I’m not claiming great knowledge of either region, but I did read Jared Diamond’s Guns Germs and Steel, for instance, which seems to broadly answer your question about an African Singapore. If you have an alternate theory, I’m interested in seeing specifics.
We seem to have strayed a fair bit from your general assertion about charity being always negative outside of a narrow context.
I didn’t read Guns, Germs and Steel, but I read the synopsis on Wikipedia. My impression is that Diamond discusses the reasons why civilization developed in Europe (rather than elsewhere) in the past. The synopsis on Wikipedia does not, however, discuss anything relevant to why Africa has been unable to pick up civilization after it has already been developed. Are you aware of a synopsis of Diamond’s argument that addresses specifically that?
I gave the example of Singapore specifically because it is a country that grew from virtually nothing to prosperity in a matter of decades. Japan and Taiwan could also be used as examples, and China is not faring too bad either. There are still a large number of countries in Asia that are dysfunctional, but many countries, some of them very large, have picked up the lessons of what works, and have applied them, or are now applying them, to create a functional civilization.
This, however, is not happening in Africa, nor in Caribbean (where independent), nor in the Philippines, nor in the Bronx—nor anywhere with a majority of largely African descent.
In all these places, the reverse process took place. The locals took control away from colonizing foreigners, and then instead of a proliferation of prosperity, it all broke down and fell apart. Why is that?
If you want to be shocked some more, follow an international news source such as BBC for a few years, and pay attention to news from Africa and the Caribbean. The pieces will fall in place in time.
You are definitely shifting the goal posts. Are you now saying that charity shouldn’t be directed to countries inhabited by races which by virtue of low IQ will be unable to make good use of it?
Comparing the above post to your original comment, one has to wonder why you didn’t start there.
It still seem clear that health, nutrition and education can have major effects on IQ regardless of the extent to which IQ differences might be due to genetic factors associated with ethnicity. (Imagine raising your kids in exactly the same conditions as slum dwellers in Haiti or Africa.)
I don’t believe that I’m shifting the goal posts; I stand behind both my original comment and the one above. They are different aspects of a greater concept.
Are you now saying that charity shouldn’t be directed to countries inhabited by races which by virtue of low IQ will be unable to make good use of it?
That’s part of what I’m saying. It should also not be directed towards the homeless and other failures.
I am in favor of a social net for those who are legitimately out of luck and soon regain gainful employment.
It still seem clear that health, nutrition and education can have major effects on IQ regardless of the extent to which IQ differences might be due to genetic factors associated with ethnicity. (Imagine raising your kids in exactly the same conditions as slum dwellers in Haiti or Africa.)
I’ve been looking for about a decade now, but have not encountered evidence that would discredit Lynn. I have however seen a lot of evidence which corroborates his findings.
If you have evidence that discredits his work, I would appreciate it.
Some of that “data” is hard to take seriously when you come across quotes such as the following:
Upon reading the original reference, we found that the “data point” that Lynn and Vanhanen used for the lowest IQ estimate, Equatorial Guinea, was actually the mean IQ of a group of Spanish children in a home for the developmentally disabled in Spain.
There’s a similar issue with the next lowest IQ on the list, and when you learn that the greater portion of the “country IQ” figures were obtained by averaging IQ data from nearby countries, you see how this kind of data quality issue could have contaminated the entire data set. But say I am inclined to take the data seriously and dismiss a few mistakes. This is from Wikipedia’s page on “IQ and the Wealth of Nations” by Lynn and Vanhanen:
The authors believe that average IQ differences between nations are due to both genetic and economic factors. They also believe that low GDP can cause low IQ, just as low IQ can cause low GDP. [...] The authors write that it is the ethical responsibility of rich, high-IQ nations to financially assist poor, low-IQ nations, as it is the responsibility of rich citizens to assist the poor.
IOW, the authors whose work justifies your conclusions arrive at more or less opposite conclusions from yours. You’re seeing a correlation, and assuming a causation in one direction, without (so far as I can see) a proper argument for that direction. Since this is one of the classic mistakes people are warned against in the sciences, I’ll maintain my skeptical attitude until you adress my actual arguments.
When you do, please take into account how cognitive abilities actually develop (i.e. if you’re fed, healthy and go to school you’ll end up smarter than if you’re starving, sick and nobody ever talks to you, and the former is more likely in a rich country).
