How to prepare for the coming science of genetic racial variations, and a summary of the full case for the genetics of racial differences in intellige

[Axulus]

When everyone was in school, everyone know who the "smart kids" were. Why, based on these anecdotal and unsystematic observations that we were confident enough to make an assessment of someone, do people believe that after years of academic study by an entire profession, no better way to refine our categorization of such people has been achieved beyond our naive assessments from school?

 

[Axulus]

There are three modules in the brain that, when working together, emerge as intelligence. The IQ test doesn't capture them all with a single number, but there is no reason to reject the idea that a better test couldn't be performed. Also, these brain functions can't be improved upon with practice (little to no test familiarity bias). The three skills are working memory, reasoning skills, and verbal components. So concludes a recent paper on the subject:

Here, we provide a perspective on human intelligence that takes into account how general abilities or “factors” reflect the functional organization of the brain. By comparing factor models of individual differences in performance with factor models of brain functional organization, we demonstrate that different components of intelligence have their analogs in distinct brain networks. Using simulations based on neuroimaging data, we show that the higher-order factor “g” is accounted for by cognitive tasks corecruiting multiple networks. Finally, we confirm the independence of these components of intelligence by dissociating them using questionnaire variables. We propose that intelligence is an emergent property of anatomically distinct cognitive systems, each of which has its own capacity.

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0896627312005843

 

[Canard DuJour]

I'm not sure what species you are describing. Human females don't select only the most powerful males.

Throughout human history, the most dominant males tended to have many wives. Genghis Khan is just one example, who had so many children that 1 out of 200 humans today are believed to be direct decedents of him. There are also other examples of such:

Since 2003 there have been other cases of “super-Y” lineages. For example the Manchu lineage and the Uí Néill lineage. The existence of these Y chromosomal lineages, which have burst upon the genetic landscape like explosive stars sweeping aside all other variation before them, indicates a periodic it “winner-take-all” dynamic in human genetics more reminiscent of hyper-polygynous mammals such as elephant seals.

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/g...ect-descendants-of-genghis-khan/#.VSbnUvnF9j8

Which is what you'd expect where females can only reproduce about once a year within a limited window and males can reproduce practically without limit. What's surprising is how sexually democratic humans are. Only the alpha male gets to breed among other primates with less steep m/f reproductive differential. What's more, we've been getting more sexually democratic along with more intelligent. Not what you'd expect if runaway sexual selection accounted for our runaway intelligence.

As with most things, Apostate Abe is wrong about current theory. A better fit with fact is the idea that we needed big brains and language because we had to find smart ways to co-operate, divide labour and gang up on stronger, faster animals. A lone pleistocene hominid was not equipped to garner enough calories, proteins and vitamnins. If only one of the males walking out with pointy sticks got to breed, they'd as likely kill each other as a protein-rich animal. Kalahari Bushmen (consdered closest to our hunter gather ancestors) asked what happens when someone kills an animal on his own and doesn't share, laugh and say it couldn't happen. Lions could do that, they say, not men.

By "powerful" Abe seems to mean something like having access to resorces. Women certainly find that attractive and yer Khans and Manchus certainly had that. But generally because they (or their recent ancestors) were part of gangs of conspicuously violent males. "Powerful" in the other sense. Guys who secure access to resources that way generally aren't conspicuously bright. It's why they do it. They may be more of an atavism than the driver of human intelligence.

 

[Togo]

So its not just IQ you want to modify but behavior. You want to genetically modify people into goodness.

I think it's more that they want to select for intellectual conformity.

An IQ test is a confirmation test. The tester has the 'right' answer, and the answerer is tested to see how well their answers conform to that right answer. The better your answer matches the 'right' answer, the higher your score. A perfect scorer is the one who's thinking exactly matches that of a psychologist specialising in IQ testing.

Which is fine and dandy as long as you stick to questions that have an unambiguously right answer. Some of us might feel that the most important and interesting questions don't actually have a right answer, but that view can be safely excised from the measuring of the worth of human thought. Instead, we can measure all mental ability, and thus 'correct' thinking and the inherent worth of people, via adherence to questions and answers that are safely 'right' and unambiguous. By extraordinary coincidence this approach emphasises the kinds of thinking favoured by people who hang out on atheist discussion forums - digital fact-based thinking that involves a maximum of complex linear thought to provide unambiguous answers which can be used to bash others, and a minimum of social awareness, ambiguity arising from the questioning of basic premises, or pesky parallel logic.

If you want to sort humanity in order of worth, put yourself near the top, and fantasise about how those you rate as lower down will one day have their inferiority objectively established beyond all doubt, then religion is probably your best bet. But a dedication to a Unitarian Theory of Intelligence is a pretty good second place, and serves most of the same functions.

