It is perfectly reasonable for critics to ask, every so often, if there is any work showing that genes make a contribution to intellectual differences between genetic groups. I assume it can be accepted that genes make a difference within a genetic group, and the animus arises only when genetic groups are being compared.
One approach is to begin by mentioning the major findings of the last century of research, which set the context of the debate. Although reasonable, the reading involved may seem unreasonable to those who want immediate answers. A brief summary would be that, despite many interventions over seven decades, African Americans remain roughly one standard deviation behind European Americans. Whatever the reason for the ability gap, it has not proved malleable.
Another approach is to discuss a selection of recent papers. This ought to be welcome, but unfortunately for those who want to skip the reading, it is necessary to go back to some old debates.
For example, although differences in intelligence between racial groups could be caused by different genetics, they might also be caused by trivial aspects of race like skin colour, which then triggers non-trivial bad treatment by other races. This bad treatment, the argument goes, could cause intellectual under-performance, either by denying educational access and quality, occupational opportunity, sufficient encouragement and mentoring, or leads to some other broad, unfair impositions. So, if a research finding is to be believed, it must distinguish between deep intrinsic causes and superficial social ones.
Furthermore, if some ancestral backgrounds really create higher intelligence in offspring, then those who have less of that advantageous genetic material should have progressively lower intellectual ability; that is to say, there must be a linear dose-response relationship. Purely European children must be brighter than those with a little less European in their genetic mix; and they must be brighter in turn than those with even less European blood. No excuses allowed.
Global Ancestry and Cognitive Ability.
Jordan Lasker, Bryan J. Pesta, John G. R. Fuerst and Emil O. W. Kirkegaard
Psych 2019, 1(1), 431-459; https://doi.org/10.3390/psych1010034
30 August 2019
https://www.mdpi.com/2624-8611/1/1/34/
This is a very detailed paper, which makes use of a natural experiment. Since Europeans, African Americans, and the children of European/African American parents have varying amount of European ancestry, it ought to be possible to check whether that genetic mix predicts intelligence, and whether is does so better than superficial characteristics like skin colour.
The paper is set out in a series of logical steps, each countering objections commonly raised against the hereditarian hypothesis.
They say:
The present work uses a population-representative Philadelphia-based sample, the Philadelphia Neurodevelopmental Cohort (PNC), otherwise known as the Trajectories of Complex Phenotypes study (TCP). Due to the location, the results are directly comparable to those of Scarr et al.[52]. Our analysis has numerous advantages compared to earlier admixture studies.
First, participants all came from the same location, so geographic confounding is not an issue.
Second, we assessed measurement invariance (MI) for the cognitive test battery using multi-group confirmatory factor analysis (MGCFA;[64]).
Third, the heritabilities of the g factor and subtest scores have already been estimated for this sample. Specifically, Mollon et al.[65] reported heritabilities for g of 0.61 (standard error (S.E.) = 0.14) and 0.72 (S.E. = 0.07) for the non-Hispanic African and European-Americans in this sample respectively.
Fourth, we included estimates of skin, hair, and eye color to evaluate phenotypic discrimination (i.e., colorism) models of the observed differences.
Fifth, we validated polygenic scores (PGS) associated with cognitive ability for both the African- and European-American samples and we examined to what extent cognitive ability- and education-related PGS (eduPGS), could account for group differences.
Sixth, we tested for Jensen effects in relation to ancestry, heritability, and eduPGS.
Seventh, we examined whether MI was tenable across the full range of European ancestry using local structural equation modeling (LSEM).
Measurement invariance means that the tests are testing the same things in all populations. This is done by carrying out confirmatory factor analyses in both populations. The study already has calculations of the heritability of intelligence in different racial groups. The fourth point is a great addition: they have predictions of what people looked like in racial terms, so one can test if people have been treated differently because of skin-colour and hair-type superficial characteristics. If intelligence is affected by racism, then these superficial appearances will be useful predictors of the size of the deleterious effect on intelligence. Fifth, on the basis of DNA taken from most of the subjects, polygenic risk scores have been calculated, which show the genetic estimates for intelligence for each person. The sixth and seventh points are further tests for whether the genetic explanation is tenable for the test scores in these different racial groups.
There is a great deal in this paper, so I will pick out the main features only, and the technical details are all there in the text, many of them dealing with possible methodological objections.
The total sample includes data from 9421 genotyped participants assessed primarily from 2010 to 2013. Demographically, the sample was 51.7% female, 55.8% European-American, 32.9% African-American, and 11.4% Other, with a mean age of 14.2 (standard deviation (SD) = 3.7) years of age. Participants were recruited from the Philadelphia area. Persons with severe cognitive or medical impairments were excluded from the final sample. The subjects were English-speaking people aged 8–21 years at the time of testing.
Participants were administered the Penn Computerized Neuro-cognitive Battery. This battery was built to be highly-reliable, psychometrically-robust, and to incorporate tasks linked to specific brain systems. The battery consists of 14 tests grouped into five broad behavioral domains: Executive Control, Episodic Memory, Complex Cognition, Social Cognition, and Sensori-motor Speed.
The tests in the battery are as follows: Penn Conditional Exclusion Test (meant to assess Mental Flexibility), Penn Continuous Performance Test (Attention), Letter N-Back Task (Working Memory), Penn Word Memory Task (Verbal Memory), Penn Face Memory Task (Face Memory), Visual Object Learning Test (Spatial Memory), Penn Verbal Reasoning Test (Language Reasoning), Penn Matrix Reasoning Test (Nonverbal Reasoning), Penn Line Orientation Test (Spatial Ability), Penn Emotion Identification Test (Emotion Identification), Penn Emotion Differentiation Test (Emotion Differentiation), Motor Praxis Test (Sensorimotor Speed), Finger Tapping (Sensori-motor Speed), and the Penn Age Differentiation Test (Age Differentiation). The sample also completed the Wide Range Achievement Test, which is a highly-reliable broad ability measure.
Of the included participants, there were 5183 European-Americans, 3155 African-Americans, and 242 biracial African-European-Americans.
Since we were only concerned with European and African-Americans, we ran ADMIXTURE with k = 2 genetic clusters. Some subjects either had no genotypes available or their data failed quality control. Thus, the final sample size was reduced to 7399. Consistent with previous research (e.g.,[59], SIRE is strongly associated with genetic ancestry. This can be seen in Figure 1 which shows the probability of identifying with a particular SIRE group as a function of European admixture.
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As previously found, people in the US know which racial groups they are in, and those social-construct descriptions match with their DNA.
And now, to see if there is some skin in this particular game:
The data did not include measures of appearance, so we opted to impute these based on genotypes. We used the HIrisPlex-S web application to do this (https://hirisplex.erasmusmc.nl/). This application was developed by the U.S. Department of Justice for use in forensic investigations. It imputes skin, hair, and eye color probabilities with a high degree of accuracy based on 41 SNPs (with overlapping variants; 6 for eye color, 22 for hair color, and 36 for skin color). This tool has been validated on thousands of people from diverse regions of the world[79].
We focus on skin color since this trait is given primacy by colorist theorists (e.g., [80,81]) and because we were able to calculate skin color scores for a larger sub-sample than for hair or eye color.
The correlation between our imputed color score and European ancestry was −0.87 for the combined sample (N = 5585) and −0.39 for the African-Americans only sample (N = 1557).
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They then calculated 4 cognitive ability polygenic risk scores, to provide DNA-based intelligence estimates. Of course, these currently capture only part of the effects caused by genes, but the interest is to see whether these partial measures are better predictors of intelligence than skin colour. If even a partial measure is as good as, or better, than skin colour, then the case for a genetic cause of racial differences in intelligence is strengthened. Those comparisons are discussed a bit later.
Here are the simple summary statistics for the sample:
American Africans are 19% European, and when an AA marries a European their children are 80% European.
Socio-economic status is highest in Europeans, then Biracial AA-Europeans, then further down, Africans.
The intelligence data, collected in 2010-2013 from these teenagers confirms the usual 1 standard deviation difference between Europeans and American Africans. Although a narrowing of the intelligence gap is often suggested, that is not the case on this very large sample, recently measured on a variety of mental tasks.
The groups differ in the colour score. In general, Biracials are more like Europeans than American Africans.
Does racial ancestry predict intelligence? The authors construct regression equations to test this hypothesis. They describe their results thus:
In models that only included monoracial African-Americans, we found that European ancestry was always strongly and significantly related to cognitive ability. Skin color (assessed genetically with the highly accurate predictor [79,93] was associated with cognitive ability (Model 1b, Table 5), but made no significant incremental contribution when ancestry was also in the model (Model 2, Table 5).
Results could still be due to phenotypic confounding from other appearance variables. To test this possibility, we fitted a number of models including skin, hair, and eye color. We found that none of these features had significant effects on their own, except for brown eye color, which was positively related to cognitive ability, but with a large standard error. These results are shown in the R notebook.
The last monoracial African-American model (Model 3, Table 5) included SES, which had a considerable effect on cognitive ability. However, the so-called sociologist’s fallacy [2,5] may be at play here. That is, controlling for parental SES also controls for genetic effects on SES which may be shared with cognitive ability.
They also look at the power of education polygenic risk scores when used across genetic groups.
4.2. eduPGS Findings and Past Research
We also evaluated the transethnic validity of eduPGS. We found that the eduPGS with the highest validity for g in both the African- and European-American samples was the MTAG_EA_10K set. Although the validity in the African-American sample was approximately half of that in the European-American sample (rAA = 0.1115; rEA = 0.2269), the relations were statistically significant in both populations (p < 0.0001). As with Piffer[111] we found large African-/European-American differences in these eduPGS (d = 1.89). Using the beta in the African-American sample and controlling for the effect of European ancestry (B = 0.124; Model 1b; Table 10), we estimate that the known eduPGS can naïvely explain as much as 20%–25% of the African-/European-American intelligence gap.
Removing variants with low Minor Allele Frequency in African 1000 Genomes lineages had little effect on the validity of MTAG_10K eduPGS among African and European-Americans. Thus, contrary to some arguments, European-specific alleles do not seem to be biasing prediction with eduPGS. Our results corroborate those of Piffer[111] who found a strong ecological correlation between MTAG-derived SNPs and population IQ (r = 0.86). We also found, using both regression and path analysis that, while the eduPGS mediates the association between European ancestry and cognitive ability, skin color scores do not.
The authors are now coming towards their conclusion, and outline further work which can be done to test their findings.
Our data are compatible with a between-group heritability (variance explained by European ancestry) of between 50% and 70% depending on the model chosen (see Scarr et al.,p. 85). This estimate of between-group heritability is consistent with Rushton and Jensen’s[9] hereditarian model, according to which 50%–80% of the African-/European-American cognitive difference is due to genetic differences.
While the statistical mediation by PGS scores suggests that genetic factors may be involved, as discussed in detail by Kirkegaard et al. we cannot rule out many types of confounding environmental variables with this research design. Global admixture analysis results are suggestive and should only be considered a first step for investigating the effects of admixture on a trait. We suggest to attempt replication of the current results using a nationally representative sample and then, if these findings are confirmed, proceed to admixture mapping (local admixture analysis). This is the standard approach taken in medical epidemiology.
We suggest two approaches to further reduce the uncertainty regarding the causes of the African-/European-American cognitive ability gap.
First, attempts should be made to replicate the current results using other samples (e.g., the Add Health study).
Second, local ancestry analysis/admixture mapping to examine the regions of the genome where the association with ancestry is most pronounced are a natural follow-on project.
The rationale of such an analysis has been explained by others (e.g., [17,24,113,114]). It would also be worthwhile to attempt to replicate these results in admixed American populations outside of the United States (e.g., Brazil, Colombia, etc.). This research project can and should be expanded to other ethnic groups both in and outside of the United States. Examples include Aborigines in Australia, Cape Coloureds in South Africa, and the Mestizo population in Mexico. For some groups, it may be of utility to examine differences in broad abilities (e.g., spatial or mathematical ability) instead of general ability as done here, as differences may not be general.
The claim that 50% to 70% of the black-white difference is due to genetics is virtually the same as that concluded by Rushton and Jensen in 2005, when they did a review of 30 years of research on the topic. Testing this more recent finding on the Add Health sample could disprove it, so this ought to be done quickly.
Also, I am strongly in favour of these findings being tested on a Brazilian sample. Brazil has always had a more relaxed attitude to race, and had far higher levels of inter-marriage than was the case in the US. I clearly remember in 1964 reading Time magazine about segregation and civil rights marches in the US while taking un-segregated buses into the centre of Sao Paulo to teach English to un-segregated classes, and later listening to Brazilian singers in un-segregated bars and night clubs. Research in Brazil should show lesser effects on intelligence if part of the intelligence gap is due to racial intolerance from Europeans.
The authors conclude:
4.4. General Conclusion
Rushton and Jensen[9] called for modern genetic studies to test the hereditarian model. They predicted that “for those Black individuals who possess more White genes, their physical, behavioral, and other characteristics will approach those of Whites” ([9], p. 262). In the present study, we confirmed that this was the case for general cognitive ability. Moreover, we showed that the association between European ancestry and g was substantially mediated by eduPGS rather than skin color PGS. These results provide support for a hereditarian model.
We conducted several analyses aimed at testing a genetic hypothesis for the African-/European-American difference in cognitive ability. We found that European ancestry was a consistent predictor of cognitive ability, even after entering various controls into our models. The large observed eduPGS differences were capable of predicting substantial proportions of the cognitive ability gap, which suggests the possibility of mediation. Future assessments with cross-racially valid PGS should attempt to assess this possibility more clearly. Our global admixture-based results suggest a contribution of admixture to the African-/European-American cognitive ability gap and should encourage future investigations at the level of local admixture.
This is a very important study. I have had to summarize, and the detail about dealing with precise methods and possible confounding is in the text of the paper. Does this paper wrap up the issue of genetic factors in racial differences in intelligence? It is hard to see what else the authors could have done to carefully test the genetic hypothesis. It appears to be a solid result. Testing it in other samples should happen quickly, so that if it does not replicate, we can discard it. Meanwhile, it stands as a clear indicator that at least half of the black-white difference is probably of genetic origin.
The upper claim is probably at least 10% low. Black sub Saharan intelligence was considerably below White northwestern European levels long before Whites were involved there. Their lack of development is testimony to that.
people in the US know which racial groups they are in, and those social-construct descriptions match with their DNA.
Better the rapier than the bludgeon, eh, doc?
American Africans are 19% European, and when an AA marries a European their children are 80% European. I get 60%: where did I go wrong?
This is the standard approach taken in medical epidemiology.
Until recently that would have been praise.
Very interesting: once again, thank you, blogger.
African Americans average about 20% European but there is a lot of variability. The 80% European admixture in biracial blacks could indicate that blacks who marry whites tend to have significantly higher European ancestry on average.
Therefore, the average “biracial” black in the study may have a black parent with an average of 60% European ancestry, and 40% African ancestry.
It’s an interesting result. It indicates that whites tend to mate with blacks with a higher European admixture rate than the population average.
(I think there’s a small chance that that it’s a typo.)
It’s in the table too (0.796 European ancestry), doubt it is a typo.
Biracials are a small sample, with a very big standard deviation, which is almost 5 times as big as the European one.
African Americans have a standard deviation 2 times as big as the European one.
This suggests that African Americans vary quite a bit in their European admixture, and biracials even more so.
The selective mating hypothesis proposed by Nurd is likely to be correct.
I stoutly deny that Nurd is a typo!
That’s right. There is assortative mating for intelligence, social class etc., and since this is correlated with European ancestry among African Americans (blacks), the blacks who mate with Europeans (whites) will be more European on average. As far as I know, this expected finding has not been studied rigorously, but it could be done using some existing datasets. For instance, NLSY datasets contain data on race of spouse, so one can check whether the smarter blacks are more likely to have white (and Asian) spouses. Furthermore, there is a self-report measure of European ancestry in one of these datasets, and Add Health also has a skin color assessment. These should both predict having a non-black spouse.
Meta-analysis of genetic ancestry and social status across American countries
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/315818167_Biogeographic_Ancestry_and_Socioeconomic_Outcomes_in_the_Americas_A_Meta-Analysis
Shouldn’t that be ~60%?
Thanks, chaps: sounds plausible to me.
On a pedantic note: if American blacks are (on average) 20% European surely they should be called called “bi-racial”?
Anyway, it seems entirely improper that “bi-racial” be used solely when the two races concerned are black and white. I have two biracial friends – neither has a drop of black or white ‘blood’.
No doubt “bi-racial” will soon go the way of half-caste or mulatto: the outward and visible sign of a speaker’s inward and spiritual evil.
In Brazil, Biracial would be a very big sample.
It would be great to do a triracial model in Brazil: Amerindian, African, European in Northeast, Northwest, Southwest Brazil. That analysis not just skin colour but a composite of that and hair texture, facial traits and so on.
Then that sentence needs a clarification at the very least. If you’re right, the African American parents of the sampled mixed children have three times more white genes than stated. They’re actually more white than black at 60/40.
The average intelligence of self-identified “African-Americans” varies considerably by subgroup/US state, something known as far back as the Army Alpha test scores. Kaufman and Doppelt (1976) later analysing WISC-R test scores for self-identified African Americans and found those in the southern states, had a mean IQ of 83 (some as low as 80), compared with 87 for western states, 89 for the north-central states and 93 for north-east states (94 the highest). In other words, African-Americans depending on state differ on average by almost one standard deviation. There’s more recent data showing similar results. The authors of Lasker et al. 2019 however only sample self-identified African-American from one US state, Philadelphia, with a mean IQ of 85.
Hereditarians seem to ignore the huge diversity in mean IQs between subgroups/US states within larger social ‘races’ (e.g. “Black”/”African-American”) for obvious reasons – the hereditarianism hypothesis doesn’t make sense when there is a gap virtually as big as the mean ‘Black-White’ difference within the putative “Black” racial grouping itself, furthermore the smartest “Blacks” have higher IQs than some subgroups of “Whites”. Hereditarians of course rarely discuss this overlap – when they do discuss it they come up with bizarre ad hoc hypotheses like Richard Lynn.
I suspect Black women with above average amounts of white DNA would gain appeal in the eyes of white men from looks inclining to the white much more that they would through IQ inclining to the white. The Minnesota adoption study found a couple of points higher IQ in biracial children of white birth mothers compared to those with black birth mothers.
I think having a white rather than black mother is a lot more common among Black/white biracial children, because white women rate the physical attractiveness of Black men much more highly than white men rate the physical attractiveness of Black women. Kanazawa presented seemingly objective data showing Black women (but not Black men) were less attractive than their white counterparts. In fact, Kanazawa said the data showed Black men were independently assessed as more physically attractive than white. But no one wants to hear that kind of thing, which is why Kanazawa was cancelled.
Would you agree with the assessment that this shows the 15 point IQ gap is only 0.5-0.7 genetic, or that this study indicates the American black and white IQ gap is at least 0.5-0.7 genetics and may be more with additional genetic information?
That the American b-w IQ gap is only around 8 points due to genetics really seems surprising as the adult 15 point gap hasn’t seemed to move in 40 years or more.
So do whites: there was once a useful table (on Audacious Epigone’s blogspot site) but the link now says “Blog has been removed”, and the only remaining trace is a tweet by JayMan…
From memory, whites in West Virginia were ~1sd dumber than whites in DC.
The shortest distance from Washington DC to a point interior to the boundary of the state of WVa is ~67km as the crow flies.
At the end of the day, it’s much ado about fuck-all though.
If 70% of IQ variation can be explained by heredity, then an imprecise-but-suitably-graphic way to think about it is as follows:
• if 2 average boobus Americanus squirt out offspring, ~65 IQ points gets explained when Pappa dumps a hot load in Mamma’s front-bum.
• what happens thereafter is the difference between 80 and 110.
That assumes that the genetic contribution is augmented by even the most basic neonatal environment – i.e., that enough food, shelter and hygeine to stay alive is enough to generate extra IQ, and that a neglected kiddie with a genetic potential IQ of 100 will wind up with an IQ of 80 (rendering them useless for any role in a modern economy).
And of course extra attention, affection and other positive environmental stimuli aren’t getting a “vanilla” human to 140 (absent some superhero ‘origin story’, perhaps involving massive exposure to radiation).
But put a kiddie with a potential IQ of 100 in a contaminated shithole with measurable lead particulates in the environment, fluoridated water and what-not, and then feed them standard American gavage (sugary shit in coloured boxes)… 80-something is about right.
Hereditarians don’t ignore IQ differences between countries of the same race. Why then would you assume that they ignore what you’re talking about? It’s called an average. Also, we can’t assume that all whites and all blacks in the U.S. came from the same stock in their countries or territories of origin. New England whites and Appalachia whites aren’t from the same sub-racial stock, for example. White means European caucasoid which is a broad racial category that includes a variety of European caucasoid sub-races. The same goes for the term black which includes a variety of African negroid sub-races. Slaves came from all over Western Africa and belonged to a multitude of ethnic groups. Also, I would venture that over time, many of the more intelligent blacks in the U.S. migrated northward once they were freed because of better educational and economic opportunities to be had there. Selection bias and all that.
https://www.unz.com/jman/the-genetics-of-the-american-nations/
1. If white people are so darned smart, how come they are losing?
2. There are none so stupid as those who will not learn from experience. How many super-high IQ people did it take to invade Iraq? Or destroy Libya? Or ship all of our industries to China? Hello?
I am not sure exactly what you are referring to regarding the “ad hoc hypotheses.” To my knowledge, the existence of intelligent Black cognitive classes (including elite African immigrants) does not disprove the genetic basis of intelligence and likely bolsters the hereditarian hypothesis. Furthermore, the artifact known as regression to the mean once again implicates the underlying genetic origin for intelligence.
Most psychometricians are transparent regarding the statistical methods underlying their research. The Mainstream Science of Intelligence cogently outlined the issue; moreover, The Bell Curve plainly stated that most ethnic differences in functionality erode between Blacks and Whites once controlled for IQ. As it stands currently, the Black mean IQ of 85 is one standard deviation from the White average of 100, therefore putting 2% of Blacks at 115 or greater. That would entail 2% of Blacks exhibit higher IQs than 84% of Whites.
If one read The Bell Curve, then the first three chapters detailing cognitive stratification would be clairvoyant. I would intimate that a significant amount of Blacks with IQs of 115 or greater show higher admixtures of European ancestry and exhibit endogenous mating. These multiracial elites comprise the historical “bourgeois Black” class. The present study bolsters my claim, and time will only increase our current understanding.
Lastly, the existence of geographic differences amongst Blacks has been subject to detailed analysis. How is a five-eight point difference, predicated on phenotype-disparities in environmental development, akin to the standard deviation B/W one? Did you not read the first paragraph clearly stating the Black/White IQ differential has not been malleable?
Jensen explicitly discussed the different rates of European ancestry in African Americans in different US states. This has been known for a long time.
It could have – if culture would not have worked in the opposite direction.
Steve Sailer’s estimate is that 5 IQ points could be a reasonable goal and within reach via appropriate cultural (= disciplinary, for example) changes in black schools/environments. –
– Is it that Bill Gates does not get this idea, because he is brighter than Steve Sailer, or because he is not as bright as Steve Sailer is? –
– On the other hand – if it depended on being bright to understand this culture-problem, why humble me could grasp it? Hehe. – Problems over problems.
Oh, but it is malleable. If you do the correct things, that is. But they’re… extremely controversial.
If you compare mean IQ of AA’s by state and then look at the percentage of mean “European” admixture in AA’s by state – it doesn’t fit the hereditarian hypothesis very well. As an example one of the states with highest mean “European” admixture, 30% is Washington (Bryc et al. 2015, Table S3). However, the IQ of AA’s in this state is far from the highest. Yet if the hereditarian hypothesis was true one would expect the states with highest “European” admixture to have highest IQ. Not the case.
Although AA’s in southern states with the lowest amount of “European” admixture such as Alabama, South Carolina and Mississippi have the lowest IQs – if you look at the IQs of “White Americans” in those states, they also have the lowest. This has been explained by the poor quality of schools in these states if I’m not mistaken. So when you also look at the lower IQs of “White Americans” in these states, it doesn’t support hereditarianism.
> So when you also look at the lower IQs of “White Americans” in these states, it doesn’t support hereditarianism.
In your remarks, when you write “hereditarianism,” you seem to mean “a model in which inter-group heredity explains nearly everything.” But that strikes me as a straw-man characterization of James Thompson’s writing, and of the Lasker et al study. One of the Lasker authors (Kirkegaard) has participated in this thread, strengthening that impression.
It seems to me that in the Thompson/Lasker context (and in the context of informed commenters on this thread) that a “hereditarian” is somebody who allows that both Nature and Nurture likely play important roles in determining an individual’s intellectual and psychological phenotypes (e.g. g and OCEAN/HEXACO traits).
From an evolutionary-biology perspective, it would be unlikely (not impossible) if groups that have been reproductively isolated for many centuries — and subject to different selection pressures — did not have some different mean values in quantitative phenotypic traits. In my view, understanding the causes and extents of inter-group mean differences is an interesting scientific question with important policy implications.
I’m referring to what you just posted as bizarre ad hoc hypotheses e.g. “elite African (im)migrants”.
We know mean IQ test scores of self-identified “African-Americans” differs by state; those living in the southern states have the lowest IQs. The reason for this is because the south has poorer education/socioeconomic conditions, hence why self-identified “White Americans” in those same states also have lower IQs, despite having the highest proportion of “White American” ancestry (how do hereditarians explain this?)
Hereditarians instead claim the IQs of AA’s in northern states are higher because these are/descend from “elite” blacks (and so are not typical) who migrated from the south. This was an argument popular among segregationists known as the selective migration hypothesis; it was debunked by Ashley Montagu in the 1940s. Yet that argument is still used by Richard Lynn, and what you seem to be arguing here.
It hasn’t been seriously moved in 100 years. Well, maybe. https://emilkirkegaard.dk/en/?p=6519
These estimates are not that precise. Sampling error is not the main concern here, the concern is that in these data, the effect of self-identifying as biracial black-white is quite large, and that’s why the genetic slope is not that large. This way of interpreting the results assumes that this self-identification is not confounded by the true polygenic score for intelligence etc., which is likely the case. Thus, treat these estimates with caution. Personally, I think the US black-white gap heritability is in the 50-100% region, closer to 100% than 50%. See this post: https://emilkirkegaard.dk/en/?p=6774
This blog is now on unz.com: https://www.unz.com/anepigone/state-iq-estimates-2013/
an interesting scientific question: it certainly is.
with important policy implications. I doubt it. But maybe times will change.
It’s also very possible that the whites in the south are not lower average IQ for the same reason blacks are. White southerners, from what little I’ve read, tend to descend principally from people from the United Kingdom and the UK has some of the trashiest, most aggressive whites in Europe. If you contrast that with the more placid Germanic peoples in the midwest and beyond, it makes a lot of sense to boil white differences down to ethnic reasons rather than socioeconomic reasons. I can’t really explain whites in the northeast; they very well may come from Southern English stock and they tend to be less thuggish.
I’m curious though. How do you explain the different outcomes between Asian nations and African nations? Both were poor as fuck 70 years ago and under the thumb of European nations, but the Asians have elevated themselves well beyond that of the Africans.
But then we have the different outcomes for Pakistanis, Bangladeshis, sub continental Indians and East African Indians who have emigrated to the UK. They are the same race and sometimes the same religion so they are all more or less equally oppressed by skin colour. However, their acheivements differ hugely. Bangladeshis are generally amongst the poorest in British society. Indians, especially East Africans, are notable for acheivement. The richest man in Parliament is the Indian Chancellor of the Exchequer, still young. This is a strong argument for environment, expressed as the internal culture of a group, playing a huge role.
Amongst those of African descent, recent arrivals from Africa outperform Afro-Caribbeans. Former school teachers here as asylum seekers from Zimbabwe zealously seek out employment opportunities as security guards that more established oppressed communities fail to find. White oppression? too much Ganja smoked by one of the groups? Self selection for higher motivation by the Africans?
My take home from the Bell Curve is that any genetic differences are trivial. You simply can not judge an individual by race.
I did run across a fascinating paper describing relative amounts of neanderthal DNA between Asians, Europeans and those of African descent.
Once, many species of humans roamed the Earth, of which Homo sapiens was just one. Human beings of European and Asian descent are not entirely human, as we had previously understood the term.
Everyone except sub-Saharan Africans has some Neanderthal DNA lingering in their cells, around 4 percent on average.
This is because most of the interbreeding between different human species happened outside of the African continent, after the first humans had ventured out and began spreading to the rest of the world..
Neanderthal is our closest-known evolutionary relative, and coexisted with H. sapiens on Earth for more than 5000 years , and frequently interbred with modern humans . According to researchers, at least one-fifth of the Neanderthal genome may lurk within modern humans, influencing traits including the appearance of the skin and hair people have today and the diseases they get. This finding indicates that a true “extinction” of Neanderthals may not have occurred, but that they may have been absorbed into H. sapiens.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4947341/
Neanderthals were less aggressive and possessed brain development that enabled greater visual acuity than H. sapiens, but the the latter had better language-processing abilities . In general, because Neanderthal brains were devoted to vision and spatial memory, this left less area for cognition and social interactions.
The first interbreeding with Neanderthals occurred in the Middle East before the ancestors of modern non-Africans spread out across Eurasia.The ancestors of modern Europeans and Asians then split out of this migrant group and the ancestors of East Asians interbred again with Neanderthals after the split.
