If I.Q. is innate, it shouldn't make a difference whether it's a mixed-race child's mother or father who is black. But it does: children with a white mother and a black father have an eight-point I.Q. advantage over those with a black mother and a white father.
Assume men and women select for different characteristics--for instance, women select for intelligent men, while men select for XYZ women (with XYZ being anything other than intelligence.)
Assume that the average white IQ is 100 and the average black IQ is 85, and assume that there is a genetic component to these numbers.
The average black woman (IQ: 85) will select a white male of >85 IQ. Her average offspring will probably have >85 IQ.
The average white woman (IQ: 100) will select a black male of >100 IQ. Her average offspring will probably have >100 IQ.
Therefore, the differences in sexual selection between men and women can result in genetically distinct offspring given bm/wf, wm/bf pairings. So the logic is...there is no logic.
You're assuming a whole lot more than that, most notably that the researchers used incredibly poor methodology, forgetting to control for the IQ of the parents.
I would be utterly shocked if they controlled for anything--most social experiments like this use what data they can get, and are, as you say "incredibly poor". The closest thing to a reasonable experiment in this regard are studies of separated twins--studies Gladwell obviously doesn't mention, as they show exactly what everyone knows, that intelligence is largely inherited. The German study that he brings up at the end has been dredged up over and over and over for many years and is apparently not easily repeatable. Again, most readers can't tell the difference between a data point and a proof.
Anyway, he's the one making a claim, and he's the one who needs to show that the methodology is sound, not me.
" . . . studies Gladwell obviously doesn't mention, as they show exactly what everyone knows, that intelligence is largely inherited.
You're misconstruing Gladwell's position. He's not arguing against inheritance of intelligence; he's arguing against a biologically innate and immutable race-based component to intelligence.
"Anyway, he's the one making a claim, and he's the one who needs to show that the methodology is sound, not me."
Actually, you made the latest claim. You set up a somewhat absurd strawman for what Gladwell argued and then tried to lampoon it and make his position look illogical when, in fact, the interpretation you constructed relies on the researchers literally ignoring the most basic of statistics. That needed to be pointed out, lest people buy the strawman and actually get swayed to believe that black people are biologically less intelligent than whites.
I hardly made a "strawman", which would require a construction of the form, "Gladwell said XYZ", which I did not do. Rather, I showed a single example of how different kinds of pairings could result in different kinds of results. Here is an example of a strawman argument, for your reference:
There are a lot of pseudo-scientists out there who claim that IQ tests are perfectly accurate, not at all culturally biased, and are in fact objective, innate measures of intelligence.
Anyway, as for
researchers literally ignoring basic statistics
Their statistics may be pure as a mountain spring. It doesn't matter. What I suspect is that there are factors they completely didn't account for--something that happens to every scientist. It tends to happen more to scientists trying to prove political points.
he's arguing against a consistent, innate, statistically significant, race-based component to intelligence
He needs to quit picking-and-choosing studies then. I've seen the German study, and I'm glad to take it into account, and if there are repeated examples, I'll take them into account also. Well, here's something most of us have probably seen already:
...the thing to reflect upon here isn't that innaccuracies exist (because they do). Rather, the gross consistency of the results--why do poor countries like Thailand and Malaysia have passable scores compared to Africa? Do Africans suffer from a particularly racist sort of poverty? Why does a country like Iraq--living under a dictator, facing decades of war and mass starvation and international isolation have a higher average IQ than every African country? More racism?
Why would China, a country that still has hundreds of millions of peasants score much better than every African country? Compare China to Hong Kong--areas with racial similitude, but vastly--diametrically--different histories and circumstances, with every advantage going to Hong Kong. Should not the difference be greater than 7 points?
Eventually, the question is, "How much evidence does it take?" and the answer is obviously, "No amount of evidence is enough". It's an idealogical question.
Let me present the inevitable extremes. The list of Jewish scientists (which wikipedia warns is "incomplete") is broken down into numerous sections:
...contains no scientists at all. Yes, I know some exist, but no one thought well enough to add any. Blame the community, I guess.
Not to belabour the point, but Jews are numerically inferior to African-Americans, and have suffered a fair amount of uncomfortable circumstances. So, how to explain the wild differences? Again, when does the evidence become overwhelming..?
You pretty clearly set up a strawman by saying that Gladwell ignored a study because it supports the idea that intelligence is largely inherited, a position he's not at all trying to refute. Then, you took the position you manufactured and discredited it in hopes that people would get confused and dismiss his real argument. That's the textbook definition of attacking a strawman.
The statement of mine that you quoted, ironically enough, is not a strawman. It may be an ad hominem attack, but it's definitely not a strawman. ;)
Not to belabour the point, but Jews are numerically inferior to African-Americans, and have suffered a fair amount of uncomfortable circumstances. So, how to explain the wild differences? Again, when does the evidence become overwhelming..?
Thanks for revealing what you believe. I respect the fact that you're willing to come out and admit that you think blacks just aren't as smart as whites. Now we're getting somewhere! You're allowed to believe that without needing to justify it with pseudo-science.
I'll let this sit for a while -- hopefully you've got the courage not to delete it -- and I'll finish my coding tonight. Tomorrow, if I'm up to it, I'll retort.
...
You know, on second thought, I don't think I will. I can't help my position anymore than you already have.
-You practically conceded (or at least haven't adequately rebutted) the points I brought up against your characterization of Gladwell's article as illogical.
-You've weakened your position in an argument about the measure of biologically innate and immutable intelligence by resorting to bringing up a bunch of cultural phenomena that anyone on this board can easily rebut using vast socioeconomic factors. (If you really want to take it there, by the way, you can repost this to a new YC discussion thread questioning the legitimacy of the claimed non-biological factors that have stunted the economic growth of African-Americans and I'll address it there.)
-Most importantly, you've shown the people reading this that, indeed, there exist people who think that blacks are intellectually inferior to other races by their very biology. This is useful evidence I can point to every time someone says that racism no longer exists except amongst the most uneducated segments of society.
Snore. Sub-sahara Africa has been near-100 percent black for many millenia. There's no one else to stick the blame on, even if you want to bring up "society" and "economics". Hell, the only country whose socio-economics can be traced to white people is the only one with a decent economy. And, what do you know, another one, Zimbabwe, took a nose dive right after its ethnic cleansing of whites. Shock. Horror.
Thanks for revealing what you believe.
I believe the facts, sure. If there is anybody here who thinks that blacks and Jews are genetically equivilent in intelligence, raise your hands. Please, I beg you. But you have at least 2500 years of evidence fighting against you, so bring some counter-evidence first...unlike pius.
If there is anybody here who thinks that blacks and Jews are genetically equivilent in intelligence, raise your hands. Please, I beg you.
Ooh, this is getting nasty. A smart guy once told me when you find yourself in a hole, stop digging. I'm black and even I can figure out how to heed that advice! This is instructive though, so keep doing what you're doing.
Sub-sahara Africa has been near-100 percent black for many millenia.
Most African countries had robust cultures and economies before they were plundered by the European imperialists. For example, as hard as it is for you to believe, the first great libraries (pre-dating even the one in Alexandria) were in Africa. I guess you think that because Native Americans were successfully conquered, subjugated, and impoverished they must not have been very bright either.
There's so much to say, but again you're really doing a great job sinking your own ship. It's hard not to respond to you, but for the sake of my coding, I'm gonna try to keep my finger off the reply button for the rest of the night.
Again, if you want to take this cultural discussion further, do feel free to post a new thread and I'll address it at length tomorrow or so, I promise.
you're really doing a great job sinking your own ship.
You realize this isn't much of an argument, don't you?
The reason I brought up Jews was because I'm not Jewish and so I consider myself neutral in the matter. I have nothing to gain from whatever inborn virtues jews might have. But the evidence still stands... I also have nothing to gain from whatever inborn virtues the Chinese might have. But the evidence still stands... I'm also not offended by the Parsis or Armenians or Brahmans or any of them, despite their achievements. What does it cost to be honest? People are different, and if we deny it, we make mistakes...
Most African countries had robust cultures and economies before they were plundered by the European imperialists.
It's just a cop-out. Every piece of land in this world (with a few exceptions) has been overrun and plundered and ravaged time and time and time again. People just can't get over those evil European colonists. No one ever complains about the Turks or Tatars or Mongols or Huns or Aztecs or Arabs or a thousand others...all monstrous in their time.
