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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   28436 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 19, 2024

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Quite frankly given the high level of motivated reasoning I see behind the HBD debate I doubt that the proponents of this theory are more careful than the academics who point at other factors. I would have to see significant actual evidence that they indeed have taken these things into consideration.

Right, but we're discussing the individual heritability of intelligence here, not the race-level heritability, so this is an area where the scientific consensus disagrees with the comment you linked. See e.g. this review, finding intelligence to be highly heritable through genes. This isn't a HBD guy, this is ". A Review of General Psychology survey, published in 2002, ranked Plomin as the 71st most cited psychologist of the 20th century.[1] He is the author of several books on genetics and psychology." and "Plomin was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in the 2023 New Year Honours for services to scientific research.[8]". There is a tremendous amount of mainstream literature on the heritability of intelligence, a lot of back and forth between various camps, and the consensus has ended up that there are large genetic components.

Crucially, I stated that environmental confounding was well addressed for the heritability of intelligence among individuals, and that this is the consensus. I am not claiming that the scientific consensus claims environmental confounding has been addressed as an issue for the heritability of intelligence contributing to group differences.

Right, but we're discussing the individual heritability of intelligence here, not the race-level heritability, so this is an area where the scientific consensus disagrees with the comment you linked. See e.g. this review, finding intelligence to be highly heritable through genes. This isn't a HBD guy, this is ". A Review of General Psychology survey, published in 2002, ranked Plomin as the 71st most cited psychologist of the 20th century.[1] He is the author of several books on genetics and psychology." and "Plomin was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in the 2023 New Year Honours for services to scientific research.[8]". There is a tremendous amount of mainstream literature on the heritability of intelligence, a lot of back and forth between various camps, and the consensus has ended up that there are large genetic components.

I don't doubt that intelligence is heritable; however on a group level there is very little actual diversity within the human population given the fact that our most common ancestor is very recent, and HBD is making claims about the average intelligence of different groups.

The simple way to settle this would be to:

A. Discover the genes responsible for intelligence. B. Genetically test a significant number of various groups to get a baseline rate of their presence. C. Derive the genetic difference in intelligence between groups.

Has anyone actually done this?

  • -10

You keep saying there's very little diversity. What counts as little? What's your scale? What would be enough diversity, and why that threshold?

There's very obviously enough that we can plainly notice it for some traits, and you haven't acknowledged this.

Modern humans are a lot alike--at least at the genetic level--compared with other primates. If you compare any two people from far-flung corners of the globe, their genomes will be much more similar than those of any pair of chimpanzees, gorillas, or other apes from different populations. Now, evolutionary geneticists have shown that our ancestors lost much of their genetic diversity in two dramatic bottlenecks that sharply squeezed down the population of modern humans as they moved out of Africa between 60,000 and 50,000 years ago.

See: https://www.science.org/content/article/how-we-lost-our-diversity

Yes, this is true.

Now, why is it enough to matter? If the problem was that the out-of-Africa bottleneck of ~10000 or whatever it was, was too small, is there some higher number at which it would make sense to talk about variation being relevant?

Being much more similar at a genetic level than average does not mean that they are similar along any particular trait, as has been pointed out to you repeatedly, and there is clearly enough variation that we can see some traits vary.

My point isn't to disagree that humans have lower genetic diversity than chimpanzees or whatever (especially if we are excluding the most genetically diverse groups like the pygmies, sticking to the majority of the world's population), that's just true, and you're right on that. But you keep bringing this up as evidence that genes can't matter, for which it is only very weak evidence, not at all a serious consideration.

But you keep bringing this up as evidence that genes can't matter, for which it is only very weak evidence.

I'm bringing it up because genes do matter, but there simply isn't nearly as much diversity within the human population which means the overall effect of genetics cannot be large on a population level. It tempers the overall impact of any kind of diversity, the fact that we humans are so similar. I simply do not believe that HBD as seemingly commonly held in this forum is nearly strong enough as a concept to use it as a battering ram to dismiss or deflect the mainstream or the left wing's position on this matter.

I thought I made the comment clear. You still didn't answer, but just repeated what you were saying.

I'll try again: You keep saying that humans have less genetic diversity, therefore there cannot be any substantial genetic effect. But you have yet to show that that's a valid inference. How do you know that the lesser degree of diversity in comparison to chimpanzees or whatever means they can't vary along relevant traits? Why isn't it the case that we have less, but still quite enough, diversity?

As evidence that there's probably enough, we notice variation attributable to genetics in all sorts of other things.

Relevant traits such as height, weight, intelligence etc? Compare Europe with Japan, they are very similar and yet separated by thousands of kilometers.

I see this HBD talk here constantly, yet it seems everyone assumes that it is true without bringing evidence, where is the proof for such a bold claim?

The HBD discourse is fueled by people freaking out over representation in high-status classes like successful CEOs, scientists and Ivy League applicants. People get into those by being outliers on a standard distribution in talent, and this amplifies small initial population differences. A relatively small difference in mean IQ between populations that looks inconsequential in everyday tasks can still end up making the tail of people capable of becoming theoretical physicists have a 2x overrepresentation of people from the higher mean IQ population.

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