Well, all I have to say is: ooh-ooh-OOO! AAA-AAA-AAAH! eee! EEE! EEEE! (does the joke work well without the visual of me holding a spear, swinging from a vine, dismounting and waddling along with my knuckles scraping on the ground?)
See, something didn't sit right with me when I read Saletan's article. I was worried: did I have some sort of egalitarian bias? was i refusing to look at this data for what it was because of my own wishes for equality?
Then I read your take and realized his piece just didn't intuitively jive because there were actual holes in the argument. What if we do do a definitive study in the future that proves that some 'races' have genetically inferior intellects? What do we DO with that information? How does it help us?
And why are we getting all hopped up on these studies when so many others have pointed to this conclusion: race is mostly a social construct.
The bit about head size tipped me off that the studies cited maybe weren't so reliable. I mean science hasn't yet dedicated a significant amount of research to the inherent differences of the FEMALE brain, what makes Saletan think we are so advanced to imply that whole genomes are better suited for intellect than others?
Anyway, Bravo.
Back to phrenology, I say.
Mark
Ottawa
Well, that's the direction in which we appear to be, er, headed. : )
This is my first time to your blog, Dr. Dawg, but I really must commend you for this post. I've spent a great deal of time arguing against supposed advocates of the "truth" of racially-related intelligence, and I will link to this next time the topic comes up.
As an aside, the most disturbing part of any of these articles comes when Jews (well, Ashkenazi Jews) are placed in a separate racial category. Will they start comparing Italians and Irish to "Anglo-Saxons" next?
Head size was definitely a give away. If hat size correlates to IQ we could dispense with all that silly testing and just pop out the tape measure.
The reason why the article is interesting is that it represents the ultimate defeat of the "liberal" idea that culture really is relative and that one choice is just as valid as another.
Saletan is so incapable of saying that the choices black people make are - for a huge minority of those black people - destructive that he has to go to a Tommy Douglas brand of eugenic thought to pretend those choices are out of those people's control. Worse, the poor man is forced by his liberal adherence to group rather than individual rights and outcomes, demand that all blacks be taken on average. The Powells and rices of the world need to be driven back into their group where they belong.
Group IQ is one of the least interesting ideas in the world. Because groups are not intelligent or unintelligent; people are. If ever there was an argument against identity politics IQ is it. There are very dim Chinese and brilliant Bushmen; but to speak of a group or a race in IQ terms is virtually meaningless and totally useless.
But it is kinda fun to watch liberals twist on this one.
Nice one.
It IS amazing how many otherwise smart people can be taken in by pseudo-science. A bit of correlative statistical analysis presented Ipse Dixit, and all their critical thinking goes out the window.
Rushton's being the head of the Pioneer Fund (an organization formed to promote white supremacy and eugenics) doesn't exactly give one a whole lot of confidence in his methodology or impartiality on this particular subject. Then the buffoon goes to American Renaissance conventions and hangs out with David Duke and Don Black (both former grand wizards of the KKK) http://www.searchlightmagazine.c...plate&
story=162 ... one can only wonder how anyone can take these guys seriously.
I'm not making a pure guilt by association argument here. There are plenty of factual refutations for their claims as you have shown... but hanging out with neo-nazis and expecting anyone to take your racialist "g" talk seriously is pushing it (let's not even discuss the head and penis measuring). Being a racist does indeed have a direct bearing on whether one can be trusted to conduct racial studies fairly (if you even buy into race). It is a simple quality of evidence question...
Anyway, thanks for some nice links and some witty observations. We've been arguing this with "race realists" for so long now that we forget how obvious this all is to someone who isn't invested in the racial pissing contest.
JahSun,
Many thanks for that link, and for your comments (I believe this is your first time here--welcome aboard). I've added an update and credited you.
Have you seen Andrew Sullivan's take on the topic:
http://andrewsullivan.theatlanti...and-iq-
upd.html
No, James, I hadn't, but I've seen that movie before, as it turns out. Take racialized people, try to correct the socioeconomic imbalance that they have suffered because of racialization, and get called "racist" for doing so.
Classic "blame the victim, or at least their advocates" stuff. African Americans didn't invent the category in which they were placed, and because of which they suffered discrimination. Then some of us interested in social justice take note of this constructed category, and the very real people who are assigned to it, we observe the consequences, and we argue that those placed in this category should have certain opportunities to level the playing field. Only then does the word "racist" pop up--used against us by those who have a vested interest in maintaining both the category and the socioeconomic status quo.
Well, Dawg, that's because affirmative action IS racism.
As Barry Bruyea pointed out years ago on UseNet, at least the Brits are honest about it when they call their affirmative action "positive discrimination".
So it may be "positive racism", but any selection process that measures a person's race is, by definition, "racist". In the literal meaning of the word, of course.
This new study from Duke (http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20071130/ap_on_sc/
silenced_genes) gives shows some promise as to increasing our understanding of possible environmental effects on genetics. It shows approximately 200 human genes that can be turned off by environmental factors and passed to progeny "silenced," thus leaving them with only 1 working gene in that area.