You realize this isn't much of an argument, don't you?
That's because I'm no longer arguing with you. You haven't pieced together much that's cogent enough for me to debate and your conclusions are nearly as despicable as they are preposterous. You're trying to argue that black people are biologically less intelligent than whites and other races, a view controversial enough that the burden of proof lies with you. Let's review how you've set out to prove it.
You tried to discredit Gladwell's article with fuzzy math and attacking the strawman; I exposed it. You failed.
Then you tried citing other people's research into IQ to support your views. Unfortunately there's no serious research that supports your world view, so you were left citing "studies" that have been widely discredited and debunked. (For example, "IQ and the Wealth of Nations" literally concludes that most of Africa is functionally retarded.) Reductio ad absurdum, you fail.
Then you gave up citing research into IQ and g, and started citing cultural phenomena that clearly are not relevant to the biological innateness topic at hand. Even the cultural phenomena you bring up aren't particularly compelling. (For example, you're comparing the plight of cultures conquered by the Ottoman empire that fell in the 1600's to that of African nations occupied and conquered by the British empire, which didn't leave in many cases until the late 1960's and, in the case of Zimbabwe, until 1980.) Failed again.
Finally, you got frustrated and started blurting out that it's "trivial" to conclude that blacks just aren't intelligent as other races, figuring that a few upmods on YC.News will make you seem right without proof. Fail.
I'm sure you're going to find another flawed study funded by known white supremacy groups to justify your beliefs. Or maybe you'll start citing phrenology or Nordic theory. I don't know what you'll pull out next, but I can assure you that I won't care, unless it's got some legitimate scientific basis.
It's often the dumb ones who take the stance on discussing other people's intelligence. There is a wealth of circumstances and complexity of the issue that never crosses this posters mind, yet he is quick to make definitive claims of such gravity. Racism has the interesting tendency of exposing the fools even amongst the most educated individuals.
Oh, where would I start... The structure of the brain? Our understanding and concept of what is "intelligence"? Nonexistentent genetical variation between the so called "races", which are themselves based on fallacious premises? The theory of races after all started in Germany as measured by the differences in the shapes of skulls, and was mainly categorized as an issue of beauty. With Germans obviously appointing themselves (aryans) the most graceful and beautiful "race" of them all. And now people are trying to retrofit genetic explanations on such an old theory based purely on pseudo-science? There is at maximum 5-15% genetic variation between the continental populations, and note that this is not the same as our naive notions of "race". There is less genetic variation in humans than in any other mammalian species. Worldwide genetic variation in humans is less significant than in 2 closely related chimpanzee species having evolved closely together in western Africa, to give you some magnitude for comparison. 90% of the genetic variation occurs on a local level as opposed to globally, if you can wrap your head around what that means? And every instance of "child genius" that has been studied has boiled down to no innate ability, but rigorous practice from an early age. Meaning that "intelligence" is largely learned, mind is an empty plate of neurons waiting to be connected. The only thing conceivably affecting their training are chemical balances, malnutrition, toxicity of the environment, and so on...
Basing your theories directly on empirical evidence about the economies of the world obviously can't factor in all the relevant facts. You say that all the African countries with no whites are poor? Did you know that a lot of them have been paying the debts created by the colonialists ever since they were "liberated"? Do you know how the West still sponsors guerillas and pays diamond merchants in many parts of Africa? Only a secluded mind could have such delusions of grandeur. I recommend debating with some intellectual and educated black scholars.
At the current state of research, nobody claims to know enough about how the brain works to conclude that the mind is "an empty plate of neuron waiting to be connected." Trisomy 21, or Down Syndrome, can be classified as mental retardation, and you might call it an abnormal lack of mental capacity. This is a completely genetic abnormality. Obviously, they go through the same stages of neonatal development, neuron pruning, etc., but their ability to form neuronal connections, like yours and mine, is limited, at birth.
I picked a rather extreme example just to illustrate the point. I don't disagree with everything you wrote, but it is a mistake to believe early manifestations of genius have nothing, or even little, innate roots. Daniel Tammet is your living example. If his brain were a bit different, he'd be just another Kim Peek. It will be very hard to argue that this is due to rigorous practice from an early age. Kids with autism don't just gradually lose their aptitude to comprehend emotions by lack of practice. They are born with a dysfunctional empathy circuit. Kids with epilepsy don't just develop their symptoms. They are testable and predictable, and heritable.
I'm not saying what you say is wrong -- it depends on what you mean by intelligence. But you're being unspecific about "intelligence" while being specific about how it is related to genetic, inborn traits. This opens the door wide to attacks like mine -- just pointing it out.
One more thing. The statement "The theory of races after all started in Germany" evaluates to false. I assume you're referring to early 20th century Germany. It started with the European colonialists, which wasn't even such a German thing. That's also the Eurocentric interpretation of the word. I'm sure other cultures had their own ideas of race dating to much earlier. The Chinese always called the people outside their country borders barbarians. And Orthodox Jews consider themselves the chosen people. Take that interpretation, then I'm among the unchosen barbarians, or race, whatever.
The genetic diseases you mentioned are significant mutations leading into strong dysfunctionalities in how the brain is supposed to function. Leading it not to function correctly. This is far from evolutionary path leading one population of people into some sort of mental retardation, especially when evolutionary selection would be against it. In addition most of the mentioned diseases are recessive which is the only reason they have survived, as any offspring with the disease won't survive to pass the genes on.
Autism is a different case because it's not necessarily genetic (although I'm not sure if there are also genetic cases). In fact autism cases have exploded in recent history, so environmental factors are likely a contributor. One such theory is the vaccines containing mercury which is a strong neuro-toxin decaying neuron connections which would result into the observed behavior. I'm not going into that discussion however.
I'm being unspecific about intelligence because it's inherently a very ambiguous concept, which is one of the fallacies of the IQ testing and the arguments given by the racists like in this thread. I can see short comings and non-objectiveness in almost every IQ test I have seen. And that without even taking into account the fact that they're "adjusted" periodically to reflect the norm which obviously means they're not perfectly objective to begin with.
I was referring to 18th century Germany and for example theories created by Johann Friedrich Blumenbach.
There are lots of points to address in your post but I choose not to. Thanks for the Blumenbach post; it was very interesting (but nevertheless does not show Germany to be the origin of the concept of race).
Anyhow, I saw this on reddit and found it related, and interesting in general:
"The MIT study found that FMRP and mGluR5 are at opposite ends of a kind of molecular seesaw." These kinds of "molecular seesaws" are everywhere in the body. When things are only slightly out of balance you _may_ get drastic effects. Emphasis on may, because at this point nobody knows exactly what and how much of it is required to achieve what effect. But there you have it -- once it is identified, it is manipulable. The more important point is, many symptoms are graded in severity, and as this study shows, autism could be found to be less disconnected from normal than you may think.
And every instance of "child genius" that has been studied has boiled down to no innate ability, but rigorous practice from an early age.
Completely laughable, and completely unverifiable. The only passable tests of such things that I am aware of are studies of separated twins, which have indicated quite clearly, time and time again, that variance in intelligence is attributable in great part to inheritance. There's no arguing around such tests--bring up as many chimpanzee breeds that you want.
Meaning that "intelligence" is largely learned, mind is an empty plate of neurons waiting to be connected.
The oldest error in the discussion. Start your elementary education in the subject here:
Pinker spends an enormous amount of time bowing down to the antique emotionalisms of the age, and so the book shouldn't be too offensive to the weak-hearted.
Obviously intelligence has a genetic factor, there is no question about that. Why is cat's intellect different from humans? Due to its DNA. But that is not the point, when it comes to humans, there is no significant enough variation that could lead into large scale intellectual differences. Likewise due to the genetic mixing you couldn't label one traditionally understood "race" as one or the other. Furthermore it makes little sense from evolutionary perspective.
The child genius comment is not laughable. A genius is always tied to a particular skill given in a cultural context. For example playing a piano, or juggling. It is possible that a child is born with certain innate physical qualities that help him in whatever he practices. Like being fair, or strong, tall, etc... But to assume that any 5 year old learned to play piano as some kind of a genetic gift is far more ludicrous. It takes hard practice to perfect your body and mind to work in unison for any particular task, approximately the same for everyone bar perhaps the effects of personal motivation and rigor of the exercise.