Unfortunately, it's nonsense. People who actually study, construct and use IQ tests are very clear on the benefits and limitations of the approach. IQ tests are another form of psychometric testing, the same kind that divides people into personality types or tries to test cultural biases. They are a very highly developed tool, honed to a fine edge of accuracy and repeatability. But they measure what they measure - the ability to answer maths and verbal tests using a paper and pencil or computer equivalent. Any idea that this is somehow a measure of a fundamental, or basic form of human thought, that can be used to rate all mental activity, has no empirical foundation. It's an interesting idea, and gets a lot of time with scientists in the area precisely because it would greatly expand the utility both of their field, and their existing data, but it's just an idea. We know that many forms of human activity do not correlate strongly with IQ, we know that manipulating IQ results is trivial, we know that people who research IQ testing tend to score higher in such tests than those who don't, and we know that such tests are highly slanted towards those used to standardised tests.

Whatever your views on the practical utility of psychometrics, including IQ testing, IQ testing no more demonstrates that there physically exists a g, or some form of unitary intelligence, than the success of Mazlow's personality inventory demonstrates that there are only 9 personalities in the world. It's an abstract measure combining many influences. It probably doesn't correspond to a thing that actually exists, and any physical neural structure that it does correspond to isn't going to represent a general capacity for all of human thought, because the brain simply doesn't work like that.

 

[Togo]

When everyone was in school, everyone know who the "smart kids" were. Why, based on these anecdotal and unsystematic observations that we were confident enough to make an assessment of someone, do people believe that after years of academic study by an entire profession, no better way to refine our categorization of such people has been achieved beyond our naive assessments from school?

Well, as one of the smart kids, I noticed that the group was made up of:
- Dan, who studied very little but could fake erudition in essays quite well
- Chris, who took good notes
- Alex who studied far more than anyone else
- Louis, who had after school private tutors, due to grade-conscious parents
- Me, who was good at spotting the bits teachers were interested in, and slipping it into my work
- the other Chris, who was actually a year older but had been held back to due to childhood illness
- Max, who got 100% in modern languages because he was from Belgium and had grown up speaking English, French and German, and had strictly average grades in everything else
- Jason, who was long-sighted, and could copy other people's work from across the room, and was skilled at reading upside down
- Matthew, who was going to get shipped back to his home country by his relatives unless he maintained a certain average grade
- Neil, who's parents were both teachers

It didn't include
- Abe, who was taking care of his parents after their severe car accident left them with mental problems
- James, who made $23,000 dollars trading his own portfolio account before he hit 14, but often didn't complete his homework
- Adrian, who had average grades but kept on winning national music prizes
- James, who could fix rubix-magics, the schools computers, the school's alarm systems, bikes, some cars, and a betting pool, but couldn't spell.

That left me with the idea that 'being smart' was very little to do with a single unitary capacity in the brain, and much more to do with whether you could successfully apply what disparate talents you do have to the task at hand.

 

[AthenaAwakened]

When everyone was in school, everyone know who the "smart kids" were. Why, based on these anecdotal and unsystematic observations that we were confident enough to make an assessment of someone, do people believe that after years of academic study by an entire profession, no better way to refine our categorization of such people has been achieved beyond our naive assessments from school?

Well, as one of the smart kids, I noticed that the group was made up of:
- Dan, who studied very little but could fake erudition in essays quite well
- Chris, who took good notes
- Alex who studied far more than anyone else
- Louis, who had after school private tutors, due to grade-conscious parents
- Me, who was good at spotting the bits teachers were interested in, and slipping it into my work
- the other Chris, who was actually a year older but had been held back to due to childhood illness
- Max, who got 100% in modern languages because he was from Belgium and had grown up speaking English, French and German, and had strictly average grades in everything else
- Jason, who was long-sighted, and could copy other people's work from across the room, and was skilled at reading upside down
- Matthew, who was going to get shipped back to his home country by his relatives unless he maintained a certain average grade
- Neil, who's parents were both teachers

It didn't include
- Abe, who was taking care of his parents after their severe car accident left them with mental problems
- James, who made $23,000 dollars trading his own portfolio account before he hit 14, but often didn't complete his homework
- Adrian, who had average grades but kept on winning national music prizes
- James, who could fix rubix-magics, the schools computers, the school's alarm systems, bikes, some cars, and a betting pool, but couldn't spell.

That left me with the idea that 'being smart' was very little to do with a single unitary capacity in the brain, and much more to do with whether you could successfully apply what disparate talents you do have to the task at hand.

Good post

There is nothing that IQ tests actually test that cannot be explained by environmental factors.

 

[Canard DuJour]

When everyone was in school, everyone know who the "smart kids" were. Why, based on these anecdotal and unsystematic observations that we were confident enough to make an assessment of someone, do people believe that after years of academic study by an entire profession, no better way to refine our categorization of such people has been achieved beyond our naive assessments from school?

