Wait, the Japanese tendency to be introverted isn’t based in their genome?

Dan Freedman: Racial differences in newborn behavior, 1974

I read most of the link and one thought that came up was this argumentative style is much more likely to be used by a Jew – turns out, yep, I was correct, Turkheimer is indeed Jewish.

So another observed behavioral difference for the list.

“Group Evolutionary Strategy” may still be a bridge too far, but doesn’t it seem self-evident when you’re talking about Gypsies? Irish Travelers have adopted a similar strategy, but did they imitate the Roma or did they come up with their system on their own?

The great thing about posts like this from Turkheimer is that they cement his reputation as a super progressive anti racist, so anything he writes must be O.K.

Now go back to the May and June 2017 Vox articles of his:

1. IQ is real
2. IQ can be accurately tested for
3. IQ predicts important life outcomes
4. IQ is heritable (i.e., parents to child, not group genetics)
5. Blacks “obtain” lower IQ scores than whites
6. Racial groupings are legitimate in this context, showing origins

He agreed with all of this! Yet his piece was retweeted by countless idiots who didn’t read the piece, as “Vox takes down racist asshole Murray!”

What didn’t he and his coauthors agree with? Two things only:

1. Murray is WRONG that there is a 15 point IQ gap: it’s only 10 points, closer to 9.5.
2. Murray is WRONG that the difference is group genetic, there is “still no good evidence” that it’s not environmental (Murray has never taken a stance on this, as Vox’s Timothy Lee noted on Twitter, but whatever).

So Turkheimer believes that blacks are two thirds of a standard deviation below whites, and that this might at some future date be closed when hypothetical environmental causes are discovered, verified, and fixes implemented, and the kids then grow up to adulthood (so like 50 years from now).

So in other words, if you are an employer or university, you are not going to find blacks in proportional numbers to whites now or for the foreseeable future, and hiring unqualified blacks now won’t fix things.

but Latin American love of salsa dancing turns out to be environmental.

Is that a new dance style I have never heard of or just that their salsa was too picante?

There is an even deeper problem, which we can get to by way of Cochran’s next topic, which is dog breeds. Comparing groups of humans to breeds of dogs is perhaps the laziest analogy in the history of human behavior genetics.

Of course, lazy does not equal bad……

You could start with the fact that dogs have been systematically selected for physical and behavioral characteristics for many thousands of years; humans have not.

On the other hand, some dog breeds are quite recent creations…..Like, say, Dobermanns….which were first bred in the late 19th century….

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dobermann

And then there’s the domesticated Red Fox…..And foxes haven’t exactly “been systematically selected for physical and behavioral characteristics for many thousands of years”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domesticated_red_fox

That is part of what makes the argument so gross,

Why do grown nowadays sound like ’80s Valley Girls?

The behavior of dogs is “significantly, innately” (if not completely) fixed by their genomes. My two golden retrievers love to swim, like all golden retrievers, and they didn’t need to be taught. Like many water dogs, they have webbed paws, an actual biological adaptation, a mechanism, for swimming. My old hound dog wouldn’t jump in the water on a bet. That is part of being a dumb dog—they don’t make choices about that kind of thing.

Dunno, Eric. A friend of mine has a golden retriever that is afraid of water (when he was a puppy, he nearly drowned). Does this mean that golden retrievers are not innately fond of water…..

Suppose all races were equal in ability in everything. But suppose they still have different roots, histories, and appearances. That will be enough to determine behavior.

If there’s a school that is 50% white and 50% hindu and even if both groups had same abilities, many people will organize around identity of roots and appearances. Whites will look at whites(of whatever ability) and feel ‘my people’, and Hindus will feel likewise.

So, even if a white guy who’s into sci-fi may get along with a hindu guy who’s into sci-fi in terms of shared hobby, the white guy will still feel as part of a white community while the hindu will feel as a part of hindu community.

Also, even if the New People are equal in ability, were they overwhelm or replace the old people, it will be a much changed society. Suppose Palestinians of equal ability with Jews. Suppose Israel goes from majority Jewish to majority Palestinian and suppose Palestinian run government and industry as they’d been before. So, has nothing crucial changed? Is it still the same nation? No, the change has been profound because one people and culture have been replaced by another.

Suppose there is a society that is Arab and Muslim. Suppose the average IQ is 100. Suppose Hindus arrive and they have average IQ of 100, and they are of same ability as Arab Muslims. So, in terms of performance, it will be up to the same level.
BUT, the fact that an Arab community has been overwhelmed or replaced by a Hindu community is HUGE. One people and culture have lost out to another. Humanity isn’t simply about ability. It’s about identity of roots and culture, of memory and history.

As Cochran and Turkheimer are intellectuals, they tend to focus on IQ and ability. But a society is more than ability. It’s about identity of roots and appearances. When people are with others who look like them and share same collective ancestry, there is a sense of belonging.

PS. It appears many non-whites want to come to the West and have their own communities. They want to have the cake and eat it too, or have it both ways. They want to live in the white world because white people run things better and are fairer in terms of Rule of Law and justice. (In contrast, their own kind back home are corrupt, brutal, and cruel.) So, non-whites move to white nations to live in better-managed societies.
But they feel as outsiders, and so, they form communities of their own in the West. Being with others who look like them, they have a sense of togetherness and belonging like in the home country; but, unlike in the old country, there is rule of law and more productivity and efficiency maintained by White Ability.
Somalis want to live with other Somalis but in a white nation. Somalis don’t want to live with Somalis in Somalia as too many Somalis from top to bottom are thieving morons. But they would feel as strangers if they tried to fit into the white world. So, they form their own communities in places like Sweden and Minnesota. They feel safe, well-fed, and happy because the system is ruled and run by capable whites.

It’s a strange kind of habit. Non-whites want to live with their own kind but in white nations. Chinese want to live with Chinese in Canada than in China. Jamaicans want to lived with Jamaicans in UK than in Jamaica.

The Anglo-Germanic World has become a place where the Other can come to have the cake and eat it too. The Other arrive to enjoy all the amenities and niceties made possible by Anglo-Germanic ability. But in the name of Diversity or Multi-Culti, they form their own community to feel like they never left home. Look how Turks act in Germany. Jews may have pioneered this attitude. Move to the nicest nations made by Anglo-Germanics yet insist on keeping their own identity, interests, and community.

It’s weird that Turkheimer uses his first post on this topic not to review the Zimmer book, but to review a review of the book.

Great Sailer post partly on Turkheimer:

https://isteve.blogspot.com/2007/11/more-on-race-iq-brouhaha.html

Beat me to it!

Sam Harris did alright in defending himself against Turkheimer’s hit piece in Vox last year – the one published to “debunk” Sam’s podcast with Charles Murray – but Sam spent most of his energy on defending technical points that, for lack of a better term, “normies” don’t understand or care too much about.

Alt Hype, on the other hand, really picks apart Turkheimer’s whole worldview. Sam could do this, but he knows that would mean no more TED conference invites. (He may have crossed that line already.) But Alt Hype definitely doesn’t care.

YouTube is a fucking free-for-all right now, guys. Get in on it before they bring the hammer down.

Funny that Burkina Faso sees that the Emperor has no clothes or French team has no French. It’s an African team now.

https://www.breitbart.com/london/2018/07/06/burkina-faso-media-declare-diverse-france-an-african-team-in-world-cup/

“malleable” reminds me of chomsky’s strong argument that leftists shouldn’t be environmentalists–because its an assault on human dignity and freedom.

he could give you specific examples of people he knew and whose records are also known; skinner eg was a batshit authoritarian playing god.

“malleable” is a pretty dim view of humanity for supposed liberal humanists.

presumably its based on looking at cherry blossoms or eating fish with rice

Is that actually correct, that twins have an IQ difference of 1 SD on average? My gut wants to call BS on that, but if true it has some amazing implications. Mostly that the way your body builds the brain is insanely complex and somewhat random, even with the same genes guiding the way.

Can someone rephrase Turkheimer’s dog argument in a more understandable manner? Here’s what I have so far:

1. Cochran uses the example of dog breeds.

2. Down Syndrome is on a single gene.

3. Intelligence is highly polygenic.

4. Golden retrievers can swim, while many other dogs don’t.

5. Dogs are bred by man, not nature (which is gross because Nazis).

6. Dog breed swimming variance is small compare to human race IQ variance.

7. Therefore human race IQ variance is environmantal, not a group genetic trait.

I don’t follow this. I’m assuming he left some steps out. For instance, is he saying that unlike IQ, which is polygenic, golden retriever swimming ability is a Down Syndrome-like single gene diffference? Because, no, it isn’t.

I wonder how much he knows about dog breeding, by the way. The very existance of breeds is becasue they are maintained, with written records, continously by humans. To maintain traits male dogs are mated with their granddaughters. It’s a very tight, vertical family tree compared to that of human races. There is little variance because dogs have been bred to have little variance. There are golden retrievers that don’t swim as well because they have some mutt in their admixture, and they are not recognized as golden retrievers by the breeding powers that be. (That might change if an admixtured retriever were elected president of all dogs. Other retrievers might then adopt him with pride.)

Also, what is the basis of his claim that traits encouraged by human breeding are different in nature than traits that develop by natural selection? How do the genes of the dog or other organism know that humans are contolling things? Is this where the mystic free will ghost in the dog machine comes into play?

To those race-realists who set their store by genetics, I would extend an invitation to ponder this question: What if the Lewontins of the world are ultimately proven correct? What if, as I believe to be the case, the genetic data proves in the last analysis to be inconsequential and inconclusive? Are you prepared to follow that horse wherever it may lead? Will your loyalty to “science” then cause you to abandon race-realism?

It certainly should not do so. Still less should it tempt you to engage in dead-end and increasingly desperate arguments about the “real meaning” of the data. Rather, it should compel you to accept the fact that the issue was never there to begin with. Race was a real and recognized factor in human experience long before the discovery of DNA, and it continues on in the experience of the majority of human beings who possess no conscious awareness of DNA even today. But this means that the true science of race is no more essentially about genetics than it is essentially about skin color. Both of these are simply expressions of race. They are symptoms of the underlying race that exists prior to the appearance of any phenomenon.

It is a tragic commentary on the state of “science” today that, rather than clarifying the issue, it has served only to obscure it. Race-realists and politically driven race-denialists fight each other for the scepter of genetic evidence, not realizing that this scepter confers no actual authority over the subject. What’s sorely needed is a phenomenology of race developed along poetic/noetic lines.

Now the basic outlines of a science of race would be these. To begin with, we deny that race is a biological property. We affirm that race is a metaphysical property that expresses it itself not only biologically but also culturally and in other ways, however not unambiguously. Mindful, then, of these dangers, we agree that one may use biological phenomena as an avenue by which to approach the prime fact of race, with the reservation that such evidences are circumstantial and not dispositive. One may reason inductively from the phenomena about race, but not deductively. Since the subject matter here is by nature metaphysical, it can only be grasped noetically. Racial science is therefore a branch of ontology.

From the above paragraph it should be clear that a true and accurate science of race, or of anthropology, or even biology in general, is not even possible along empiricist lines and any explanatory schemes developed along such lines result in statements that are “not even wrong.” The fatal problem with Darwinism is not its material improbability but the fact that it is a categorically erroneous way of appraising the subject matter.

Why don’t you ask Turkheimer for a proper debate, like the kind you had with Will Saletan a couple of decades ago? Otherwise you just throw out these examples, he’ll probably never read this article, or never respond, and each of you will think that you have won the argument and move on.

> Danes have a more milk-drinking culture than do Vietnamese.
This is innate ability, not behavior.

> Sherpas are more likely to be employed as a Himalaya guides than lowlanders.
I’m sure this has nothing to do with the fact that Sherpas are born and raised in the highlands, and lowlanders are not. The former do have high-altitude tolerance, but that isn’t behavior.

> Kenyans are more likely to be in the distance running business than Hindus or Senegalese.
Again, innate ability (body structure), not behavior.

> In South Central Los Angeles, African Americans are more likely to get basketball scholarships than their Mexican American neighbors.
How neighborly are they? If they are self-segregated, their respective kids will just pick the game their peers are playing. In blacks’ case, it’s basketball; in Mexicans’ case, it’s soccer. Innate ability for success in either sport also plays a factor, but that doesn’t seem behavioral to me. There are black soccer players, and there probably are Mexican NBA players too (I don’t follow the sport close enough to know.)

> Mexican American high school baseball players are less likely to be pitchers than their white American teammates due to their shorter average stature.
You are referring to height, so there doesn’t seem to be a behavioral component here.

> Budapest Jews have a more literate lifestyle than do Budapest Gypsies.
Probably your solidest example, but group norms play a big part here. Back when group solidarity was essential for physical and economic security, people would have to follow particular norms to avoid getting expelled. Jews enforced literacy among their ranks, and Gypsies enforced a, well, carefree lifestyle among theirs. Jews that want to be more carefree probably exist but they can opt out of their group. Gypsies that want to get educated and live more respectably can leave their communities and join the general populations. In either case, group behavior doesn’t change significantly.
At the very least, this is a complex topic that you are highly simplifying by calling it genetically-determined behavior.

> Germans are more into tanning and nudism than are Arabs.
Germans are weird. (So are Arabs.)

> There hasn’t been a non-black starting cornerback in the NFL since 2003.
Innate ability, not behavior.

It really is the Magic Dirt®. We have it, and we’re racists if we don’t share it.