With the exception of people with disorders that in some way may make them amazingly good at certain tasks, like having eidetic memory.
I've made more than enough mistakes in judging individuals. Doing it based on the colour of their skin is just the most egregious.
I've met white slackers, I've met chinese pot heads and I've worked with black men who humble me with the grasp of subjects I'm considered an expert in.
It's just a stupid (and I don't use that word lightly) way to judge someone.
I just wanted to point out that in the black/white terminology, where Asians are yellow and Indians are brown, the Jewish aren't necessarily white. Jews are from the Middle East, whereas the common white-folk are from Europe. That is, depending on how you look at it, they are "racially" different (quotes significant).
Also, I am not a Jew, but Jews are a particularly interesting group by themselves and are not to be ignored. IQ and the Wealth of Nations is not really what you want to read. Gregory Cochran is (regardless of how vilified he may be). The list of Nobel laureates is also nothing to shrug off as simply a result of environmental factors. Steven Pinker gave a (supporting) talk on this topic. Statistically speaking, the "Jewish" (which is a fuzzy definition if you look into it) are, without any doubt, the group of people with the highest collective scientific and financial achievement in the world.
Meanwhile, who has ever pointed out that there are no Jewish basketball superstars, sprinters, weight lifters...? Are they endowed with inferior physical ability? Perhaps I shouldn't say so, but this "deficiency" is as glaringly obvious as their accomplishments, and it doesn't seem as sensitive a topic.
It's all about relative distributions. If a patient goes to a hospital to treat Torsional Dystonia, 99.9% of the time, they are Jewish. It also happens that heterozygotes of TD have higher myelin density. It also happens that Einstein had abnormally large glial growth (which affects myelin density). It is also common knowledge that Einstein's brain was structurally different than most humans and this difference was a genetic alteration.
No matter how you look at it, there are genetic influences in intelligence. It is logical that certain genetic traits may be more prevalent in certain localized populations. Now I said nothing about these groups based on skin color, but as a group that has been highly in-bred, the "Jewish" group of people are, statistically as a whole, incontrovertibly, "superior" in certain areas, that the current society finds valuable.
I'm surprised you've chosen to point to IQ and the Wealth of Nations. It is not exactly the paragon of scholarship. As has been mentioned before, for the majority of those nations, no study was even available, they extrapolated from neighboring nations. As the result we can posit that the lowest scoring nations (at least those distant from one another) actually had studies, of some sort done (let's not question that validity of said studies for the moment, even though they should hardly count as IQ tests).
Let's examine the neighbors of the five lowest scoring nations:
Zimbabwe, The Democratic Republic of the Congo, Sierra Leone, Ethiopia, Sierra Leone, Equatorial Guinea.
Each of these nations are fairly distant from one another (ie: at least two hops on the world graph). Yet if you flood fill at a depth of two from each of them, you discover something pretty interesting: nearly all of Africa is filled! These countries were given a score of about 64, a bit more than two SD's below the world average. If an averaging of the scores of nearby nations took place, and it must have by the author's own admission, then the mere presence of these five low scores depresses the scores of the entirety of Africa, and this negative influence spreads all the way to the middle east. There's your consistency.
I'm aware of problems there. (As the wikipedia article discusses.) It's still the best overview, though. I am tempted to say that a country that can't administer a credible IQ test probably doesn't need to.
Actually, the African countries aren't of serious concern. [1] Rather, the disparities between developing countries' current wealth and predicted wealth based upon current IQ have their uses:
Trivial? You have to define black, you have to define intelligent, and if the answer happens to be an unorderable set, you have to define _less_.
I'm unconvinced that they're measuring generated wealth by IQ, either. Most of the administered tests weren't IQ tests, they were educational tests. They measured the standard deviation of the _nation's_ mean, and then mapped that to an IQ. The correlation thus isn't a direct one between IQ and generated wealth, but rather between educational performance and wealth. More obvious, this one is.
In any case, he's not even arguing about intelligence per se. Rather, he's supporting James Flynn's argument that IQ tests are flimsy instruments for measuring intelligence. Flynn's argument is that kids from societies/households which require high abstract cognition (read: modernness) will score better on some of the IQ sub-tests (eg. similarities and abstract taxonomy).
This suggests that kids can be "trained" to score well on IQ tests. There is more than socioeconomic factors at work here, and cultural factors (particularly those that influence cognitive modes of thought) are important. But ultimately, IQ tests are probably a dubious measure of someone's general intelligence anyway.
I can see how the argument may be confusing . . . Gladwell's mincing words a bit, trying hard not to explicitly call out the racism inherent in the arguments put forth by some in this tired IQ debate. Allow me to paraphrase the statement, kid-gloves off:
There are a lot of pseudo-scientists out there who claim that IQ tests are perfectly accurate, not at all culturally biased, and are in fact objective, innate measures of intelligence. According to these folks, black people are just fundamentally less intelligent than white people, that's why IQ scores are so correlated to race. This theory would predict that "tainting" pure white blood with "intellectually inferior" black blood should yield children who are stupider than their white counterparts, without regard to cultural factors. In practice, though, the evidence appears to point to a more nuanced explanation, as there is a statistically significant difference between IQ scores when cultural factors (such as race and gender combinations of the parents) differ. In other words, IQ may not be statistically independent of the non-genetic factors surrounding the test-taker.
That might clear it up.
If not, the remainder of the paragraph that you quoted may elucidate it further:
"And it shouldn't make much of a difference where a mixed-race child is born. But, again, it does: the children fathered by black American G.I.s in postwar Germany and brought up by their German mothers have the same I.Q.s as the children of white American G.I.s and German mothers. The difference, in that case, was not the fact of the children's blackness, as a fundamentalist would say. It was the fact of their Germanness--of their being brought up in a different culture, under different circumstances."
If you consider the historical genetic variation in humans through our expansion from Africa and then spreading throughout the continents. Differences in the development of intelligence due to the different environmental factors makes little sense. Likewise the overall genetic of variation in humans is extraordinarily small and interbreeding extraordinarily high compared to other mammalian species further reducing any likelihood of significant variation between the continental populations.
If anything, the Chinese should be the dumbest, the Europeans second dumbest, the Africans smartest. Think about it:
For centuries, what did you do if you were a bright kid in China? Get your balls loped off and become a eunuch. Who needs children when you have the Imperial household to run? Even if you didn't become a eunuch, you at least became a Buddhist monk or something if you were smart.
Europe was pretty much the same thing. Smart people became priests and monks, who, while not completely celibate in the real world, still had much lower rates of reproduction.
On the other hand, in Africa, you gotta be smart, or your ass is lion fodder. Are you a lazy daydreamer with no head for thinking? Too bad, because when the drought comes, only smart dudes will be able to provide for their families through alliances and phony witch doctor magic tricks.
----
That a story like this can be so easily constructed is why I never put too much stock in things like evolutionary psychology per se. It's easy to come up with a fable that "explains" why the world is the way it is. Real history and real facts are much harder to piece together.
Actually in China if you were smart, the standard route was to take an imperial exam to become a bureaucrat. Traditionally, each man could have multiple wives, but usually only the upper class could afford a large family. Bureaucrats, along with merchants, made up most of the upper class, and it was common for a single man to have a dozen children in these families.
Africa had some of the world's first high culture societies which are probably older than Europe's or China's due to the tremendous history of that continent. I mean it is the cradle of the civilization after all. But you wouldn't think that way today with a lot of that history having been nearly eradicated and not taught.
> Smart people became priests and monks, who, while not completely celibate in the real world, still had much lower rates of reproduction.
Actually that's not the case. Popes and priests used to have orgies and sex parties; the reason to go into the clergy was for money and power. They had a racket going, collecting money from poor villagers; joining up was how you cashed in. They were FAR from celibate.
Similar history for Dalai Lamas; they used to go to war, have illegitimate offspring, etc.
In outlying areas where there wasn't much power to be had, you joined up with the local monks/priests if you didn't have other job skills and thus no way to support a wife/family, so it wasn't as if the most promising males were all taking themselves out of the gene pool or anything close to it.