I disagree, my current best estimate is the low 80s. The main reasons for this is various factors like parasites lowering IQ and lingering iodine and micro nutrient deficiencies have been empirically demonstrated to have measurable impacts on cognition and these factors are a bigger problem in Africa than elsewhere. Another reason is the analysis of other authors who tried to disprove his claims by using other tricks to try to infer g and the equivalent IQ (but could only rig the IQs up to the high 80s).
Even the maximalist (and implausible in light of other data) Rushton-Lynn hypothesis is perfectly consistent with aid (external provision of disease treatment, etc) having massive benefits in reducing disease and increasing wellbeing until biotech or more radical things can bypass any genetic disadvantage.
Even the maximalist (and implausible in light of other data) Rushton-Lynn hypothesis
I’ve been looking for about a decade now, but have not encountered evidence that would discredit Lynn. I have however seen a lot of evidence which corroborates his findings.
If you have evidence that discredits his work, I would appreciate it.
is perfectly consistent with aid (external provision of disease treatment, etc) having massive benefits in reducing disease and increasing wellbeing until biotech or more radical things can bypass any genetic disadvantage.
Why stop at Africa then? Shouldn’t we invest billions in animal shelters, so that dogs and cats can live long lives until we find a way to bypass their genetic disadvantage? Wouldn’t those be just as “massive benefits”?
And there’s no need to be smug.
Perhaps it came across as smugness, but I do find that every piece of news I see, either from South Africa, or from Haiti, or from Nigeria, or from Zimbabwe, or from Turks and Caicos, just adds to the pile of evidence.
Also, I myself live in a place like that. Which is why I suggest (in all seriousness!) that people should consider visiting a country like South Africa for a while.
There’s no better cure for academic distance than direct contact with the hard facts on the ground.
African-American IQ in the 80s, with only 20% European admixture, shows that African IQs are depressed by environment. The Dickens-Flynn model explains how to reconcile the Flynn effect and heritability increasing with age: gene-environment interactions, suggesting that any genetic difference would be amplified by feedback environmental effects. Even Jensen gives a chunk of the gaps to environment.
Animals have short lives so it wouldn’t work well, and I care less about them than people with long term plans hopes and fears.
African-American IQ in the 80s, with only 20% European admixture, shows that African IQs are depressed by environment.
I wouldn’t say so. I think it shows that genes for higher IQ are inherited dominantly.
This has also been proposed as an explanation for the Flynn effect—whole countries getting “smarter” over time—being due to the gene pool mixing more in cities, and thus with dominant pro-IQ genes gaining ground.
The same mechanism has been proposed for the increasing height.
Animals have short lives so it wouldn’t work well, and I care less about them than people with long term plans hopes and fears.
See, that’s fine with me. You want to indulge in X because you like it, not because of rationalization Y or Z. Just like I want to indulge in chocolate. That’s fine with me.
I just don’t like the claim that it is morally superior. Or that it’s something everyone should do. Or that it’s how resources “should” be spent. If it is an indulgence, though, then indulgences are fine with me.
Btw, I’m just going to interject and say that this conversation has been done at Hacker News many times and it never really goes anywhere. I’m going to wait five years until more genome wide association studies are done before I try to enter this argument again. It seems obvious to me that there are some genetic differences in intelligence, but it’s a touchy enough subject that I don’t feel it’s worth entering an argument based on individual interpretations of incomplete evidence.
Regardless, I advise not talking about the idea now. If it’s true large genomics studies will conclusively indicate that in the next few years without harming anyone’s reputations today. If it’s false, one will have avoided reputational costs as well as stoking racism.
That depends on what you mean by proven nonexistent. There are differences between the populations of black and white Americans in terms of what results you get if you measure their intelligence. There are also explanations for those differences that don’t involve any inherent differences in intelligence.
Also worthy of note: whatever IQ measures, second and third-generation immigrants to First World nations from Third World ones have more and more of it.
Yet at least in the case of those of African ancestry don’t seem to ever catch up. Those of East Asian ancestry don’t seem to ever drop to European levels either. It makes perfect sense that lower exposure to parasites and better nutrition will boost IQs for quite some time. Since stupid people generally earn less, this means their children get to enjoy fewer of the benefits of a good envrionment.