As a result there is a higher Neanderthal admixture in East Asians compared with Europeans. East Asians inherited 15–30 % more Neanderthal DNA than Europeans
Homo heidelbergensis mostly had smaller brains than Neanderthals, and H. sapiens. While no traces of H. sapiens interbreeding with Neanderthals have been detected in Sub-Saharan Africa, genetic studies show that H. sapiens did interbreed with H. heidelbergensis in this region
Without an archaic Neanderthal ancestry, Sub-Saharan African populations would be more affected by genes linked to aggression or hyperactivity, which are found only in H. sapiens. This finding could help account for the differences in violence or aggression found in the human race today.
East Asians have slightly larger brains than Europeans . In more detail, the perceptual brain regions are larger in East Asians, whereas the regions related to language are larger in Europeans. Sub-Saharan Africans mostly have smaller brains than the aforementioned two groups.
In terms of hyperactivity and aggression, the lowest scores among present human populations are obtained by East Asians, followed by Europeans and then Sub-Saharan Africans . The genes pertaining to aggressiveness and hyperactivity originate with H. sapiens, and interbreeding with Neanderthals led to more peaceful behavior in humans inheriting Neanderthal genes.
The differences in environment coupled with varying amounts of neanderthals DNA led to genetic and epigenetic differences , the latter being transgenerational and more or less permanent differences.
But again, the Bell Curve makes this all moot when it comes to individual relationships. We are one species. At the Middle of the curve where most of us reside there is little difference.
‘Hereditarians seem to ignore the huge diversity in mean IQs between subgroups/US states within larger social ‘races’ (e.g. “Black”/”African-American”) for obvious reasons – the hereditarianism hypothesis doesn’t make sense when there is a gap virtually as big as the mean ‘Black-White’ difference within the putative “Black” racial grouping itself…’
It makes plenty of sense if one assumes that ‘blacks’ in the Northeast et al have a greater admixture of white genes than blacks in Alabama et al — as they presumably would have.
I would also suspect that would also tend to be some genetic sorting for intelligence; American blacks started out in the South, and some emigrated outwards. Wouldn’t it follow that those who emigrated tended to be more intelligent than those who never did?
To put it differently, try driving around a town like Tuskegee, Alabama, and studying the local fauna. The best and the brightest did not stay down home on the farm.
Longitudinal data exist.
Do genes account for 50—70% of racial
———————————————
no, it’s awl about the hare, silkie vs nappie…
The Lasker et al. article is a very important contribution; it rejects definitively the conventional theory that the race gap is 100% environmental. It is great to see so many thoughtful contributions in the comments here.
It is important to acknowledge the slight ambiguity of assigning % contributions to genetic versus environmental causes of the race gap, due to the presence of genotype/phenotype interactions. African Americans are raised in neighborhoods with lower average g-factor scores and this environmental influence lowers their own g-factor scores relative to if they were raised in a different type of community. So this interaction effect creates a small ambiguity since it is neither a purely genetic nor a purely environmental cause. It is a “nonlinear” term coming from the interaction of genetic and environmental causes. Some of the earlier comments ignore this ambiguity.
Consider the following thought experiment. A group to 1000 talented musicians establish an isolated community and inter-marry producing a new generation in this isolated community. The children of this community would show great music talent, both because of genetic inheritance and because they live in a community where most everyone plays instruments and there are musical opportunities at every stage of life. Similarly, African Americans’ g-factor scores are impacted by being raised in communities with low average g-factor scores. This interaction effect might be small, but it is a potential ambiguity.
Why is this study so important, because it “confirms” that whites are “Übermensch “, and they should continue to treat the non-whites accordingly?
” In fact, Kanazawa said the data showed Black men were independently assessed as more physically attractive than white. But no one wants to hear that kind of thing, which is why Kanazawa was cancelled.”
A lot of white male sports fans (jockstrap sniffers) seem to have a homoerotic fixation with black men which is borne out by the fact that they spend endless hours gazing at them on the televitz and endless amounts of money collecting clothes that black athletes have worn at some point in their careers.
White women who get involved with black men are usually ones that have had abusive fathers and seek out men of any color who will abuse them. Since there is an endless supply of nasty black men (even some with money), the odds are that this type of white woman will end up with a nasty black man. Since money trumps all, a nasty black man with money will get the best looking of these women. There’s no true “physical attraction” going on there, just a mentally ill woman desiring to be wanted and the only male model that she can relate to is one that will abuse her, since black men are experts at abusing women over white men by a factor of 100, that’s usually what she ends up with.
“Indians, especially East Africans, are notable for acheivement. The richest man in Parliament is the Indian Chancellor of the Exchequer, still young. This is a strong argument for environment, expressed as the internal culture of a group, playing a huge role.”
Indians from East Africa are generally Ismaeli Muslims who have as their leader the Aga Khan. They are a subgroup that are smarter than the average Indian and are successful at business. They have a lot of money behind them and tend to be the most liberal of Muslims. Many were kicked out of Uganda by Idi Amin and given asylum mostly by the white Commonwealth countries. https://the.ismaili/global/about-us/the-ismaili-community
You are presenting politicized interpretations of news items as if they are indicative of some biological truth. The issue is not whether the United States has made bad choices politically. Good arguments could be made for the choices that were made for each of the topics you mention.
As for invading Iraq… consider that Iran fought a war with Iraq for nearly 10 years, losing hundreds of thousands of soldiers, whereas the US was able to invade and occupy Iraq within days and lost only a tiny fraction of the amount of soldiers that Iran lost.
Finally, losing what? A starring role in television commercials?
You seem to be declaring victory in a contest that took place nowhere else than in your own head.
Honestly? I doubt it. I am a firm believer in epigenetics. Give me a black kid raised on brains and fish over any white raised a vegan. If not in one generation, in two the black kid will prevail over the dumber vegan. The problem with blacks that stayed in Africa is that it is much easier there to survive on a mostly plants diet. You only need to stretch an arm to pick a papaya.
Whites are blacks who emigrated North. There you can survive only on a meat-based diet (to preserve scarce vitamin D for example), plus the difficult environment forces you to develop tools and technologies.
The intelligence of Negronians can be argued ad infinitum.
What even the Whitest of simpletons knows is no state, city or neighborhood is improved by a large influx of blacks.
No. Plus the smear that has now become popular among the lower IQ rabble that white people have some how mistreated them is so blatantly false as to be truly absurd. Would you prefer to have been sacrificed to the Sun God by Aztecs? Would you prefer to have been enslaved by Arabs? Would you have preferred to have been starved to death by Chinese emperors? How is it that no one is aware of any aspect of human history other than a few examples of bad experiences people have had in the United States? Seems like an intentional sort of ignorance. Basically, you read a bad yelp review of America, which is all Black Lives Matter really is, and now you think it’s the worst country in human history. Would you prefer to be born into the “untouchable” caste in India?
One of the main reasons people focus on this topic of population IQ is that it has implications for social policy. If everyone is literally a moron (for example unable to comprehend simple written explanations) then the ability of those people to formulate or understand laws is very limited. To give a specific example: they simply would not be able to comprehend or even read complex tax law as it applies to international corporations. To give another example: they would not be able to formulate and follow rules for validating that a chemical is safe to use in household cleaning products. And on and on.
In short, democracy is impossible with such people.
We are just now beginning to see the collapse of democratic institutions in the US as a consequence of encouraging low IQ non-white people to have babies and immigrate here. For example, in the olden days when America was still 85% white, political campaigns revolved around assessing a candidates policy positions on taxation, foreign affairs, etc. The average voter was expected to be a well-informed citizen who was a stakeholder in the decisions being made. Fast forward to today and note that the average voter can barely be expected to grasp the idea of a bicameral legislature and so now we are getting nothing but the basest political topics being discussed: you are racists vs we are not racists. People are barely even able to solve a simple math problem anymore and yet they have somehow worked out that America is “the richest country in the world” so they should be given free money. That’s how stupid people destroy a democracy. Another example would be the sheer volume of violent crimes that people of African descent commit without being able to recognize that violent crime leads directly to impoverished, stigmatized neighborhoods.
There are myriad examples of such topics. I only mentioned a few. But we are certainly not talking about IQ just because we want to lord it over black people that they can’t do math. I would love it if a black person won the Fields Medal.
It is an open question whether or not America will be able to survive the onslaught of idiots we are now forced to deal with. We need capable citizens not beneficiaries of welfare handouts.
still this crap of “denying opportunities”? LOL
intelligent children create their own educational opportunities (this is studied as well); giving this argument of “denied opportunities” any air at all just legitimizes it. nobody taught whites to read or bestowed “opportunities” on them. wealth does not cause intelligence; intelligence causes wealth.
and why is everyone so obsessed about the B/W gap? There are 4 other major races. Where is the literature on the asian-hispanic gap? Or the indoaryan-arab gap?
whites and blacks are not even the same species; whites are a sapiens/neanderthal hybrid.
The ones I know are Hindu, edcuated at Catholic schools. All the East Africans tend to be smart.
However, my original point was broader. All the sub continentals in the UK were motivated enough to come here and to navigate the bureaucratic obstacles so they are all self selected. Even so, some groups outperform others despite a common “racial” background and disadvantages.
Outsiders with the right family structures do prosper. Armenians, Lebanese Christians, Parsees, Ibos, the aforesaid East African Asians and of course the Jews all have some family/religious structure that holds them together as a group that trusts each other enough to do business without contracts. I suspect a tendency to accept arranged marriages are a feature of this.
Black men were not regarded as most attractive…there are a number of Tinder/OkCupid and other dating site analyses which show white men received the most likes worldwide.
Nonetheless, taking data about what women find attractive is specious as women’s preferences are astroturfed by media.
throughout asia, black men are considered largely disgusting and for good reason- intentionally giving your offspring degenerate DNA is genetic suicide. However, the preference model of female attraction is ENTIRELY driven by social status models.
In the old days, social status came from power, wealth, the respect of other men, etc. Now, it comes from jews’ advertising and sportsball (in the West). There is not a multibillion \$ skin whitening product industry in SE Asia because black men are “more attractive.”
Letting women choose their mates is dysgenic. They will make choices effectively based upon testosterone levels. Letting jews decide who women should mate with is even worse as they will choose the least fit candidates for other races.
Notice how jewish media encourages literally everyone to mate with black men (except jewish women of course, who should stay in the tribe). Nobody is pushed to mate with asian men or hispanic men by jewish media. The absence of these encouragements is inferential proof that actual literal “diversity” is not the goal here.
Jews wish to acquire the beneficial DNA of whites for beauty and creativity and intelligence and hoard these traits for themselves alone. Chinese will use CRISPR to the same effect. At the same time they would prefer their rivals in this evolutionary war to be disadvantaged by suboptimal DNA.
Your chart is missing a ‘Culture’ Box which empirically is the single most obvious and important variable that differentiates the European people from all others in the world.
“Intelligence” is a socially mediated concept. Proof? Take someone with high IQ and toss them into a jungle and make them survive. They won’t last 3 hours. All of their IQ-ness won’t do squat for them.
Of course, the first response to this will be “This is stupid.” Or, “that has nothing to with intelligence.” If survival is not tied to intelligence, I don’t know what is.
There was a famous study in Brazil in late 80s where they tracked favela black kids (elementary school) who were placed into a (mostly white) middle class school. The favela kids were already seasoned drug dealers and runners.
The favela kids dominated in math. Of course they did — they already mastered all of basic arithmetic, understood percentages, ratios, discounts, etc. The “smartest” middle class kid couldn’t keep up with them.
The favela kids, however, didn’t fare well in school. They lacked the cultural capital of (Western) schooling — yes sir, no mam, thank you sir, etc. Follow this direction, meet this deadline, kiss this rear, placate this authority this way, that authority that way, smile at so and so when spoken to, etc.
I suggest you look into “Activity Theory” rather than this nonsense. Read some Cole and Scribner.
Disagree totally with your epigenetic premise.
A good example of this is blacks who are raised in white households from near birth.
No matter how culturally enriched the black child is because of his white adoptive “parentage” who have been taking care of him from birth, almost ALWAYS when he reaches the age of 12 or 13, his black DNA starts to assert itself, and he will eventually “turn against” his white parents.
The old adage, “you can take the negro out of the jungle, but you cannot take the jungle out of the negro” has been proven true, again and again.
A prime example of this is the case of football player Colin Kapaernick who disavowed his upbringing in a white family and culture and turned against them, embracing his black DNA.
Some thing just cannot be changed…
Yes, it’s depressing we need complex intellectual arguments for very obvious realities.
Of course only low IQ Whites would have children with blacks.
I note you have posted 3…count them 3 comments on Unz Review. You are a goddamn troll, as is Oliver D. Smith and many others. One of your White hating asshole friends contacts other White haters and swarm to a pro White article to spout bullshit.
Excellent comments.
Any government that allows idiots to vote is doomed.
..legitimately.
But you sure can judge a race by their average IQ.
The middle of the curve is not equally populated by all races…far from it. The middle of the curve is lacking in black population.
I generally agree with you, but defending the decision to invade and occupy Iraq…is a bridge too goddamn far for me.
The last time they raised black kids on brains and fish the results were unconvincing …
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kuru_(disease)
Epigenetics is the last refuge of the scoundrel.
That whole article is what’s termed “statistical noise,” in other words- bullshit.
Exactly. I’m sick of long rambling essays about what is clearly self-evident.
Adoption studies find that being raised in a particular family and community does not affect g.
I see.
Stupidity, violence and yuck are proprietary to the only fully human fraction of the One Species ™ .
Would you like to rephrase that?
(Besides, it´s BS; at the very minimum account for the Khoisan and the Ghost population)
That doesn’t explain enough. Africa is a pretty harsh environment too, with parasitic diseases, heat, droughts and large predators. Similarly, there’s the American native tribes, in the same seasonal zones as Europe,but way, way behind in civilization-building. And then there’s the far-North American tribes, with extreme seasonal changes but content just to fish and hunt whales and seals.
There is probably something to the hypothesis that geographic isolation and lack of competition from other humans stunts development. But in the end we’re all really saying the same thing: intelligence confers an advantage, so evolution is going to select for it, in its unconscious, haphazard way. The idea that we all pop out with generic cerebrums just waiting for the right combination of teachers, parents and nutrients to blossom into Isaac Newtons really has no basis in science.
The papaya (Carica papaya) is native to Central America.
Jeez, can’t anyone here keep geography straight. Kuru is in New Guinea, not Africa.
A pretty disturbing result for the egalitarians and those who insist that race is a social construct.
When will this paper disappear from the scientific literature?
I was under the impression that even unbiased scientific inquiry was not allowed to explore these kinds of subjects?
Any meaningful rebuttal on the merits of this paper from Obwandiyag?
That was in essence the reasoning in Brown vs. Education …
(Blacks are stupid because they are traumatized by the presence of blacks)
The follow-up studies did not bear it out – black girls did improve but barely significant, boys only got twice as criminal.
Of course that was only the skoolz – do you advocate mandatory transracial adoption?
(geez, I hope I´m giving no one ideas 😀 )
I think you miss the forest for the trees. First of all “intelligence” as measured by Europeans is relative to European culture and it has left its actual and cultural DNA in its wake. Second, there are, according to the best science, about a dozen or more different kinds of intelligence that are very different from the culturally determined IQ test. Life, if you’ve live much at all, is a highly complex matter and different cultures have adapted differently over time and geographical location. Third, I think you underestimate the effects of prejudice clearly shown in the by the Jane Eliot blue eye/brown eye experiments that show that when you create a conceptual framework wherein one color of the eyes are show to be superior or inferior that students will gradually adapt to that as also was the case in the prisoners/jailer experiment in the Stanford Prison experiment. I’ve seen this role determining outlook phenomenon up close in my years in government work and interacting with people with legal power over others.
As a practical matter, however, the current cultural set-up is still rather rigid and sets people with IQ advantages to succeed over those that don’t regardless of actual “race.” We also have to remember that Africans brought over as slaves selected for strong bodies and not minds–sensitive or nerdy Africans either died on the slave ships or on the plantations so it would be theoretically obvious that American blacks would end up being better athletes.
Chinese are into Eugenics, while the west is into Dysgenics.
China also uses the American System of Economy (industrial capitalism) while the west adopted the Jewish/English finance capitalism model.
Who will win?
It is a foregone conclusion. In the long run, the combination of industrial capitalism and eugenics will make China unbeatable.
Jewish mania for becoming a “creditor” class to the world, and repairing the world with Tikkun Olam, has more than met its match in the China/Russia combination.
Jews cannot keep up their inside game of usury, rents, unearned income and war to promote tribal interests … the long term trends are against them.
Here is a link explaining Chinese Eugenic practices. I can guarantee there is no black DNA being collected by China to improve their gene pool.
https://www.edge.org/response-detail/23838
excerpt:
Chinese eugenics will quickly become even more effective, given its massive investment in genomic research on human mental and physical traits. BGI-Shenzhen employs more than 4,000 researchers. It has far more “next-generation” DNA sequencers that anywhere else in the world, and is sequencing more than 50,000 genomes per year. It recently acquired the California firm Complete Genomics to become a major rival to Illumina.
The BGI Cognitive Genomics Project is currently doing whole-genome sequencing of 1,000 very-high-IQ people around the world, hunting for sets of sets of IQ-predicting alleles. I know because I recently contributed my DNA to the project, not fully understanding the implications. These IQ gene-sets will be found eventually—but will probably be used mostly in China, for China. Potentially, the results would allow all Chinese couples to maximize the intelligence of their offspring by selecting among their own fertilized eggs for the one or two that include the highest likelihood of the highest intelligence. Given the Mendelian genetic lottery, the kids produced by any one couple typically differ by 5 to 15 IQ points. So this method of “preimplantation embryo selection” might allow IQ within every Chinese family to increase by 5 to 15 IQ points per generation. After a couple of generations, it would be game over for Western global competitiveness.
Game over
Don’t confuse delusions with intelligence…..
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thought_disorder
said:
“Black sub Saharan intelligence was considerably below White northwestern European levels long before Whites were involved there. Their lack of development is testimony to that.”
– No studies are needed to confirm what simple observation tells us.
– Even today, simple comparison of Euro-white majority continents, regions, countries, states, counties, cities, neighborhoods, etc. with the same of blacks & browns reveals the truth.
– And where is it that all the world’s black & brown ‘immigrants’ want to be?
Is that like being debunked by Snopes?
Ahhh, so we should expect Africans to excel in other areas, like maybe Witch Doctoring or telekinesis.
Nope. Not thinking big enough. Wakanda actually exists, it’s just that white technology is not good enough to detect it!
Name one place that has been improved by a large influx of “white” exiles from European trailer parks?
One word two syllables:
Walmart
Welcome.
Your assertions about multiple intelligences is not one I agree with, so it would be interesting to know why you think that to be the case. General mental ability seems the most important.
https://www.unz.com/jthompson/multiple-emotional-intelligence/
To be more precise:
So, that means that only about 48% of blacks overlap the 68% of whites who occupy the 2SDs around the white mean.
However, worse than that, 79% of those blacks occupy the 1SD below the mean, compared to 50% of the whites in that 2SD block around the white mean..
“Blacks” don’t waste their life embarrassing themselves day after day online for the entire world to read whining and complaining about “whites”.
IQ? 🤭🤐😂🤣
The men are result of our biology and of the cares wich our family and our society have given our for our breeding.
If you have two baby twins and you carry one of them to a jail and put him in a cell in absolute isolament , you’ll find that two decades after you’ll have a young man and a baby in the body of an adult.
The man is a product of his society.
It is not possible to come up with a working model that explains how humans became more intelligent than animals unless:
1) IQ is a heritable trait.
2) It gives a Darwinian competitive advantage to those who have it.
Oh, look. Charts. He must be right. He has charts. That makes him right.
Interesting point.
I notice this website gets all depressed when there is real news, like a war or a plague or something, because it diverts them from whining and complaining about blacks. Damn those wars and plagues.
I think the theory is that dealing with parasites in Africa requires little intelligence.
I know a blank-slate scientist who did it. He was obvioudly disappointed by the results. Blamed them effortlessly on the capitalist system though (not kidding). – He is a scientistic anti-Freudian too, btw., which is good in such cases because it allows you to – neglect – your defense-mechanisms…and lets you untroubled by doubts rest in peace, when the evening comes.
I sort of take your point, but I have to admit I actually respect taking such pains: it’s not the kind of conclusion you want to screw up. Besides, you need to tie down all the loose ends, because you know people are going to try to squirm out of conclusions they don’t like (and jump to those they do).
The point is, observations can give you a hypothesis, which you may want believe for whatever reason, but only after getting and analyzing data like do you have actual verification.
That’s what (used to) pass for science, though I realize this is a pointy-headed boomer thing whose time has passed. We’re now so much better off, getting information about nature from Disney creation Bill Nye the Science Guy, who is not only authoritative but more entertaining to boot, And most recently, we have the benefit of internet censorship to save us from wasting time learning the wrong information, I mean ideas.
I mean obviously the most competitive cities will draw the smartest of all races, and obviously the only reason a black man would find himself in New Hampshire or Wyoming is that he has some lucrative business opportunity that makes up for the fact that he is moving to a place that is like 2% black.
I don’t think this implies all that you think it does. Averages are still a better way to go.
1. Black-americans come in last in all standardized tests. Asian-americans do fine on all the tests so it’s not due to cultural bias in the tests.
2. Africa is by far the poorest and most backward continent on the planet. All of black africa is now controlled by blacks and has been for decades so it’s not due to racism.
3. No black has ever won a Science Nobel Prize unless you count one in 1979 for the semi-science of economics. They have won many nobels in non-brain fields like Peace and also in Literature so it is not due to racism.
4. Out of 1552 chess grandmasters in the world, only THREE are black.
You’re an idiot, so you shouldn’t be allowed to vote.
Your history is not even 7th grade.
The Chinese government was so bad that their population increased precipitously in the second millennium. Just for instance. Let us not speak of the wonders and glories and tolerance and complete superiority over Europeans of Moorish Spain, or the Islamic world in general.
But your comment on welfare reveals what a real bona fide chump you are. All you pathetic brain-dead low IQ nobodies sitting in your basements trying to find W on the keyboard think that “welfare” is a “problem.” I bet you didn’t even know that conservatives with actual brains will freely admit (in private) that “welfare” is not a problem at all. It’s just a stick to whip up the boobs with and truncheon the liberals with. Thus, anybody who brings up “welfare” at all is either a fully-fledged chump member of the booboisie, or else a disingenuous liar, panderer, manipulator.
Fuck you, please.
Out of 1552 chess grandmasters in the world, only THREE are black.
No wonder, they must be triggered by those black and white squares, black and white pieces.
Shouldn’t chess swap to, say, red and yellow? Hang on, that wouldn’t do. How about purple and aquamarine? Hold on, purple is the imperial colour. So how about …..
Q: Name one place that has been improved by a large influx of blacks & browns from anywhere.
A: There are none.
recommended:
– The Color of Crime: https://www.amren.com/the-color-of-crime/
– What is “privilege”??, by Bloomingdale, GA mayor, Ben Rozier:
https://iontheworld.wordpress.com/2008/03/26/iq-and-life-outcome/
Intelligence and IQ in the western mindset comes down to this ( just how much bullshit and lies) called history and Trivia you can retain then vomit out when asked. I know high IQ, book smart people who have the social skills of toads. LEARNING depends on your astrology sign and how you process information presented to you. Some people read and retain, some learn by doing, etc…
But in the end, having a high IQ just means your a different type of “dumb ass”
“…sensitive or nerdy Africans either died on the slave ships or on the plantations…”
Did those “nerdy” Africans already exist in Africa in the first place? Did they have a culture in which such “nerds” could survive and procreate?
Why guess? The data are right there in Bryc et al 2014. Yes, they do have higher European ancestry. Yes, they are smarter also in newer data (e.g. NAEP).
https://www.cell.com/ajhg/fulltext/S0002-9297(14)00476-5
You mean that an intelligent person – who has gained practical experience of one environment, is mostly useless in a very different environment?!
Well of course! Put a ship captain in a kitchen, and, they will fuck up for a while too!
Btw my kid, a white boy of 87.5% slavic descent, lacks ‘cultural capital’.. The 5 year old boy is a basic noble savage – shuns the knife and fork, ‘willy out’ whenever he can, but you give him a maths problem (down to linear algebraic equations), and he chooses to solve them for his own enjoyment.
Not saying other races don’t have this, but I would put money on this being more prevalent for high IQ parts of the species.
Australia was originally populated by white convicts. Eventually it became something more than just a trailer park. Many Irish immigrants in America came as indentured servants (virtually slaves), but they evolved way beyond the “trailer park”. Whites create civilization, Blacks destroy civilization. Deal with it.
IQ testing is not about how much information you have stored (“learning”), but about how you process information (“understanding”). Those who passionately reject IQ testing, always have themselves a low IQ. QED, in your case.
I respectfully disagree. It’s just that the sites where they are complaining are far more lowbrow than Unz, yet if you are familiar with them the commenters there probably represent the smart fraction of blacks.
The good news is that if intelligence is largely genetic the problem can be easily solved, perhaps within a generation if you disregard any downstream effects.
I would love nothing more than for a Wakanda to exist on this earth. It would make things more interesting than the typical back and forth where Europeans are whinging over how powerful they are. Let them have some real competition to get them back to reality.
you just proved my point!
No, more because it smokes out the enemies and liars.
Happens. Women have a problem — to have children, they need a man of some sort. An individual woman has no innate idea of what kind of society she has been born into, but does have an innate idea that she has to have children and needs a man for that. Women judge by early experience, assuming that what they see as children will be available when they grow up.
So it’s not quite mental illness, but pretty close. It’s an adaptive mechanism gone wrong.
“Real news” being anything that doesn’t provide an opportunity to lift “yourself “up by putting others down.
Like: “blacks, Muslims, Jewish civilians, and or ancient history” didn’t enable the systemic genocides all over the planet aka “sectarian violence” “revolution” “freedom” by funding supporting consenting paying 24/7 high ratings attention
Unlike: self-proclaimed Anglo Saxon Caucasian Christian White Western superior civilized
Taxpayers
That’s the only news
can you provide a link?
People are People as far as I’m concerned
This is probably as good a place as any to post some thoughts on the significance of IQ.
If you’re trying to say that intelligence should be more than the ability to “vomit out” something “when asked”, I’d agree, though I’m not quite ready to eliminate book learning in favor of astrology.
I was thrown in with a lot of nerdy “high IQ” people during my graduate education. Vomiting out trivia was pretty common, but there was also a lot of effort exerted toward grasping difficult ideas, sometimes involving a level of mental struggle that was more stressful than healthy. A couple of things became apparent. Individuals tended to think in different patterns, and it was clear that each of us were bringing very different mental skills to bear, even though we were working on the same single problem in the same narrow academic discipline. What struck me was that “IQ” at it’s heart was multi-dimensional. And it was also clear that there were times when some really smart people got themselves stuck in places the rest of us could get through.
I think what you refer to as “LEARNING” is a meta-ability to bring what abilities you do have to bear on the issue at hand. This is like not knowing there’s a spare screwdriver under your spare tire, because you didn’t think, or weren’t prompted, to check. I don’t think that’s measured in an IQ test, but I don’t know how to account for it either.
The opposite of this very human characteristic also makes me very ambivalent about our trust not just in IQ but in AI as well. We will see (actually probably now have) machines intelligent enough to have optimizable IQ’s. But that doesn’t address the very human talent of having good ideas pop into your head free-form, for no particular reason. (e.g., to think to look under the tire.) Some of these can be very important by themselves, or trigger a whole chain of other ideas; others are just distractions. An example of this is the issue of insight, where noticing a simple way to look at a problem can be more important than the solution (Archimedes’ Eureka!). Sometimes the insight draws attention to other problems you hadn’t thought of in a way that transcends what you’re working on.
In spite of this deficiency, an AI world might function just fine. So I’m not so much worried about what improving AI and focusing on IQ might lead to, as much as unrealized potential that we might be leaving behind, because we don’t quite yet understand things we haven’t quite noticed.
It isn’t necessary to be overconfident to the point where we believe our knowledge is complete.
“…People are People as far as I’m concerned…”
Yes, A = A as far as I am concerned, but that was not the question.
I know
As I said, longitudinal data exist. There is no need to fantasize.
LOL
IQ and race are fairly accurate ways to explain almost everything regarding human behavior.
The left dismisses race and IQ simply as a means to blame whites for the failures of non-whites.
It’s that simple and transparent.
Race and IQ make culture as the culture reflects the abilities of any given group.
jews lead the effort to dismiss race and IQ because of their agenda to demonize white people.
If the truth about race and IQ could be openly discussed and debated then perhaps some real life political solutions could be found for some of the problems facing humanity.
But as long as jews seek to dominate and rule over all of humanity, we will continue to be inundated with lies and gaslighting and all sorts of ridiculous nonsense.
Hans Eysenck was one of the earliest protagonists in the controversy over race and intelligence. He believed that the observed variability in IQ scores is genetically determined to a high degree (80% heritability) and that, in consequence, the Black–White IQ gap in the US is due predominantly to genetic factors. Subsequent investigations have confirmed that IQ is indeed heritable, though at a level substantially below 80%, and a deeper understanding of population genetics has shown that race differences in IQ could be determined entirely by environmental factors even if its heritability were as high as Eysenck believed it to be. Several lines of research, notably racial admixture studies, racial crossing studies involving interracial parenting or adoption, and especially investigations using more recent techniques of molecular genetics, have provided evidence suggesting that the Black–White IQ gap is not determined significantly by genetic factors.