And you don't need a 1:1 ratio of fathers to mothers; a single smart, powerful male can father hundreds or thousands of children, and pass on his "smart genes".
This reminds me of the article in Harvard Magazine a couple of years ago about "applying science to gun control". As soon as I saw the title, I had a sense of foreboding. Regardless of the merits, based solely on the publication you know which way the argument has to go. To his credit, the author of the Harvard Magazine article waited until the second paragraph to note that the scientist in question considered himself lucky to live in a safe state like Massachusetts, with its "strong gun-control laws". You can guess the conclusion of his "scientific analysis" of gun control...
And so it goes with The New Yorker: when you are deeply emotionally committed to a position, it's virtually impossible to trust anything you say. I admire Malcolm Gladwell, and enjoy The New Yorker, but really, could this article have gone any other way?
You raise a good point . . . articles on either side of the issue almost always have passionate activists as authors rather than dispassionate scientists.
People who believe in the equality of human beings typically believe in it strongly enough that they find it difficult to objectively analyze putative evidence to the contrary -- they're damn stubborn. Meanwhile, people who are racial supremacists of any kind in this day and age have self-selected themselves as pretty headstrong, stubborn individuals themselves.
It is often the racists who portray themselves as "dispassionate scientists", as if they have no agenda. And it is also the same people who know very little about the subject. To know anything, you have to by minimum have a passion for that knowledge. Anyone trying to hide that is putting up a facade.
I perceive the author to have been favorable to one side, therefore I discard all his evidence and argumentation.
Not discard, simply distrust. Remember all those Microsoft studies comparing the total cost of ownership of Windows and Linux? Finding flaws in the studies was hard. Discovering an a priori reason to distrust the studies was not.
Simply put, any article like this is going to make claims: "X is a fact." When the source is biased, and X confirms the bias, it's much harder to trust that X is true.
Apparently, Bill Gates and Paul Allen (and Paul Gilbert) started a company before Microsoft, called Traf-O-Data. (wow.)
They did data analysis from traffic controllers.
Despite the name, they actually made a fairly decent revenue for high school kids (some tens of thousands annually). Once Bill's age was discovered they had a much harder time selling anything.
Even Steve Jobs had to stop being a shaggy hippie.
But luckily for founders, unless you're in the consulting business, the market really doesn't care who you are. There are far too many layers of abstraction for your identity to have any meaning, beyond of course, that which is deliberately constructed. (Mac People, Japanese Cars, German Engineering, Scandinavian design, etc) ^.^
Gates' father was a lawyer. It takes seed capital to found Traf-O-Data. Thankfully, the seed capital needed for a startup is dropping dramatically thanks to the web, but it's still a serious problem for people from poor families.
"... There should be no great mystery about Asian achievement. It has to do with hard work and dedication to higher education, and belonging to a culture that stresses professional success. But Flynn makes one more observation. The children of that first successful wave of Asian-Americans really did have I.Q.s that were higher than everyone else's--coming in somewhere around 103. ..."
Only at the summary do you get a hint why this might be. My guess is access to improved nutrition could be one factor.
I'd say the self-selection bias would be a big factor. Most of the dumbass and lazy Asians probably stayed at home. Those first generation asian-american kids would likely have had the value of hard work forcefully instilled in them as well.
I have taught in Japan. Their dumbasses say, "hi."
(Seriously, "the Asians = smart" myth doesn't last long if you actually meet normal people in Asia. Normal Asian people are... of normal intelligence! What a shock!)
- whether you're likely to get sickle cell anaemia
- the age your children develop teeth
- the age your children walk
- the size of your penis (if you have a Y chromosome)
- the amount of fast twitch fibres in your muscles
It has no bearing whatsoever the brain. Why? Because of magic. While all of the aforementioned effects of race on physiology links are well known and freely discussed, race cannot have any bearing on anything inside the skull, because the brain is magic.
Anybody that suggests otherwise, or suggests investigating or discussing the effects of race on the brain is a racist and we need to moderate them down.
The only people who would discuss such things are racists with an agenda like James Watson, not scientists like the people that understand how the brain has magical properties.
Brain=magic. You don't even need to read the article. Now lets moderate the racists down!
1) Race, genetically, doesn't exist. People who are black basically have one trait in common: black skin. Just think of how "White" covers a range from the Sami people of Scandinavia all the way to the Portuguese or the Persians. And "black" covers everything from Zulus to Pygmies.
This isn't to say that heredity plays no part, or that certain groups of people won't be more likely to have certain traits. Maybe you could say that some tribes in West Africa are such-and-such. But we can't expect our eyes to reveal genetic truths.
2) I think you're missing Gladwell's point. It is not that heredity doesn't affect the brain. It's that IQ testing is far too flawed to yield meaningful results, especially when comparing groups of people tested in different places and at different times.
In the story, they mention how properly normalized IQ tests find that Asians have a lower average IQ than whites. They speculate that Asians' success in academics is due to cultural values and individual efforts -- and if you know any super-achiever Asian students, that was in plain sight all along!
Yes, but the human notion of "race" is just "people of a certain color". In dogs, this would group black yorkshire terriers and black labs together.
Furthermore, dog breeds are nothing like ordinary human populations. We simply don't have human populations that are subjected to the extreme selection pressures that we apply to dogs, which produce breeds with strong natural talents and lots of natural deficiencies that would kill them if they were turned loose in the wild. Chihuahuas versus Great Danes. People vary, and natural selection matters, but it's nothing like dog breeds.
Would you say that "Dog breeds, genetically, does not exist?"
Whatever you mean by that, it is pretty clear that it makes sense to talk about Caucasian race (or terriers) and use that concept, even if the manifested features vary.
No, it doesn't make sense to talk about Caucasian race. There isn't enough genetic difference between any human populations to divide humans into subspecies or races, unlike for example dogs. Humans have the least genetic variation of any mammalian species, so you can't make the dog comparison anyways.
Furthermore the name was created on fallacious premises to begin with. From the creator of the "Caucasian race" Johann Friedrich Blumenbach:
Caucasian variety - I have taken the name of this variety from Mount Caucasus, both because its neighborhood, and especially its southern slope, produces the most beautiful race of men, I mean the Georgian; and because all physiological reasons converge to this, that in that region, if anywhere, it seems we ought with the greatest probability to place the autochthones (birth place) of mankind.
How much genetic difference is enough? It is obvious that there is a grouping of features beyond skin color. Where you put the line between races is somewhat arbitrary - and this is the same with all concepts, so it doesn't make sense to think about genetic difference (e.g. in Rwanda Hutu and Tutsi are considered different races, even though genetic difference is almost inexistent http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Origins_of_Tutsi_and_Hutu). People have established this concepts because they are/were useful, and will continue to use them.
If by the Sami people you think "blue eyed and blonde", you are wrong. Not that there aren't blond and blue eyed Sami people, but the stereotypical Scandinavian is not a Sami.
At a certain level, everything is hereditary, and at another level, nothing is hereditary.
Take a Norwegian. Put him in a suntanning booth 5 hours a day. His skin will be dark.
Take an African. Never let him see sunlight in his life. His skin will be light.
Take an XX embryo, inject male growth hormones into the womb at the proper time, it will grow a penis.
Take the children of geniuses, have it raised by a Harlow-style "wire mother," and it'll be as dumb as a brick.
The question isn't "nature vs. nurture." It's how much of each is involved. The question about the black-white test gap is not "Are blacks born dumb?" It's "Have we already pushed everyone (black, white, visual learner, auditory learner, whatever) to the outer limits of their innate capacity?" Since the Flynn effect exists, the answer is probably, "No."
On top of that, intelligence is not a one gene, on-off thing. It's a million different things working together better or worse. That's why intelligence is distributed in a Bell curve. Anytime you have a bunch of different factors influencing things at random, a Bell curve develops, since there are more ways to randomly have a bunch of X, a medium amount of Y, but not enough Z than there are to have a bunch of all three. This means we're talking about a wide variety of genes, not just one pair of deformed genes like sickle cell anemia.
On top of all that, IQ tests are designed to measure something called "g" which is supposed to predict general ability, but the whole thing is a statistical chimera. G should be able to tell you how good you are at any other test, plus or minus a small factor of particular competency in the field, plus or minus an even smaller amount of randomness, but it doesn't actually do that. So, IQ tests basically only measure ability to take IQ tests and are vaguely correlated with other, useful abilities in the same way that height is "correlated" with the ability to drive. (Ever see a six year old who could parallel park?) See http://cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/weblog/523.html for a full breakdown on why "g" isn't actually a useful thing to measure.
