Tabula rasa, or science denial of the left

[Seangoli]

A significant portion of their advancement involved the extensive trade networks set up by the Italian states, incorporating technology, philosophy, amd sciences developed across the world. Particularly following the Crusades, this trade influenced the Renaissance era of expansion and innovation many fold and disseminating from there. A luxury afforded to them, in part, due to their reluctance to war between themselves and relative peace as no singular state was powerful enough to conquer another and its allies.

The Renaissance was one of the most violent periods in European history, particularly in Italy where this series of conflicts was being fought in the middle of the Renaissance.

This isn't including the Wars of Religion which would kick off around this point or the previous few centuries of conflicts both in Europe and abroad.

I wa speaking more of the early Renaissance in the 14th and 15 century than of Middle Renaissance of the late 15th and 16th centuries. Following the fracturing of the Holy Roman Empire in the mid-1300s and the beginning of the Hundred Years War at the same time, there was little in the way of outward agression towards the Italian States. Equally, the Black Death in the 1300's crippled the populations of the peninsula, which inadvertently played a part in the Italian State's reluctance to war between one another as they didn't have the ability to muster large forces. Following the 1300's, the Peninsula was relatively at peace as they had no need to concern themselves with outside aggression nor was inter-state warfare viewed as a particularly good idea. From about 1350 moving forward until the Italian Wars, they were far more reluctant to enter into war with one another. The States accumulated a truly disgusting amount of wealth (relatively) through heavy trade during this period, and they effectively threw money at more 'frivolous' projects such as the humanities and arts that they otherwise would not have, spurring the explosive growth of the early Renaissance.

While there were certainly conflicts during this period, particularly the Wars of Lombardy (1424-1454) and the Florence-Milanese wars (1390-1402) these were an intermission and largely smaller-scale affairs than you would see elsewhere in Europe, and typically were contained to two feuding states and were quite limited both in scale and in scope. Further, the end of Wars in Lombardy in 1454 marked an age of actual peace in Italy until the Italian Wars, where there was no major conflicts going on and the states once again focused almost their entire efforts on become filthy, ludicrously, and disgustingly rich and willing to fund frivolities to their heart's content. To be frank, while the conflicts and wars that were going on between the Italian States was certainly present, they were much, much smaller scale affairs during the 1350s-1494 period, lacking the scope or the scale of what you would see elsewhere in Europe at the time, and often were interludes to long periods of relative peace. And it was the accumulation of vast amounts of weatlh during these interludes that allowed (certain) Italian States to fund fun side projects.

[Darussalam]

I can't "move the goalpost" when that's never what I fucking said.
I said that they had resources AS WELL AS factors that encouraged urbanization.

Pretending that your readers are retarded to the point of brain hemorrhage

I'm not pretending any such thing, I'm quite clearly stating that you can't fucking read or refuse to.

Not really, because when you have the specific claim contested you doubled down and insist on the validity of the point, as opposed to pointing out to urbanization as a more important factor, clearly indicating that you thought that your point is perfectly valid, that Europe has an edge on natural resources over other continents, because why would you mention it when you don't think so, and just think of it in "absolute terms", as if you can quantify Europe's extent of natural resources in such? It doesn't take a Kabbalist or an autist to see that you are being dishonest here. Maybe admitting that you're wrong on that part is more prudent.

And once again we find that years of conflict encourages military innovation, it was around this time that gunpowder warefare kicked off IIrc.

Congo Basin is also very violent.

Environment can vary in many different ways, not just GDP. Two countries can have equal GDP, but different literacy rates, different levels of urbanization, different levels of lead contamination, etc., etc.

There could easily be some of the variation that comes from genetic causes, but you are overstating the extent to which other variables can be controlled and the extent to which a genetic explanation can be proven.

This is just the Environment of the Gaps I have been talking about. Yeah nobody has peered down to the entire universe and found no God anywhere. But people used to think that lightning is the surest sign of divine anger that nobody can explain, that life is the surest evidence of the Supreme Clockmaker that creates such finely-tuned and complex system, but as we are capable of explaining more and more things you think it is more than [predictively unknowable] and crank it up into the meta level of [fundamentally unknowable]? When people attribute certain problems as caused by environment they're not using the null hypothesis of hereditarian claim, they also have specific environmental factors that have been shown to lack evidence of substantial effect, just as when people attribute things to divine providence they're talking of a prayer-answering, miraculous, interventionist God, retreating only as science marches further.

The issue with racism and it's fake moustache and nose incarnation of Race realism is not that there may or may not be statistical variances in perceived racial groups abilities, preferences or whatever.

It's that those statistical differences are utterly irrelevant. If 90% of people who wear green hats are especially good at accounting, that doesn't mean you should assume that anyone who wears a green hat is a good accountant.

Just because someone is part of a group that is statistically inferior at a given task doesn't make it any less of an injustice to not consider them as you would anyone else of their chosen vocation.

It's about morality. Not science.