Source: Race differences in IQ: Hans Eysenck’s contribution to the debate in the light of subsequent research
Everything’s either “Black or White Left or Right”…. and that’s supposed to take a high IQ?
My cat begs to differ…
Sorry chum. Most of these wars have been and continue to be orchestrated by the Zionists.
Christians are the dupes fighting the immoral wars.
No excuse. But put the blame where it belongs.
Keep your high IQ global genocide and torture Cabal! We don’t want whatever it is “White” race has….🐽 job?
“””Q: Name one place that has been improved by a large influx of blacks & browns from anywhere.
A: There are none.”””
Everywhere that is majority black is a sewer. We see it in african countries and american cities. Black Lives Do NOT Matter because blacks can’t do anything useful. Anything involving tech skills is beyond them. They excel at sports ( a useless activity) and that’s it.
Your comments rank at buckwheat level.
You are way out of your league here.
If Snopes´real name is Ehrenberg 😛
One-shot over maybe three generations, not “per generation” … and maybe with unforeseen consequences.
But the Chinese lack of misplaced sensibilities WILL give them an edge –
10-15 pts overall will amount to a Quantum Leap Forward.
The IQ of african-americans in the north-east states is higher than the National IQs of all the nations of:
the Middle-East and North Africa (including Israel).
Latin America
South Asia
Central Asia
It is much higher in numerous cases.
For example the african-american IQ (93) in the north-east states is
over 15 points higher than 8 nations in MENA (including Egypt and Syria), 3 nations in South Asia (including India) and 3 nations in Latin America. In 4 of the above cases it is a whopping 30+ points higher.
It is also higher than at least 9 european nations, 2 of them by over 10 points.
It’s amusing how Sailer, Thompson and the rest of the HBD cult studiously ignore such facts. Why? Because they pull the rug from underneath them. These quacks are selling snake oil. Buyer beware, lol.
Source: https://www.unz.com/akarlin/iq-2019/
I knew that 😀 just couldn´t resist glib´s wording.
(and I agree on vegans)
The idea goes back to a screed “The Beginning Was The End” (can´t remember the author) arguing man evolved by eating the brains of his fellows; utter drivel.
… though there may be something to the “aquatic (evolutionary) period” hypothesis (in Southern Africa).
Right after you provide one saying that the sun shines during the day.
If you disagree, _you_ provide a link.
When the USSR stopped, c.a. AD 1990, the entire manufacturing sector was fired. The whole thing. There was no money to pay it because the current resource exporting economy of the RF had not been established and there was no money, just Rubles that could be used as shin plasters and little else. The US appears to be going the same route. The 0.8 trillion dollars/year could and probably will vanish.
Fortunately, you regard this as a good thing. Also, Whites are moving out of the areas likely to be rioted into destruction should this happen, so you won’t even have to see Whites. It would appear that we have a deal here that will be of mutual benefit.
And its your deal — you proposed it, insisted on it, wouldn’t shut up about it, took cities and destroyed them to make your point, used up enough capital that the cities and labor force can’t feed everybody, drove many Whites to suicide and, well, now you get your way.
And at least have the courage not to complain about it, lest you push yourself into complete contempt.
DC (and the immediate surrounding area) is a bad example, because it’s an area where people that grow up all around the country flock to for the good high paying jobs. So you have a large number of very intelligent people there, then they have kids who are also intelligent. The opposite can be said for places like WV, where there are few jobs. Anyone that’s intelligent leaves the state to work somewhere else, and then they have smart kids who in turn grow up somewhere else. So you have some geography with continual influxes of intelligent people and other places with continual drains of their most intelligent people. You have to acknowledge this to be intellectually honest here.
Yeah, and many forget that many upper middle class children spend most the first four years of their lives in daycare, where they are often raised by some \$10 an hour Spanish speaking lady and many kids with far lower intelligence. But they always turn out just fine, just as intelligent as they would have otherwise.
When Black Lives Matter demand that black people be repatriated to the relatively white free lands of Africa I will begin to think they are serious in their belief that whitey is the root of all their problems.
Until then I will see them for what they are: Liars and parasites who would much rather live off the productivity of whitey than to decamp back to their ancestral homelands and live free of whitey.
Africa welcomes you back. Go there and elevate your people and your ancestral lands.
Why not take up the invitation and free yourself from the pernicious influence of evil whitey??
This is one cause that I could genuinely support in earnest.
I note a certain “bias” (in the abstract, not the attitudinal, sense) in the article. The testing seems aimed at discerning “White” characteristics in (otherwise) Black individuals. Seldom, if ever, do I note the seeking of “Black” characteristics in (otherwise) White individuals.
This might be an subconscious echo of a standard I’ve heard of in the southern US, if not also elsewhere, where, if a person has one Black grandparent, said person “is” Black. This standard was noted in mid-Thirties German studies of American race law, and rejected by the Germans for purposes of crafting their own race laws (vis-a-vis Jews) in 1935. They conditionally admitted such “quadroons” to Aryanhood.
Do you mean Table S2? Table S3 is by region, not state. Since you can’t be bothered to link your references, Bryc et al. 2015 is:
The Genetic Ancestry of African Americans, Latinos, and European Americans across the United States
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4289685/
Did you happen to notice the sample sizes in Table S2? That WA number is based on 10-49 individuals. I wonder which end of that range applies.
Then there is the issue that the paper data is from 23andMe. Are you familiar with the concept of selection bias?
I read somewhere that over half of the Nobel prizes to Jews have been awarded after World War two.
With so many Jews getting killed during WW2, it seems to be a great mystery how their population could have suffered a large percent loss and still bounce back and take the lion’s share of this coveted prize as all academics from around the world want it too. Perhaps there is more than one explanation?
Any ideas, and references for further reading? Thx
Is it that much trouble for you to provide links for your references?
Analysis of WISC-R standardization data in terms of the stratification variables
https://psycnet.apa.org/record/1976-27046-001
It looks like you are using the WISC-R Full Scale IQ column of Table 4 for your data. Here are the values for Blacks 6 1/2 – 16 1/2
Region | Mean | SD | N
NE | 93.0 | 12.2 | 57
NC | 88.1 | 12.4 | 64
S | 83.4 | 12.1 | 166
W | 87.3 | 11.7 | 18
From where do you get your 80 lowest and 94 highest figures? I am not seeing those in the paper. Given the sample sizes I am not sure I would trust numbers for individual states outside of the South.
Links?
For anyone interested, Jensen and Reynolds (1982) looks at the same WISC-R standardization data in the context of subtest differences.
Race, social class and ability patterns on the WISC-R
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/0191886982900071
It is odd that you make this criticism in a post about a paper with this figure.
Figure 3. Regression plot for the relation between g and European ancestry (r = 0.411).
Seems to me that provides a partial explanation for the issue you raise. Selective migration probably supplies another partial explanation. As well as assortative mating mentioned by Emil.
BTW, this link is helpful for figure inclusions. Thanks for uploading the content, Emil!
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/335506114_Global_Ancestry_and_Cognitive_Ability
Really? Are overlapping distributions so hard to understand? Figure 3 makes this overlap obvious. Perhaps we don’t see this discussed much because statistically literate people understand overlapping distributions and don’t need to belabor the point?
Europeans have large data sets, Africa not yet. Once Africa has 1 million persons with genomic data and years of schooling then the African polygenic risk score can be tried out on Europeans. This two way comparison should be instructive.
Thank for your comments.
My WISC manual is elsewhere so I cannot look at the European results, but I note the African American samples you describe have very narrow standard deviations of roughly 12, which is extraordinary. Jensen noted this and discussed it. Easy to see how adverse circumstances could depress a mean, but harder to see how those adverse circumstances could narrow a distribution.
‘… With so many Jews getting killed during WW2, it seems to be a great mystery how their population could have suffered a large percent loss and still bounce back and take the lion’s share of this coveted prize…’
Those Jews who were killed were disproportionately not those winning the prizes?
Note that the blow fell most heavily not on German and Austrian Jews, half of whom got out in good time, but the Jews of Poland and points east. Not many of the Nobel Prize winners were hanging out in Bialystok.
‘… especially investigations using more recent techniques of molecular genetics, have provided evidence suggesting that the Black–White IQ gap is not determined significantly by genetic factors.’
First off, this sort of bumph is the academic equivalent of all the pseudo-genetic studies showing that Jews come from Palestine after all.
Whenever science produces an unpalatable result, ‘science’ is hastily fabricated to disprove that unpalatable result.
Secondly, it’s not just IQ tests that demonstrate the intellectual inferiority of blacks. Look at the level black societies invariably regress to. Look at the sociological indices of black behavior. It’s exactly what one would expect of a society made of people who had a really low average intelligence.
Finally go out there and meet some blacks. Not the blacks able to function in white society, or the ones capable of interacting with you — meet a real, random assortment of blacks.
They are dumb. I mean seriously stupid. You have no idea.
You can muddy up the IQ test results all you like. The truth remains the truth.
I agree with you about that, as I explain here: Why IQ Tests Don’t Measure Intelligence.
You mean like this guy or this guy?
We don’t want whatever it is “White” race has….🐽 job?
Turn off your computer then.
The left dominates most of academia and graduates thousands of PhDs a year in various racial studies.
With all that education the most common response from the leftist is to make snarky comments.
Must be rough getting a 10 year degree and then taking that long to find out that the left is completely full of shit on race.
You are always interesting in what you right about IQ and its correlates.
How can I send you some interesting information by email? I want to engage your interest in what might be the second most important measurable but rarely measured polygenetically calibrated human characteristic for human prosperity. I refer to the amount of sleep people need. Donald Trump says he rises at 5.30 and is said to be, like Margaret Thatcher a very short sleeper. My hypothesis is that average adult requirement is 7.25-8 hours and sd about 1 hour for at least some aspects of what happens during sleep. I wouldn’t be surprised to find that a plumber with IQ 100 but sleep requirement 4sds below average had made himself a multiimillionaiire. And I would be surprised if a battlefield general with 1Q 140 but requiring 8 hours sleep could compete with one who required only 4. It is a very important variable, and maybe a complex one. I once invented the Just So story that acknowledges the utility for a tribe of having people who are alert in the morning and others alert at night but that having too many Margaret Thatchers who would compete for attention night and morning would be disruptive…..
So, how to send you something?
I haven’t yet read the linked article so I am stuck with early respect for the work of Eysenck and his pupil Jensen whom I had to a lunch of politicians of all sensible flavours when they were in Melbourne and being ignorantly abused by Know Nothing idiots whose backgrounds should have supplied some sense.
As you have, I notice, put considerable effort into researching the antihereditarian case I wonder if you have come across evidence of particular relevant mutations which may, by tbeir dates, preclude their presence in African populations at least South of the Sahara? I seem to remember.ber reading of a couple of important mutations amongst Eurasians well after the out of Africa migrations.
Does it not strike you as probable that there is far more variety of everything heritable within Africa than has yet been fully described or adequately explored? I mean caste systems in West Africa, for example, and then the evidences of huge genetic variation that are so obvious in athletics. Given this obvious reality shouldn’t we expect to find some small classes of Africans with e.g. mathematical talent, but not many?
“The genes pertaining to aggressiveness and hyperactivity originate with H. sapiens, and interbreeding with Neanderthals led to more peaceful behavior in humans inheriting Neanderthal genes. ”
WWI, WWII, Holocaust ……examples of peaceful behavior in humans inheriting Neanderthal genes !!!
Don’t forget that those peaceful human beings will be responsible for nuclear war that is going to wipe out humanity from the face of the earth.
Aah I see where you’re coming from….
I can’t read this standard Wikipedia dictation.
There are people who experience life in their world and (T) here are Necro political Mouthpieces
I’m giving it the benefit of doubt. You’re right all shades of brown skin are intellectual inferior to white skin period!
That doesn’t change the fact that African-Americans are extremely likeable and popular in virtually the entire world
I’m not talking about Hollywood celebs obviously.
The internet has opened people’s eyes about certain things
People generally look at parts of very recent history. Egypt and the Middle East and parts of India and China were much more advanced than Europe in the past. Koreans were much poorer than many Africans within living memory. China was very poor in the first half of the 20th century. Japan was much poorer than Europeans within living memory.
You’re being too harsh. It’s hard to get people to look at things over 70 years let alone hundreds or thousands. It doesn’t seem real to them. I’ll give a trivial example. I was a teenager in the 1950s and it was men who crossed their legs in Australia then. Women wore dresses to just below their knees and only a bold young woman crossed her legs because the men might see a flash of thigh. In the late 60s, mini dresses became shorter and shorter and women crossed their legs so men couldn’t see a flash of fork.
When all the young women started crossing their legs, men stopped. I didn’t. I only see other old men cross their legs when they’re with a group of old men. Just try to explain that to a young woman who’s convinced you’re homosexual because you’ve crossed your legs. I can talk until I’m blue in the face but it makes no impression. Only the recent past was ever real. I’m as homosexual as I’m Ibo but nobody accuses me of being Ibo. [email protected]
The study of the genetic basis for intelligence, as well as the differences in this behavior between individuals as well as as human population, is a fascinating one and sure to bring out a lot of information that many people would rather ignore.
It seems clear to me that one cannot accept natural selection and conceive of a natural world where human intelligence would not vary across geographically distinct human populations.
I think the sting of some of these results could be lessened if we really had a color blind society where individuals would be judged strictly on merit–no such thing as affirmative action or disparate impact judicial nonsense. I think in such a world it is conceivable that racial relations would improve significantly. If a black person is smart enough to become a doctor fair and square there would be no need to question how they achieved what they have achieved.
But in the world we live in today, where poor black performance on whatever measure one cares to examine is blamed on white racism, the only rational response is to look at genetics. And in the process, one does find biological reasons for black dysfunction that cannot be blamed on racism.
But there is good news in the heritability data as well and the normal distribution for IQ. It is clear that at least 10 percent of African-Americans score higher than the average white European. This is not a trivial number. Even if one put all value for a human being on the basis of intelligence, just this result alone confirms that a non-trivial number of black people do have the intelligence to become productive members of a technologically sophisticated civilization.
The bottom line. The science behind IQ is fascinating and should not be censored and should be allowed freedom from political interference. But as long as the narrative demands reparations and full scale blame whitey for black dysfunction a rational response to these hate filled charges is to bring up the issue of biology.
If you want the study of biological differences in intelligence between the races to remain an esoteric scientific discussion, it might be smart to cut back on the hate whitey meme. This is bad for everyone.
First guy :
Source : http://www.iq-test.net WHAT IS MUHAMMAD ALI’s IQ.
Second guy : Well, do I believe he belongs to the small number of Blacks in the extreme right of the black Bell curve. Nobody denies that such people exist.
Chapeau! Eventually you’ll find an excuse to justify murder I mean mass murder and repeatedly. Colonial Europe’s destructive ways created the Social “sciences” for the sake of
White Superiority
English is not my first language but I’m sure you’ll get the point regardless
And you can’t write, either. OK, simple version: Blacks and Latinx are supported in the US largely by White and Asian tax money. About 800 billion dollars worth of support each year. Pelosi wants to spend 3 trillion dollars that just might bring the system down.
After it comes down, Blacks and Latinx in the US at least won’t be supported by White and Asian tax money. They won’t be supported at all. Neither will most of the
When that happens, at least have the courage not to whine about it. You said you wanted nothing form Whites, and you will finally have it.
You, in this case. You’re asking that the Blacks and Latinx be starved out. That’s Necro.
If a black person is smart enough to become a doctor fair and square
That was actually the case in the US before the 1964 Civil Rights Act. _The Bell Curve_ pointed out that Black income was identical to White when adjusted for IQ, and back in the 1950s one figured that a Black professional was as good as they came, and generally had a dignity the other professionals couldn’t equal. The 1964 Civil Rights act changed all that — today Black income does not correlate to Black IQ.
if we really had a color blind society where individuals would be judged strictly on merit
Well, we did, in much of the US. Trouble was the IQ distribution works within families also. About 50% of the Black population was under 85 IQ, and had real trouble getting a job, the more so as machines took over brute muscle jobs (*). So every Black professional had relatives who were unemployed and in trouble with the police. This, and some organizing money plus LBJ’s brilliant idea of financing US cities through welfare money funneled through the Black ethnic group, made industrial society unpopular with the Blacks, and thus Whites unpopular with the Blacks.
*) An old Irish joke was that the Irish owed much to the inventor of the wheelbarrow, who enabled the Irish to walk upright. A standard job back then for first generation Irish immigrants to the US was moving construction materials and spoil in wheelbarrows, hence the joke. Can’t do that now, have to be bright enough and trained enough to operate earthmoving equipment.
Not find me defending human evil of any stripe.
Not my cause.
Well that sounds very pious but do you insist in it being totally useless as well?
If I have applications from individuals in the US for a small number of software engineering jobs whose names are DeShawn, Leroy, Dwayne,and their cousins all with similar degrees from black colleges will I not be most likely to save time, money and effort if I follow up first on the Tans, Lee’s and Pengs from run of the mill colleges in Hong Kong?
As to
have you forgotten chimpanzees and their differences from bonobos?
Interesting scientific questions are being raised here.
95% of whites are within 2SDs of the white mean.
I have read your linked article and I detect the well practved advocacy, but I think it would be fallacious to disregard the evidence IQ tests provide of sometimes needed cognitive abilities. The fact that a ten year old’s 140 plus IQ is a very good predictor of his being in the running for due of the school in 7 years time is not only true but useful in making sure he is kept interested and mentally active. Indeed, in a class which has to go slow the child who was reported to be very bright but only evidences it to the teacher by doing the maths tests in half the time others take will often lead to his IQ being tested so parents or class teacher can get the school to do more for him.
Making connections (or seeing patterns) quickly is required for many high intensity cognitive activities and is highly correlated with IQ scores so it can make good sense to discourage the kid with an IQ of 110 from aspiring to be creative tax lawyer like his Dad. Being “slow on the uptake” can really matter, not least for police and emergency services workers so making sure recruits to fire service score at least 100 on a well designed IQ test makes good sense and the examples of people being described as highly intelligent because they are respectively outstanding surgeons, musicians, theatre directors, etc is hardly relevant. It is not impossible that one day, without genetic engineering, sub-Saharan Africans and their close relations will be brought up to European average measured IQs ‘ but would you not bet against it? And would you bet that that they would prove equally employable in a modern society?
I don’t always need to link to them; unless you’re lazy someone can easily find them on a search-engine, searching Bryc et al 2015 on Google and you find the study on the first page of results.
All of a sudden you’re concerned with samples sizes? Funny, considering you and Thompson cite Tang et al which uses a sample of one self-identified AA’s for some states yet you never raised the same objection…
Very similar results are reported in other studies e.g. Parra et al. 1998, see Figure 1:
“Parra [15] presents data showing that the percentage of European contribution to several African American communities within the continental US varies tenfold, from 3.5% in the isolated Gullah-speaking Sea Islanders from South Carolina to 35% in Seattle (Figure 1).”
https://humgenomics.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s40246-014-0023-x
Seattle is the largest city in the state of Washington. So AA’s have a mean estimate of 30% “European” ancestry across the state, but in Seattle this reaches as high as 35%.
Do AA’s in Washington/Seattle have the highest IQs? Nope. This is just one obvious evidence against hereditarianism – AA’s with the highest “European” ancestry don’t have the highest IQs. Seems you don’t have any rebuttal, so you’re desperately left with trying invalidate the studies by criticising the sample sizes. lol
Looking at the individual SNPs driving the PGS differences between Europeans and Africans in Davide Piffer’s work would give a good first cut at answering this question. Don’t know if anyone has done that.
I think there is some truth to that. Though I think 1000 Genomes and the HGDP give decent coverage of African diversity at a coarse level.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1000_Genomes_Project
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_Genome_Diversity_Project
Rather than looking at these African examples, I think it is better to take a look at Jewish IQ genetic differences for lessons which can be applied elsewhere. A similar analysis (to African-European differences example above) of SNPs driving PGS differences could be done there. I think that is a similar case (small subpopulation with special talents) to your example. In Africa the Igbo and Yoruba seem like a good place to start. I am unaware of any Igbo genetic studies, but both the HGDP and 1KGP have Yoruba populations.
If you are looking for groups with special intellectual talents I wold expect to find them in populations which already have a reputation like that (I would not expect traits to evolve in populations where they are not being expressed phenotypically). The Igbo have such a reputation–which is why I emphasize them.
P.S. Just found this paper.
A Quantitative Comparison of the Similarity between Genes and Geography in Worldwide Human Populations
https://journals.plos.org/plosgenetics/article?id=10.1371/journal.pgen.1002886
That paper combines data from multiple studies.
It includes the Igbo among 23 SSA populations (see Figure 3). There are 4 additional hunter-gatherer populations. Figure and SSA excerpt after the MORE.
It would be interesting to extend Piffer’s analysis to the finer grained populations.
He phrased it as
Which means the same as within 1SD of the white mean (the 68% was a good clue). Agreed the wording is a bit confusing.
Best to send your work to a sleep researcher. I have never worked in that field, so would not be able to help you very much.
Lasker et al. 2019 has been criticised by geneticist Kevin Bird, however the paper is still a pre-print.
Bird, K. A. (2020). “No support for the genetic hypothesis of the Black-white achievement gap using polygenic scores and tests for divergent selection.”
https://osf.io/preprints/socarxiv/2qfkt/
As for –
Figure 3 doesn’t show an overlap of group means/averages but individuals overlapping. What instead I was discussing was the averages of local subgroups within a putative broad group (‘race’) having very different IQ test scores to other local subgroups within the same putative broad group i.e. some self-identified African-American subgroups by state have mean IQs in the low 80s, but others in the 90s. This arguably falsifies the hereditarian hypothesis because as repeatedly noted by Richard Lynn – a prediction of hereditarianism is groups that are closely genetically related in a putative race should be similar in IQ test scores. But this is not what we find. However, self-identified African-Americans are probably a bad example because hereditarians will just use an ad hoc explanation of selective migration to explain any discrepancies. I have better examples.
(TLDR, even if you are tired of me going round and round with Oliver, take a look at the Parra and Pfaffelhuber references below. The former has a nice table of SNPs differing in frequency between West Africans, Europeans, and Native Americans, and the latter has more on Ancestrally Informative Markers in general.)
That is a reasonable point of view, but I think it is courteous to include the links. Especially if there are many references in a comment and/or they are more obscure. One case where a link is important is when the full text is not easily available but there is a PDF out there. I make an exception for Libgen and Sci-Hub which I don’t like to link (concerned about drawing attention, plus the URLs change as different mirrors are shut down) though I will sometimes give a DOI and note it can be found there.
FWIW I think it is worthwhile to instill good habits in oneself. I could just as easily argue that you are the one being lazy by not including links since, as you say, it is so easy.
If you look at my comments (e.g. search for sample) you will discover I am often concerned about sample sizes.
To my knowledge I have never cited Tang et al. (2005). Searching my comments I find the only time I have used the word “Tang” is within a quote from you.
https://www.unz.com/jthompson/weaponizing-race/#comment-4069252
False accusations are unacceptable. I think you owe me an apology. Or a link to me citing that paper before now.
Looking at that thread it seems you object to Dr. Thompson’s use in the initial post. Since the study population was looked at as a single entity for his comment the sample size for a single race in a single state does not matter. In your usage you were using those small state samples to estimate AA IQs for specific states. Completely different. (I go into detail on specific cases like this because there is no way I can address your blizzard of FUD in its entirety. My hope is that by showing how baseless many of your comments are I can make clear the rest aren’t worth much either.)
??? The paper you link is from 2015.
More interestingly though, that figure is reproduced from an earlier book chapter (reference 15):
Parra E. Admixture in North America. In: Suarez-Kurtz G, editor. Pharmacogenomics in Admixed Populations. Georgetown, TX: Landes Bioscience; 2006
The book is available on Libgen as ISBN 1587063115
The reference is to chapter 3 on pp. 28-46.
The reason I am going on at length about that reference is it includes an extremely interesting table of 100 SNPs used to estimate admixture in North American admixed populations. Anyone want to check if any IQ SNPs are on that list? 😉 But seriously, the SNPs which are close to fixation in Europeans are unlikely to be found in GWAS unless they are very large effect. Parra calls these Ancestry Informative Markers (AIMs). The table is available at semanticscholar.org if you search for “Admixture in North America”.
An even better reference for AIMs in general (Parra might be better for North America specific admixture) is Pfaffelhuber et al. (2019) which includes code to find them and multiple sets. Including a 17 SNP set in Table 3 which is supposed to resolve 1000 Genomes samples with 100% accuracy.
How to choose sets of ancestry informative markers: A supervised feature selection approach
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/759464v1.full
Their code is at https://github.com/fbaumdicker/AIMsetfinder
You are entertaining. Do you believe that rant actually has merit? How about we look at this statistically? Using “AA’s with the highest “European” ancestry don’t have the highest IQs.” as a criterion for validity is just silly for anyone who understands statistical distributions.
Do you have any comprehensive data for AA admixture and IQ by state? Because that would at least make for an interesting topic to discuss.
P.S. Thank you for leading me to that interesting Parra book chapter and the even more interesting Pfaffelhuber paper. There are two reasons I keep responding to you.
1. To make clear how baseless most of your comments are.
2. The occasional nugget of a reference like that. Even if it is something indirect I have to chase down.
The signal to noise ratio is rather poor, but at least there is SOME signal.
“I would love it if a black person won the Fields Medal.”
As would I. Sadly, all the testing says that’s unlikely.
There’s an excellent “science” site that I frequent,
https://www.quantamagazine.org/
It’s dedicated to scientific advancement, covering developments in physics, mathematics, biology and computer science.
My favorite game to play there is, “spot the black guy” – kinda like “Where’s Waldo?”
Except Waldo is nowhere to be found…
You might be interested in this paper.
Sleep quality, duration, and consistency are associated with better academic performance in college students
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41539-019-0055-z
Abstract
The interesting (and non-intuitive to me) point there is that sleep the night before a test did not seem to matter. I wonder if that should be taken at face value or if students tend to make more effort to sleep the night before a test. It might be interesting to see how night before test sleep relates to the average for the participants.
I suspect what you would be interested in is knowing more about people like the one who (Figure 1A) slept less than 5.5 hours/night and scored around 80%.
Do you know of good data on this topic? I am skeptical that (short) sleep duration makes that much difference for success compared to managing one’s time in general (e.g. how much TV does the average person watch?).
Do you take Kevin Bird seriously? Here is a sample of his incisive criticism.
I assume this is the pre-print you mean?
No support for the genetic hypothesis of the Black-white achievement gap using polygenic scores and tests for divergent selection
https://osf.io/preprints/socarxiv/2qfkt/
There is some discussion of an older version of that here:
https://www.unz.com/isteve/the-mismeasure-of-genes
Some highlights from that thread are the Twitter responses in comment 22 from me and this link:
xxxhttps://www.reddit.com/r/heredity/comments/ev1vv3/thoughts_on_kevin_birds_paper_on_race_and_iq/
in comment 51 from bispora.
FWIW, I think Figure 3 is decisive on the topic of the relation of African admixture to intelligence.
Groups are made up of those varying individuals. Therefore groups will vary as well–depending on how large and/or randomly selected they are.
Um, no. Race is not the only thing that matters. Would you expect whites at Harvard to have the same average IQ as whites in your local jail?
P.S. Some useful links and summary at
xxxhttps://www.reddit.com/r/heredity/comments/9nnmb6/fallacious_or_otherwise_bad_arguments_against/
But I suspect that Michael Mosley of the BBC’s “Trust .e I’m a Doctor” who IMO stuffed up a program called “Keep Me Awake” by simple innumeracy would take notice of you proposing e.g. that he look at the requirement (maube plural) for sleep as normally distributed as one would expect when many genes are involved.. And wouldn’t be good to know more about that very important variable?
So you’re saying that Muhamed Ali was a gamma minus moron? LOL
Hey Wiz,
Well, thanks for that. Actually, that piece was somewhat rushed and I’ve just been trying to fix some of the more wild and woolly sections.
But, yes, people with high IQ test scores are, obviously, highly intelligent at doing IQ tests.
And, yes, IQ tests are often a useful indication of academic aptitude, which largely involves IQ-test-type mental functions. But when you see someone above arguing that Muhamed Ali was a gamma minus moron because of his army IQ test score of 78, you realize that gamma-minus morons can be highly articulate, individuals with very sharp logic circuits (and the follow up discussion with Cavett and Norman Mailer confirms the point).
Actually, the transformation has already occurred, with children of African immigrants to Britain outperforming white children in many communities.
…from a source that needn’t be mentioned. But you can figure it out.
“…Nearly 60% of male Chinese doctors are smokers, which is the highest proportion in the world.[4]”
Xin, Dingding (2009-12-11). “Smoke-free list extends to healthcare facilities”. China Daily.
That’s intelligent??? No, smoking is not intelligent!
Do I take Kevin Bird more seriously than the four authors of Lasker et al. 2019? Yes.
Bird seems to be an actual scientist with credentials:
https://kevinabird.github.io/1_about.html
https://www.linkedin.com/in/kevinabird
He also publishes in reputable peer-reviewed journals (see his Google Scholar).
