*claps*

*gives standing ovation*

Yeah!  The one place I’ve seen this brought up before is by the philosopher Ned Block in his review of The Bell Curve.  He’s talking about how to explain the 15-point difference in black and white IQ scores:

the statement of alternatives blots out a crucial possibility: that Blacks are much worse off than Whites environmentally and better off genetically. Allowing this option, we get a different set of alternatives: genetically, Blacks are worse off - or better off - or equal to Whites. I don’t say that it is likely that blacks are better off genetically than whites, but it is possible, and—a very important point—what you consider possible affects what you think is an extremist position.

I’m not sure this is a fair criticism. When this bullshit comes up, it’s usually in the context of African-American underperformance in education and the like. The idea that black people are genetically smarter than everybody else, on the face of it, doesn’t strike me as a tenable explanation for that. It doesn’t make a lot of sense to say they do worse in school because they’re smarter.

But the contention here has become more abstracted.  It’s not just explaining underperformance (and my propositions dovetail with Ned Block’s) - in this case, it’s about defending proposition 1 as scientific exploration and having proposition 2 be the other result.  If you’re going to presume to explore this at all, proposition 3 simply has to exist, or else 1 and 2 are agitprop for a wholly different debate.

“I’m not sure this is a fair criticism.”

It is when they essentially turn around and claim - as both Volokh and Grace did - “but I’m just throwing out scientific theories!”

Um, NO.  Because if that’s really all they were doing, they would have allowed for option 3.  Option 2 already makes no sense with the test scores you mention - unless there is another factor at play.  And if there is anther factor at play, why not option 3 as well?  Not including the possibility is just bad science at that point.

Especially as *clearly* option 3 exists.  Just look at all the rhetoric about girls and math scores and how its changed over the years.  Even Larry Summers had to essentially bolster his argument that option 1 was the reason for the lack of women with physics PhDs by also arguing that option 3 is also sorta true because, you know, women are also less likely (according to him) to be at the other end of the spectrum.

It would be one thing if they just stayed on the whole philosophical side of things, as odious as that is, but when they claim scientific objectivity - while clearly demonstrating nothing of the sort - that’s when they really show their true colors.

Well in fairness the debate so far has been one set of academics saying that they found hypothesis 1 to be true and another set of academics saying that isn’t the case. Bringing up hypothesis 3 does sort of stray off the beaten path of the debate so far. Incidentally the first set of academics say that black people differ from the population as a whole which is actually different to saying that whites are smarter than blacks. It kind of boils down to that because the population as a whole is largely white but there is a distinction.

Personally I think IQ tests are stupid and don’t really measure anything but if anyone is curious you can get Jensen’s (the major figure on the blacks are dumb side) summary of his 30 years of work here http://www.ssc.uwo.ca/psychology/faculty/rushtonpdfs/PPPL1.pdf

OH MY GOD. THIS is what I’ve been trying to say and haven’t quite been able to for years.

Thank you, Jesse.

Option 3 is never discussed because that doesn’t feed into the money-making argument.  Option 1 is a Tea Party stand by and while offensive it will win you allies in boardrooms and apparently law firms.  Option 2 is the truth but without playing the eugenics card under new scientific names we would have to acknowledge that most true “success” has less to do with capabilities as the environmental benefits we receive. 

In other words:  Don’t give credence to the argument of “well one race can be genetically smarter than the other!” Since we’ve yet to figure out a single gene that actually clearly defines IQ & race together.

Bringing up hypothesis 3 does sort of stray off the beaten path of the debate so far.

But if you’re just “asking questions” or “throwing things out there” why not ask that? And in terms of scientific inquiry, shouldn’t the null hypothesis be no difference? They, in a completely non-racist way of course, assume blacks are stupid and ask everyone else to provide incontrovertible proof to them. Why is the burden never on the racist to prove that their racist views are correct?

How can one study sociology at Princeton under a professor who specializes in race and never come across real data? She is willfully ignorant, just like tea partiers are. And thats the mark of a genuine racist; they usually need to ignore facts because that would interfere with their worldview.

While we’re on the subject, t Kagan is looking like someone with an enormous blindspot.

These women were/are my friends, and it was very difficult for them and for me to cope with this parody. HLS is already a hostile place to be for a black woman. The parody made it worse, but it gave us more insight into what our classmates really thought of us. Some of the women who were depicted in the play were so deeply offended they wanted to transfer schools. When we protested and communicated how upset many of the black and Latino students were, we were criticized as being too sensitive, for not being able to take a joke and for trying to suppress free speech. Dean Elana Kagan refused to take a stand, stating that she could not take responsibility for the parody — even though she actually had an on-stage role in its performance.

especially when you add this.

When Elena Kagan was Dean of the Harvard Law School, she hired 29 tenured or tenure-track faculty members. But she did not hire a single black, Latino, or American Indian faculty member.
...
Moreover, of the 29 new hires, only six were women. So, she hired 23 white men, 5 white women, and one Asian American woman.

I wlll also say thank you, Jessee, and well-fucking-said!

They already have the conclusion formed in their minds before they even ask this question. They already conclude, through their racist stereotypes, that blacks are inferior to whites in intelligence, and set out to prove it. That’s not science.

The closest they ever come to #3 is saying that (Eastern) Asians (or sometimes, Jews, though this has died out in recent years) are superior to whites in intelligence, but that’s just more racial stereotyping in the opposite direction, the whole “model minority” stereotype. Once again, they’re just setting out to prove their already arrived at conclusions.