I agree. But as this thread demonstrated, it's not me who disagrees with this assertion. People don't think that we should treat everyone equally because that is a good thing regardless of observed statistical differences - they want to believe that human cognitive and behavioral equality is a biological truth. And why some people reject that they ascribe it to nefarious motives like racism. They are instinctively repulsed by it - they reject it as a possibility altogether. Why do you think people are branding me as a racist even though I have never for once advocated any 'oughts' in this thread, and just focus on the 'is'?

I'll answer it myself: because there's this bubble where discussing about IQ means that you belong to the outside tribe, associated with a certain list of views. But that has no bearing whatsoever on the truth value of questions raised, just as the answers given might have no bearing whatsoever on your fundamental values. Intensive, polarized tribal signaling obscures the need of actually looking at the evidences - "looking at the evidences" becoming yet another tribal signal, an empty statement that you belong to the right group, regardless of whether you are doing it or not.
(I can't imagine it won't affect policy prescriptions, though. For example, accepting that everyone is different means that accepting a different outcome each as possibly caused by a fair, merit-assessing system, as opposed to constant crusading of the racism of the gaps)

[Genivaria]

I can't "move the goalpost" when that's never what I fucking said.
I said that they had resources AS WELL AS factors that encouraged urbanization.

I'm not pretending any such thing, I'm quite clearly stating that you can't fucking read or refuse to.

Not really, because when you have the specific claim contested you doubled down and insist on the validity of the point, as opposed to pointing out to urbanization as a more important factor, clearly indicating that you thought that your point is perfectly valid, that Europe has an edge on natural resources over other continents, because why would you mention it when you don't think so, and just think of it in "absolute terms", as if you can quantify Europe's extent of natural resources in such? It doesn't take a Kabbalist or an autist to see that you are being dishonest here. Maybe admitting that you're wrong on that part is more prudent.

And once again we find that years of conflict encourages military innovation, it was around this time that gunpowder warefare kicked off IIrc.

Congo Basin is also very violent.

Environment can vary in many different ways, not just GDP. Two countries can have equal GDP, but different literacy rates, different levels of urbanization, different levels of lead contamination, etc., etc.

There could easily be some of the variation that comes from genetic causes, but you are overstating the extent to which other variables can be controlled and the extent to which a genetic explanation can be proven.

This is just the Environment of the Gaps I have been talking about. Yeah nobody has peered down to the entire universe and found no God anywhere. But people used to think that lightning is the surest sign of divine anger that nobody can explain, that life is the surest evidence of the Supreme Clockmaker that creates such finely-tuned and complex system, but as we are capable of explaining more and more things you think it is more than [predictively unknowable] and crank it up into the meta level of [fundamentally unknowable]? When people attribute certain problems as caused by environment they're not using the null hypothesis of hereditarian claim, they also have specific environmental factors that have been shown to lack evidence of substantial effect.

The issue with racism and it's fake moustache and nose incarnation of Race realism is not that there may or may not be statistical variances in perceived racial groups abilities, preferences or whatever.

It's that those statistical differences are utterly irrelevant. If 90% of people who wear green hats are especially good at accounting, that doesn't mean you should assume that anyone who wears a green hat is a good accountant.

Just because someone is part of a group that is statistically inferior at a given task doesn't make it any less of an injustice to not consider them as you would anyone else of their chosen vocation.

It's about morality. Not science.

I agree. But as this thread demonstrated, it's not me who disagrees with this assertion. People don't think that we should treat everyone equally because that is a good thing regardless of observed statistical differences - they want to believe that human cognitive and behavioral equality is a biological truth. And why some people reject that they ascribe it to nefarious motives like racism. They are instinctively repulsed by it - they reject it as a possibility altogether. Why do you think people are branding me as a racist even though I have never for once advocated any 'oughts' in this thread, and just focus on the 'is'?

I'll answer it myself: because there's this bubble where discussing about IQ means that you belong to the outside tribe, associated with a certain list of views. But that has no bearing whatsoever on the truth value of questions raised, just as the answers given might have no bearing whatsoever on your fundamental values. Intensive, polarized tribal signaling obscures the need of actually looking at the evidences - "looking at the evidences" becoming yet another tribal signal, an empty statement that you belong to the right group, regardless of whether you are doing it or not.
(I can't imagine it won't affect policy prescriptions, though. For example, accepting that everyone is different means that accepting a different outcome each as possibly caused by a fair, merit-assessing system, as opposed to constant crusading of the racism of the gaps)

Not really, because when you have the specific claim contested you doubled down and insist on the validity of the point, as opposed to pointing out to urbanization as a more important factor, clearly indicating that you thought that your point is perfectly valid, that Europe has an edge on natural resources over other continents, because why would you mention it when you don't think so, and just think of it in "absolute terms", as if you can quantify Europe's extent of natural resources in such? It doesn't take a Kabbalist or an autist to see that you are being dishonest here. Maybe admitting that you're wrong on that part is more prudent.

Right, it's funny that you think you know what my thoughts are but you trying to spin my words to mean something else doesn't actually make your point stronger.

Congo Basin is also very violent.

What's your point?
It has a very different type of conflict going on, nations which actually have the manpower and resources to do so will engage in an arms race against their enemy.
You can't really do that when ALL of your resources are being dedicated to simply surviving.