Turkheimer shifts the burden of proof. It is the “Zero (!) genetical caused behavioral differences between Nigerians and Japanese” dogma which is totally dominating the public debate and has been the basis for countless policies and political ideologies in recent decades. This dogma should be tried to proven, not the other way round.
Also of course small differences matter, because of the tail effect. They also matter because small statistical differences between groups are used to justify unjust policies such as affirmative action etc.

oh yes they do.

tinkering with metal and thieving as the lord told them to:

Another version does not condemn blacksmiths. It says that the blacksmith was addressed by God in a dream, where he was told to make four nails, but only hand over three, as the fourth was intended to pierce the heart of Jesus. In return God gave his descendants the right to wander the earth, rather than cursing, them to it) and also the right to steal from non-Romanies, without breaking the 7th of the Ten Commandments “Thou shalt not steal”.

The Irish traveller Gypsies have no origin story- 0r rather they have many of them. Despite efforts to proclaim themselves as a disadvantaged ethnic group that came into being after the great Irish famine (from peasants who lost their land) there are traveller communities that have existed in the United States for hundreds of years before that event happened and when this is pointed out to them they deny their relation to them (the famine story is mainly for them to get government benefits in England-there was an assimilation program in Ireland in the 1960s and they all pretty much decamped to England) despite the two groups behaving in exactly the same ways and even sharing surnames.

Some of the Traveller origin stories are: the aforementioned famine story, that they are the descendants of a caste of transient tinsmiths from Roman times (this is in accord to the distinction that used to be prevalent in rural Ireland until about 40 years ago-there were two types of Gypsy, the good ones who mended pots and pans ‘tinkers’, and the bad ones who just came and stole etc.), that they are the remnants of the Irish nobility displaced by the English (in pretindustrial times there was one major distinction between people-those who worked and those who did not, in this story the displaced aristocrats were too proud to work and lived off of charitable donations from their former peasants and eventually turned into Gypsies) or that they are the descendants of foreign groups (not Roma) who came to Ireland and for various reasons did not want to settle down (Ireland has had a turbulent history with a lot of changes in land ownership). The reality is that they are probably a mix of all these people. Travellers are of course illiterate and this brings me to my next point.

In France there was a caste of people who were small in stature and visibly different ethnically from the French. Because these people could not read and write, and because being one of them carried a massive social stigma ethnologists and historians literally have no idea who these people were and where they came from. There are no communities of these people left and even people alive today who have this ancestry are ashamed and will not come forward for DNA testing. The only remains of the people are legends of social stigma and small doors in the side of churches in southern France- they were small in stature and were discriminated so they could not use the same church doors as everybody else in France. The point of this is that if a community is illiterate it is incredibly hard to trace their history and it can even be lost entirely. The people who I am speaking of (if somebody knows the name please do reply and tell me) were actually only in France from the late middle ages but now their history is completely lost.

This will not happen to the Travellers as they are an incredibly hardy and adaptable bunch (if extremely anti-social) and even with a clear majority of them being ‘settled’ (semi-assimilated) they still keep up their travelling lifestyle. Many of the Travellers I knew were millionaires (mainly from not paying tax and using the excess to get in on the London and south east England property boom) and now there is less social stigma with many of them receiving specially tailored government benefits.

‘What’s up with that white voice?’: The tricky art of linguistic code-switching (by @misssoniarao, featuring @RadioMirage of @nprcodeswitch) https://t.co/6KN51aSquH

— Ben Zimmer (@bgzimmer) July 6, 2018

He retweeted the following

Has Meghan Markle adopted a British accent? @americandialect members Dennis Preston and Bill Kretzschmar weigh in. https://t.co/hCiMXRcL98

— American Dialect Society (@americandialect) July 6, 2018

This literally put me to sleep.

I know very little about them, but I believe the consensus is that they were Irish thrown off their land (during Cromwell’s terror campaign, perhaps, or at some other point ) who were forced to adapt a nomadic life.

I have encountered only one of them–,in Dublin–and she,yes she,scared the hell out of me. I guess they target the tourist.

This was not the harmless eccentric “tinker” my mother told me about,nor the ” jolly tinker” Tommy Makem sang of. Then again,maybe she wasn’t a tinker at all,but a drug addict or a ho.

Their origins,if the story is true, are profoundly melancholy,IMO.

The former, apparently.

No actual working scientist is a naive empiricist. Scientists merely demand that theory be in accord with evidence that anyone can in principle observe. That is a radical position among intellectuals – always has been and always will be.

Turkheimer strikes me as an obscurantist bullshitter type, unlike Zimmer who was mealymouthed.

Genetic tests show Irish Travellers diverged from the rest of the population around 350 or more years ago. They share many traits with gypsies, but their crimes tend to be more violent.

OT:

Professor says facial recognition software can tell if you’re gay, and the Russians are interested.

Some claim to be descendants of dispossessed famine victims, but people didn’t lose land during the famine.

A recent DNA study showed the Travellers to have separated genetically from the larger population more than a millennium ago:

https://www.irishexaminer.com/ireland/health/dna-study-travellers-a-distinct-ethnicity-156324.html

They’re not related to the gypsies.

I spent a few days in a hotel in Limerick across the street from a Traveller camp. During the day, they would roam the parking lots looking into cars. At night, they would race each other in sulkies right up the street. They tied up their horses to a line running between the camp wall and a nearby building. I heard their language and it’s nothing like English.

There’s a quite good magical realist movie from the early 90s called “Into the West” about two Irish Tinker boys who escape from their depressing housing project on a white horse who is presumably the spirit of their dead mother and go off into the West pretending to be American cowboys until Gabriel Byrne as their dad catches up with them.

I think Turkheimer is (deliberately?) confusing heritability with observed correlations in identical twins’ scores, which are higher. What is the actual observed correlation among identical twins’ IQ? This study says .84-.88: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/m/pubmed/1864898/
But what’s the observed correlation when the same person takes the test twice? .87-.91.
http://edpsychassociates.com/Papers/WISC3LongStability%281998%29.pdf

I think Turkheimer is (deliberately?) confusing heritability with observed correlations

Turkheimer is deliberate but not confused. Correlation between MZ twins separated at birth is heritability. The numbers you are citing (.84-.88) must be for twins that were not separated. To get heritability from them you need also correlation between DZ twins. Then heritability H=2(r_MZ-r_DZ).

Peasant,

The short people of France you are trying to remember are the Cagots. See here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cagot

Seems they lived in the south of France. Your recall is correct. Lots of conflicting accounts as to their appearance or origin.

Please take your obscurantist rambling elsewhere

Murray is WRONG that the difference is group genetic, there is “still no good evidence” that it’s not environmental

This is the heart of the matter; the thoughtful opposition cedes ground, but always clings to the power of the environment to close all gaps and make us all equal.

You’ll notice that critics like Turkheimer always apply a double standard. They wave off the evidence we do have as insufficient. In fact, noticeable reality is often dismissed as inconsequential. yet, when it comes to core belief in environmental causes, the near total lack of supporting evidence is no big deal. It is just assumed to exist.

In France there was a caste of people who were small in stature and visibly different ethnically from the French.

They were called Cagots. There’s an extended discussion about them in Graham Robb’s Discovery of France (Amazon link).

Wikipedia

The BBC and Guardian went crazy when France won the World Cup – the (50%+ minority) side was apparently a symbol of something or other. Not long after that the ‘youths’ started burning cars and it doesn’t seem to have stopped since.

This is a very weak World Cup (though more entertaining – who would have bet on Japan 2 Germany 0?) in that most of the historic ‘big guns’ are gone – Germany, Italy, Brazil, Spain, Portugal, Holland all eliminated or failed to qualify. Only England and France, both at least 50% African, are left, along with heavily African Belgium, mildly African Sweden, and Slavic Russia/Croatia.

If England get anywhere near the final we will never hear the last of it over here from the usual suspects.

They are #1 in the UK when it comes to ‘modern slavery’ – find some homeless guy or alkie on the streets, give him a van to live in, then work him 12/7 laying block paving or tarmacing drives for subsistence food and drink – usually while taking him to collect his benefits every week.

The Republic changed the laws on trespass and a lot of them upped sticks to the UK. They come back sometimes.

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/crime/rathkeale-a-small-irish-town-swollen-by-the-proceeds-of-crime-a6904141.html

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2248125/High-life-travellers-ran-slave-gang-Lived-luxury-beating-homeless-man-state-servitude.html

I guess 350 years of selection for ‘don’t mess with him’ levels of violence can make quite a difference to a group.

An interesting idea.
My father and his brother were identical twins. I mean really identical; even people who had met them before would tell them apart using minor differences in their appearance, such as the broken nose my father had suffered as a teenager, or the fact that one smoked a pipe, while the other smoked cigars.
They ran an auto repair business together, and wore shop uniforms with their first names embroidered on the shirts, to avoid confusion.

My father related to me that they were tested for I.Q. at least twice ( the last time at age 18 after they were drafted into the Army at the end of WW II), and my uncle’s I.Q. was always about 2-3 points higher than my father’s, never more and never less.

No, they’re vagrants living in intellectual houses long since abandoned by liberal humanists.

Can someone rephrase Turkheimer’s dog argument in a more understandable manner?

dog breeds prove beyond any doubt that both behavioral and physical traits (including intelligence) are genetic and heritable

so the only valid counter argument to the idea of human breeds is that you need a certain minimum level of consistent, directed selection pressure to achieve it and the selection pressure on humans didn’t meet that threshold

the rest is a smoke screen to disguise his acceptance of the core point

Irish Travelers being so similar to Gypsies in behavior despite being almost opposite in looks made me wonder if they were somehow the western and eastern branch versions of some aspect of the Indo-European expansion.

There’s a huge market for said obscurantist bullshit. If he doesn’t serve it, someone worse will.

Better look at demand-side reduction. Sailer-style mockery is one approach.

Romany and Irish Travellers almost certainly don’t share an origin. In George Borrow’s 19thC books (he was an autodidact polylinguist who spent a lot of time with gypsies and travelled with them) he makes plain the loathing of the Rom for the ‘wild Irish’ who were already travelling in the UK and who already had a reputation for violence.

https://www.gutenberg.org/files/37665/37665-0.txt

“What brought me into Wales? I’ll tell you; my own fool’s head. I was doing nicely in the Kaulo Gav and the neighbourhood, when I must needs pack up and come into these parts with bag and baggage, wife and childer.

I thought that Wales was what it was some thirty years agone when our foky used to say—for I was never here before—that there was something to be done in it; but I was never more mistaken in my life. The country is overrun with Hindity mescrey, woild Irish, with whom the Romany foky stand no chance. The fellows underwork me at tinkering, and the women outscream my wife at telling fortunes—moreover, they say the country is theirs and not intended for ni**ers like we, and as they are generally in vast numbers what can a poor little Roman family do but flee away before them? a pretty journey I have made into Wales. Had I not contrived to pass off a poggado bav engro—a broken-winded horse—at a fair, I at this moment should be without a tringoruschee piece in my pocket. I am now making the best of my way back to Brummagem, and if ever I come again to this Hindity country may Calcraft nash me.”

“I wonder you didn’t try to serve some of the Irish out,” said I.

“I served one out, brother; and my wife and childer helped to wipe off a little of the score. We had stopped on a nice green, near a village over the hills in Glamorganshire, when up comes a Hindity family, and bids us take ourselves off. Now it so happened that there was but one man and a woman and some childer, so I laughed, and told them to drive us off.

Well, brother, without many words, there was a regular scrimmage. The Hindity mush came at me, the Hindity mushi at my juwa, and the Hindity chaves at my chai. It didn’t last long, brother. In less than three minutes I had hit the Hindity mush, who was a plaguey big fellow, but couldn’t fight, just under the point of the chin, and sent him to the ground with all his senses gone. My juwa had almost scratched an eye out of the Hindity mushi, and my chai had sent the Hindity childer scampering over the green. ‘Who has got to quit now?’ said I to the Hindity mush after he had got on his legs, looking like a man who has been cut down after hanging just a minute and a half. ‘Who has got notice to quit now, I wonder?’

Well, brother, he didn’t say anything, nor did any of them, but after a little time they all took themselves off, with a cart they had, to the south. Just as they got to the edge of the green, however, they turned round and gave a yell which made all our blood cold. I knew what it meant, and said, ‘This is no place for us.’ So we got everything together and came away, and, though the horses were tired, never stopped till we had got ten miles from the place; and well it was we acted as we did, for, had we stayed, I have no doubt that a whole Hindity clan would have been down upon us before morning and cut our throats.”

Oh cheer up. All popular Irish history is balls, as my Irish grandfather used to insist.

Agree absolutely, and let me add:

The moment has come for “the other”, nice turn of phrase, btw, to leave. As a series of groups, there is no possible benefit they provide for our society that outweighs the drawbacks of the tax monies that flow into their communities.

The reality is that Whites, as a group, pay a huge net inflow of taxes to all levels of Government, and non-Whites, as a group, are huge net tax takers. The reality is that Whites, as a group, maintain the physical and legal infrastructure of the USA- the Courts, Power Grid, Internet, Air Traffic control, train Schedules, “teeth arms” of the Military, Charitable Organizations, and so forth, and non Whites, as a group, almost spectacularly do not contribute.

The reality is that it is fair to say that, on the whole, non Whites are Economic Parasites upon the White societies they live in, and every year more Whites are starting to realize this. Combine this with the unassailable fact that a technological\robotic society has ABSOLUTELY NO USE FOR ANYONE BELOW 110 IQ, and you have the making of a first rate catastrophe on our hands. This will build and build, and then one day, there will be what appears to be a complete implosion, not of our society, but of our two societies, and it will be very, very bad.

I would extend an invitation to ponder this question: What if the Lewontins of the world are ultimately proven correct? … Are you prepared to follow that horse wherever it may lead?

Yes. First thing we do is send all the refugees to India or Nigeria, their choice. It’s racist for them to want to come to NW Europe when they have the choice of any country in the world as their destination.