Anyhow, there's three different problems with linking IQ and race, and none of them have anything to do with the brain being magic.
1) What's the benefit of doing this research outside of curiosity? Education research is useful, yes, but studying raw intelligence to try to figure out what parts of it are genetic seems like a waste of time, unless you plan to give babies the "smart gene" in a Sci-Fi scenario.
2) I'm not sure why you're bringing up the Italian example. It shows that Italians were performing really low, but when their culture changed, the problem went away. So, it wasn't genetic. To show something comparable about the IQ gap for black people would be really hard, because Africa is poor as hell, which depresses IQ scores, and Africans living in the First World aren't a part of the majority cultures. So, you'd either have to get all black people to be rich for a generation or have them all look white somehow but keep living in a white culture in order to make a fair comparison. It's not a repeatable experiment.
How could understanding the brain be a waste of time?
I've heard this objection before and I often wonder if the people making this argument secretly think that some races really are inferior, but that we mustn't talk about it.
Or, perhaps you are implying that such research might overturn our egalitarian, meritocratic society. Personally I have no fear about that. It's obvious that some people are born superstars in pure physical ability, and yet we all still enjoy sports and not all physical work has been dominated by one race.
And I think you can see that there would be huge benefits in learning what the non-genetic factors of intelligence are.
"How could understanding the brain be a waste of time?
I've heard this objection before and I often wonder if the people making this argument secretly think that some races really are inferior, but that we mustn't talk about it."
Perhaps you should wonder if they're being sarcastic.
Point 1 is easily attacked so I will. Definitely not a waste of time.
Suppose you don't deliberately study "raw intelligence" but are interested in autism. There are a bunch of genes related to the manifestations of autism. You have a relatively low-functioning empathy circuit, for example. You develop obsessions with numbers, for example. This could be a malfunctioning orbitofrontal circuit (which is also dysfunctional in OCD patients).
It is not a coincidence that some people with superior memories exhibit very similar symptoms as autists, but retain most of their social ability, and there you go, innate, genetic intelligence, almost as a side effect of an impartially developed disorder.
What's the benefit of researching Viagra outside of pleasure? It was an accidental discover during heart research (IIRC).
You don't even have to be curious about discovering what genes are responsible for "superior" mental functions. That's almost like trying to solve a puzzle with the expectation that you only connect the pieces that you consciously set out to connect.
The article at no point says that those genetic traits which are linked to race could not have an impact on intelligence. Instead, it says that what evidence there is for that is very weak, and that the effect (if it exists at all) is small.
Furthermore, your understanding of race appears to be different than mine. You say that race has bearing on "whether you develop sickle cell anaemia" - this is untrue. A particular mutation in a particular gene has bearing on that, and that mutation is more prevalent (statistically) in groups of people we label with a certain race. But it is in no way casually related with race.
Yeah, I don't get it either, nailer. Massive insecurity, I guess.
I routinely notice when someone is smarter than me, or has a better memory than me, or who can visualize complex logical structures better than me. It sucks (for me, in this instance), but that's just the way it is.
> If what I.Q. tests measure is immutable and innate
The entire premise is wrong. IQ scores typically rise 5-15 points on a second test, now that the taker knows what kind of questions to expect. IQ tests can be studied and practiced for.
Just like if you hear enough logic puzzles, you can work out solutions to similar problems without needing the "AHA!" moment of insight that you needed the first time.
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[ 4.3 ms ] story [ 155 ms ] threadWhat is the logic behind this argument?
Assume that the average white IQ is 100 and the average black IQ is 85, and assume that there is a genetic component to these numbers.
The average black woman (IQ: 85) will select a white male of >85 IQ. Her average offspring will probably have >85 IQ.
The average white woman (IQ: 100) will select a black male of >100 IQ. Her average offspring will probably have >100 IQ.
Therefore, the differences in sexual selection between men and women can result in genetically distinct offspring given bm/wf, wm/bf pairings. So the logic is...there is no logic.
Anyway, he's the one making a claim, and he's the one who needs to show that the methodology is sound, not me.
You're misconstruing Gladwell's position. He's not arguing against inheritance of intelligence; he's arguing against a biologically innate and immutable race-based component to intelligence.
"Anyway, he's the one making a claim, and he's the one who needs to show that the methodology is sound, not me."
Actually, you made the latest claim. You set up a somewhat absurd strawman for what Gladwell argued and then tried to lampoon it and make his position look illogical when, in fact, the interpretation you constructed relies on the researchers literally ignoring the most basic of statistics. That needed to be pointed out, lest people buy the strawman and actually get swayed to believe that black people are biologically less intelligent than whites.
There are a lot of pseudo-scientists out there who claim that IQ tests are perfectly accurate, not at all culturally biased, and are in fact objective, innate measures of intelligence.
Anyway, as for
researchers literally ignoring basic statistics
Their statistics may be pure as a mountain spring. It doesn't matter. What I suspect is that there are factors they completely didn't account for--something that happens to every scientist. It tends to happen more to scientists trying to prove political points.
he's arguing against a consistent, innate, statistically significant, race-based component to intelligence
He needs to quit picking-and-choosing studies then. I've seen the German study, and I'm glad to take it into account, and if there are repeated examples, I'll take them into account also. Well, here's something most of us have probably seen already:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IQ_and_the_Wealth_of_Nations
...the thing to reflect upon here isn't that innaccuracies exist (because they do). Rather, the gross consistency of the results--why do poor countries like Thailand and Malaysia have passable scores compared to Africa? Do Africans suffer from a particularly racist sort of poverty? Why does a country like Iraq--living under a dictator, facing decades of war and mass starvation and international isolation have a higher average IQ than every African country? More racism?
Why would China, a country that still has hundreds of millions of peasants score much better than every African country? Compare China to Hong Kong--areas with racial similitude, but vastly--diametrically--different histories and circumstances, with every advantage going to Hong Kong. Should not the difference be greater than 7 points?
Eventually, the question is, "How much evidence does it take?" and the answer is obviously, "No amount of evidence is enough". It's an idealogical question.
Let me present the inevitable extremes. The list of Jewish scientists (which wikipedia warns is "incomplete") is broken down into numerous sections:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Jewish_scientists_and_p...
The list of African Americans:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lists_of_African_Americans
...contains no scientists at all. Yes, I know some exist, but no one thought well enough to add any. Blame the community, I guess.
Not to belabour the point, but Jews are numerically inferior to African-Americans, and have suffered a fair amount of uncomfortable circumstances. So, how to explain the wild differences? Again, when does the evidence become overwhelming..?
The statement of mine that you quoted, ironically enough, is not a strawman. It may be an ad hominem attack, but it's definitely not a strawman. ;)
Not to belabour the point, but Jews are numerically inferior to African-Americans, and have suffered a fair amount of uncomfortable circumstances. So, how to explain the wild differences? Again, when does the evidence become overwhelming..?
Thanks for revealing what you believe. I respect the fact that you're willing to come out and admit that you think blacks just aren't as smart as whites. Now we're getting somewhere! You're allowed to believe that without needing to justify it with pseudo-science.
I'll let this sit for a while -- hopefully you've got the courage not to delete it -- and I'll finish my coding tonight. Tomorrow, if I'm up to it, I'll retort.
...
You know, on second thought, I don't think I will. I can't help my position anymore than you already have.
-You practically conceded (or at least haven't adequately rebutted) the points I brought up against your characterization of Gladwell's article as illogical.
-You've weakened your position in an argument about the measure of biologically innate and immutable intelligence by resorting to bringing up a bunch of cultural phenomena that anyone on this board can easily rebut using vast socioeconomic factors. (If you really want to take it there, by the way, you can repost this to a new YC discussion thread questioning the legitimacy of the claimed non-biological factors that have stunted the economic growth of African-Americans and I'll address it there.)
-Most importantly, you've shown the people reading this that, indeed, there exist people who think that blacks are intellectually inferior to other races by their very biology. This is useful evidence I can point to every time someone says that racism no longer exists except amongst the most uneducated segments of society.