[Jamdt]

The argument has ended up being about the Great Divergence, the popular term for Europe pulling ahead of the rest of the world and successfully extracting large quantities of labor and resources from the rest of the world, arguably continuing to the present. Now, since you've had a very questionable posting history with regards to your opinions of colonialism, I'm going to spell this out very clearly and make sure that this statement is non-controversial. Europeans, and to a lesser extent societies of neo-Europeans in America, Australia, etc., spent the better part of the period between the Colombian Expeditions and the 1970's using military power and economic power to extract, by force when necessary, extremely large amounts of value from the rest of the world. Mineral and material resources were exploited and exhausted using indigenous labor, and when indigenous labor proved to be inadequate, Europeans hijacked a centuries-old system of slave trading in West Africa and cranked it up to 11, essentially converting the Atlantic coast of Africa into an enormous battery of cheap labor which could be used to fuel the development of the Western Hemisphere. Essentially, Europe enriched itself, at the expense of the rest of the world, for something like five hundred years. For a majority of that time, the profits of that enrichment went back to European cities, and fueled further advancements there. During the Imperial Age, one cannot deny that Europe and the neo-Europes experienced a flowering of science, art, civil society, philosophy, infrastructure, applied science, industrialization, commercialization, urbanization, the development of transportation and communication networks, etc. All of these systems were designed to benefit the population of Europe as a whole - it is during the Imperial Era that mass, compulsory schooling becomes common, that bureaucracies develop with the goal of making government interaction with the average citizen more effective and efficient, and that massive new opportunities for voluntary education, employment, and innovation are made available, over time, to a broader and broader portion of the European population. Europe developed traditions of literacy, self-improvement (in the capitalist, become-wealthier sense), democracy, political engagement, scientific approaches to the world, and the like.

During the Imperial Age, the rest of the world, wherever Europeans had a say, was explicitly, intentionally, purposefully denied as many of the benefits of this system of resource and wealth extraction as possible. Even within the societies, like Europe and the Neo-Europes, where this system brought that kind of development, non-European people were legally, culturally, and socially excluded from the system, when and if they escaped being exploited themselves. The centuries of a headstart that Europeans gave themselves in terms of civil society alone can account for an enormous portion of the differences between modern European states and, say, sub-Saharan African ones. Without centuries to create traditions and institutions, to allow those institutions to develop prestige and reputation, and to establish themselves, it's no wonder that the modern African, statistically speaking, lacks meaningful access to the benefits of a stable, non-corrupt, generally benevolent state - it took Europe hundreds of years to develop such states, and then Europeans crushed developing state systems, extracted wealth for centuries until is was no longer economically feasible, forced the adoption around the world of the nation-state, even where it was painfully inadequate to the situation, and then left completely new nation-states to stand on their own with no chance to develop the strong institutions they needed to be able to function as effectively as a European nation state. That's just one example of how Europeans managed to skew the system against an African, even centuries in advance.

So when you cite statistics that say things like "IQ is a full standard deviation lower in Africa than in Europe", well, that may be empirically proven. But there's zero reason to immediately conclude that that's due to differing genetic inheritance across all of sub-Saharan Africa. Numerous studies have found that sub-Saharan Africa possesses some of, if not the, greatest genetic diversity on the planet. Yet, the argument seems to be that, across these enormously genetically diverse populations, there is reduced I.Q. Know what all those populations have in common? Brutal exploitation by Europeans and denial of centuries of benefits which Europeans received, access to stable states with functional, reputable institutions being just one.

Aha, you say, but I.Q. is an objective measure of individual's capacity to learn, not how much they have already learned from, say, an effective, standardized education system. And it is, you're right. But even within European cultures, I.Q. doesn't perform like the perfectly objective measure you claim it to be. I.Q. in America has steadily risen since the creation of the test, to the point that, like most similar tests of intelligence, it now has to be recallibrated every so often, since otherwise, the average I.Q. would drift up an average of 3 points per decade. This is known as the Flynn effect, and it's proof that there are definitely some kinds of external factors that influence I.Q. I will happily contend, with the force of history behind me, that discrepancies in European and sub-Saharan African I.Q. can be explained by environmental factors.

[Dogmeat]

I don't subscribe to the theory, for the record (although I do think some cultures are more superior than others, and that may affect variables) but it is certainly an interesting fact that wealthier countries in the Caribbean have IQ scores closer to their African ancestry than countries on equal levels of development and/or wealth/education.

I do think that IQ has a genetic link, though. There's simply way too many examples of people in relative poverty escaping that poverty with greater success if they had better off ancestors, and its certainly correlated with wealth/status. It's most commonly quoted and seen in former deposed French aristocrats when the country turned anti-noble, only for them to return to success when it was lifted, a theory backed by French ANF. It backs the old adage: Take money away from the rich and spread it equally and a few years later the rich will be rich again. Racial? Don't think so, but who am I to know. I don't think it has a racial link, but a cultural one appears to be logical. To convince me wrong you'd have to point out that there appears to be some IQ difference in relatively peaceful multiracial single-culture countries.

