https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2020/01/23/intelligent-argument-race
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An Intelligent Argument on Race?

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Scholar makes argument in favor of race-based research into intelligence, but experts in that subfield say it's an unnecessary plea that doesn't square with scientific realities.
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By Colleen Flaherty 
January 23, 2020
 
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WIKIMEDIA COMMONS
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The journal Philosophical Psychology is taking flak for publishing an article in defense of race-based science on intelligence. The publication’s editors anticipated blowback, writing an accompanying note as to why they approved the piece by Nathan Cofnas, a Ph.D. candidate in philosophy at the University of Oxford. But some critics of the article say that the editors’ note raises as many questions as it attempts to pre-empt, and they want a formal response to their concerns.
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Cofnas’s paper “disingenuously argues that the best explanation of differences in IQ scores between racial and ethnic groups is genetics,” reads a petition posted by Mark Alfano, associate professor of philosophy at Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands and associate professor of philosophy at Macquarie University. In so doing, Cofnas “completely neglects the role played by environmental injustice,” such as documented racial disparities in exposure to lead, housing segregation and other factors.
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Calling on the editorial team of Philosophical Psychology to answer in some meaningful way -- perhaps via resignations -- Alfano wrote that philosophers and other scholars should boycott the journal in the interim. The fact that Cofnas’s paper was ever approved shows a fundamental breakdown in the editorial process that must be addressed, he argues.
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“If the editors and referees at Philosophical Psychology had competently reviewed the paper, they would have noticed this glaring error and insisted on revisions (or simply rejected the paper),” Alfano wrote. “Instead, it was accepted and published alongside an editors' note defending the decision to publish that refers to the value of free speech and free inquiry.”
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While “we also support free speech and free inquiry,” the petition says, “free inquiry should be guided by norms of accuracy and expertise. Indeed, that is the point of academic peer-review.”
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In their journal note, editors Cees van Leeuwen, professor of psychology and education sciences at Katholieke Universiteit Leuven in Belgium, and Mitchell Herschbach, lecturer in philosophy at California State University at Northridge, responded at length to the three main criticisms they foresaw: Cofnas’s hereditarian stance that IQ differences between racial groups may be the result of genetics; his flying leap of an assumption that neuroscience and genetics will be unified within “several years”; and his inclusion of highly contested empirical evidence on race and intelligence -- including the work of Charles Murray, co-author of The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life.
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Van Leeuwen and Herschbach weigh each point but determine that none disqualifies the paper for publication. As to Cofnas’s fundamental argument that race and IQ may be linked, for example, the editors wrote that many researchers “argue that everyday racial groupings have no biological grounding and that the ancestral populations used in behavioral genetics research have little to do with our socially constructed racial categories.” At the same time, they continued, “biological racial realism certainly has its defenders in the sciences and philosophy.”
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Cofnas’s paper “certainly adopts provocative positions on a host of issues related to race, genetics, and IQ,” the note concludes. “However, none of these positions are to be excluded from the current scientific and philosophical debates as long as they are backed up with logical argumentation and empirical evidence,” and they “deserve to be disputed rather than disparaged.”
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In and of itself, Cofnas’s article doesn’t break new ground: it mostly cites existing research surrounding race and intelligence, including a large body of work supporting the idea that race is a social construct. But it also discusses what Cofnas describes as another, largely ignored or rejected body of work suggesting otherwise -- that race does matter when it comes to intelligence. His main point is that when (soon, he says) and if (likely, he asserts) advances in science reveal “genetic variants underlying individual differences in intelligence,” we won’t be ready for it.
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In that case, Cofnas warns, “social policies predicated on environmentalist theories of group differences" in intelligence “may fail to achieve their aims. Large swaths of academic work in both the humanities and social sciences assume the truth of environmentalism and are vulnerable to being undermined.”
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In a statement this week, the journal’s editors said that Cofnas’s initial submission met the minimum conditions to go through their standard review process. Per normal procedure, they said, two independent reviewers read the paper. Two rounds of revisions followed, as did approval and publication.
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In an academic journal such as Philosophical Psychology, van Leeuwen and Herschbach continued, “the role of the editors is to monitor the scholarly adequacy of the reviewing process -- not whether we, or the readership, endorse the values behind the paper.” Readers of our journal, therefore, “get to read papers they may find offensive, or papers by authors whose other statements or behaviors they may find objectionable.”
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Addressing Alfano’s concerns about an insufficient discussion of environmental causes of group differences in IQ, Van Leeuwen and Herschbach said that would be relevant if Cofnas’s article had been a review on the most likely causes of the IQ gap. Instead, they said, Cofnas’s focus is to “defend the moral imperative of research into the possible genetic causes of the gap." Given that, "Cofnas attempts to show that the hereditarian thesis is a scientifically serious possibility.”
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Precisely because the issue is so complex, van Leeuwen and Herschbach said, “we welcome responses to what is empirically and normatively controversial about Cofnas’s paper." Efforts to "silence unwelcome opinion, however, are doing a disservice to the community.”
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Ongoing Discussions, and Why Humans Aren't Like Fruit Flies
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Alfano said this week that he hadn’t yet heard back from the journal’s editors directly. He did spar, ad hominem, on social media with Cofnas -- probably in a way that didn’t help his argument. Asked about his Twitter style, Alfano said that when he participates actively in online discussions, he finds a need to distinguish between “people with whom I can have an actual conversation” and “trolls.” Of the latter group, he said, “I treat them with the contempt that they deserve.”
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As to why Alfano didn’t submit a rebuttal for the journal to consider, he said this case called for a different response. Cofnas’s paper, he said, is a “Trojan horse” and not a “genuine contribution to the scholarly discourse.” 
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Ultimately, he said, free speech for Cofnas “just means the right to push his views about racial hierarchies without pushback or consequences. And free inquiry is what the actual scientists who study intelligence already enjoy.”
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What does Cofnas want? Cofnas said this week that he is not trying to be a provocateur and that he doesn’t in fact enjoy the backlash he’s experiencing.
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“I wrote about this because it’s important, and if we fail to deal with these issues, I believe the long-term consequences could be disastrous,” he wrote in an email. “People who think this area of research is ‘pseudoscience’ are in almost all cases uninformed about the relevant science." Statements such as "‘IQ tests only measure your ability to take an IQ test’ are flat out wrong. IQ tests measure cognitive abilities that are involved in performing real-life tasks both inside and outside the classroom.”
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There is more to intelligence than just IQ, “but IQ tests measure something important,” and IQ has been proven to be heritable, he added.
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As for race, Cofnas cited his own paper, saying that “no completely environmental explanations of IQ gaps in the U.S. have been successful. There is no scientific basis for rejecting the theory that genes play a significant role in these gaps.” And any scientific basis to support that would bring “very difficult moral challenges,” he said, underscoring his thesis.
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Cofnas has certainly raised big philosophical questions. But there are others who are perhaps better situated to address whether or not we face an impending moral crisis about genetics and neuroscience -- namely those philosophers and natural scientists who work in this area every day. Among them is Quayshawn Spencer, Robert S. Blank Presidential Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Pennsylvania. Spencer studies the philosophy of science, biology and race and was inspired to become become a philosopher by reading The Bell Curve.
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Spencer said that Cofnas’s article appeared -- as described in the editors' note -- not to address the very nature of race. That’s a common oversight among hereditarians, and “particularly frustrating to philosophers of race like myself who specialize in researching and publishing on exactly this topic.” In other words, Spencer said he didn’t see how it’s not a “fatal flaw” for an article on hereditarianism not to discuss the race schema used in the psychological research at hand and whether the existence of racial groups is based in scientific reality.
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Even if one does have good reason to think that the “folk races" used in IQ research are biologically real, Spencer said, referring to the way we talk about race in everyday life, there are many different ways of being biologically real -- and some of them don’t lend themselves to the hereditarian hypothesis.
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What hereditarians need is a clear, nonaccidental, causal link between group DNA and so-called cognitive capacity, Spencer said. And that doesn't exist.
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Joseph L. Graves, professor of biological sciences at the Joint School of Nanoscience and Nanoengineering North Carolina A&T State University and the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, said that there wouldn’t be a problem with Cofnas’s line of inquiry if it were “being done in a way that adheres to what we really know about the genetics of complex traits.” Complex traits aren’t solely determined by the environment or by genes, but are rather always a "complex interaction" between genetic and environmental effects.
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The real question, then, for those who study complex traits, is the split: how much is environmental and how much is genetic. And currently, Graves said, that’s impossible to estimate or “partition” because people are, well, people.
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The kind of certainty that Cofnas seeks would require us to “grow human beings in controlled ways,” such that they all experience the same environmental, genetic and combined environmental and genetic effects, Graves said. To boot, we’d need to do that for at least two generations to eliminate maternal effects on the complex traits. (Graves has studied complex traits in fruit flies but published on why his approach won’t work with humans.)
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“I’m not against the study of complex traits in humans,” Graves said, “but what I am against is pseudoscience masquerading as the study of differences in complex traits in humans.”
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As to Alfano’s petition, Spencer, the philosopher of race, said he didn’t condone censorship, as it was The Bell Curve that inspired his own career path. That book had some glaring problems, he said, but it “wasn't, in my judgment, anything so below the industry standard of social science that it didn't warrant being allowed to be read.”  (Other philosophers have disagreed with the premise of the petition, including in a discussion thread on the popular philosophy blog Daily Nous.) Pointing to other issues plaguing academic publishing, Spencer also said it’s also increasingly difficult to find expert readers -- including subfield specialists on, say, race and intelligence -- to referee journal articles.
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Sensitivities surrounding race are heightened in the current political climate, and science is surely no exception. But is race-based science, or eugenics, making a comeback, along with white supremacist political activity? A 2018 investigation by the Associated Press, for instance, determined that the Pioneer Fund -- founded in 1937 to promote research on eugenics -- was still supporting a professor of psychology at the University of Arizona. The London Conference on Intelligence, running since 2014, also has attracted international criticism for hosting panels on eugenics. 
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Graves said it was a mistake to think that race science ever went away.
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The majority of biomedical researchers still think that humans have biological races, and race differences are still taught in medical schools, he said. To understand why that’s wrong -- why our geographically based genetic variations can’t be “unambiguously apportioned into biological races” -- requires a specific sort of training, in evolutionary and population genetics. The majority of graduate students who exit Ph.D. programs in biology never receive that training, Graves said, while genomics often attracts those with a computer science background.
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Of course, he added, the “overall shift towards legitimacy of white supremacy also helps.”
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Read more by Colleen Flaherty
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Eduard C Hanganu • 2 years ago • edited
Alfano seems to believe that researchers need his approval in order to publish papers. His twitter posts appears to confirm this perspective since he bullies all those who disagree with him. Graves is another one who believes that he knows everything about race and intelligence and is ready to interdict all those who don't fall under his "scientific" umbrella.
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jacksmi  Eduard C Hanganu • 2 years ago
Alfano's point seems to be that the journal was lax in it publication standards, which if true is a legitimate criticism. Since the race science movement has a long history of pushing bad science in receptive or poorly vetted venues (including academic ones), he may have a valid point. You call Graves a "bully," but I note that you do not address the very relevant and substantive points raised by both Graves and Spencer. Defenders of race science typically and systematically avoid dealing with these points, which are the real issues.
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David  jacksmi • 2 years ago
The response is that the stuff they raise is just typical criticism that can be applied to any social science research. We don't throw out all the rest of it because of such criticisms.
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David Pittelli • 2 years ago
Cofnas’s paper “disingenuously argues that the best explanation of differences in IQ scores between racial and ethnic groups is genetics,”

Cofnas actually argues that "We should be prepared for the possibility that these [IQ-related genetic] variants are not distributed identically among all geographic populations, and that this explains some of the phenotypic differences in measured intelligence among groups."

And: "There is a danger for the philosophical community in putting our credibility on the line over the claim that race differences are entirely environmental. If work on genetics and neuroscience within the next decade produces convincing evidence that differences in measured intelligence among groups have a significant genetic component, there will be no way to conceal this information."

Cofnas “completely neglects the role played by environmental injustice,” such as documented racial disparities in exposure to lead, housing segregation and other factors.

Actually, although Cofnas does not mention lead or housing specifically, he discusses environmental factors at length (e.g., "environmental" occurs 24 times in his paper).
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jacksmi  David Pittelli • 2 years ago • edited
There are several problems with the kind of argument Cofnas is making. Here are a few: First, "race" as the term is ordinarily understood does not have any straightforward match to the kinds of clusters that population geneticists have been finding in the past few years. On the contrary, the more research that is done, the more complex the picture becomes. Even race scientists, these days, have been forced to water down the definition of "race" to near meaninglessness. Second, when traits have been identified with "race," they have consistently been physical ones that typically have reasonable explanations in terms of local selective pressures. I am aware of no psychological traits (including intelligence) that have been identified as phenotypic correlates of any genetically identified population (racial or nonracial). Third, attempts to identify genes with cognitive outcomes have produced only massive arrays of large numbers of genes showing, individually, only very weak correlations with cognition. Attempts to combine genes from these studies into scorable factors have never been able to identify anything other than miniscule relations to outcomes--and these seem to operate at the low ends of the intelligence scale (which suggests that they are associated with specific disorders, not normal development). Finally, there is a whole passel of problems with equating IQ with real intelligence, including by way of the so-called "general" factor ("g"), which I won't attempt to get into in this limited comment.

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Glen_S_McGhee_FHEAP  jacksmi • 2 years ago
Not to mention, the Flynn effect.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wi...

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David Pittelli  jacksmi • 2 years ago
While I find the analysis of John Ogbu to be more persuasive than any genetic explanations of race and achievement, I don't see how what you write here refutes Cofnas' position, which is about being open to possible evidence in the future, lest we paint ourselves into a philosophical corner. For example, it is true that GWAS (genetic) scores are currently almost useless at predicting intelligence, but studies on twins (adoption, etc.) show that genetics cause about half of individual variance in intelligence; unless science comes to a halt, these genes and their interactions will increasingly be understood, and they may (or may not) show significant racial differences. It is dangerous, therefore, to ground racial equality on the falsifiable premise that there are no significant differences in the races. As Steven Pinker put it: "Equality is not the empirical claim that all groups of humans are interchangeable; it is the moral principle that individuals should not be judged or constrained by the average properties of their group."

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jacksmi  David Pittelli • 2 years ago
The literature you cite on variance is seriously problematic. The "proportions of variance" argument relies heavily on twin studies, which have been deeply critiqued by many--especially Jay Joseph in his 2015 book on the topic. Furthermore, your interpretation of proportions of variance in terms of genetic causation conflates genetics with heritability--two completely different constructs which are not congruent (the latter is wildly deflected by environmental factors). Moreover, even if you could make the connection you want to make, it still shows nothing whatsoever about the differences between groups (the figures you cite involve within-group not between-group variance; again, the latter wildly deflected by environment). Regarding Cofnas's cautionary comments, they are technically defensible, but trivial compared to the damage that the race science advocates do (sometimes intentionally, sometimes unintentionally).