Little disproves the genetic superiority of the Aryan Master Race concept more than the history of the Aryan Master Race concept.  We think of sheep as stupid, but the allegedly superior, “intelligent” Germans either murdered millions for madness or tolerated those who did like cowardly, stupid sheep, a few war resisters and White Rose types aside. 

Since Germany was a highly-educated, sophisticated and wealthy society, we have to assume that its self-destruction was do to a deep genetic defect in the German people’s DNA; neither money not cultural patrimony nor educational resources could stop the self-destructive genetic inferority of the Germans in their efforts to last out in insane violence onto self-destruction, killing by the millions and laying waste to their own country.

Finally, once their genetic predisposition to inferior reason and moral courage exhausted the last military resource of Germany, the mongrel races - Russian Slavs, multi-ethnic American race-mixers including many genetically superior African-Americans - reorganized Germany for them and ran it for 50 years until this stupid people had enough history of doing it right to be allowed out of genetic probation and into political reunification.  Much of the European Union is designed to prevent a relapse of Germans into their reptilian DNA, wealth and education notwithstanding.  We still see evidence of the criminality of the German Thug DNA through occasional racist violence against dark-skinned people and Jews, though Germany has few of either after the mass killings of 70 years ago.  Regrettably, Germans could not be expected to produce a moral visionary of the likes of Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, WEB DuBois, A Philip Randolph or Frederick Douglass; they produced us Marx, Bismarck, Hitler, Himmler, Eichmann, Erick Honecker, Walter Ulbricht, Hess, Goebbels and other murderous, gang-land thugs.

Now the foregoing is a bunch of bullshit but it makes more sense than what white racists write.

Bruce—

I have an example similar to that to disprove that the white race is superior to any other, but it’s much shorter: George Walker Bush. Not only was he white, but a majority of white people vote for him both times.

Yeah. Sorry, that pretty much disproves that we’re in any way superior to any other segment of humanity.

I encourage geneticists to keep trying to find what genetic variations exist in the human species, but I wish them luck in trying to pick through the mountain of cultural noise that sits on top of and distorts the genetic data when trying to understand how genetics influences behavior.

This is another example of the tendency of our society to turn to genetics to explain any issue before exploring the societal factors. It is similar to the need to jump right to the supernatural to explain seemingly strange phenomena before exploring the far more likely natural explanations.

But if you’re just “asking questions” or “throwing things out there” why not ask that? And in terms of scientific inquiry, shouldn’t the null hypothesis be no difference?

You can say a lot of things about Jensen but he doesn’t jaq off. He and his colleagues did substantial quantities of empirical work and it was good empirical work. There was nothing sloppy about it Except that intelligence is sloppy and IQ tests aren’t. The null hypothesis is that black people will not differ from the population as a whole. They found that black people do and they determined the quality of that difference. Anyway its all in that summary article I posted. Its worth the read especially if you disagree with it. The rebuttals are only meaningful in light of the work and arguments they present.

*sigh*

You forgot to mention the problematics of defining the (nonexistent) races, which humans do not in fact have.  This “debate” has been settled long ago and the answer is that there is no relationship between “race” and intelligence when you control for environmental factors like income, education, background, and the like.

Thank you. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve observed this phenomenon. Somehow when it comes to race, “I’m just asking questions” always errs on the side of “questions” that hypothesize that the speaker is better than the group being discussed.

This Racialicious post explores some defenses and reactions to this woman’s actions. Latoya Peterson:

[...] I find it interesting that when it’s a young white woman the defenses are like “she’s just learning!” “They need a chance to learn!” What the hell makes people think that people learn to be less racist over time instead of just finding ways to reinforce their existing beliefs? Racism, by nature, is irrational.

And in the meantime, these people are building their careers on a racist foundation and are entering our existing racial hierarchy. All the while, these people are gaining power. It’s was kind of like some of the responses to the entryway – people were seriously like “well, they’re just kids, they are only learning.” But they are being published in major news outlets and getting funding. We aren’t playing parlor games, these people are firmly in the real world. This chick will have a hand crafting legal policy – and people wonder how institutional bias persists. Newsflash: this is how!

You wonder when the age is that a person can be held responsible for their views. Seriously - she’s in law school, about to graduate, and she’s “just learning”? Who was it that said free speech is not synonymous with consequence-free speech? Say what you want, but live with the fallout.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fc56moy0poA&a=qqtNMQ-lI6U&playnext_from=ML

A taxonomy of European mass violence, put to cool music.  They cannot help it, it’s in their genes.

http://ephphatha-poetry.blogspot.com/2010/04/imagine-if-tea-party-was-black-tim-wise.html

assuming all definitional problems are solved

That’s a whopping big assumption there.  I’d love someone to be able to point out, at a genetic level, what exactly “black” and ‘white” are.

Because, you know, if they’re social categories, there are better and more obvious explanations for IQ gaps…

Can we debate the idea that people of predominantly West European ancestry are, on average, less intelligent than people of predominantly East Asian ancestry?  If we really want to try and establish whether or not intelligence is, in fact, genetically determined this would seem to be the place to start since even white racists tend to fluctuate between all 3 potential outcomes (but Chinese have no doubt the answer is 3).

Comment #22: vanya6724 on 05/02 at 11:28 PM

Can we debate the idea that people of predominantly West European ancestry are, on average, less intelligent than people of predominantly East Asian ancestry?

These days, proponents of the theory that Blacks and Hispanics are less intelligent than West Europeans will actually claim that East Asians are more intelligent than West Europeans as alleged proof that they are not White supremacists.

I’ve thought for many, many years now that the whole “science of intelligence” is bullshit anyway.  The big problem that I just hardly ever see anybody point out is that “intelligence” is a value judgement, not a fact judgement.  When you call somebody “intelligent,” what you’re really doing is claiming that that person possesses certain qualities that you or somebody else values highly.