If you're talking about stuff that happened within a single generation where people were raised in rich households, but then lost their wealth, they would still have any skills they learned from their parents growing up and those skills would still be useful. And they'd still be likely to have a lot of their old social network. Even over two generations, you might still be looking at knowledge that was passed down rather than something genetic.

To expand on this:
Here in Minnesota, the Vietnamese immigrants very quickly recovered from having lost most of their wealth in expatriation. Whereas the Hmong immigrants did not. This, despite presumably having very similar DNA. The difference seems to mostly lie in the relative education of the two groups prior to making the journey.

[Darussalam]

To expand on this:
Here in Minnesota, the Vietnamese immigrants very quickly recovered from having lost most of their wealth in expatriation. Whereas the Hmong immigrants did not. This, despite presumably having very similar DNA. The difference seems to mostly lie in the relative education of the two groups prior to making the journey.

"despite presumably having very similar DNA"

First, Indochina has an unique geography that allows the development of many distinct population clusters within such a compact area. Hmong constituted the most genetically distinctive group in Vietnam.

Second, Vietnamese and Hmong immigration might draw from different social classes. This is not impossible to posit - Indian immigration to the US was highly selected in favor of high-caste individuals, which is partly why Indian-Americans is one of ethnic groups with highest income in the US.

Third, educational attainment in home country doesn't tell us anything about whether a trait is hereditary or not. Especially in developing countries, educational attainment might as well be caused by IQ.

[Bombadil]

These are his cites. The first is the Jensen & Rushton study that has come under intense fire.. here from a report in the American Psychological Association..

From which..

J. P. Rushton and A. R. Jensen (see record 2005-03637-001) ignore or misinterpret most of the evidence of greatest relevance to the question of heritability of the Black-White IQ gap. A dispassionate reading of the evidence on the association of IQ with degree of European ancestry for members of Black populations, convergence of Black and White IQ in recent years, alterability of Black IQ by intervention programs, and adoption studies lend no support to a hereditarian interpretation of the Black-White IQ gap. On the contrary, the evidence most relevant to the question indicates that the genetic contribution to the Black-White IQ gap is nil.

However it would be disingenuous of me not to note that this comes from Nisbett, and his interpretation is also in question, though mostly as a battle between him and Rushton to be honest.

Yet to say that study is 'proof' is simply untrue.

One group of scholars, including Richard E. Nisbett, James R. Flynn, Joshua Aronson, Diane Halpern, William Dickens, Eric Turkheimer (2012) have argued that the environmental factors so far demonstrated are sufficient to account for the entire gap, Nicholas Mackintosh (2011) considers this a reasonable argument, but argues that probably it is impossible to ever know for sure; another group including Earl B. Hunt (2010), Arthur Jensen, J. Philippe Rushton and Richard Lynn have argued that this is impossible. Jensen and Rushton consider that it may account for as little as 20% of the gap. Meanwhile, while Hunt considers this a vast overstatement, he nonetheless considers it likely that some portion of the gap will eventually be shown to be caused by genetic factors.

Both authors of the study have written a more than sufficient refutation of Nisbett's points and then some. James Lee also have written a review on Nisbett's book, which largely reiterates the same thing.

To quote from Lee,
"The ultimate test of the hereditarian hypothesis is of course the identification of the genetic variants affecting IQ and a tally of their frequencies in the two populations. Because of their likely small effects, we may have to identify dozens of such variants before we are able to make any confident inferences regarding the overall genotypic means of different populations. Although this task is currently within our technological means, it seems practically out of reach in the very short term. Ancestry estimation is much less costly than gene-trait association research and thus offers the advantage of an immediate increment toward the resolution of this issue."

https://osf.io/ydc3f/
https://osf.io/z8dy5/
https://www.researchgate.net/publicatio ... ifferences

These, and a few more studies presented below, I think are quite sufficient demonstration that hereditarianism "passed the test".

Finally, I think it is necessary to note something. Contrary to what you might think, Nisbett does not deny genetic explanation for differences in intelligence within groups. Nor I believe Turkheimer, or other authors for that matter - they certainly consider genetic component as a more important factor than you do. Now, you claim neutrality with "some of them are genes, some of them are environment", but as evident below, I don't think your neutrality is being genuine. And later on, Nisbett et al., acknowledged the role of genetics in score difference between Asian-Americans and European-Americans, and (anecdotally) apparently approved of Cochran and Harpending's hereditarian paper on Ashkenazi IQ.

As acknowledged in the article by Nisbett published in 2012, among others,
"When the Neisser et al. (1996) article appeared, the controversy over whether genes influence intelligence was mainly in the past. That controversy has faded still further in the intervening years, as scientists have learned that not only intelligence but practically every aspect of behavior on which human beings differ is heritable to some extent."

This is the arch-environmentalist Nisbett we're talking about (one of the few that are credible and aren't outright cranks) - at worst, his description is credible enough. At best, it might be understating!

The third link is to a Florida twins study, there's another oft cited in Missouri. Yet there are major issues with twins studies.. twins are not genetically identical and intelligence is not isolated to a single gene.
Other studies have examined variations across the entire genomes of many people (an approach called genome-wide association studies or GWAS) to determine whether any specific areas of the genome are associated with IQ. These studies have not conclusively identified any genes that underlie differences in intelligence. It is likely that a large number of genes are involved, each of which makes only a small contribution to a person’s intelligence.