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David Pittelli  jacksmi • 2 years ago
The Trouble with Twin Studies has some interesting points to make, but while I am not an expert in this field, it is my understanding that virtually everyone studying the issue believes that there are significant genetic effects on intra-group variance in intelligence. I agree that we don't know that what genes drive most intra-group differences, and that the genes in question (or any genes) may not drive differences between groups. But they may on the other hand be proven to do so. Like many, you point to the damage that race science can do, and I agree that is not a trivial problem. However, it is also a problem if anti-racism own-goals itself by unnecessarily positioning anti-racism as the logical consequence of empirical findings that may some day be shown to be untrue -- and an unnecessary problem, since there are moral and philosophical reasons to oppose racism, and to favor treating people the same regardless of any differences in racial averages.

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jacksmi  David Pittelli • 2 years ago
I agree with your final point about the reasons to oppose racism. But those reasons will always be ignored by a substantial part of the population as long as they are bamboozled by a never-ending stream of bad science and bogus interpretations of valid studies designed to keep racism alive. And most of the studies of race and various psychological traits function to do exactly this, whether by design or not. And regarding the good (high quality) science that studies these issues (and there is some), many of the issues addressed, especially re who has how much innate, genetic intelligence, are not likely to be answered any time in the near future, or ever, due to the complexity of the issues and the severe limitations of our tools for studying them. To give just one example, your statement about intra-group intelligence is true, but only in the loosest sense. Everyone agrees that intelligence is "partly" genetic. Indeed, to claim otherwise would be nonsense. But what does "partly" actually mean? The standard answer in behavioral genetics is to parse the variance of genetics and environment quantitatively. But the techniques for doing this only make sense (if at all) when applied to experiments in which environmental variables can be rigorously controlled. There was some grounds for assuming this when these techniques were first developed by quantitative geneticists who were working with plants and a few simple animal models. But behavioral geneticists then imported these techniques, wholesale, into studies of human groups, where environments are not even remotely controllable. And behavioral geneticists have been trying ever since to use these same techniques productively (with extremely limited success---for reasons that should be fairly obvious). So why do they keep persisting in doing this? Mostly for bad reasons, including professional blinders, public funding and career investments, encouragement from groups with hereditarian and/or racist agendas, etc. Even the noble motives--e.g. hope for medical knowledge and applications--are producing few results and directing attention away for more productive approaches. Hence my conclusion about Cofnas's defensible, trivial and mostly counterproductive stance.

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Michele Broche  David Pittelli • 2 years ago
There was some research by geneticians at the university of Chicago on this.

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ProfStewart • 2 years ago
I support continued race-based research into intelligence - and athletic ability.

Over 150 years since the 14th Amendment to the US Constitution, we have not yet discovered why racial differences persist and what, if anything, to do about them.

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George deMan  ProfStewart • 2 years ago
The 14th Amendment was a paper tiger. It was roundly rejected in letter and spirit in the post-Reconstruction South and its provisions were weakly enforced if at all until the passage of the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts a century after its passage. By then, a great deal of social, educational, and economic damage had been done to the African-American community.

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Unemployed_Northeastern  George deMan • 2 years ago • edited
And the Roberts Court all but destroyed the Voting Rights Act in Shelby County, which led immediately to southern and other red states enacting all manner of voting obstructionism aimed squarely at African-American voters. As Florida governor Ron DeSantis said the other week, a bit too loudly, "voting is a privilege, not a right."

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Greg McColm • 2 years ago
The primary reason for not wanting people to investigate racial differences in intelligence seems to be the mischief that pseudo-discoveries in this field have inspired in the past. Setting that aside (which means setting a lot aside), the basic problems seem to be that it isn't clear that race and intelligence are coherent notions. This article addressed some of the difficulties with race as an identifiable property, but did not address intelligence other than to say that IQ tests do test something (which they do: they measure the ability to rapidly and reliably answer correctly lots of silly little questions in a classroom situation - an ability apparently subject to past experiences with classroom situations, what one had for breakfast that morning, exposure to carbon monoxide, etc.).

As Mr. Socrates repeatedly demanded, first define your terms....

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David  Greg McColm • 2 years ago
You don't explain the persistence of early-childhood IQ into the school and adult years.

And nothing in social science is defined exactly. If you and Unemployed_Northeastern want to use this typical lack of obvious boundaries to dismiss IQ and race, then you'll have to dismiss the rest of social science (and their faculty lines) as well.

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jacksmi  David • 2 years ago
There is a whole literature on this. The evidence favors the explanation of persisting and accumulating environmental influence on IQ scores.

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Element59  jacksmi • 2 years ago
Actually, they do not. The mainstream scientific evidence on the validity of IQ as a valid measure of human intelligence, and the genetic variances of IQ, along with personality and behavior, suggests that genes account for no less than 50% of the variance between any two individuals or groups - and that's the current conservative position in these fields.

Recommend that you read-up on the current state of neuroscience with "The Neuroscience of Intelligence" [Cambridge U Press, 2017] by Richard Haier, along with "Blueprint" [MIT Press, 2018] by Robert Plomin. Both are on the leading edge of intelligence and behavioral genetics research, and they are mainstream representative within their fields of research.

There are mountains of other lines of evidence from dozens of other researchers from several nations which backs up their work, but one can easily fall into the the intellectually lazy trap of accepting journalistic arguments from authority such as Flaherty's piece here, an English major, [let alone those from Angela Saini, Amy Harmon, etc.], or unquestioningly accepting a tiny, but outsized vocal minority of researchers who are contrarian [Jospeh, Turkheimer, Flynn, Nisbett, Graves, etc.], but you likely do so because they intuitively align with a sacred moral belief. In other words, human equality is a "universal moral fact", and any questioning of this absolute universal fact, or indeed scientific investigation of it, is motivated by bigotry, ignorance, and evil intentions - and therefore they are a priori immoral

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jacksmi  Element59 • 2 years ago
Haier's book draws from three main types of evidence (psychometic, genomic, and scanning studies). All of them are correlational and often fallaciously over-interpreted, sometimes egregiously, as causal by many non-researchers and a few speculative researchers. Plomin has been over-predicting the power of genomic methodologies for decades. Ideological hereditarians are indeed a significant portion of the psychometric and genomic communities, but they are not the mainstream, which is composed of researchers who are much more careful in their inferences. That's not politics, my friend, that's just good science.

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Unemployed_Northeastern  jacksmi • 2 years ago
David explicitly doesn't believe in science by consensus - see one of his other responses to me. He apparently believes in science by ipse dixit. Which [checks notes] is the antithesis of science.

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Jack  Greg McColm • 2 years ago
Your reductive characterization of IQ tests as nothing but "silly little questions" is wrong.

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Andrew Schlukebier  Jack • 2 years ago
Maybe IQ tests consist of "silly little questions", but scores on IQ tests still predict things that are not silly.

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Unemployed_Northeastern  Andrew Schlukebier • 2 years ago
Weak correlation as causation fallacy.

"Colleges and employers interested in predicting the success of applicants would do better to look at a student’s grades, which measure personality traits, like grit and attention to detail, more effectively than IQ and SAT tests, according to a recent study from a team led by James Heckman, the Nobel Prize-winning economist from the University of Chicago. The research was released as a discussion paper by the IZA Institute of Labour Economics.... in the National Survey of Midlife Development, which researchers at the University of Wisconsin used to study 2,298 Americans over 10 years, the results of a personality test were twice as predictive as IQ on future wages, and four times more predictive of health."

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David  Unemployed_Northeastern • 2 years ago
It's only a fallacy to the extent that any statistically based conclusion can be called a fallacy.

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Unemployed_Northeastern  David • 2 years ago
"Every time I stub my toe it is a full moon outside. Therefore stubbing my toe makes it a full moon."

- David's fantasy world where every correlation is causation.

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jacksmi  Jack • 2 years ago
Maybe so, but the rest of his points are spot on! There are serious problems with treating IQ concretely as a valid measure of inherent cognitive potential. And don't bother quoting all the correlations between IQ and various kinds of success, because these rarely address--and never effectively parse out--the deep and pervasive influence of environment.

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David  jacksmi • 2 years ago
These are the sorts of problems every social science investigation has, and they're controlled for using standard techniques -- which are not perfect but are well tolerated when they deal with different research topics.

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jacksmi  David • 2 years ago
Actually, this literature is almost entirely correlational. And the statistical controls on them raise them, at best. to the level of quasi-experimentation--a poor proxy for controlled experimentation and rigorous causal inference.

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Mike Delasalle  jacksmi • 2 years ago
"these rarely address--and never effectively parse out--the deep and pervasive influence of environment..."

So - research on human (and most non-human primate) cognitive abilities is meaningless, and we should only conduct research on mice?

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Erik Kengaard  jacksmi • 2 years ago
How would you measure ' inherent cognitive potential. ?'

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Erik Kengaard  jacksmi • 2 years ago
Do you claim there is no such thing as inherent cognitive potential?

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jacksmi  Erik Kengaard • 2 years ago
No--only that it's so abstract as to be effectively unresearchable. "Race scientists" can keep us going down that rabbit hole forever.

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HistoryProf  Greg McColm • 2 years ago
We know intelligence is real, and that it varies across species. We can observe differences in the reasoning capacity of, say, human beings vs. brine shrimp. Current measurements of intelligence are imperfect, but that's a reason to try harder, not to just say "well, forget about investigating any biological or genetic dimension to intelligence at all."

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Humanist  HistoryProf • 2 years ago
Nobody is saying that. However, pretending that the current categories of what we call races are relevant to this discussion always comes from a lack of understanding about race and genetics and an agenda that is never to help those less fortunate but to support discrimination. When you combine lack of scientific rigor with the intention of justifying the mistreatment of those different from you, there is no "trying harder". They should do better, as researchers and human beings.

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David  Humanist • 2 years ago
So, the argument "why do we need to know this stuff anyway?". A lot of money and bureaucracies depend on the status quo, after all.

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HistoryProf  Humanist • 2 years ago
It would seem, then, even more important for philosophers to explore the ethics and application of such research. It seems like that is what Cofnas is proposing, and what Alfano seems to consider utterly verboten to even contemplate.

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ScienceProf69  HistoryProf • 2 years ago
All healthy humans have a different reasoning capacity from brine shrimp.
McColm asks for fundamental definitions. You define intelligence as "reasoning capacity". What is that?

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David  ScienceProf69 • 2 years ago
Often, it's defined as results on an IQ test. You know what the test is, so that measurement is well defined.

In an article yesterday, it was defined as math achievement scores (although even basic details of that definition seemed to be missing, a real problem with that paper.)

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jacksmi  David • 2 years ago • edited
Excellent definition, David. And this explains why Jensen (1979) found that the IQ of the average brine shrimp is 1.75 standard deviations below that of the average human being, though some critics have attributed that difference to the difficulty the brine shrimp had holding their pencils. By the way, I'm just kidding. But Jensn did make inter-species claims only slightly less absurd.

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Glen_S_McGhee_FHEAP  jacksmi • 2 years ago • edited
Hilarious! As did Robert Yerkes regarding chimps and WWI soldiers.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wi...

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Buick Vina  Greg McColm • 2 years ago
Because a few inventors arose from a race does not mean every member of that race is of high intelligence. If intelligence has anything to do with race, then all members of such race in question should have been innovators of various wonders. So,in any race there are few geniuses(maybe 100 out of 150 million people). This does not mean that the 100 geniuses mean all 150 million are more intelligent than other race because it is common that many from other race are more intelligent than many of the rest of this 150 million.

IQ test questions are based on cultures and traditions of certain part of the world. A person of high IQ from a certain race(part of the world) may be seen as retarded or dumb in another part of the world with different culture and tradition. Can some please tell me what we mean by intelligence measurement?

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Erik Kengaard  Buick Vina • 2 years ago
'Cultures in certain parts of the world' may be a more useful classification than 'race.' Does not Intelligence, in the sense of ability to solve puzzling problems, differ among various 'cultures?'

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Brian Gratton • 2 years ago
Ethnic and racial differences among humans are not simply socially constructed, despite the repeated assertions of same by nearly all humanists and the majority of social scientists. Any geographical distance between groups of humans will over time produce biologically detectable differences, observable in physical adaptive differences such as skin color. When a claim is made of purely social construction, the claim should be dismissed and the claimant doubted. Whether these genetic differences lead to differences in intelligence is yet to be proven. The issue, like all other scientific questions, should be open to discussion.

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Barbara Piper  Brian Gratton • 2 years ago
"Ethnic and racial differences among humans are not simply socially constructed, despite the repeated assertions of same by nearly all humanists and the majority of social scientists."

But race is a social construct (it's not even one thing -- every culture has different ways of chopping up what we have conventionally called "race", as the famous scene from Fawlty Towers illustrated [https://www.theguardian.com...]), and the issue was whether the additional social construct "intelligence" is associated with "race" in any meaningful way. Despite your statement, there is no evidence that "race" has sufficient construct validity to be used as a variable in such research.

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Lyubov Raskolnikov  Barbara Piper • 2 years ago
Is it possible that both of you may be simultaneously right?

The effect of geographic distance on biology is undeniable--widely visible in animals as well as humans. But the fact that we force these often subtle differences into grossly generalized racial bundles--usually lumping people into little more than 5 or 6 categories (I think)--is based on a human need to systematize, which absolutely underscores the nature of a social construct.

Why, in the 21st century, have we presumed that Scots and Italians, are the same race? There was broad dissent on this subject as recently as the 1920s, but Italians' assimilation into broader American cultural norms has "whitened" them. Turkish Americans, generally assimilated in the US, are rarely questioned as anything as white; ask Germans what race the Turks are and you'd get widely divergent answers. Arab-Americans overwhelmingly identified as white up to the 90s; September 11th created a cultural rift (at least among Arab Muslims) that has left them agitating for arab as a separate race, or at least ethnicity. Then there are the physiological similarities between Indians and Europeans (beyond their shared language heritage), where melanin is the greatest distinguishing factor: hair, eyes, nasal bridge are largely the same across this vast expanse. Lastly, many of the populations of southwest Asia (Kyrgyz, Turkmens, Uzbeks), though not well known in the Americas, look half-white/half-"Asian" by our crude judgments.

While it's clear that the existing categorizations fail to do justice to the more gradiential differences we see among historically spatially separate groups, it's also unclear that--given the tremendous cultural sensitivities--a complete rethinking won't spawn a new host of questions...and bigotries.