The problem is that racism involves a systematic derogation of any skills that are found in the racial minority.  The examples I’m most familiar with (as a former linguist) is all the people who point at many African-American Vernacular speakers that, under any objective analysis, demonstrate enormous skill at using language, yet call their speech a demonstration of their inferiority because it doesn’t adopt to mainstream, White norms.  Large parts of William Labov’s classic article in The Atlantic are precisely about this—a quick-witted black teenager that’s very skillful at argumentation games is bound to be seen as “speaking deficiently,” while an educated but not-as-smart black man who speaks standard English is seen as “intelligent.”

Volokh is a twit.

He’s that unrare breed of legal “scholar” who flaps his gums for the sake of flapping yet who knows nothing at all about anything except legal “analysis.”

He reminds me of my torts professor who didn’t know anything about any of the actual topics at issue in our torts cases but who loved to berate the 1Ls about their lack of legal skills.

She, too, is a twit.

Well said, Jesse.  Even the most virulent proponents of the view you describe—that a person in the United States with African ancestry possesses inferior levels of intelligence, at a genetic level—insist they’re horrified by enslavement and post-enslavement oppressions.  Let them explain why the genes of those persons who survived those horrors AREN’T superior in every way, including intellectually.

There was nothing sloppy about it Except that intelligence is sloppy and IQ tests aren’t.

Okay, now I know you must be spoofing, because the inherent problems of “IQ” tests are very well-known.  Any master’s degree student in psychology can tell you all of those problems and that “IQ” is a very rough estimate of how someone will do academically in the US school system and that’s about it.  They absolutely are not some kind of objective measure of inherent intelligence.  If they were, then the Flynn effect would not exist.

These days, proponents of the theory that Blacks and Hispanics are less intelligent than West Europeans will actually claim that East Asians are more intelligent than West Europeans as alleged proof that they are not White supremacists.

They will often tell you “jokes” about the size of Asian men’s penises while they claim they can’t be racist because they’re “admitting” that Asians are smarter than they are.

As for IQ tests being good measures of intelligence, one great proof to the contrary is the fact that there are just as many high IQ people…including many MENSA members I’ve met who are ineffective in their daily lives and thus, lead unsuccessful lives…..a fact which to some*....casts doubt on their supposed “intelligence”. 

As someone who was strongly urged by a high school librarian who is a MENSA member to join….seeing that, the unremitting efforts by some to show how much better they are by virtue of their MENSA membership/high IQ, and the fact she and some of them were strongly urging me to consider joining were all reasons why I declined.  Why were they so eager to get a kid who’s familiar with the dean’s office and is struggling to maintain a mediocre GPA when the school’s full of kids who do extraordinary things like win Westinghouse competitions, impress Ivy/Ivy-level admissions, and go directly to STEM PhD programs at 15??

I had no use for a “high IQ” society…especially one which defines intelligence solely on the basis of a dubious test which is just as likely to reward those who are good at taking IQ tests….and little else in life. 

As such, one critical foundation for these “genetic studies” is IMHO, nothing but utter garbage.  Consequently, these “studies” are worth about as much as a plugged Confederate nickel. 

* I tend to lean more towards intelligence not only as an innate series of qualities and traits, but also a demonstrated ability to harness them to effectively accomplish tasks in daily life as well as long-term goals.  Something which IQ tests don’t seem to measure very well if my experience with several highly ineffective MENSA members and other “high IQ” people are any indication.

Okay, now I know you must be spoofing, because the inherent problems of “IQ” tests are very well-known.  Any master’s degree student in psychology can tell you all of those problems and that “IQ” is a very rough estimate of how someone will do academically in the US school system and that’s about it.  They absolutely are not some kind of objective measure of inherent intelligence.  If they were, then the Flynn effect would not exist.

Agreed.  Some of those highly ineffective MENSA members ended up dropping out of college because they couldn’t be bothered to do the work because they were “too smart” for it and couldn’t be bothered to figure out ways to work around the issue such as taking some time off to work/reassess things, taking more challenging courses/joining the college’s honors program, changing majors/divisions within a school, or transferring to a more compatible school. 

I also get a kick out of ETS sponsored studies saying how a given high school graduate’s GPA and SAT scores are a strong indicator of their future college-level performance.  Funny how several high school classmates, most college classmates/acquaintances at other colleges, and I are all living examples of how wrong that is….whether it is a friend who has had a highly successful college, grad school, and professional career despite scoring below 800 combined on the pre-1995 SAT…...or the dozens of college classmates/acquaintances at other colleges with 1500-1600/1600s who flunked out or floundered their way to graduation with GW Bush level GPAs.

You wonder when the age is that a person can be held responsible for their views. Seriously - she’s in law school, about to graduate, and she’s “just learning”?

About 24 hours before it becomes “well, her views are a little old-fashioned, but you can’t blame her for them because they’re of her time”.

The other part of this discussion that seems to get left out a lot is the incredibly obvious next step.

Yes, anything like this may actually be a statement of scientific fact, if it were possible to measure it accurately and control for outside influences.

But you also have to talk about things like the range and the outliers. I have never seen this kind of discussion come up where the two populations weren’t treated like homogenous wholes, whether it has to do with Black intelligence, women’s athletic or math ability, gay parenting, men’s aggression, or whatever.

The problem is that the idea that white people are more intelligent (on average) than black people turns instantly into “any white person is therefore automatically more intelligent than any black person.”  Or, only slightly less offensive, but equally wrong, “and therefore, the very smartest people will all be white, and the very dumbest people will all be black.”