Remember even Lynn, Jensen, ect., the scientists favouring the hereditarian hypothesis consider a 50-50 split between genetic and environmental factors to best match their data. Their opponents claim it is nearly all envrionment.
I’m pretty much certain Askenazi Jews are smarter than gentile Europeans because of genetics. I’m also very certain that East Asians are smarter than Europeans because of genetics. The IQs of these groups have been measured in environments that appear to be as optimal as we can make them.
I’m not so sure where South Asian and Middle Eastern IQs would lie under 1st world conditions but if I had to make a guess I’d say the difference in intelligence is probably comparable to the difference between Europeans and Asians, putting their average somewhere in the mid 90s.
I’m also unsure how much of this low IQ is just the result of inbreeding, which is something “easily” fixed. It seems very plausible that the European vs. Middle Eastern gap can entirely be explained by different levels of inbreeding.
African IQs until quite recently seemed very firmly and robustly one standard deviation (15 points) below the European average, but there’s recently been some strange educational achievement data from the UK, which suggests the difference may be as low as half a standard deviation. Low 90s quite honestly seems a stretch considering all the other data though, so my best estimate is in the 80s. Which also happens to be about right considering educational attainment of second generation immigrants elsewhere in Europe and African Americans.
Do you have any reason to believe Lynn is a racist, or is that just a knee-jerk reaction? Lynn is too contrarian and I am too unqualified to agree or disagree with him, but I believe his work is done in good faith. At the very least, it’s unreasonable to label any research into race and intelligence ‘racist’ just because you don’t like the conclusions.
Claims about race and intelligence are racist. They suppose that race is a relevant factor to consider. I submit that the idea of ‘race’ is based solely on bad science and doesn’t have any real meaning such that it can be related to anything else.
I will also give a dismissive “boo phrenology” to anyone posting a link to a book that talks about the relationship between intelligence and lumps on one’s skull. It deserves no further comment.
It is impossible to draw a clear line between races, but it is also impossible to draw a clear line between colors of the visual spectrum, and yet “red” and “blue” exist. For a non-IQ related example, people of Ashkenazim heritage are known to be at risk for certain genetic issues, while people of African heritage are known to be exposed to heart-related risks.
The concept of race (or any other word that symbolizes this concept) is statistically significant and useful—more so in countries that are much more homogeneous than the USA.
I submit that the idea of ‘race’ is based solely on bad science and doesn’t have any real meaning such that it can be related to anything else.
Nevertheless, the word “race” remains a useful shorthand for “populations differentiated genetically by geographic location” or what have you. If you don’t think there are genetic differences between, say, Northern Europeans and Sub-Saharan Africans, you are literally blind. They obviously belong to groups that evolved in different directions. That does not have to include intelligence, but it’s not reasonable to refuse to consider a hypothesis just because you find it repugnant.
Nevertheless, the word “race” remains a useful shorthand for “populations differentiated genetically by geographic location” or what have you.
That isn’t what it means. It’s a useful shorthand for nothing, or at least nothing of worth. If you’re referring to a particular clade, for instance, don’t use the word “race” to differentiate that clade. That’s just using the word wrong.
You know the history here right? These bogus definitions were crafted by humanities scholars to have empty extensions so that the scholars could claim that the biologists and ordinary folk were using the words (with their ordinary meanings) illegitimately. It’s like if I suddenly redefined ‘atheism’ to mean ‘the worship of 4-sided triangles’ and started browbeating atheists for their confusion.
Famously anti-racist psychologists like James Flynn and Richard Nisbett disagree, and make claims about race and intelligence fairly frequently, namely that phenotypic differences in IQ between groups are not caused by direct genetic effects on IQ (‘direct’ because of indirect effects like genetic effects on skin color which elicits discrimination, etc). Are they misusing words?
I find Flynn and Nisbett’s position unconvincing. Asians are obviously different and were heavily discriminated against, yet have integrated in America regardless, and now have comparable or better outcomes. There must be a more substantial reason why Africans haven’t done the same, and the most plausible reason so far for me is genetics.
Pretty much the one major argument against genetics is that people just don’t want this to be the case, because it’s one of the least hopeful explanations. But this is bias. Once you eliminate it, it becomes strikingly evident what the most likely explanation is.