Five major mental illnesses — depression, bipolar disorder, ADHD, schizophrenia and autism — are traceable to the same inherited genetic variations, according to the largest genome-wide study of its kind.

Common Genetic Factors Found in 5 Mental Disorders

“The Jews have a rather famous Origin Story (beginning with “Let there be light”) but the Gypsies don’t seem to have a story about where they are from.”

Not only that, but the Jewish story if you believe the Patriarchal Narratives was based on a deal with God: if Abraham and his descendants were fair and just in their dealings with the peoples they met in the promised land, then God (who was just) would protect them. Granted, this deal came under strain in the Mosaic period, but there was a loophole — essentially only those peoples they met who had a fear of God were considered human in the sense that they could be trusted — but with the Gypsies all peoples they lived among were fair game to be swindled and they had no myth to restrain them.

For the historical details, see here: https://sites.google.com/site/thetorahandthewestbank/home

Hmmm:

'Today’s social democracy falls apart on the contradiction between advocating nearly unlimited government largess and nearly unlimited immigration.' From @BretStephensNYT: https://t.co/9TkzidJmlh pic.twitter.com/B6oKMIyYPS

— Byron York (@ByronYork) July 7, 2018

“Genetic tests show Irish Travellers diverged from the rest of the population around 350 or more years ago.”

Here is the original article from Nature:

https://www.nature.com/articles/srep42187

Going back to the ancient beginnings of this blog, you gotta be careful whenever Sailer uses the terminology of “introverted” vs. “extroverted” — in his usage these apparently carry some precise-yet-esoteric technical definition which the rest of English speakers in the world fail to appreciate. Also, he believes everybody famous is on steroids…

That is the glass half full view of Turkheimer. And probably how he justifies the BS part to himself. I find it hard to get past the BS coming from a real behavioral geneticist. https://teammccallum.wordpress.com/3-laws-of-behaviour-genetics/

Psychologist Eric Turkheimer wrote The Three Laws of Behavior Genetics and What They Mean (in Current Directions in Psychological Science in 2000).

“First Law: All human behavioural traits are heritable.

Second Law: The effect of being raised in the same family is smaller than the effect of the genes.

Third Law: A substantial portion of the variation in complex human behavioural traits is not accounted for by the effects of genes or families.”

P.S. Greg Cochran ably defends his piece: https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2018/07/07/turkheimer-speaks/

I think it is a combination. Their lifestyle fits a sort of evolutionary niche that tends to get filled in any society. There have been nomads since the beginning of history. If the nomads cannot survive by hunting or grazing flocks they have to provide some sort of goods or services to the settled population. Preferably something that is not available locally and that is not needed every day. In rural America in the late 19th century you had the pack peddlers who were usually either Jewish or Maronite Christian Lebanese (“Syrian”) and they replaced the earlier Yankee Peddlers. “Tinkers” had the skill to mend your broken and leaking cooking pots and other metal items. Fortune tellers provided a form of entertainment.

Maybe these groups are less than 100% honest according to the laws of the settled society. The gypsies would fix your pots but after they left town you might notice that you were short a few chickens (maybe children too according to legend). Connecticut is supposedly called the Nutmeg State because Yankee Peddlers specialized in selling wooden nutmegs – pieces of wood carved to resemble the actual expensive nutmeg spice. But they had to (at least before the modern welfare state) on the whole fill some sort of socially useful role because people would not have tolerated a group that made their living purely from crime.

However, when you have more than one group filling the same niche their lifestyles will bring them into contact with each other and they will directly copy some of the behaviors of the other group if these are socially useful for the lifestyle they have adopted. I’m sure the Syrian and Jewish pack peddlers picked up tips from their customers on what the competition was selling.

The rain in Spain stays mainly on the heads of marginalized POC stakeholders

p.s. with the demonstrated local interest lately in Gypsy neo-Bohemianism, I hope we get a review of this new “Leave No Trace” movie which looks interestingly terrible. The author of the book it’s based on is an alum of Deep Springs College:

http://www.deepsprings.edu/

Graham Coop’s take on the dog breed analogy and Turkheimer’s reply:

https://twitter.com/ent3c/status/1014162141702651905

Graham Coop does good work and his blog has nice technically accurate articles about a number of interesting genetic questions: https://gcbias.org/

I imagine he is at high risk of being Watsoned for his work if he is not careful. His polygenic scores post is IMHO a good example of remaining on the good side of the goodthinkers: https://gcbias.org/2018/03/14/polygenic-scores-and-tea-drinking/

Why do grown nowadays sound like ’80s Valley Girls?

They’ve been selected for.

Turkheimer is trying to be both a liberal and a behavioral geneticist. It’s a waste of time to argue with him. He’s a bit dim.

Professor Eric Turkheimer writes:

AchMG! There are so many Turks in Germany that they’ve founded their own city??!

No, but the Yakuza’s tendency to gain fantastic displays of tattooed skin is.

OT: Rage Meme provider RT provides:

‘Racial profiling’: Man fired after calling police on black neighbor at pool (VIDEO)

The video has been viewed more than 125,000 times online. Bloom has since resigned from his position in the homeowners’ association.

Immediate Judaic-Style Excommunication ensues:

He has also been fired from his job at the packaging company Sonoco.

“We are aware of a terrible incident involving the actions of one of our employees outside of the workplace. The well-documented incident, which involves activities at a neighborhood pool, does not reflect the core values of our company, and the employee is no longer employed by the company in any respect,” Sonoco said in a statement.

but with the Gypsies all peoples they lived among were fair game to be swindled

Every group (except for white Christians who we know would never ever cheat or steal or treat those of another race worse than their own under any circumstances – this is why in pre-immigrant America they didn’t even have jails or a court system) has, to some extent, the notion that you owe fewer social obligations to people who are outside your group than those within your group. Gypsies just take this to the extreme. However, this does not mean that Gypsies were, in pre-modern times, nothing but social parasites and made their living entirely from theft. We all know that peasants were well equipped with pitchforks and if Gypsies did nothing but steal they would not have been tolerated. As Luke explains in his linked article, nomadic tribes especially have to depend on the goodwill of the local population and offer them a somewhat fair deal in order to survive because they are always outnumbered by the locals.

You could start with the fact that dogs have been systematically selected for physical and behavioral characteristics for many thousands of years; humans have not.

Yes, absolutely right. This is why Finns and pygmies look exactly like each other. If there had been selection going on, they might look as different as Great Danes and Daschunds but in reality you can’t tell one from the other. There also hasn’t been any selection that would make say Chinese more adapted for living in densely populated areas than Australian aborigines so that’s why when you put both groups in a big city, their real life outcomes are identical. Jews were not selected to be any different than Ukrainian peasants – this is why they have identical size and strength and have identical average IQs. Nothing to see here folks, move along.

why do they perform so poorly in academics.

In the original post, Sailer writes,

Uh … It seems like we do have many examples. Danes have a more milk-drinking culture than do Vietnamese. [Sherpas/lowlanders. Kenyans/Hindus. African Americans/Mexican Americans. Etc…] I could go on for hours like this. Now, no doubt some of my examples are wrong…

No, Steve, none of your examples are wrong. They are all correct.

Why? Because, as you have written over and over again, you are advancing the moderate, empirical view; Glass Partly Full and Glass Partly Empty. Turkheimer is beating the drum of “no meaningful hereditary causality,” with Turkheimer trimming the specifics of ‘meaningful’ on an ad hoc basis. He supports this extreme position with his rules on standard-of-proof. By Turkheimer’s lights, any ambiguity — or any evidence of any cultural or environmental influence — proves that he was right all along.

I only know Turkheimer by reputation, as one of the sharper social scientists. This flighty and ill-informed essay must not be the best introduction to his writing. Granted, it’s only a blog entry. But it’s one that I’d have been embarrassed to post.

If you look at the IQ correlation between various types of twins and siblings you see a pattern:

Same person tested twice .95
Identical twins—Reared together .86
Identical twins—Reared apart .76
Fraternal twins—Reared together .55
Fraternal twins—Reared apart .35
Biological siblings—Reared together .47
Unrelated children—Reared together .30

I think you can see from this that there is a strong genetic component independent of environment. Environment has some influence in that separated twins have less correlation than twins raised together but genetics is the stronger force.

… What about groups? I agree with Cochran: if someone found a well-understood genetic mechanism that had a deterministic effect on behavior within a close range, some IQ equivalent of webbed paws, and groups turned out to differ in that mechanism, the race-hereditarians would have what they want.

Eppur, si muove.

It’s like seeing birds flying and saying “if someone found a well-understood mechanism for flight”…

Man saw birds fly for thousands of years before he came up with a good explanation for how they managed it.

What hereditarians shouldn’t be doing is trying to twist basic data about polygenic heritability into false intuitions that genetically-based group differences in behavior are somehow inevitable. They aren’t.

(Generally speaking, environmental determinists are projecting when they call others “hereditarians”; race-realists are moderates who believe in some mix of nature and nurture)

Turkheimer has this mixed up; we believe genetically-based group differences in behavior are inevitable; that’s genetics, selection, evolution. Incoming genetics data is predicted to conform to that expectation, and surprise-surprise, it does.

As I have said many times, if different groups of people were genetically “tuned” (Sam Harris’ term) to behave in certain ways, wouldn’t you think we would have some examples by now?

(Anyone who hasn’t noticed Jews’ “tuning” is not paying attention)

Has he not heard about Pacific Islanders and the MAO thing? Has he not noticed the birds flying, everywhere around him?

Races and ethnic groups do vary wildly in their behavior. Race-realists expect the variance to be explained by some combination of nature and nurture. Environmental determinists expect it to be explained wholly by nurture.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cagot

Is that actually correct, that twins have an IQ difference of 1 SD on average? My gut wants to call BS on that, but if true it has some amazing implications. Mostly that the way your body builds the brain is insanely complex and somewhat random, even with the same genes guiding the way.

1. Your DNA is the house plan
2. Your brain is the house
3. Your IQ test results are conversations between you, the real estate agent, and the prospective buyers.

In other words, yes, you’re right, but there’s more to that variance than just the way your body builds the brain. Keep that .95 correlation between different tests for the same individual firmly in mind. Environment does matter. The slacker twin raised not to GAF is going to get different results from the twin raised to run on all 8 cylinders, possibly extremely different results. On the other hand, these differences tend to wash out in group averages.

Steve’s a good Sancho Panza for all the starry-eyed Donna Quixotewitzes in Greyladyland.

Turkheimer aids and abets their delusions.

For anyone interested, this post discusses how to use results like that to calculate heritability: http://www.cureffi.org/2013/02/04/how-to-calculate-heritability/

The simplest and most common is Falconer’s formula: heritability = 2(rMZ – rDZ)
So for the numbers above we have heritability = 2 * (0.86 – 0.55) = 0.62

But this means that the true science of race is no more essentially about genetics than it is essentially about skin color. Both of these are simply expressions of race. They are symptoms of the underlying race that exists prior to the appearance of any phenomenon.

This is completely wrong, in the “wet streets cause rain” sense. Race is how genes are expressed, not vice versa. Let’s say that back in the day, Chevy painted all their big block engines blue and the small block ones were painted red at the factory, but nobody knew how to measure displacement or hp. But despite their ignorance of what was going on inside, people would still notice that the cars with blue engines tended to win more races. The larger displacement is not a “symptom” of the underlying structure of the engine the way blue paint is. The displacement IS the underlying structure.

I read most of the link and one thought that came up was this argumentative style is much more likely to be used by a Jew – turns out, yep, I was correct, Turkheimer is indeed Jewish.

So another observed behavioral difference for the list.

Anybody got the correlations handy? Black African and NBA vs Jewish and Race-Obscurantist?

Anon[415]:

2. Murray is WRONG that the difference is group genetic, there is “still no good evidence” that it’s not environmental (Murray has never taken a stance on this, as Vox’s Timothy Lee noted on Twitter, but whatever).

Murray’s stance is an important one. The differences are ubiquitous and persistent; who really GAF that we haven’t nailed down every letter of DNA involved?

Syon (by way of quoting):

There is an even deeper problem, which we can get to by way of Cochran’s next topic, which is dog breeds. Comparing groups of humans to breeds of dogs is perhaps the laziest analogy in the history of human behavior genetics.

In other words, it’s a really good analogy and people immediately understand that and grasp its significance and that drives me nuts and I got nothin’ so I’m going to call it lazy. It’s like calling planetary motion or Earth’s gravity well the laziest examples in the history of the theory of gravity. MAYBE, if you assholes hadn’t spent the last 100 years conducting a scorched-earth campaign to obscure and demonize the reality of gravity, you might have a valid point…

You could start with the fact that dogs have been systematically selected for physical and behavioral characteristics for many thousands of years; humans have not.

Leftists want proof of every letter of DNA, but they get to make sweeping statements like “dogs have been systematically selected for physical and behavioral characteristics for many thousands of years; humans have not” with no support at all. Yes, humans have been systematically selected for physical and behavioral characteristics for thousands of years, you dullard. We put violent criminals to death, for example, often during their most fertile years. We’ve rounded up aggressive young males and sent them off to war (or chattel slavery) on a routine basis for eons.

if somebody knows the name please do reply and tell me

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cagot

https://www.rt.com/news/432074-policeman-charged-manslaugter-riots/

Who cares if Africans burn down cities? They keep France in the running in the World Cuck.

Europeans save African ships, and Africans burn European cars.

When migrants started rioting over a thug shot by the police in Nantes, France four days ago, the leftist mayor Johanna Rolland said her thoughts are with the victim and the suburbs.