Link

Polygenic traits are widely understood to be a thing in biology. So what? First, through eliminating all other possible variables in the research it is still possible to conclude whether there is genetic factor that explains the disparity or not, regardless of whether the trait will turn out to be monogenic or polygenic. Second, I am quite certain that one of the studies I cited and you omitted contained just exactly the explanation that the inheritable part of intelligence is polygenic. I quote!:

We conducted a genome-wide analysis of 3511 unrelated adults with data on 549 692 single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) and detailed phenotypes on cognitive traits. We estimate that 40% of the variation in crystallized-type intelligence and 51% of the variation in fluid-type intelligence between individuals is accounted for by linkage disequilibrium between genotyped common SNP markers and unknown causal variants. These estimates provide lower bounds for the narrow-sense heritability of the traits. We partitioned genetic variation on individual chromosomes and found that, on average, longer chromosomes explain more variation. Finally, using just SNP data we predicted ∼1% of the variance of crystallized and fluid cognitive phenotypes in an independent sample (P=0.009 and 0.028, respectively). Our results unequivocally confirm that a substantial proportion of individual differences in human intelligence is due to genetic variation, and are consistent with many genes of small effects underlying the additive genetic influences on intelligence.

In addition, twin studies are often found to have major flaws.

Many twin pairs experienced late separation, and many pairs were reared together in the same home for several years
Most twin pairs grew up in similar socioeconomic and cultural environments
MZA correlations were inflated by non-genetic cohort effects, based on common age, common sex, and other factors
Twins share a common pre-natal (intrauterine) environment, and the MZA pre-natal environment is more similar than the DZA pre-natal environment
TRA study findings might not be (or are not) generalizable to the non-twin population
In studies based on volunteer twins, a bias was introduced because pairs had to have known of each other’s existence to be able to participate in the study
MZA samples were biased in favor of more similar pairs, meaning that studied MZA pairs are not representative of MZAs as a population

Link

Take a look at these two, twins who were effectively separated at birth with one sent to the US and one remaining in the UK, and rather wide different environmental factors..

Overall, the twins’ differences were more frequent than their similarities. Differences were most apparent in general intelligence, Stroop completion times, ideational fluency, psychomotor completion times and medical health. Similarities included mental status, job satisfaction and social support. The personality data yielded mixed findings.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4563825/

Jay Joseph's criticism of twin studies seems to primarily stem from his rejection of the EEA - Equal Environment Assumption. In the classic twin study design, identical (MZ) twin pairs are compared to fraternal (DZ) twin pairs so as to estimate the relative contributions of heredity and environment to individual differences. According EEA, to the shared environment of MZ twins is not more similar than that of DZ twins, which is an assumption that he rejected. First of all, an extensive literature has existed which accepted the reliability of EEA - Barnes et al., and Felson among them. The key is that while it's true that environment of MZ twins might be more similar to each other than the environment of DZ twins, there is little evidence that they experience more similar trait-relevant environments. Adoption studies and standard twin studies also give very similar results - indicating that the flaws in EEA certainly do not substantially influence the intended purpose of twin studies in the first place.

The second is from Tabarrok's criticism here:

Even more important, for an article that goes on about “modern genetics” the author seems completely unaware that it is now possible to do a whole-genome analysis. That is, instead of assuming that siblings share 50% of their genes on average it is possible to estimate, sibling-pair by sibling-pair, how many genes siblings share and then correlate that with various characteristics. Obviously, it takes a lot more data to do a study like this but it has been done. Visscher et al., for example, use data from 3,375 sibling pairs to estimate the heritability of height. Interestingly, they find a heritability of 0.8, very close to that found in traditional studies.

Even if we didn't have twin studies, genome-wide association studies exist. Coincidentally, they also have similar result with adoption studies AND twin studies. Tabarrok also linked to the study that I gave above. Trivia: Tabarrok is so racist, he's an open border proponent.

EDIT: note that I myself called citing just Nisbett in refutation of Jensen as also disingenuous - so to your question yes, if you presented the opposite argument citing the opposite side only then I'd call you out on it.

I'm aware. It's just that that you don't really mean it, and your attempt at neutralism here is not very convincing. "You must present both sides" here is disingeneous - to me, the sides are asymmetrical in quality and popularity, and the environmentalists don't really do much to present their case even though they're supposed to be the ones who are obviously right. If the environmentalists are the first to present their evidences here, you wouldn't go into tangent about how they should present #bothsides, because why should they?

I mean.. to be honest nature and nurture are being found to be less of two separate things, it's not like any debate can fall to one or the other side. Genes are not static in expression or immune to modification due to environment, especially during childhood.

This cohort comprised over 3,000 pregnant women recruited in the Philippines in 1983. These women came from all different walks of life: They differed in access to clean water or a roof over their heads, whether they lived in an urban or a rural area, and whether they came into frequent contact with animals. From the data, they looked at over 500 of those women in order to figure out if their child’s environment growing up led to epigenetic modifications to their DNA—and later to a change in inflammatory proteins in their blood in adulthood.