The authors of Lasker et al. in contrast are four dodgy individuals who primarily publish in less reputable journals including some that are fraudulent or phoney (e.g. OpenPsych journals that arn’t even formally peer-reviewed, see links below). Three of the authors (excluding Bryan Pesta) also have no scientific credentials whatsoever (sorry a BA in linguistics doesn’t count…) Lasker’s four publications are all in a single journal (Psych). Nowhere else is publishing him. Don’t you think this looks at least a bit suspicious? And ~80% of Kirkegaard’s and Fuerst’s citations are by themselves as authors/co-authors. Again, do you not find this suspicious?
http://closerlookattheissues.blogspot.com/2019/02/emil-kirkegaards-self-citations.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenPsych#Criticism
https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/OpenPsych_pseudojournals#Lack_of_peer_review
Psych the publisher of Lasker et al. is widely considered to be the ‘successor’ of OpenPsych, now inactive because it gained such a bad reputation. It’s mostly the same dodgy people who publish in both:
https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Psych_(journal)#Psych_as_OpenPsych_Version_2
Unlike OpenPsych, Psych at least uses formal peer-review. However, its quality has nonetheless been disputed. Psych is published by MDPI that has a long history of controversies and criticisms:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MDPI
Bird’s comment describing MDPI/Psych as “garbage” is clearly accurate.
By subgroup I meant ethnic groups within each putative race. To me, this is the best evidence against hereditarianism and strong support for the environmental hypothesis because there is a big differences in IQs between many ethnic groups that are closely genetically related. The hereditarianism hypothesis instead predicts ethnic groups that are closely genetically related should have very similar IQ scores.
It is not I who is saying that, it is the US Army.
BTW, smooth talking might create the impression of high intelligence, but only to the superficial. Mr. “I am the greatest” was not the smartest.
I would suggest you avail yourself of the vast array of afrocentric style sites on the interwebz. Like almost all things black, they’re a poor facsimile of European things, with the White oriented sites being heavily laden with studies, research, well documented stats and evidence, while the afrocentric style ones almost invariably decide on a truth that is preferred, before outrageous, non contextual, historical cherry picking occurs, mixed in with great dollops of self serving fantasies. The levels of delusional White hating and blaming for black underperformance in the west is at once disturbing in its deep, DEEP, stupidity & vitriol and comical for its endlessly contrived displays of self reverence. I do feel embarrassed for them sometimes but, I usually start laughing again quite soon, so… no bother there.
But, it doesn’t really stop there does it? The race based shakedown is the biggest game in town for black America. The assertion that Whites are the stumbling block to full Wakanda being achieved is the generic go to argument for the astute black whiny man/woman in virtually every field where the claim can be made, eg, a White person lives within a five hour drive of a black person.
Without White people to blame fro any perceived black failing, a genuinely harmful malaise would overtake the self indulgent black soul, forcing blacks to look inward and would most likely be the catalyst for some long overdue introspection on personal responsibility and an addiction to the excuse culture that pervades black thought processes.
The hatred of Whites by a large proportion of blacks is actually highly public display and has been going on for quite some time. The reasons stated are clearly dishonest though, as can be observed by the unbroken river of blacks endlessly trying to live wherever Whites are engaged in the industrious, farsighted activities that create our mighty nations.
Thanks. Unfortunately I know of no useful data but the constant reiteration of “contemporary Americans/Australians/Whatever are not getting enough sleep” just makes me irritated that no one tests [or even posits] the hypothesis that need for sleep – at least in respect of some important functions of sleep – is normally distributed – and that the results of the research you cited were merely or largely the result of the competitive pressures of modern life.
I can’t help agreeing that failure to use one’s time well is huge. But surely I am right when I get much of my daily aerobic exercise bike while watching TV 😉 I mean, if only Ron could overcome his disdain for excellent documentaries like “9/11 – 102 Minutes that changed the world” he would surely take particular notice of the roaring red flames in the Towers and the vast volumes of smoke evidencing the scale of the fires and be tempted to give up his residual support for programmed demolition theories. (I watched that last night and it would take a Steven Spielberg to convince me that the evidence therein was faked of (i) planes flying into the towers, (ii) huge long lasting fires capable of weakening steel members; (iii) gravity producing collapse quicker in the tower where the weakness of support was lower down so the weight above was greater.
LOL. What do you mean by “that”? Apparently, you are saying that “that” was that Muhamed Ali was a gamma-minus moron. But it is untrue that the US Army said that. What the US army “said,” according to your citation, was that Ali had an IQ of 78, which is quite a different thing.
Rather it was you, who “said” by implication that Ali was a gamma-minus moron because of his supposed IQ of 78. But Ali clearly was not a gamma minus moron, as can be seen from his conversation with Cavett and with Norman Mailer. Thus the conclusion is evident: IQ does not measure intelligence. And the reason it does not measure intelligence is for the reason I have stated here.
But let us invite others to adjudicate the disagreement. How many who have watched those video clips of Ali speaking with Cavett and Mailer conclude that he was a gamma-minus moron, someone who, according to Jordan Peterson, would have been unable, because of their low IQ, to perform effectively in any form of employment.
I remember noting the apparent quick witedness in a later social setting of a fellow I had been at school with who like his brother, had had his IQ measured at about 80 according to records I had seen. In the case of Cassius Clay, he may have been smart enough to fake his IQ score to stay out of armed service. I also note the to me anomalous fact that the Flynn Effect has been most notable with “culture fair” tests like Raven’s Matrices. What that suggests to me is that they are not really culture fair but, as one can prove for oneself, susceptible to traiinng effects .
Not to repeat myself on this thread I am not sure what can be made of the Upper class Yoruba and Igbo beats White Trash argument. Jamaicans don’t seem to have upgraded their cognitive performances in the same way. And of course the days of six (white) siblings all going to Oxbridge are hardly even a distant memory. .
What you may have overlooked is the possibilty – high probability in fact – that IQ tests generally are valid as threshold tests. Mother and father are professors of physics and would love their son to be too. But he he has never scored more than 1.2 sds above average on an IQ test. Don’t bother would be the right advice. Don’t set yourself and parents up for disappointment.
Thanks for at least giving a straight answer. I tend to believe in letting the work (and Twitter dreck, oops, I mean tweets) speak for itself rather than letting your notion of the “reputation” of people and publications dictate what to believe. But I guess if all you have is guilt by association…
He was responding to a tweet about a specific paper. Seems like it would be better to offer substantive criticism of that paper. But that’s just me, I guess. Different standards apply for SJWs it seems. All it takes is a snarky insult to “refute” something.
Not sure what that even means. I thought you were talking about differences between average AA admixture and IQ in different states. Kind of like how whites in different states have different average IQs.
I enjoy the way you define the “hereditarian hypothesis” however you feel like. You really do need to learn what a straw man is–and stop using them. Or perhaps you can point me to someone who actually makes that argument?
Hush
What a waste of time I don’t read psychoses
You got that right. In spades.
Says the arrogant fool, who can neither read nor write, but can hate Whites. Well, at least you’re taking my advice about not complaining. Time to go on to something else.
“Take someone with high IQ and toss them into a jungle and make them survive. They won’t last 3 hours.”
Utter and complete bullshit that instantly shows you’ve never left your comfortable urban environment.
If you had any firsthand experience with any potentinally lethal natural environment, even as much as mountain hiking, you would have known that the most common reason of people killing themselves is abject stupidity. That is, inabililty to listen to instructions, understand them and follow them or inability to do basic assessment of risks and your own abilities.
Chicago is burning. https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2020/08/breaking-massive-looting-underway-chicago-riots-continue-across-nation-watch-live/
Comment section:
The true image of the nation.
Black Loots Matter.
Excellent response–and true.
What does the data show? That is science, not argument from “reputation.”
Excluding Kevin Bird, look at the remaining 8 citations of Lasker et al. 2019 –
https://scholar.google.co.uk/scholar?cites=3407205024582536480&as_sdt=2005&sciodt=0,5&hl=en
1. [PDF] Race Differences: A Very Brief Review
EOW Kirkegaard – Mankind Quarterly, 2019 – maistre.uni.cx
2. Race differences: a review
EOW Kirkegaard – 2019 – psyarxiv.com
3. Race differences
EOW Kirkegaard
4. [PDF] Human Biodiversity for Beginners: A Review of Charles Murray’s Human Diversity
EOW Kirkegaard – MANKIND QUARTERLY, 2020 – researchgate.net
5. [PDF] By Their Flags Ye Shall Know Them: National Flag Symbolism and Colors Predict Average Country IQ and HDI
S Koljević – Mankind Quarterly, 2020 – researchgate.net
6. Rushton, Jensen, and the Wealth of Nations: Biogeography and Public Policy as Determinants of Economic Growth
GB Christainsen – MANKIND QUARTERLY, 2020 – researchgate.net
7. Racial and ethnic group differences in the heritability of intelligence: A systematic review and meta-analysis
BJ Pesta, EOW Kirkegaard, Intelligence, 2020
8. Defending Biobehavioral Science
MA Sarraf, C Feltham – Modernity and Cultural Decline, 2019
—
So 5/8 of these citations are self-citations by Kirkegaard, as author/co-author (including 3 versions such as preprints of his paper ‘Race Differences’ published in Mankind Quarterly) while 2 /8 are from different authors, but still published in the Mankind Quarterly. So more than half are MQ citations (if you include the preprints.)
So that leaves only one paper Sarraf et al. However, I Googled Matthew A. Sarraf and guess what? He’s published papers in MQ and has co-authored a paper with Kirkegaard…
All these papers are incestous. It’s basically a small group of individuals, many who co-author papers together and are associated with the MQ who cite each other’s work (virtually no one else is) in the controversial journal Mankind Quarterly – the website domain of which is owned by Kirkegaard.
https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Mankind_Quarterly
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mankind_Quarterly
All of this I exposed 4 years ago, so it’s not a surprise they’re still doing the same dodgy old thing. None of this is a ‘guilt by association fallacy’.
The people that like them really like them a lot but they are a minority. Maybe kids are an exception to this.
More adults seem to like Mexicans or East Asians.
Much on the internet is a waste of time, most people shouldn’t be making videos. African-Americans are on the lower more wasteful end of the internet. Face it, there’s much better things watch than Frog Boy and Turdie Locks.
Generally, perhaps, but with many exceptions.
For instance, what if Ali was illiterate — I don’t know if he was or not. There must be plenty of highly intelligent illiterates in the world, people unable to attend school regularly, dyslexics, or kids who for whatever reason do not relate to the educational process.
For someone who has attended school regularly, a low IQ test score may indicate an organic brain issue, but there are many other possible explanations, hence many highly intelligent people with modest to low IQ test scores, e.g., Richard Feynman, Louis Alvarez, William Shockley, among the greats in 20th century physics with barely half the IQ of Ron Unz.
Science is about more than just data but academic integrity, including research standards and ethics. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Academic_integrity
The individuals I criticised lack this which is (1) why they publish in dodgy/bad reputation journals (some don’t even have formal peer-review), (2) excessively self-cite themselves to deceptively make it seem lots of scientists pay attention to their work when virtually none are, and (3) are prone to bad research (serious methodological flaws, confirmation bias etc), the list goes on. However a random person who is not an academic or has had not a paper peer-reviewed is unlikely to understand this.
My comment at #165 referring to that of Franklin Rychaert at #162, to which I failed to link.
? Look at most papers by Richard Lynn. He claims it is possible to estimate missing national IQ scores from the scores of nearby nations because he argues they will be similar because they are genetically similar. Since we also know genetic similarity is inversely correlated with geographical distance so populations nearby are genetically more similar than distant populations, meaning geographical distance maps genetic distance – the hereditarian hypothesis argues the “intelligence levels of people throughout the world vary consistently with their geographical location and race, even if there are considerable overlaps.” (Lynn, 2003)
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/B9780080437934500453
My argument in contrast, is we cannot estimate missing national IQ scores reliably from nearby nations because they are often not similar, secondly, correlation between geographical/genetic distance and IQ is too weak to support the hereditarian hypothesis. Becker and Rindermann (2016) report genetic distances and cross-national IQ differences are positively correlated (r = .37).
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S019188691630174X
r = 0. 37 = r2 0.1369
So this means genetic (=geographical) distance explains only 14% of the total variation in IQ test scores differences between countries.
The actual figure is even lower, because Becker and Rindermann used Lynn’s inaccurate IQ data for Africa.
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/01/100121155220.htm
No support at all for the hereditarian hypothesis.
To say that none of that is is LOL! worthy. Your obsession with absolutes does your comments a disservice by making them so easy to refute.
But to take your concerns in that comment seriously, since I think they make a point worth raising. I believe the incestuous behavior you observe is generally caused by one of two reasons (any more suggestions?).
1. A group of people working with premises and/or methods which are incorrect.
2. A group of people working with premises, methods, and/or conclusions which are unacceptable politically.
Those are very different, which is why we need to let the work speak for itself. As well as the “refutations.” Of which there are shockingly few with substantive criticism. Lots of ad hominems and guilt by association though. (any resemblance of your comments to those last two sentences is completely coincidental, of course ; )
It is to Kevin Bird’s credit that he at least seems to be trying to engage in somewhat substantive fashion with the Lasker et al. paper. I am a bit disappointed that the Lasker et al. coauthors have not engaged with Bird’s paper (to my knowledge, beyond Emil’s tweet which I linked in the earlier thread), but my understanding is they are waiting for it to pass peer review and be published officially.
I think his paper is a combination of FUD and goalpost moving. For an example of the latter, see Table 1. If EA/IQ h^2 is 0.5 (which seems a low value based on estimates in the literature, yet he uses values of 0.15, 0.35, and 0.5 for his calculations) he estimates 16-18% of global IQ variance is attributable to “additive genetic differentiation.”
Here is how he defines the hereditarian hypothesis in his pre-print.
So leaving aside the validity of both his methodology and his h^2 estimate of 0.5 we are looking at 17% of between group variance. And whether or not that is “substantial.” Let’s convert the variance explained to Cohen’s d to give another view of this.
Two relevant references.
Calculating and reporting effect sizes to facilitate cumulative science: a practical primer for t-tests and ANOVAs
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3840331/
Effect Size: Relationship between partial Eta-squared, Cohen’s f, and Cohen’s d (SPSS manual)
https://www.ibm.com/support/pages/effect-size-relationship-between-partial-eta-squared-cohens-f-and-cohens-d
From the first reference, roughly speaking eta^2 is the percent variance explained. From the second reference we have two equations.
d = 2 * f (where f is effect size)
f = sqrt(eta^2 / (1 – eta^2))
These give us:
f = sqrt(0.17^2 / (1 – 0.17^2)) = 0.17251
d = 2 * 0.17251 = 0.35
The d and eta ^ 2 values seem to differ in interpretation (have I made an error above?). Here is what the first reference above has to say about interpretation.
By the first criteria the effect is halfway between small and medium, by the second (which I trust more since it uses the value provided in the paper directly) the effect is large.
Another example of goalpost moving is Jensen generally refers to the US B/W IQ difference as a function of genetics. Bird is referring to global differences. The environmental differences between US blacks and whites are substantially smaller than those between Europeans and Africans. Given this, one would expect different values for percent variance explained (which of course depends on both environmental and genetic variance within and between the populations).
P.S. I find it intriguing that 17% is close to Lewontin’s estimate for between groups genetic variation. Any thoughts on why that might be? Coincidence?
P.P.S. For anyone interested, Cohen (1988) is available at (579 page PDF):
Statistical Power Analysis for the Behavioral Sciences
http://www.utstat.toronto.edu/~brunner/oldclass/378f16/readings/CohenPower.pdf
His interpretations for d are on pages 25-27.
He discusses f and eta^2 starting on page 280 in subsection
8.2.2 f, THE CORRELATION RATIO, AND PROPORTION OF VARIANCE.
The interpretations in that section are primarily in terms of f. He also gives them in terms of eta^2 which correspond in rounded form to the values I gave above.
The equation I gave above for f is equation 8.2.22 and is tabulated in Table 8.2.2. Looking at the table, an eta^2 of 0.17 (0.1684 in the table) corresponds to an f of 0.45 and thus a d of 0.9. So it does appear I made an error in my calculation of d above, but I am not seeing it. I would appreciate it if someone could double check my analysis/math.
That is why it is better to focus on US B/W differences. As both Jensen and Lasker et al. do.
And your original comment was based on blacks in the US by state so invoking African data is just a red herring.
There are several good reasons for focusing on US B/W differences here.
1. Varying admixture allows admixture analysis as we see in Lasker et al.
2. Environmental differences between US blacks and whites are much smaller than those between Africans and Europeans.
3. US data is much more available and higher quality then African data. Even though certain types of racial data seem surprisingly hard to come by.
4. The most relevant policy implications (for me, e.g. countering the lie that is disparate impact) depend on the US differences.
Stop already with that strawman. And the “no support” part is simply untrue.
Do you agree that the strong environmentalist hypothesis (0 genetic contribution to group differences in IQ) has been refuted decisively?
Eysenck would have agreed with your implicit point about levelling the playing field. He insisted that the msin thing wrong with using the 11 Plus test was that there ought to be practice for it – confirmed to me by a successful engineer and Coirbyn supporter who recognised that his material success in life, and his older brother’s lack of it hsd been the result of his mother getting wise to what it took to get into a grammar school.
As to the allegedly low IQ scores of Feyn mman et al. I only know about Feynman’s alleged 125 and I don’t believe it. Jerry Pournelle knew him quite well and I wonder if Jerry ever told Ron or Steve Sailer whether he believed the 125.
2: No.
There’s no academic censorship in this debate. Hereditarians can get published in reputable peer-reviewed journals. Here’s an example (Rushton and Jensen, 2005):
https://www1.udel.edu/educ/gottfredson/30years/Rushton-Jensen30years.pdf
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychology,_Public_Policy,_and_Law
The dubious claim of censorship forms part of a victim/persecution complex common among many so-called HBDers, including (from what I’ve encountered) Nathan Cofnas. I’m not sure what they base this claim on since hereditarians have been published in mainstream science journals for decades. Where’s the censorship? There are also unfounded allegations HBDers have lost their jobs for their views. When I looked at these alleged cases though I found something completely different like Noah Carl.
Note my own field of expertise is extremely hard to publish in peer-reviewed journals, but I’ve never claimed I’m being censored – It’s hard for me to publish work in academia since very few academics are interested in the unusual stuff I choose to write about, so often my manuscripts get sent back as there are no specialist referees.
I’ll respond to your other points in another comment.
I don’t agree with your abhorrent views, but how do you think you are achieving anything for your own ‘movement’ when you sit on the internet all day like a nutcase, creating hundreds of accounts on social media, spamming abuse?
https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Michael_Coombs#2020_activity
Here’s a link. Just for you! Have fun!
https://www.worldstarhiphop.com/videos/
LOL. The fact is well documented. Feynman’s intellect was not well rounded. His low level of literacy gave those at Princeton considering his application for admission to grad school grave cause for concern. Beyond the exposition of physics, Feynman’s command of language was modest, and his ideas uninteresting — as is true of Einstein. If you doubt that try The Meaning of It All: Thoughts of a Citizen Scientist, perhaps the only book published in Feynman’s name that was actually written by Feynman, not ghosted. Even the Lectures on Physics, perhaps the world’s greatest physics text, was massively edited for publication.
I find this response disingenuous at a minimum.
Do you honestly maintain that those researchers who want to investigate whether differences in IQ between blacks and whites have a genetic basis are completely free to do so? That there exist no institutional or societal obstacles to a free inquiry into this subject matter?
What happened to Jason Richwine when he dared to investigate this subject and report on his findings?
And what happened to Watson, arguably the greatest living scientist, when he suggested that perhaps genetics might account for some of the observed differences in intelligence between the races?
If they can ruin the life of such a famous scientist, and they have, only those with extreme courage (or crazy) would attempt to make a career out of such a field of study.
There are real costs to the investigation of these matters, as I am sure the author of this essay can attest.
I find this response disingenuous at a minimum.
That is because it is a troll account, nothing more.
Yes – absolutely. The idea there is censorship in this field is paranoia and unhinged victim/persecution complex. I’ve also observed ‘race realists’ go as far as fabricate claims to make themselves look like victims. This includes false rumours about myself trying to ‘shut down’ an ISIR conference with Antifa.
As for Watson, he had a long history of making sexist, homophobic, racist and other offensive comments. See the timeline of his offensive comments leading up to 2007:
https://www.vox.com/2019/1/15/18182530/james-watson-racist
Was he fired from his job? No. Watson had his administrative responsibilities from the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory suspended until there was an investigation, but he retired before that happened.
Watson apologised for his 2007 comments:
http://edition.cnn.com/2007/WORLD/europe/10/18/nobel.apology/index.html
Had he worded his comments differently, there would have been less outrage as he admits.
I have commented about this before – Watson’s suspension is not an example of hereditarianism views about race and intelligence being censored or silenced, but the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory getting fed up with Watson making offensive and embarrassing comments over a long period and damaging the reputation of the institute.
Well said. One minor clarification, Jason Richwine was Watsoned for discussing IQ differences between Hispanics (not blacks) and whites.
https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2013/05/why-people-keep-misunderstanding-the-connection-between-race-and-iq/275876/
For those who believe there is no persecution (which is quite funny coming from someone who engages in it so frequently) this book chapter by Linda Gottfredson is worth reading.
Suppressing Intelligence Research: Hurting Those We Intend to Help.
https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2005-02409-009
This paper from Nathan Cofnas seems like one of the more even handed discussions about free inquiry in this context. Dr. Thompson, have you discussed this paper? I am not finding it in a search.
Research on group differences in intelligence: A defense of free inquiry
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09515089.2019.1697803
I read somewhere that Feynman taught himself Japanese so he could give a lecture series in Japan. Mind you, I don’t recall reading Japanese student reviews. You do bring to mind a young relation who topped sciences and maths and who was witty and went through clear thinking sections of English papers like a flash but only got pass marks in English. He seemed to explicitly treat English tests as threshold tests that he would pass.
Didn’t I just show above that the IQ of african-americans in the north-east states is 93, which is substantially higher, upto 26 points higher (average about 12 points higher), than all the white caucasian nations of the Middle-East and North Africa? And higher than 9 european nations? Didn’t that teach you that Iran, Lebanon, Syria, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Ukraine, Bosnia, Greece, Serbia etc are all intellectually inferior to african-americans? Why not? You believe in IQ or not? Try to be honest and consistent. Why is that so hard for you guys?
Read this and weep:
https://www.guinnessworldrecords.com/world-records/most-nobel-prize-laureates-per-capita
Unfortunately for your delusions St. Lucia is an afro-Caribbean nation.
It also has a nominal per capita income over \$11,600. Which is higher than that of East Asia & Pacific, Latin America, Middle-East & North Africa, South Asia, Central Asia, Arab World & ASEAN.
And higher than many european nations: Russia, Ukraine, Bulgaria, Serbia, Bosnia, Albania, Belarus, Macedonia, Moldova, Kosovo…..
Source: https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.CD
And to put icing on the cake, St. lucia is a beautiful tropical island paradise:
https://qtxasset.com/styles/breakpoint_xl_880px_w/s3/travelagentcentral/1545411957/SimonDannhaueriStockGettyImagesPlusGettyImages.jpg/SimonDannhaueriStockGettyImagesPlusGettyImages.jpg?A0oZQ4nR0.hnf76hYlo2YQ.zQ_LzmJJ1&itok=Tw7OEf3c
I’d never heard of Jason Richwine but according to his Wikipedia page (that quotes a newspaper source) he resigned himself from The Heritage Foundation. So what was this supposed censorship meant to be? No one ever censored his controversial PhD dissertation or work.
More victim/persecution complex.
You people are so much like SJWs. You’re opposite political extremes, but have so many traits in common like victim complex. Horseshoe theory. SJWs love to make themselves victims, so do the HBD crowd.
‘Didn’t I just show above that the IQ of african-americans in the north-east states is 93, which is substantially higher…’
Apparently, you can’t read. At any rate, your post shows no evidence that you understood what I wrote.
‘…St. Lucia can claim the title for the most Nobel Prize Laureates per capita, with a rate of 10.81 per million people…’
Saint Lucia is a very small place. It has had two Nobel Laureates, one of whom was virtually white. So there was once a Black Nobel Laureate.
Did anyone ever claim all blacks are especially stupid? Your understanding of statistics would also appear to be deficient.
Are you black?
Yes that’s all true. There’s also huge variation in IQ test scores across countries in Sub-Saharan Africa, some are in 90s, but these are usually ignored and the typical ‘race realist’ will just fixate on the countries with low IQ scores in the 70s.
As I explained in my other comments, the fact you can find such huge variation in IQ test scores between different ethnic groups of the same putative ‘race’ (White, Black, East Asian etc) is a major blow to the hereditarian hypothesis because you end up with ethnic groups closely genetically related but with very different mean IQ test scores. To me, this is strong evidence for the environmental hypothesis.
Stop being intentionally obtuse. I included a link. I guess I’ll spoon feed you the first paragraph.
And to be clear, I referred to persecution, not censorship. You are “good” at moving those goalposts and strawmanning other people.
Your empathy for people who are losing (e.g. “decided to resign” generally means under pressure) their jobs, reputations, and livelihoods due to intellectual disagreements is breathtaking. The worst of it is how often they (e.g. Richwine here) are objectively in the right.
Your comments offer a clinic in the use of logical fallacies. That one was the false equivalence.
Worth pointing out here is the fact that James Watson was 16% african, and 4% asian:
http://www.nbcnews.com/id/22248094/ns/health-health_care/t/does-man-look-black-you/#.XzHgWRNKg1I
The african ancestry is not visible in his case, which is also true of many millions of other “white” caucasians, but it was quite visible in his “irish” grandmother:
True, and well put.
What these simple-minded fools here fail to understand is that the mind does not belong in the same category as skin, muscle, hair, bone, pigmentation etc. The mind is a category of its own, about which science remains clueless, because it can’t explain consciousness.
No. It hasn’t been refuted. Do I personally think zero genes is likely though? No. There’s a useful quote by Earl Hunt in his 2010 book where he says something like the debate shouldn’t be whether between-group heritability is 0% or 100%, but between 1 and 99%. Most experts think there is a genetic contribution.
More horseshoe theory for you. Who fixates on the 0%? HBDers and SJWs. The former and latter both restrict the environmental hypothesis to 0% (which it never was).
Here’s Jensen and Rushton with their “culture-only” straw-man as 0% genes:
https://www1.udel.edu/educ/gottfredson/30years/Rushton-Jensen30years.pdf
And here’s an SJW (Block, 1995) arguing the same thing:
http://www.nyu.edu/gsas/dept/philo/faculty/block/papers/heritability.pdf
What’s funny is to someone like Block, my position of a trivial/minor % of genes is ‘racist’ and he goes on to criticise/reject Herbert (1994) who says “environmental conditions account for most of the disparity” (my view) because “most”, isn’t 100%.
Which are those? And which data source(s) are you using for country IQs?
That looks like a nice example of a false dichotomy. Perhaps you could clarify what you mean by each of those hypotheses?
Ok you’re claiming not censorship but persecution.
But what persecution?
The guy resigned himself after receiving a public backlash and harsh criticism for publishing a controversial paper arguing against immigration based on the fact certain immigrants have lower IQs., and then someone dug up his PhD thesis.
What’s the problem? It is an immoral and absurd view to oppose immigration, based on someone’s intelligence. So understandably there would be a backlash to these sorts of horrid views.
Ps. I hold ultra-controversial views myself on certain things, probably the most extreme here, and if I voiced them in certain places they would cause a negative emotional response and anger among many people. Would I though claim I’m persecuted for holding them? Nope.
Give up the victim complex.
Correction: he was 16% african and 9% asian. So a full quarter non-white. Source for the correction, and his grandma’s pic:
https://isteve.blogspot.com/2007/12/james-watson-and-passing.html
It’s a fact that tri-racial mixes like Watson’s grandma (and likely someone else among his ancestors) look more ambiguous than two race mixes. Just look at the Puerto Ricans, Dominicans, Brazilians etc for the examples.
Another example of a very famous part-african who passed for white, though he did not fool everyone (unlike Watson), was J Edgar Hoover, founder of the FBI, the most famous crime-fighter in American history. The FBI’s headquarters is named after him:
https://www.takimag.com/article/j_edgar_black_or_gay/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._Edgar_Hoover#Legacy
Any better evidence for that claim? I searched and had trouble finding anything more recent than 2007.
There was this note from pp. 113-114 of “Straightening the Bell Curve: How Stereotypes about Black Masculinity Drive Research on Race and Intelligence”
That is less than confidence inspiring and the lack of followup would seem to indicate the claim failed to hold up. Do you have any better evidence?
P.S. Thanks for giving such a good indicator of the validity of things you assert. Especially since this source indicates the claimed Asian percentage was 9% rather than 4% (not actually mentioned in your link).
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/revealed-scientist-who-sparked-racism-row-has-black-genes-764104.html
It’s a waste of time debating these people as they’re not going to ever change their viewpoint and they’re committed ideologues. Prior to a few days ago, I hadn’t debated here in 6 months. I have long gaps between these silly debates.
The reason HBDers focus on that position is because.
1. There are idiots like Block who espouse it (i.e. it is not a strawman, again, you need to learn what that word means).
2. It is relatively easy to refute.
I bring it up (qualified as strong environmental hypothesis, though “culture-only” might be a better phrase) in an effort to better understand your position. For example, your claim it has not been refuted.