Her car was just burned. 🤭

— Monokulttuuri FM (@MonokulttuuriFM) July 7, 2018

SoMania

This is in Maine. pic.twitter.com/kwhZxm5Ddx

— Steve Franssen (@SteveFranssen) July 6, 2018

Burden of proof is a legal concept, not a scientific one. In science, all hypotheses start out with equal weight and the data is supposed to lead you to the right one. Do two objects of different weight fall at the same or different speeds in a vacuum? If we start out by assuming that one or the other is true we are already making a mistake. “All men are created equal” is a religious belief – science does not make moral judgments (though people try to spin it in a way that favors their beliefs).

There are a couple of things going on here.

First of all, Turkheimer doesn’t want to get Watsoned – people will lie/dissemble/shade the truth if they fear that their career is on the line. For most people if the choice is between speaking the honest truth or losing everything that they have, they will decide that some things are more important than integrity.

2nd, in any ideological battle, especially those with religious implications, people naturally end up at extremes. If you admit of any ambiguity, if you allow the camel’s nose in the tent, then your faith is in question and you will be attacked by people from your “own” side who fear that you are not a true believer. Jesus either is or is not the product of virgin birth – there is no possibility of ambiguity or grey zone. “All men are created equal” is another religious belief. “IQ is x% heritable (where x is greater than zero) puts you in a gray zone, like saying Mary is 60% virgin/ 40% not virgin – this cannot be permitted. So you have to plant your flag at zero or else you are an enemy sympathizer.

Everyone who loves Bogart in that scene from the Maltese Falcon (if you don’t I want to have nothing to do with you) should also watch the version made a decade earlier staring Ricardo Cortez. Cortez plays it much differently, and possible more appropriately. Sam Spade (I’m told) is written as a womanizer. Bogart, being kind of short and ugly, had trouble with such roles. Cortez was one of the leading prospects to be the new Latin Lover to replace Valentino.

Cortez plays Sam Spade just that way except he’s more jolly than either Valentino or Bogart. In Cortez’s interpretation he is too busy chasing every available shirt to bother with all that detective stuff. Cortez was the Hollywood predecessor of Cesar Romero and Ricardo Montalban. He was very Latin, except for the fact that he was a Austrian Jew. Movie magic.

In science, all hypotheses start out with equal weight and the data is supposed to lead you to the right one.

Of course this isn’t true. It’s not even ideal.

If all hypotheses started out equal, we could randomly select for them before doing experiments and still expect the scientific process to move forward at a brisk clip. Instead that randomness would be a colossal waste of time.

Scientists take educated guesses based on data when developing their hypotheses and then, ideally, frame them in such way that those hypotheses can subsequently be tested in experiments that can either be disproven or temporarily confirmed.

The problem in this debate is that most scientists who occasionally have to look at these questions involving race don’t want to frame their ideas in ways that can be disproven. Instead, they frame them in moral terms. Turkheimer’s long post is dripping with moral condescension for Cochran.

Jefferson had a natural law theory, in which propositions are not religious or other beliefs but deductions from nature, reality, etc.

What’s sorely needed is a phenomenology of race developed along poetic/noetic lines.

Then elucidate one and give us the link when you’re done. Your present vague question-begging snippets of verbosity are not an argument.

The “psychologists” are increasingly tiresome and boring. By now we have evidence that complex traits (e.g. IQ) are correlated with over a thousand genes. This means that no genetic prediction of the complex trait of IQ can ever be statistically validated – and the problem is even worse if one tries to go “polygenic”. All these “psychologists” are simply selling snake oil.

Do we really need both Thompson and Sailer selling snake oil for the gullible here?

“Budapest Jews have a more literate lifestyle than do Budapest Gypsies.
Probably your solidest example, but group norms play a big part here.”
Rock solid you mean.
In Hungary there are three main gypsy tribes and its seems that they differ in their cognitive abilities and in the degree of their integration. The Hungarian speaking “Romungro” clan is much more integrated and ancient (the first gypsies arrived to Kingdom of Hungary ~A.D.1400) than the “oláh gypsy” and “beás gypsy” tribes. The romungros are somehow resemble to the Spanish gitanos in this feature. Interestingly both groups were “domesticated” by the ruling elite in the 18 century (Maria Teresia and Ferdinand VI- “general imprisonment of the gypsies”) During this period endogamy was partially eliminated and these roma groups lost their most violent and dumb people . The oláh and beás gypsy groups -appeared in Hungary in the 19-20 century (at the end of their slavery in Romania)- missed this process. Of the first grader gypsy pupils annually 20-21% were sent to special schools because of their very low cognitive abilities (IQ<70). As the closest relatives of the European gypsies are the North-Indian dalit tribes, who live similar life stiles as gypsies (dirty ghettos on the confines of the towns and villages), it seems plausible that their lifestyle rooted in extreme low inherited cognitive abilities.
“Gypsies that want to get educated and live more respectably can leave their communities and join the general populations.” Do you know, that you are speaking about 1% of the gypsy population, as in Hungary this is the amount of gypsies with degree…

Even Graham Coop makes untenable simplifications that are essentially untestable with respect to complex traits. For example: polygenic scores are a simple sum of individual gene scores. This is basically the same as assuming that there is no interaction between two (or more) genes that contribute to a trait. Highly unlikely.

Turkheimer is beating the drum of “no meaningful hereditary causality,” with Turkheimer trimming the specifics of ‘meaningful’ on an ad hoc basis. He supports this extreme position with his rules on standard-of-proof. By Turkheimer’s lights, any ambiguity — or any evidence of any cultural or environmental influence — proves that he was right all along.

This is a common trick by these guys: they demand extreme rigor from hypotheses they dislike, while keeping much lighter standards for their favorite ideas. Proving causality is hard, but it’s hard either way; yet no doubt Turkheimer is more willing to tolerante ambiguity, bad data, and small effect sizes when they favor his pet sociological explanations.

Danes have a more milk-drinking culture than do Vietnamese. Sherpas are more likely to be employed as a Himalaya guides than lowlanders. Kenyans are more likely to be in the distance running business than Hindus or Senegalese. In South Central Los Angeles, African Americans are more likely to get basketball scholarships than their Mexican American neighbors. Mexican American high school baseball players are less likely to be pitchers than their white American teammates due to their shorter average stature. Budapest Jews have a more literate lifestyle than do Budapest Gypsies. Germans are more into tanning and nudism than are Arabs. There hasn’t been a non-black starting cornerback in the NFL since 2003.

What is the evidence that any of these “traits” are anything more than cultural conditioning?
What is the evidence that any of these “traits” have a genetic component?
This statement seems to be nothing more than hand-waving to get the “desired” result without any proof.

Yes, his calculation of a supposed 10.58 point difference between MZ (monozygotic = identical) twins is simply wrong. Even intentionally doing the wrong calculation as he does, his arithmetic is also wrong, he should have gotten 10.6066. The difference between MZ twins has been directly measured many, many times and he knows this, yet he comes up with this BS calculation to make a point which he knows gives the wrong answer, and he does it because readers are intimidated by math and the actual data don’t serve his purpose. Turkheimer is a liar, not merely mistaken. He lies with a malicious and deliberate purpose.

The actual expected difference between MZ twins is 2.1 to 4.4 IQ points, reared together or apart. ( (1-.71) *15 or (1-.86) * 15 )

Here’s a good summary of the actual knowledge on the subject: Genetics of intelligence by Ian J Deary, Frank M Spinath & Timothy C Bates in the European Journal of Human Genetics volume 14, pages 690–700 (2006) (open full text) particularly Table 2: Summary of the review of the world literature on IQ correlations between relatives with different degrees of genetic and family rearing overlap (from Bouchard and McGue, 1981)

This literally put me to sleep.

I’ve heard anecdotes about how viewing this makes contemporary students really, really uncomfortable….All their lives, they’ve been taught that differences in behavior between racial groups are entirely environmental in origin…..Then they see evidence clearly showing newborns from different races exhibiting distinctly different reactions to the same stimuli….

Speaking of race, the Slavic derby of the World Race Cup is in progress at comment-posting time.

France prevailed in the Romance derby over Uruguay. England deprived Sweden of the Germanic cup, and Belgium topped Brazil in the Unwise Foundation for a Modern Nation-State derby.

Russia just scored first, so Belgium is the best hope for the little countries. Croatia is ranked 20th, though, and Russia 70th, so the inventors of the necktie are hardly underdogs.

Russia has home-pitch advantage, but that may not be as overwhelming as in Uncle Joe’s days.

Spaniards can’t give birth above a certain altitude in the Andes, where indigenes have little problem.

If the ability to give birth isn’t a hereditary factor, I don’t know what is.

A Croat just used his noggin and evened things up.

We could benefit from you writing more clearly; your prose is a bit difficult to parse.

Let me me rewrite your point in more pedestrian terms (and please, correct me if you think I got it wrong): you think race exists, but is not (or should not?) be defined on a biological basis. Rather, it’s a metaphysical category that manifests itself in both biology and culture. You think this allows the concept of race to survive even if Lewontin et al are right.

Here is my answer: I disagree with you, because I think race is just biological. We divide people in races because they look different, and we know that these differences are genetic in origin and correlated with where your most of your ancestors were 10 generations ago. The concept doesn’t need a metaphysical justification to persist even in the unlikely event of Turkheimer being right, because we have our eyes. Even if the only differences among races were on external features, and they were absolutely equal in everything else (from 99% of genes to IQ to behaviour to culture), we would still know the difference between White and Black. The difference would be less relevant, of course, but would still exist.

Also, I don’t know what you have in mind when you mention the consequences of anti-hereditarians being right. Myself, I know what I would do: if they get convincing evidence that every race has the same IQ and behaviour, I will go back to what I believed ten years ago, and will admit that the problems of blacks are due to sociocultural factors that may possibly be mitigated. That’s it. For me, this genetics of race discussion is about getting the facts right to get history right (who were the Indo-europeans and where were they from?) and get the policy right (is the number of Blacks in intelectual pursuits what we would expect given what we know about race?), nor about essential metaphysics.

OT: I just found by accident the most Sailerific article ever written. It’s a bit old, from 2013 but from the International Business Times.

A young upper caste Bengali woman and an ‘irregularly employed’ middle aged Albanian discover that Edward Said was wrong, non-WEIRD Eurasian societies can be lumped together compared to WEIRD ones.

http://www.ibtimes.com/albanian-who-taught-me-i-dont-really-belong-america-1229419

The Albanian Who Taught Me That I Don’t Really Belong In America
By Palash Ghosh @Gooch700
…
Besim was part of a group of five or six Albanian men who hung out at this pub once or twice a week — and they were quite unforgettable. Proudly defying Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s smoking ban in restaurants, these Albanians puffed like crazy, drank heavily, and spoke and laughed loudly in a language that sounded strangely lilting.

Initially, I couldn’t identify their tongue or their nationality, but I was mesmerized by them. They seemed like characters from “Doctor Zhivago” or “Zorba the Greek,” with their extravagant mustaches, gravelly voices and exotic countenances — that is, like men from a distant and unspoiled past magically transported to the bland, stale, uncultured world of early-21st-century tech- and career-obsessed New York City.

I noticed that most of the other patrons in the bar were intimidated by these strange Albanians — indeed, they looked like dangerous characters, the type of men you would not want to ever cross.
…
It turned out that Besim had immigrated to the States in the mid-1990s and settled in the Bronx, which (unknown to me at the time) has a large Albanian community. He said he studied engineering at a school in Tirana, the capital of Albania, but it was unclear what he actually did for a living; he obviously was not employed as an engineer of any kind.
…
This was the world Besim came from – and the more I spoke to him, the more he reminded me of my own father, despite the fact that this Albanian was about two decades younger.
…
And like my father, Besim was simply bewildered by the modern (i.e., Western) world and saddened by the inexorable destruction of traditional culture and mores.

When Besim revealed his views on modern American society, I found myself agreeing with about 75 percent of his remarks. He was appalled by such things as rap music, fast food, obesity, reality TV shows, etc. He couldn’t understand why the wealthiest society the world has ever seen was filled with so many people who were either obese or unhealthy or addicted to drugs or mentally ill or poorly educated — echoing my views almost perfectly. (Of course, Besim said nothing about alcohol, which he seemed quite fond of!)

On a deeper level, Besim was very disappointed by America and its people, since the reality contrasted so dramatically with the fantasy image he was fed through movies (smuggled, I suppose) and other sources. Despite the poverty of his homeland, he seemed to miss it terribly.

He saved his bitterest attacks for America’s youth, particularly the men, whom he castigated as weak, spoiled and unmanly – he essentially characterized them as being emasculated (though he used a far more vulgar term).

Again, his views on this particular subject mirrored my father’s opinion – and perhaps even my own.

Indeed, I realized much to my surprise and embarrassment that I was in agreement with someone who had a rather medieval and archaic mind-set and whose upbringing was vastly different from my own rather conventional, middle-class, bourgeoisie life.

While I generally enjoyed Besim’s company, some of his views left me aghast – for example, he was very racist against black people, extremely homophobic and somewhat anti-Semitic. But I wrote that off to his Old World nurturing and attitudes (again, a mentality I was very familiar with).

I lost touch with Besim a few months later and did not hear anything about him for about eight years – when I found out from a third party that he’d died.

I did not even known Besim’s last name, yet I’ll never forget him. He serves as a kind of troubling reminder of who I might have become had the fates decreed a different direction in my life and of some attitudes and complexes that remain entrenched in a brave new world that people like Besim and my father simply could not cope with nor ever feel at home in.

Is this a joke?

Ah that’s the one thank you very much

SWEDEN LOSES SWEDEN LOSES

Let this be a lessen to you. You NEED diversity. England had 7 Men of Color Sweden had none

In fairness, I had the same question regarding several of those traits–“literate lifestyles,” for example. But I’m sure at least one of those is likely genetic: milk drinking. Lactose (in)tolerance is definitely a genetic trait.