Well partly because the "smart kids" weren't always the academics. Smart kids were often smart enough not to be too smart because it was uncool and might even reward you with a beating. I doubt you can really control for that sort of thing.

I remember one very uncool kid who was a maths whizz but not considered smart. He used to tick "E : Don't know." in multiple choice questions if he didn't know. I know because I used to sit close enough to copy his work. Could we hell explain to him why that was dumb. "But I don't know," he kept repeating as if that made it the right answer.

And.. I swear I'm not making this up.. he had a twin brother who was thick as shit, including at maths.

(unscientific, unrepresentative anecdote - yes.)

 

[Canard DuJour]

When everyone was in school, everyone know who the "smart kids" were. Why, based on these anecdotal and unsystematic observations that we were confident enough to make an assessment of someone, do people believe that after years of academic study by an entire profession, no better way to refine our categorization of such people has been achieved beyond our naive assessments from school?

Well, as one of the smart kids, I noticed that the group was made up of:
- Dan, who studied very little but could fake erudition in essays quite well
- Chris, who took good notes
- Alex who studied far more than anyone else
- Louis, who had after school private tutors, due to grade-conscious parents
- Me, who was good at spotting the bits teachers were interested in, and slipping it into my work
- the other Chris, who was actually a year older but had been held back to due to childhood illness
- Max, who got 100% in modern languages because he was from Belgium and had grown up speaking English, French and German, and had strictly average grades in everything else
- Jason, who was long-sighted, and could copy other people's work from across the room, and was skilled at reading upside down
- Matthew, who was going to get shipped back to his home country by his relatives unless he maintained a certain average grade
- Neil, who's parents were both teachers

It didn't include
- Abe, who was taking care of his parents after their severe car accident left them with mental problems
- James, who made $23,000 dollars trading his own portfolio account before he hit 14, but often didn't complete his homework
- Adrian, who had average grades but kept on winning national music prizes
- James, who could fix rubix-magics, the schools computers, the school's alarm systems, bikes, some cars, and a betting pool, but couldn't spell.

That left me with the idea that 'being smart' was very little to do with a single unitary capacity in the brain, and much more to do with whether you could successfully apply what disparate talents you do have to the task at hand.

A class of 14 with no girls to distract you probably didn't hurt either.

 

[Togo]

Well, as one of the smart kids, I noticed that the group was made up of:
- Dan, who studied very little but could fake erudition in essays quite well
- Chris, who took good notes
- Alex who studied far more than anyone else
- Louis, who had after school private tutors, due to grade-conscious parents
- Me, who was good at spotting the bits teachers were interested in, and slipping it into my work
- the other Chris, who was actually a year older but had been held back to due to childhood illness
- Max, who got 100% in modern languages because he was from Belgium and had grown up speaking English, French and German, and had strictly average grades in everything else
- Jason, who was long-sighted, and could copy other people's work from across the room, and was skilled at reading upside down
- Matthew, who was going to get shipped back to his home country by his relatives unless he maintained a certain average grade
- Neil, who's parents were both teachers

It didn't include
- Abe, who was taking care of his parents after their severe car accident left them with mental problems
- James, who made $23,000 dollars trading his own portfolio account before he hit 14, but often didn't complete his homework
- Adrian, who had average grades but kept on winning national music prizes
- James, who could fix rubix-magics, the schools computers, the school's alarm systems, bikes, some cars, and a betting pool, but couldn't spell.

That left me with the idea that 'being smart' was very little to do with a single unitary capacity in the brain, and much more to do with whether you could successfully apply what disparate talents you do have to the task at hand.

A class of 14 with no girls to distract you probably didn't hurt either.

Of course it didn't. Private single-sex education got me into the university of my choice. We had tiny class sizes, well-paid teachers, and a variety of extra-curriculars during school hours. How the heck people from a comprehensive school are supposed to compete with that, I don't know.

I'm not convinced by the no girls thing though.

 

[Keith&Co.]

Rushton's theory rather founders on the fact that tropical climates are actually more predictable than temperate climates.

Well, maybe Rushton's got someone to plow his driveway, so the ranges of snowfall over the last 30 years have never made him late for work. But that one summer he took a Caribbean cruise? A hurricane ruined his plans. Therefore, the temperate climes are predictable...

 

[ApostateAbe]

There is something to be said for that point. Rushton's plausible theory is that tropical races adapted to their chaotic unpredictable climates through greater reproductive rates. Greater intelligence may actually be an impediment to that strategy, as children are costly and a threat to the survival of adults. Maybe a case can be made that the ancestors of Polynesians and Australian Aborigines living in northern climates had greater intelligence than their modern descendents, in which case we would know that low intelligence is a positive adaptation, not a lack of adaptation. If civilization completely breaks down through a nuclear winter or whatever, it may be greater reproductivity, not greater intelligence, that ensures the survival of the human species.