Or, similarly, that any male couch potato should be able to beat a female Olympian at any sport.

Even if “the average” actually does work the way this theory claims (of which I am completely skeptical), there is nothing about it that prevents the most intelligent people on the planet from being black, with the vast majority of white people being barely, but noticeably smarter than the majority of black people (a difference you wouldn’t notice in practical reality, but enough to skew the statistics), and the stupidest people alive mostly coming from the white population.

Okay, now I know you must be spoofing, because the inherent problems of “IQ” tests are very well-known.  Any master’s degree student in psychology can tell you all of those problems and that “IQ” is a very rough estimate of how someone will do academically in the US school system and that’s about it.  They absolutely are not some kind of objective measure of inherent intelligence.  If they were, then the Flynn effect would not exist.

Frankly no. Modern IQ tests are intended to measure intelligence. If you have read any textbook on intelligence you should be aware of the massive song and dance about what is and is not g and is there a g how can we to g in the first few chapters of everyone one of them. They are not intended to measure how well people will do in the US school system. They use IQ tests in other countries too. You might not be aware but a french guy called Binet came up with the things in order to find out which kids needed special education and which didn’t. There has been significant mission creep since then.

Intelligence tests do not measure creativity, a person’s ability to plan, to define ambiguous situations and every problem in an IQ test has clear start state and finish state. Hence patients who had lobotomies performed roughly the same pre and post lobotomy. I don’t think anyone would call their behavior intelligent or expect them to get much done in a school environment. 

Oh and the Flynn effect was a controversy because it did undermine credibility in IQ tests.

Oh and I have a masters in psychology and I am licensed to administer the WISC 4 though to be fair I only did that little course to have the qualification.

“and therefore, the very smartest people will all be white, and the very dumbest people will all be black.”

In fairness to our friends who have horrible opinions there is a certain president about whom they would have to agree phrases like “scary smart” and “strikingly clever” are entirely accurate that should completely undermine the idea that all black people are stupid especially when they consider his predecessor.

So funny when idiot law students try to be scientists.  Try this one on (maybe Jesse caught it, maybe I missed it):

THERE IS NO SCIENTIFIC AND TESTABLE GENETIC DEFINITION OF RACE.

Race is entirely a social/political/historical construct.  I am culturally white, but if a forensic scientist found my skeleton?  Or I did one of those blood tests that supposedly determines ancestry?

We are barely distinguishable from other primates, let alone able to construct stable genetic definitions of race within that 2% that separates us from our closest primate ancestors.  Any scientist worth their pay knows this.

“that should completely undermine the idea that all black people are stupid”

Not for the dedicated bigot. Obama’s mother was white.

Anyone who would actually need to have Obama pointed out to them has already decided not to notice all the other intelligent, accomplished, and amazing black people in the world around them. Ignoring the President shouldn’t be that much of a stretch, and if pressed, they’ll simply fall back on the “Braawwk! Quota! Quota! Braawk!” excuse to prove that he doesn’t deserve to be where he is.

Besides, whatever else ANYONE said about Bush, I don’t remember anyone claiming he was at the deep end of the gene pool.

Can I think that Grace’s email is pretty obviously racist, but also that it’s pretty awful for one of her “friends” to forward her private email to the BLSA?

Grace got what was coming to her.  I doubt her racist Bell Curve bullshit is confined to e-mail, and I suspect somebody was just so fucking sick of it they gave it the sunlight that it and she deserved.

Oh, yeah.  What “genetically determined” race category does President Obama fit into, actually?  What about his daughters?

The whole “just putting out scientific theories” is laughable bullshit on its face: not only was this shit discredited long ago, but any real scientific theory has to be testable.  We have an unclear and completely undefinable categorical predictor variable (if we are talking race as a genetic construct and not a social one) and a high-uncertainty outcome variable.  That means that these “scientific theories” are completely untestable by design.

Sorry.  Not Science.  You read Guns, Germs, and Steel if you want science.  You don’t read The Bell Curve, unless you also read the far more thoroughly scientific work discrediting the supposed “science” of that bit of sewer gas.

I’ve known some dumb fucking white people, so I think this hypothesis that whites might just be genetically inferior has some legs.

For those who are interested, Cosma Shalizi (a pretty smart dude himself), wrote an article about 3 years ago called g, a statistical myth. It’s really worth reading in order to understand why these are in fact not well-formed scientific questions at all.

Why does nobody ever ask if being an asshole is heritable? (in the genetic/narrow sense of heritability).  Just wondering.

But you also have to talk about things like the range and the outliers. I have never seen this kind of discussion come up where the two populations weren’t treated like homogenous wholes, whether it has to do with Black intelligence, women’s athletic or math ability, gay parenting, men’s aggression, or whatever.

When I hear people spouting this stuff, it’s usually in the context of “hey, discriminatory outcomes overall are just fine and don’t indicate any systemic problem because ...”.  There, the issue is precisely a comparison of different populations and so the distinction between group averages and individual performance is used to dismiss exceptional individuals of the “wrong” race as irrelevant, or as showing that there isn’t any actual discrimination there to begin with.  (despite whatever overall statistics might say)

The people defending this woman keep trotting out the statistic that the average white IQ is 100, the average black American IQ is 85, and the average IQ in Sub-Saharan Africa is 70. They present these with a triumphant attitude of “Just the facts, now quit being so overly sensitive.” But hold up: don’t African-Americans descend from sub-Saharan Africa? If IQ is 100% genetic and can’t be changed, so we need to just accept that blacks are dumber, how come the people who are closest to them genetically have an IQ 15 points lower? That’s a big difference—as big as the difference between whites and blacks in America. That tells us 1) IQ tests aren’t as definitive as Stephanie Grace thinks they are, 2) Something else besides genetics accounts for at least some of the variation.