Snore. Sub-sahara Africa has been near-100 percent black for many millenia. There's no one else to stick the blame on, even if you want to bring up "society" and "economics". Hell, the only country whose socio-economics can be traced to white people is the only one with a decent economy. And, what do you know, another one, Zimbabwe, took a nose dive right after its ethnic cleansing of whites. Shock. Horror.
Thanks for revealing what you believe.
I believe the facts, sure. If there is anybody here who thinks that blacks and Jews are genetically equivilent in intelligence, raise your hands. Please, I beg you. But you have at least 2500 years of evidence fighting against you, so bring some counter-evidence first...unlike pius.
Ooh, this is getting nasty. A smart guy once told me when you find yourself in a hole, stop digging. I'm black and even I can figure out how to heed that advice! This is instructive though, so keep doing what you're doing.
Sub-sahara Africa has been near-100 percent black for many millenia.
Most African countries had robust cultures and economies before they were plundered by the European imperialists. For example, as hard as it is for you to believe, the first great libraries (pre-dating even the one in Alexandria) were in Africa. I guess you think that because Native Americans were successfully conquered, subjugated, and impoverished they must not have been very bright either.
There's so much to say, but again you're really doing a great job sinking your own ship. It's hard not to respond to you, but for the sake of my coding, I'm gonna try to keep my finger off the reply button for the rest of the night.
Again, if you want to take this cultural discussion further, do feel free to post a new thread and I'll address it at length tomorrow or so, I promise.
You realize this isn't much of an argument, don't you?
The reason I brought up Jews was because I'm not Jewish and so I consider myself neutral in the matter. I have nothing to gain from whatever inborn virtues jews might have. But the evidence still stands... I also have nothing to gain from whatever inborn virtues the Chinese might have. But the evidence still stands... I'm also not offended by the Parsis or Armenians or Brahmans or any of them, despite their achievements. What does it cost to be honest? People are different, and if we deny it, we make mistakes...
Most African countries had robust cultures and economies before they were plundered by the European imperialists.
It's just a cop-out. Every piece of land in this world (with a few exceptions) has been overrun and plundered and ravaged time and time and time again. People just can't get over those evil European colonists. No one ever complains about the Turks or Tatars or Mongols or Huns or Aztecs or Arabs or a thousand others...all monstrous in their time.
That's because I'm no longer arguing with you. You haven't pieced together much that's cogent enough for me to debate and your conclusions are nearly as despicable as they are preposterous. You're trying to argue that black people are biologically less intelligent than whites and other races, a view controversial enough that the burden of proof lies with you. Let's review how you've set out to prove it.
You tried to discredit Gladwell's article with fuzzy math and attacking the strawman; I exposed it. You failed.
Then you tried citing other people's research into IQ to support your views. Unfortunately there's no serious research that supports your world view, so you were left citing "studies" that have been widely discredited and debunked. (For example, "IQ and the Wealth of Nations" literally concludes that most of Africa is functionally retarded.) Reductio ad absurdum, you fail.
Then you gave up citing research into IQ and g, and started citing cultural phenomena that clearly are not relevant to the biological innateness topic at hand. Even the cultural phenomena you bring up aren't particularly compelling. (For example, you're comparing the plight of cultures conquered by the Ottoman empire that fell in the 1600's to that of African nations occupied and conquered by the British empire, which didn't leave in many cases until the late 1960's and, in the case of Zimbabwe, until 1980.) Failed again.
Finally, you got frustrated and started blurting out that it's "trivial" to conclude that blacks just aren't intelligent as other races, figuring that a few upmods on YC.News will make you seem right without proof. Fail.
I'm sure you're going to find another flawed study funded by known white supremacy groups to justify your beliefs. Or maybe you'll start citing phrenology or Nordic theory. I don't know what you'll pull out next, but I can assure you that I won't care, unless it's got some legitimate scientific basis.
You're making a fool of yourself.
Oh, where would I start... The structure of the brain? Our understanding and concept of what is "intelligence"? Nonexistentent genetical variation between the so called "races", which are themselves based on fallacious premises? The theory of races after all started in Germany as measured by the differences in the shapes of skulls, and was mainly categorized as an issue of beauty. With Germans obviously appointing themselves (aryans) the most graceful and beautiful "race" of them all. And now people are trying to retrofit genetic explanations on such an old theory based purely on pseudo-science? There is at maximum 5-15% genetic variation between the continental populations, and note that this is not the same as our naive notions of "race". There is less genetic variation in humans than in any other mammalian species. Worldwide genetic variation in humans is less significant than in 2 closely related chimpanzee species having evolved closely together in western Africa, to give you some magnitude for comparison. 90% of the genetic variation occurs on a local level as opposed to globally, if you can wrap your head around what that means? And every instance of "child genius" that has been studied has boiled down to no innate ability, but rigorous practice from an early age. Meaning that "intelligence" is largely learned, mind is an empty plate of neurons waiting to be connected. The only thing conceivably affecting their training are chemical balances, malnutrition, toxicity of the environment, and so on...
Basing your theories directly on empirical evidence about the economies of the world obviously can't factor in all the relevant facts. You say that all the African countries with no whites are poor? Did you know that a lot of them have been paying the debts created by the colonialists ever since they were "liberated"? Do you know how the West still sponsors guerillas and pays diamond merchants in many parts of Africa? Only a secluded mind could have such delusions of grandeur. I recommend debating with some intellectual and educated black scholars.
I picked a rather extreme example just to illustrate the point. I don't disagree with everything you wrote, but it is a mistake to believe early manifestations of genius have nothing, or even little, innate roots. Daniel Tammet is your living example. If his brain were a bit different, he'd be just another Kim Peek. It will be very hard to argue that this is due to rigorous practice from an early age. Kids with autism don't just gradually lose their aptitude to comprehend emotions by lack of practice. They are born with a dysfunctional empathy circuit. Kids with epilepsy don't just develop their symptoms. They are testable and predictable, and heritable.
I'm not saying what you say is wrong -- it depends on what you mean by intelligence. But you're being unspecific about "intelligence" while being specific about how it is related to genetic, inborn traits. This opens the door wide to attacks like mine -- just pointing it out.
One more thing. The statement "The theory of races after all started in Germany" evaluates to false. I assume you're referring to early 20th century Germany. It started with the European colonialists, which wasn't even such a German thing. That's also the Eurocentric interpretation of the word. I'm sure other cultures had their own ideas of race dating to much earlier. The Chinese always called the people outside their country borders barbarians. And Orthodox Jews consider themselves the chosen people. Take that interpretation, then I'm among the unchosen barbarians, or race, whatever.
Autism is a different case because it's not necessarily genetic (although I'm not sure if there are also genetic cases). In fact autism cases have exploded in recent history, so environmental factors are likely a contributor. One such theory is the vaccines containing mercury which is a strong neuro-toxin decaying neuron connections which would result into the observed behavior. I'm not going into that discussion however.
I'm being unspecific about intelligence because it's inherently a very ambiguous concept, which is one of the fallacies of the IQ testing and the arguments given by the racists like in this thread. I can see short comings and non-objectiveness in almost every IQ test I have seen. And that without even taking into account the fact that they're "adjusted" periodically to reflect the norm which obviously means they're not perfectly objective to begin with.
I was referring to 18th century Germany and for example theories created by Johann Friedrich Blumenbach.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blumenbach
Anyhow, I saw this on reddit and found it related, and interesting in general:
http://www.scienceblog.com/cms/mit-corrects-inherited-retard...
"The MIT study found that FMRP and mGluR5 are at opposite ends of a kind of molecular seesaw." These kinds of "molecular seesaws" are everywhere in the body. When things are only slightly out of balance you _may_ get drastic effects. Emphasis on may, because at this point nobody knows exactly what and how much of it is required to achieve what effect. But there you have it -- once it is identified, it is manipulable. The more important point is, many symptoms are graded in severity, and as this study shows, autism could be found to be less disconnected from normal than you may think.
Completely laughable, and completely unverifiable. The only passable tests of such things that I am aware of are studies of separated twins, which have indicated quite clearly, time and time again, that variance in intelligence is attributable in great part to inheritance. There's no arguing around such tests--bring up as many chimpanzee breeds that you want.
Meaning that "intelligence" is largely learned, mind is an empty plate of neurons waiting to be connected.
