Race and IQ

[The Widening Gyre]

Can you make your point more explicit? I can't parse "These gradients no not conform to racial categorizations.". This statement seems to have many possible meanings, some of which are true, some of which are false.

The variation we observe in human physiology does not conform to what we would expect if races were valid taxonomic groupings.

My taste in food is measured by my revealed preferences for food when I am given a free choice. Similarly intelligence is measured by ability to perform mentally-loaded tasks when under pressure to do so. They're both physical things.

They're not physical, since as you yourself point out we can only measure them indirectly, through the way they make us act. Intelligence part of the emergent function of an extremely complex set of genes and the environment and epigenetics interacting to form our consciousness.

Races clearly do correspond largely to independently evolving groups separated by geographical barriers. Even if they didn't, though, that would neither 1. make the socially constructed labels "invalid" nor 2. mean that those groups are all the same interchangeable.

They don't, though. There is and always has been gene flow between all of the different 'racial' groups. Asia to Europe, Asia to the Americas, Europe to Africa, Africa to Asia and so on. 1.) It does, though. The whole point of 'races' is that they're supposed to be valid taxa - ways to categorize humans according to our understanding of the evolution of humans. If they aren't valid taxa, then they're just simply wrong, in the same way that categorizing people based on the four humours is wrong. 2.) No-one here is arguing that humanity is uniform. What we're arguing instead is that the diversity we see in human physiology and genetics does not conform to what we would expect to see if races were taxa.

I don't think species, as it is used in either common speech or scientifically, is consistently defined. To say something is part of a species is much more a social statement than to say that someone is white. To say that blacks and whites are different species is primarily a political statement. It's not a statement I am making, but I can't say it's strictly false either - it's indefinite.

There are many ways to define species, yes. The problem is that the races don't mesh with any of them, as I pointed out. You can use the colloquialism instead all you like, but that just relegates you to the same bin as people who call lemurs monkeys.

[USS Monitor]

you're just wrong.

That seems to point toward an epigenetic component. African immigrant populations have African genes, and they would be affected if discrimination based on skin color was the problem, but they don't have the epigenetic effects of slavery.

[Aggicificicerous]

Once or twice on the way to being awarded a PhD in physics. There is a y-axis label: the sum of the area under the two graphs is normalised to 1.0 Population of the United States. From this you could calculate numbers for the axis if you wanted but it would add no important information to the graph - presumably why it wasn't done.

The numbers on the y-axis just happen to be unimportant? How do you know? Have you calculated them? And why would blacks and whites be normalised to 1.0 population of the US when blacks and whites do not make up the entire population of the US?

See, I tried to look the data from that graph up, and I couldn't find it. I checked the page where you got the graph from, and they don't offer a link. Now I don't want to sully the reputation of the good folks over at The Alternative Hypothesis, but I don't just take numbers at face value. The closest I could find was this page, which has numbers from all sorts of the dates, the closest being 1979-1992. Unfortunately, the data is behind a paywall, but that's an interesting discrepancy, no?

I'm not just curious to see the calculated y-axis of that graph, I'm curious to see if those numbers are even legitimate. And if they are, how were they selected? The people making the National Longitudinal Surveys do an excellent job of explaining their methodology, noting the social standing, income, and so on of the people they test. The graph makes no such allowances. It does not explain how the numbers were obtained, or from whom they were obtained. I'm no PhD in physics, so maybe you can do better than I did: where are those data?

[Constitutional Technocracy of Minecraft]

There are biological differences between races, such as tolerance of UV radiation. However, no such differences affect intelligence.

[Cedoria]

I was trying to wait for Greater Ohio Valley to respond before we tackled these myths, but might as well.

Well it is. Intelligence is at least as much socially and environmentally determined as genetically. That is obvious to anybody with even a vague scientific literacy of the subject.

That there is indeed an environmental part has never been in doubt, but that whether or not such explained the gap. The Minnesota Trans-Racial Adoption study, which was conducted to test this theory of socio-economic status explaining the difference, found that it did not decisively.

That's before we get to correct the erroneous assumption that IQ is actually an accurate metric to start with, which it's not.

So you don't like IQ, that's fine. Here's SAT scores:

SAT scores aren't metrics that are useful either, You're still left holding an empty sack.