Flynn and Nisbett think that Asians have better cultures in this respect (cultures are passed down from parent to child, and note that the transracial adoption studies, the most powerful evidence have had mixed results) and Africans worse. Note that Asian-American kids lag in IQ before they enter school (when their parents talk less to them than white Americans) but then surge ahead after entering school, as their parents put intense pressure on them to learn and succeed. Also Asian-Americans are much more successful educationally and professionally than their IQs would predict.
Good points. But then why don’t African Americans perform much better when adopted and raised by non-African parents? If it’s about parent pressure, then an African American kid adopted by Asian parents should perform at about Asian level. Why do they not?
They do in some of the handful of transracial adoption studies, and don’t in others. Rushton and Jensen et al hype the Minnesota study, because it’s the one that supports their case, and note data quality problems with the other studies. Nisbett and Flynn do the reverse. But very little work is done in this area (yes, because of PC issues with funding bodies), so the data is still too thin to be very confident either way.
They do in some of the handful of transracial adoption studies, and don’t in others. Rushton and Jensen et al hype the Minnesota study, because it’s the one that supports their case, and note data quality problems with the other studies. Nisbett and Flynn do the reverse. But very little work is done in this area (yes, because of PC issues with funding bodies), so the data is still too thin to be very confident either way.
Agreed. More data would be nice.
I am open to a different explanation, it’s just that the genetic one seems most compatible with what I do know at this time.
Seeing a prosperous and competent country arising out of Africa would surely be nice. I would prefer living in a universe like that. It’s just that I don’t see it happening—regardless of the aid—at this time.
phenotypic differences in IQ between groups are not caused by direct genetic effects on IQ (‘direct’ because of indirect effects like genetic effects on skin color which elicits discrimination, etc).
This in itself does not use the mal-formed concept of “race”. I have no problem with assessing genetic influences on intelligence.
Famously anti-racist psychologists like James Flynn and Richard Nisbett disagree, and make claims about race and intelligence fairly frequently … Are they misusing words?
I’m not aware of a simple, accessible guide to the history of science regarding race. The AAA Statement on “Race” seems to disagree with me, claiming that the concept of “race” was based on bad philosophy and political motivations instead of bad science.
The AAA is at odds with biologists, esp. geneticists, and that statement is the result of heavy politicization. The philosophers and anthropologists (among others) have used a silly strategy to attack research on group differences, by assigning bogus meaning to the word race and pretending that there is no such thing. Neven Sesardic is a philosopher with some good (in the journal Philosophy of Science, etc) articles on the subject, and reveals the blatant dishonesty of some of the philosophical misrepresentations on the subject:
I disagree with him on the proper stance to take on the word “race”, but I doubt our disagreement goes any deeper than that. At the end of the day, my feeling on the matter probably does have more to do with politics than linguistics.
Book pointers welcome.
I’m not claiming great knowledge of either region, but I did read Jared Diamond’s Guns Germs and Steel, for instance, which seems to broadly answer your question about an African Singapore. If you have an alternate theory, I’m interested in seeing specifics.
We seem to have strayed a fair bit from your general assertion about charity being always negative outside of a narrow context.
I didn’t read Guns, Germs and Steel, but I read the synopsis on Wikipedia. My impression is that Diamond discusses the reasons why civilization developed in Europe (rather than elsewhere) in the past. The synopsis on Wikipedia does not, however, discuss anything relevant to why Africa has been unable to pick up civilization after it has already been developed. Are you aware of a synopsis of Diamond’s argument that addresses specifically that?
I gave the example of Singapore specifically because it is a country that grew from virtually nothing to prosperity in a matter of decades. Japan and Taiwan could also be used as examples, and China is not faring too bad either. There are still a large number of countries in Asia that are dysfunctional, but many countries, some of them very large, have picked up the lessons of what works, and have applied them, or are now applying them, to create a functional civilization.
This, however, is not happening in Africa, nor in Caribbean (where independent), nor in the Philippines, nor in the Bronx—nor anywhere with a majority of largely African descent.
In all these places, the reverse process took place. The locals took control away from colonizing foreigners, and then instead of a proliferation of prosperity, it all broke down and fell apart. Why is that?
The short answer is: their average IQ is 70.
