Re:A Profile of Claire Lehmann of Quillette
by tomp on Monday November 19, 2018 @11:09AM
(#18487357)
Article [3] is pretty terrible, he doesn't make very many coherent arguments. IQ is subject to the same mixing, complex influences, mutations and trade-offs as other heritable traits (such as physical strength and lifespan, which also have no immediately obvious downsides), and writing a long article doesn't invalidate that. For example, this line is utter stupidity:
> This constant churn of genetic variation works against any long-term rise or fall in intelligence.
How did humans evolve then?!
More importantly, as pointed out in an article by Kevin Mitchell [3], a professor of genetics and neuroscience in Dublin, we do not really know of any plausible mechanism by which such differences could have evolved. In the end, if you want to do science, you have to propose a theory by which an effect can be explained and then test that theory. What Murray & Co. have never done is to provide a testable theory that explains how cause and effect are supposed to be related.
[1] http://www.poverty.org.uk/low-income-and-ethnicity/
[2] http://www.unz.com/jthompson/intelligence-of-5-year-olds-in-... (not keen on citing James Thompson here, but I didn't find an open access source for the data)
[3] https://www.theguardian.com/science/blog/2018/may/02/why-gen...