Once their children were born, the investigators kept track of them and of the environments they were exposed to throughout their lives. Once they turned 21, the investigators took a blood sample that they used to measure the DNA methylation throughout their genome, as well as inflammation-related proteins that have been previously associated with cardiovascular diseases and other aging-related diseases.

The authors determined that the childhood environment of these youths affected the level of inflammation-related proteins (biomarkers) in their blood during adulthood, likely as a result of methylation of some of their inflammation-related genes. The dysregulation of these proteins can affect health and risk of disease.

The nutritional, microbial, psychological and social environments that children are exposed to growing up are critical for their physiology and health later in life, says McDade. As to the effects of specific childhood environments, he pointed to prolonged breastfeeding, exposure to microbes, and an abundance of family assets that led to better regulation of the inflammatory proteins.

Read more: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science- ... HFPiMae.99

Yes. What you have discovered is called "epigenetics", a study that has boomed lately in the present decade. It's not as revolutionary as frequently hyped (bonus question: guess why epigenetics is overhyped than what it actually is). It's not without detractors, but that doesn't really matter - even if epigenetics do inform us about causal mechanism behind inherited phenotypes, giraffes still didn't gradually inherit the length of their stretched necks.

The presence of epigenetics does not shut down discussion on whether something is inherited trait or not, in any way. Is it possible that Africans inherit low average cognitive ability due to epigenetics mechanism influenced by centuries of oppression? Sure, I'm not averse to that conclusion. On the other hand, that seems unlikely. Population groups which were used to be oppressed or poor - Jews, Koreans, Chinese, all have high IQ scores, and their scores are already high when they were opressed/poor. I already mentioned the Ashkenazi IQ here, but let me cite it again:

http://web.mit.edu/fustflum/documents/p ... socsci.pdf

In the 1920s a survey of IQ scores in three London schools (Hughes, 1928) with mixed Jewish and non-Jewish student bodies showed that Jewish students had higher IQs than their schoolmates in each of three school, one prosperous, one poor, and one very poor. The differences between Jews and non-Jews were all slightly less than one standard deviation. The students at the poorest Jewish school in London had IQ scores equal to the overall city mean of non-Jewish children.

The main thing is that in your opening remarks you state that 'leftist' believe evolution stops qt the neck - that is really a straw man that I don't see anyone claiming here. Everyone and anyone accepts that genes play a part, environment also plays a part, genes can influence environment and environment influences genes.

'Evolution stops at the neck' refers to the prevailing belief of human cognitive (and behavioral, but the latter hasn't been addressed much in this thread) equality, where inherited human cognitive ability is equally distributed across groups and couldn't possibly not be, to be held even in opposition of empirical evidence. I don't think this is a strawman. Consider the following statement: intelligence is not equally distributed across groups, some groups have higher average intelligence than other and a substantial reason of this disparity is hereditary in nature. If you're repulsed by the idea then you believe in the faith of cognitive equality.

Yet the final point is if you take something static like IQ and apply it against various categorisations you're going to find a ranking, and you might think that consequential within a species but if you take humans as a whole relative to the IQ of any other animal and the variation is very much insignificant.

I'm not talking about animals in general - I'm talking about humans in particular. The thing is, variations in average intelligence within human subgroups is significant. You might be worrying about nebulous notions like human equality, racial superiority, or other things that are mainly useful on podiums and campus protests. But IQ correlates with many useful things: educational and professional achievement, national productivity, scientific innovation, etc. etc. I'm not saying that it's an objective measurement of innate human worth. But if you want to trace back and resolve many problems in human society, accepting cognitive ability measurement as a tool of analysis is certainly useful, moreso than holding intelligent people for "holding the marginalized down".

Poor nutrition, poor education, poor childhood circumstances are going to have an effect on IQ results, not IQ results causing poor nutrition, poor education and poor childhood. Are you really saying evolution is the cause of the Flynn effect, that magically everyone's evolving intelligence at a rate that then drives economic improvement or is it more likely that economic improvement is driving better IQ results.

There's really just too many variables to come down on one side or the other and the truth is there's likely no side, there's no means of saying 50% or 60% or whatever because of how highly dependent they are on each other and the high rate of variability not just in genes and expression but environmental factors.

Ok, what? In a span of two paragraphs you just claimed two contradictory things. First is that poor environment definitely causes IQ and it couldn't be the other way around, second is that #bothsides should just lay it down because we couldn't know for sure. All motte and bailey does is confusing the discussion around.

I repeat: we know a way to find out whether IQ is influenced by external factors, or IQ influences these external factors. And what we find is mostly that IQ is more influential to economic growth than vice versa. Poorest Jewish children have IQ equivalent to middle-class English children in 1920s United Kingdom, Koreans did not have the IQ of Ghana when they have equal GDP per capita, hell China is not a very developed country and yet its average IQ score exceed many countries more developed than it, on par with wealthy Western European countries.