The long answer is:
http://www.amazon.com/dp/159368021X
If you want to be shocked some more, follow an international news source such as BBC for a few years, and pay attention to news from Africa and the Caribbean. The pieces will fall in place in time.
You are definitely shifting the goal posts. Are you now saying that charity shouldn’t be directed to countries inhabited by races which by virtue of low IQ will be unable to make good use of it?
Comparing the above post to your original comment, one has to wonder why you didn’t start there.
It still seem clear that health, nutrition and education can have major effects on IQ regardless of the extent to which IQ differences might be due to genetic factors associated with ethnicity. (Imagine raising your kids in exactly the same conditions as slum dwellers in Haiti or Africa.)
I don’t believe that I’m shifting the goal posts; I stand behind both my original comment and the one above. They are different aspects of a greater concept.
That’s part of what I’m saying. It should also not be directed towards the homeless and other failures.
I am in favor of a social net for those who are legitimately out of luck and soon regain gainful employment.
I’ve been looking for about a decade now, but have not encountered evidence that would discredit Lynn. I have however seen a lot of evidence which corroborates his findings.
If you have evidence that discredits his work, I would appreciate it.
Some of that “data” is hard to take seriously when you come across quotes such as the following:
There’s a similar issue with the next lowest IQ on the list, and when you learn that the greater portion of the “country IQ” figures were obtained by averaging IQ data from nearby countries, you see how this kind of data quality issue could have contaminated the entire data set. But say I am inclined to take the data seriously and dismiss a few mistakes. This is from Wikipedia’s page on “IQ and the Wealth of Nations” by Lynn and Vanhanen:
IOW, the authors whose work justifies your conclusions arrive at more or less opposite conclusions from yours. You’re seeing a correlation, and assuming a causation in one direction, without (so far as I can see) a proper argument for that direction. Since this is one of the classic mistakes people are warned against in the sciences, I’ll maintain my skeptical attitude until you adress my actual arguments.
When you do, please take into account how cognitive abilities actually develop (i.e. if you’re fed, healthy and go to school you’ll end up smarter than if you’re starving, sick and nobody ever talks to you, and the former is more likely in a rich country).
I disagree, my current best estimate is the low 80s. The main reasons for this is various factors like parasites lowering IQ and lingering iodine and micro nutrient deficiencies have been empirically demonstrated to have measurable impacts on cognition and these factors are a bigger problem in Africa than elsewhere. Another reason is the analysis of other authors who tried to disprove his claims by using other tricks to try to infer g and the equivalent IQ (but could only rig the IQs up to the high 80s).
Why is this answer down voted?
Even the maximalist (and implausible in light of other data) Rushton-Lynn hypothesis is perfectly consistent with aid (external provision of disease treatment, etc) having massive benefits in reducing disease and increasing wellbeing until biotech or more radical things can bypass any genetic disadvantage.
And there’s no need to be smug.
I’ve been looking for about a decade now, but have not encountered evidence that would discredit Lynn. I have however seen a lot of evidence which corroborates his findings.
If you have evidence that discredits his work, I would appreciate it.
Why stop at Africa then? Shouldn’t we invest billions in animal shelters, so that dogs and cats can live long lives until we find a way to bypass their genetic disadvantage? Wouldn’t those be just as “massive benefits”?
Perhaps it came across as smugness, but I do find that every piece of news I see, either from South Africa, or from Haiti, or from Nigeria, or from Zimbabwe, or from Turks and Caicos, just adds to the pile of evidence.
Also, I myself live in a place like that. Which is why I suggest (in all seriousness!) that people should consider visiting a country like South Africa for a while.
There’s no better cure for academic distance than direct contact with the hard facts on the ground.
African-American IQ in the 80s, with only 20% European admixture, shows that African IQs are depressed by environment. The Dickens-Flynn model explains how to reconcile the Flynn effect and heritability increasing with age: gene-environment interactions, suggesting that any genetic difference would be amplified by feedback environmental effects. Even Jensen gives a chunk of the gaps to environment.
Animals have short lives so it wouldn’t work well, and I care less about them than people with long term plans hopes and fears.
I wouldn’t say so. I think it shows that genes for higher IQ are inherited dominantly.