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Unemployed_Northeastern  Brian Gratton • 2 years ago • edited
"Any geographical distance between groups of humans will over time produce biologically detectable differences, observable in physical adaptive differences such as skin color."

Yes, this is called phylogeography. Vicariance, dispersal, etc. As it so happens, I have the standard textbook by John Avise, Phylogeography: The History and Formation of Species. So let's see what he has to say about geographical distances/separation in terms of human genetic diversity:

"The global mtDNA genealogy of humans is exceedingly shallow in comparison to those of many species, including several higher primates." [p. 124]

"In comparison to many other species, the phylogenetic branches in the intraspecific human pedigree are shallow and only weakly structured geographically. Human mtDNA lineages on a global scale show far lower sequence divergence (maximum p ≅ 0.006) than do, for example, regional populations of pocket gophers in the southeastern United States (mean p ≅ 0.034)." [p. 135]

So... not so much, then.

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Andrew Schlukebier  Unemployed_Northeastern • 2 years ago
David Reich knows a thing or two about genetics.

https://www.nytimes.com/201...

"You will sometimes hear that any biological differences among populations are likely to be small, because humans have diverged too recently from common ancestors for substantial differences to have arisen under the pressure of natural selection. This is not true. The
ancestors of East Asians, Europeans, West Africans and Australians were, until recently, almost completely isolated from one another for 40,000 years or longer, which is more than sufficient time for the forces of evolution to work. Indeed, the study led by Dr. Kong showed that in Iceland, there has been measurable genetic selection against the genetic variations that predict more years of education in that population just within the last century."

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Unemployed_Northeastern  Andrew Schlukebier • 2 years ago
Does not refute my comment in any meaningful way. You will of course note that Reich is at pains to explicitly state in that op-ed that race is a social construct, not a genetic one.

"In the United States, historically, a person is “black” if he has any sub-Saharan African ancestry; in Brazil, a person is not “black” if he is known to have any European ancestry. If “black” refers to different people in different contexts, how can there be any genetic basis to it?"

A good question for the IHE trolls.

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Andrew Schlukebier  Unemployed_Northeastern • 2 years ago
The labeling conventions vary from place to place. So what?
There’s an underlying reality that does not depend on the labels.

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Glen_S_McGhee_FHEAP  Andrew Schlukebier • 2 years ago
Maybe, but questions about the nature of "reality" has kept philosophers fully occupied for thousands of years. And now, cognitive psychologists and sociologists have gotten into the act as well.
Raw sense data encountered by infants has to be sorted, filtered, organized. What we observe as adults "depends" on a scheme of abstraction which is invariably social. We are, after all, social creatures.

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Unemployed_Northeastern  Andrew Schlukebier • 2 years ago
Guy, Reich's point is that the *reality* changes from nation to nation, culture to culture. That's because... wait for it... race is a social construct. It doesn't matter how many times you cite discredited white nationalists on this website for higher education, either. Race. Is. A. Social. Construct.

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Mike Delasalle  Unemployed_Northeastern • 2 years ago
"Race. Is. A. Social. Construct."

In that case, social constructs differ dramatically in their propensity for susceptibility to disease (malaria, glaucoma, dementia, cancers...), success in sports etc. If I understand Cofnas correctly, all he is asking is for such studies to be extended to the analysis of cognition.

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Unemployed_Northeastern  Mike Delasalle • 2 years ago
Yes, race is a social construct. We know that from, among other things, the definition of various races shifting over time and from place to place. "White" in the US today is very different from "white" in, say, 1880, when Americans of Irish, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, and eastern Europe ancestry were not white. Likewise the definition of black varies considerably from the US to Brazil to Africa. Which one is the genetic definition, pray tell? Also the peoples of Africa have more genetic diversity than the rest of the world's population put together but they're all just lumped together in one race because... reasons.

Cofnas citing Bell Curve is proof positive of how far out of his depth he is. The book is a piece of hack work written by a political scientist who burnt crosses as a teenager, that never sought galley proofs, much less peer review, has been ripped apart many, many times over the years by actual sociologists, biologists, geneticists, etc. yet still oozes from the dreck whence it came every time race is mentioned in these threads.

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John Ahearn  Unemployed_Northeastern • 2 years ago
The fact that humans show less branching than other groups does not mean that there is no branching at all. It is obvious that at least some branching has taken place (hence lactose intolerance).

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Andrew Schlukebier • 2 years ago
So the experts agree that race is a "social construct"?

A Miami cop was suspended yesterday for socially constructing himself as a black male.

Miami police captain Javier Ortiz suspended after claiming he’s black

https://nypost.com/2020/01/...

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Unemployed_Northeastern  Andrew Schlukebier • 2 years ago • edited
"A Miami cop was suspended yesterday for socially constructing himself as a black male."

OK, I'll bite: that explains how race is a genetic construct in your brain how, exactly? Be specific. Or are you actually saying 'race is a genetic construct because the New York freaking Post said a cop in Miami was fired."

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Andrew Schlukebier  Unemployed_Northeastern • 2 years ago
My point was how silly this “socially constructed” blather is.

If race is “socially constructed” (with no biological basis), why shouldn’t the guy be able to identify as a black man if he feels like it?
And what was the problem with Rachel Dolezal identifying as black?

It turns out that gender is socially constructed, too, but there people are able to get away with identifying as whichever of the many genders they want to. If Javier Ortiz had started wearing a dress and had demanded to be addressed as “Loretta” (along with some new pronouns), that wouldn’t have gotten him into trouble at all.He might even have gotten a promotion out of it.

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Barbara Piper  Andrew Schlukebier • 2 years ago
Sorry, but your comment does not reflect any understanding of the concept of social (or cultural) construction. You seem to think that social construction is the opposite of "biological basis," here. On the contrary: "social construction" refers to knowledge about, understanding of, and use of.... whatever, all of which is socially mediated. A tree is an empirical object. But knowledge of trees is socially constructed, in the very obvious sense that we are not born with complete and total and full knowledge of trees; we have to learn it, acquire it, discover it. Botanists will have extensive knowledge of trees through their social experience; I have relatively little. Some social constructs have no empirical counterparts -- for many of us 'ghosts' are pure cultural constructs -- but most things in the empirical world are socially constructed in the sense that, again, we are not born with any knowledge or understanding of them, and we have to acquire that knowledge and understanding -- knowledge and understanding which may always be highly variable from person to person.

"Race" is a social construct in the sense that whatever the biology of physical sameness or difference between individuals or groups, we also have elaborate sets of beliefs and practices that are part of our understanding of "race." Many of those beliefs and practices change over time -- though the biology does not -- and this is one obvious sense in which "social construction" is not the same as empirical reality, but sits along side it as our culturally mediated experience of that reality, our understanding of that reality, etc.

Remember, too, that "social" construction is not "individual" construction. Rachel Dolezal doesn't get to "individually" construct her race, because race is a "social" construct that is imposed on her. She might try it more successfully if she possessed some of the empirical qualities of another race, but she doesn't. Ask instead why Obama is Black, since he has equal biological heritage from a White mother and a Black father: our social construction of race includes variations on what used to be called the one drop rule: any Black ancestry revealing itself empirically leads to being considered Black. Obama doesn't get to chose.

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Glen_S_McGhee_FHEAP  Barbara Piper • 2 years ago • edited
"... there wouldn’t be a problem with Cofnas’s line of inquiry if it were being done in a way that adheres to what we know about [[the social construction]] of complex traits" such as intelligence.
Everyone here (except me) gleefully skips over the chasm between "intelligence" and "IQ scores". The history of mass standardized testing bears studying, serves as a wobbly bridge between the two points, BOTH imminently social constructs. For starters, consider the lack of validity of the US Army's Alpha and Beta Intelligence Tests which were given to over 1 million United States soldiers during World War I.

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Unemployed_Northeastern  Glen_S_McGhee_FHEAP • 2 years ago
The very WWI tests later used to create the SATs by the notorious eugenicist Charles Campbell Brigham...

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David  Unemployed_Northeastern • 2 years ago
He's not saying that race is a genetic construct.

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failureofreality • 2 years ago • edited
The issue is this: there are differences in success between racial groups. The usual explanation is racism. But differences in intelligence also explain the differences in the success of various groups.

It is a matter of the mean, or average, intelligence quotient and the standard deviation. The identified differences in average IQ for a group tells us nothing about the intelligence of an individual in the group or other talents possessed by an individual.
The real issue is solving the problem of different outcomes for different racial groups. The current fashion is to assume racism and provide different requirements for success for groups that cannot satisfy a higher standard. This does not address the underlying problem.
If there are differences in the average IQ for racial groups--again, not a matter of an individual's IQ--then the reason for the difference should be identified. If the difference is due to environment, then changes can be made. If is a matter of diet or educational opportunities, effective change can be made. If the differences are due to genetics, the problem becomes harder to solve. If it is matter of genetics and heredity, we may all have to resolve ourselves to accepting the different outcomes.
We are all subject to the vagaries of life. Some people are born with special talents that give them special success in life. Some people are born smart. Some people are born with wonderful musical talent. Individual people face individual success or failure.
Everyone hates the Bell Curve. But Murray's identification of intelligence as a source of conflict is more and more apparent. Our economy gives smart people a huge advantage. It is not only a conflict between racial groups. There is a conflict among white people. As jobs that did not require above average intelligence have disappeared, people with below average intelligence have struggled. It is just true that half of white people have below average intelligence. About 15 percent of white people have an IQ below 85, which means that they are unsuited for work in the modern economy. There are over 40 million white people in America who will find work harder and harder to get. This is a social problem that must be addressed.

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King Goat  failureofreality • 2 years ago
The people that are so enthusiastic about research into genetic limitations of groups remind me of coaches that want to know what the average limitations of groups seems to be so they can not waste time on developing talents in those areas for persons in that group. Most successful coaches I know want to know how they maximize the talents of everyone on their team. Consider if a coach took away from the fact that 3/4 of NBA athletes were non-white that he shouldn't waste his time on recruiting, training and playing non-white athletes. What a state he must be in when, say, a Larry Bird, John Stockton, Luca Doncic, Nikola Jokic, etc., etc., comes in and drops a double-double on his team...

Likewise, as a teacher, I'm not so interested in what the average limits of groups seem to be, I'm interested in what the individuals in my classes *can* do with my help, and the answer seems to be a great deal.

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StillCantFindReverse  King Goat • 2 years ago
That's absolutely the right attitude for a teacher. The problem is the constant trumpeting from many, often including yourself, that if the average GPA/SAT/admitted student %/some other metric for students of different groups don't match up, it must because of racism. At that point, examination of averages rather than individuals becomes paramount.

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King Goat  StillCantFindReverse • 2 years ago
Oh, I see, we need this research so that when people point to disparities being due to racism we can reply 'no, it's due to genetic inferiority.'

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David  King Goat • 2 years ago
Or at least so we can stop being accused of racism, for nothing.

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StillCantFindReverse  King Goat • 2 years ago
We need it so that we can determine what portion of a disparity is due to things societally could theoretically fix if it wanted to - racism, inequality of opportunities, etc. - and what portion is due to things it currently can't. Without that knowledge, it's impossible to know what success would look like.

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John Ahearn  StillCantFindReverse • 2 years ago
Even if we found a genetic influence on IQ, it wouldn’t imply that we couldn’t do anything about it. We can’t adjust the genome directly in humans, but we might be able to treat its effects. See the PKU example elsewhere.

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failureofreality  King Goat • 2 years ago
Yes. Treat everyone as an individual.
But, without a doubt, height is an advantage in basketball. Is there any player in the NBA that is below average in height? Should this issue be addressed with a program to give short people an opportunity to play in the NBA?

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Steve Foerster  failureofreality • 2 years ago
Is there any player in the NBA that is below average in height?
Muggsy Bogues played for four different teams over fourteen seasons in the NBA and he's 5' 3". But I agree with you that the existence of a few vertically challenged basketball players doesn't mean height isn't an advantage in the sport.

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hrhdhd  failureofreality • 2 years ago
Spud Webb (5'6"?) was amazing in his day. Today he probably wouldn't be.

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Ziegler45314  hrhdhd • 2 years ago
Comparable player today would be Isaiah Thomas, Washington Wizards guard or Chris Clemons, Houston Rockets guard, both of whom are 5'9".

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David  failureofreality • 2 years ago
I remember Henry Bibby on "my" 76ers. I claimed them as my own because they were close and they won a whole lot (they also had Julius Erving). Bibby was memorable because he was such an exception.

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AssociateProfessor  failureofreality • 2 years ago
Isn’t Kobe Bryant shorter than average for NBA players?

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failureofreality  AssociateProfessor • 2 years ago
It is really a shame that someone who identifies as AssociateProfessor does not understand the nature of averages. Yes, if you take the average height of players in the NBA, half will be below average in height.
The issue is the average height of men in America. Is there any player in the NBA below 5 feet 10 inches tall?

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Mike_Masinter  failureofreality • 2 years ago
It is really a shame that someone who posts about the nature of averages doesn't understand the difference between an average and a median. It is not true as a general rule that, in a given population, half the people will be below average, whether we're talking measures of height, weight, intelligence, age or anything else unless, by coincidence, the average also happens to be the median.

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King Goat  failureofreality • 2 years ago
Isiah Thomas Thomas is 5'9' and is an NBA All-Star player.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wi...

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King Goat  failureofreality • 2 years ago
"is there any player in the NBA that is below average in height?"

Arguably the greatest point guard to ever play the game is John Stockton at 6'1'. The point guard for the defending NCAA men's national championship Virginia Cavaliers, Kihei Clark is 5'9'. But of course, we were talking about genetic research into race, not height.

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EasyJay  King Goat • 2 years ago
According to the federal CDC, the average height of US males is 5’9”. So, neither of those guys is below average.

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David  King Goat • 2 years ago
But coaches don't think that way. They presumably want the best players. Presumably there's neither a racial bump or deduction.

White guys can't jump. Everyone's heard it, it's true, and it's racial. Larry Bird couldn't jump very high, but he made up for it with other strengths. Coaches were always (far more than) willing to have him on their teams. They probably never expected him to jump as high as many other players, because of his race, and that was rational.

How many blacks are recruited for the offensive line in football? That's white man's territory. Blacks are expected to do better on the defensive line. There are jobs for both, but different jobs.