[Oil exporting People]

SAT scores aren't metrics that are useful either, You're still left holding an empty sack.

No, I think it's more of a case of you having moving goalposts.

[36 Camera Perspective]

IQ is completely irrelevant to the issue of racial equality; even if blacks had lower IQ's than whites, because of the fact that they are black, that would still not amount to an argument that blacks are not worth equal moral consideration.

To quote Peter Singer, quoting Jefferson:

“Be assured that no person living wishes more sincerely than I do, to see a complete refutation of the doubts I myself have entertained and expressed on the grade of understanding allotted to them by nature, and to find that they are on a par with ourselves … but whatever be their degree of talent it is no measure of their rights. Because Sir Isaac Newton was superior to others in understanding, he was not therefore lord of the property or person of others.”

[Bombadil]

IQ is completely irrelevant to the issue of racial equality; even if blacks had lower IQ's than whites, because of the fact that they are black, that would still not amount to an argument that blacks are not worth equal moral consideration.

..any more than conservatives should be of less equal moral consideration.

https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/th ... servatives

[Petrolheadia]

OK, so let's say there is a 15 IQ point gap between white and black people.

Still, discriminating blacks would make as much sense as bachelors discriminating high school graduates.

[Vassenor]

Didn't the authors of the MTRAS say it wasn't indicative of actual racial differences?

They argued that, "contrary to Levin's and Lynn's assertions, results from the Minnesota Transracial Adoption Study provide little or no conclusive evidence for genetic influences underlying racial differences in intelligence and achievement, " and note that "We think that it is exceedingly implausible that these differences are either entirely genetically based or entirely environmentally based. The true causes of racial-group differences in IQ, or in any other characteristic, are likely to be too complex to be captured by locating them on a single hereditarianism-environmentalism dimension."[9]

[Oil exporting People]

Didn't the authors of the MTRAS say it wasn't indicative of actual racial differences?

They argued that, "contrary to Levin's and Lynn's assertions, results from the Minnesota Transracial Adoption Study provide little or no conclusive evidence for genetic influences underlying racial differences in intelligence and achievement, " and note that "We think that it is exceedingly implausible that these differences are either entirely genetically based or entirely environmentally based. The true causes of racial-group differences in IQ, or in any other characteristic, are likely to be too complex to be captured by locating them on a single hereditarianism-environmentalism dimension."[9]

No, the authors were Levin and Lynn, who stood by their research. The portion you are quoting is from a response to it in the 1990s and, as they state, they cannot rule in either way on it. The APA took a look at it as well in 1994 after The Bell Curve was published and found that they indeed did agree that IQ in Whites is clearly a heritable factor, while they could not also find a cause for why Blacks never can seem to converge.

[Zottistan]

IQ disparities across populations exist, to a pretty huge degree, but it seems pretty unlikely to me that the origin is racial. Better educational standards and access to better food in wealthy white and Asian populations seem more likely.

[Shaggtopia]

Shaggtopian Human and Untested... fynumbers.

[Phoenicaea]

pardon, should IQ grow with education, on currenttly accepted scheme s behalf?

[Salandriagado]

pardon, should IQ grow with education, on currenttly accepted scheme s behalf?

IQ does grow with education, yes. Mathematical education particularly strongly, IIRC (but I'd guess that the latter is due to mathematical education being exactly what you need to game the test more effectively).

[Jabberwocky]

The OP is guilty of bad science: i.e. beginning with a conclusion and finding facts to support it.

[HMS Barham]

Can you make your point more explicit? I can't parse "These gradients no not conform to racial categorizations.". This statement seems to have many possible meanings, some of which are true, some of which are false.

The variation we observe in human physiology does not conform to what we would expect if races were valid taxonomic groupings.

Which would be what?

My taste in food is measured by my revealed preferences for food when I am given a free choice. Similarly intelligence is measured by ability to perform mentally-loaded tasks when under pressure to do so. They're both physical things.

They're not physical, since as you yourself point out we can only measure them indirectly, through the way they make us act. Intelligence part of the emergent function of an extremely complex set of genes and the environment and epigenetics interacting to form our consciousness.

Human behaviour is physical, as are its causes. You're not religious are you?