The one good reason to push the culture-only hypothesis is to avoid the slippery slope. See this comment from dearieme and the slippery slope comment from me under the same blog post.
https://www.unz.com/jthompson/scientific-racism/#comment-2610869
Speaking of legendary part-african crime fighters, check out the amazing life of Bass Reeves, cowboy crime-fighter, who probably was the inspiration for the Lone Ranger (played by a white actor, typically for Hollywood):
https://www.history.com/news/bass-reeves-real-lone-ranger-a-black-man
https://truewestmagazine.com/was-bass-reeves-the-real-lone-ranger/
Thanks for answering your own question.
Why? Are there limits? Should a country be required to let any person with a sub-60 IQ worldwide who wants to immigrate do so? What reasons ARE legitimate for opposing immigration?
What if you lost your job over those views? “Resigned” or not, that is what happened to Richwine.
Assertion: “Blacks” don’t waste their life embarrassing themselves day after day online for the entire world to read whining and complaining about “whites”
To which, directions are presented to help show the exact opposite exists in large quantities, as evidence against the assertion, followed by……
“What a waste of time I don’t read psychoses”
Gotta maintain the narrative, even if that entails denying the existence of anything that points out the fallacies propping it up. Why isn’t Africa a bastion of high level knowledge and human advancement, well it’s a damnable mystery huh? A riddle wrapped up in an enigma, tied together with twine of the deepest mystery.
Your comments offer a clinic in the use of logical fallacies.
A common practice among Internet trolls. Probably just a coincidence.
More convincing proof of your inability to think logically.
The lack of followup proves the exact opposite of what you think. It would be easy to disprove the genetic test results that found Watson to be 25% non-white. No one has been able to do that yet. Why?
What these simple-minded fools here fail to understand is that the mind does not belong in the same category as skin, muscle, hair, bone, pigmentation etc.
As far as we know, the brain is the seat of consciousness and thus “mind”. The brain is immune to evolution? There are no genes that influence the brain?
Please do explain in detail.
The mind is a category of its own, about which science remains clueless, because it can’t explain consciousness.
Untestable, therefore irrelevant. Do you believe in astrology? Phrenology? Palm reading? Just wondering.
Yes, the reference to your young relative illustrates my point nicely. Note, though, that in the case you refer to there is a difference between cognitive capacities both of which an IQ test is designed to evaluate. But there are many other mental capacities of importance for human survival that are not assessed by an IQ test. Musical ability; the verbal gifts abundantly demonstrated in Ali’s conversation — gifts that obviously facilitate social dominance; path finding ability, essential to those who live in wildernesses such as the Australian outback or the Canadian Arctic; humor — so helpful in the seduction of a maid; creativity in its many forms — artistic, poetic, mechanical, scientific; battle management skill, essential to those in need of a kingdom, and so on and on.
IQ tests may be of value in some circumstances, but the notion that they measure general intelligence, or g, is nonsense, because there is no such thing. Yes, there a shared cellular and physiological substrate of all mental activity, but these generally account for only small correlations among abilities. Each of the main facets of intelligence depend on independent lobes, ganglia and neural networks, each with its own genetic determinants. Each also with its onw unique environmental history, which give rise to the large effects of culture and education on IQ test scores.
Well, I happened to notice there’s a heated discussion about the Jason Richwine Affair from 2013. Those so interested might want to take a look at my article on the incident, which got a certain amount of attention at the time and highlighted numerous very ironic aspects:
https://www.unz.com/runz/raceiq-the-jason-richwine-affair/
That is true. It is like arguing with brainwashed religious fanatics. But they serve as convenient punching bags to hammer your points home, and expose them for the immoral liars and irrational fools that they are.
I think you under rate the generalised manifestations of mental speed and good short term memory for which I note the work of Harpending et al on the side effects of certain typically Ashkenazic neurological diseases gives so.e support. Still, I have relations who have made me exasperated enough to complain that very high IQ is inadequate protection against complete foolishness.
On a more hopeful note: do you not agree that individuals’ requirements for sleep’s neurological efficiency functions is likely to be normally distributed and very important indeed to worldly success? Why is it not treated that way by all those repeating the mantra about us all needing our 7 to 8 hours a night?
I don’t follow what you are saying, reflecting no doubt my ignorance. Are you suggesting that those who need less sleep are more successful in life? If so, it is not obvious to me why that should be so. But so little seems to be known about the function of sleep that the question of how an individual’s requirement for sleep affects worldly success would seem difficult to assess.
My own belief is that sleep evolved to save us from walking around in the dark and tripping on rabbit holes or stubbing our toes on unobserved rocks. But apparently there are other vital functions of sleep, the prolonged interruption of which leads to death, hence my inclination, when I feel a worry coming on, to close my eyes and doze a while.
By the way, what do you think of the idea floated in the Spectator that Brexit Britain should re-establish the Anglo-sphere, a free trade and free people movement zone including Australian, New Zealand, Canada and Britain. I thought about that while looking at the Daily Mail pictures of all the obese Brits blithely crowded together on Brighton beach and at other sunspots and wondered whether what were formerly known as the white dominions would really want all those fat Brits swarming over their beautiful beaches. I find it bad enough that the best beaches on Vancouver Island attract a smattering of Germans, Japanese, Chinese and Canadians from back East. Opening to the whole population of the UK would, in my view, be a complete disaster.
LOL!
You mean the same test results that indicated he had two X chromosomes? You did read that note I included, right?
Given that the ability to detect ancestry from a given genome has improved significantly in the intervening 13 years I am quite surprised there has been no followup. What is also interesting is that I have been unable to find a primary source for the full text of Kari Stefansson’s comments which originally sparked off the media feeding frenzy around this topic in late 2007. Perhaps not a coincidence that this happened shortly after Watson’s comments about Africa which got him in trouble?
Let me repeat the most relevant part of that note. Remember that this is from the person who did the analysis in the first place.
According to deCODE’s Kari Stefansson, the analysis relied on an error-ridden version of Watson’s full genome sequence, and Stefansson ‘doubts . . . whether the 16 percent figure will hold up,’ adding that based on the data used ‘it appears that Watson has two X chromosomes, which would make him a woman.’”
I am sure the media that broke this story is happy that there are people as credulous as you. Now if only someone would revisit this issue with current technology.
P.S. Some links for anyone who is interested in looking at more about Watson’s genome.
https://www.nature.com/articles/nature06884 (the 2008 Nature paper)
https://www.snpedia.com/index.php/User:Watson (has his SNPs, but only as deviations from the reference genome)
https://web.archive.org/web/20080705140221/http://jimwatsonsequence.cshl.edu/about.html (the browser for his genome is gone, but this archive gives an idea of what it used to have)
P.P.S. Some more links talking about the validity of the admixture results.
http://racehist.blogspot.com/2008/01/graphic-evidence-james-watson-admixture.html
https://web.archive.org/web/20080614061955/http://www.rootstelevision.com/blogs/megans-rootsworld/2007/12/a_first_look_at_decodeme_dna_r.html
Lol, you two can easily open up a move theater with all that projection!
Thanks, Ron. It looks to me like this article has most of your data about Hispanic IQ.
https://www.unz.com/article/race-iq-and-wealth/
In this article Jason Richwine asserted “Because a large number of recent immigrants are from Latin America, I reviewed the literature showing that Hispanic IQ scores fall between white and black scores in the United States. This fact isn’t controversial among experts, but citing it seems to have fueled much of the media backlash.”
https://www.politico.com/story/2013/08/opinion-jason-richwine-095353
Do you disagree with that assertion? I agree that the W-H gap has narrowed in the US over time and that the gaps observed with Hispanics immigrating from other countries are likely to have an environmental component amenable to improvement in the next generation in the US, but I see no reason to believe there is no genetic gap. Whether the magnitude is sufficient to make it a matter of concern is a more complicated question, and I am not well enough acquainted with the work in this area to judge that.
Here is a collection of articles about the Hispanic-White IQ gap which may be of interest to anyone who wants to look into this more deeply.
https://humanvarieties.org/category/hispanic-white-iq-gap/
I enjoy seeing such pure and unvarnished examples of projection. You and Oliver definitely make quite the pair.
My observation is that chief executives, Permanent Secretaries, admitals and generals and top politicians all (as far as I have been able to observe it – less for the military: that’s more theory and biography) all tend to get by on less than 6 hours sleep. And it just makes sense that someone who is alert to threats to his position and able to function effectively as a problem solver for more hours each day than those of equal cognitive ability (and other relevant characteristics) will tend to be more successful. How could it be otherwise?
My assumption of normal distribution is nased simply on the fact that many genes would be responsible, perhaps more than for height but less than for IQ. And it also fits observation well enough.
Unfortunately there are probably a lot of people damaging their help by truing to compete with those equipped by nature to need less sleep. I have also noted elsewhere the possibility that someone who only needs 4 hours a night for good mental function might need 7 for heart health.
Canada hasn’t enough beaches for frolicking. Australiawould hardly notice obese Brits if they went to WA and offered themselves as sharkbait.
Was it Andrew Roberts who wrote the Spectator piece? I used to know him quite well and he is certainly readable but I don’t see much in it for Australia though we should certainly take advantage of Brexit selectively with no more sentimentality than the 1790s upper classes were showing when they sent my first Australian ancestors here – much to the benefit I guess of my thousands of Australian cousins.
Thanks for that clarification and all your rigorous analysis provided here.
Research into the genetics of human behaviors, particularly research into differences between human populations, has always been a field fraught with danger for those scientists who have ventured into this domain.
The West will fall behind in this area of study simply because any idea challenging the egalitarian hypothesis will be attacked mercilessly. But the Chinese will continue to study the genetics of human behavior and invariably will discover genes that correlate with both higher and lower intelligence. Our society will continue to dismiss these findings as “racist” and pretend that only a hate filled person would believe that there might be differences in human populations in their ability to think and to be creative.
I recall watching the debate between Rushton and Suzuki and was amazed by how poorly Rushton was treated by Suzuki. This was many years ago and I have despised Suzuki ever since that time.
Look how bad Arthur Jensen was treated for daring to study this matter.
E.O. Wilson became a pariah for suggesting that human behaviors are influenced by genes. Leaders of this effort to discredit Wilson included SJ Gould and Lewontin, both of whom were celebrated by the great and the good as dispassionate scholars and men of high integrity.
Things have gotten worse since that time with the celebration of clear lightweight thinkers such as Amy Harmon and the destruction of men like James Watson.
The censorship over uncomfortable ideas will continue I am sure. Furthermore, the significant gaps in achievement and criminal behavior between the races will continue to be explained by the immoral and racist behavior of the evil white man.
Alabama Governor Big Jim Folsom, an authentic New Dealer who served in the late forties and middle fifties, responded to a complaint that his social welfare spending was also helping the niggers by saying, “God-damnit! Niggers is people too.”
I have discussed this before in my other comments elsewhere. My view is the only reasonable argument to limit immigration is based on environmental concerns about overpopulation and unsustainable population growth including people moving from countries with low carbon emissions to countries with high carbon emissions. However, it only makes sense for people making this argument if they are child-free and who want to drastically decline fertility rates everywhere, including most importantly in the West.
You can easily spot racists or white nationalists misusing population growth arguments to limit immigration since they have kids themselves and/or don’t want to cut fertility rates in the West.
An example is David Brower of the Sierra Club who wanted to restrict immigration allegedly over concerns about overpopulation and unsustainable population growth, yet himself had four children and promoted large families among whites. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Brower#Rejoins_and_resigns_from_board
Recently I have seen Steve Sailer bang on about overpopulation to limit immigration, yet he himself has kids and has no interest in declining fertility rates in the West.
Well, although Richwine’s work on Hispanic crime rates was seriously mistaken, I can’t condemn its methodology. However, as I discussed in my linked article, his Race/IQ analysis revealed his utter incompetence:
https://www.unz.com/runz/raceiq-the-jason-richwine-affair/
There just aren’t any two ways about it. When you do a doctoral dissertation in that subject and yet seem totally unaware of the IQ scores of American ethnic groups during the early decades of the 20th century, nor the relevant analyses of leading psychometricians such as Jensen and Eysenck, you deserve most of the trouble you eventually accrue.
As you said, I had previously covered much of the ground in my 2012 Race/IQ article that provoked an enormous amount of discussion on the Internet, and you might also want to take a look at the dozen or so follow-up columns linked at the bottom of that piece:
https://www.unz.com/runz/race-iq-and-wealth/
Richwine clearly falls into the Lynnist school, and Richard Lynn and his close collaborator published lengthy responses to my critique, but I think my rebuttal was quite decisive:
https://www.unz.com/runz/unz-on-raceiq-response-to-lynn-and-nyborg/
In my own opinion, these issues were mostly settled years ago, and the fact that Richwine moved in such narrow ideological circles that he seemed totally unaware of these widespread earlier discussions is hardly a credit to his intellectual quality, nor to that of the ignorant journalists who took him seriously.
Your dubious claim is someone who makes an outrageous/offensive comment and is denounced or receives a public backlash is “persecuted”.
So in your view is someone who promotes something as controversial as a terrorist group and in response who receives a lot of harsh criticism, “persecuted”?
You’ve not presented any evidence hereditarians are actually censored or persecuted. If someone makes an offensive comment and there is a strong negative emotional response – this isn’t “persecution”.
You also laughably claimed I have “persecuted” people.
As I said you have a lot in common with SJWs who share your victim complex.
No one else takes Lasker et al. serious, so don’t bother to respond. Bird’s preprint is the only independent citation of the paper (as I showed the other 8 citations are by co-authors of Lasker et al. and the dodgy MQ journal most of the same co-authors regularly publish in).
As proof virtually no one takes the co-authors serious:
If you take a look at one of the co-authors, John Fuerst, you will see almost no one is citing his work apart from himself and Kirkegaard, plus a couple of racists at MQ.
The paper listed at the top of his Google Scholar has 42 citations.
https://scholar.google.co.uk/scholar?oi=bibs&hl=en&cites=8003298242431943073
Nearly all of them are by Kirkegaard and the few rest are Fuerst himself and people associated with MQ.
I will probably file a report to get these idiots banned from Google Scholar for abusing the citation metrics. How the hell can you have a paper with 42 citations when about 35 are by one person?
Is certainly not a low value – Jensen massively inflated within-group heritabilities:
– Mackenzie, 1984
https://psycnet.apa.org/record/1985-25462-001
In the not too far distant future genetic correlates associated with robust measures of G unlikely to be influenced by the environment, such as backward digit span, will be discovered. These genetic correlates will be found to be more prevalent in certain human populations and therefore less prevalent in other human populations.
Despite this discovery our culture will continue to be dominated by those who insist that any differences in intellectual accomplishment or civilizational achievement between the races has nothing to do with genetics and everything to do with white racism.
And they will continue to be as certain in their belief in the egalitarian fiction as they are now.
Count on it.
The Catholic Church persecuting those who thought Earth revolves around the sun has nothing on the piety and intolerance of the modern egalitarian fundamentalists.
It doesn’t make sense to me to draw that conclusion if one knows nothing of the function of sleep. There is reason to believe that sleep is necessary for the processing of information, but we don’t know what that processing entails. If it impacts judgement, maybe the more sleep the better.
Donald Trump seems not to sleep much, devoting the time thus saved to Tweeting. But I am not convinced that that does him or anyone else much good.
That may not be exactly true, but may the world long believe it.
I assert that backlash at that level accompanied by losing one’s job constitutes persecution. Your comparison to promoting terrorist groups is…interesting. Perhaps you need to reread my false equivalence comment above?
Your habit of trying to put words in my mouth (and not in a polite, “do you agree with…” way) is tiresome and annoying.
I think the RationalWiki hit pieces you have (proudly) been involved in provide ample evidence of that.
Speaking of laughable claims. I have presented such evidence in this thread.
BTW, For anyone who is actually following my discussion with Oliver (masochists? ; ), please pay attention to all of my assertions and questions which he ignores.
You’re displaying another bizarre mental complex of hereditarians/’race realists’ – the Galileo gambit which has overlapping traits with persecution complex-
https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Galileo_gambit
It puts you in the same boat as global warming deniers and creationists (see examples on the page).
I agree that the environmental argument is important. But strongly disagree with your final sentence.
It seems to me everyone has a basic human right to reproduce at a replacement fertility rate. One could argue that only applies if they can support their own children, but let’s leave that thought aside for now. Also, I think those statements apply to both individuals and groups (e.g. countries).
Most countries in the West are currently below replacement fertility.
https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/total-fertility-rate
Are you seriously arguing that they should do the following?
1. Limit their own fertility further.
2. Allow immigration from countries with high fertility like Nigeria (5.4).
3. Not say anything about reducing fertility rates in high fertility countries.
That is a recipe for making one’s people disappear while still overpopulating the Earth.
Your litmus tests are funny. Or would be if you and so many other people didn’t seem to think like that for real.
I took credit at RationalWiki for exposing and criticising a phoney/fraudulent journal and the dodgy people connected to it. My criticisms in those articles are shared by almost everyone.
Run a Twitter search for OpenPsych and have a good laugh:
https://twitter.com/search?q=OpenPsych&src=typed_query
https://twitter.com/search?q=OpenPsych&src=typed_query&f=live
All the other claims about my activities on RationalWiki are false rumours and lies circulated by Emil Kirkegaard. For example, he tried to blame the Bo Winegard article onto me, when I never created it and have nothing against Winegard. Most recently he’s tried to blame a Twitter account attacking Winegard named Creed Barron (or something similar) I don’t own.
Ron, you go on about non-quantitative thinkers frequently, yet I observe that there are no numbers in that comment and precious few in your first linked article. I understand that you have written tens (hundreds?) of thousands of words on this topic. But I am not seeing summaries of your views.
First, how about you answer the simple question I posed in my comment? I have bolded the primary point.
This article addresses the Richwine controversy and references your work substantially and favorably.
https://reason.com/2013/05/17/are-hispanics-too-stupid-to-become-ameri/
I would like to focus on the study mentioned within this excerpt (BTW, the excerpt seems like a good high level statement of Richwine’s views. Can you outline where you disagree with that, quantitatively if possible?).
Time to be quantitative. That paper frames its discussion in term of Cohen’s d for IQs between whites vs. blacks and Hispanics. They give top line estimates of d = 1.1 for blacks (Table 1) and 0.72 for Hispanics (Table 7). Those translate to IQ estimates (assuming white IQ is 100 and SD is 15) of 83.5 for blacks and 89.2 for Hispanics.
Richwine’s dissertation provides a host of numbers.
https://www.gwern.net/docs/iq/2009-richwine.pdf
Let’s focus on Table 2.6 ASVAB Ethnic Group Differences by Immigrant Generation (in SDs)
which provides estimates for immigrant IQs and in particular the second generation immigrant numbers which are 101.2 for Europeans (a touch of selective immigration?), 87.8 for Mexicans, and 97.2
Do you disagree with those numbers? If so, based on what? And what estimates would you make?
What I find odd is the 3+ generation immigrants scoring lower–he estimates Mexican immigrants at 85.6 and other Hispanics at 88.2.
P.S. One major problem with discussing Hispanics is how diverse that group is genetically (and environmentally). In Latin America the urban Spanish-descended elite is very different from the rural 100% indigenous. A similar difference exists in “Hispanics” within the US.
P.P.S. And yes I understand that there are issues with Lynn’s country IQ numbers. As with all country IQ numbers. Some countries just aren’t very good at collecting such data (which should provide a clue BTW). Let’s focus on the US which actually is pretty good about having usable data.
So you are “probably the top article creator” at RationalWiki but have nothing to do with ANY of those hit pieces? Interesting.
https://www.unz.com/akarlin/open-thread-88/#comment-3437791
And this makes clear you were lying in comment 238.
https://www.unz.com/akarlin/open-thread-88/#comment-3437654
Bragging about what you do seems to be a fundamental weakness of yours.
Then there is this comment.
https://www.unz.com/article/its-official-again-leftists-particularly-leftist-women-are-nuts/#comment-4087531
It certainly is convenient that so many of those RationalWiki hit pieces reflect your views well enough that you link them at every opportunity.
P.S. Since you have no problem with attack pages and seem to have high standards for what constitutes persecution, let’s include a link to this.
Rationalwiki’s (Oliver D. Smith’s) attack page about me
https://emilkirkegaard.dk/en/?page_id=7034
Thanks for your helpful comments. Hispanic is a difficult category, but another approach is to study Mexicans. I am reading a relevant meta-analysis and might comment later.
Well, that’s because in some subjects there exists solid and reliable quantitative data, and in others there doesn’t. Unfortunately, it’s my decided conclusion that the sort of IQ results Richwine was relying upon very clearly fall into the latter category. The extremely rapid changes in Flynn-adjusted IQ that can occur in just a few decades make this very clear.
As I noted in my article during the 1920s and 1930s IQ tests uniformly placed native-born Italian-American children down at around 80 or so, relative to 100 for the mainstream white population, yet within a generation or two they were about the white average. The Flynn-adjusted IQ of Ireland’s Irish, as determined in a massive and very rigorous study, was only something like 87 in the late 1960s, but within a generation or two had reached 100. After German unification, the Flynn-adjusted IQ of East Germans rose by something like 12-15 points in one generation. A very long list of similar solid examples were cited in my long article and numerous subsequent columns. Just go through and read them if you’d like.
When data is subject to such rapid change, using it in the static way Richwine did is simply ridiculous. Perhaps he could have found a way to explain these difficulties, but he seemed totally unaware of them, a gaping flaw in someone seeking to earn a Harvard doctorate. He similarly seemed equally unaware of the analytical analysis by Jensen and Eysenck, who had argued that environmental factors were responsible.
I probably shouldn’t have let myself get drawn into this subject, which I haven’t looked at in five or six years. But the Richwine case is a perfect example of how ideological leanings can easily overcome objective analysis, especially if all the people you talk to believe in the same absurd framework.
May I suggest that both you and Mr. Smith review your concept of rights. Smith might invite comment on his notion of the right to immigrate from America’s residual population of Indians, Australia’s aborigines, or perhaps even the ghosts of Canada’s long exterminated Beothuk tribe of Nova Scotia.
Concerning your remark:
you do realize that this would pretty much end the process of natural selection, leading not only to a standstill in human evolution but a progressive decline in the fitness of the population as deleterious genetic changes accumulate in the gene pool?
Rights can only be granted by the ruling power, which theoretically, is the people in a democracy. Thus Smith’s idea that the interests and preferences of the people can be ignored in determining who, if anyone, has the right of immigration is a total non-starter for a sovereign democratic state.
Your claim that ” everyone has a basic human right to reproduce at a replacement fertility rate,” though it might fly in a referendum, is for the reason I stated, not a good idea. Clearly, a rational public policy will promote the fertility of the fittest, the better to equip future generations with the chance of survival. To that end, it seems to me that a democratic state with intelligent leaders could, and should, persuade the public of the need for:
(a) the imposition of severe restraints on welfare reproduction, which would not be difficult to achieve if it were not for all the bleeding hearts and social workers anxious to generate as many unproductive people as possible, and
(b) the reversal of the present negative relationship between female fertility and fitness/intelligence (roughly assessed by family tax payments).
Objective (a) can be achieved by fairly obvious means it would be tedious to discuss here. Objective (b) could be achieved by providing large tax breaks based on the incomes of both parents, which would be paid in cash to mothers for life. This would grant substantially increased financial security to intelligent women who favor motherhood over career.
Your points (1) through (3) make a conclusive case against the Treason Party’s genocidal program of mass immigration to the Western democracies.
Ron,
I have been following this immigration debate and Race and IQ debate for some time.
I was wondering if you had any solid numbers for what the flynn-adjusted IQs of our various immigrant groups should be?
Like, what is the IQ difference between Hispanics and Whites, or what is the difference between Whites and Middle Easterners/South Asians, etc.
Has anyone really estimated those numbers?
I feel like looking at 4th or 5th generation would be a good way of figuring this out, but I’ve haven’t seen anyone actually research those figures.
So no conclusions at all can be drawn from the data? That seems like quite the cop out.
That was a reason I focused on the second generation immigrants in particular. It seems reasonable to expect that they are on close to the same Flynn trajectory as natives by that point.
I know. But have you chanced to notice that all of your examples are genetically closely related? Do you have any reason to assume the same will happen for Hispanic and black immigrants? Note that I mean the transition to near or above the white average. I agree we can expect an increase (as did Richwine).
On the contrary, I thought Richwine discussed the change aspect. In particular see Table 2.6 (which I referenced) and the surrounding discussion on pp. 42-48 (in particular note the Flynn Effect references there and elsewhere). Here are some excerpts which I think are particularly relevant.
However, the assumption that each generation is comparable is dubious. NLSY respondents were born between 1957 and 1964, and immigration policy was changed to favor lower-skill immigrants after 1965. Approximately 75% of NLSY immigrants came to the U.S. after 1965, meaning the difference between the first and second generation may just reflect changes in policy rather than intergenerational intelligence gains.
…
However, there are four reasons to believe that real intelligence differences are responsible in large part for the differences in test scores. First, most of the immigrants in the NLSY are young people who have attended American schools. Second, natives score well above immigrants on mathematics tests, even when controlling for years of education. Third, factor analysis shows that the g-loadings of the subtests are essentially the same for immigrants and natives. Fourth, there is a positive correlation between subtest gloading and native-immigrant d for most ethnic groups
I am not familiar enough with Richwine’s body of work to judge it in its entirety, but I do think the points I have raised are all on target and well supported. And all I see you doing is evading (notice the complete lack of an answer to my explicit questions in particular) and throwing around rhetoric (note the adjectives) like: “ideological leanings can easily overcome objective analysis, especially if all the people you talk to believe in the same absurd framework.”
Yes. Because 95% of my article creations aren’t about individuals. I made only around a dozen pages on individuals out of hundreds of pages. The vast bulk of my page creations and edits aren’t about people. Like Kirkegaard you totally misrepresent my activity. As an example I created most of RationalWiki’s pages on palaeo-anthropology topics (including models of human origins), non-Darwinian evolution and alternative cosmology. How are those ‘hit pieces’?
https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Multiregional_hypothesis
https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Assimilation_model
https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Recent_African_Origin_hypothesis
https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Non-Darwinian_evolution
https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Alternative_cosmology
The idea I was using to site to ‘harass’ people is blatant misinformation – the vast bulk of my edits and page creations aren’t on individuals but science topics and get good feedback. Regardless, I no longer edit the wiki. I only link to its articles if they are useful in a discussion.
No it just makes you dishonest and quoting out of context.
I said in my comment #238 above that I created the articles on people connected to OpenPsych.
Noah Carl is OpenPsych’s second top article contributor, and also sits on its ‘review’ team.
https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Noah_Carl#OpenPsych
So I’ve not lied about anything. More of your projection.
I don’t generally care what Kirkegaard writes about me because he’s spread lies and wild allegations about me for 4 years and no one who knows me and has read that page takes any of the preposterous claims serious. I’ve never bothered writing a detailed rebuttal.
What though I did block from a search engine and may take legal action against is Kirkegaard uploading old photos of myself with ‘pedophile’ written on it on his website. But then again, I’m not sure if I will go ahead and sue for defamation since I know I’m not a pedophile, so why should I really care about someone who is my my opinion extremely unhinged writing lies about me who lives 5000 miles away? This has always been generally my attitude. I support freedom of speech far more than Kirkegaard does.
I was wondering if anyone was going to engage with that remark of mine ; )
In all sincerity, thank you. This is a much more interesting conversation than the one I am having with Oliver.
First, I’ll note that I followed that sentence with “One could argue that only applies if they can support their own children, but let’s leave that thought aside for now.” Which was a nod in the direction of your points.
Calling it a right was (intentionally) provocative language. I would qualify that a bit by calling it aspirational and note that I am more in favor of not allowing people to actively prevent reproduction (e.g. Oliver and the West) than guaranteeing they are able to reproduce.
As practical points I tend to agree with your objectives. As a clarification, by “welfare reproduction” I assume you mean having children while on welfare. It seems reasonable to me that a condition of accepting welfare is that one have no additional children while on it. Though the details become complex (e.g. ANY form of welfare? what about bouncing on and off welfare to have children? how to guarantee that and sanction violation?).
I wonder if the tax breaks you envision would be sufficient to achieve your goal. I think a big part of the issue is glorification of female careers over motherhood in popular culture. Not just the financial aspects.
Where things become even more complex/interesting is when talking about above replacement fertility. I have friends I look at and think: I am glad YOU are having three (or more) children (they will all be assets to our society). But I don’t think that would be a good norm for a well populated Western society.
P.S. I’m curious how you feel about the group vs. individual version of my statement.
You mean by quoting your own comments?
Rereading your comment 238 I do see your “dodgy people connected to it” statement which is enough of a qualification that is was unfair of me to call that a lie.
That said, in the interest of transparency perhaps you could outline which RationalWiki pages on individuals you have edited under which specific usernames? I would not want to misrepresent your activities.
Re: everyone has a basic human right to reproduce at a replacement fertility rate.
If by group, one means sovereign state, then there is no body that can confer or deny the right to reproduce at whatever rate the people or its government chooses. I suppose the UN might try to jaw-bone states such as Nigeria (projected population of 800 million within eighty years) to slow down a bit. But I see no obvious means of enforcing such an objective short of war and oppression.