I'm curious as to what you think of this line of research. It seems to throw yet another monkey wrench in the simplistic "additive" models of the hereditarians.
Sorry, I garbled the link:
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20071.../
silenced_genes
JahSun,
Thank you for that link--a fascinating article. What it indicates to me is that our notions of inheritance have a longer way to go than the distance from Mendel to the present. Indeed, the whole environment/heredity binary may have to be discarded: we should look at the coded information in genes, as well as its expression, as an integral, dynamic part of the environment. There is one thing going on here, in other words, not two.
The hereditarians' position is based upon outmoded notions of lineage, legacy and so on that seem frankly simplistic when one observes the complex, dynamic collection of phenomena that we called "the environment" -- and when we recognize that we are not "in" it, but part of it.
The reality is that recent genetic research shows that there identifiable clusters of points, corresponding to traditional continental ethnic groups: Europeans, Africans, Asians, Native Americans, etc. (See, for example, Risch et al., Am. J. Hum. Genet. 76:268–275, 2005.)
This clustering is a natural consequence of geographical isolation, inheritance and natural selection operating over the last 50k years since humans left Africa.
Two groups that form distinct clusters are likely to exhibit different frequency distributions over various genes, leading to potential group differences.
For instance, in 2007 it was found that at least 7% of the genome had undergone recent selection (over past 10,000 years). Some of these changes are neurological and likely to affect behavior in some way. For example, you see new versions of SLC6A4, a serotonin transporter, in Europeans and Asians. There’s a new version of a gene (DBA1) that shapes the development of the layers of the cerebral cortex in east Asia.
It will take some time to figure out how these changes affect us, but it makes little sense to expect no differences between groups given divergent evolutionary paths.
"As an aside, the most disturbing part of any of these articles comes when Jews (well, Ashkenazi Jews) are placed in a separate racial category. Will they start comparing Italians and Irish to "Anglo-Saxons" next?"
It must be noted that much resentment actually stems from the idea that some groups are overrepresented in professional or well paying occupations purely due to cunning or unfair practice. The Ashkenazi Jews are an example of a successful minority group who have faced such persecution.
The reality is that the Ashkenazi mean IQ is 2/3 of a std dev above the general white mean. Psychologists and educational researchers have pegged their average IQ at 107.5 to 115. That's only modestly higher than the overall European average of 100, but the gap is large enough to produce a huge difference in the proportion of people with an IQ over 140. When a group's average IQ is 100, the percentage of people above 140 is 0.4%; when the average is 110, the rate is 2.3%.
So the overrepresentation is simply due to having a higher proportion of high ability individuals, not foul play.
Cochran, Gregory; Hardy, Jason; and Harpending, Henry (2006): "Natural History of Ashkenazi Intelligence" (PDF). Journal of Biosocial Science 38(5):659-693 SEP 2006.
http://homepage.mac.com/harpend/
....jbiosocsci.pdf
You see a similar phenomenon with the Chinese in Malaysia where they have a larger proportion of people in the upper end of the distribution.
Just further to the point above regarding race being a social concept, that is true in that humans define what race is. However, it does not mean that race is biologically meaningless. As noted above - groups cluster into recognisable clusters.
The best explanation of this I've seen is by Steve Hsu:
"For previous discussion of genetic clustering of human populations, see here and here. It has been known for some time that major continental groups ("races") form distinct clusters. Improved data allow for much finer exploration of clusters within clusters.
Further technical comment: you may have read the misleading statistic, spread by the intellectually dishonest Lewontin, that 85% percent of all human genetic variation occurs within groups and only 15% between groups. The statistic is true, but what is often falsely claimed is that this breakup of variances (larger within group than between group) prevents any meaningful genetic classification of populations. This false conclusion neglects the correlations in the genetic data that are revealed in a cluster analysis. See here for a simple example which shows that there can be dramatic group differences in phenotypes even if every version of every gene is found in two groups -- as long as the frequency or probability distributions are distinct. Sadly, understanding this point requires just enough mathematical ability that it has eluded all but a small number of experts.) Update: see here for an explanation in pictures of Lewontin's fallacy.
There is no strong evidence yet for specific gene variants (alleles) that lead to group differences (differences between clusters) in behavior or intelligence, but progress on the genomic side of this question will be rapid in coming years, as the price to sequence a genome is dropping at an exponential rate.
What seems to be true (from preliminary studies) is that the gene variants that were under strong selection (reached fixation) over the last 10k years are different in different clusters. That is, the way that modern people in each cluster differ, due to natural selection, from their own ancestors 10k years ago is not the same in each cluster -- we have been, at least at the genetic level, experiencing divergent evolution.
In fact, recent research suggests that 7% or more of all our genes are mutant versions that replaced earlier variants through natural selection over the last tens of thousands of years. There was little gene flow between continental clusters ("races") during that period, so there is circumstantial evidence for group differences beyond the already established ones (superficial appearance, disease resistance). ..
http://infoproc.blogspot.com/200...s-for-
race.html
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