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Unemployed_Northeastern  failureofreality • 2 years ago • edited
Everyone hates the Bell Curve because it is pseudoscience. As in it's actually a common example of bad methodology in college stats and social science courses. A methodology reverse-engineered from the desired conclusion. Cherry-picked evidence. Dismissal of evidence contrary to the desired outcome. Unwarranted leaps in logic. In some cases erroneous data (but only when it supports the thesis). Never even attempted to get galley proofs, let alone peer review. Universally derided among legitimate scientists and social scientists. An author with no academic expertise in the subjects he is purporting to study (Murray is a political scientist). Shall I go on? Did I mention that Murray was burning crosses as a teenager - and that his excuse later in life was "I didn't know that was bad or racist?" And we are supposed to take him seriously as a sociologist?

"Some people are born with wonderful musical talent. "

Wow! Can you link a video of a newborn playing an instrument, since musical gifts are apparently from the womb? I'll wait.

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David  Unemployed_Northeastern • 2 years ago
Do you think everyone could be W. A. Mozart, or Felix Mendelssohn? I just watched the other day a five year old Russian kid playing a piano concerto, on stage with an orchestra. He was just getting through it, it wasn't a great performance, but it wasn't terrible and he is just five years old. Do you think he has no special talent?

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DavidT  David • 2 years ago
There is a vast difference between identifying individual talents and a social/cultural assumption or claim that an entire "race" has some intellectual property, advantage, or feature merely by virtue of being a member of that "race."

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Unemployed_Northeastern  David • 2 years ago
Could Mozart play music at birth, David? It's not a trick question. No? OK then. Say, did he have Leopold Mozart - a famous and talented musician - for a father? Who drilled him in the art of music pretty much from the second young Wolfgang could control his fingers? Yes. So environmental factors - that great bane of all race scientists - are paramount.

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StillCantFindReverse  Unemployed_Northeastern • 2 years ago
Really? I had the same environmental factors as several high school classmates who are now professional musicians. Same lessons from the same teacher, comparable instruments at home, similar time spent practicing, similarly unmusical parents, etc. They're professional musicians and I'm not because they had talent and I didn't.

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Unemployed_Northeastern  StillCantFindReverse • 2 years ago
And yet you were all equally capable musicians at birth, I reckon. Just as you and Da Vinci had exactly the same painting ability at birth, i.e. none whatsoever. Not enough strength or hand-eye coordination to even hold the brush.

Talent has its place. So do environmental factors. *Race scientists* ignore environmental factors because their sheer existence nigh decimates the genetic determinism derpitude of their pseudoscience.

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David  Unemployed_Northeastern • 2 years ago
And yet you were all equally capable musicians at birth, I reckon.

and yet you have no evidence to support your reckoning. Is that called "dead reckoning"? (please laugh at the little joke)

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David  Unemployed_Northeastern • 2 years ago
Environmental factors are important. Even more in this case because I suspect dad donated some of his own compositions to little Wolfgang to help his reputation as a composing prodigy. (I did a style analysis on this once when I happened to hear them both, it was pretty obvious just from listening, plus the story makes sense as a smart thing to do -- Dad's career is what it is, the boy has a chance to be famous.)

Nevertheless, it's highly likely that little Wolfgang inherited musical ability from his dad. One of my sons obviously inherited ability in chemistry from my dad. I don't have that ability and quit chem after my first orgo course, for the friendlier environment of EE. So he didn't have a chem-rich environment growing up. But chem came easily to my dad, and to my kid who also inherited dad's nose and some other things including from dad's mother. If you knew the people involved, this would be simply obvious.

How many of the "nurture only" folks have actually raised children? I would guess, not many.

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makelovenotwarud  Unemployed_Northeastern • 2 years ago
Unless, of course, the talented musician gene was carried on the Y-Chromosome and passed from the father to the son. Yes, so it could also be explained by genetics or, more likely, the interaction of a host of variables which makes that statistics-that great bane of marginally trained social scientists-so fascinating for us that do understand what the heck we are talking about.

FYI: Murray has a book coming out at the end of the month. I am sure you will view his childhood actions are relevant to his comments on Gender, Race and Class. In my childhood I borrowed (well, hot wired and trashed) several cars. I really don't think that is relevant to my adult status as a researcher, husband, friend, father, minister, shooting instructor, life coach, little league umpire and all around interesting guy.

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Unemployed_Northeastern  makelovenotwarud • 2 years ago
"FYI: Murray has a book coming out at the end of the month."

Tell me when he dares get it - or ANY of his work - peer-reviewed.

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failureofreality  Unemployed_Northeastern • 2 years ago
Murray was raised in Iowa. He served in the Peace Corps.
And maybe you are right. I must be able to sing as good as Beyoncé since there is no video of her playing an instrument as a newborn.

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Unemployed_Northeastern  failureofreality • 2 years ago
Environmental factors, how do they work?

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John Ahearn  Unemployed_Northeastern • 2 years ago
By interacting with genetic factors.

In any event, your argument is akin to saying that secondary sex characteristics, sex drive, etc. are environmentally produced because they aren’t present at birth.

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Unemployed_Northeastern  John Ahearn • 2 years ago
You miss me - the most persistent criticism of Murray's works over the years is that he always, always, always dismisses or outright ignores environmental factors because they would destroy his risible genetic determinism pseudoscience. Don't take my word for it - read some academics' reviews of his books.

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failureofreality  Unemployed_Northeastern • 2 years ago
Have you read the Bell Curve? He has never taken a stand on the reason for differences in the distribution of intelligence between different groups.
Read all the reviews you want. But it is a lazy approach.

Murray's primary concern is the effects of differences in intelligence within populations and between population subgroups. His subsequent work has largely been vindicated: our society is pulling apart.

The primary objection to his analysis of the difference between the distributions of intelligence between people usually identified as Black and people identified as white is that the difference in the average intelligence of Black people as measured by IQ tests and the average IQ of white people is smaller than the distribution of intelligence among white people. This is, of course true. The range if IQ for white people goes from below 70 to above 130, while the identified difference between the averages for Black and white people is only 15. This would be true of most distributions.

We can ignore Murray but he has raised some important questions. And again, he has not so far taken a position on the reason for the differences between groups. His concern is that the measured differences are source of conflict. Even the distribution of intelligence among white people is a source of conflict as our society becomes more driven by advanced technology.

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Unemployed_Northeastern  failureofreality • 2 years ago
"The primary objection to his analysis of the difference between the distributions of intelligence between people usually identified as Black and people identified as white is that the difference in the average intelligence of Black people as measured by IQ tests and the average IQ of white people is smaller than the distribution of intelligence among white people. "

Not too fast, there. From Nicholas Lemann's critique of Bell Curve at

"What Herrnstein and Murray used to measure IQ is actually a measure of education as well as intelligence. All the people tracked in the National Longitudinal Study of Youth took the Armed Forces Qualifying Test, which Herrnstein and Murray treat as a good measure of intelligence. Because the material covered in the test includes subjects like trigonometry, many academic critics of The Bell Curve have objected to its use as a measure only of IQ and not at all of academic achievement. Herrnstein and Murray concede in the footnotes that scores tend to rise with the subjects’ education–but they seriously underestimate the magnitude of this rise, as shows. And they resist the obvious inference that the test scores are measuring something other than intelligence"

And of course this is when Murray & Hernstein didn't pull figures uncited out of the air:

"The Bell Curve’s air of strict scientism doesn’t preclude the use of lightly sourced or unsourced assertions, such as the statement that the median IQ of all black Africans is 75, or that “intermarriage among people in the top few percentiles of intelligence may be increasing far more rapidly than suspected” (no footnote)."

Maybe you should read some of the criticisms of Bell Curve before asserting its discredited methodology as legitimate.

"Herrnstein and Murray, sounding like the souls of caution, write that “half a century of work, now amounting to hundreds of empirical and theoretical studies, permits a broad conclusion that the genetic component of IQ is unlikely to be smaller than 40 per cent or higher than 80 per cent. … For purposes of this discussion, we will adopt a middling estimate of 60 per cent heritability.” This now looks seriously overstated. Michael Daniels, Bernie Devlin, and Kathryn Roeder of Carnegie Mellon University took the same studies on which Herrnstein and Murray based their estimate, and subjected them to a computer meta-analysis (“a powerful method of statistical analysis”–The Bell Curve). Their paper, which has not yet been published, says: “In brief, studies of IQ, and our reanalyses of them, suggest a narrow-sense heritability of 34 per cent and a broad-sense heritability of 46 per cent. [The difference between broad and narrow is too technical to explain in this limited space.] This is a far cry from Herrnstein and Murray’s maximum value of 80 per cent or their middling value of 60 per cent. "

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Glen_S_McGhee_FHEAP  failureofreality • 2 years ago
Actually, the studies point in the opposite direction. "It is possible to see why measures of ability, such as IQ, cannot be used as simple predictors of success. 'Intelligence' operates primarily within the context of the school system, and its greatest utility is in predicting grades. ... the fact [is] that IQ tests were developed for use in schools and have received few other applications ..." (Randall Collins, 1979/2019: 38-39.)
This limits the applicability of the following to school system. "The issue is this: there are differences in success between racial groups. The usual explanation is racism. But differences in intelligence also explain the differences in the success of various groups."

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Glen_S_McGhee_FHEAP  failureofreality • 2 years ago • edited
Well, there's problem here. I like your approach -- but it implies, for example, that men are smarter than women because males are paid a higher hourly rate than females.
So, gals -- are men smarter?
"The issue is this: there are differences in success between racial groups. ... But differences in intelligence also explain the differences in the success of various groups."

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HistoryProf  Guest • 2 years ago
"Race" may be a social construct, but scientists do accept that there are significant genetic variations between demographic sub-groups. Knowing this is often quite important in medicine, as certain diseases and illnesses are more prevalent in some demographic sub-groups than others due to genetic factors.

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Unemployed_Northeastern  HistoryProf • 2 years ago
Is this like how the peoples of Africa "are more diverse genetically than the inhabitants of the rest of the world combined, according to a sweeping study that carried researchers into remote valleys and mountaintops to sample the bloodlines of more than 100 distinct populations" yet *race scientists* all lump them together as "black" because, uh, reasons?

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failureofreality  Unemployed_Northeastern • 2 years ago
This must be similar to the way all people with light skin are lumped together in terms of income and wealth, when the diversity of income and wealth among light skinned people is greater than the difference between light skinned and dark skinned people. The race scientists that look for average differences between people usually identified as white and people usually identified as African American should also stop lumping together people with diverse incomes such as the poor in Appalachia and the wealthy in San Francisco whose only common characteristic is the color of their skin.

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Unemployed_Northeastern  failureofreality • 2 years ago
It's hard to stay on topic, isn't it?

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StillCantFindReverse  Unemployed_Northeastern • 2 years ago
Should differences between them not be studied, either?

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Unemployed_Northeastern  StillCantFindReverse • 2 years ago
Tell that to the *race scientists* who have universally always considered them one monolithic group.

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StillCantFindReverse  Unemployed_Northeastern • 2 years ago
The US government and most US colleges currently consider them one monolithic group, so if the purpose of the research is to examine the efficacy of various race-based and race-conscious programs, I don't see how further subdivisions would serve any purpose.

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David  Guest • 2 years ago
Given that it's modern Scientific American (can't hold a candle to what it used to be) I'd guess the article just reports the results of a poll. Sort of like 97% of climate scientists (according to NPR, those who returned a survey and said they were climate scientists, minus most of those who returned the survey disagreeing with the desired conclusion -- I am not kidding!) who said the globe is warming, except that oops it isn't.

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Unemployed_Northeastern  David • 2 years ago • edited
"The sun clearly revolves around the earth; I see it happen every day!"

- David

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failureofreality  Guest • 2 years ago
Then let us stop talking about race. Let us stop using race as a factor in hiring and admission to college. Stop finding differences in outcomes for different groups. Let us stop the false belief in diversity. Let us assume everyone is the same and move on.

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Unemployed_Northeastern  failureofreality • 2 years ago
Saying that race is not a genetic construct is not the same thing as saying that race doesn't exist. It is quite clearly still an important, oft-fraught social construct.

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Emik  failureofreality • 2 years ago
"Then let us stop talking about race."

Based on your comments you appear to be suggesting this: either let me defend my belief that some races are superior to others based on irrefutable scientific proofs, or let's not discuss race at all and let me erase all these hopelessly misguided attempts to address so-called social inequities that don't really exist because there's no such thing as race.

Just because there is no scientific basis for a thing does not mean there is no belief in a thing. And when there is sufficient belief in a thing such that it informs the very fabric of a society, then some of us may want to address that thing such as it is.

Feel free to stop talking about race, I suspect you can afford the luxury.

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Glen_S_McGhee_FHEAP  Emik • 2 years ago
He might as well be talking about biological gender -- see above.
Since males have higher earnings than females, following his logic, they are more intelligent. Hardly!
I only WISH that we could stop "talking" about race. It will take one thousand years to erase race as a barrier.

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David  Guest • 2 years ago • edited
There is a cluster of physical characteristics associated with each race, especially in skull configuration, as was shown in the very old deprecated research on racial difference and IQ.

Disregarding the controversial IQ aspects, I think the existence of physical differences is still undisputed. And so, can race really be said to be just a social construct?

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DavidT  David • 2 years ago
The IHE censors removed my long response, for reasons that are completely opaque to me, but the short answer is that the existence of physical differences is highly disputed for the simply reason that "race" is so complex a category that is usually impossible to demarcate a "race". Bantu speakers are different physically from Xhosa speakers in Africa. Han Chinese are physically different from Hmong. And so on. The analogue in population genetics refers simply to endogamous communities in which genetic clusters can emerge. But things like shovel-shaped incisors are not what we usually think of a socially relevant dimension of "race."

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DavidT  David • 2 years ago
"I think the existence of physical differences is still undisputed."
On the contrary. We mostly use the term "race" in such an imprecise way that "physical differences" are impossible to enumerate. Americans minimally recognize 4 races: White; Black; Yellow; Red, each traditionally referring to skin color. But is a Black African the same as a South Indian? Or someone from Melanesia? Even people of Bantu language families are physically different from people of Xhosa language families. Are Han Chinese the same "yellow" people as Hmong?

The closest analogue to "race" in science is probably from population genetics, and the fact that genetic communities can sometimes be endogamous enough to present a high concentration of shared genetic traits. Tay-Sacks clusters in my Jewish patients, but "Jewish" is less a distinct race than a population that has traditionally preferred in-marriage. Similarly, my African-American patients sometimes carry the sickle-cell trait; but my Greek patients have thalassemia -- is "Greek" a race? And remember that Greeks and Italians were not considered "White" in the U.S until well into the 20th century.

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makelovenotwarud  DavidT • 2 years ago
I understand DavidT, Unemployed, Yiddish and Grace are going to never agree to disagree and will instead continue to spin your wheels. Can I try asking each of you if you think a different measure which I will call, "Location on Earth Five-hundred Years ago" "LEFY" matters for a traits other than what we (foolishly) call IQ? What I mean is Race is such a loaded term and causes people (on all sides of the argument) to ignore weaknesses in their points.