The problem with Steve’s examples is that they refer to physical differences, whereas Cochran is talking about differences in behavior/personality type.

Does anyone believe there’s no difference between blacks and Japanese when it comes to extroversion? Of course not. Let’s go find the genetic markers, then.

The “psychologists” are increasingly tiresome and boring.

I suppose it’s always been that way, but maybe more so now: anything that people are not really interested in understanding they proclaim as “boring” and unworthy of their time and interest.

By now we have evidence that complex traits (e.g. IQ) are correlated with over a thousand genes. This means that no genetic prediction of the complex trait of IQ can ever be statistically validated

Ooh, 1,000 is such a big number. And I’m sure that all 1,000 genes are COMPLETELY independent and you would have to measure each one separately before you could make any meaningful conclusion. You would need an army of black lady geniuses with microscopes and adding machines before you could do a multivariate analysis involving such a large number for just one individual let alone everyone. This kind of problem could never be solved in our lifetime. If only we had some kind of machine or device that was capable of searching for DNA markers and doing this kind of repetitive math quickly and without human involvement. And if we do ever have such a machine, I’m sure it will never get any cheaper or faster than the ones we have today because we know that never happens with electronic devices.

In science, all hypotheses start out with equal weight and the data is supposed to lead you to the right one.

Take a class in the History and Philosophy of Science. Or Epistemology. Or read a book.

What is the evidence that any of these “traits” are anything more than cultural conditioning?

Invite a large Vietnamese family (one born and raised in Denmark) over to your 1 bathroom home and give them each a quart of milk to drink and then get back to me as to whether milk drinking is just cultural conditioning, once you are done cleaning up.

This is a common trick by these guys: they demand extreme rigor from hypotheses they dislike, while keeping much lighter standards for their favorite ideas.

Like it or not, humans are just like that.

Turkheimer insists that scientists come up with specific mechanisms whereby specific genes achieve specific behavioral effects, otherwise we should dismiss any claims that genes play a causal role in behavioral traits.

He surely knows this is absurd special pleading: scientists are never obliged to do so in the case of any other kind of trait, or for any other kind of animal or vegetable.

Because he knows better, he really is telling a Big Lie here, in the hopes of some good moral outcome.

But when has a Big Lie like this ever paid off in the long run? Did it work out with the Soviet Union? Where did it actually work out, achieving, in the end, a positive payoff for society? If one assumes that the lie is eventually found out — which in the case of a scientific question will likely always be true — how can society have been better off for having believed the lie, even in the wake of the lie being exposed?

It seems that its very hard indeed to base society on a falsehood, and to have that society function well assuming that falsehood is true.

Turkheimer may win cheap approbation today because so many people want to believe his lie. But when the lie is in the fullness of time revealed, what will be his reputation? How will he be perceived as anything other than a charlatan, with too little integrity to respect the truth, and too much craving for adulation to avoid maligning truth tellers?

Turkheimer might ask himself a simple question: when, in all of history, has a scientist been thought well of for having stood defiantly on the wrong side of scientific truth? When has a scientist eagerly propagated a Big Lie, and held a good reputation when that lie has been found out?

Jefferson was an intelligent man and understood that “equality” meant that all human groups are equal in dignity before God and the law, not that we are literally equal in capabilities and that to show otherwise would require overcoming an impossibly high burden of proof.

If by some miracle you met that burden and brought the blank slaters the proverbial broom of the Wicked Witch of the West, they would just move the goalposts and send you off on a further quest – they have no honest intention of every letting you win the argument no matter how much proof you bring them.

I agree now and have agreed before with a lot of your criticism of “sciencism”: a modern religious dogma where empty materialist concepts take the place of traditional religious precepts.

I won’t hold my breath for any mass conversion away from this modern pseudo-religion, but I do admire your persistence in taking whacks at it every now and again.

Since I too would like to see the false behemoth slain, or at least chased from the field, may I suggest that though the current disputation over race and genetics makes this particular area appear to be a soft spot, it is here that it is in fact most armored because so much that flows out of the fallacy here directly impacts people, both the pro and the con.

By contrast, the more rarefied parts of the behemoth, for example, not biology but epistemology, not race but ontology, is where the beast is truly vulnerable. These questions are too abstract and philosophical for most people to care, so they don’t, and therefore the purveyors of falsehood have not bothered to armor men’s minds on these matters. A few well-laid blows in these areas will have, in the long run, far more effect, and then the more parochial shibboleths of race and genetics will collapse of their own accord, though we may not live to see it.

I think Turkheimer is (deliberately?) confusing heritability with observed correlations

Turkheimer is deliberate but not confused. Correlation between MZ twins separated at birth is heritability. The numbers you are citing (.84-.88) must be for twins that were not separated. To get heritability from them you need also correlation between DZ twins. Then heritability H=2(r_MZ-r_DZ).

In the long run we are all dead. Turkheimer doesn’t have to get away with his BS forever, just until retirement. Whereas coming out on the side of truth may get him Watsoned TODAY. Given the choice between being judged harshly by history and being judged harshly today I think I would take my chances with the judgment of history too.

OT: For people here who think there is a Jewish privilege, take a look at the social lynching of Adam Bloom.

Many Jews should also figure out that the year is 2018 and the Left is far more likely to be vicious and destructive.

The difference would be less relevant, of course, but would still exist.

No, that’s not true. If it was merely a difference in skin color, like the difference between different colors of poodle, then no one would give a damn about race. In the minds of the blank slaters, that’s all that it is – just a little different concentration of melanin in the skin cells and otherwise we’re all the same on the inside. The problem is that is not true and that race is connected to many other traits, both physical and behavioral.

2. Murray is WRONG that the difference is group genetic, there is “still no good evidence” that it’s not environmental . . . .

Why would we need evidence? The default position — which is ALWAYS applied by everyone to every species other than h.s.s. — is that everything is genetic.

Also, what is the basis of his claim that traits encouraged by human breeding are different in nature than traits that develop by natural selection?

There is none.

I understand that experimental science is an iterative process so that you don’t go back to square one each time (though a surprising # of foundational experiments cannot be replicated and often whole towers of theory are built on shaky foundations). But often “educated” guesses are not really based on data at all but the prejudices of the time or notions which appear to be logical (but are completely wrong). The “educated” guess that all races possess the same intelligence and any difference observed are purely environmental is not “educated” at all, it is in the nature of a religious belief. Scientist are influenced by the fashions and dogmas of the broader culture. If popular culture and other prominent scientists says that man is causing global warming (0r cooling – in the ’70s man was going to blot out the sun and start a new ice age) it takes a very brave man to make an “educated” guess that is different from the herd.

From the time of the Greeks until Galileo (a period of several thousand years) it was universally believed that heavier objects fell faster than lighter ones (even putting aside air resistance). This seemed so logical that no one even bothered to check until Galileo. Or if anyone did, they deferred to authority and assumed that their observations were wrong and the “settled science” was correct.

“Unwise foundation for a modern nation state” made me laugh.

No, that’s not true. If it was merely a difference in skin color, like the difference between different colors of poodle, then no one would give a damn about race

If the difference was only in skin color and physionomy, it would still matter as a marker of ancestry and origin to trigger our tribal instinct (and then the condemnation of racism would be more defensible). But it would matter much less, of course, than it does today.

Sure, but if you accept the theory of evolution, you also accept certain expectations, like “populations will vary in their behavioral genetics.”

Also, burden of proof is a scientific concept, in that if you say something exists, the burden of proof is on you to show evidence.

“But when has a Big Lie like this ever paid off in the long run?”

The major Semitic religions have trundled on successfully and they are obvious packs of lies.

What really matters are external phenotype traits like skin color, hair, facial features. The IQ score difference between Blacks and Whites is secondary. Actually every Afro-American can be paired with White-American of equal or lower IQ score. This subpopulation of Whites which is Black equivalent in IQ is not being noticed and thus is not considered problematic. The fact that it belongs culturally to white majority helps. Solidarity and social cohesion plays a major role here. Blacks because of external phenotype differences have no luxury to practice successful mimicry and thus will always end up creating incompatible separate cultural identity so they will no get benefits of solidarity and social cohesion from majority. So in this sense Turkheimer is correct when he says that pointing to differences in polygenic traits like IQ score is not ethical. The problem with Blacks is because Shvartzes are Schwartz not that because they have lower IQ. Lower IQ exacerbates the problem but it would not matter if Blacks were undistinguishable form Whites in their external phenotype.

“This seemed so logical that no one even bothered to check until Galileo.”

According to WKPD he apparently never claimed to have checked it. Which seems reasonable: to get good data he’d have needed a vacuum pump which he presumably didn’t have. To prove Aristotle wrong would be a good deal easier than proving Galileo right. But Galileo didn’t even bother with that, it would seem.

This WKPD account seems to me to be consistent with what we learned in school physics. So how have people become convinced that GG performed an experiment that he didn’t actually do?

(The same question probably applies to Ben Franklin, the kite, and the key, by the way. And to why people erroneously believe that Columbus’s opponents thought the world was flat. It might seem harsh to say that Popular Accounts of Science are full of shite but it’s probably a decent working approximation. Don’t forget all those Harvard students who know that summer is caused by the Earth being nearer the Sun.)

Absolutely. Separate group identity is formed around external phenotypical differences not around IQ.

Only Semitic religions? What about Buddhism? Hinduism? Etc. Are these any more true?

The Big Lie does not pay off in science (see Lysenko) but in matters of faith (and leftism is a religion) it does because its propositions are designed to be impervious to facts. Miraculous events are seen not as indications of falsity but proof of the power of the Deity who is capable of transcending the laws of physics and biology.

OT: For people here who think there is a Jewish privilege, take a look at the social lynching of Adam Bloom.

He’s being lunched as a white man, not as a Jew.

An excellent observation. That phenomenon actually has a name: “isolated demands for rigor.” For example, see http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/08/14/beware-isolated-demands-for-rigor/

This is similar to ideas like “psychological projection” and “who, whom?” in that once you have a term for them (good old Sapir-Whorf), and start looking for them, they are everywhere.

Another term relevant to Turkheimer’s piece is FUD (Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt).

“Only Semitic religions? What about Buddhism? Hinduism? Etc. Are these any more true?”

No doubt they are rubbish too but I know much less about them.

Jack D:

John McCarthy, one of the founders of the discipline of artificial intelligence, ascribed Jefferson’s unfortunate misuse of “equality” in the Declaration to the strains of meeting an overnight deadline.

Untrue! Every sentence was actually quite thoroughly analyzed and reviewed by Jefferson’s co-conspirators. What does this prove? Answer: there was and is plenty of blame to be spread around!

Also, what is the basis of his claim that traits encouraged by human breeding are different in nature than traits that develop by natural selection?

There is none.

Actually there is a very important difference. Let’s revisit the dog breed analogy to see what it is.

Dog breeds, like any any other animal or plant intensively cultivated by humans, have been developed along some sort of utilitarian principle by forced matings and crossings. The results of these selections do not do the creatures any good, as they are almost invariably far less “fit” than the wild type. The utility that is educed out of their native forms is wrung out of them by the applied pressure of not only artificial selection but also by myriad aspects of the cultivation process itself. Thus, domesticated wheat is not only bred into its current state, it is also massively fertilized, protected from pests, watered, and pampered like no wild creature ever is, and it will not survive outside these conditions. Any changes educed from the form by pressure—by violence—are detrimental to the organism as a whole and must be subsidized by inputs from elsewhere.

That dog breeds are artificial is evidenced by the fact that the dogs themselves show no concern for their preservation. If you took a bunch of fertile dogs of every conceivable breed and type and set them loose in a safe environment with adequate resources, they would breed indiscriminately with each other until they had produced a fully mongrelized tribe of feral canines. This is rather unlike, say, the tail of the peacock, which we can know to be a true race-trait of that bird type since the males proudly display their plumage and the females mate with males based on their tail displays. This takes place even in zoos where all natural selective pressures are removed. Peacocks of their own accord will preserve their tails, but dogs will not preserve their breeds. This is an important difference; it means that whatever qualities we’ve bred into dogs are not race-traits of the natural canine type.

There is buried in here a very subtle, very profound implication which, at least to my knowledge, until now everybody has missed, and which therefore deserves to be set off with italics. It is this: The fact that artificial selection is possible at all means that natural selection cannot have taken place. The reasoning for this startling claim goes as follows. We may say without fear of over-generalization that the choice of mates between creatures in the wild is constrained by who is available and who is desirable. Artificial selection works by completely controlling the available mating partners and by taking no notice of what may or may not be desirable to the creatures themselves, substituting that which is desirable to the human breeder. And yet successful couplings will take place even under these conditions, where the organism does not stand to benefit itself or its posterity whatsoever. This indicates that there is in the bare act of mating no intrinsic selection mechanism for or against the breeder’s desires (at least in some cases, and only up to a point; for it is known that certain creatures cannot be bred in captivity at all, and of course a breeder is limited in the choice of traits he can breed into his stock by the basic tendencies and direction of the organism). Artificial selection is therefore strictly confined to developing only those qualities which may be considered extraneous, irrelevant, or counterproductive from the organism’s point of view. If, as every evolutionist will readily assert, there is no difference between artificial and natural selection pressures, then neither can natural selection result in any changes that are not similarly otiose. The core of the organism, its essential nature, cannot be altered by external pressures of any sort.

What is the meaning of artificial selection, of human breeding? A I have stated before, it is a testament to the plasticity within the form. Dogs, cereals, and fowl demonstrate a great deal of plasticity in their efforts to survive under the grueling pressures of artificial selection and cultivation. Those creature which will not breed in captivity—usually the nobler ones—show less plasticity. They will either be as they must or perish. But in no case has selection, artificial or natural, shown any ability to alter an essential form much less generate one. The fact of breeding itself proves that forms exist prior to selection and are not touched by it.