This has also been proposed as an explanation for the Flynn effect—whole countries getting “smarter” over time—being due to the gene pool mixing more in cities, and thus with dominant pro-IQ genes gaining ground.
The same mechanism has been proposed for the increasing height.
See, that’s fine with me. You want to indulge in X because you like it, not because of rationalization Y or Z. Just like I want to indulge in chocolate. That’s fine with me.
I just don’t like the claim that it is morally superior. Or that it’s something everyone should do. Or that it’s how resources “should” be spent. If it is an indulgence, though, then indulgences are fine with me.
Btw, I’m just going to interject and say that this conversation has been done at Hacker News many times and it never really goes anywhere. I’m going to wait five years until more genome wide association studies are done before I try to enter this argument again. It seems obvious to me that there are some genetic differences in intelligence, but it’s a touchy enough subject that I don’t feel it’s worth entering an argument based on individual interpretations of incomplete evidence.
I thought racial disparity in IQ was proven to be minimal or nonexistent?
Cases so thoroughly closed tend not to have Wikipedia pages that look like this.
Regardless, I advise not talking about the idea now. If it’s true large genomics studies will conclusively indicate that in the next few years without harming anyone’s reputations today. If it’s false, one will have avoided reputational costs as well as stoking racism.
That depends on what you mean by proven nonexistent. There are differences between the populations of black and white Americans in terms of what results you get if you measure their intelligence. There are also explanations for those differences that don’t involve any inherent differences in intelligence.
Also worthy of note: whatever IQ measures, second and third-generation immigrants to First World nations from Third World ones have more and more of it.
Yet at least in the case of those of African ancestry don’t seem to ever catch up. Those of East Asian ancestry don’t seem to ever drop to European levels either. It makes perfect sense that lower exposure to parasites and better nutrition will boost IQs for quite some time. Since stupid people generally earn less, this means their children get to enjoy fewer of the benefits of a good envrionment.
Remember even Lynn, Jensen, ect., the scientists favouring the hereditarian hypothesis consider a 50-50 split between genetic and environmental factors to best match their data. Their opponents claim it is nearly all envrionment.
I’m pretty much certain Askenazi Jews are smarter than gentile Europeans because of genetics. I’m also very certain that East Asians are smarter than Europeans because of genetics. The IQs of these groups have been measured in environments that appear to be as optimal as we can make them.
I’m not so sure where South Asian and Middle Eastern IQs would lie under 1st world conditions but if I had to make a guess I’d say the difference in intelligence is probably comparable to the difference between Europeans and Asians, putting their average somewhere in the mid 90s.
I’m also unsure how much of this low IQ is just the result of inbreeding, which is something “easily” fixed. It seems very plausible that the European vs. Middle Eastern gap can entirely be explained by different levels of inbreeding.
African IQs until quite recently seemed very firmly and robustly one standard deviation (15 points) below the European average, but there’s recently been some strange educational achievement data from the UK, which suggests the difference may be as low as half a standard deviation. Low 90s quite honestly seems a stretch considering all the other data though, so my best estimate is in the 80s. Which also happens to be about right considering educational attainment of second generation immigrants elsewhere in Europe and African Americans.
boo racism
(hooray beer)
Do you have any reason to believe Lynn is a racist, or is that just a knee-jerk reaction? Lynn is too contrarian and I am too unqualified to agree or disagree with him, but I believe his work is done in good faith. At the very least, it’s unreasonable to label any research into race and intelligence ‘racist’ just because you don’t like the conclusions.
Claims about race and intelligence are racist. They suppose that race is a relevant factor to consider. I submit that the idea of ‘race’ is based solely on bad science and doesn’t have any real meaning such that it can be related to anything else.
I will also give a dismissive “boo phrenology” to anyone posting a link to a book that talks about the relationship between intelligence and lumps on one’s skull. It deserves no further comment.
It is impossible to draw a clear line between races, but it is also impossible to draw a clear line between colors of the visual spectrum, and yet “red” and “blue” exist. For a non-IQ related example, people of Ashkenazim heritage are known to be at risk for certain genetic issues, while people of African heritage are known to be exposed to heart-related risks.
The concept of race (or any other word that symbolizes this concept) is statistically significant and useful—more so in countries that are much more homogeneous than the USA.