Consider LEFY, does it matter for some measurable genetic variable (height, weight, disease)? I ask because it seems that race is clearly a social construct, yet is clearly matters in health care. Drugs, diseases, treatments differ based upon race even if you correct, as best we can, for environmental factors. So, if we step out of race and ask something like "To best of your knowledge, where were your ancestors 500 years ago?" Do you see that as a relevant question?

I ask because it seems obvious that yes, LEFY matters. We have dutch populations in schools with 500 students here in Midwest that have girls volleyball teams that start 3-4 girls over 6 feet year after year. Outcomes that are statistically impossible in a sample randomly drawn from the entire USA population of teen girls. Given that's true, it seems highly, highly, highly unlikely we will not eventually find other currently unobserved differences within these populations as well (say, salt metabolizing rates).

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DavidT  makelovenotwarud • 2 years ago
The problem might be that you are drifting between "race" and genetics. The Dutch girls you mention are presumably "White", so the fact that they are unusually tall simply suggests that it is difficult to predict height from "White", just as "Black" includes the very tall Dinka of the Sudan as well as the very short Mbuti. Again, population genetics can reveal clusters of traits in small, inbreeding populations, whether of humans -- Dinka versus Mbuti -- or lions, but that is not what we have meant by our concept of "race" for hundreds of years.

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John Ahearn  makelovenotwarud • 2 years ago
There are certainly statistical differences in, say, height across what we call racial/ethnic groups (and within them, too). With the possible exception of the Khoi-San, these differences are general, the population distributions overlap, and they are heavily affected by environmental factors. But yes, there are differences.

It is likely that any "underlying" genetic differences in IQ, intelligence, or whatever you want to call it are hidden amidst environmental factors, prenatal health, etc.

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David  DavidT • 2 years ago
Race is most persistent and may have the most social effect when it is evident in physical appearance, especially in the face. Humans love to categorize things, and they can categorize people by their faces, and they can seek to find out if they can make somewhat meaningful predictions based on those faces.

This sorting is consistent, although of course not perfectly at the boundaries. We all have an idea what a Polish face, a west African face, and a northern Han Chinese face look like and we'd not mistake one for another.

And often it's been shown that in some cases, meaningful group predictions can be made based on those faces.

Which determines how someone's face looks -- nature or nurture or society? Almost entirely nature.

So among the millions of genetically determined variables, a rough and not always consistent set of them sorts people into racial categories. One can define race by ancestry or maybe by genetic tests, but the sorting will end up being almost the same.

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DavidT  David • 2 years ago
I'm sorry but this is extraordinarily naive, wrong on facts and confuses nationality (Polish) with race. "The sorting will end up being almost the same" is empirically false, and any familiarity with the history of the concept of "race" would show that.

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Unemployed_Northeastern  DavidT • 2 years ago
I'm starting to remember why I had David banned last year (he started a new profile a few weeks ago).

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Unemployed_Northeastern  David • 2 years ago
And here's David bringing phrenology into the mix.

"And so, can race really be said to be just a social construct?"

People of Polish, Iberian, Italian, Russian, etc. heritage did not used to be considered white. Your 19th century phrenologist friends would have been in this camp. Now those peoples are considered to be white. Is this because their magic beans race gene that no geneticist has found or believes exists changed and everyone realized it... or because the social construct of who is considered white expanded? Hmmm....

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David  Unemployed_Northeastern • 2 years ago
They weren't considered black. What were they considered? It's hard for me to believe the very white Polish and Russians weren't considered white.

None of this shows that race is a social construct. That's really a far reach, and finding some boundary or undefined cases doesn't do it.

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Grace Alcock  David • 2 years ago
It's not a far reach at all. Poles definitely weren't considered white. Neither were Italians and Greeks. Just google "are Jews white?" and you will go down a racist internet rabbit hole right now. The construction of who was allowed to be considered white and when is not even some deep, dark historical mystery. It's pretty recent and not exactly hidden.

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Unemployed_Northeastern  David • 2 years ago
"It's hard for me to believe the very white Polish and Russians weren't considered white."

Perhaps drop the willful stupidity act and read literally any book on the history of 19th and early 20th century America, racism, immigration, or even those very phrenologists you alluded to earlier. I already alluded to one such work, Charles Campbell Brigham's A History of American Intelligence.* That's the fellow who created the SAT. I'm sure any number of us on this board can give you many, many book recommendations. Or even better, stop espousing ignorant nonsense on a website for higher education.

*To quote Murray's excrement from pp. 82-3 of Edwin Black's excellent "War Against the Weak: Eugenics and America's Campaign to Create a Master Race":

"We still find tremendous differences between the non-English speaking Nordic group and the Alpine and Mediterranean groups... the underlying cause of the nativity differences we have shown is RACE [my emphasis] and not language... the decline in intelligence is due to two factors: the change in the races migrating to this country, and to the additional factor of sending of lower and lower representatives of each race."

Of course, to his (minimal) credit, Brigham later disowned his study: "Comparative studies of various national and racial groups may not be made with existing studies... one of the most pretentious of these comparative racial studies - the writer's own - was without foundation." [Ibid at 85]

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David  Unemployed_Northeastern • 2 years ago
The insults do nothing to strengthen your weak case. They may have said "Irish and blacks need not apply" but they did not mistake one for the other.

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Unemployed_Northeastern  David • 2 years ago
So... your hot take for everyone telling and citing for you that eastern & southern Europeans were not considered white until the 1940s or so is... that you believe there are only two races, white and black? Are you really that stupid or is this some sort of weird performance art?

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King Goat • 2 years ago
Who can blame people, especially persons of color, for being concerned about racialist research? There's a long history of it being dishonestly done and/or used to justify horrible treatment of them. To take an example, my conservative friends have long been wary of research into gun violence by epidemiologists because they say there's a history and perhaps built-in field bias against gun rights and that it's often seized upon, distorted and used to erode rights in that area. Well, magnify that history a hundredfold and that's the basis of concern about racialist research.

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Douglas Levene  King Goat • 2 years ago
That may be true but shutting down scientific research into the genetic basis of intelligence seems a bit extreme. There is obviously some genetic basis to it. Shouldn't we want to know how much and how much that can be affected by external sources? The opponents want to make all such research taboo.

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King Goat  Douglas Levene • 2 years ago
Let me ask you this: if a researcher were to announce they were conducting research into the genetics of 'Jewish degeneracy' (once a not uncommon scholarly pursuit) would you blame many Jews if they went 'wtf?' Or would you say, 'hey, there's obviously a genetic basis to degeneracy, shouldn't we want to know how much can be affected by external sources...'?

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HistoryProf  King Goat • 2 years ago
You say it mockingly, but there would be nothing wrong with investigations into, say, genetic influences on impulse control, or on violence, drug/alcohol addiction, or on serious personality disorders. Researchers have found that all of these things have some degree of genetic, inheritable influence. It would be improper to frame a study as "Jews are worse than others," but knowing that such things are to some extent genetically influenced might lead to constructive changes in therapeutic approaches, law enforcement, and rehabilitation of criminals.

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John Ahearn  HistoryProf • 2 years ago • edited
And in fact these exist and are relatively uncontroversial. Nobody thinks that the exploration of genetic factors for these factors precludes an exploration of environmental factors. Certainly some people think of genetics as destiny, but that's rarely the case in reality; genetic influences are, well, *influences*, and they regularly interact with environmental factors.

The most familiar example is phenylketonuria, where a particular genetic variant can lead to intellectual disability UNLESS the individual stops consuming phenylalanine. Is PKU genetic? Environmental? Obviously it's both.

Frankly, it would be astounding if genetic differences had *no* effect whatsoever on intellectual ability (within the normal range--we obviously know that it can lead to serious intellectual disabilities). It would also be astounding if the relevant genes did not vary in prevalence across broad groups of people.

Finding these effects would *not* mean that (say) black people were inherently and necessarily dumber, or that Jews were inherently and necessarily crafty/greedy/whatever, or that Asians were inherently and necessarily smarter.

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Douglas Levene  King Goat • 2 years ago
I suppose if someone announced they were conducting research into the genetics of "negro degeneracy" I would say wtf. But if they said the are conducting research into the genetic basis of intelligence, I'd say, that could be interesting and might open the door to more interesting research and possibly even medical advances.

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Unemployed_Northeastern  Douglas Levene • 2 years ago
And if they said they were conducting research into the genetic basis of intelligence but then cherry-picked some data, excluded mountains of contrary evidence, used biased testing methods, cited more than a few discredited sources, made up others entirely, and of course ignored environmental factors altogether to come to the conclusion that African-Americans are dumberer than everyone else, what would you think? Because that's been the go-to playbook for everyone from Madison Grant to Charles Murray. Go read "IBM and the Holocaust" author Edwin Black's "War Against the Weak, " among other deep dives into this very ugly side of *science.*

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StillCantFindReverse  King Goat • 2 years ago • edited
Pinning down a definition for "degeneracy" would be pretty difficult, but genetic influence on things like criminality, welfare use, and numerous other socially undesirable outcomes is studied all the time via twin and adoption studies. It's not possible to figure out "how much can be affected by external sources" without simultaneously figuring out how much can't.

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Unemployed_Northeastern  StillCantFindReverse • 2 years ago
"Pinning down a definition for "degeneracy" would be pretty difficult,"

As opposed to pinning down a definition for intelligence, which obviously perfectly conforms to that test a guy in France came up with in 1904, long before the dawn of modern neuroscience.

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StillCantFindReverse  Unemployed_Northeastern • 2 years ago
If the new rule is going to be "nothing that can't be perfectly defined to everyone's satisfaction can be studied," everything other than the hard sciences - and at least half of those - should cease to exist.

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Unemployed_Northeastern  StillCantFindReverse • 2 years ago
Uh huh, because there's no difference or daylight between, say, flat Earth theory and the theory of gravity in how well they are defined. It's a binary "perfectly defined or should be tossed" choice. Right. Sure. That's totally what I was implying and not a ridiculous straw argument.

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David  Unemployed_Northeastern • 2 years ago
I am not aware that neuroscience generally says IQ testing is invalid or that it doesn't measure genetically determined things (among other things).

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Unemployed_Northeastern  David • 2 years ago
You have also said in this thread that you are unaware of slavery and that science doesn't work by consensus. You are doing a remarkable job of showing that you are far out of your depth here, and as such you are one thin thread away from my banhammer. Comment in good faith or don't bother commenting. This isn't the Daily Caller.

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StillCantFindReverse  King Goat • 2 years ago
No one blames them for being concerned. People blame them for believing their feelings of "concern" or any other emotion should amount to a veto power over whether that or any other research is performed.

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Jonathan Kaplan  StillCantFindReverse • 2 years ago
To the best of my knowledge, no one, including Alfano, has ever called for "shutting down scientific research into the genetic basis of intelligence," and any such call would be laughable. The GWAS folks are plugging away solidlyi, and we've learned a lot about the relationship between genes and e.g. performance on IQ tests or educational attainment. Part of what we have learned, in fact, is that the genetics is way more complicated than anyone would have guessed 20 years ago. Similarly, the neurobio folks are hard at work, and no one is saying that their work isn't legitimate. etc.

Nor is the claim that hereditarian research per se should be "shut down" particularly popular. Rather, people like me look to the fantastic work that went into unraveling the genetics of, say, lactase persistence in humans, and understanding the distribution of lactase persistence world wide, and then we look at actual hereditarian researchers today, and we can't help but notice a quite dramatic gap the quality of the research, the variety of methods deployed, etc. Hereditarians look like incompetent dilettantes when compared to the biologists who work on the really much similar and more straightforward trait of lactase persistence. Shouldn't we demand the same quality of research into the possible causes of IQ gaps between populations as we got from research into why most people in some populations can digest milk as adults, and most people in other populations can't? Isn't that a fair ask? Really?

IF a hereditarian researcher in fact found a marker associated with IQ test-scores that was so-associated in two different populations, where it was equally predictive in both, and where the allele frequencies differed significantly between the populations, everyone would sit up and take notice. (We'd want to be cautious, because the genes associated with those markers might not be directly impacting cognitive development in a straightforward way. But we'd want to look!). No such markers have been found; and yes, they have been looked for. (Note that hereditarian research is so non-taboo that almost the first thing people did when they got the polygenic scores for educational attainment in (more or less) "western-European whites" was to see if it worked on people identified as Black; it didn't -- the scores were far less predictive in that population than the original. This isn't surprising, as GWAS's done in one population for complex behavior traits tend not to travel well. But it is definitely bad for the hereditarian hypothesis!) Absent direct genetic data, backed up by an understanding of the pathways between the genes and the phenotypic outcomes of interest, the standard tests used to determine whether two populations form separate ecotypes would be seem appropriate. These are, alas, all-but impossible to perform on humans, but that really isn't an excuse for pretending that those tests aren't the standard to which ecotypic claims are held. They are.

Some people have noted that current research aimed at defending genetic hypotheses regarding racial IQ gaps is of pretty terrible quality, and has been used (over and over again) to undermine calls for society to aim for a kind of rough equality in opportunity, at least. On the basis of that, they've suggested that this is a degenerate research program, and perhaps people should stop pursuing it, and that it is reasonable to stop funding it. That isn't shutting down research, either. It is rather asking proponents of a hypothesis that they have failed to move the needle on for the past 50+ years to please stop wasting everyone's time, and come back when they have something new (including new ideas to try). That seems reasonable to me.

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StillCantFindReverse  Jonathan Kaplan • 2 years ago
IF a hereditarian researcher in fact found a marker associated with IQ test-scores that was so-associated in two different populations, where it was equally predictive in both, and where the allele frequencies differed significantly between the populations, everyone would sit up and take notice. (We'd want to be cautious, because the genes associated with those markers might not be directly impacting cognitive development in a straightforward way. But we'd want to look!). No such markers have been found; and yes, they have been looked for.
I don't see why it would need to be equally predictive in both/all populations; if it's more predictive in one than the other, that's likely as not because of some other allele that hasn't yet been identified that's more common in one or the other. As to the larger point, though, there's long since stopped being any serious scientific dispute that intelligence is at least partially heritable. If it's heritable at all, then some alleles for it must exist somewhere. We're not anywhere close to unravelling (pun not intended) the actions, if any, of every last bit of human DNA, and I don't expect we'll get there in either of our lifetimes. Just because we haven't identified genes or alleles that all research on the subject says have to exist doesn't mean that it's no longer worthwhile to look.