So long as humanity remains organized on the basis of sovereign states, population policy, if any, will be determined primarily on a national basis. The rational objective of population policy should reflect the need for national security, most fundamentally the ability of the nation to continue to exist as a genetic entity. (One might say continue to exist as a race, but that would likely lead to an unproductive diversion on the definition of race and the relation of race to nation, etc. Better than either term might be “bearers of a gene pool,” but that sounds weird.)
As a question concerning national survival, population policy must consider both quantity and quality. The probability is that the Western nations are grossly overpopulated. Whereas, in times past, most work was achieved by muscle power, human or four-footed, today there is virtually no demand for a “labor” force. Moreover, whereas wars used to be settled by mass armies slugging things out with pikes and bayonets, the outcome of the next big war may already have been settled by the coding of critical computer systems. In future, therefore, national survival will surely depend on a population policy focused on quality.
In times past, the wealthy tended to produce more surviving offspring than the poor. Insofar as intelligence in all its manifestations generally favors the acquisition and retention of wealth, humans have thus long been under selection for intelligence. Democracy, however, has changed the rules in such fashion as to favor reproduction by the poor not the rich. In the interest of national security, this needs to be reversed and could be reversed, for example through the application of intelligence to public policy relating to taxation, quota hiring of women (or is it people with a cervix we now have say), public education (i.e., state-controlled propaganda), and reproduction on the dole.
Well, I remember reading his entire doctoral dissertation at the time, which got posted online. As far as I recall, he dismissed all the copious American IQ data from the first part of the twentieth century by saying all our leading psychometricians back then were “racists.” I actually read several of the books from that era, and the authors seemed scrupulously careful scientists (very much unlike Richwine!), and not crazy “racists.” So I actually think it serves Richwine right that he himself was soon purged as a “racist.”
If you feel you can throw around wild accusations of “racism” to eliminate all the data you don’t like, you’re not a serious scientist.
Personally, I’m pretty sure that Richwine is one of those “soft-core WNs” I described in a recent article, or at least opportunistically seeking funding in those quarters.
And what about Jensen and Eysenck? I never bothered trying to track down Jensen’s paper, but he claimed his examination of the IQ structure suggested the effect was overwhelmingly environmental, and his analysis persuaded Eysenck. If Jensen and Eysenck both agree on that sort of technical psychometric issue, that’s good enough for me. Go ahead and look up Jensen’s paper if you’d like, and maybe you’ll discover he was wrong.
When you can find many, many cases of large-sample Flynn-adjusted IQs jumping around by 10-20 points in just a generation or two, you need to be very cautious in treating them as hard quantitative evidence.
Well, for the reasons I cited in my series of articles, I’m very cautious about taking any of these IQ subsamples very seriously. On the other hand, it really seems pretty likely that different ethnic groups have somewhat different IQs, also including different Verbal, Math, and Spatial subcomponents.
So if you forced me to take a guess, I’d suspect that on a fully environment-equalized basis, Hispanics in America would have IQs something like 3-5 points below the white mean, probably (like East Asians) somewhat higher in Spatial and somewhat weaker in Verbal.
Similarly, I wouldn’t be surprised if South Italians generally fell into the same range. I remember that Lynn found that South Italians in South Italy had IQs of something like 85 back in the 1980s. (It was years ago, so my numbers are probably a little fuzzy).
Maybe Middle Easterners might be similar. South Asians are much more complex since they almost certainly have a multi-modal structure based upon caste and sub-caste.
For clarification, I do no support any coercive measures to prevent people procreating. If someone wants 1, 3, 5, 10 or 22 children they have the right to do so. And I oppose any form of eugenics.
My position is simply voluntary childlessness. People have the choice not breed. Simple.
As for non-coercive ways to cut fertility rates: the most humane and practical way is empowering women by giving them the full opportunity of education. The number of years a woman has spent in education is usually inversely correlated with the number of children she will bear in her lifetime.
On top of this, people can simply learn why deciding not to have children is the most environmentally positive thing. For example, being child-free is the most effective method to reduce carbon emissions.
1. Yes. For example, in the US the carbon footprint of a child is roughly 58.6 metric tonnes annually, whereas that of a Malawian child has been estimated between 0.07 and 0.1 metric tonnes. Or to use another example, a person in the UK produces 70 times the CO2 of someone in Niger.
If you’re concerned about the environment and the climate crisis, we have to drastically cut fertility rates in the Western world. ‘Mythbusting’ what you posted is also explained well here –
https://populationmatters.org/mythbusting
2. I would support restricting immigration from any countries with low per capita carbon emissions to high per capita, as well as supporting balanced migration to prevent population growth. However there seems to me no humane or practical way to do this, so it’s futile. Anyone who wants to limit immigration will (understandingly) become associated with accusations of racism and xenophobia, because limiting immigration is a talking point of right-wing populists and the ‘far-right’. Since there’s no humane or practical method, it’s not something I now dwell on, although I used to talk a lot more on this issue like a decade back because mainstream politicians then were too afraid to tackle or even mention it. That’s no longer really the case today because of the rise of populism since the mid-2010s (Brexit, Trump, etc).
3. Certainly they are overpopulated too like everywhere and I support declining fertility in every country, but the reason I focus more on declining fertility rates in the West is explained in 1.
Speaking of Afro-Caribbeans, Biden just picked Kamala, the daughter of Jamaican-born Stanford Professor, Donald Harris as his running mate:
I have been clear since day one when I’ve discussed the articles (contrary to Kirkegaard’s many misleading claims and lies about my activities) I created the OpenPsych and MQ:
https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/OpenPsych_pseudojournals
https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Mankind_Quarterly
https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Emil_Kirkegaard
https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Edward_Dutton
https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Gerhard_Meisenberg
https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Noah_Carl
https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Aurelio_J._Figueredo
https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/John_G.R._Fuerst
https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Heiner_Rindermann
(not a full list, but the bulk of them)
Note though these articles have been edited by different users over the years and the current pages look little like how I originally made them in 2016-2018 and I don’t necessarily agree with all the edits, nor am I responsible for those I didn’t make.
If it’s not someone associated with OpenPsych or MQ, it’s very unlikely I created it.
I have already explained why I focused on OpenPsych and MQ – the former is a phoney journal that has no formal peer-review, and the people who publish in it are dodgy. And the latter is an infamous racist journal that has been widely criticised since the 1960s, so it also attracts dodgy people.
All the other pages on legitimate/non-dodgy intelligence researchers on RationalWiki (i.e. people not publishing in OP/MQ)- I never created nor have an issue with, however, Kirkegaard has blamed me for writing them with the intention of causing animosity between me and these people. And this includes people emailing me legal threats for content I’ve not even written based on Kirkegaard’s unfounded allegations. Furthermore, I believe it was Kirkegaard’s strategy to misrepresent me as an “SJW attacking intelligence researchers” to discredit me, when that was never what I was doing.
Nevertheless, a bunch of his close friends (uncritically) copied his falsehoods.
As an example I did not create either of the Bo and Ben Winegard articles:
https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Ben_Winegard
https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Bo_Winegard
The latter was created last month and I’ve never made a single edit on it:
https://rationalwiki.org/w/index.php?title=Ben_Winegard&action=history
These brother’s are followed around by SJWs, not me.
Nor did I create Richard Haier, Robert Plomin or Intelligence (journal):
https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Robert_Plomin
https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Richard_Haier
https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Intelligence_(journal)
I disagree with much what is written on Haier’s & Plomin’s article and they should be deleted. I also never created the Eric Turkheimer and Kathryn Paige Harden articles.
https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Eric_Turkheimer
Note I banned the creator of these articles and voted to delete them. Harden’s article was deleted for pure character assassination and lies, and Turkheimeer’s was completely re-written after I left complaints.
https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Talk:Eric_Turkheimer
So as you can see it’s complete BS and an absurd lie I “attack intelligence researchers”.
LOL
Your not for eugenics but you wish to promote dysgenics by further lowering the fertility of the most educable women, i.e., the most intelligent.
Crazy, or worse.
I’ve noticed that Meztizo Hispanics are disproportionately concentrated in professions in which one needs strong hands-on skills, like carpentry, construction, home repair, etc. I wonder if this could reflect their relatively strong spatial skills.
I’ve also noticed that “White” Hispanics (like Cubans) seem to do much better in verbal careers, like politics and entrepreneurship. Maybe they skew more towards verbal and less towards spatial.
It seems that the time Trump gives to extending his ad lobbing self into the Twittersphere has been an indispensable element in the extraordinary swathe he cut through a big Republican field and then captured the electoral college votes where it counted so it did him good if you don’t believe in an afterlife! Apparently Margaret Thatcher was notoriously on top of her many briefs and able to catch out her sleepier colleagues. And then there are those ubion officials who control political parties because everyone else is too exhausted by 3 am…. Mind you I think much of that achievement is often alcohol fuelled and so those woth the healthier livers may have an additional advantage m.
I don’t know what dsygenics is, so Googled it.
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/dysgenic
I don’t see how you got this from my views and argument.
Sure, that seems plausible. Plus I think a significant number of the highest-end white Cubans are at least substantially Jewish, with an extreme Verbal skew.
And I think the pattern is even clearer if you focus on the Meso-American Hispanics, like the MexAms, who are probably over 75% of the total. Their higher-performing individuals are far more likely to become engineers than lawyers or financiers, partly because the latter professions are considered a little “dishonest.” My guess is that it’s a mixture of genetic and cultural factors, reinforcing each other.
If Trump ever got a decent night’s sleep maybe he’d say something sensible. As it is, he has Twittered away so much credibility with his late-night driveling that he headed for near certain defeat by the serial plagiarizer, past opponent of desegregation and clearly demented Joe Biden.
“Africans carry surprising amount of Neanderthal DNA
By Michael PriceJan. 30, 2020
For 10 years, geneticists have told the story of how Neanderthals—or at least their DNA sequences—live on in today’s Europeans, Asians, and their descendants. Not so in Africans, the story goes, because modern humans and our extinct cousins interbred only outside of Africa.
A new study overturns that notion, revealing an unexpectedly large amount of Neanderthal ancestry in modern populations across Africa. It suggests much of that DNA came from Europeans migrating back into Africa over the past 20,000 years. ”
Perhaps we can focus on the energetic plumber with an IQ of 100 who worked at plumbing 15 hours a day and spent 4 hours researching the real estate opportunities he saw thanks to his plumbing – now construction and real estate holding – business which puts him in some Forbes list.
I’m not a fan of the “name drop a prolific researcher (Arthur Jensen wrote over 400 papers, Hans Eysenck wrote about 80 books and over 1600 papers) and claim he supports me without giving a specific reference” game, but I’ll at least try to play along.
The most recent paper from Jensen I see on the topic is this.
https://www1.udel.edu/educ/gottfredson/30years/Rushton-Jensen30years.pdf
There he seems to affirm the differences, but gives no numbers and makes no comment on genetics vs. environment.
That paper gives three references from Eysenck and fifteen references with Jensen as first author.
The most recent Eysenck reference is this, but I can’t find a PDF.
https://mankindquarterly.org/archive/issue/32-1/8
The 1984 Eysenck reference is a book chapter with a substantial (but very equivocal IMHO) discussion of genetic vs. environmental explanations for racial differences. This is the closest thing to a conclusion I see (page 285). PDF of the book is available on Libgen.
https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-1-4684-4658-6_8
Eysenck’s 1971 book: Race, Intelligence and Education
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/406402
sounds promising, but is focused on blacks.
I did not see any discussion of Hispanic environmental vs. genetic differences in Jensen’s The g Factor, but it is possible I missed it. It is a big book.
Jensen’s 1973 book Educability and group differences has a great deal of discussion about “Mexicans.” This page from Emil has a link and some comments.
https://emilkirkegaard.dk/en/?p=4132
That book does have what seems to be a VERY relevant discussion on pp. 306-312
It tends to confirm your point IMO. I am concerned about it being based on two particular tests though. I think that makes the methodology vulnerable to differing average ability profiles by race. Perhaps one of the experts here could comment on how that might affect the analysis?
Some excerpts.
That is very interesting. I find it surprising that I am unable to find an equivalent discussion in The g Factor 25 years later. Any thoughts why that might be?
Feel free to give your own SPECIFIC Jensen and Eysenck references if you don’t like those.
Here is a paper somewhat similar to the Lasker et al. paper we are discussing, only it includes Hispanics.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/332610894_Biogeographic_Ancestry_Cognitive_Ability_and_Socioeconomic_Outcomes
And here is a plot of of cognitive ability vs. percent European ancestry for Hispanics.

I commented on that graphic in this iSteve post.
https://www.unz.com/isteve/biogeographic-ancestry/#comment-2790072
Emil’s Rpubs for that paper breaks down Hispanic ancestry by European, African, and Amerindian.
https://rstudio-pubs-static.s3.amazonaws.com/259501_069f8c321aa340449f109066bb1fdf8d.html
The Amerindian effect is rather small with by my eye no effect being (just) within the confidence interval. As is typical though, the African effect is larger.
P.S. I’ll also note that your comment was again full of evasion and rhetoric. Hard data and real references, not so much. Doesn’t seem much like the comment of a “serious scientist” to me. Perhaps people who are occupying a glass house should go a bit easier on the stone throwing? And before you point me to tens of thousands of words worth of your articles or entire bodies of work from prolific researchers how about giving some specific references which respond to MY points?
Actually, the 1971 Eysenck book approvingly quoted long sections of Jensen’s analysis on pp. 120-126, though I never bothered looking at Jensen’s original material, which he apparently later included in his 1973 book. I stumbled across it by accident while doing some follow-up reading on my Race/IQ article 7 or 8 years ago. The fact that Richwine apparently never noticed it while doing a Harvard Ph.D. dissertation on exactly that issue hardly speaks to the quality of his research skills.
Look, you’re a fanatic IQist, and that’s perfectly fine, but don’t misrepresent someone who raises serious doubts about your religious dogma.
The point I repeatedly made in my articles and mentioned in this thread is that there are a plethora of large-sample IQ results for various ethnic groups that jump around by 10-20 points during just a generation or so even after Flynn-adjustment. So I think that the data is just too noisy and changeable to rely upon in the way IQists do.
You still haven’t explained why you think Italian-American schoolchildren used to have IQs of around 80, but are now close to 100, or why the IQ of Ireland Irish rose by around 15 points in about a generation, or why Jewish-American IQs rose by almost as much during the 20th century. There are many, many additional cases along these lines.
Richwine seemed to think it was because the past generations of psychometricians were all “racists” so maybe that’s your explanation as well…
One of the authors of the Lasker study, Kirkegaard, filed a defamation suit against you.
What was the outcome?
I noticed Kirkegaard mentioned the suit on his website, and elsewhere a while back, but suddenly went silent and nothing about it has been mentioned since.
I assume given his change from mentioning it and almost boasting he was suing you, to silence, the outcome was not so good for Kirkegaard. Or am I mistaken?
He lost the lawsuit by discontinuance (he won £0 damages) and is liable to pay my legal costs. It is though taking me a long time to sort out the latter – I’m still working on the bill of costs and money he owes me.
Of course as you noted his behaviour changed. Until he realised he lost, he was harassing me across the internet about it with his friends (I got comments such as I “would be made bankrupt” and “100% lose”) and uploading legal letters and documents to his website to intimidate me. He loses, and then he all of sudden goes silent about it… Obvious humiliation and his only strategy now is to try to brush it under the carpet.
You mean you didn’t know. But since you just looked it up, presumably you do know now, unless you already forgot.
Your idea was:
so why not think about that a bit.
You’re saying female education cuts the fertility rate, so the more education a woman has the fewer children she will have.
And which women will have the fewest children?
QED, right?
This plumber sounds an awful bore. A sort of blue-collar Trump. He should work less, get a prescription for sleeping pills and try to develop some worthwhile cultural or intellectual interests. For example, he could take up collecting antique plumbing hardware, toilet seats and the like, an activity that might, by virtue of the Flynn Effect, raise his modest IQ by a point or two.
Agree of course.
But then I could not understand why anyone would be confused based on your original comment.
Thanks for finally including a specific reference. I missed that discussion because I searched for Hispanic rather than Mexican (and forgot to go back and double check after seeing the Jensen version).
I would like to emphasize this excerpt from page 124 (emphasis mine).
(1) Mexican-American children are by far the lowest in socioeconomic status, being over three times as much below the whites as are the negroes. (This statistic does not take into account the additional fact, very important for school work, that English is the only language spoken in the child’s home in 96.5% of white homes, 98.2% of negro homes, but only in 19.7% of Mexican-American homes; in the lastmentioned homes, Spanish or some other foreign language is the only language spoken in 14.2% of all cases!) Thus on an environmentalist hypothesis, Mexican-American children should do much worse than negro children on IQ tests and school work. (2) On tests of non-verbal intelligence, i.e. culture fair tests, Mexican-Americans are hardly inferior to whites; both groups are markedly superior to negroes. (3) On verbal IQ and school achievement, MexicanAmericans are still superior to negroes, although inferior to whites. (4) On rote memory, negroes are equal to whites, Mexican-Americans are inferior in both groups. These results would seem to defy explanation in purely environmentalistic terms.
The discussion of subgroups on pp. 127-128 is also interesting. And the pages through 140 provide a vigorous argument against environmentalism. Followed in the Epilogue by a vigorous argument against affirmative action.
Unfortunately, though it has a list of further reading, Eysenck’s book does not give explicit references in the text. I think this is the relevant Jensen paper with the original work we are discussing.
A. R. Jensen et al ‘Environment, heredity and intelligence’, Harvard Reprint Series No 2, 1969
I am not finding that book in its entirety, but this page appears to have the relevant papers (but I don’t see the analysis we are discussing).
https://arthurjensen.net/?p=838
This also seems somewhat relevant (but not concerning group differences).
A. R. Jensen ‘Estimation of the limits of heritability of traits by comparison of monzygotic and dizygotic twins’, Proceedings of the National Academy of Science of the United States of America, No 58, 1967
https://www.pnas.org/content/58/1/149
This 1973 paper has an exposition of the results we are discussing.
https://arthurjensen.net/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/How-Biased-Are-Culture-Loaded-Tests-1973-by-Arthur-Robert-Jensen.pdf
It references this 1968 paper which I think is the original source (based on the book publication dates).
Jensen, A. R. Another look at culture-fair tests. In Western Regional Conference on Testing Problems, Proceedings for 1968, “Measurement for Educational Planning.” Berkeley, Calif.: Educational Testing Service, Western Office, 1968. Pp. 50-104.
That is reference 71 at https://arthurjensen.net/?page_id=9 but they don’t give a link. And I can’t find either that book or the reprint they mention.
As I noted earlier, my big concern with this work is that by using the PPVT and Raven’s Matrices Jensen was as much detecting differences in cognitive profile (e.g. verbal vs. spatial) as he was differences in culture fairness.
I just searched The g Factor for Peabody and PPVT and am finding no mention of this work. That does not encourage me. Does anyone know if my cognitive profile concerns have been discussed in the 50 years since this work was done?
LOL! Which is why I spent hours digging around for vague references from you which run counter to my priors. And where exactly have I misrepresented you?
Ron, you really are a bit quick with the ad hominems these days (I have been seeing you do it with other commenters as well). Reread my comments and notice that I have criticized your comments (for rhetoric and evasion) but not you personally. And I stand by my comments there. In fact, I think this most recent comment of yours just further validates them.
That is one reason neither you nor I should have complete confidence in what we believe. But it is hardly a compelling argument for the genetic gap being zero. BTW, I find your comments 251 and 259 quite reasonable. Not sure why you are being so hostile to my points if those are your more specific views. Perhaps you have decided I am on the “other side” for whatever reason?
Because no one has asked me until now? Improved environment and cultural adaptation (e.g. language) seem adequate to explain that. Though I think we both are well aware that the causes of the Flynn Effect are not settled science.
The question is whether the more recent immigrants will rise to the same average (or near enough so as not to matter) as natives. And neither you nor I I know the answer to that with certainty. Don’t pretend you do.
The same argument has been and still is being made with respect to blacks. Do you think the B-W IQ gap in the US is ever going to close to 0? If not, which pieces of evidence do you find compelling there which are lacking in the Hispanic version of the question?
BTW, if you look at my comments above you will notice my focus on 2nd generation immigrants. This was the reason.
I’m not a big fan of the “putting words in my mouth” gambit. You are better than that.
Being willfully obtuse seems to be one of Oliver’s tactics. It is not an endearing characteristic.
FWIW, that is how I interpreted his original “I don’t know what dsygenics is” statement. I suppose it is possible for someone to talk as much about these topics as he does and not have ever run across it, but is it likely?
Notice that the RationalWiki hit piece on Emil uses the word “dysgenics” multiple times.
https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Emil_Kirkegaard
Women who stay in education the longest usually have the fewest children, but women who spend longest in education won’t necessarily all be smart. What is the average IQ of a university student? Seems to vary a lot depending on the subject studied.
Anyway, my concern and argument has nothing whatsoever to do with intelligence.
There are more humane (non-coercive) and practical methods to reduce fertility rates, not just empowering women through opportunity of education. I only mentioned the latter because it has been very effective in reducing fertility rates (see the charts or diagrams I already posted).
One might point out that women in the Western world already have good opportunities to a long education, however, there is still sexism that prevents them from having equal opportunities such as in jobs. Some women opt to stay at home and have kids because of encountering sexism, so they choose kids over career. I would like to see that reversed.
Actually it only quotes one of Kirkegaard’s tweets when he uses the odd term:
“Dysgenics is real. Eugenics or Western civilization dies. Choose wisely.”
Dysgenics > eugenics look very similar. Most people not familiar with the word would think they’re the same thing. Furthermore, when this quote was first added to the page in 2018, dysgenics was not mentioned because of probable confusion with the same word.
https://rationalwiki.org/w/index.php?title=Emil_Kirkegaard&diff=1965082&oldid=1963858
I have no familiarity with the term, nor likely do other editors on the article.
Well, perhaps I’m mistaken but I had the clear impression that you’d never previously bothered to read my long series of articles on Race/IQ from a few years ago, and that greatly irritated me. At the time, they provoked an enormous amount of Internet discussion on that topic, probably more than anything else had in many years. Here’s a link to a summary of the debate and the topic series:
https://www.unz.com/runz/raceiq-the-entire-series-and-debate/
https://www.unz.com/author/ron-unz/topic/race-iq/?ItemOrder=ASC
Indeed, Nicholas Wade cited my analysis in his 2014 book, and that citation soon became the central point of controversy between him and the 139 leading geneticists who signed the letter denouncing him and demanding that he be purged from the media:
https://www.unz.com/runz/raceiq-should-scientists-bother-reading-the-books-they-denounce/
Towards the end of my original article, I had summarized my conclusions in the following paragraph:
https://www.unz.com/article/race-iq-and-wealth/
I think others came to similar conclusions. I remember that one or two of the most energetic IQists on the Internet actually abandoned their previous beliefs, and shut down the websites at which they’d previously spent years promoting IQism.
Again, I might be entirely mistaken and perhaps you had indeed read my articles, but simply came to different conclusions. But if you’re a zealous IQist and you’d never bothered reading my articles, I think my annoyance was fully justified.
I have read one or two of your articles on race versus IQ and thought them informative and interesting. However, your assumptions about that question are open to challenge on several grounds. For example, you say,
Here I think is reflected a widespread and serious misapprehension, or rather two misapprehensions: namely, (1) that intelligence is a “trait” rather than a collection of traits; and (2) that intelligence is independent of the environmental history 0f the organism, e.g., education, but by no means limited to that (which is why country folk, are smarter than city folk at distinguishing a bull from a cow).
In this assumption, you take the IQist view, that IQ tests provide an estimate of a property called “general intelligence,” or for greater scientific cred., just g – as basic as a fundamental constant in physics. But for reasons that I have noted briefly here, the brain isn’t like a computer. There is no central processing unit that determines computing power, FLOPS or IQ. Rather:
And that’s why intelligence is not a “trait”, singular, and why IQ tests don’t measure intelligence.
Yes, IQ tests measure competence at various intellectual tasks, competence at which may, if combined with other advantageous traits, promote material and social success in Western society. But those competences are of a narrow range and depend for maximum expression on extensive Western-style education. There are many other forms of intelligence, as the dictionary defines that term, and different forms of intelligence depend on different neurological systems, the genetic determinants of which, in the individual, vary more or less independently, and the phenotypic expression of which depend on the environmental history, including education, of the individual.
So attempting to rank people differing in race, culture or creed by means of an IQ test is absurd. You can compare Paganini with Pearlman and perhaps decide who is the better violinist, or you can compare Feynman with Clerk Maxwell to decide who was the greater physicist. But to compare Einstein with J.S. Bach or W. Shakespeare to decide who is most intelligence is ridiculous. Those guys were each among the best at at what they were best at, and what the three were best at were different things, each with a distinct neurological and experiential basis. And beside what they were best at, they may have been complete clutzes.
I agree with your views on race/race and IQ, excluding this one issue:
https://www.unz.com/runz/does-race-exist-do-hills-exist/
In contrast what I argue is only those ‘smaller population groups’ are meaningful to population genetics and bio-medicine, not aggregates/clusters of them at the continental level (it’s incorrect the small populations are naturally grouped into higher-level clusters; any clustering is arbitrary.) I therefore like William W. Howell’s change of Livingstone’s (1962) aphorism “There are no races, there are only clines” –> to “There are no races there are only [local] populations”.
I find larger-scale/continental groups aren’t at all useful to study, unless analysing traits under climatic selection. Similar conclusions were reached by the anthropologist Grover Krantz (Climatic Races and Descent Groups, 1980) yet few people have read that book.
I submitted deletion request pages for all my RationalWiki articles on individuals. If they’re causing conflicts, delete them – I don’t want the hassle.
Anatoly Karlin, Emil Kirkegaard, etc., could have had their pages deleted.
So what happened?
Well, these same people who complained I wrote hit-pieces on them like you are complaining now voted to keep their articles I voted to delete. You really couldn’t make it up…
Karlin has trailed me across the internet for 2 years moaning about his page, when I requested and voted for its deletion out of good faith:
https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/RationalWiki:Articles_for_deletion/Anatoly_Karlin
Now who voted to keep the article despite still complaining about it non-stop:
Yep Anatoly Karlin voted to keep his article when I voted to delete it.
I always told you I was not dealing with sane people.
I gave these people who complain about the articles an opportunity to delete them but they refused, but these people still follow me across the internet complaining about their pages. Karlin has made like 100 tweets complaining about his RationalWiki, while attacking me (despite he voted to keep his page I wanted deleted). It’s insane.
As you have most likely noticed, I responded to yours at #275 with a comment at #276, inadvertently doing so without a link back.
As you can see from my comment history, I started commenting at The Unz Review in 2014, and I was reading a bit before that. My familiarity with your work dates from about then (though I had seen some of your comments elsewhere and found them insightful, big part of the reason I came here) so I missed those Race/IQ debates happening in real time. Since then I have read a number of your articles on the topic, but not all and not systematically. I certainly don’t claim to have anything like an encyclopedic knowledge of them.
Thanks! After looking through those links I see there were more articles than I realized (17). Providing the list of your own articles in the second link (most from 8 years ago, not “a few years ago”) earlier would have helped me find your most relevant articles. Some of which I had not read.
I think adding your definition of the “Strong IQ Hypothesis” from that same article helps gives some context to your excerpt.
You contrast that with “Weak IQ Hypothesis,” which I don’t see given an equally detailed definition (at https://www.unz.com/runz/raceiq-is-it-game-over/ you describe it as “which suggests a much more limited genetic influence upon IQ”). But I suspect comments 251 and 259 above (which, as I said before, I find reasonable) provide an example. In particular, this excerpt from comment 251 mentions differences in both group averages and ability profiles (note relevance of the latter specifics to my Jensen PS).
FWIW, that statement seems completely consistent with my comment 222 request for clarification.
As I see it there are a few issues here which could stand clarification and/or discussion.
1. Hispanic is a very imprecise category. Your more detailed comments and in particular your articles are much better at being clear about this by focusing on particular subsets (e.g. Mexican-American, but even that lacks precision).
2. Individual pairs of populations vary greatly by how strong/weak the IQ hypothesis is in their particular case (e.g. my comments are full of statements about the Europe/Africa IQ differences having a more significant environmental component than the US B/W IQ differences).
3. For particular population pairs (e.g. US white natives and children of Mexican immigrant) we could use more effort at estimating the differences and the relative balance of genetic and environmental effects.
4. “Strong” and “Weak” are very qualitative terms. I think that tends to add to the heat vs. light ratio for this conversation. It would be helpful to have some discussion of ranges. For example, I might approximate strong as 80-100% genetic and weak as 0-20% genetic, with a range of intermediate possibilities which I don’t think fit either term that well. I think other people can differ greatly in their implicit priors for those ranges. Note that by my lights your 3-5 IQ point estimate for a possible Hispanic genetic gap falls into the intermediate range.
I tend to view your work more as a valuable corrective to some of Lynn et al.’s more extreme positions rather than as a decisive refutation of their ideas in total (trying to understand your points in detail and whether or not you have gotten the balance right is more the focus of my questions). IMHO this conversation could use a bit more of people working together to come up with a range of agreement and less dividing into hostile opposing camps.
At some point do you plan to update your Race and IQ work to include more recent developments like:
– IQ GWAS and PGS.
– Admixture analysis of the sort described in Lasker et al. (2019) which is the topic of this blog post.
– Davide Piffer’s work looking at correlations of worldwide IQs and IQ PGS results.
? These techniques offer far more powerful ways of looking at the genetic vs. environmental contribution to IQ question than were available in 2012 (much less 1970).