Races clearly do correspond largely to independently evolving groups separated by geographical barriers. Even if they didn't, though, that would neither 1. make the socially constructed labels "invalid" nor 2. mean that those groups are all the same interchangeable.

They don't, though. There is and always has been gene flow between all of the different 'racial' groups. Asia to Europe, Asia to the Americas, Europe to Africa, Africa to Asia and so on.

Before the 19th century there clearly was extremely little gene flow between, say, Sub-Saharan Africa and Europe. Sure, it wasn't zero either. So what?

1.) It does, though. The whole point of 'races' is that they're supposed to be valid taxa - ways to categorize humans according to our understanding of the evolution of humans. If they aren't valid taxa, then they're just simply wrong, in the same way that categorizing people based on the four humours is wrong.

There are all sorts of "valid" ways of categorising people that have no direct relation to evolution, such as felon/non-felon, employed/unemployed, by level of physical attractiveness, by level of intelligence, etc. These are not "wrong". What does that even mean? Schemes of categorisation are tools. They can be more or less useful. They cannot be correct or incorrect.

2.) No-one here is arguing that humanity is uniform. What we're arguing instead is that the diversity we see in human physiology and genetics does not conform to what we would expect to see if races were taxa.

Even if I granted that races didn't relate to evolution, and even if I granted that not being related to evolution made a categorisation scheme "wrong", I strongly disagree that the centrist posters on this thread have been making the very narrow claim you describe. They have not been granting that races might be massively different just so long as those differences aren't directly attributable to human evolution - in the way that felons and non-felons are massively different - they are arguing that the races are biologically interchangeable.

[HMS Barham]

Once or twice on the way to being awarded a PhD in physics. There is a y-axis label: the sum of the area under the two graphs is normalised to 1.0 Population of the United States. From this you could calculate numbers for the axis if you wanted but it would add no important information to the graph - presumably why it wasn't done.

The numbers on the y-axis just happen to be unimportant? How do you know? Have you calculated them? And why would blacks and whites be normalised to 1.0 population of the US when blacks and whites do not make up the entire population of the US?

State one way in which the numbers on the y axis could possibly materially affect the argument being made. The numbers on the y axis don't tell you anything about relative intelligence of racial groups, they tell you about the total population of the USA.

See, I tried to look the data from that graph up, and I couldn't find it. I checked the page where you got the graph from, and they don't offer a link. Now I don't want to sully the reputation of the good folks over at The Alternative Hypothesis, but I don't just take numbers at face value. The closest I could find was this page, which has numbers from all sorts of the dates, the closest being 1979-1992. Unfortunately, the data is behind a paywall, but that's an interesting discrepancy, no?

It's the same data used in the book The Bell Curve. The book was published in 1994, so using data out to 1990 doesn't seem strong evidence of some massive conspiracy. Probably the data from later years just hadn't been collected or processed yet when they began writing the book. The National Longitudinal Survey of Youth is US government project with a wiki page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_ ... al_Surveys

The people making the National Longitudinal Surveys do an excellent job of explaining their methodology, noting the social standing, income, and so on of the people they test. The graph makes no such allowances.

What allowance could be made when whether social standing an income cause or derive from biological factors like intelligence is one of the key points in dispute? The IQ data on its own admits either explanation (dumb people end up poor/poor people end up dumb), but twin studies come down heavily in favour of the former.

It does not explain how the numbers were obtained, or from whom they were obtained. I'm no PhD in physics, so maybe you can do better than I did: where are those data?

You linked it yourself: you just don't want to pay for an ORCHID subscription. Sure, my argument is not as rigorous as a PhD thesis. You'll note that the egalitarian side is not making such an argument either. My argument is much more rigorous than theirs, based on (btw, largely uncontroversial) data that you can indeed find if you apply the time and money. Their argument is based on "but shirley", taunts, and social confirmation bias.

[HMS Barham]

The OP is guilty of bad science: i.e. beginning with a conclusion and finding facts to support it.

Oh rubbish. Literally no one started with the assumption that racial egalitarianism and racial hierarchies were equally plausible, and decided to become an egalitarian after carefully examining the evidence. I know because I used to be a racial egalitarian before I looked at the evidence. Now that was unscientific behaviour - I had absolutely no foundation for my prior beliefs, other than their being popular among people at large and more popular among high status people than low status people. For practically everyone, egalitarianism is a prejudice (for the rest it's conscious lies).