And anyone who bothers to read the Bell Curve, which is a bunch of selective statistical cherry picking and the polar opposite of scientific inquiry, should read Stephen Jay Gould’s refutation of it and Christopher Jencks/Meredith Phillips’ Black-White Test Score Gap and the work of Claude Steele on stereotype threat.

The thing that bugged me most about Ms. Grace is that fact that she’d basically be penning opinions (dissenting ones in the 9th Circuit, probably) on things like Title VII.

In some circles, there’s an anecdotal belief that people of african descent who come to the US from Africa or from the caribbean are typically more motivated/successful/educated/polite/white-acting/etc than those born in the US. Although there are obvious social reasons why this might be the case, possibility 3 offers a clear genetic explanation as well: all the european genes in US-born people of african descent have diluted their natural intellectual superiority.

Oddly, you will probably never see someone who believes along these lines pushing such a theory.

Great post, Jesse. Spot on.

(Why is it that every time I use the phrase “spot on,” my brain starts adding “Cheerio” and “Tallyho” and various other Woosterisms? Must be that England gene I’ve got.)

Anyway, yes, if these people were operating in good faith, option 3 would be on the table. And they would be just as willing to talk about the possibility of Asians having genetic superiority to whites. Except when the subject is whites and Asians, somehow environmental and cultural factors come up far more frequently. Funny how that works, huh?

I’m not going to rule out the possibility that the ability to score high on IQ tests is genetically linked to a lack of empathy—maybe Stephanie Grace, Volokh et al. suffer from a mild case of Asperger’s.

Comment #31: Lymis on 05/03 at 06:26 AM

The problem is that the idea that white people are more intelligent (on average) than black people turns instantly into “any white person is therefore automatically more intelligent than any black person.” Or, only slightly less offensive, but equally wrong, “and therefore, the very smartest people will all be white, and the very dumbest people will all be black.”

The other problem is that the idea that white people are better at intellectual tasks may well be a self-fulfilling prophecy.  Teacher’s beliefs about which students they expect to perform better have been shown to cause students to perform better (the Pygmalion effect).

The people defending this woman keep trotting out the statistic that the average white IQ is 100, the average black American IQ is 85, and the average IQ in Sub-Saharan Africa is 70. They present these with a triumphant attitude of “Just the facts, now quit being so overly sensitive.” But hold up: don’t African-Americans descend from sub-Saharan Africa? If IQ is 100% genetic and can’t be changed, so we need to just accept that blacks are dumber, how come the people who are closest to them genetically have an IQ 15 points lower? That’s a big difference—as big as the difference between whites and blacks in America. That tells us 1) IQ tests aren’t as definitive as Stephanie Grace thinks they are, 2) Something else besides genetics accounts for at least some of the variation.

They don’t like to acknowledge that a lot of rape went on as part of slavery in America.

I don’t want tests to reveal that farming people are genetically less intelligent than hunting and gathering people, having had longer buffers against life on the edge, and thus different selective pressure. For selfish reasons, I am against research into group genetics and intelligence.

One of the great examples of this is how marginalized populations in their home countries start to score higher on IQ tests as they come to America and lose the economic/cultural/social baggage of being part of the “discriminated class” after a generation or two.

One can measure differences in intelligence via IQ tests and the like, but you just can’t make wide racial conclusions about them. Discrminated-against ethnic Koreans in Japan score worse on IQ tests than ethnic Japanese. Irish Catholics in northern Ireland score worse on IQ tests than Irish
Protestants. And so on. The only conclusions you can draw are about relative intellectual abilities between people in the same circumstances.

Our “white people” in America are full of the same subgroups that were supposedly the genetically inferior ones not too long ago, but in the absence of all that discrmination, they seem
to blend in when it comes to IQ performance.

“The people defending this woman keep trotting out the statistic that the average white IQ is 100, the average black American IQ is 85, and the average IQ in Sub-Saharan Africa is 70.”

That’s not a “statistic”.  It may look like a “statistic”, but it’s not.  Statistical measures such as “IQ” are, first of all, valid, if at all, only for the population they were standardized on.  This means that if there is any substantial difference between, say, “blacks” in the US and “whites” in the US, then an IQ test standardized on the “white” population simply is not valid for use on members of the “black” population.  And certainly not valid for assessing the “IQ” of Sub-Saharan Africans.

Second, “IQ” and similar measures are really only good for assessing groups within the target population.  They are not valid on an individual basis, no matter how much they are used, and talked about, as individual measures.

Finally, I would like to remark, as the parent of a number of unusually smart kids, that I would not be at all surprised to find a correlation between intelligence (however measures) and poor performance in school.  The schools I have been associated with as a parent have not been designed to notice, let alone nurture, intelligent students.

I wish I had remembered to say that no amount of speculation or even of scientific fact regarding relative intelligence of different “races” has anything to do with how we should arrange the schools, or how we should regard any particular applicant for a job.  Because regardless of the average in one’s racial group, each one of us is as intelligent, or as well-prepared as he/she is, and needs to be dealt with as an individual, not as a representative of some statistical group.

Hector @50: there’s an unfortunate tendency to conflate ‘selfish asshole’ with ‘has an autism-spectrum disorder’. People with ASDs like Asperger’s have a difficult time reading social cues or understanding others’ motivations; that doesn’t mean they lack empathy or are genetically doomed to be Libertarian.

How quickly the racists forget that ‘white’ used to mean ‘of English, French or Scandinavian descent’ and didn’t include ethnic groups like, oh, Italians.