Thanks for the reference!

Can you elaborate on this calculation?

The actual expected difference between MZ twins is 2.1 to 4.4 IQ points, reared together or apart. ( (1-.71) *15 or (1-.86) * 15 )

I don’t understand how that follows (don’t you usually have to do that type of calculation in terms of r^2 and variance rather than correlation and SD?).

This 1973 paper from Arthur Jensen has some empirical data: http://arthurjensen.net/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/IQ%E2%80%99s-of-Identical-Twins-Reared-Apart-1973-by-Arthur-Robert-Jensen.pdf

From the abstract:

The 244 individual twins’ IQ’s are normally distributed, with the mean = 96.82, SD = 14.16. The mean absolute difference between twins is 6.60 (SD = 5.20), the largest difference being 24 IQ points. The frequency of large twin differences is no more than would be expected from the normal probability curve. The overall intra-class correlation between twins is.824, which may be interpreted as an upper-bound estimate of the heritability (h2) of IQ in the English, Danish, and North American Caucasian, populations sampled in these studies. The absolute differences between twins (attributable to nongenetic effects and measurement error) closely approximate the chi distribution; this fact indicates that environmental effects are normally distributed. That is, if P = G + E (where P is phenotypic value, G is genotypic value, and E is environmental effect), it can be concluded that for this population P, G, and E, are each normally distributed. There is no evidence of asymmetry or of threshold conditions for the effects of environment on IQ. The lack of a significant correlation (r = -0.15) between twin-pair means and twin-pair differences indicates that magnitude of differential environmental effects is not systematically related to intelligence level of twin pairs.

From the body of the paper (pg. 280):

Since the absolute difference between twins also contains measurement error due to imperfect reliability of the tests, the |d| of 6.60 should be compared to the value of 4.68, which is the mean difference between forms Land M of the Stanford-Binet administered to the same persons. The SD of these differences is 4.13 (Terman and Merrill, 1937, p. 46). Some of this difference, of course, reflects gains due to the practice effect of the first test upon the second. But the mean difference of 6.60 can be corrected for attenuation assuming the upper bound reliability for the Stanford-Binet of .95, which results in a “true” absolute difference of 5.36

Figure 5 looks at the distribution of the IQ differences. The case with the most extreme twin IQ difference gives an idea of the magnitude of environmental differences involved:

This is the frequently cited case of Gladys (IQ 92) and Helen (IQ 116) in the study by Newman et ai. (p. 245). They were separated at 18 months and tested at the age of 35 years. They had markedly different health histories as children; Gladys suffered a number of severe illnesses, one being nearly fatal, while Helen enjoyed unusually good health. Gladys did not go beyond the third grade in school, while Helen obtained a B.A. degree from a good college and became a high school teacher of English and history.

Table 3 provides a nice decomposition of the twin IQ variance.

Components of Variance in IQ’s Estimated from MZ Twins Reared Apart
Source       |    sigma | sigma^2 | %Variance
Heredity          13.83    191.25              85
Environment  4.74       22.50              10
Test Error        3.35       11.25                5
Total (Pheno) 15.00    225.00          100

“I believe the consensus is that they were Irish thrown off their land (during Cromwell’s terror campaign, perhaps, or at some other point ) who were forced to adapt a nomadic life.”

In 2011, an analysis of DNA from 40 Travellers was undertaken at the Royal College of Surgeons in Dublin and the University of Edinburgh. The study provided evidence that Irish Travellers are a distinct Irish ethnic minority, who separated from the settled Irish community at least 1000 years ago [i.e., about five centuries before the first Romani arrived in Ireland]; the claim was made that they are as distinct from the settled community as Icelanders are from Norwegians.[15] Irish Travellers “left no written record of their own” and their families do not date back to the same point in time; some families adopted Traveller customs centuries ago, while others did so more recently…

Among other speculation on their origins, “two theories are rejected outright”: that they were descended from those Irish who were made homeless by Oliver Cromwell’s military campaign in Ireland in the 1650s, or made homeless in the 1840s famine due to eviction

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irish_Travellers (the 2nd paragraph references David Keane.)

Well said. One issue I see though:

because I think race is just biological

In the US the one drop rule is a clear example where race really is a social construct. There is a social construct aspect to race (most easily seen by comparing race perceptions in different countries, say the US and Brazil). It is just that is only a portion of the race question and mostly pertains to the treatment of mixed race individuals (who can also be complicated to characterize genetically. Consider two 50/50 white/black individuals who just happen to have roughly opposite sets of the SNPs that differ between races, obviously an oversimplified thought experiment, but hopefully the point comes across).

There is of course a large biological component to race. Easily seen with PCA done on genetic data.
https://www.unz.com/gnxp/one-principal-component-to-rule-them-all/

Pay particular attention to how much variance is explained by PC1 below.

‘Romany and Irish Travellers almost certainly don’t share an origin’

Yes I know . Where I live we differentiate between Travellers and Roma Gypsies but we still refer to them as Gypsies. A common offensive slang term for an Irish traveller Gypsy is Gypo.

Not even wrong, as usual. Such computations have nothing to do with the observed correlation between IQs of MZ twins reared apart nor the observed average differences in IQ between MZ twins reared apart, which latter Turkheimer was trying to compute and which depends only on the former, not on heritability. No computation of heritability can change the actual observation of the IQ difference of MZ twins reared apart, the computation was not done correctly in any event, nor was heritability even computed by Turkheimer – he just pulled a wrong number out of the air then used it to compute (also wrongly) the expected IQ difference between MZ twins. If he had done the computation properly, he would have gotten a number that actually disproved his estimate of heritability rather than one that just appeared to do so, which disproof he then idiotically used as support for his lies.

You might have pointed out that Spotted Toad was using numbers for MZ twins reared together, which aren’t on point for estimating IQ differences due to solely to genetics rather than environment, but you didn’t. ST’s numbers are on the high side even for MZ twins reared together, but for those reared apart the correlation is still at least 0.71, which is likely depressed by some of the studies being among children, whereas the correlation is higher between adults, as well as not being adjusted for the test-retest reliability (measurement error) that TS noted.

Using a correlationt of 0.71 (cited in my previous comment; 0.8 is probably closer to the truth for adults, even before accounting for measurement error), the expected difference in IQ between MZ twins reared apart is (1 – 0.71)*15(IQ pts./std. dev. = 4.35 points, which is less than half what Turkheimer came up with. There is no good evidence that any of the difference in adult IQs of MZ twins reared apart comes from anything other than measurement error and other chance processes which are misleadingly called “unshared environment” despite no evidence of being environmental at all. None of the difference comes from environment properly speaking, “shared environment” as it is called in the literature, once twins are old enough to choose their own preferred environments, which they observably do based on their shared genetics rather than their different early environments.

However, it is possible to reduce the correlation between twins’ IQ to zero by simply killing one of them. (Though one will have trouble getting that research approved, even at Harvard.) The arguments for the primacy of environment over genetics are just disguised versions of this absurd extreme.

Good data Jack. Do you have a source where this was pulled together, or sources you used to pull it together?

Only Semitic religions? What about Buddhism? Hinduism? Etc. Are these any more true?

The Big Lie does not pay off in science (see Lysenko) but in matters of faith (and leftism is a religion) it does because its propositions are designed to be impervious to facts. Miraculous events are seen not as indications of falsity but proof of the power of the Deity who is capable of transcending the laws of physics and biology.

Buddhism and Hinduism hit some pretty hard limits in their regions of origin, and didn’t go much further. Christianity and Islam were far more successful at capturing large swathes of foreigners.

Not that I consider Christianity a Semitic religion. There is a currently-dominant Semiticizing heresy, but heresies come in any flavor you can imagine.

Jewish privilege is complicated. TL;DR version, Mafia privilege isn’t disproved by federal convictions.

See EH’s link in comment 92. In particular, this table is a slightly different, but more comprehensive, version of what Jack D presented: https://www.nature.com/articles/5201588/tables/2
Missing the test-retest correlation of 0.95 and DZ apart of 0.35 from Jack D though.

What really matters are external phenotype traits like skin color, hair, facial features. The IQ score difference between Blacks and Whites is secondary. Actually every Afro-American can be paired with White-American of equal or lower IQ score. This subpopulation of Whites which is Black equivalent in IQ is not being noticed and thus is not considered problematic. The fact that it belongs culturally to white majority helps.

The fact that it is not as obnoxious and violent as its Black “equivalent” helps them avoid notice, as does the fact that they are much more rural than Blacks. Also, TPTB deliberately ignore them, whereas they make spurious claims to the moral high ground by making a lot of noise about the plight of Blacks.

Of course, IQ isn’t the only important difference, so the groups really aren’t all that “equivalent.” Poor Whites are better behaved than poor Blacks and tend to move up and out of poverty at a faster rate than Blacks.

So in this sense Turkheimer is correct when he says that pointing to differences in polygenic traits like IQ score is not ethical.

Pointing to biological differences is of course eminently ethical, in the general sense: leftists have falsely accused Whites of “breaking” Blacks and are targeting White kids to pay the “damages” in perpetuity. This is an evil plan that should be demolished BAMN, like any other false charge.

He is attacked for being a moser — a snitch. What he publishes (for all the goyim to read) undermines Jewish solidarity, the common narrative, and reduces Jewish collective security in the Diaspora.

Israeli Jews don’t give a damn about Bloom one way or another.

I don’t put too much stock in “race”–although I do think it has utility in disciplines such as medicine–but you seem to be talking about is “ethnie”, not “race” in the traditional sense.

While I suspect that “ethnic consciousness” is based on a biological platform probably influenced by biological phenomenon like “kin selection”, it is also clearly rooted in language, customs, rituals, and morals as well. That is to say, it is a higher level platform built on a biological foundation.

But it sounds like what you are talking about is basically the traditional discipline of ethnography, with some Evola and a smattering German Idealism on top.

to get good data he’d have needed a vacuum pump which he presumably didn’t have.

This is not true. If for example you drop two cannon balls of different weights from the Leaning Tower of Pisa (say both are the same diameter but one is lead and the other iron) then the influence of air resistance would be minimal. Whether Galileo did this or not is an open question but if he had tried it would have worked even in the absence of a vacuum.

https://genetics.thetech.org/ask-a-geneticist/intelligence-and-genetics

Let me correct your mistake. You wrote:

The actual expected difference between MZ twins is 2.1 to 4.4 IQ points, reared together or apart. ( (1-.71) *15 or (1-.86) * 15 )

Let’s derive formula for the variance of difference between IQ’s or twins. First, the notation:

V(∆IQ) – variance of IQ difference between twins
V(IQ1), V(IQ2). – variance of IQ’s for twin 1 and twin 2, respectively. With a reasonable assumption that V(IQ1)=V(IQ2)=V=225
r – correlation between IQ1 and IQ2
COV(IQ1,IQ2) – covariance
SD(∆IQ)=sqrt(V(∆IQ)) – standard deviation of ∆IQ
SD=sqrt(V)=15. – standard deviation of IQ

Let’s start with the formula for variance of sum/difference of variables:

V(∆IQ)=V(IQ1)+V(IQ2)-2COV(IQ1,IQ2)

From which we easily get:

V(∆IQ)=2V-2Vr=2V(1-r)

Then:

SD(∆IQ)=SD*sqrt(2(1-r))

Note that

if r=0 SD(∆IQ)=21.15
if r=0.5 SD(∆IQ)=15

Only for r>0.5 the standard deviation SD of the difference is smaller than 15. So, if r=0.8 then SD(∆IQ)=9.48

What was the mistake that Turkheimer has made? He thought that the unexplained variance sqrt(0.5*225) where he assumes that heritability is 0.5 is the variance of difference.

However, now let’s try to figure out why the unexplained variance is not the variance of the difference? Unexplained variance applies to both twins and thus is added when calculating the difference. He did not do it and applied it only to one twin. He forgot about the sqrt(2) factor. With the sqrt(2) factor he would have obtained 15.

Anyway, one can write that for r=0.8 IQ1=IQ2±9.48 (1 sigma).

You are welcome.

Pointing to biological differences is of course eminently ethical

It would be if the same motivation and energy was devoted to the White subpopulation that is IQ-equivalent to Blacks.

the power of the environment

if cultural Marxists could take 100 random pit bulls and produce 100 working sheep dogs without selective breeding then…

the blank slate ideology wouldn’t be total nonsense.

Assuming a correlation of 0.76 in identical twins and a population s.d of 225, more like 7 points, some of that test error.

Those creature which will not breed in captivity—usually the nobler ones—show less plasticity.

There are no “noble” animals – an animal is an animal. Nor are “noble” animals (whatever those are) less plastic – they are just not useful to humans so humans have not bother breeding say different varieties of lion the way we have bred different breeds of housecat. If we had spent the last 5,000 years working on lion breeding, we would have had long haired lions, short haired lions, hairless lions, miniature lions, etc. by now just as we do housecats but no one has had any reason to try. The same thing is true with crops. There were a handful of plants that were a little more edible than the others so we set to work on breeding those and ignored the rest. If 12,000 years ago humans in China had picked some other grass instead of rice then by now we would have bred that plant to the point where it produces useful food. There are probably grasses with edible seeds out there in the marshes of Asia which even now could be selected but since rice has a 12,000 year head start they will never catch up. There are some animals (for example cheetahs) that have been thru population bottlenecks and have very little natural variation between individuals so there is very little to work with, but you can always for example emphasize juvenile traits – dogs are more or less wolves whose never outgrow most of their wolf puppy behavior. You are right that you cannot breed traits that are just not present in the animal (you will never breed a flying dog) but you can emphasize traits that already exist at various stages of life and suppress other traits.