[El-Amin Caliphate]

It's disheartening that we still have a debate as to whether people are smarter/dumber than others just because of their skin color.

[USS Monitor]

It's disheartening that we still have a debate as to whether people are smarter/dumber than others just because of their skin color.

Arguing that race correlates with intelligence doesn't necessarily mean the difference is caused by skin color. Correlation isn't causation.

If anyone does argue causation, that wouldn't make much sense.

[Darussalam]

It's disheartening that we still have a debate as to whether people are smarter/dumber than others just because of their skin color.

Being an IQ realist and accepting that IQ correlates with racial background doesn't necessitate regarding individuals of low IQ, let alone individuals from races with average low IQ as subhumans to be exterminated or persecuted. To use another wording, being smarter should not confer you right to disproportionately cause suffering to others.

[Aggicificicerous]

State one way in which the numbers on the y axis could possibly materially affect the argument being made. The numbers on the y axis don't tell you anything about relative intelligence of racial groups, they tell you about the total population of the USA.

The y-axis does not tell you about the total population of the US. It tells you about the populations sampled. Which, once again, does not correspond to the total population unless you're trying to tell me that everyone in the US is either black or white. Without a y-axis, I can't even see how many people were sampled. If the graph is pulling data from a sample size of 50 in one district, the graph will not tell you about the US as a whole. Because the authors of the graph haven't included a y-axis, I'm concluding that they either don't want people to see it, or were too lazy to show their work. Neither conclusion is in their favour.

It's the same data used in the book The Bell Curve. The book was published in 1994, so using data out to 1990 doesn't seem strong evidence of some massive conspiracy. Probably the data from later years just hadn't been collected or processed yet when they began writing the book. The National Longitudinal Survey of Youth is US government project with a wiki page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_ ... al_Surveys

I don't have the book, and the wiki page has neither has data nor names a survey that ran from 1980-1990.

What allowance could be made when whether social standing an income cause or derive from biological factors like intelligence is one of the key points in dispute? The IQ data on its own admits either explanation (dumb people end up poor/poor people end up dumb), but twin studies come down heavily in favour of the former.

IQ is not the same as intelligence. That aside, a scientific test for a biological component to intelligence cannot have outside variables like income disparities, social standing, and so on. It is fundamental to running an experiment that all variables must be accounted for except the one you're testing.

Incidentally, how far are you on your way to a PhD? I find it hard to believe that someone aiming for an advanced degree in the sciences doesn't understand something that should be covered in a high school or first year science class.

You linked it yourself: you just don't want to pay for an ORCHID subscription. Sure, my argument is not as rigorous as a PhD thesis. You'll note that the egalitarian side is not making such an argument either. My argument is much more rigorous than theirs, based on (btw, largely uncontroversial) data that you can indeed find if you apply the time and money. Their argument is based on "but shirley", taunts, and social confirmation bias.

I did not link it myself. My link does not include any surveys from 1980-1990. As it stands, I see no data backing up your argument.

[Neutraligon]

It's disheartening that we still have a debate as to whether people are smarter/dumber than others just because of their skin color.

Being an IQ realist and accepting that IQ correlates with racial background doesn't necessitate regarding individuals of low IQ, let alone individuals from races with average low IQ as subhumans to be exterminated or persecuted. To use another wording, being smarter should not confer you right to disproportionately cause suffering to others.

The problem is that you have yet to show causation rather then correlation.

[Darussalam]

Being an IQ realist and accepting that IQ correlates with racial background doesn't necessitate regarding individuals of low IQ, let alone individuals from races with average low IQ as subhumans to be exterminated or persecuted. To use another wording, being smarter should not confer you right to disproportionately cause suffering to others.

The problem is that you have yet to show causation rather then correlation.

Hence why I said correlation - USS Monitor already elaborated "correlation =/= causation" part so I feel no need to further emphasize the obvious. I suppose you can extrapolate that the cause is biological by considering that IQ is very heritable and that the gap remains even controlling for income and education level, but that's not the point.