Some people have noted that current research aimed at defending genetic hypotheses regarding racial IQ gaps is of pretty terrible quality, and has been used (over and over again) to undermine calls for society to aim for a kind of rough equality in opportunity, at least.
Terrible quality or not, it's never been disproven. Given the methodology of a lot of studies that purport to do so, I really doubt any of its detractors are seriously concerned with those standards.

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Jonathan Kaplan  StillCantFindReverse • 2 years ago
It needs to be predictive in both for the following reason. Say that a marker is predictive in population 1, but not in population 2. Does it matter whether a particular form of an allele is more common in one than the other, with respect to predicting a between-population outcome? With very limited exceptions (e.g., it is non-predictive in one population because in that population there is no variation at that loci -- ie., it is at fixation or it is absent), the answer is no. Because if it fails to be predictive in one population, then it's frequency is simply not part of the explanation for the average outcome of that population. It just isn't and can't be. So since it isn't part of the explanation for the average in one population, it can't be part of the explanation of the difference between them (with the exception noted above).

So you really need to show that the genes you find do the same thing in both populations, if differences in allele frequencies in those genes are to be part of your explanation of between-population differences.

The "hereditarian hypothesis" as it is usually construed has not been "disproven" in the sense of being shown to be strictly speaking impossible. But it is looking ever more implausible. Hereditarians back down to the position of it being plausible that there is some difference in genes related to cognitive ability between some populations or others, but that isn't really what they are arguing; they think they know the populations, and will tell you which ones they are. But then, it is hard to see how the claim that they are explicitly defending re: Black/White performance differences on IQ tests could work, given the results of recent GWAS work, etc.,and what we know about population genomic clustering and variation. It may not have been shown to be entirely impossible, but on empirical grounds, it is looking like the world would have to be very weird indeed to make the numbers come out as they'd like.

Yes, performance on IQ tests, and educational attainment, are heritable. You are right that no one who is seriously involved in these debates doubts that. But note that the missing heritability problem not only hasn't been solved, but that the sib-pair control methodology has shown the problem to be vastly worse for complex behavioral traits than it is even for complex ordinary physical traits. That's a very interesting result in this context; it suggests that we are even further from understanding how genes come together to influence the development of complex behavioral traits (like IQ test-taking performance) than we might have thought.

And that leaves us where we've been for the past 50 years -- hereditarians making really bad arguments that just don't work, and then pretending that it is the responsibility of everyone else to show that the hypothesis that they are pushing is wrong, rather then their having to show that it is actually plausible.

Many many environmental factors have been found that influence IQ test-taking performance in both populations of interest, that vary between them, and that disadvantage blacks. Exactly zero genetic factors have been found with these traits.

And while hereditarians like to claim that if you put all the factors identified together, you don't get a big enough number, that's a crappy argument. No one has figured out the exact constellation of environmental factors that made people in the 1950s score so much lower on IQ tests than people in 2000s, eitehr. But we know that that wasn't genetic. So we know that big differences can be entirely environmental, even when we can't identify all the factors. (And anyone who thinks the difference between being born Black and being born White in the US is smaller than the difference between growing up in the 50s and growing up in the 90s with respect to the sorts of things we'd expect to impact the development of the kinds of cognitive abilities IQ tests measure is, I would suggest, viewing the world through a very odd lens indeed -- a lens that does not take the past and ongoing effects of racism seriously, and ignores racism more generally.)

Given all that, there are no good reasons for people to keep pushing the same old bad arguments. Hereditarians need to stop screwing around with lazy statistical tests, and start doing real biology, if they want to be taken seriously. And if they aren't willing to do that, I see no reason to keep wasting time or space on them.

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Glen_S_McGhee_FHEAP  Jonathan Kaplan • 2 years ago
What is you explanation of the Flynn Effect, and the Reverse Flynn Effect?

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Jonathan Kaplan  Glen_S_McGhee_FHEAP • 2 years ago
Hi Glen --

The easy answer is that I don't have one; indeed, part of my point above was that we don't have a good explanation for the Flynn effect, but we know with certainty that it isn't because of changing allele frequencies! (That is, we know it isn't genetic in that sense, but rather environmental.) If you ask: what environmental factors that influence the development of I.Q. test-taking performance in the 1950s and 2000s explain the difference in average scores between people tested in those periods? the answer is: we don't know. (There are some things that vary that we can point to, but no one thinks that these associations can explain the entire difference.)

Flynn, as you might already know, posited that the explanation was that over time the cognitive demands of our daily lives came to better match the cognitive demands that influence I.Q. test-taking performance (in large part, particular kinds of abstract thought), and that the kind of thinking that resulted in poor performance was no longer as useful in daily life. I find that explanation interesting, but it would be very hard to test in a clear way!

As for the recent measured decline, similarly, we don't know. But if I had to take an educated guess, it would involve the same kind of factors that have resulted in the U.S. in the recent (past 3 years or so) decrease in life-expectancy. That is, the so-called 'social determinants of health' likely influence not only morbidity and mortality, but the kinds of developmental factors that emerge as changes in the kinds of cognitive ability associated with I.Q. test-taking performance. But that's just a guess.

Hope that helps!

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Glen_S_McGhee_FHEAP  Jonathan Kaplan • 2 years ago
Yes, this helps -- thank you for taking the time to update me on this continuing mystery!

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Grace Alcock  StillCantFindReverse • 2 years ago • edited
Part of getting an IRB through is demonstrating that the finding is worth the potential risk to subjects. Why exactly is it necessary and valid to parse out precisely what differences there might be in human groups and IQ? We know that basic intelligence is only one partial predictor of actual human achievement, and there are multiple other variables that are at least as important. So is the research actually all that interesting in the first place at this point? What more can really be gained from it beyond the racialist application?

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John Ahearn  Grace Alcock • 2 years ago
Because IRBs have not historically defined "risk" to include "someone might use or misapply this research to say nasty things about people." It doesn't even include "the results, even if true, might cast certain people in a bad light."

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Grace Alcock  John Ahearn • 2 years ago
It does, in fact, include potential psychological, economic, reputational harm to subjects.

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John Ahearn  Grace Alcock • 2 years ago
Absolutely in the sense that researchers can't cause psychological harm to people (unless the benefits outweigh the harms done) and that we have to protect individuals' privacy (so I can't publish a list of people who participated in a study of risky sexual behavior).

Absolutely not, in the sense that I am never precluded from discovering something on the grounds that someone somewhere might not like the discovery.

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StillCantFindReverse  Grace Alcock • 2 years ago
It's necessary because a huge amount of government programs and taxpayer spending are premised on the as-yet-unproven assumption that differences in outcomes for various racial groups are entirely or at least primarily due to social conditions that government resources should be expended to rectify. If that isn't the case, and the disparity is instead largely caused by factors beyond anyone's current ability to fix, those resources can be better expended elsewhere. Whether 'race' is a valid biological categorization is beside the point here, because it's the one the government and most private entities use when making those calculations, so any study on the utility of those preferences and programs would need to be done using the same groupings.

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jacksmi  StillCantFindReverse • 2 years ago
"a huge amount of government programs and taxpayer spending are premised on the as-yet-unproven assumption. . ."

We already know from years of research that environment is important and that its effects can be modified--but if you want final, indisputable, detailed, genetic "proof" of that (or anything else in social science), then, as you observed in your previous comment "don't expect we'll get there in either of our lifetimes." And there you have it: The perfect excuse for us to wait "lifetimes" before we begin do anything about unjust social circumstances. Thank you for laying out the issues so clearly.

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Mike Delasalle  jacksmi • 2 years ago
We know from years of research that BOTH genes and environment are important. We know from mouse research that skills at problem solving are highly heritable.

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jacksmi  Mike Delasalle • 2 years ago
Neither of these points contradicts what I said.

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King Goat  StillCantFindReverse • 2 years ago
They can't really veto such research, they're trying to argue, as a social norm, 'hey, don't do this, it's ugly in its results.' And there's every reason, historical-empirically at the least, that that is so.

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StillCantFindReverse  King Goat • 2 years ago
A better use of their energy and outrage would be finding less-ugly ways for society to deal with results that, while ugly, might inconveniently happen to be true.

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swankj  StillCantFindReverse • 2 years ago
You're (probably intentionally) using "results" in a different way than King Goat, who was, I believe, referring to the brutality, violence, and enslavement visited on people of color by so-called white people.
You use "results" to mean that people of color are less intelligent than so-called white people.
If you believe that, your own intelligence is in question.

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StillCantFindReverse  swankj • 2 years ago
I use results to mean that it's possible the averages are different, which if true would be of no importance to anything other than various programs that use group average outcomes as indicators of opportunity. If that were true, and it had consequences beyond that, that would be unfortunate - but it wouldn't be a justification for suppressing information or continuing to throw resources at programs that aren't capable of closing the gap.

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David  swankj • 2 years ago
the brutality, violence, and enslavement visited on people of color by so-called white people

Really? Where?

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Unemployed_Northeastern  David • 2 years ago
Why are you here?

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swankj  David • 2 years ago
You're kidding, right? Or did you simply decide to ignore centuries of slavery here in the US and in many other places...and the continuing killing of unarmed black men by police who somehow evade conviction?

How about harassment of people of color by law enforcement? Ask Henry Louis Gates about his experience with the police at his own home. https://en.wikipedia.org/wi...

There are countless other examples, but I'm sure you've blinded yourself to them.

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David  King Goat • 2 years ago
I don't blame people for being concerned.

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Guy • 2 years ago
The editor's note and the abstract of the journal article, as well as Prof. Albano's petition, are worth taking the time to read. (Links thoughtfully provided by IHE). Ideas cannot be defeated by ideological, religious, social, academic or official banishment or intimidation. This is unfortunate for incorrect ideas and fortunate for correct ones, but true for both.

I understand Prof. Alfano's objections (racism is bad and not to be encouraged), but only with free discussion committed to honestly following the facts wherever they lead and then applying them ethically for the benefit of humanity will incorrect and harmful ideas be defeated. They need to be discredited through skillful, unbiased inquiry and research, open engaged discussion and intellectually honest debate. Much painful experience shows us that there is no other way. There are no shortcuts, however much we might wish there were.

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Candisdisgus • 2 years ago • edited
My favorite part is where they insist that free speech follow existing norms. Lololol. Science: weaponizing and diminishing free speech one valid criticism at a time..since the "Enlightenment."

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HistoryProf • 2 years ago
We now know that genetics plays a large part in brain development and behavior in humans. Mental illness? Partly genetic. Alcoholism? Partly genetic. Sexual orientation? Partly genetic. In fact, the most comprehensive scientific review of behavioral genetics reached this as its #1 conclusion: "All psychological traits show significant and substantial genetic influence."

Except, apparently, we are supposed to assert that intelligence is the lone exception and it has 0% genetic influence. Exploring the roots of intelligence differences would yield information. That information could be used for good, or it could be used for evil. That's true of all types of information.

Let's take a hypothetical example: Let's say that scientists discover an "intelligence gene." Research indicates that stimulation of that gene in utero is correlated with higher intelligence after birth. Due to genetic factors, that gene tends to get stimulated more in fetuses of parents of Asian descent than Caucasian, and more in Caucasian than African. This gene is the root of some as yet unknown percentage of the intelligence gaps observed in adults. As we become more adept at gene editing therapies, doctors could make sure that this hypothetical "intelligence gene" gets similarly stimulated in fetuses across population groups, thereby closing some portion of the intelligence gap. Would that not be a positive outcome in most people's minds?

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David Pittelli  HistoryProf • 2 years ago
No one in the field believes that there is "0% genetic influence" on individual variation in intelligence. The debate is about whether, or to what extent, group (i.e., race) differences in intelligence are due to genetics, and to what extent they are due to environmental factors. Because race is visible, there is no way to entirely factor out environmental differences. And because you can't do anything like a double-blind study in a society that is not blind to race, none of the evidence that we currently have can demonstrate a genetic component to group differences. In theory, genetic studies may demonstrate this in the future, which is a major reason Cofnas believes that the philosophical community needs to address the possibility of such genetic components.

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Unemployed_Northeastern  HistoryProf • 2 years ago
"Let's take a hypothetical example: let's say that scientists discover that the world is an inverted triangle."

Race is not a genetic construct; it's a social construct. Ask any reputable social scientist, biologist, geneticist, etc. This isn't in dispute. Since your nym is HistoryProf, think about the US of circa 1900 and who was considered white back then versus who is considered white today. Query: did all of those people from southern and eastern Europe suddenly start mutating the whiteness gene in the past century, a la X-Men, or did American society just broaden the definition of "white?" Hint: it's not the science fiction answer.

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HistoryProf  Unemployed_Northeastern • 2 years ago
And so because people in 1900 had poor racial ideas, all genetic investigation is forever foreclosed? I did not use the terms "white" or "black" in my post, but rather referred to general geographic origins, since genetic differences are often geographically concentrated. If you want to know a good example of this with a positive outcome, I worked on a police tip line for the Baton Rouge serial killer in the early 2000s. The profile we were given by the FBI was that police were looking for a white male in his 20s or 30s, who probably worked in some sort of handyman or construction trade. Police had the killer's DNA, and wasted several months testing hundreds of white suspects with no match. Finally, a DNA company ran a geographic profile of the killer's DNA sample and found it was 85% African and the remainder Native American. Immediately the police knew to look for a black man. Should that geographical genetic profile not have been run at all?

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Unemployed_Northeastern  HistoryProf • 2 years ago
You didn't answer the question: how did those nonwhite people of 1900 become white by 2020? And how do we genetically know they are white today? Oh, right - we don't. Because there is not a gene that makes someone white or not. Because race is a social construct. It's really quite simple and, outside of tiresome comment boards, not at all controversial.

"but rather referred to general geographic origins, since genetic differences are often geographically concentrated"

Elsewhere in the thread I have cited the standard phylogeography textbook about this very issue: the global human DNA pool is very shallow compared to virtually every other species and is only weakly related by geography.

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John Ahearn  Unemployed_Northeastern • 2 years ago • edited
And you didn't answer HistoryProf's. If race is a social construct, then how is it that DNA can be used to predict someone's racial makeup? Do you think these predictions are wildly inaccurate? Do you know how they work?

Race can be a social construct *and* still have genetic correlates. I can explain if you like. Here's one that will blow your mind, though it's on a different level: "Being from New Mexico" and "being from Minnesota" are obviously social constructs. Yet some genes will be more common in one population than another.

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Glen_S_McGhee_FHEAP  John Ahearn • 2 years ago
Because DNA testing -- like IQ testing -- is a cultural artifact. To neglect this fact risks what Whitehead called the fallacy of misplaced concreteness. Be wary!

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Unemployed_Northeastern  John Ahearn • 2 years ago
This has been answered elsewhere in the thread: DNA is used to predict someone's ancestry. Ancestry and race are not synonymous terms in biology or genetics.