The oldest error in the discussion. Start your elementary education in the subject here:
http://www.amazon.com/Blank-Slate-Modern-Denial-Nature/dp/06...
Pinker spends an enormous amount of time bowing down to the antique emotionalisms of the age, and so the book shouldn't be too offensive to the weak-hearted.
EDIT:
user: politrix
created: 1 day ago
The child genius comment is not laughable. A genius is always tied to a particular skill given in a cultural context. For example playing a piano, or juggling. It is possible that a child is born with certain innate physical qualities that help him in whatever he practices. Like being fair, or strong, tall, etc... But to assume that any 5 year old learned to play piano as some kind of a genetic gift is far more ludicrous. It takes hard practice to perfect your body and mind to work in unison for any particular task, approximately the same for everyone bar perhaps the effects of personal motivation and rigor of the exercise.
With the exception of people with disorders that in some way may make them amazingly good at certain tasks, like having eidetic memory.
I'm not sure if there is a standard emoticon for raising a hand. But that looks sorta right.
Good luck.
I've made more than enough mistakes in judging individuals. Doing it based on the colour of their skin is just the most egregious.
I've met white slackers, I've met chinese pot heads and I've worked with black men who humble me with the grasp of subjects I'm considered an expert in.
It's just a stupid (and I don't use that word lightly) way to judge someone.
Also, I am not a Jew, but Jews are a particularly interesting group by themselves and are not to be ignored. IQ and the Wealth of Nations is not really what you want to read. Gregory Cochran is (regardless of how vilified he may be). The list of Nobel laureates is also nothing to shrug off as simply a result of environmental factors. Steven Pinker gave a (supporting) talk on this topic. Statistically speaking, the "Jewish" (which is a fuzzy definition if you look into it) are, without any doubt, the group of people with the highest collective scientific and financial achievement in the world.
Meanwhile, who has ever pointed out that there are no Jewish basketball superstars, sprinters, weight lifters...? Are they endowed with inferior physical ability? Perhaps I shouldn't say so, but this "deficiency" is as glaringly obvious as their accomplishments, and it doesn't seem as sensitive a topic.
It's all about relative distributions. If a patient goes to a hospital to treat Torsional Dystonia, 99.9% of the time, they are Jewish. It also happens that heterozygotes of TD have higher myelin density. It also happens that Einstein had abnormally large glial growth (which affects myelin density). It is also common knowledge that Einstein's brain was structurally different than most humans and this difference was a genetic alteration.
No matter how you look at it, there are genetic influences in intelligence. It is logical that certain genetic traits may be more prevalent in certain localized populations. Now I said nothing about these groups based on skin color, but as a group that has been highly in-bred, the "Jewish" group of people are, statistically as a whole, incontrovertibly, "superior" in certain areas, that the current society finds valuable.
Let's examine the neighbors of the five lowest scoring nations:
Zimbabwe, The Democratic Republic of the Congo, Sierra Leone, Ethiopia, Sierra Leone, Equatorial Guinea.
Each of these nations are fairly distant from one another (ie: at least two hops on the world graph). Yet if you flood fill at a depth of two from each of them, you discover something pretty interesting: nearly all of Africa is filled! These countries were given a score of about 64, a bit more than two SD's below the world average. If an averaging of the scores of nearby nations took place, and it must have by the author's own admission, then the mere presence of these five low scores depresses the scores of the entirety of Africa, and this negative influence spreads all the way to the middle east. There's your consistency.
Actually, the African countries aren't of serious concern. [1] Rather, the disparities between developing countries' current wealth and predicted wealth based upon current IQ have their uses:
http://finance.yahoo.com/q/bc?s=FEMKX&t=my&l=off&...
[1] The "are black people less intelligent?" question is actually pretty trivial, and has very few practical applications.
I'm unconvinced that they're measuring generated wealth by IQ, either. Most of the administered tests weren't IQ tests, they were educational tests. They measured the standard deviation of the _nation's_ mean, and then mapped that to an IQ. The correlation thus isn't a direct one between IQ and generated wealth, but rather between educational performance and wealth. More obvious, this one is.
This suggests that kids can be "trained" to score well on IQ tests. There is more than socioeconomic factors at work here, and cultural factors (particularly those that influence cognitive modes of thought) are important. But ultimately, IQ tests are probably a dubious measure of someone's general intelligence anyway.
There are a lot of pseudo-scientists out there who claim that IQ tests are perfectly accurate, not at all culturally biased, and are in fact objective, innate measures of intelligence. According to these folks, black people are just fundamentally less intelligent than white people, that's why IQ scores are so correlated to race. This theory would predict that "tainting" pure white blood with "intellectually inferior" black blood should yield children who are stupider than their white counterparts, without regard to cultural factors. In practice, though, the evidence appears to point to a more nuanced explanation, as there is a statistically significant difference between IQ scores when cultural factors (such as race and gender combinations of the parents) differ. In other words, IQ may not be statistically independent of the non-genetic factors surrounding the test-taker.
That might clear it up.
If not, the remainder of the paragraph that you quoted may elucidate it further:
"And it shouldn't make much of a difference where a mixed-race child is born. But, again, it does: the children fathered by black American G.I.s in postwar Germany and brought up by their German mothers have the same I.Q.s as the children of white American G.I.s and German mothers. The difference, in that case, was not the fact of the children's blackness, as a fundamentalist would say. It was the fact of their Germanness--of their being brought up in a different culture, under different circumstances."
I wonder if you can subscribe to the New Yorker in the UK. I'm starting to appreciate that magazine more and more.
For centuries, what did you do if you were a bright kid in China? Get your balls loped off and become a eunuch. Who needs children when you have the Imperial household to run? Even if you didn't become a eunuch, you at least became a Buddhist monk or something if you were smart.
Europe was pretty much the same thing. Smart people became priests and monks, who, while not completely celibate in the real world, still had much lower rates of reproduction.
On the other hand, in Africa, you gotta be smart, or your ass is lion fodder. Are you a lazy daydreamer with no head for thinking? Too bad, because when the drought comes, only smart dudes will be able to provide for their families through alliances and phony witch doctor magic tricks.
----
That a story like this can be so easily constructed is why I never put too much stock in things like evolutionary psychology per se. It's easy to come up with a fable that "explains" why the world is the way it is. Real history and real facts are much harder to piece together.
Actually that's not the case. Popes and priests used to have orgies and sex parties; the reason to go into the clergy was for money and power. They had a racket going, collecting money from poor villagers; joining up was how you cashed in. They were FAR from celibate.
http://www.cracked.com/article_15648_five-biggest-badass-pop...
Similar history for Dalai Lamas; they used to go to war, have illegitimate offspring, etc.
In outlying areas where there wasn't much power to be had, you joined up with the local monks/priests if you didn't have other job skills and thus no way to support a wife/family, so it wasn't as if the most promising males were all taking themselves out of the gene pool or anything close to it.
And you don't need a 1:1 ratio of fathers to mothers; a single smart, powerful male can father hundreds or thousands of children, and pass on his "smart genes".
And so it goes with The New Yorker: when you are deeply emotionally committed to a position, it's virtually impossible to trust anything you say. I admire Malcolm Gladwell, and enjoy The New Yorker, but really, could this article have gone any other way?
People who believe in the equality of human beings typically believe in it strongly enough that they find it difficult to objectively analyze putative evidence to the contrary -- they're damn stubborn. Meanwhile, people who are racial supremacists of any kind in this day and age have self-selected themselves as pretty headstrong, stubborn individuals themselves.
Bias itself is not a flaw in an argument. Bias may tell us where to look for flaws in the argument.
Not discard, simply distrust. Remember all those Microsoft studies comparing the total cost of ownership of Windows and Linux? Finding flaws in the studies was hard. Discovering an a priori reason to distrust the studies was not.
Simply put, any article like this is going to make claims: "X is a fact." When the source is biased, and X confirms the bias, it's much harder to trust that X is true.
"What's that? Your parents aren't rich? Nor are your friends? All you have in collateral is an old Buick? Next please."
They did data analysis from traffic controllers.
Despite the name, they actually made a fairly decent revenue for high school kids (some tens of thousands annually). Once Bill's age was discovered they had a much harder time selling anything.