I also get a kick out of ETS sponsored studies saying how a given high school graduate’s GPA and SAT scores are a strong indicator of their future college-level performance.  Funny how several high school classmates, most college classmates/acquaintances at other colleges, and I are all living examples of how wrong that is…

Well, no, the correlation is that high scores indicate possible high performance in the future, not that low scores predict low performance in college per se.

That was how it was explained to me by an education grad student some decades ago as I mentioned my case of non-correlation between my high SATs and barely-above average undergrad grades, just one C in Organic Chemistry, First Semester, how I got through Physics without a C either semester is something still beyond my comprehension…................... 

There is a common-sense explanation to your observations:

In a longitudinal study of 140 eighth-grade students, self-discipline measured by self-report, parent report, teacher report, and monetary choice questionnaires in the fall predicted final grades, school attendance, standardized achievement-test scores, and selection into a competitive high school program the following spring. In a replication with 164 eighth graders, a behavioral delay-of-gratification task, a questionnaire on study habits, and a group-administered IQ test were added. Self-discipline measured in the fall accounted for more than twice as much variance as IQ in final grades, high school selection, school attendance, hours spent doing homework, hours spent watching television (inversely), and the time of day students began their homework. The effect of self-discipline on final grades held even when controlling for first-marking-period grades, achievement-test scores, and measured IQ. These findings suggest a major reason for students falling short of their intellectual potential: their failure to exercise self-discipline.

Funny how “objective” sources of information such as encyclopedias touted Asians as being vile and lowly and stupid only a century or so ago.  How come we don’t see any theories about how this group managed to genetically evolve so quickly to acheive so much?  Hmmm?

I also get a kick out of ETS sponsored studies saying how a given high school graduate’s GPA and SAT scores are a strong indicator of their future college-level performance.

Well, they are correct about that in that there is a correlation between SAT scores and first year college grades. Even though you may be aware of exceptions.

But I do wonder how much of this effect is due to self-motivation. One of the biggest effects on my SAT scores was simply a determination to have a very high SAT score, a determination which carries over into other things.

IQ tests have evolved as well. Some of the first intelligence tests, back in the 1910s, had questions about topics like baseball, and were still used to “prove” that immigrants were less intelligent than natives.

As for IQ tests being good measures of intelligence, one great proof to the contrary is the fact that there are just as many high IQ people…including many MENSA members I’ve met who are ineffective in their daily lives and thus, lead unsuccessful lives…..a fact which to some*....casts doubt on their supposed “intelligence”.

As someone who was strongly urged by a high school librarian who is a MENSA member to join….seeing that, the unremitting efforts by some to show how much better they are by virtue of their MENSA membership/high IQ, and the fact she and some of them were strongly urging me to consider joining were all reasons why I declined.  Why were they so eager to get a kid who’s familiar with the dean’s office and is struggling to maintain a mediocre GPA when the school’s full of kids who do extraordinary things like win Westinghouse competitions, impress Ivy/Ivy-level admissions, and go directly to STEM PhD programs at 15??

You’re largely debating success, effective intelligence, and actual IQ.  I could have gone to MIT at 17 but I instead chose to step into a engineering program at University of Pittsburgh then found myself in History getting a doctorate.  Am I as smart as the Westinghouse winners?  Maybe.  The difference is that their ability to channel their effective intelligence is most likely far greater than mine but ask them to describe the social effects of railroads upon the post-civil war culture and they’ll be dumbfounded. 

People like to compare success to intelligence as if it has an inherent relationship.  IQ tests are a poor test of one’s actual intelligence since the Q in IQ fully admits that it is only a quotient and thus not an absolute with a fairly wide possible range (last I read it was guessed about 20, 10 either way on average.)  I guess in our business-driven society we’re losing sight of great thinking and focusing on great success now as the truth.  That model though is bound to crush minorities in an apartheid system the US still maintains on a de facto level of socioeconomic. 

To get onto MENSA for a moment, I don’t know what kind of chapter you lived by but I have never met a MENSA member who was such a disturbed individual as you described.  I’ve met some jerks at MENSA meetings but for the most part they’re just people who never get to discuss and play games with others who can keep up.  For the most part MENSA folks are relatively successful, the occasional hobbyist with a handyman job is always fun to be around.  They have the best ideas for odd things because they aren’t locked into that structure.

But I do wonder how much of this effect is due to self-motivation. One of the biggest effects on my SAT scores was simply a determination to have a very high SAT score, a determination which carries over into other things.

Probably plays some role in self-motivation…though it can go in more directions than your experience. 

Saw plenty of 1500-1600/1600 SAT scorers become too overconfident, lazy, and arrogant against lower scorers and those who graduated from “inferior” public/urban public schools only to find that they fell flat on their faces once they hit undergrad or the working world. 

Someone with stratospheric SAT scores and yet who flunks out of college or flounders to graduation with GW Bush level GPAs tends IME to be regarded more with derision and disdainful pity than genuine respect. 

Conversely, someone who scored quite low and yet…managed to excel in undergrad, grad school, and professional career tends to be highly regarded and his/her low SAT scores regarded either as an irrelevant detail from the past….or proof that such tests are meaningless with kudos given for not letting the stigma of a low score get them down.  If anything, having a low SAT can also be a great motivator…..to prove everyone…especially those who place stock in such tests completely wrong.  On this, I do speak from some firsthand experience. 

Can I think that Grace’s email is pretty obviously racist, but also that it’s pretty awful for one of her “friends” to forward her private email to the BLSA?