Nevertheless, the word “race” remains a useful shorthand for “populations differentiated genetically by geographic location” or what have you. If you don’t think there are genetic differences between, say, Northern Europeans and Sub-Saharan Africans, you are literally blind. They obviously belong to groups that evolved in different directions. That does not have to include intelligence, but it’s not reasonable to refuse to consider a hypothesis just because you find it repugnant.
That isn’t what it means. It’s a useful shorthand for nothing, or at least nothing of worth. If you’re referring to a particular clade, for instance, don’t use the word “race” to differentiate that clade. That’s just using the word wrong.
In the 19th century, such phrases as “the English race” or “the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life” were popular.
You know the history here right? These bogus definitions were crafted by humanities scholars to have empty extensions so that the scholars could claim that the biologists and ordinary folk were using the words (with their ordinary meanings) illegitimately. It’s like if I suddenly redefined ‘atheism’ to mean ‘the worship of 4-sided triangles’ and started browbeating atheists for their confusion.
I don’t take your characterization of the history as fact. I don’t have the resources to dispute it.
The articles and referrences thereof that I linked to cover include most sides of this debate.
Famously anti-racist psychologists like James Flynn and Richard Nisbett disagree, and make claims about race and intelligence fairly frequently, namely that phenotypic differences in IQ between groups are not caused by direct genetic effects on IQ (‘direct’ because of indirect effects like genetic effects on skin color which elicits discrimination, etc). Are they misusing words?
I find Flynn and Nisbett’s position unconvincing. Asians are obviously different and were heavily discriminated against, yet have integrated in America regardless, and now have comparable or better outcomes. There must be a more substantial reason why Africans haven’t done the same, and the most plausible reason so far for me is genetics.
Pretty much the one major argument against genetics is that people just don’t want this to be the case, because it’s one of the least hopeful explanations. But this is bias. Once you eliminate it, it becomes strikingly evident what the most likely explanation is.
Flynn and Nisbett think that Asians have better cultures in this respect (cultures are passed down from parent to child, and note that the transracial adoption studies, the most powerful evidence have had mixed results) and Africans worse. Note that Asian-American kids lag in IQ before they enter school (when their parents talk less to them than white Americans) but then surge ahead after entering school, as their parents put intense pressure on them to learn and succeed. Also Asian-Americans are much more successful educationally and professionally than their IQs would predict.
Good points. But then why don’t African Americans perform much better when adopted and raised by non-African parents? If it’s about parent pressure, then an African American kid adopted by Asian parents should perform at about Asian level. Why do they not?
They do in some of the handful of transracial adoption studies, and don’t in others. Rushton and Jensen et al hype the Minnesota study, because it’s the one that supports their case, and note data quality problems with the other studies. Nisbett and Flynn do the reverse. But very little work is done in this area (yes, because of PC issues with funding bodies), so the data is still too thin to be very confident either way.
Agreed. More data would be nice.
I am open to a different explanation, it’s just that the genetic one seems most compatible with what I do know at this time.
Seeing a prosperous and competent country arising out of Africa would surely be nice. I would prefer living in a universe like that. It’s just that I don’t see it happening—regardless of the aid—at this time.
This in itself does not use the mal-formed concept of “race”. I have no problem with assessing genetic influences on intelligence.
No, they’re privileging the hypothesis
Source?
I’m not aware of a simple, accessible guide to the history of science regarding race. The AAA Statement on “Race” seems to disagree with me, claiming that the concept of “race” was based on bad philosophy and political motivations instead of bad science.
The AAA is at odds with biologists, esp. geneticists, and that statement is the result of heavy politicization. The philosophers and anthropologists (among others) have used a silly strategy to attack research on group differences, by assigning bogus meaning to the word race and pretending that there is no such thing. Neven Sesardic is a philosopher with some good (in the journal Philosophy of Science, etc) articles on the subject, and reveals the blatant dishonesty of some of the philosophical misrepresentations on the subject:
http://www.ln.edu.hk/philoso/staff/sesardic/getfile.php?file=Race.pdf http://www.ln.edu.hk/philoso/staff/sesardic/getfile.php?file=POS-2000.pdf
I disagree with him on the proper stance to take on the word “race”, but I doubt our disagreement goes any deeper than that. At the end of the day, my feeling on the matter probably does have more to do with politics than linguistics.