It might seem harsh to say that Popular Accounts of Science are full of shite but it’s probably a decent working approximation.

Correct. Responsible: Idolization of great scientists and triumphalism of new narratives.

The Veeck effect.

Isn’t 15 the S.D. and 225 is the variance (sigma squared)?

“I don’t understand how that follows (don’t you usually have to do that type of calculation in terms of r^2 and variance rather than correlation and SD?).”

You’re correct.

Coop organized the denunciation letter against Wade.

You are mixing up Blooms. Adam Bloom is “ID Adam” – the guy who just ruined his life by asking a black woman for ID at the pool of his condo.

Yup.

If we had spent the last 5,000 years working on lion breeding, we would have had long haired lions, short haired lions, hairless lions, miniature lions, etc. by now just as we do housecats but no one has had any reason to try.

Humans have been breeding lions since antiquity, so I don’t know what you’re on about here.

If 12,000 years ago humans in China had picked some other grass instead of rice then by now we would have bred that plant to the point where it produces useful food.

This is a baseless assertion on your part that is in any case nothing to the point I was making.

You are right that you cannot breed traits that are just not present in the animal (you will never breed a flying dog)

That being the case, I will leave it to evolutionists to explain how natural selection bred a flying bat.

Actually every Afro-American can be paired with White-American of equal or lower IQ score.

While this is true, there are 6 whites for every black so after you have pair off Cletis with D’Shawn you still have 5 more white people who are smarter than both of them.

Frankenstein’s monster

The formula to be used

SD(∆IQ)=15*sqrt(2(1-r)), where r is correlation between twins.

If correlation r=0.5 then the standard deviation of difference is 15. If correlation r=0.7 then the standard deviation of difference is 11.6.

The reason these numbers are large is because the standard deviation due to the unexplained variance, i.e, the noise due to environment is applied to each twin, thus there is the sqrt(2)=1.41 factor.

Dog breeds, like any any other animal or plant intensively cultivated by humans, have been developed along some sort of utilitarian principle by forced matings and crossings. The results of these selections do not do the creatures any good, as they are almost invariably far less “fit” than the wild type.

Do they live? Then it has done them good. Do they reproduce? Then they are fit.

One more question: Are “civilized” humans less fit than the “wild type”?

So what? I gave an example of White subpopulation (40 millions) that is IQ-equivalent to Black population. The purpose of this example was to demonstrate that IQ does not explain the difference in attention the two populations get because they are IQ equivalent. And if there is a significant difference in accomplishments of two populations then it can’t be the IQ that could account for it. You can read.

For r=0.76 the SD of difference between twin IQ’s is 10.39.

That dog breeds are artificial

yeah but in practical terms it doesn’t matter

say

1) it’s true that human breeds are 100% created by environmental variables but we don’t know what they are yet

and 2) that these environmental variables are the cause of the education gap

but 3) at the same time we’ve known for 10,000 years that intelligence can be artificially selectively bred in dogs

then

while we’re waiting for BBNs to figure out what the mystery environmental variables are we could start closing the education gap tomorrow by simply telling women in the currently lagging populations they can f**k who they like but only make babies with the smarter half of the local men.

easy peasy, lemon squeezy

https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2014/07/01/the-veeck-effect/

> This means that no genetic (statistical) prediction of the complex trait of IQ (relevance) can ever be statistically validated

Any yet the founders of Google are laughing all the way to the banks. You are really stupid.

Thanks. I was not aware of the first kind (though I had heard of the second kind without the “second” qualifier).

For anyone interested in more about this, here is a link to your article: https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11409

That sucks. Thanks for letting me know.

Your numbers are rather different from the empirical SDd (SD of the difference) of 5.2 seen in Table 2 of the 1973 Jensen paper I linked above. More detail in comment 131.

Türkheim.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turckheim

I think this is because they calculate SD of absolute value of differences and SD(Y-X)>SD(|Y-X|).
see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Folded_normal_distribution

SD(Y-X)= 1.6589*SD(|Y-X|) if Mean(Y-X)=0

From your 131 comment if I read it correctly they got: Mean(|Y-X|)=6.6 and SD(|Y-X|)=5.2 providing that they did not do some dubious correction for test repeat error. Note that ±1 sigma of data will be in [1.4, 11.8] interval. It does not look that great anymore, right?

Now let’s convert their SD|x| to SD(x)=5.2*1.6589=8.62628. Multiply it by 15/14.16 because their SD of data is 14.16 not 15. SD=5.2*1.6589*(15/14.16)=9.13801

I do not know what was their correlation but to get 9.13801 from my formula

SD(∆IQ)=15*sqrt(2(1-r))

correlation r must be equal to 0.8144. There will be differences because their data is a small sample that is not necessarily well distributed.

So again res you can see how one can present data to make them look better. They figured out that by calculating SD for absolute values they can fool credulous and uncritical customers because they will not think that the mean value of absolute difference is also an error that should count. And they gave you to swallow the value SD=5.2 with the intent to overlook the Mean=6.6. Pretty sneaky guys. Never trust the IQists.

don’t you usually have to do that type of calculation in terms of r^2

You’re correct.

Not really. The 1-r^2 comes into the picture when calculating variance of residuals in linear regression fit when with the variable X we predict variable Y. This variance is not calculated as variance of residuals (Y-X) but as variance of residuals (Y-A*X) where A is the slope form the fit equal to COV(Y,X)/COV(X,X). You are looking at the best predictor that’s why you include the slope. And then the r^2 comes into the picture because of the COV(Y,X).

But when you look at variance of (Y-X) then r^2 does not come into the picture and r itself pops up in the formula.

These two fromulas

SD(Y-X)=15*sqrt(2*(1-r)) and SD(Y-A*X)=15*sqrt(1-r^2))

measure standard deviation of different residuals.

————–SD(Y-X)——– SD(Y-A*X)
r=1.0———-0.00—————–0.00
r=0.95——–4.74——————4.68
r=0.90——–6.70——————6.53
r=0.75——–10.60—————–9.92
r=0.65——–12.54—————-11.39
r=0.50——–15.00—————-11.39
r=0.25——–18.37—————-14.54
r=0.0———21.21—————–15.00

For large correlations they produce similar numbers that’s why people may not realize that they are using a wrong formula if they are using a wrong formula. Good check is for r=0. Uncorrelated variables increase SD by factor of sqrt(2), i.e., SD=15*1.41=21.21 while when calculating linear regression residuals the slope A=0 so SD(Y-A*X)=SD(Y)=15.

“Not that I consider Christianity a Semitic religion.”

Really? What is Christianity then, a Norse religion?

No, the average IQ difference between identical twins isn’t anywhere near 1 SD. It’s possible for identical twins to be 1 SD apart, but it’s extremely unlikely (I suppose if you hit one twin on the head with a hammer at age 1, there might be a 1 SD difference).

But it sounds like what you are talking about is basically the traditional discipline of ethnography, with some Evola and a smattering German Idealism on top.

No, not really. But thank you for at least making an honest effort to understand and reply.

I am not talking about the volksgeist or any other spiritual force binding together the tribe. I am talking about race proper. And I am speaking strictly within the tradition of classical (Aristotelian) metaphysics.

Thanks. There are also English Travellers who don’t seem to be ethnically gypsy. They go in for the same type of crimes as their Irish counterparts, e.g. burglary and home invasion. They were in the news a couple of months ago when one of them burst into the home of a 77-year-old man and learned that you don’t bring a screwdriver to a knife fight.

Thanks for the clarification,my friend. It’s a long way to Tipperary!

That would be true if their plight was being blamed on some other race to the extent that Blacks’ plight is being blamed on Whites.

Yeah I wasn’t really paying attention to the specific numbers (not the sd cited in the quote I responded to, or the higher correlation between tests taken by the same person which was contradicted by another, lower figure elsewhere in the thread), just yakking about the “noise” in the results.

Partly off-topic:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-5930593/Doctor-fired-government-role-insisting-gender-determined-birth.html

“Christian belief” or just common freakin’ sense?

Good check is for r=0.

Excellent point. Using boundary values is great for double checking work. I find it invaluable.

I get grumpy with you about math mistakes sometimes, utu, but I think you have the right of it here.

Your pointer to the folded normal distribution was helpful. It is worth noting that what we have here is actually a special case of that: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Half-normal_distribution

I think it is sensible to look at |Y-X| given there is no natural ordering for twin pair IQ. Though on reflection, it might be interesting to use birth order, or weight at birth, and look at the differences with respect to those. Does anyone have a good reference looking at this? The closest I found was http://www.sulloway.org/BirthOrder&Intelligence-Science2007.pdf

I have a show me attitude towards theoretical math, so I did a simulation of this in R (1e4 samples). I used Jensen’s Table 2 correlation of 0.82 (it’s nice to be able to compare to a real dataset) which gave me a simulated (folded) mean(d) = 7.2 and SD(d) = 5.49. Both of those are a bit larger than Jensen’s mean of 6.60 and SD of 5.20, but I think they are close enough to Jensen to consider my simulation a decent representation of real data, and close enough to your results to convince me of your analysis (barring a convincing counterargument from anyone). My unfolded SD(d) was 9.02.

So I think we have established both empirical and mathematical evidence indicating EH’s comment 92 estimate of the expected difference is low (though his high boundary is much closer to reality than Turkheimer’s estimate). It is worth noting that the “expected difference” terminology implies a folded distribution. The mean of the two tailed difference is ~0. (and FWIW, it looks like my reply to EH was off target as well)

Regarding this:

Note that ±1 sigma of data will be in [1.4, 11.8] interval. It does not look that great anymore, right?

The high end of that is larger than I would have guessed, but that is what a 0.82 correlation looks like. I found the Gladys and Helen account from Jensen to be helpful for calibrating how much the environment can differ for twins adopted apart. It is worth noting that we have a one sided distribution so the normal distribution intuitions about SD and frequency do not apply. Here are the deciles from my simulation:

## 0%        10%     20%     30%     40%     50%     60%
## 0.000676 1.094597 2.248598 3.451064 4.699772 6.101767 7.624648
## 70%     80%     90%     100%
## 9.382199 11.693364 15.008811 32.966672

Based on that, ~10% of MZ twins (adopted apart) have an IQ difference > 15 (i.e 1 SD), which I do find surprising.

I reran the simulation with the test-retest correlation of 0.95 and got the following deciles:

## 0%      10%     20%     30%     40%     50%     60%
## 0.000357 0.576903 1.185115 1.818870 2.476997 3.215914 4.018542
## 70%     80%     90%     100%
## 4.944853 6.162944 7.910338 17.374962

Which adds some additional perspective.

If anyone wants me to look at anything else using my simulation, just ask.

P.S. But could you please back off with the obnoxiousness exemplified by the last paragraph of your comment 171?!

You are right, of course. I was trying to make the sentence shorter, and ended simplifying the discussion too much.

What I meant was that the concept of race, for me, is rooted only in biology, not in metaphysics or sociology. True, society has an influence on how we define the racial groups (as you aptly mentioned), but it needs the biological differences to start; without them, society may get you different classes, but not different races in any meaningful sense. Even in Brazil, a country with a mostly mixed population, we can still talk about race only because you can see differences in phenotype (and the common people mostly doesn’t understand, as they are mixed enough for much of the perceivable differences between the phenotypes to have weakened a lot).

Wasn’t it Thucydides who first noticed? Anyway, some folks on Turkheimer’s side are more stubborn than the average on this.

Turkheimer links to the story of the Bajau deep sea divers in a very dismissive way, implying the left accepts it because the genetic evidence is there.

They probably accept it because they think it fits into the diversity mantra: here is a strange people (refugees!), see what an interesting and unique ability they have? Diving: it is something that we do on vacation. Diversity is a strength!

Obviously, they have a kind of natural blindness that prevents them from seeing the woods for the trees. The Bajau are adapted to their environment, not merely to survive – but in order to better to acquire resources – that utterly destroys the narrative. It should be making people like Turkheimer and the Marxist Lewontin eat their hats.

If people are adapted to their waters, the same, as has been long proposed, is obviously true of their soils. Why wouldn’t it be?

The accomplishments of Western Christian civilization are many, but probably the greatest is modern science. Not perfect or without misfires and screwups–as are all things from man–but a huge advance.

It turns out that the best way to figure out how things actually work is observe, test, collect data and see … how things actually work. Amazing … but true.

And it’s the people who refuse to observe–and acknowledge–how things actually work, but insist on imposing their perfected ideologies, who continually create catastrophe after catastrophe and are now destroying the West.

The results of these selections do not do the creatures any good, as they are almost invariably far less “fit” than the wild type

You are using the word “good” in a sense that we humans often do, but which does not mean anything to evolutionary theory.

Important to remember that, from evolution’s POV, “good” means whatever makes the individual leave more descendants than its competitors. Nothing else matters: not beauty, nor elegance, nor perfect functionality, nor nobility, nor independence, nor even greater malleability, unless any of these things leads to greater reproductive success. Likewise, “fit” is about how many descendants an organism leaves in the environment it inhabits in comparison with the competition; how it would fare in situations it doesn’t face matters not.

Cattle are meeker than aurochsen, and definitely less fit for survival in the environment originally inhabited by aurochsen. But cattle doesn’t live there ; they live in a different environment, the one dominated and maintained by humans. Selection did them a lot of good to avail survival in this new environment: there are hundreds of millions of cows today, but no aurochsen anymore.

Artificial selection is therefore strictly confined to developing only those qualities which may be considered extraneous, irrelevant, or counterproductive from the organism’s point of view.