It fills me with great contentment that this snotty, overprivileged, unapologetic racist has “friends” who will stab her in the back at a moment’s notice.  Maybe that’s petty of me.

It fills me with great contentment that this snotty, overprivileged, unapologetic racist has “friends” who will stab her in the back at a moment’s notice.  Maybe that’s petty of me.

There is no expectation of privacy in email when it is sent to a group as her email was as well as the fact that email itself isn’t very secure….a reason why many corporations use disclaimers saying any unauthorized recipients must delete the emails immediately or something like that. 

Unless she was using an encryption protocol like PGP(Pretty Good Privacy), sending that email is more similar to sending out postcards to multiple individuals. 

Also, she should have learned from her law classes and summer associateships that emails can rapidly get around and that people will hold her accountable for what’s said in them….especially in the professional world as another Princeton graduate found out back in 2000:

http://www.snopes.com/risque/tattled/chung.asp

You read Guns, Germs, and Steel if you want science.

No, you don’t actually.  Diamond wrote an easily accessible books that had some good motives, but failed when it came to his understanding of what he was writing about.  Collapse suffers the same problems and is in the “epic fail” category.  The book Questioning Collapse is a series of essays by anthropologists who point out massive flaws in Diamond’s popular work, primarily the second book, but some in Guns, Germs, and Steel as well.

It should be noted, especially when it comes to the criticism of Collapse, that the issues the essay authors have are not with the premise that human effects on the environment can be catastrophic, but that the examples he cites from history are wrong, and most of them aren’t even examples of environmental collapse in the first place, and the ones that are frequently have cause and effect backward: the salination of soil in Mesopotamia is one example where it wasn’t the failure of farming that caused the society to collapse, but the defeat of that society by military conquest which caused the farming to collapse.

@#26,

Hell, we covered the problems with IQ testing in an introductory 100 level psych research methods class.  Just to drive the point home, the whole class did a version of the Raven matrices (supposed to be one of the most neutral IQ tests) and compare scores - I scored well into the genius range on the the IQ test, but just scraped a B pass in the course.

Self-discipline measured in the fall accounted for more than twice as much variance as IQ in final grades, high school selection, school attendance, hours spent doing homework, hours spent watching television (inversely), and the time of day students began their homework. The effect of self-discipline on final grades held even when controlling for first-marking-period grades, achievement-test scores, and measured IQ. These findings suggest a major reason for students falling short of their intellectual potential: their failure to exercise self-discipline.

And, as was pointed out in another Internet conversation a while back, there’s an assumption made that IQ tests are an objective measure.  Take a bored classroom of poor inner-city students who don’t see academics as important and a classroom of middle-class aspirational students who have been conditioned to see academics as their ticket to the better life.  If you give a two or three hour sit down test to the two groups, one is going to goof off and get disgusted way more than the other.  What do you know - “IQ tests proves blacks are dumb”.

You’d be able to find the same sort of correlation between wearing glasses and IQ, but no-one is claiming that putting on spectacles makes you smarter.

So much heat and so little light.

Any reasonable geneticist would think it at least plausible that virtually any arbitrary biological phenotype (we aren’t talking intelligence yet) in any arbitrary species (we aren’t talking people yet) could in principle exhibit genetic variation that differentiated one deme(s) from another deme(s). This is not controversial. As far as this goes, this is a reasonable stance in absence of evidence (or if the only evidence is questionable). Importantly, this stance only comments on plausibility and shouldn’t be construed as making a positive or negative case for any particular case that lacks evidence.

So far so good.

Next, let’s turn to humans and human demography. It is well established (almost beyond reasonable doubt) that the history of humanity is dominated by a migration out of Africa tens of thousands of years ago. Although there are other forces that may also operate (involving migration between regions outside Africa or hybridization with Neanderthals in Europe, for two examples among many), very few geneticists question that probably the most important demographic event influencing modern human populations is the migration out of Africa. (A close second might be the rapid near exponential population expansion over the last few millennia.)  In other words, human demography as revealed by genetic markers bears the undeniable stamp of one or more out of Africa migration event(s). In an important sense, Africa is the most important cradle of humanity.

One consequence of this important aspect of human variation is that, generally speaking, the genetic variation found within Africa is a superset of the genetic variation found everywhere else. There are exceptions to this, but this observation is very robust. One consequence of this is that, if you sample randomly from Africa and obtain “neutral” genetic markers (silent SNPs e.g.), you will find more variation than a similar sample taken from the rest of the ENTIRE world. This is also uncontroversial.

This is the last step I’d like to work through here. Let us now consider “neutral” physical traits (i.e. traits that don’t affect survival) that have a genetic basis. For any arbitrary trait described in the previous sentence, you would either: 1) expect on average to be more likely to find it variable in Africans than in any other population (for single gene traits); or 2) would expect variation to exhibit higher phenotypic variance in Africans than in the rest of the world (for multigenic traits), on average.

The consequences of the above logic suggests the following:
1) If anything, you’d expect Africans to (on average) have more “highs” and more “lows” than virtually any other population;
2) It would be unsurprising that variation in virtually any other population would be be a proper subset* of the variation in African populations.

So, everything I said above is conditional on some assumptions. First, these are all “all else being equal, on average” types of generalizations. They need not be true in particular cases. Next, these ideas don’t work for genetic variation that is good in one environment but not in another inhabited by humans. Finally, these ideas neglect the genetic history that has occurred since the out of Africa migration event. There is little question that at least some traits have emerged that are special to different geographical areas. These may be consequences of novel variation or genetic drift or perhaps hybridization events. But I’m ignoring this.