And you're literally shifting around explanations for which IQ might not be [genetic] in the orthodox sense, in the single post. First you think twin studies are wrong, then it might boil down to epigenetics, then external factors influence IQ and it cannot be the other way around period, and now we don't know for sure. Which one is right, again?

It's worth studying of course, the more we know.. but it really has little to say about any superiority or inferiority of races.

Actually that's wrong. It proves that there's one superior race with the right of dominion over the world, and it's the Jews. Duh.

Good lord that's a lot of misinterpretation..

I'm aware. It's just that that you don't really mean it, and your attempt at neutralism here is not very convincing.

Don't I, I've been consistent on the position throughout the thread, the variabilities in effects of genes and environment are too wide for concrete conclusions. This is typical of you creating straw men from the very OP and throughout.

For one individual genes might vastly outweigh environment, for another environment might vastly outweigh genes.. poverty of money does not mean equal use of resources in either nutrition or hygiene.

If you can adamantly prove one side or the other then enjoy your Nobel prize.

[Darussalam]

Good lord that's a lot of misinterpretation..

I'm aware. It's just that that you don't really mean it, and your attempt at neutralism here is not very convincing.

Don't I, I've been consistent on the position throughout the thread, the variabilities in effects of genes and environment are too wide for concrete conclusions. This is typical of you creating straw men from the very OP and throughout.

For one individual genes might vastly outweigh environment, for another environment might vastly outweigh genes.. poverty of money does not mean equal use of resources in either nutrition or hygiene.

If you can adamantly prove one side or the other then enjoy your Nobel prize.

Poor nutrition, poor education, poor childhood circumstances are going to have an effect on IQ results, not IQ results causing poor nutrition, poor education and poor childhood. Are you really saying evolution is the cause of the Flynn effect, that magically everyone's evolving intelligence at a rate that then drives economic improvement or is it more likely that economic improvement is driving better IQ results.

So much for Golden Mean.

Also, that's not how Nobel prize works at all.

[Bombadil]

Good lord that's a lot of misinterpretation..



Don't I, I've been consistent on the position throughout the thread, the variabilities in effects of genes and environment are too wide for concrete conclusions. This is typical of you creating straw men from the very OP and throughout.

For one individual genes might vastly outweigh environment, for another environment might vastly outweigh genes.. poverty of money does not mean equal use of resources in either nutrition or hygiene.

If you can adamantly prove one side or the other then enjoy your Nobel prize.

Poor nutrition, poor education, poor childhood circumstances are going to have an effect on IQ results, not IQ results causing poor nutrition, poor education and poor childhood. Are you really saying evolution is the cause of the Flynn effect, that magically everyone's evolving intelligence at a rate that then drives economic improvement or is it more likely that economic improvement is driving better IQ results.

So much for Golden Mean.

Also, that's not how Nobel prize works at all.

Really? I don't know how to write this more plainly..

There are more than a thousand genes that go towards intelligence, and more are constantly being discovered. However each baby will have their unique make up on birth, their potential for intelligence. However from birth there's a lot of things that won't improve the potential but can only downgrade that potential, these include poor nutrition, poor education and many many other factors.

Someone with relatively adequate nutrition and education will reach their potential, so one would say genetics has a greater influence on that individual. Someone who lacks will not meet their potential and so one would say environment has a greater influence on that individual.

In terms of nations (or races if you want), cultural weight on education, availability of things like iodine in the diet.. many many factors can impact. Low average IQ certainly will lead to low economic performance.

Are you saying evolution caused IQ to magically explode to explain the economic explosion in growth since the industrial revolution?

What incredible evolutionary phenomenon in IQ explains this chart.. GDP per capita in England since 1270 https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/GDP- ... since-1270

[Kaggeceria]

That's not what tabula rasa means.

[Genivaria]

That's not what tabula rasa means.

No it refers to the moral concept of humans born as a blank slate.
Apparently OP took it to mean evolution and IQ....somehow.

[Darussalam]

That's not what tabula rasa means.

No it refers to the moral concept of humans born as a blank slate.
Apparently OP took it to mean evolution and IQ....somehow.

It's meant as a reference to Steven Pinker's book. See that I'm not talking about Locke at all in this thread.

https://www.amazon.com/Blank-Slate-Mode ... 0142003344

[Great Minarchistan]

*Doesn't mention the right and their "invisible hand"
*Doesn't mention That FDR got us rid of the Great Depression

If you got your eyes off your APUSH class and sneaked to see the actual statistics of the period, you'd notice that the Depression was already stabilizing into a subsequent recovery before FDR even got into the office.

*Doesn't mention That the 2008 crisis happened because we thought banks wouldn't Just fuck everyone up, knowing they would be bailed of anyway

Oh yes sir, someone doesn't know what is the CRA and what is the Federal Reserve?

[Darussalam]

Really? I don't know how to write this more plainly..

There are more than a thousand genes that go towards intelligence, and more are constantly being discovered. However each baby will have their unique make up on birth, their potential for intelligence. However from birth there's a lot of things that won't improve the potential but can only downgrade that potential, these include poor nutrition, poor education and many many other factors.

Someone with relatively adequate nutrition and education will reach their potential, so one would say genetics has a greater influence on that individual. Someone who lacks will not meet their potential and so one would say environment has a greater influence on that individual.