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John Ahearn  Unemployed_Northeastern • 2 years ago
They are related; that’s the point.

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Unemployed_Northeastern  John Ahearn • 2 years ago
Related is not synonymous. Let's look at this logically:

- DNA is A
- Ancestry is B
- Race is C

Sometimes A --> B (i.e. DNA can predict ancestry but not perfectly under all circumstances)

B ~ C (ancestry is not race)

So what can we derive from the relationship between A and C? It certainly isn't A --> C

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Ziegler45314  Unemployed_Northeastern • 2 years ago • edited
It wasn't so much in 1900 that Slavs were consider "non-white" as genetically inferior to western and northern Europeans. Lots of well intentioned and not at all well intentioned pseudo science followed.

Ultimately, 'race' is construct that help to classify people who have ancestors that come from specific areas of the world. There are documented genetic physical abnormalities (e.g. sickle cell anemia) that affect people who have ancestry from a particular region, or a certain genetic pool (e.g. Jews in that they tended to marry and have children exclusive with other Jews over a period of many centuries, regardless of the region they were residing in) more than others. To say however that a child, isolated from negative environmental influences will grow up to be something lesser (or greater) intellectually simply because of their genetic origin from a specific region/genetic pool is bovine scatology.

That last assertion comes with a certain amount baggage almost as troubling to some as saying intelligence has a genetic component. If in fact there demonstrable differences between racial constructs, then to what degree do we owe it to the progeny of those racial constructs to eliminate negative environmental factors? To anticipate a comment, no the negative environmental factors can't be attributed exclusively to lead paint.

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David  Unemployed_Northeastern • 2 years ago
Race is significantly a genetic construct.

The case of sub-Saharan Africa is interesting. It has great genetic diversity by some methods of measurement, but surprise, surprise, surprise, all the people (except some who came from Europe within the past thousand years) are black. So there's a genetic similarity that begs for an explanation, even if we don't know how to read skin color from the genome yet. We may end up with a method of assessing genetic similarity that isn't simply counting how many genes are the same, or whatever is used now.

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Saluki Prof  David • 2 years ago
The environmental origins of skin coloration is well established. Sub-saharan populations are darker due to much higher uv light levels--melanin blocks carcinogenic aspects in UV light. Populations evolved to the local climatic levels of UV light. It also happened in on the Indian subcontinent. And again in Asia. And again in Oceania. And again in the equatorial Americas. Distribution of melanin density is one of the things about 'race' we actually know a ton about.

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David  Saluki Prof • 2 years ago
Have we seen a line of people get darker because of where they lived?

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Unemployed_Northeastern  David • 2 years ago
"Race is significantly a genetic construct."

Citations missing. And there you go confusing correlation with causation. Again.

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Andrew Schlukebier  Unemployed_Northeastern • 2 years ago • edited
"Citations missing." Try this one.

Genetic Structure, Self-Identified Race/Ethnicity, and Confounding in Case-Control Association Studies

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.go...

"Subjects identified themselves as belonging to one of four major
racial/ethnic groups (white, African American, East Asian, and Hispanic)
and were recruited from 15 different geographic locales within the
United States and Taiwan. Genetic cluster analysis of the microsatellite
markers produced four major clusters, which showed near-perfect
correspondence with the four self-reported race/ethnicity categories. Of
3,636 subjects of varying race/ethnicity, only 5 (0.14%) showed genetic
cluster membership different from their self-identified race/ethnicity."

The article is from 2005. If you take a 23-and-me test, they'll tell you, with reasonable though maybe not perfect accuracy, where your ancestors came from. Are you not aware of that?

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Unemployed_Northeastern  Andrew Schlukebier • 2 years ago
"Race is a concept defined by society, not by genes. It’s true that people around the world differ genetically due to their ancestry, and that people’s racial identity may be statistically correlated with their ancestry, albeit unreliably. But “race” does not mean “ancestry,” and it’s a loaded term for scientific outreach: Biological races are not a current scientific concept and often reinforce historical biases."

https://www.theatlantic.com...
, opining on the very David Reich op-ed you've cited elsewhere. So yeah, where you came from is not the same thing as race.

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David  Unemployed_Northeastern • 2 years ago
The Atlantic's peer-review process for publication is quite rigorous, I hear.

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Unemployed_Northeastern  David • 2 years ago
You just wrote to me that you don't believe in science by consensus. So why do you give a damn if the Atlantic is peer-reviewed or not? You're contradicting yourself.

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John Ahearn  David • 2 years ago
It is not a contradiction at all to note that an otherwise heterogeneous group has a genetic marker or two in common.

To use an ad absurdum example, mammals are pretty heterogeneous, but there are likely some genes involving lactation and milk digestion that are common across all of them.

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David  John Ahearn • 2 years ago
You're right, it does happen. Why are some genetic markers common and others widely vary?

Why are there only a few types of blooded creatures: mammals, reptiles, birds, fish, that's about all. They're all creatures with blood, but those subgroups are significant and have a cluster of traits that go together, despite wide genetic variation within groups. Nobody will mistake a fish for a human -- any fish, any human. You'll never find a fish where the males grow whiskers. You'll never find a fish with scales and no fins. We might get all confused trying to find the "scales" trait in a fish genome, but somehow it never fails.

Our measurement of genetic diversity is naive, because we don't know how that works. If we understood better, we'd use a different "metric" on the set of fish genomes where the distance to something with scales-but-no-fins was greater than the distance between two actual fish.

Now we can "awkwardly" note that IQ (however one would measure it in the various creatures) probably also varies among the different main types, on average.

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sam lomb  HistoryProf • 2 years ago
Do you mean Caucasian as in "White" or as in "from the Caucuses" ie Georgian, Azerbaijani, Armenian, Abhazian etc? Those are two really different things and use of "Caucasian" to mean white comes from the outdated idea there were three races, Caucasoid, Mongoloid and Negroid and was often based on the debunked skull measurements David cites above, not anything close to modern genetics. You really need to think about the racism embedded in genetics and anthropology due to holdovers from colonial scientists and eugenicists.

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David  sam lomb • 2 years ago
Are you saying the skull measurements were inaccurate, that the inches were miscounted or the samples weren't representative? Because regardless of how the rest of the research is debunked, I haven't heard of that part of it being challenged.

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sam lomb  David • 2 years ago
You can establish "race" based on skull morphology in some cases and have a higher rate of success if you have other bones. Using measurements gives a window of 57% to 95% accuracy in determining race, which is a wide window for error https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.go.... There is no correlation between cranial measurements and intelligence and is one of the foundational ideas of scientific racism and sexism. Three minutes on google will show this https://www.smithsonianmag...., https://www.tandfonline.com...

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Unemployed_Northeastern  David • 2 years ago
And here's David, self-proclaimed scientist, literally defending phrenology. Why do we tolerate such profound ignorance on this website?

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David • 2 years ago
The race-difference arguments seem to have been stopped some years with the argument "what good would it do to know about this stuff anyway?" And that's perhaps a fair question, maybe the answer isn't obvious, but the answer is that big decisions are now based on the assumption of no significant genetic differences. Are we right in making that pervasive assumption?

Should we wring our hands that there's always "more work to do" when racial averages don't converge? This goes beyond wanting to help those who are behind, which pretty much everyone wants to do on a simpler, more personal level. The fate of many and large bureaucracies are at stake.

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Unemployed_Northeastern  David • 2 years ago
Since you clearly didn't read the article, let me repeat it for you: race is not a genetic construct. The end. Don't believe me? Then look at how much the "white race" in America has grown in the past 100-120 years. Italians didn't used to be white. Or Portuguese. Or anyone whose ancestors came from east of, say, the Elbe. One of the seminal works of early 20th century eugenics - written by the guy who invented the SATs, no less - divided Europe into at least four races* and found meaningful intelligence distinctions between them. Heck, he didn't think the Swiss and the English were parts of the same race.

Meanwhile the peoples of Africa have more genetic diversity than the rest of the world put together and we lump them all together in "black."

*Nordic, Alpine, Mediterranean, Jewish.

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David  Unemployed_Northeastern • 2 years ago • edited
I did read the article (I'll assume your apology edit to your post is stuck in moderation), and it doesn't prove that race a genetic construct. Above you claim that Polish weren't white. If people were asked whether they are white or black, of course they would be called white.

The availability of different ways of defining genetic racial categories doesn't mean race isn't genetic. In my area (this is common in NY state) we have town lines, school district lines and zip code lines that are all different, sometimes nearly the same but not quite. These are different ways of dividing up the land.

But it doesn't mean that location isn't a physical geographic phenomenon. It doesn't mean that location is a purely cultural phenomenon.

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failureofreality  Unemployed_Northeastern • 2 years ago
If there is such genetic diversity, then the groups should be more refined. What if we stopped referring to race and instead referred to genetic similarity?

Given that race is a social construct, let's just ignore it and move on. It seems race is used more as a weapon to demand privileges when someone is unqualified in any other way. Get rid of diversity programs and let people succeed or fail as individuals.

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Bob K. • 2 years ago
I don't disagree with Alfano's criticism of Cofnas' paper but I would much rather see him patiently take apart Cofnas' arguments in a paper published in the same journal. Trying to de-platform an offensive author, and the editors who published him, is not persuasive and gives the impression that the mistakes made by Cofnas are not in his methods but rather in the offense given against the political-religious dogmas of our day. Be assured that the methods of this type of research are shoddy, which makes it infuriating that we can expect to see its proponents style themselves as a heterodox thinkers, brave iconoclasts standing up against stifling, politically correct academic dogmatists in their pursuit of knowledge wherever it may take them. I hope that true heterodox thinkers see this as the poison pill that it is and resist the urge to swallow it. Sometimes even neo-Stalinists can be right.

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Unemployed_Northeastern  Bob K. • 2 years ago
" I would much rather see him patiently take apart Cofnas' arguments in a paper published in the same journal."

People have done this with Charles Murray for decades now, yet he remains as popular as ever with ideologues and the sorts of internet trolls that show up in comment threads such as this one.

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Erik Kengaard • 2 years ago
The obstacles preventing objective discussion of factors that [more or less] determine intelligence are the powerful voices promoting various public policies. Those voices dominate the conversation. The heritability is no longer in doubt - bright parents have bright children. The connection with race is less clear, in large part because race is not well defined.

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Tony Davis • 2 years ago
"...Cofnas warns, “social policies predicated on environmentalist theories
of group differences" in intelligence “may fail to achieve their aims.
Large swaths of academic work in both the humanities and social sciences
assume the truth of environmentalism and are vulnerable to being
undermined.”

Translation: the house of cards that is contemporary social science and humanities research is about to fall. Ouch. It is perfectly understandable why some scholars want this buried.

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Unemployed_Northeastern  Tony Davis • 2 years ago
Yes, we should definitely take the word of a young doctoral candidate in philosophy in a non-peer-reviewed article over the global consensus of the world's social scientists. /sarc

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cinchloc  Unemployed_Northeastern • 2 years ago • edited
This seems like an ad hominem against the author. If you were to look at his actual CV, you would note that he's in a PhD program at Oxford University (not slouchy and he's probably not some crank), the journal involved is very respected, the article was peer-reviewed, and the author has also published in the journal "The Quarterly Review of Biology" which is a scientific journal.

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Glen_S_McGhee_FHEAP  cinchloc • 2 years ago
Francis Galton, the pioneer of eugenics and the heritability of human intelligence, went to University of Cambridge. He invented statistical methods in the process of founding racial eugenics. https://en.wikipedia.org/wi...

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Unemployed_Northeastern  cinchloc • 2 years ago • edited
How many genetics, neuroscience, biology, etc. courses does this philosophy student have on his CV?

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cinchloc  Unemployed_Northeastern • 2 years ago
He has an MPhil from Cambridge University in Philosophy of Science, is now at Oxford University, and has published in respected Biology journals. Surely you jest.

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Unemployed_Northeastern  cinchloc • 2 years ago
And yet he's prominently citing perhaps the most discredited work of *social science* of the last 25 years, The Bell Curve. A book, I might add, not written by an academic at all.

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Andrew Schlukebier  Unemployed_Northeastern • 2 years ago
You're very big on credentialism. If the world's social scientists tell you one thing and your lying eyes tell you another, do you go with the world's social scientists?

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Unemployed_Northeastern  Andrew Schlukebier • 2 years ago
Speaking of lying eyes:

"It is true that race is a social construct."

Your David Reich link to me in another post on this thread.

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Andrew Schlukebier  Unemployed_Northeastern • 2 years ago
Reich was trying to be as PC as he could, while warning that the old PC dogma on race was becoming scientifically untenable. His message was about the same as that of this Cofnas guy.

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Unemployed_Northeastern  Andrew Schlukebier • 2 years ago
So... all of a sudden your one citation is lying when he doesn't say the things you want him to say? Spare me this pap.

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David  Unemployed_Northeastern • 2 years ago • edited
Now you're reduced to touting a consensus of social-scientists. Elsewhere you tout the consensus of climate-scientists.

In my training, which involved just plain science, I didn't learn that science depends on consensus.

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Unemployed_Northeastern  David • 2 years ago • edited
So far in this thread, you've

1) averred that any correlation is causation
2) derided the consensus of the world's social scientists and geneticists about race being a social construct
3) derided the consensus of the world's scientists about anthropogenic climate change.

Yeah, I'll stick with the consensus of the worlds' scientists - people who are actually scientists - for many reasons, not the least of which is that science... is built on consensus!

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alampls • 2 years ago
The comments defending a genetic basis for race are sadly predictable
and revealing in the way they conflate key concepts. The argument for a
genetic basis for our racial categories is, at best, extraordinarily
weak and is clearly different from the question of a genetic basis for
intelligence. To believe that there's a genetic basis for these categories, you'd have to believe that Turks are more genetically similar to Japanese then they are to Greeks. It speaks poorly of the journal editors that they fail to
understand how this is such a dubious idea, but
at least they can say they're following in the long and appalling
tradition of academics trying to justify racial
discrimination. Trying to link intelligence to our racial categories is
as plausible as linking it to one's astrological sign.

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David  alampls • 2 years ago
Do even the adjectives really need modifiers?

To believe that there's a genetic basis for these categories, you'd have to believe that Turks are more genetically similar to Japanese then they are to Greeks.

This is not true. We don't know the genome well enough to be able to define genetic similarity properly. Counting the numbers of identical differing genes on the same sites is something like saying

1000 is closer to 100 than it is to 999

an easy mistake to make if one doesn't know how we encode quantities in numbers.

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KeenIncite • 2 years ago
Believing that intelligence is based largely on race is just as absurd as believing that people experience the same social inequities, "oppression," or "privilege" based largely on race... or sex... or ethnicity... or gender.