Even Steve Jobs had to stop being a shaggy hippie.
But luckily for founders, unless you're in the consulting business, the market really doesn't care who you are. There are far too many layers of abstraction for your identity to have any meaning, beyond of course, that which is deliberately constructed. (Mac People, Japanese Cars, German Engineering, Scandinavian design, etc) ^.^
Only at the summary do you get a hint why this might be. My guess is access to improved nutrition could be one factor.
(Seriously, "the Asians = smart" myth doesn't last long if you actually meet normal people in Asia. Normal Asian people are... of normal intelligence! What a shock!)
Race has bearing on:
- skin color
- whether you're likely to get sickle cell anaemia
- the age your children develop teeth
- the age your children walk
- the size of your penis (if you have a Y chromosome)
- the amount of fast twitch fibres in your muscles
It has no bearing whatsoever the brain. Why? Because of magic. While all of the aforementioned effects of race on physiology links are well known and freely discussed, race cannot have any bearing on anything inside the skull, because the brain is magic.
Anybody that suggests otherwise, or suggests investigating or discussing the effects of race on the brain is a racist and we need to moderate them down.
The only people who would discuss such things are racists with an agenda like James Watson, not scientists like the people that understand how the brain has magical properties.
Brain=magic. You don't even need to read the article. Now lets moderate the racists down!
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/1998-10/WUiS-GSRD-071...
This isn't to say that heredity plays no part, or that certain groups of people won't be more likely to have certain traits. Maybe you could say that some tribes in West Africa are such-and-such. But we can't expect our eyes to reveal genetic truths.
2) I think you're missing Gladwell's point. It is not that heredity doesn't affect the brain. It's that IQ testing is far too flawed to yield meaningful results, especially when comparing groups of people tested in different places and at different times.
In the story, they mention how properly normalized IQ tests find that Asians have a lower average IQ than whites. They speculate that Asians' success in academics is due to cultural values and individual efforts -- and if you know any super-achiever Asian students, that was in plain sight all along!
You are talking about race as if 'black' or 'white' were a race. This is confusing race with skin color. I have not done this and neither should you.
"2. Gladwell's point ..is that IQ testing is far too flawed to yield meaningful results"
I completely agree with Gladwell's point. My post above is satirising this thread and the discussion therein.
There are so many breeds of dogs, you can hardly find a common thing among them. This doesn't mean dogs don't exist.
Furthermore, dog breeds are nothing like ordinary human populations. We simply don't have human populations that are subjected to the extreme selection pressures that we apply to dogs, which produce breeds with strong natural talents and lots of natural deficiencies that would kill them if they were turned loose in the wild. Chihuahuas versus Great Danes. People vary, and natural selection matters, but it's nothing like dog breeds.
Whatever you mean by that, it is pretty clear that it makes sense to talk about Caucasian race (or terriers) and use that concept, even if the manifested features vary.
Furthermore the name was created on fallacious premises to begin with. From the creator of the "Caucasian race" Johann Friedrich Blumenbach:
Caucasian variety - I have taken the name of this variety from Mount Caucasus, both because its neighborhood, and especially its southern slope, produces the most beautiful race of men, I mean the Georgian; and because all physiological reasons converge to this, that in that region, if anywhere, it seems we ought with the greatest probability to place the autochthones (birth place) of mankind.
Take a Norwegian. Put him in a suntanning booth 5 hours a day. His skin will be dark.
Take an African. Never let him see sunlight in his life. His skin will be light.
Take an XX embryo, inject male growth hormones into the womb at the proper time, it will grow a penis.
Take the children of geniuses, have it raised by a Harlow-style "wire mother," and it'll be as dumb as a brick.
The question isn't "nature vs. nurture." It's how much of each is involved. The question about the black-white test gap is not "Are blacks born dumb?" It's "Have we already pushed everyone (black, white, visual learner, auditory learner, whatever) to the outer limits of their innate capacity?" Since the Flynn effect exists, the answer is probably, "No."
On top of that, intelligence is not a one gene, on-off thing. It's a million different things working together better or worse. That's why intelligence is distributed in a Bell curve. Anytime you have a bunch of different factors influencing things at random, a Bell curve develops, since there are more ways to randomly have a bunch of X, a medium amount of Y, but not enough Z than there are to have a bunch of all three. This means we're talking about a wide variety of genes, not just one pair of deformed genes like sickle cell anemia.
On top of all that, IQ tests are designed to measure something called "g" which is supposed to predict general ability, but the whole thing is a statistical chimera. G should be able to tell you how good you are at any other test, plus or minus a small factor of particular competency in the field, plus or minus an even smaller amount of randomness, but it doesn't actually do that. So, IQ tests basically only measure ability to take IQ tests and are vaguely correlated with other, useful abilities in the same way that height is "correlated" with the ability to drive. (Ever see a six year old who could parallel park?) See http://cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/weblog/523.html for a full breakdown on why "g" isn't actually a useful thing to measure.
Anyhow, there's three different problems with linking IQ and race, and none of them have anything to do with the brain being magic.
Indeed, all of those problems exist. However they can be more or less overcome, especially over time.
- In the first case, as with the Italians immigrating to the US, and their second generation children, per the article.
- Larger sample sizes, and lessening of socioeconomic and cultural differences should help the second case.
- The last could be assisted by better definitions of 'intelligence', or finding another, more specific field to measure.
My point is, however, that despite the improvements that could be made in this field of research, nobody will fund or perform it at least in the US.
Why? Because the brain is magic, and people who discuss physiological differences between races involving brains are racists.
1) What's the benefit of doing this research outside of curiosity? Education research is useful, yes, but studying raw intelligence to try to figure out what parts of it are genetic seems like a waste of time, unless you plan to give babies the "smart gene" in a Sci-Fi scenario.
2) I'm not sure why you're bringing up the Italian example. It shows that Italians were performing really low, but when their culture changed, the problem went away. So, it wasn't genetic. To show something comparable about the IQ gap for black people would be really hard, because Africa is poor as hell, which depresses IQ scores, and Africans living in the First World aren't a part of the majority cultures. So, you'd either have to get all black people to be rich for a generation or have them all look white somehow but keep living in a white culture in order to make a fair comparison. It's not a repeatable experiment.
I've heard this objection before and I often wonder if the people making this argument secretly think that some races really are inferior, but that we mustn't talk about it.
Or, perhaps you are implying that such research might overturn our egalitarian, meritocratic society. Personally I have no fear about that. It's obvious that some people are born superstars in pure physical ability, and yet we all still enjoy sports and not all physical work has been dominated by one race.
And I think you can see that there would be huge benefits in learning what the non-genetic factors of intelligence are.
I've heard this objection before and I often wonder if the people making this argument secretly think that some races really are inferior, but that we mustn't talk about it."
Perhaps you should wonder if they're being sarcastic.
Suppose you don't deliberately study "raw intelligence" but are interested in autism. There are a bunch of genes related to the manifestations of autism. You have a relatively low-functioning empathy circuit, for example. You develop obsessions with numbers, for example. This could be a malfunctioning orbitofrontal circuit (which is also dysfunctional in OCD patients).
It is not a coincidence that some people with superior memories exhibit very similar symptoms as autists, but retain most of their social ability, and there you go, innate, genetic intelligence, almost as a side effect of an impartially developed disorder.
What's the benefit of researching Viagra outside of pleasure? It was an accidental discover during heart research (IIRC).
You don't even have to be curious about discovering what genes are responsible for "superior" mental functions. That's almost like trying to solve a puzzle with the expectation that you only connect the pieces that you consciously set out to connect.
Furthermore, your understanding of race appears to be different than mine. You say that race has bearing on "whether you develop sickle cell anaemia" - this is untrue. A particular mutation in a particular gene has bearing on that, and that mutation is more prevalent (statistically) in groups of people we label with a certain race. But it is in no way casually related with race.
I routinely notice when someone is smarter than me, or has a better memory than me, or who can visualize complex logical structures better than me. It sucks (for me, in this instance), but that's just the way it is.
The entire premise is wrong. IQ scores typically rise 5-15 points on a second test, now that the taker knows what kind of questions to expect. IQ tests can be studied and practiced for.
Just like if you hear enough logic puzzles, you can work out solutions to similar problems without needing the "AHA!" moment of insight that you needed the first time.