Rushton's theory rather founders on the fact that tropical climates are actually more predictable than temperate climates.

That suggests strongly that it is not so much a 'plausible theory' as it is a 'bullshit rationalisation'.

Tropical climates have tropical storms, droughts, heavy rainfalls with floods, tsunamis, epidemics, most occurring somewhat randomly throughout the year, on top of a very diverse ecosystem that made plentiful eating but littered with dangerous species. The migrants out of Africa evolved in the icy environments of the last ice age, not merely a temperate climate: http://www.iceagenow.com/NOAA_Map_MostOfNrthnHemisphIceCovered.jpg, and they were stable climates, with much fewer natural disasters, and with scarcer and narrower ecosystems. They are very different environments, and it would be extremely odd if the only adaptations were in outward appearance.

 

[Nice Squirrel]

Tsunamis? Really?

http://www.usc.edu/dept/tsunamis/alaska/1964/webpages/

 

[Sarpedon]

Tsunamis really aren't a weather phenomenon.

 

[Jimmy Higgins]

Tsunamis really aren't a weather phenomenon.

Neither is intelligence linked to race, but we still seem to be having a dialogue on it.

 

[Nice Squirrel]

And thinking of all the things that can kill you here in North America and they didn't have to deal with a competing hominid species like the Euros did.

 

[ApostateAbe]

Tsunamis really aren't a weather phenomenon.

Neither is intelligence linked to race, but we still seem to be having a dialogue on it.

Among academics, the relevant question is: "What explains the average differences in intelligence measurements? Is it environmental variations, or is it genetic variations? Which is more important and why?" Among members of the public, the question is: "What? Really? Some races are dumber than another? Bullshit. Go away."

- - - Updated - - -

Tsunamis? Really?

http://www.usc.edu/dept/tsunamis/alaska/1964/webpages/

Good point!

 

[Jimmy Higgins]

Neither is intelligence linked to race, but we still seem to be having a dialogue on it.

Among academics, the relevant question is: "What explains the average differences in intelligence measurements? Is it environmental variations, or is it genetic variations? Which is more important and why?"

People with Downs have a genetic differentiation. The lowered intelligence is well demonstrated and the physical causes are well demonstrated.

The differences among races is poorly demonstrated (if at all) both in actual practice and genetically. It makes me ponder, if intelligence varies by race so much, then why is it so hard to demonstrate it.

 

[Sarpedon]

Have faith in the coming tsunami of evidence! Prepare for it!

Any minute now!

 

[Jimmy Higgins]

Have faith in the coming tsunami of evidence! Prepare for it!

Any minute now!

The Institute of Creation Research, I think they were the ones. Any minute now, Young Earth will be proven!

 

[ApostateAbe]

Among academics, the relevant question is: "What explains the average differences in intelligence measurements? Is it environmental variations, or is it genetic variations? Which is more important and why?"

People with Downs have a genetic differentiation. The lowered intelligence is well demonstrated and the physical causes are well demonstrated.

The differences among races is poorly demonstrated (if at all) both in actual practice and genetically. It makes me ponder, if intelligence varies by race so much, then why is it so hard to demonstrate it.

The race gap in intelligence scores between blacks and whites in the United States is perhaps the most heavily-studied phenomenon in the field of psychology. The reason you don't know much about it is because the topic is taboo among the public. If you heavily follow popular science news like I do and you have a science-based undergraduate and post-graduate education like I do, they will almost never mention it, but you will still get the impression that you have a well-informed scientific base of knowledge. You can know more science than 98% of everyone else and not know this.

I have two stacks of books in my room. The left stack of books argues that the race gaps in intelligence scores are primarily environmental. The right stack of books argues that the race gaps in intelligence score are primarily genetic. Each rests on the same unified data set: in every test of mental abilities ever examined, there are race gaps.

Herrnstein and Murray of Harvard wrote The Bell Curve, which stirred up a lot of public controversy in the mid-nineties, because it made the case that the race gap in intelligence scores was the main cause of the racial wealth gap. They got a lot of blowback from the public, who were largely unaware that the intelligence score race gap even existed, and the primary objections reflected the barest minimum comprehension of the science (i.e. IQ scores say nothing except how well you score on an IQ test). Since then, the science has remained largely taboo. Even those who defend the environmentalist explanation have to tread lightly for fear of public hatred. Many academics have challenged Herrnstein's and Murray's proposed causes, but none of them challenged the correlations and averages that they based their case on. It is now the same data you can download and analyze yourself.