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King Goat  KeenIncite • 2 years ago
I'm curious, would you argue that, say, black people in 1950 didn't generally experience 'the same social inequities...based largely on race?' Or is your position that that, and all it's effects, just went poof sometime later?

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Matthew Hoffman  KeenIncite • 2 years ago
It shocks me that someone commenting on a Higher Ed site can claim that it is "absurd as believing that people experience the same social inequities, "oppression," or "privilege" based largely on race... or sex... or ethnicity... or gender." It seems to me that you are saying Blacks, women, Gays, etc., have not experienced more discrimination and oppression in this country than white men? There is no historical basis for this claim. I myself don't like how the concept of "white privilege" is used today, but that doesn't mean that, for instance, Jim Crow didn't oppress all Blacks under its rule. The rate of violent crimes against gays and transgender people because of their gender or sexual orientation is what it is and has been because of sex and gender. That's great that you prefer to view all people as individuals, that doesn't mean they have been treated that way in this society.

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KeenIncite  Matthew Hoffman • 2 years ago • edited
I don't deny the historical record. What I do deny is that there is systemic racism, sexism, etc. happening today that's completely divorced from the behavior of the individuals in question. This Marxist construct that everyone in a particular, identifiable group shares the same life experience at the same level or the same type is patently absurd. And yet, we have entire university departments (African American/Black, Women's Gender and Sexuality/Feminism/Queer, Latinx/Chicanx/Hispanic, Indigenous American/American Indian, American, and [insert hyphenated American name here] studies,) based on precisely that concept, which, BTW, has never been conclusively proven, but merely deemed to be true by proponents of these departments.

There will always be individual acts of racism, sexism, etc., because they are the result of the fallen condition of the human heart which tends toward evil. You show me clear, individual cases of these maladies which aren't based on the bloated, twisted and perverted terms of these words, and I'll be right there with you in denouncing them, but this idea of systemic, intrinsic, societal, racism, sexism, etc., is complete and utter baloney being propagated for a leftist political goal, not for any achievement of "social justice."

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Barbara Piper  KeenIncite • 2 years ago
"This Marxist construct that everyone in a particular, identifiable group shares the same life experience at the same level or the same type is patently absurd."
Could you cite where, in Marx, there appears any such "construct"?

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KeenIncite  Barbara Piper • 2 years ago • edited
Marx spoke in the context of class, and insisted that everyone in the proletariat was oppressed, and if any member didn't feel that way, then they were experiencing "false consciousness." His followers have extended this to include race, gender, ethnicity, sexuality, etc., any definable difference upon which people can be "oppressed." And the solution is always the same: We must eliminate capitalism because it is the repository of all oppression.

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Glen_S_McGhee_FHEAP  KeenIncite • 2 years ago • edited
Actually, "false consciousness" is not from Karl Marx, but his followers. You will not find the term anywhere in Marx, either in the German or in translation.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wi...

Yes, Marx spoke in the context of class -- his work was based on class conflict, and how it operated economically and culturally. But he did not explore the subjective feelings of the oppressed as you state here -- at least, not to my knowledge. His job -- as he understood it -- was to wake up the masses into awareness about their enslavement.
When subsequent sociologists, like Max Weber, critiqued Marx, they did so by acknowledging his contribution to social analysis and then showing how the complex networks of status groups and political coalitions diverted and shaped class antagonisms. See Randall Collins, The Discovery of Society.

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KeenIncite  Glen_S_McGhee_FHEAP • 2 years ago
Just because it was Engels who used the term in a letter instead of Marx is a distinction without a difference. They were joined at the hip in their formulation of "Marxism." Therefore, it is considered a Marxist formulation.

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Barbara Piper  KeenIncite • 2 years ago
I agree on this point. The mystification of relations of exploitation -- forms of "false consciousness" -- is a core part of Marxist Social Theory, and there is no need to quibble over the source of the term. It's simply irrelevant to your original claim about the "same life experience..."

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Glen_S_McGhee_FHEAP  Barbara Piper • 2 years ago
Barbara, I notice that as modern life becomes more and more lived in bureaucratic organizations, more and more coercion permeates existence. How much of this appears as "oppression" in Marx? or as "alienation"? Thanks!

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Barbara Piper  Glen_S_McGhee_FHEAP • 2 years ago
Hi, Glenn -- excellent question, about which we can only speculate, since Marx wrote before the rise of modern bureaucracy, and was mostly silent on that issue as I recall. I think you identify one of the ambiguities that "Keenincite" might be tripping over: "oppression" is part of Marx's political agenda, but within his theoretical agenda, "oppression" is a formal relationship of alienation form the products of one's labor in a system of commodity production. If you produce a widget that sells for $1, but you get paid only 50 cents for your labor, and when that widget circulates as an anonymous object in a network of buyers and sellers, separated from the hand that made it, you are "oppressed." That's quite a different notion of "oppression" than racial or gender discrimination: being incarcerated for "driving while Black" is a bit different from a group of stock holders making money off of your labor, and Marx understood very well that workers voluntarily enter into that work relationship, even if they justify that decision -- to themselves -- through mystifications such as the inherent value of good, hard work (tell that to the stock holders, Engels would say....)

But back to your question, Weber was the great theorist of bureaucracy, as you know, and that's one reason why I was drawn to Weber's work early on. I'm sure you're familiar with Weber's metaphor of the iron cage of bureaucracy -- the coercion you mention can be seen as part of that push for rational forms of action, which is basically what bureaucracy organizes.

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Barbara Piper  KeenIncite • 2 years ago
Sorry: you're wrong on Marx, wrong on "his followers", and wrong on "solutions".

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KeenIncite  Barbara Piper • 2 years ago
This is an opinion, not a refutation...

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Barbara Piper  KeenIncite • 2 years ago
I think of it as a statement of fact. If you want evidence read Marx's The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte.

I asked you for a reference in Marx to your strange claim. So far you have provided nothing expect your own opinion.

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KeenIncite  Barbara Piper • 2 years ago
"I think of it as a statement of fact. If you want evidence read Marx's The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte."

Why don't you just boil this down for me to what you think your evidence is?

"I asked you for a reference in Marx to your strange claim. So far you have provided nothing expect your own opinion."

"Briefly stated, critical theory is “a complex theoretical perspective…that explores the historical, cultural, and ideological lines of authority that underlie social conditions.” Critical theory is a broad knowledge area which has developed significantly since its origins in the ideas of Karl Marx and the Frankfurt School" (Marx's followers.) "From its inception, “critical theory has been primarily concerned with the elimination of oppression and the promotion of justice,”[9] with contemporary iterations of critical theory being “more sensitive to modes of domination that involve race and gender and to the complexity of lived experience than in the Frankfurt School’s original articulation of the notion.”[10] (Also add ethnicity, ability, sexuality, etc.) (parenthetical inserts, mine.)

Contemporary Critical Theory is what insists that everyone in a so-called "marginalized " group experiences the same "oppression" at the same level, and this is derived from the notion of false consciousness. People in "marginalized" groups are being oppressed even if they don't realize it. If they weren't, then they couldn't be treated as members of a group instead of individuals, because their widely divergent real life experiences would undermine the theory.

https://cbmw.org/topics/eik...

Engels wrote about "false consciousness," which makes it part of "Marxism."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wi...

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Barbara Piper  KeenIncite • 2 years ago • edited
None of this is relevant to your original claim, to which I was responding:

"This Marxist construct that everyone in a particular, identifiable group shares the same life experience at the same level or the same type..."
You then shifted to "oppression," which is a different issue. In the 18th Brumaire, Marx detailed the variety of forms of experience of the proletariat, far from your silly claim of "the same life experience at the same level or the same type."

I'd also be cautious about assuming that Critical Theory and the Frankfurt School is now what we regard as "Marx" -- if you knew anything about French cultural Marxism, you'd respond, as social theorists in the U.K. and the U.S. have responded, that Marx would be turning in his grave.

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KeenIncite  Barbara Piper • 2 years ago • edited
"You then shifted to 'oppression' which is a different issue."

Categorically not! It's the life experiences of oppression that I'm specifically referring to because this is the assumption of critical social theorists. It gives them the "justification" for treating people as members of a group as opposed to individuals with varied life experiences with "oppression" which may not include any "oppression" at all. That's the only way they can even remotely use the terms race, class, gender, sexuality, ethnicity, ability, etc., as theoretical categories of marginalization. That's how they can come up with the ridiculous concept of "whiteness" because the underlying assumption is that all white people are guilty of it even if they don't realize it.

"I'd also be cautious about assuming that Critical Theory and the Frankfurt School is now what we regard as 'Marx'"

Marx and Engels left many ambiguities and contradictions in their theory after they died which later Marxist theorists attempted to resolve. Communism, Fascism, Syndicalism, Nazism and Progressivism were all the results of exactly this kind of attempt - but that's another discussion for another day. The theorists all considered themselves Marxist. The same applies to the Frankfurt School. They all considered themselves Marxists. Whether "Marx would be turning in his grave" is irrelevant, because his theory has evolved as a result of those who consider themselves Marxist. Therefore, their extrapolations are considered today to be "Marxian" regardless of how closely they resemble Marx's original theory. There is at least one branch of contemporary critical social theory that claims to be Marxian. This is the branch of which I speak.

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Barbara Piper  KeenIncite • 2 years ago
This requires a longer response that I can dash off before lunch, but "oppression" refers to forms of exploitation of a social class, while the lived experience of different members of that social class will be highly variable. If you are reducing all of that lived experience to "oppression" you are contradicting Marx himself, and I suggested that you read the 18th Brumaire for his most detailed analysis of this. Perhaps it would be useful to think of "oppression" as top-down; Marx was also interested in the lived experience of the proletariat, which was the bottom-up approach that complements it.

The realm of social theory -- even the Marxist realm -- is considerably broader than the Frankfurt School, which was most active prior to the Second World War, and combined Marx with a variety of other approached, including psychoanalysis. Considering that their goal was to centralize Idealism as a core dimension of social theory, they were flagrantly anti-Marx, whose materialism is the opposite -- which is one reason why the Frankfurt School, along with their French cultural Marxist counterparts (you'll remember Althuser) are considered moribund today.

Finally, apologies for any insulting or harsh language on my part. I'm not a Marxist theorist in any sense, having been drawn to the other side of social theory by Weber decades ago, but I have been studying and teaching Marx for 50 years now, and perhaps I can be forgiven for believing that my understanding of Marx is a bit more nuanced than the kind of comic book over simplifications that we so often read and hear.

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KeenIncite  Barbara Piper • 2 years ago
No reason to apologize. I found our debate enlightening. You are one of the few who can disagree without being disagreeable. I have about a dozen IHE commenters on my blocked list now because they simply can't keep from attacking me personally. Good day to you and Happy New Year!

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Barbara Piper  KeenIncite • 2 years ago
And Happy New Year to you as well. I would not read these comments if they didn't offer challenging perspectives, which we should be able to discuss without rancor. I always hope that my training as a lawyer prepares me to defend a position vigorously but cogently, and then go off and have lunch with my 'opponent'!

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johnlittle • 2 years ago
Once again the fear of inequality overtakes the discussion of racial differences in I.Q.. Ironically, such fear does not present a problem regarding genetic differences between groupings of athletes, i.e. who makes the team, who sits on the bench and plays in the game. Now, go figure.

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Glen_S_McGhee_FHEAP • 2 years ago • edited
Randall Collins' reissue of The Credential Society (1979/2019) includes this cautionary study regarding the life-time achievements of 109 retarded children with IQs near 60.
"Few were in institutions. Most worked as unskilled or semiskilled laborers, but 18% held white-collar jobs [in 1967], including positions as office and sales clerk, policeman, shop foreman, auto and real estate salesman, photographer, laboratory worker, and businessman. Occupational success was not related to intelligence differences within this group. Rather, the most successful workers were those who had the middle-class patterns of dress, speech, and personal behavior, and those who had worked throughout their careers in a single big business or who early attained some skill such as barbering. Other studies have found that there is a considerable range of measured intelligence within any occupational group so that although professionals have higher average intelligence than manual workers, there is a considerable degree of overlap among them." (37-38, but see page 39 for further discussion of "racial differences" "given undue prominence as a cause of social inequality". Part of the problem is "that IQ tests were developed for use in schools and [tests] have received few other applications". The larger question "concerns how and why education is tied to occupational stratification.")

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Dave Kielpinski • 2 years ago
Well now I know that Philosophical Psychology is a crap journal. TIL

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GooseGeeseMooseMeese • 2 years ago
The number of races is completely
arbitrary. But if you give a computer
DNA samples and tell it to produce 1 group, 2 groups, 3 groups, etc.
This is what you get.

# races = 1: Homo Sapiens
# races = 2: African, Asian
# races = 3: African, North Eurasian, Southeast Asian
# races = 6: African, Caucasoid, NE Asian, American, Pacific Islander,
Australian
etc.
I think 100 "races" is probably about right. I'm mixed race myself, German and Scottish.

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me me • 2 years ago
Oh the social justice prevails by calling it all unscientific conjecture while providing nothing of scientific value other than social justice talking points.

Dna of certain groups are inevitably going to process intelligence differently. Man didn't evolve intelligence, intelligence evolved the man. If any man was left out of the evolution they will for obvious reasons lack the evolutionary benefits.

Asians and Caucasians also have genetic influence that sub Saharan Africans didn't.

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Buick Vina • 2 years ago
Because a few inventors arose from a race does not mean every member of that race is of high intelligence. If intelligence has anything to do with race, then all members of such race in question should have been innovators of various wonders. So,in any race there are few geniuses(maybe 100 out of 150 million people). This does not mean that the 100 geniuses mean all 150 million are more intelligent than other race because it is common that many from other race are more intelligent than many of the rest of this 150 million.

IQ test questions are based on cultures and traditions of certain part of the world. A person of high IQ from a certain race(part of the world) may be seen as retarded or dumb in another part of the world with different culture and tradition. Can you then tell me what you mean by intelligence?

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gladlylearn • 2 years ago
What is a clear definition of race? Of intelligence? Until these are determined, how can we examine the link between them?

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Leslie Clarke • 2 years ago
Race...Exactly who is Black, white, brown, yellow, and red...Did I leave out purple, orange, blue, and green? As if something good would come out of this research, Poppycock I say!

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David  Leslie Clarke • 2 years ago • edited
We don't know exactly in edge cases, but most people can be reliably and easily categorized into one of the above buckets before the "Did I leave out" by looking at their faces, and everyone will agree on the categorization. Yellow vs. red might be the hardest distinction.

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Last Milwaukee Socialist • 2 years ago
Perhaps Cofnas needed to produce research to qualify for Oxford's new Houston Stewart Chamberlain chair.

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