P.S. Any thoughts on my concern about the Jensen Mexican-American work being vulnerable to influence by differing ability profiles? That work seems to be a linchpin of your argument:
https://www.unz.com/runz/raceiq-a-coda-on-mexican-american-iq/
and I am sincerely concerned about how little mention of it I see in more recent work (e.g. The g Factor). BTW, linking that specific article earlier would have saved us (me in particular) some time.
Fucking idiots, IQ inheritance is not the canonical 70% you’re talking about, but 100%, because you don’t consider the test-retest differences.
The hereditarian hypothesis for B-W was originally 50%-75%:
– Jensen, 1973, p. 363
Later Jensen revised this to 80%:
It seems between-group heritability in general (not B-W specific) he estimated 50%:
– Jensen and Rushton, 2005
More recently however, the hereditarian hypothesis has been lowered to above 20%:
– Winegard et al. 2020
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/339502675_Dodging_Darwin_Race_evolution_and_the_hereditarian_hypothesis
So this leaves:
0-19% environmentalism
above 20% hereditarianism
I consider this range to be too high for the environmentalist view. As I mentioned elsewhere my cut- off would be 12.5% based on Loehlin et al. 1975.
0-12.5% environmentalism
above 12.6% hereditarianism
It seems though since hereditarianism is such a big range (either using my own or Winegard et al. ranges), this can be split into ‘moderate’ and ‘strong’ divisions. The latter would refer to Jensenism i.e. the original hereditarian hypothesis.
Perhaps we can agree the environmentalist view was never only 0.
I don’t support the idea proponents of hereditarianism are censored or persecuted – they’re clearly not because they have had their articles published in mainstream journals. However, there’s no denying Jensen’s hereditarian hypothesis is widely considered to be racist and its proponents are commonly labelled white supremacists, Nazis, far-right, and so on. Considering I spent 5 years looking into people who support Jensenism and writing their RationalWiki articles – I found this to be virtually always the case. The hereditarian hypothesis with very few exceptions is supported by people with extreme right wing views.
What is interesting to me is how moderate proponents of hereditarianism (not Jensenism) have avoided all these labels and are not accused of racism. Loehlin et al. 1975 are a good example since they argue the evidence best favours either environmentalist or moderate hereditarianism interpretations. They estimate B-W heritability is 0.125. These ‘moderate’ (or weak) hereditarians have avoided the racist label because their more moderate viewpoint doesn’t seem to attract white nationalists and the far-right. I cannot find any bad racist-type ‘associations’ for John C. Loehlin nor has he ever made any offensive comments on race, although he’s a eugenicist which I find distasteful.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_C._Loehlin
In contrast, the typical Jensenite will be connected to racist/white supremacist groups like the Pioneer Fund etc., the dodgy OpenPsych, Mankind Quarterly, etc., while having a history of making racist comments. Davide Piffer calling immigrants from Africa to Italy “gorillas” is a good example. https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Davide_Piffer#Racism
If hereditarianism is ever to be taken serious, it needs more Loehlin’s and less Piffer’s.
You might want to pay more attention to this point.
2. Individual pairs of populations vary greatly by how strong/weak the IQ hypothesis is in their particular case (e.g. my comments are full of statements about the Europe/Africa IQ differences having a more significant environmental component than the US B/W IQ differences).
Keep moving those goalposts. You just make it more likely that “hereditarianism” is correct by decreasing that threshold.
No. Plenty of evidence to the contrary. I might be able to agree with something like: “the sane environmentalist view in private conversation was never only 0.”
You are probably talking about the white Hamites of North Africa, who have to a certain extent also mixed with sub-Saharan Africans (especially in the Horn of Africa). Pure Negroids with no Hamitic admixture have no Neanderthal admixture.
Hence Jensen estimated 50% in general for populations, but 50-75% and later 80% specifically for US B-W.
I’m not a proponent of hereditarianism – it is proponents of hereditarianism themselves who are now lowering the threshold and weakening their hypothesis:
“…the view that a substantial proportion (20% or more) of differences in psychological traits within and among human populations is caused by genes” – Winegard et al. 2020 [note by “among” it is clear in their paper they mean between, so they are talking about both within/between-group heritability being above 20%]
A much similar occurrence is in the more broad debate about whether races exist (my position is they don’t, but it is not me weakening my viewpoint, instead it’s you pesky ‘race realists’ again…):
“The problem with weak versions of racial naturalism is that they do not contrast with anti-realism about biological race. When race naturalists weaken their position they end up agreeing with their opponents about human biology, and defending a trivialised definition of race.”
– Hochman, 2014
It is not environmentalists weakening their hypothesis, but hereditarians. Since Winegard and other hereditarians move the thresholds and weaken the hereditarian hypothesis – I might as well play along. As I explained, my preference would be to now divide moderate hereditarianism from Jensenism because otherwise the hereditarianism range is too big.
Disingenuous. You know this is a straw-man. The environmentalist view was never zero heritability. And usually when you find someone who claims 0, they don’t deny the possibility of above 0 – this includes a Marxist scientist:
“Theorists such as Lewontin have never denied the possibility of genetic influences; what they have denied is that there is any convincing evidence of any genetic influences.”
– Knapp et al. (1996)
I hope I remembered to thank you many years ago for saving me the time and effort of finishing Lynn & Vanbenen’s book looking accusingly at me from the bedroom mantel piece when I remember reading of Australian Aborigines and Khoi San peoole having IQs under 60 and being told solemnly by Rushton that it wasn’t absurd or just useless. Your observations of rapid large increases in measured IQs that obviously weren’t genetically caused made immediate and convincing sense. And, as you know, I came to h-bd with respect for Eysenck and Jensen and a principal interest in defending Australia from continued dysgenics (as well as immediate cultural retrogression) by – inter alia – maintaining de facto selection of immigrants for IQ. Now I have a request to you, being so much better read and otherwise equipped on these questions than I, that you give us your analysis and solution of the big Flynn Effect puzzle that presumbly nobody mentions because old lefty Flynn is no man’s yes man when it comes to saying the fashionably acceptable.
The problem is this. The Flynn Effect is strongest on the supposedly culture fair Raven s Matrices rather than on the tests which are at least in part of crystallised intelligence such as typical verbal and math tests. How come? And it is quite obvious to anyone who tests himself that Raven’s Matrices, even if “culture fair” (as to which I would have a few questions of experienced psychometricians**) that there can be a big training effect.
** one question would be how far age of test taker and cultural background affects the time it takes to neutralise the training effect and achieve level playing field.
Here, for the more committed amti-IQists is something which should keep up their courage though not I think likely to do much for the confronting evidence about African-Americans. From today’s Australian Finan city Review:
PS Many of the extreme IQ ists fail to even mention the fact that – apart from lacking Neanderthal and Denisovan contributions , genetic variety in Africa is huge and greatly in excess of Eurasian variety. They must be very boring people not to notice how gorgeous a high proportion of East African women are. Many, even if they aren’t winning marathons have beautiful fine noses that they must have got from the Nilotics even when they identify as Bantu.
20% or more doesn’t mean 20% it means 20-100%.
Yes I know, although arguably the range is 20-99% since virtually no hereditarian argues 100%. There’s a quote from Hans Eysenck in one of his books who criticises 100%.
None of this matters to me as this range isn’t realistic.
There’s no evidence for above-0 between-group heritability-
There’s still no good reason to believe black-white IQ differences are due to genes
https://www.vox.com/the-big-idea/2017/6/15/15797120/race-black-white-iq-response-critics
My personal view though is genetic factors are trivially involved based on probability, but this is only based using Jensen’s reasoning ‘High within-group heritability cannot prove between-group heritability, but it does increase the a priori likelihood of finding genetic components in the average difference between groups.’ I see no contradiction between this and acknowledging there’s “no good reason” to believe black-white IQ differences are due to genes because we lack any direct scientific evidence while strong claims of hereditarianism >50% are arguably falsified by transracial twin adoption studies and various other things I’ve already discussed in my comments above.
Another thing is that Bo’s numbers are the range of estimates which could be called hereditarian, versus Jensen’s estimate, so you’re comparing things in different categories, i.e. not making sense.
@res, @mikemikev or anyone else who thinks this like Thompson:
If Lasker et al. 2019 is an important study and “wraps up the issue of genetic factors in racial differences in intelligence” –
1. Why is it published in a low-tier journal with a bad reputation?
2. Why are virtually no scientists (excluding Kevin Bird) citing or taking serious the results of the study? The paper has 9 citations but 8 of them are self-citations by co-authors or are from Mankind Quarterly.
https://scholar.google.com/scholar?cites=3407205024582536480&as_sdt=2005&sciodt=0,5&hl=en
May be of interest:
https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/RationalWiki:Saloon_bar#Why_won.27t_RationalWiki_make_an_article_for_Oliver_Smith
If they hide what I wrote from there, view the comments:
https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Special:Contributions/Sniper
I have found Oliver doesn’t lie about his accounts, but at the same time isn’t exactly truthful since he knows the person behind accounts that aren’t him are his twin brother.
Oliver has a twin (born 1990); Ben and Bo Winegard’s RationalWiki articles were created by the twin named Darryl who edits RationalWiki as Johns (formerly John66). So while Oliver is telling the truth he didn’t create these pages, he doesn’t point out his brother did-
https://rationalwiki.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Contributions/Johns&target=Johns
https://rationalwiki.org/w/index.php?title=Ben_Winegard&action=history
17:47, 30 July 2020 Johns (talk | contribs) . . (2,078 bytes) (+2,078) . . (Created page with “{{race}} ”’Benjamin Mark Winegard”’, best known as ”’Ben Winegard”’ is an American right-wing psychologist and HBD pseudoscience advocate. He writes articles for Qui…”)
There is a blogger (an old man) who has spent hundreds of hours going through the accounts and matching them to Oliver’s brother:
http://coldfusioncommunity.net/anglo-pyramidologist/darryl-l-smith/skeptic-from-britain/john66/
http://coldfusioncommunity.net/anglo-pyramidologist/rationalwiki-smith-brothers-conspiracy-theory/
Some people confuse Oliver with his brother’s accounts on RationalWiki, and Emil Kirkegaard seems to have done this. For example, the user ‘Skeptical’ who Kirkegaard criticises for making edits on his RationalWiki hit-piece, is Darryl, not Oliver.
“To put it differently, try driving around a town like Tuskegee, Alabama, and studying the local fauna. The best and the brightest did not stay down home on the farm.”
Where did these supposed “best and brightest” go?
Detroit?
I’ll take the farm boys any day.
Yes siree:
Why do you change the subject when shown to be false, only to make the exact same point at another time? Are you going to admit that what you were saying is false?
It lasted less than half an hour (per the Fossil record).
This is like a soap opera. If only I was able to just change the channel.
These links provide some more background (in addition to the links in comment 294).
http://coldfusioncommunity.net/anglo-pyramidologist/identity/
https://www.tefter.io/bookmarks/45215/readable
It is worth noting that regression to the mean moderates those trends in the next generation. For both cases.
Fortunately, they didn’t rape him, or challenge him to dueling banjos.
No, because nothing I posted was false:
I never said 20% or more means only 20%.
I was simply discussing different estimates for between-group heritability in the literature. Jensen has 50% (but 50-75% and later 80% specifically for B-W) while Winegard et al. have above 20% (20-100%).
I then said it would make more sense to split Winegard’s and Jensen’s ranges into “moderate” (or weak) and “strong” hereditarianism. The latter being Jensenism.
0-20%: environmentalist
21-49%: moderate hereditarianism
50-100%: strong hereditarianism (aka Jensenism)
I said though I would prefer to lower environmentalist to 12.5%.
My working hypothesis for this (and I agree with you, compared to the astonishing lead countries of European origin had over the rest of the world in spring 1914, the current situation of Japan, Taiwan, Singapore being more productive per capita and better places to live means the west is clearly losing) is that our (speaking as a citizen of one of the less astonishing western countries) advantage was the systemic prejudice in favour of men.
This prejudice died away (for no good reason apart from fashion, there was little to nothing to demonstrate any economic advantage to it) with feminism, and several decades out this has made itself manifest in societal leadership positions. And Angela Merkel lets in 400,000 middle eastern young men to Germany, what a surprise, they end up attacking young German women, and Theresa May manages to make no decisions at all regarding Brexit.
But I don’t think the big systemic decisions are actually the issue. I believe that the economic advantage higher IQ countries enjoy is a result of the compounding of individual decisions, and Theresa May and (my personal) interaction with any institutional body heavy on women demonstrate that women prefer to make fewer decisions than do men. So fewer decisions, less to compound, less relative advantage.
I also believe that the differential between the sexes is likely smaller in East Asia, in large part because of the female suicide figures. China is likely the only country in the world where female successful suicide is close to that of men. In every western country, women commit suicide at a much lower rate than do men (women *attempt* suicide, by measure of report attempts, at a much higher rate); that counts strongly towards the decisiveness of East Asian women.
Winegard wasn’t making an estimate, he was defining the word hereditarian. One could agree with that definition while being an environmentalist, or having no opinion on BGH. They’re two different things. True or not?
I am amused though not particularly surprised that neither Ron Unz nor anyone else has risen to the challenge of showing that G, or general intelligence, which is what IQ tests are supposed to estimate, is more than a triviality likely accounting for no more than 10%, and certainly no more than 20% of the variation among individuals in specific manifestations of intelligence.
You raise an interesting question, but there is probably much more to the answer than you suggest. Among the advantages of the West in the year 1900 was the fact that they got the industrial revolution first, were able therefore to accumulate great quantities of capital thereby to raise the productivity of labor and the standard of living though infrastructure and industrial investment.
However, this fundamental advantage diminished in significance as:
(a) globalization transferred technology from West to East;
(b) a Western assumption of intellectual and moral superiority allowed social developments that had huge negative impacts on labor productivity — union labor monopolies, for example;
(c) the West abandoned meritocracy for “social democracy,” a system that handicaps the best and the brightest, while imposing a huge overhead on economic activity, e.g., the UK ridiculous Health Service, among the most dysfunctional holy cows on earth;
(d) the Western nations murdered a large proportion of their most able men in the trenches during WW1, while the Russians and the Germans repeated the insanity in WW2.
They define hereditarianism (or the “hereditarian view”) by the estimate.
Here’s what Winegard et al say:
Now compare Jensen and Rushton:
Not sure why you find this difficult to understand.
You’re taking general statements about hereditarianism and pretending they’re estimates (trying to imply that 20-100% is something like 20%, bizarrely) so you can pretend your opponents made some kind of retreat and “changed their views”. I notice you like to spin this “changed their views” lie from misrepresented evidence. Is it some kind of projection? And right in the OP you’ve got hereditarians actually estimating 50-70%. And yet you still cherry pick some general statement and claim hereditarians retreated and “changed their views”. Your lies are so transparent it’s laughable. Why do you bother?
All these comments are off-topic, but the individuals on those URLs are disgruntled trolls who sued me and lost. As I mentioned in #246 I don’t much care about these people writing claims about me on their blogs since I know none of them are true.
I’ve had 3 defamation suits filed against me – I won one by discontinuance, while the other two were dismissed before any service of process. In other words, I’ve effectively won every lawsuit. What does that tell you?
The crazy blogger behind coldfusioncommunity filed a lawsuit against me and 9 other c0-defendants, including the WMF. Unsurprisingly the case was dismissed.
http://coldfusioncommunity.net/w/index.php/User:Abd/Lomax_v._WikiMedia_Foundation/Amended_Complaint
https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/14573324/lomax-v-wikimedia-foundation-inc/
Of course someone who files a lawsuit and loses is going to be pissed off, so that blogger now spends virtually his entire time online spreading lies and false allegations about me.
100 years of the same IQ scores, with affirmative action and better environments all the time. From WW1 black IQ scores to today: 85 IQ.
You clearly do support dysgenics and nothing else.
Some people will still deny genetics even with PGS score. Deny science all you want retard. Some people just can’t be helped.
You complain about lies and false allegations being made against you, yet seem oblivious to the fact that you make frequent insulting personal attacks on others. Try to stick to evaluating arguments.
Speaking of evaluating arguments…I would be very interested in getting opinions on an issue I raised here earlier. Especially from people who have deeper background in the IQ literature than I do.
To that end, let me lay out my reasoning in more detail. In comment 263 I gave a specific reference and an extended excerpt. The reference.
I was unable to find the exact paper underlying this work (if anyone has a reference please let me know, especially if full text is available) so I will focus on the account on pp. 306-312 in that book.
The methodology is to use a pair of IQ tests–one relatively culture-free and the other relatively culture-loaded–to evaluate the relative importance of genetics and environment on phenotypic IQ. Here is an excerpt.
This is a good idea so I can see why Eysenck found it convincing. But I see some problems with this approach.
First, the emphasis on culture ignores non-cultural environmental influences (e.g. diet or environmental toxins). I don’t know of any way to address this other than to try to minimize the level of those non-environmental differences. This issue would tend to underestimate environmental differences in some cases (small cultural difference, larger other differences), but might overestimate them in other cases (large cultural differences, small other differences).
Second (and I think more important), the two tests chosen target different parts of the IQ ability profile (in simple form I would say PPVT is more verbal and Raven more spatial, but am interested in a more nuanced take from an expert). If the groups under evaluation have different average ability profiles with respect to those two tests then that would introduce a bias which would distort the apparent genetic and environmental conclusions. I believe this to be the case.
As evidence for a small genetic contribution to the white-Mexican differences Jensen presents regressions of the two test scores vs. each other in Figure 17.5 (page 310, also includes “Negro”). There we see that Mexican’s score (relative between the two tests) slightly better than whites on Raven vs. PPVT, but significantly worse than whites on PPVT vs. Raven.
This is consistent with Jensen’s environmental hypothesis so he concludes (roughly, I find the lack of explicitness regarding whites vs. Mexicans in his conclusions interesting) the environmental factors are more important for the white-Mexican difference.
That is a novel and pretty good argument. I found it fairly compelling on my first read. But after reflection I came up with the following issue.
Different ability profiles could influence the relative test results in a way which would mimic the G/E differences Jensen is trying to evaluate. I believe Amerindians are relatively stronger in spatial abilities compared to verbal (also see Ron’ comment 251 on this) vs. whites. Here that would (I believe) show up as a higher relative Raven vs. PPVT score for Mexicans (Amerindian admixed) compared to whites. Which would cause exactly the same effect which Jensen sees in Figure 17.5 and uses to conclude environmental factors are more important. The further problem is by this reasoning a cultural difference might cause observers to conclude there is a difference in genetic ability profile. So as I see it the two effects are severely entangled.
Now, the problem is that both effects (different ability profiles as well as G/E balance between the groups) are likely to be present. The issue is evaluating their relative importance. The best way I can think of is to perform the comparison on groups that are as culturally similar as possible then look at the relative group averages for those tests. A difference in those averages might be used as correction to the Raven vs. PPVT offfset. Also the PPVT vs. Raven plot where blacks score close to whites with both being significantly above Mexicans (more evidence ability profiles are affecting the results? Blacks tend to be relatively stronger in verbal than spatial skills).
As I also mentioned above, the lack of later references to this argument concern me. For example, I can’t find it in The g Factor (written 25 years later). Does anyone see it there? Why would Jensen not include it or offer other follow up work on what seems a novel, interesting, and relevant observation? Does anyone familiar with the literature know what happened to this argument over the years?
To be clear, I am not saying Jensen’s conclusion is “wrong.” Rather that I think it likely overstates the environmental importance to a degree which has not been quantified, but IMHO is likely to be large enough to be important.
What does everyone think of this argument?
P.S. While writing this comment I came across this (68 page) book chapter from 1986 which appears to be highly relevant. I have not had time to look at in detail yet. It mentions Jensen’s 1973 work, but does not go into detail (that I see) beyond this excerpt.
Cultural Influences on Patterns of Abilities in North America
https://www.ets.org/research/policy_research_reports/publications/report/1986/hwnx
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1002/j.2330-8516.1986.tb00196.x
Where are these examples of “insulting personal attacks”? You mean facts or honest opinions you don’t like?
I never said all proponents of hereditarianism have changed their views. However, undeniably some have done and I provided Winegard et al. 2020 as an example. They define hereditarianism as above 20% rather than 50% like Jensen and Rushton (2005). Anyone can simply read the quotes I provided to see this.
Good luck finding where I said Lasker et al changed their views. I only provided Winegard et al. as an example. I also repeatedly clarified there are still ‘strong’ hereditarians (see my comment #301):
Yes there’s still Jensenites around, particularly individuals associated with Mankind Quarterly. And I’m well aware you haven’t changed your view, nor are likely to since you’re a self-described neo-Nazi. Moderate forms of hereditarianism are less compatible with your extreme politics.
I’m not qualified to debate these topics, that’s why I primarily focus not on the scientific arguments but who is making them and what journals they publish in. I’m currently an MA student of Tolkien studies. I have no background in science. If I point out Psych is a low-tier journal (and it’s publisher has a long history of controversy) I don’t see this as a personal attack. I don’t also see it as a personal attack to point out the co-authors are dodgy people, who lack scientific credentials and are associated with controversial (widely considered to be racist and eugenics) groups.
I noted my criticisms have been repeatedly made by Kevin Bird.
I saw your comments earlier, when I was looking at the Nijenhuis paper on Hispanics which I think you linked to later, so will need some more research on this. If the paper on the regression results is not in Jensen’s g factor I will see if it is in any other papers of his in a few day’s time. He sent me some long ago, but I don’t recall a Hispanic one.
Regarding the method of comparing different groups on tests that differ in their supposed culture-bound-ness, I think it is worth trying, but determining the culture loading of tests often boils down to 1-h2, where h2 is a heritability estimate. The remnant is culture (plus error). Rushton tried this on an item by item basis. Again, I will have to look that up.
The interesting thing about the environmental argument is that it is very hard to pin down. Sometimes it is thought to reside in the item. For example, I was shown a WAIS item in which the lamp bulb lacked the part which fitted in to the socket. In South America all lamp bulbs used the Edison screw. In England most used a bayonet fitting. Clearly, a culturally loaded item in that rather rare case. The Peabody is culturally loaded, but more importantly it lacks the logical structure of the Ravens. Raven showed me his item analyses in 2007 at an ISIR conference, and said only 3 or 4 of 60 showed any cultural effects.
Sometimes the environmental effects are said to be present in the test setting, but I think that is better controlled now. Finally, the one you mention, that bad environments in a very general sense depress health and thereby brain functioning. Not sure that that is a strong factor in the US, but very probably a factor in much of the world even 30 years ago, but less the case now.
Will try to get to this, but these are my comments for now.
Some hope! But, yes, it would greatly improve the quality of discussion here at the Unz Review.
But concerning arguments, James, I would be really interested to know how you would respond to the questions I raise at #276.
In particular: (1) Is intelligence “a trait,” as Ron Unz puts it, or is it a collection of traits?
and (2) Is the trait (or are the traits) of intelligence independent of the environmental history of the individual, e.g., education, but by no means limited to that?
In response to (1) my contention is that there are multiple traits of intelligence that are not necessarily closely correlated, hence the development of multiple SAT tests that focus on different aspects of scholastic aptitude.
I would say, further, that there are many traits of intelligence that have little or nothing to do with scholastic aptitude and that are more or less unrelated to scholastic aptitude. These would include forms of memory such as musical, visual, olfactory, etc.; situation awareness, whether on a battlefield, the soccer field, or a cocktail party; emotional awareness and the capacity for emotional manipulation; and many other things.
In response to (2) my contention is that most manifestations of intelligence reflect learning, and that variation in forms of intelligence that fall outside the regular academic curriculum will show much greater variation than forms of intelligence evaluated by an IQ test, all of which are modified by formal education.
From these assumptions, it follows that variation in forms of intelligence other than those cultivated by universal education will be much greater than the variation in scholastic aptitudes evaluated by an IQ test. What that means is that IQ test results must be even less useful in assessing non-academic, than academic, forms of intelligence.
Are these conclusions not correct?
As I also mentioned at #180:
One of the few (moderate) hereditarians who understands this is Loehlin (1992).
Should we do research on race differences in intelligence?
https://psycnet.apa.org/record/1992-34984-001
Note ‘tactful presentation’ e.g. don’t publish in OpenPsych, Psych or Mankind Quarterly.
No, in my view your conclusions are not correct! I thought we had discussed them before, and decided we could not agree. Anyway, let me explain why, because we might be at odds because of definitions, or matters of degree.
Whenever a broad range of people are tested on a broad range of intellectual tasks, a common factor emerges. This usually accounts for 40% of the variance. Group factors, usually no more than 3 or 4 account for roughly another 40%. The rest is individual task variance plus error.
If you don’t want detail, just extract one general factor for epidemiological work. That is, collapse some of the factors into a general one. If you want detail, (or the appearance of detail when giving feedback to a client) bump up the importance of 4 to 5 factors, which gives you more to talk about.
Could there be skills not yet tested? Of course. Might they amount to anything very much? Yet to be proved. All the candidates: multiple intelligence, emotional intelligence, rational intelligence, practical intelligence have disappointed, and contributed little in the way of extra variance accounted for.
So, your self-perception is that you present facts and honest opinions, and the people with whom you disagree are “dodgy”?
No sir.
I’m saying the dodgy/bad individuals associate with Mankind Quarterly, Richard Lynn’s Ulster Institute for Social Research, Pioneer Fund, OpenPsych and Psych (= OpenPsych 2.0). Look these up on Google to see they have incredibly bad reputations. The non-dodgy ones don’t publish in those journals or become associated with those controversial groups. I only ever criticised people on RationalWiki connected to OpenPsych and MQ.
OpenPsych became inactive primarily because of my criticisms and exposure. https://www.clinpsy.org.uk/forum/viewtopic.php?t=20914 Psych is the same dodgy people (they couldn’t even come up with much a different name).
But there is no persecution of researchers with those views. It is funny how often your disavowals of persecution and need to brag about doing so conflict.
Again, you show your dishonesty and your inability to think rationally.
Genetic tests are far more of a science than the IQ tests you swear by. What Kari Stefansson, founder of deCODE, the genetic testing company that revealed Watson’s african ancestry, said was that the online genome of Watson used for his test had some errors. Not that it was unusable. It only means that the percentage numbers of Watson’s african and asian ancestries, that his test found, may be a bit off. Not that it proves that Watson did not have any african ancestry at all as you are so stupidly assuming. As if a prominent DNA testing business would risk it’s reputation by lying brazenly about something that can be so easily disproved. It has been 13 years and no one has disproved that finding. What does that tell you?
And you drew an illogical conclusion from that fact. Which made you look like a retard.
There are so many racists, such as yourself, who have an ideologically vested interest in disproving Watson’s african ancestry. And it is so easy to do that. Yet no one has been able to do it. Again, what does that tell us?
That you’re lame at trolling?
You don’t even need a genetic test to conclude that James Watson was mixed race. Just the picture of his grandmother is enough proof:
James Watson has written about his Appalachian ancestry. That implies that his ancestors may be Melungeons, a tri-racial ethnicity largely concentrated in Appalachia:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Melungeon#:~:text=Melungeons%20(%2Fm%C9%99%CB%88l,Southwest%20Virginia%2C%20and%20eastern%20Kentucky.
Some melungeons:
Two of the most famous melungeons (claimed) are Abraham Lincoln and Elvis Presley; Lincoln fought and defeated the system that enslaved blacks, and Elvis brought black music to a white audience.
There is a simple solution to this disagreement. Rerun the analysis (both the DNA test and ancestry determination) with current technology. Let’s do it and see who is correct.
I think I backed up my points well enough. Let’s just finish with what Kari Stefansson actually said (from comment 206). Emphasis mine.
P.S. Ad hominems, the best way ever to say to someone arguing with you: “you win.”
https://lesacreduprintemps19.files.wordpress.com/2013/08/two-complementary-perspectives-on-inter-individual-genetic-distance.pdf
Thanks. The reference at the end of your excerpt (Yngvadottir et al., 2009) is:
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/26782786_The_promise_and_reality_of_personal_genomics
Their take is (emphasis mine):
Shameless dishonesty yet again. Those are the words of the author of the following article, yet you put them in quotation marks as if Kari Stefansson “actually said” that. Have you no shame man?
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2007/12/what-does-it-mean-to-say-that-james-watson-is-16-percent-african.html
As for the 16 percent figure not holding up because of a few errors in the genome tested I already tackled that in my previous response above.
Lol. Do it! Who is stopping you? The burden of disproof is on you racists who are in denial. Its been 13 years, yet none of your gang of deplorables has done it. Why? Because it can’t be done. Just look at the picture of Watson’s grandma….
I’m not qualified to debate these topics, that’s why I primarily focus not on the scientific arguments but who is making them and what journals they publish in.
Do you find argumentum ad hominem to be credible in general, or just in this situation?
I’m currently an MA student of Tolkien studies. I have no background in science.
Have you ever heard of “irony”?
If I point out Psych is a low-tier journal (and it’s publisher has a long history of controversy) I don’t see this as a personal attack. I don’t also see it as a personal attack to point out the co-authors are dodgy people, who lack scientific credentials and are associated with controversial (widely considered to be racist and eugenics) groups.
Do you troll other sites, or just this one?
Do you think Confucius looks black?
That is Elvis with his beloved mother in the picture.
More about Elvis and his relation with black american music, from a black fan:
https://www.elvis.com.au/presley/why-i-stopped-hating-elvis-presley.shtml
I don’t consider fair criticism to be ‘persecution’.