This doesn’t follow. Because you see most selection to weaken the fitness of the domesticates in the wild ancestral environment, you conclude that artificial selection must be capable of only doing so. How so? In theory, there is nothing forbiding us from selecting creatures you would call “better” than the wild-types (though, evolitionarily speaking, they probably wouldn’t be). We just don’t do it often because it’s dangerous and doesn’t pay.

(Also, as I stated, from an evolutionary POV artificial selection was not counterproducive for the domesticated populations (they number millions), which is what matters for the continuing the existence of the species’ pangenomes)

The core of the organism, its essential nature, cannot be altered by external pressures of any sort.

There is no essential nature as the generations pass; there is only the pangenome.

Informative clarification. Thanks.

Wasn’t it Thucydides who first noticed?

That sounds plausible given how much he thought about evidence validity. For example this comment: “Thucydides uses a grid, or set of criteria, by which he scrutinizes evidence, both ancient and contemporary (e.g., reports about the Peloponnesian War).” seen in http://academic.brooklyn.cuny.edu/classic/wilson/core/thuk1.htm

But it would be interesting to know if he did make an observation about varying demands for evidence depending on the question. It certainly sounds like an idea the ancient Greek philosophers (or historians ; ) would have thought about.

Any references to early origins of the isolated demands for rigor idea would be appreciated.

Anyway, some folks on Turkheimer’s side are more stubborn than the average on this.

Indeed.

When possible I prefer deriving formulas rather than doing numerical simulation. But I must admit I did simulations to verify whether the scaling factor between SD(x) and SD(|x|) was indeed equal to 1/sqrt(1-2/PI)= 1.6589 because I had no time to verify the formula I found in wiki.

EH – His formula is completely wrong.

Cochran (#153) – He was wrong agreeing with you that r^2 should be involved in a formula to calculate SD

Turkheimer – If he did it correctly his point would be even stronger (here from my #145 comment to EH)

What was the mistake that Turkheimer has made? He thought that the unexplained variance sqrt(0.5*225) where he assumes that heritability is 0.5 is the variance of difference.

However, now let’s try to figure out why the unexplained variance is not the variance of the difference? Unexplained variance applies to both twins and thus is added when calculating the difference. He did not do it and applied it only to one twin. He forgot about the sqrt(2) factor. With the sqrt(2) factor he would have obtained 15.

His second mistake was to equate correlation with heritability. He used H=r=0.5 which would be more correct for twins raised apart.

Jensen – There is not justification for Jensen using |x| distribution whatsoever. I see no other reason than trying to mislead, to make impression that differences are smaller than they are. The reader was supposed to take home the number 5.20 and not the number 1.68 times higher. His objective was to mislead. And he succeeded.

Ground-cherries: will they be the next berry crop?

Physalis fruits look like golden marbles, larger than a blueberry, smaller than a grape. Carl Zimmer tried one, liked the rich pineapple-orange taste and wrote about their crispy future in his new book (“She Has Her Mother’s Laugh: The Powers, Perversions, and Potential of Heredity”). Ground-cherries, as they are called, belong to the same family as tomatoes but are an impossible challenge for traditional breeding because they have four copies of each chromosome rather than two. CRISPR, however, can easily fix multiple-copy genes at once. Zachary Lippman is editing these wild plants in his lab at Cold Spring Harbor and has already succeeded in increasing the number of locules in the fruits, a key step in tomato domestication. Now he is going to test other edits to make ground-cherries easier to gather, for example by synchronizing ripening. If the traits work fine singularly, Lippman will fix them all at one shot in one plant. “I think this will be the next berry crop,” he says. Zimmer goes even further: “I thought Lippman was being too modest. He was trying to replay the Agricultural Revolution on fast-forward. Instead of thousand years, he might only need a single growing season”. Let’s wait and taste.

When possible I prefer deriving formulas rather than doing numerical simulation.

They each have their strengths. I think doing both is best when possible. It serves as a double check and lets them play to their respective strengths. Which I see as:
– formulas: mathematical conclusions, for example taking derivatives to derive changes, using as inputs for further analysis, simplifying characterizations (e.g. noticing something is a square law rather than linear, sometimes simplified formulas are better than exact for this), getting exact answers
– simulations: visualization, interpretation of equations (or systems of them, etc.) that are too complex to understand outright, evaluation of metrics that might be hard to derive analytically (e.g. the deciles I gave, though they would not really be that hard for the half-normal distribution)

Turkheimer – If he did it correctly his point would be even stronger

I don’t see how you can say this when the very first thing he does is assume a heritability of 0.5 which is even below the low range given by that bastion of crimethink Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heritability_of_IQ

There is not justification for Jensen using |x| distribution whatsoever.

I disagree. Without the abs() there is no notion of “expected difference.” Which I think is the key metric here. The SD is needed as well for more complete understanding.

Did you notice Jensen’s analysis of the variance for his data from Table 3 (see end of comment 131)? I think that gives a good idea of the relative importance of each effect.

P.S. You seem really down on Jensen. Like him or not IMHO he was the best (intellectual honesty, clarity, analysis) in this field. Is there anyone you think is better (and don’t suggest yourself ; )?

The purpose of this example was to demonstrate that IQ does not explain the difference in attention the two populations get because they are IQ equivalent. And if there is a significant difference in accomplishments of two populations then it can’t be the IQ that could account for it

Murray (1994), I believe, pointed out that IQ was a good predictor of SES (education/occupation/remuneration) irrespective of race. Now that we have something approaching a global society (institutions, transportation and communication) it is likely that the rank ordering of races by IQ scores will be incarnated in geopolitical status hierarchy, with East Asian powers dominant.

They each have their strengths. I think doing both is best when possible.

Yes and no. Closed form formula if you can get it is always better than simulations. It gives you many insights in the interdependence of parameters. Once you have a closed form formula simulations are not needed, though sometimes special numerical algorithms might be better and more efficient than following the closed form formula, e.g., Fourier transform vs. FFT. It is hard to arrive at relationships with simulations. For example if you give students a task to find the relationship between Var(X+Y) and Var(X) and Var(Y) using simulations it would take them a long time to deduce that Cov(Y,X) is needed in the equation while the formula itself can be proven very easily. And once proven there is no point of doing simulations.

I don’t see how you can say this when the very first thing he does is assume a heritability of 0.5

We are looking at two different things. Forget for a moment about the value of heritability or correlation and look at the method. His method is flawed. Bad formula. He forgot to multiply by sqrt(2). If he did it, his point that the differences between twins are large would be even stronger.

He manipulates just like Jensen. He wanted to get large values so he picked the number 0.5 but what is ironic because of his carelessness or ignorance he used a wrong formula to his disadvantage. With a correct formula and heritability of say 0.75 (to make you happy) he could have made the same point.

His third error was to implicitly state that correlation between twins is heritability. This is almost correct for twins raised apart. But we do not have enough data on separated twins to use it but certainly it seems it is larger than 0.5. (IMO, separated twins would give much better estimate than Falconer formula with MZ and DZ for not separated twins.)

Jensen manipulate in opposite direction. There is no defense for using |x| instead of x statistics by Jensen. He wanted numbers to be low. It does not make sense to use |x| which leads to two nonzero parameters: Mean and SD while x is sufficient to be described with one number, i.e., SD because it is given that Mean=0 in case of twins. No sane person abandons normal distribution and all well established intuitions that it gives us for some exotic folded distribution unless his motives are to obfuscate and manipulate.

You seem really down on Jensen.

I had his book once and made an effort to read it before I was interested in this stuff and found that he used some archaic mathematical methods so I dropped it. W/o understanding all what he was doing he left me with an impression that he was caught in some obscure and defficient methods that were obfuscating rather than explicating the simple mathematical structures he was dealing with. At that time I did not think that it was intentional and still I do not. It is just narrow mindedness or parochialism of the niche he was in. However I think that mathematical apparatus that psychometricians have developed is not mathematically rigorous and thus it leads to fuzzy thinking and unwarranted ideations, where it is hard to catch errors and fallacious or circular reasoning. But perhaps w/o fallacious or circular reasoning this field would wither away.

You are using the word “good” in a sense that we humans often do, but which does not mean anything to evolutionary theory.

You might have spared me the condescension. I know what I said, and I know what evolutionary theory says. I have read all the same books you have and I would not have written anything that could be refuted by simply repeating the all-too-familiar popular literature on the subject. This uncharitable style of argumentation is a common problem around here.

Important to remember that, from evolution’s POV, “good” means whatever makes the individual leave more descendants than its competitors. Nothing else matters: not beauty, nor elegance, nor perfect functionality, nor nobility, nor independence, nor even greater malleability, unless any of these things leads to greater reproductive success.

Thank you for committing so forcefully to this position. Now when it becomes clear that so narrow a criterion is incapable of explaining anything, there will be no ambiguity to fall back on. I wish to address this concept of “greater reproductive success,” but I will do so in the next section where it will form part of a more comprehensive answer. First it is necessary to deal with this:

This doesn’t follow.

Yes, it does follow. It follows inevitably from two premises appearing in my quoted post. The first premise, advanced by Ben Tillman, is that there is no essential distinction between natural and artificial selection. There could be no evolutionist who would not ascent to this; it is the entire force and sum of their argument. Therefore I will stipulate to it for discussion’s sake.

The second premise is the observation that traits bred into or out of organisms by their human breeders are not thereafter maintained by the organisms themselves in the course of their unmolested living activity. They are shed, leveled, terminated, discarded, or borne with of necessity, but they are not actively maintained or selected for. Note that in this description I have not mentioned “fitness” however defined or conceived. We are not in search of causes here, so it is not necessary to postulate a principle according to which this does not happen. It is enough to observe that the organisms will not do it.

Now it does follow logically from these premises that if artificial selection equals natural selection, and artificial selection does not result in traits that are actively maintained, then natural selection will not result in traits that are actively maintained. The position of the evolutionists seems to be that the natural environment exerts a sort of unrelenting pressure upon organisms that is forever coaxing them this way and that, in a manner analogous to how a human breeder develops his stock. This idea, despite its prima facie plausibility, cannot be sustained upon further reflection. While the environment certainly presents each creature with numberless vexations, it does not do so in any systematic fashion. The combination of many overlapping strains tends only to weaken and diminish the creature, to shrink it, to make it hardier and more compact. To the extent that we can call this breeding, it is breeding for the utmost conservatism; it is non-breeding. But more importantly, there is not in the sum of these forces any unified waking-consciousness capable of selecting anything at all. There is a logos-structure to reality and a rhythm to all natural things; and just as a river will sort its sediment and the wind will sculpt the desert sand into dunes, so may nature sort her creatures, dispensing with the obviously defective ones and rounding off irregularities. But when humans breed creatures, their breeding is of an entirely different kind.

All artificial selection is the fruit of the waking-consciousness. It is microcosm not macrocosm, system and not rhythm. When a man develops his stock, he does so with an eye toward altering its extended qualities, its observable and quantifiable attributes. Numerical increase is one of the most basic and least natural of these. It is the farmer who cares about his yields, the husbandman about the size of his flocks; but there is in nature no tendency towards maximal quantities. Thus the idea of “greatest reproductive success” finds no echo in the world of nature as it is. It is a common enough truism that creatures will multiply up to the level of their available resources, but this is part tautology and part nonsense. Tautology, because it goes without saying that they cannot breed past the point of their resources; nonsense, because resources are ill-defined. Certain resources such as food, water, and sunlight are comprehensible enough, but other “resources” include less tangible things such as range and socialization—the proper amount of contact with one’s own kind—which are much harder to quantify. How do we know when something has maximized itself? Simply put, we can know only that it never does. The ratios of quantifiable resources to population size will exhibit a sort of rolling Malthusiasm, oscillating in multivariate feedback loops, following each other around the roller-coaster track of hysteresis; the intangible resources, meanwhile, are realized only along with the creatures themselves, and thus they perdure in a quasi-existence of limitless abundance. When viewed in this light, the wide world of nature herself seems almost empty of creatures. Rather than aiming for greatest reproductive success, we find that the number of offspring who survive in each generation is precisely that which is needed to maintain the species in existence. The sheer multiplication of individuals is an impulse unto which nature remains entirely innocent.

The upshot here is that artificial selection, due not to any contingent choice of the human breeders but eo ipso and per se, produces and must necessarily produce nothing but monstrosities. This therefore cannot be the model on which nature acts.

It’s more of a Gnostic religion in Semitic drag.

My calculation was wrong.
This 1970 paper by Jensen says the average IQ difference between identical twins reared apart is 6.6 (SD 5.2): IQ’s of Identical Twins Reared Apart based on 122 pairs, with raw data and a good discussion. No effect of adoptive parent SES on IQ.

It also a nice section comparing educational achievement with additional MZ pairs reared together. Academic achievement has a heritability lower than for IQ (~.4 vs. .82), but differences much greater for academic achievement in twins reared apart than for IQ:
Avg. MZ twin IQ difference: 5.17 (reared together) vs 6.55 (apart)
Avg academic achievement, also on SD=15 scale: 2.74(together) vs. 10.7 (apart)
“If the MZA [apart] twin resemblance in IQ were due to environmental similarities [between their adoptive families], these similarities should be even more strongly reflected by scholastic achievement, and this is clearly not the case.” Environment makes a big difference in academic achievement, but not for IQ in the same twins.

Very helpful with the math, yes my calculation was wrong.

But my essential point was that it does not make sense to calculate the average IQ difference between twins from a value of heritability when it is the IQs that are directly observed and the heritability is calculated from the observed IQs. It doubly doesn’t make sense when the value for heritability is simply plucked from thin air and does not match actual observation.

For the actual, observed average IQ differences between identical twins reared apart (~6.6) see: IQs of Identical Twins Reared Apart (Jensen 1970). By comparison, for MZ twins reared together, the difference reported there is 5.17 points.
h^2 (max) and r for MZ twins reared apart are both given as about 0.82