In terms of nations (or races if you want), cultural weight on education, availability of things like iodine in the diet.. many many factors can impact. Low average IQ certainly will lead to low economic performance.

Are you saying evolution caused IQ to magically explode to explain the economic explosion in growth since the industrial revolution?

What incredible evolutionary phenomenon in IQ explains this chart.. GDP per capita in England since 1270 https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/GDP- ... since-1270

So... what exactly you said that have refuted my points, exactly? If there's none, do you even have a point?

Yes, intelligence is polygenic. I have been saying so in this thread, repeatedly. Someone with passing familiarity of the term can easily tell you it doesn't mean anything to psychology tests that attempt to find heredity of certain traits. It's a misconception to regard polygenic trait as cannot be inherited. Besides, GWAS already showed us that it is polygenic and heritable - squabbling about unknowability of it seems to be rather politically motivated.

Yes, environment played a role on IQ development, moreso in developing countries (https://osf.io/preprints/socarxiv/yeq68/). On the other hand, IQ disparity between Africans and White Americans is larger than IQ difference between African-Americans and White Americans, and the living standard gap between Africans and African-Americans is very large, and the intelligence gap still remains even controlling for other environmental aspects. Someone with actual understanding with what this entails will tell you this does not mean we cannot discover with reasonable certainty how much of intelligence gap between racial groups in a single country is inherited. We do, and we have found it is quite heritable.

Many people here have pointed the Flynn Effect. Do you know that Flynn Effect doesn't indicate an increase in g factor, and therefore doesn't substantially contribute in narrowing the racial gap?

It appears therefore that the nature of the Flynn effect is qualitatively different from the nature of B-W differences in the United States [...] implications of the Flynn effect for B-W differences appear small[...]

Or as Rushton and Jensen stated in their answer to Nisbett (for more, just search "Flynn" in the article)

That Black-White IQ differences aremore pronounced on the more g loaded and more heritable components of tests does indeed imply the differences are partly genetic in origin. However, it is a false claim that
gand inbreeding depression correlate with the secular rise in IQ. We review the tortured history of this claim and in the process find we have eliminated the Flynn Effect as a reason to expect any narrowing of the Black-White differences.

Flynn later on mentioned the findings of Wicherts et al., and suggested that what is represented by the IQ increase is changes in specific narrow aspects of developed cognitive style, as opposed to g factor in itself.

Suddenly talking about rapid changes in Industrial Revolution as something that couldn't possibly be caused by IQ is non-sequitur and has nothing to do with my overall points (i.e how IQ presently affects things in the present day), but I'll humor you. Personally, I would recommend the works of Gregory Clark on this. Here are the summaries of some of his works:

The book discusses the divide between rich and poor nations that came about as a result of the Industrial Revolution in terms of the evolution of particular behaviours that Clark claims first occurred in Britain. Prior to 1790, Clark asserts that man faced a Malthusian trap: new technology enabled greater productivity and more food, but was quickly gobbled up by higher populations.

In Britain, however, as disease continually killed off poorer members of society, their positions in society were taken over by the sons of the wealthy. In that way, according to Clark, less violent, more literate and more hard-working behaviour - middle-class values - were spread culturally and biologically throughout the population. This process of "downward social mobility" eventually enabled Britain to attain a rate of productivity that allowed it to break out of the Malthusian trap. Clark sees this process, continuing today, as the major factor why some countries are poor and others are rich

Clark controversially hypothesises that the main reason for the unexpectedly high persistence of social status in families (or, put another way, the unexpectedly low degree of social mobility he finds) is that high-status people are more likely to have genes that are beneficial to them achieving high status, and are therefore more likely to pass such genes on to their children.

The book also advocates a generous welfare state, on the grounds that people of lower social status are unlikely to be able to advance very far in life, contrary to the widespread American Dream ideology of "anyone can make it in America if they work hard enough", and so people's advantages in life come about mostly through accident of birth, not effort.

Maybe you favor more non-materialist explanation of Deirdre McCloskey - that proliferation of Bourgeois values and virtues (certainly not communism lol) drive the Industrial Revolution. In which case, Here's an article by Garett Jones explaining the correlation between IQ and Bourgeois virtues.

EDIT: Also, nice job dismissing 90% of what I just wrote.

[Esternial]

The scientific evidence that indicates a difference between races is just the tip of the iceberg used to justify racism, though. If you classified people purely by what we've learnt through scientific research, the groups we end up with wouldn't be the "races" we have today.

Racism is typically motivated by other reasons, and justified by certain scientific research. This kind of "close enough" mentality is wielding science in a non-scientific manner.

You don't start with a conclusion and then select the evidence to support it.

[Salandriagado]

This should be good. Please, elaborate on why the great recession, triggered by the subprime mortgage crisis, has little to do with banks.

Please, elaborate on how these people were forced to take subprime mortgages.

The subprime mortgages weren't the problem. The problem was that the process of repeatedly splitting and repackaging high-risk debt in order to produce supposedly low-risk investments was based on mathematics that was (a) wrong, and (b) horribly misunderstood.