Taking all of this into account, if I were asked to opine about an arbitrary phenotype in humans and to predict what sort of differences (if any) I would expect to find between African and non-African populations, my prediction would be (in the absence of evidence one way or another) that you would find more extremes in African populations, more variety, etc. In non-African populations, I would expect more homogeneity, fewer extremes. I wouldn’t necessarily expect to find any particular directionality to any trait. Some may be higher, some lower, some very similar. But averaged across many traits, I would expect the traits to be similar, though less variable outside Africa.

It comes as no surprise then that I find the trichotomy proposed by Jesse to be misleading, which tends to obscure the rest of the discussion.

* There has been genetic variation since the migration event, so I’m neglecting private alleles.

The other problem is that the idea that white people are better at intellectual tasks may well be a self-fulfilling prophecy.  Teacher’s beliefs about which students they expect to perform better have been shown to cause students to perform better

In fact, a lot of studies have found that black students are more dependent on teacher feedback than white students. white students get their feedback from their parents. So if a teacher is a latent racist who thinks all impoverished black kids are dumb, that’s going to have an effect on her students.

And as I pointed out, Claude Steele’s studies on stereotype threat are fascinating—and they’ve been replicated. Basically if you tell a student of a certain race or gender that other races do better on the test, they do more poorly. If however, you tell them that their race or gender does better, or if you’re neutral, they do well. This held true, by the way, for white males told that Asian students performed better.

Also, on the SAT, this gets slightly off the topic, but what is really disgraceful is that kids with high SAT scores who are in the lowest income quintile are *less* likely to go to college than a kid whose family’s income is in the top quintile but his scores are at the bottom.  So much for meritocracy.

JJE,

You have a lot of interesting things to say, but they are about, as you admit up front, aribtrary phenotypes.

Intelligence is not arbitrary.

So how does your discussion about expecting to find a broader range of arbitrary phenotypes among humans (or any species) with more genetic diversity map on to your critique of Jesse’s trichotomy, and how is the discussion off point, if you have not yet shown that your discussion of arbitrary phenotypes affects intelligence?

-Izzy

Izzy

Unless I misinterpret, Jesse isn’t critcizing the suggestion that genetic variation exists for intelligence. Rather Jesse complains that that only two parts of trichotomy are emphasized. My point is that, if one allows that there is genetic variation in the human population for intelligence (there is in twin studies without a racial component) and if you refuse to accept offensive and racially charged just so stories like “Europeans are adapted to be smart” or “Africans are adapted to be strong and sacrificed brains to build better muscles” or other ad hoc crazy ideas (as I hope you will) then the null hypothesis would be that genetic variation for intelligence is distributed like all other genetic variation. If that is the case, I think Jesse’s trichotomy is a false one and misdirects discussion. QED.

JJE,

I don’t think it would be, because the other types of genetic variation you discuss are, as you mention, arbitrary.  Intelligence (of some sort) would be selected for, which would skew everything.

That’s what I thought the initial part of your post was getting at—with regard to *non-selected for* traits, distribution would track a given population’s genetic diversity.  You never got to the second part of the matter, which is, what happens with regard to highly selected-for trait.

Two points.

First, I’m guessing that wasn’t Jesse’s point.

Second, it clearly is your point, so here’s my speculation on this new target:

I suspect (although people make entire careers of trying to show otherwise) that the selection for brains was well on its way or even basically finished by the time that most of the genetic variation that exists in modern humans was created by mutation. In other words, by the time you get to modern humans, but before some of our ancestors left Africa, we were already pretty smart.

Basically, I suspect that having genes that make you too dumb to graduate modern elementary school or having genes that make you a genius may be more or less “neutral” when you consider that both types of people can learn flint knapping, tracking, foraging, etc. Even a person with an IQ of 70 is profoundly more intelligent than even a chimpanzee. I suspect there has been much more pervasive selection for disease resistance, for example than brain size in recent times. I could totally be wrong, and this is speculation, but I can’t imagine that being smart in a modern sense ranks all that highly on fitness.

My point was that your analysis on not-selected-for traits did not affect Jesse’s three hypotheses, because intelligence was selected for.

But yeah, with regard to modern education, there simply has not been enough time for intelligence of the book learning sort to be selected for, and as you suggest, there may not have yet been time for intelligence of anything other than the “living in a hostile environment where tools and situational awareness really help” to be selected for.

Basically, I suspect that having genes that make you too dumb to graduate modern elementary school or having genes that make you a genius may be more or less “neutral” when you consider that both types of people can learn flint knapping, tracking, foraging, etc.

Nope.  One of the major evolutionary drivers for humans is that we evolved living in small groups; intelligence as a means of keeping track of social situations would be selected for.  Crudely, keeping track of what Og thinks about Grog’s feelings for Una might be important.

Clearly Grog is a philanderer and a moron to boot. What’s more he can’t aim an atlatl to save his life. True, Grog is strong and has that devastatingly handsome protruding supraorbital ridge. But Una is much better off with a caring, sensitive guy like Og. Sure, Og spends most of his days doing geeky things like testing new spear heads or new types of kindling. And he snorts when he laughs. But come the next famine, Una will be glad to be with someone with as much foresight as Og.

JJE,

Actually, Una probably banged both of them and was sweetly vague about who the baby-daddy was, assuming she even knew.  And perhaps she made a point of having children with both of them.

Remember, this is a both/and blog. 

The problem I have with the people trying to legitimate the way these pseudo-scientists rule out option 3 is that they’re piling on with more pseudo-science. Namely, that once option 2 is in the picture, you must necessarily realize that option 1 is IDENTICAL to option 3. The only difference is that people are more willing to believe option 1 than option 3 for irrational reasons.