Note some guy named Meng Hu who used to review papers for OpenPsych, left, raising some of my same criticisms:
Bad experience at OpenPsych journals
http://archive.is/YcIDb
On bias of reviewers:
On lack of anonymity and the fact most authors at OP are regular reviewers:
The journal Pysch seems to have solved these two issues. Hence I accept Psych as peer-reviewed, but not OpenPsych (its claim to be peer-review is clearly a sham). However, Psych is a low-tier journal with a controversial publisher often accused of predatory open access publishing. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MDPI And the quality of its peer-review is questionable. There’s also the fact it’s the dodgy people from OpenPsych who are publishing in it. Not sure why you think me pointing any of this out is ‘persecution’.
So that common factor is g, general intelligence. right? In that case one is left with 60% of the variance to explain. So does that not confirm my contention that intelligence is not one trait, i.e., g, but multiple traits, five at least according to the evidence you cite.
And then there is the question of what is meant by a broad range of intellectual tasks. You don’t state what these tasks are, so we don’t know whether broad range covers everything that is a manifestation of intelligence, as that term is defined by the dictionary, although pretty certainly it does not.
For example, path finding, something at which Australian aboriginals and Canadian Inuit are said to excel, is probably not included. Neither would musical memory be included, for example the ability in exceptional cases to hear a complex composition just once and write it down or play it from memory, or the capacity for perfect pitch — the ability to identify the pitch of a note heard without a standard tone to compare it with. And so many other things.
But the idea that g accounts for even 40% of variance in performance on multiple tests is surprising. Here for example the variance attributable to a single factor is surely much less than 40%:

Image source
Au contraire, it is you who is shamelessly dishonest. Either that or you are a moron.
Here is what the article said:
Can you even read? The author is claiming that Kari Stefansson said ‘… to have doubts…’ so it was appropriate for Res to quote that material.
Well, I don’t want to get drawn into this comment-thread, but I can’t let stand that ridiculous claim that James Watson was 25% non-white and 16% African.
The empirical reality of the last 100 years is that many of the most influential “anti-racists” such as Boas, Montague Francis Ashley-Montagu (Israel Ehrenberg), Gould, and Lewontin were notorious pathological liars in service to their ideological beliefs, so much so that virtually all claims made by “anti-racist” scientists should be treated with extreme suspicion. As I wrote a few years ago:
https://www.unz.com/runz/does-race-exist-do-hills-exist/
Racial traits come in a multigene bundle, and we have photos of both of Watson’s parents. I’d say there is zero chance that Watson had even a sliver of African ancestry, let alone 16%.
Well, science is a complex and difficult subject, rendered even more difficult when quite a number of the dominant figures of the last 100 years have been pathological liars for ideological reasons.
But offhand, it sounds like you have a certain mental framework of the twentieth century, which I think actually happens to be mostly upside-down and backwards. Evaluating competing scientific hypotheses often requires a great deal of technical expertise, but history is a field much more open to the intelligent layman. So you really might want to take a look at a long article I published last year on the history of World War II:
https://www.unz.com/runz/american-pravda-understanding-world-war-ii/
It’s part of a very long series of related articles on other historical matters:
https://www.unz.com/page/american-pravda-series/
We also have a photo of Watson’s grandmother:
What does she look like to you?
I assume you know about the Seashore tests of musical ability. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Seashore
They have been used in group differences research.
Path finding has been studied in neuro-psychology. For example, Freda Newcombe’s 1969 Missile Wounds of the Brain. I remember her presenting her work.
In the 1920 a very broad range of tasks were used as test of ability. Eventually research started concentrating on the most effective, a pragmatic decision depending on what the aims of the research were.
Ian Deary has good summaries of the history of intelligence testing. The eventual final working model was the The Cattell-Horn-Carroll model of intelligence. The field is wide open for new tests. Indeed, there is a premium placed on new tests which appear to go beyond the CHC model.
Perhaps my memory fails me (I would not be surprised) but I think we have gone through this before!
It’s unclear to me what you mean by that phrase. Are their ideologies pathological? Or perhaps are their pathologies ideological?
Boas and the early works of Montagu (1940s-1950s) never denied the existence of races, what they were arguing against was racism, Nazi eugenics, in particular Nordicism. Yes no doubt they were ‘anti-racists’.
In fact, C. Loring Brace criticised Montagu for dividing mankind into the same traditional Caucasoid/Mongoloid/Negroid divisions in his early work.
Here’s a quote from an early text by Montagu:
An Introduction to Physical Anthropology (1945) p. 159
In the 1950s, Montagu was behind UNESCO’s statement on race.
The statement supported ‘race realism’ and defended the idea the human species is split into Caucasoid/Negroid/Mongoloid.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Race_Question#Criticism_and_controversy
It wasn’t until Brace and Frank Livingstone in the 1960s there was actually race denialism. Montagu then shifted his viewpoint having read Brace and Livingstone.
Yes, you have offered a similar response before. Unfortunately, your response does not seem responsive to the questions I raised. For instance:
As Peripatetic Commenter said, the quotes are in the original. Pay particular attention to the single quotes before the d in doubts and at the end.
So you are either reading challenged or a liar. Not sure which is worse.
Thanks for being so blatant about it in this case. It is good to have such clear examples.
And in case I have not mentioned it lately ; ) The projection is breathtaking.
James Watson? To redo the genetic test we would need a sample of his DNA.
It upsets many self-identified ‘White Americans’ knowing they have ‘African-American’ ancestry.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4289685
Note the above study did not include White Americans with 0.1-0.9% (trivial) AA ancestry and this figure apparently is much higher. Shriver et al. (2003) calculated up to 30% of self-identified White Americans have a AA ancestry; in 1950s this was calculated to be 21% by a sociologist.
Stuckert, Robert S. (1958) “African Ancestry of the White American Population”. Ohio Journal of Science; 55:155-160
I prefer if everyone lay (one’s) cards on the table. I’ve always pointed out I’m a layperson and non-scientist. I can’t say I’ve seen many HBD/hereditarians do the same thing.
Mikemikev who posts here and I’m familiar with is a neo-Nazi/white supremacist who denies the Holocaust, yet he never points this out when debating race and IQ and tries to pass himself off as some apolitical ‘race realist’. Highly deceptive to say the least.
Sure, that sounds very reasonable and I don’t doubt that’s correct, sometimes with much higher ratios. For example, I think it’s quite likely that J. Edgar Hoover had substantial black ancestry, perhaps in the 10-15% range. Elvis Presley seems another possibility, though probably somewhat lower. Numerous other prominent American “whites” would fall into that same category. For obvious reasons, human beings have evolved effective mechanisms for visually detecting ancestry, and that includes racial ancestry, a helpful tool in such matters.
But it’s totally ridiculous to believe that James Watson had 16% black ancestry, especially since that would probably imply that one of his parents was roughly 1/3 African. That’s the equivalent of believing that the Earth is Flat. It simply illustrates that racial disputes are overflowing with lies and distortions, and that gullible people will believe almost anything that the media tells them.
Ha, ha, ha… Here’s another one of my long articles you really might want to consider reading:
https://www.unz.com/runz/american-pravda-holocaust-denial/
Your reference actually gets more interesting after that image. At your Image source link we have the following excerpt (emphasis mine) in the same subsection as your image appears.
In Carroll 2003 your image appears as Table X-4. Table X-5 looks at a model for that data with 10 orthogonal factors. Their top line result (g factor accounts for 59 percent of the common factor variance) is in the excerpt above, but note the common factor variance part (i.e. the variance left after the first 10 factors are accounted for is simply being ignored). Two thoughts I had were.
1. Make a worst case estimate for the missing variance by assuming the remaining 19 factors all explained less variance than the lowest factor given (2.1% of CCV). This would give a worst case estimate for g explaining 59.33% * (100 / (100 + 2 * 19)) = 43% of total variance.
2. Enter the intercorrelation matrix by hand and do my own factor analysis looking at how much of the TOTAL variance the first factor explained.
But after thinking about this a while I decided looking at the combined kindergarten to adult sample was a bad idea given that the factors vary differently with age. So I propose the following for addressing the question of how much variance g explains for the purposes of this discussion.
I will do a factor analysis (using PCA to give an objective and unique set of factors) of the WJIV correlation matrix for ages 20-39 described below for both the 29 and 47 test versions. We will consider the 29 test version as most important since that was the version CanSpeccy cited, but the 47 test version will also be worth discussing. I think the sample size of 1,251 is adequate for giving usable results.
What does everyone think? Anyone want to place bets concerning what I find?
Some notes.
The R EFAtools package includes correlation matrices for a number of the WJ tests, but not the one above.
https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/EFAtools/EFAtools.pdf
WJIV_ages_20_39 should be Table E-5 below (N = 1,251)
Note that EFATools requires R >= 3.6.0
Rather than updating my R installation I just downloaded the data file directly from
https://github.com/mdsteiner/EFAtools/blob/master/data/WJIV_ages_20_39.RData
A quick visual check indicates the data is from Table E-5.
WJIV_ages_3_5 is the 29 variable version for ages 3-5. Also downloaded that.
More information at
https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/EFAtools/vignettes/EFAtools.html
The 389 page WJIV Technical Manual is available at
https://www.wjscore.com/Files/WJIVTechnicalManual.PDF
Some interesting material in that. For example, Figures 5.4 and 5.4 on page 137 give age trajectories from 6-90 for a number of the factors. Many more similar plots.
Table E-5 on page 313 has the intercorrelation matrix for 47 tests for adults aged 20-39.
The 47 test version of the WJIV appears to be a superset of the 29 test version.
Some notes on performing PCA on the correlation matrix using R.
https://aaronschlegel.me/principal-component-analysis-r-example.html
Note that with their example using the correlation matrix gives a substantially lower value for variance explained by the first component than using the covariance matrix.
Some discussion of the correlation vs. covariance choice at
https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/53/pca-on-correlation-or-covariance
P.S. One additional thought is that it looks like a small number of tests are especially divergent from g. Might be worth discussing those tests in particular.
In reality, —>
https://archive.is/Wwiy5
I see the same victim/persecution-complex among Holocaust deniers like hereditarians.
As noted on above URL:
Good points, Res. But my point remains that this analysis deals only with a narrow slice of the broad range of abilities that have to be recognized as manifestations of intelligence. So even if we accept James’s estimate that g generally accounts for 40% of the variance in abilities tested by an IQ test, that still leaves most of the variance unaccounted for.
But then g must be quite trivial if the forms of intelligence that are not evaluated by an IQ test are added in, for example, the artistic genius of a Stephen Wiltshire, (an imbecile, according to the IQists);
or the musical gifts of a of a Derek Paravacini (IQ unmeasurably low);
and the physical coordination and situation awareness of a Pelé, and so many other abilities excluded from an IQ test.
So taking all these other factors into account what has become of g</b>? It’s become a rather minor factor. It means, furthermore, so much for the argument that with an IQ of 125, Richard Feynman could not have been a genius, or conversely that as a genius, Richard Feynman’s IQ could not have been the reported 125.
And so much also for the idea that with IQ’s over 150, the Terman kids were all geniuses despite the fact that none of them did anything in the least bit remarkable.
When you see someone using the terms racist or racism you know they are intellectually bankrupt.
Ignore them.
Not really, if the traditional definition is used. I oppose SJW attempts to re-define the word where they claim only ‘white people’ can be racist.
https://www.adl.org/racism
Above definition is garbage.
Instead I stick with dictionary definitions:
– Collins English Dictionary
– Webster’s New World College Dictionary
By these definitions strong forms of hereditarianism are certainly racist. I guess it’s debatable whether more moderate forms are though. Someone arguing the B-W IQ gap is 80% genetics is racist, but someone arguing 14% probably isn’t. Proponents of strong versions of hereditarianism/Jensenism describe environmentalists as “egalitarians”, e.g. according to J. Philippe Rushton (1995) it is a “politically correct equalitarian fiction” that “races are genetically equal in cognitive ability”. This viewpoint is undeniably racist.
Are you suggesting in a very diplomatic and non-hostile manner that perhaps Oliver should focus his intellectual energies on disciplines where he might have the requisite training to be taken more seriously?
Getting published on rational wiki does not seem to be that much to be proud of outside the SJW class of scholarship.
Your suggestion to read some of your essays on history is a good one as I have found these essays to be quite interesting.
Let’s have a look at publications on large samples which show that these extra skills have predictive value over and about tests of general mental ability.
I ran my analysis for the 29 and 47 test versions and the first factors explained 45.4 and 44.0 percent of variance respectively. Here is the variance explained for all of the factors in each case.
It is easy to see how much g dominates the other factors.
As an experiment I removed the lowest correlating two tests (PICREC and RPCNAM, both also present in the 29 test version) from the 47 test version. That only increased variance explained from 44.0 to 45.3 percent.
Here is a list of the 47 tests with descriptive names.
The 29 test subset is:
P.S. Thanks for including the image source link in your earlier comment. I appreciate having links to sources.
You seem oblivious to your perpetual ad hominem attacks. Try to answer the points people make.
I disagree. See here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ad_hominem#Criticism_as_a_fallacy
The latter issues I’ve discussed such as academic integrity including research standards and ethics.
Since the current ‘consensus’ (Note, consensus is not a part of the scientific method) is that homo sapiens evolved in Africa and the spread around the world and admixed with populations that had earlier left Africa, it seems like claiming people who identify as white or European should have some SNPs and genes in common with existing African populations.
So, it seems like you simply do not understand the science.
What effort did the authors go to eliminate the possibility that those common gene sequences or SNPs were ancestral and not recent?
How many angels can dance on the head of a pin?
How many angels are racist?
I prefer if everyone lay (one’s) cards on the table.
Alles klar….
Stick to the arguments, or go elsewhere.
There’s no real evidence for the notion that Bass Reeves was the basis for the Lone Ranger. The actual influences were Zorro and Tom Mix:
https://docs.wixstatic.com/ugd/41b57b_65fd2f2e944846ddbfa937d8449a43cf.pdf
Lol. The Peripatetic buffoon is as dishonest as you. I showed very clearly how you lied.
How can it be a quote without quotation marks, you dishonest con artist? You added the quotation marks where there were none in the original paraphrase by the author of the article, and claimed Stefansson “actually said” those words within the quotation marks. And you are shameless enough to stubbornly continue to deny your dishonesty. Here’s the relevant paragraph again:
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2007/12/what-does-it-mean-to-say-that-james-watson-is-16-percent-african.html
Anyone can go to that link and confirm there are no quotation marks. Yet you lied again that there are! Probably expecting that no one would bother to check. Shameless, amoral crook. Perhaps you also think that you are doing “God’s work” like the stubborn liar RobbieSmith who you were egging on a few weeks ago. I should have asked that wicked man who this God was that wanted him to lie and hate on his behalf. Can you tell us?
By the way, the author does not provide a link for us to confirm his claim about Kari Stefannson, and I can’t find it on the internet either. I gave him the benefit of the doubt because Slate is not a site for racist deplorables such as you and the Peripatetic fool, as far as I know. Can you show us where Stefannson says what Wilson claims he said?
Get a saliva swab from him, or his sons, or his relatives. Send it to 23&me, AncestryDNA etc and await the results.
It’s a fool’s errand though. There is no doubt James Watson is part-african. His maternal grandmother’s photo is enough evidence. There are millions of white americans, especially from the South like Watson’s paternal ancestors, who have some african ancestry.
Including the First Lady of the Confederacy, Varina Davis:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Varina_Davis
Are you saying that there is a SAT-type test to assess such things as:
the ability to:
identify the pitch of a musical tone;
memorize a rythmic pattern, a melody, an entire complex musical work, a landscape, a conversation, or pages of text verbatim;
conceive a pleasing melody, a poetic turn of phrase, or merely a joke;
find a way in the wilderness;
weave a way through an opposition line on the sports ground;
command a battle;
win an argument, sway a crowd;
formulate a productive scientific hypothesis?
And what is “general mental ability”? You seem to assume the existence of what remains to be shown to exist.
There is no doubt James Watson is part-african.
What difference does that make? Who cares?
Lol. What’s so funny is that this moron actually thinks he understands the science and is making a great point.
Hey idiot, if ancient ancestry was not eliminated in these genetic tests every white person tested would show african ancestry, not just a fraction of whites.
Especially the ones who fly the Confederate and/or Nazi flags. And that’s a good reason to rub it in. As Oxford geneticist does in the following video. He found that all the whites he tested in the South had some african in them, in some cases a large percentage. Which makes a lot of sense considering the history of the South:
About 95% of white Americans have zero detectable non-white ancestry and the remainder averages around 1-2%.
BTW you didn’t answer my question about whether Confucius was black.
The ~5% estimate is for >1% ‘African-American’ ancestry. So about 5% of ‘White Americans’ have at least 1% AA ancestry. If you though include the lowest/negligible range of 0.1-0.9% – up to 30% of ‘White Americans’ have AA ancestry.
The average varies depending on the state.
When looking at individuals you can find some self-identified ‘White Americans’ with a fairly large proportion of AA ancestry. The population geneticist Mark Shriver discovered he was around ~20%.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_D._Shriver#Personal_life
There are many ways of testing the abilities you list. Some are in standard test format, as the musical test already described; some like way-finding have been tested in open fields by Freda Newcombe, as already described; there are tests of “photographic memory” and ways of confirming whether the memory is indeed photographic (most of it is not); there are extensive psychometric studies of pilots and their later success in service; and long term studies of outcome in very bright people. Lubinski and Benbow very good on all this.
There are individuals with specific high abilities who are poor on general intelligence. Fascinating individuals, but not a refutation of finding which apply to most people.
LOL! I gave my full reference and an extended excerpt in comment 206. Let’s reproduce it here for the benefit of the reading challenged. You are familiar with single quotes, right? If you would like your very own PDF copy to check then go to
https://libgen.lc/ads.php?md5=587BBC5562731829DA821D866F44E044
Do you not trust Constance Hilliard?
https://www.blackpast.org/author/hilliardconstance/
The Sunday Times (UK) article she references is unfortunately paywalled. Does anyone have a subscription to check how it appeared in the original?
Note that the Slate article appeared 12/14/2007 and the Sunday Times article appeared 12/9/2007.
Skipping more truly epic projection…
See above. Was a book and page reference accompanied by a complete excerpt of the relevant note really not sufficient?
As I noted above in comment 220, I am also bothered by the absence of a complete quote from Stefannson anywhere. For both this and your original claim.
P.S. Your blind willingness to trust Slate (of all sources!) helps make some things clear.
So, if you add more abilities to the range of those tested, the common factor, what you refer to as general intelligence, diminishes in significance.
And, presumably, individuals with specific high abilities who score well on what you call a test of general intelligence. In other words, general intelligence does not measure what makes the intellectually exceptional individual exceptional.
The selective credulousness is fascinating. Just how much do you trust ancestry assessments under 1%? Being willing to trust those yet not believing there are racial clusters (or that they are arbitrary) seems rather odd.
One interesting thing about your link is it cites a 2002 article from Steve Sailer.
Notice the 2002 date. I wonder what methodology he used. I see this paper from 1998:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0002929707616280
and this from 2003
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/12579416/
I think the 2003 paper is the one based on its mention of the Duffy allele (FY-NULL). See below.
Where things get even more interesting is looking at the other Wikipedia reference (you do check the references when you use Wikipedia, right?).
http://www.thefreelibrary.com/Code+of+many+colors:+can+researchers+see+race+in+the+genome%3F-a0132049840
There they give a figure of 11% rather than ~20% (Steve’s article says “22 percent of his relatively recent ancestors were African”, which is not the same as % admixture).
Given the focus on a single allele, I again have to wonder how that result would compare to modern methods.
Well, you provided a small B&W photo of an elderly woman who looks entirely white, and you’re apparently claiming she’s actually 1/3 African, thereby allowing Watson to be 16% black. That’s totally ridiculous.
“Menes” was an Egyptian pharoah, so I assume you’re one of those ridiculous Afrocentricists, who believes that the ancient Egyptians were substantially Negroid, which they obviously weren’t. From what I recall, the DNA studies have demonstrated that they were Mediterranean, closely related to all the other entirely Caucasian peoples of that region, just like everyone had always assumed.
Since the picture is of his grandmother wouldn’t she need to be 2/3 African for Watson to be 16% African?
No. His grandfather was almost certainly African too.
Any white person who does anything of merit MUST have recently inherited a large number of Sub-Saharan African genes otherwise he or she would be just another worthless hateful racist.
Bryc et al. 2015 estimate ~3.5% of self-identified ‘White Americans’ have >1% AA ancestry [I assume this is where Mikemikev got his 5% estimate from]:
https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2014/12/genetic-study-reveals-surprising-ancestry-many-americans
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4289685/
So 1% ‘African’ ancestry equates in these autosomal DNA tests to having a single AA ancestor within the past 11 generations, say 330 years ago. Once though you go beyond about 10 generations only a very small fraction of your ancestors have contributed directly to your DNA, so this is probably why Bryc et al. made the cut-off. My simple point is the number of ‘White Americans’ with ‘African’ ancestry sharply increases if you don’t make a cut-off. Hence I would additionally look at different types of evidence. The sociologist Robert P. Stuckert for example in 1958 estimated that 21% of ‘White Americans’ — so approximately one out of every five — have ‘African American’ ancestry.
Suggesting that Watson was partly black is a dangerous game. He always allowed that Crick was much cleverer than he was. Do you see what Watson-was-black proponents could be accused of?
I must say you have disappointed me greatly. Because you have not poasted this famous monologue by James Watson in his younger days.
Tisk, tisk, tisk!
Oops! You’re 100% correct. I was very careless and assumed that the photo was of Watson’s mother. Since it looked almost entirely white, that seemed ridiculous enough, but my brain couldn’t process it was allegedly the grandmother who contributed his 16% African ancestry.
Presumably, this “Menes” fellow is relying upon the standard theory that all humans are originally African in origin, automatically placing Watson, Confucious, and Dolph Lundgren in that category.
Well, if you focus on that particular definition, then “racism” is at least substantially true according to scientific evidence.
This directly relates to an important empirical fact I noted upthread. As far as I can tell, many of the most prominent “anti-racist” scientists of the last 100 years have become notorious for the fraud and dishonesty they used in promoting their views, a situation almost entirely absent from their scientific opponents in the “racist” camp.
The obvious reason for this discrepancy is that when you are ideologically committed to supporting a scientific doctrine that happens to be false, you must necessarily employ numerous falsehoods or propagandistic tricks in promoting your theory. I assume that Creationists who attempt to debunk Darwinism suffer from many of these same difficulties.
You really are confused or worse.
You show a picture of a woman who looks to me to have some East Asian ancestry and quote some people who can’t really decide what her ancestry is and you claim that as support for Watson being 16% black?
Thanks for the laughs:
She doesn’t even look “entirely” Mediterranean, much less “entirely” northwestern european (Irish):
For your information Ancient Egypt was not a meditteranean civilization, it was a riverine civilization (Nile River) that originated in the deep south close to a thousand miles from the Mediterranean Ocean. And no one ever compared the ancient egyptians to “all the other entirely Caucasian peoples of that region”, instead they were compared to the Nubians to their South.
https://th.bing.com/th/id/OIP.smduoMovO0mt4u6Ty9mhfAHaLJ?pid=Api&rs=1
I never claimed that. However that sounds about right, and that would explain half of Watson’s 16% african ancestry. What you are overlooking is Watson’s other three grandparents. The other half of his african ancestry could come from one, two or all of them.
What’s totally ridiculous is your insistence that “there is zero chance that Watson had even a sliver of African ancestry, let alone 16%”.
In other words you are claiming the genetic test that found his african and asian admixture is 100% false. On what rational basis do you make that charge?
Oliver, did you create the Ben Winegard RationalWiki article?
It is sufficient to prove that I was wrong to accuse you of dishonesty for inserting quotation marks. I based it on the Slate article whereas you were quoting from Dr Hilliard’s book.
But the authenticity of that quote has not yet been established. The quote was embedded in Dr Hilliard’s quotation from Wikipedia’s James Watson entry, but Wikipedia doesn’t have anything about that genetic test anymore.
It’s very strange. There is no mention by anyone else of the supposed errors in his online genome either. Why don’t you email Stefansson and ask him about it?
No.
I also don’t “email people under pseudonym”. I only own one email under my real name – like I post under like here. Good article that explains what Kirkegaard has been doing to me for years: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaslighting
I devalue and debunk the “holohoax” from an engineering standpoint. For thinkers, this is a sure way to prove that it never happened.
The impossibilities of the claims made by “holohoax” “survivors” are easily proven. From lampshades, soap and shrunken heads made from jews to using “bug spray” as an execution agent in unventilated shower rooms, all can be proven to be fabrications of the highest order. Let’s not forget the “electric floors”, “masturbation machines” and other wildly impossible execution methods.
The logistics of transporting “victims” hundreds and thousands of miles only to execute them by an energy-poor country is questionable.
These claimed “death camps” had hospitals, recreational facilities, swimming pools and other facilities for use of the occupants as well.
Add to that, the advent of “holohoax” “thoughtcrimes” which prosecute and incarcerate those who go against the “original holohoax story”. Most people are unaware that, in many countries, it is a crime to go against the “official holohoax narrative”. I use prominent cases, mentioning Ursula Haverbeck, Monika Schaefer, and lawyer Sylvia Stolz, all who have been incarcerated for “holohoax” “thoughtcrimes”.
These avenues in which to invalidate the “holohoax” among thinking people usually work to plant the seeds of doubt about the greatest “hoax of the twentieth (and twenty-first) centuries”.
At least you are man enough to admit that. Do you agree that I was very clear about the source of my quote in my original reference to it in comment 206?
No. The quote was clearly from the Sunday Times article (see Note 5 which I included in its entirety). Which still exists (but is paywalled) if you search for the article title. Not sure how you missed my multiple references to “the Sunday Times article” in comment 371.
Because I doubt he would answer. How about you do it?
My view is Lower (Nile Delta) Egyptians were most closely related to eastern-Mediterranean/south Levant populations while Upper Egyptians to their southern neighbours like Nubians. I know craniometrics and other physical anthropology data is laughed at these days, but those studies from the 1930-1990s consistently showed Lower Egyptians plot closest to ancient Aegean and Syro-Palestine groups, while Upper Egyptians, to Nubians and some Horn African groups. None of this is very surprising given the geography. Ancient Greeks and Romans described Lower Egyptians as also being lighter brown skinned (bronze complexion) than the dark brown Upper Egyptians.
What is totally obsolete as you probably know is labelling things ‘Caucasoid’ or ‘Negroid’. Yet whenever you look around on the internet about the Egyptian ‘race’ debate, most laypersons are still doing this unfortunately.
Greene, D. L. (1981). A critique of methods used to reconstruct racial and population affinity in the Nile Valley. Bull, et Mem. de la Soc. d’Anthrop. de Paris. 8(XIII): 357-365.
https://www.persee.fr/doc/bmsap_0037-8984_1981_num_8_3_3842
I agree that concious phenomena are not part of the physical world. (I actually think that the physical world is a sort of illusory holograph projecting out concious phenomena). However, I don’t believe that concious phenomena feed back into the brain as information, and I don’t think that they play any particular role in intelligence or intellect. That’s what brains do. As a Swami once told me, conciousness is not the doer. I can think of nothing that is the doer, other than the nervous system.
The above quote from Jonathan Leake is just flat out wrong. XXY is male.
And, as somebody said above, why on earth does it matter at all that James Watson has African heritage.
That’s a fair criticism. But going by the “think horses not zebras” approach I think his comment is close enough for a newspaper article. The point is, the data was significantly in error. Unless you think Watson has Klinefelter syndrome.
Not sure, but the media sure was gleeful about trumpeting the news based on questionable data back in 2007.
As for why I care, I don’t like lies and liars. And those media articles seem likely to be wrong.
I actually just ran across some more background on this. The second comment on this post is very much on point.
http://blogs.nature.com/news/2007/12/james_watson_16_black_claim.html
That “original source” disappeared about a month after it originally appeared (which is itself interesting), but happily there is an archive page.
https://web.archive.org/web/20080112052929/http://science-community.sciam.com/thread.jspa?threadID=300005381
Here is the relevant part of the post.
Reread that final sentence. Does anyone here think that newspapers reporting this as news were adhering to reasonable journalistic standards?
I’m trying to follow the logic. People who dislike genetics, and accuse people such as Watson of racism, decide that they can best insult Watson by claiming he has a touch of the tar brush.
Isn’t there a bit of inconsistency or hypocrisy there?
Did you read the target article for this post?
“Testing it in other samples should happen quickly, so that if it does not replicate, we can discard it.”
As an update, we posted our peer-reviewed but not approved (“may… lead to unnecessary controversy”) follow up:
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.09.24.312074v1
We also recently replicated the results on a separate, large, nationally representative sample.
So,
1) the results replicate nationally in the USA
2) the results hold for (at least some) Latin American populations
3) we are unable to identify obvious confounds
4) more research is needed, but this is proving to be a productive — if difficult to publish — line of research
Ya, we tried sending some of these papers to PAID, since they published Colman (2016):
“Several lines of research, notably racial admixture studies, racial crossing studies involving interracial parenting or adoption…”
But they deemed that admixture/crossing studies, “especially investigations using more recent techniques of molecular genetics,” were uninteresting or uninformative. Go figure.
This essay offers another explanation for the bias in Nobel prize awards: