I'll wait.
Race, intelligence and genetics can be very emotionally charged topics, and saying things like "please educate yourself" and "zero basis in scientific evidence" betrays that you are not being as rational as you are trying to let on.
It would be far more beneficial to equity to push back on the purported implications of this fact than to try to fight a losing battle against reality. The value we place on the skills that IQ tests measure is highly suspect and should be questioned, not the idea that IQ varies between populations.
It's not even that. Imagine there is an isolated population on a remote island that is legitimately very low on general intelligence, "nobody can ever learn to count past ten" kinda low, yet undeniably human.
What would be a reasonable policy toward such people?
Ashkenazi Jews have the highest average IQ of any ethnic group for which there are reliable data. They score 0.75 to 1.0 standard deviations above the general European average, corresponding to an IQ 112-115. This has been seen in many studies (Backman, 1972; Levinson, 1959; Romanoff, 1976), although a recent review concludes that the advantage is slightly less, only half a standard deviation Lynn (2004).
I find it uncomfortable, and I personally don't accept it as a fact (there is pretty significant evidence that points at many possible conclusions, as well as many many confounding factors), but I can't, as a reasonable person, reject the possibility.
I would never even voice that opinion in public, though. Even a position like this could make me a social pariah.
And if you are curious about the relationship between IQ and genetics this Wikipedia page has a ton of cited research: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heritability_of_IQ
Also I don't think I'm the one making extraordinary claims here...
I also have read the Wikipedia article and have no idea what you are talking about. Claiming there is "no evidence" to any of the sides of this very complex issue is utterly ridiculous.
From the article:
>Mackintosh, Nisbett et al. and Flynn have all concluded that the slight correlation between g-loading and the test score gap offers no clue to the cause of the gap.[86][87][88] Further reviews of both adoption studies and racial admixture studies have also found no evidence for a genetic component behind group-level IQ differences.[89][90][91][92]
If you truly believe your extraordinary claims, you must believe these countries performed large scale human genetic engineering during these periods.
Are you claiming that African-Americans are similarly malnourished? Would they become giants if, somehow, they could be properly fed?
https://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2019/06/heres-why-the...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lothian_birth-cohort_studies
IQ can be measured quite well at the age of 10-11, before the children have had much education. It also turns out to be quite stable... and doesn't really go up if somebody goes all the way to a bachelor's degree.
This means that your education excuse either isn't true at all (most likely) or that it has really, really important, huge, big, great confounders (highly unlikely).
Your height figure tells me that there really isn't much of a height difference between whites and blacks in the US. There is a clear (but small) height difference between age cohorts but it is utterly dwarfed by the differences between age cohorts in South Korea and Japan (and by the height differences between North Korea and South Korea).
This means that your nutrition excuse either isn't true at all (most likely) or that it has really, really important, huge, big, great confounders (highly unlikely).
Or maybe Watson was on to something, whether we like or not. You clearly don't, I don't either, and I am pretty sure Watson doesn't like it one bit either.
That's utter nonsense that children have not had much education at the age of 10-11. I've personally seen kids reading books independently at the age of two (because their parents taught them, not because their genes made them know how to read). Yes, black two year olds can do this too: https://abc7ny.com/2-year-old-mensa-american-kashe-quest-iq-.... By the time they're 11, they're doing college level mathematics. The intelligence gap is vast versus cousins who were not brought up the same way.
Even today, black children have higher childhood exposure to lead and higher incidence of iodine deficiency, both of which have large impacts on IQ.
Despite the strong evidence against it, white men (like you and Watson) are much more likely to believe in large genetic differences in intelligence by race, and that is either due to genetic mental deficiency among white men (highly unlikely) or racism in developmental environment (most likely).
In that case, the IQ measured later, say at 30, should be very different from the IQ measured at age 10-11. It isn't, though...
It should also go up (a lot) if the kid ends up with lots of education compared to a child with the same childhood score that doesn't end up with lots of education. It doesn't, though.
In other words, it is NOT utter nonsense.
I have flagged you.
Of course it does. Did you fail to verify your claim prior to making it because of genetic mental deficiency (highly unlikely) or due to environmental racism leading you to believe that it couldn't be possible (most likely).
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6088505/ shows that each additional year of mediocre classroom education is worth ~5 IQ points.
"we found consistent evidence for beneficial effects of education on cognitive abilities of approximately 1 to 5 IQ points for an additional year of education"
1-5 is not 5. Besides, it is contradicted by the Lothian Birth-Cohort Studies (and many others).
You should not misrepresent your sources. On the other hand, it is good you have started citing real research instead of Mother Jones. Ritchie is a real, serious researcher, whether he is right in this case or not.
You failed to understand the study. The 1 case is the marginal effect of a year of education on students who were about to drop out of school, which is a very special type of population. 5 is for an additional year of compulsory "mediocre classroom" education on the entire population of students. Is your failure to understand due to genetic inability (highly unlikely) or due to your strong priors influenced by racism in development environment forcing you to conjure up a favorable interpretation for your argument (much more likely)?
The Lothian Birth-Cohort studies were not designed to measure genetic differences in mental ability by race, and your article does not claim it was nor draw any conclusions in that regard. It merely shows a correlation of 0.66 between mental ability at age 11 vs. age 79, which leaves a lot of variability to be explained by environment after age 11. Multiple studies have shown that intentional changes in educational environment cause large differences, with Bloom's 1-on-1 educational coaching causing the largest differences of two entire standard deviations, the difference between median and genius.
Correlated, within populations. Race, intelligence, and genetics are emotionally-charged topics because the historical and socially-prevalent assumption of white superiority threatens to be upended by the prospect of there simply being no real notional space where all three exist as rational neighbors.
To be clear, I fiercely oppose racism in all forms, but the battle should be up against the idea that there's some inherent value in IQ scores, not against the idea that genes play a role in the scores.
How well do they listen to me? Are they willing to give me time, or do they treat their patients as an assembly line? Do they continue to read up on new research, or are they relying on their 30-year-old med school degree? Are they someone that I'd be comfortable talking to about very personal matters?
None of these questions have anything to do with IQ, and I frankly have a hard time thinking of an IQ-related question that would matter to me in selecting a doctor.
>None of these questions have anything to do with IQ
They do, big time. Knowing their IQ allows to make a very good guess on who reads more, who would listen and, in general, do their job better.
You are allowed to choose based on this information only.
(I am what many people would call an "alt righter" and I would choose the doctor with IQ 150). I'm curious how other demographics would answer (white liberals, etc.)
So... it's fundamentally physiological. We just don't know the details of how the physiology gives rise to conscious thought.
> that component is the deciding factor in race-level differences in measures of IQ
I never said that it's the deciding factor and most people don't. What irks me is when people discount it as being a factor at all. Everything in biology is a complex interaction of genetics and environment, and IQ is no different.
> IQ isn't a physiological characteristic. It's a measure of intelligence
See, this is exactly my point—your line of argument does more to support racist claims than it does to dethrone them. You're arguing a position that cannot be seriously defended while giving credence to a claim that is fundamentally flawed. The idea that there is some discrete quantity called "intelligence" that can be measured by a test and that causes some people to be more successful than others is a far more vulnerable position to attack than the idea that our consciousness is influenced by our physiology, and I'm not sure why you picked that windmill to tilt at.
IQ is a predictor of academic achievement, job performance, income, health, and inversely correlates with criminal behavior. But if only we could find some value in it!
1. How good someone is at taking a test ≠ intelligence.
https://medium.com/incerto/iq-is-largely-a-pseudoscientific-...
2. The IQ test may have been specifically designed to be difficult for certain populations, which were comparatively less educated. And those populations are still less educated today. So it's a circular argument.
https://www.nea.org/advocating-for-change/new-from-nea/racis...
The parent comment that original suggested this claim linked to an article tracing the academic influences of the I.Q. test and other similar standardized testing frameworks, and it doesn't seem "very conspiratorial" to me in the absence of any specific critiques.
> Furthermore, it's pretty hard to imagine how one would design visuospatial and pattern matching problems so that they are discriminatory.
Maybe my imagination is more active than yours, but it doesn't seem that hard to imagine for me. Broadly speaking, I'd imagine that the process of coming up with any sort of test like this would consist of the following steps:
1. Come up with potential questions for the test
2. Assess people with the test in a controlled environment
3. Revise the set of questions based on the results of step 2, then repeat steps 2 and 3 until you're satisfied
You wouldn't be guaranteed to find a set of questions that ended up statistically favorable to the favored group, but it certainly doesn't seem very hard to imagine it might work sometimes, and for it to have happened, it only would need to have worked once.
there is no “the I.Q. test” there are many different ones, designed differently, the article distorts this, and attacks the original Stanford-Binet test as if it was the universe of IQ testing, and even there the entire substance of its attack on that test, delivered in meandering back and forth where it drifts in and out of discussing the SAT and other tests, seems to be that a researcher who later was influential in developing other tests also wrote their dissertation about the same work by Alfred Binet that a completely different researcher leveraged in developing what became the Stanford-Binet IQ test was a eugenicist who thought that blacks and other races were inferior and that testing supported this. Which isn’t just ad hominem, its ad hominem directed at someone not even involved in the development of the test. There is literally nothing in the piece actually arguing for any ill-motive, much less actual scientific flaw, in IQ testing.
There are some real issues that the article hints at – particularly regarding school rankings – but they spent a lot of time trying to juxtapose negative things with various tests that they had no real argument about and just hoped to use guilt-by-(often strained)-association to impugn.
Otherwise, all it means is that Chinese immigrants may have a higher capacity for work/studies (unless you are also arguing that Chinese people have rapidly been evolving intelligence in the last 100 years. And if so, why?). Which may or may not be genetic, but is definitely not the same thing as intelligence.
I could not find that data, but I found this which is also interesting:
Richard Nisbett, a professor of psychology who has written an excellent book about intelligence, cites a study that followed a pool of Chinese-American children and a pool of white children into adulthood. The two groups started out with the same scores on I.Q. tests, but in the end 55 percent of the Asian-Americans entered high-status occupations, compared with one-third of the whites. To succeed as a manager, whites needed an I.Q. of 100, while Chinese-Americans needed an I.Q. of only 93.
So the Asian advantage, Nisbett argues, isn’t intellectual firepower as such, but how it is harnessed.
Plus, it's well known that one of the most reliable ways of improving IQ (and SAT scores) is to be born in a wealthier family.
At the end of the day, it still not particularly important if different races score higher or lower on measures of intelligence. It is the environment which selects the traits in a population. There is no adaptive advantage to investing in intelligence if your environment does not require it. It would be "dumb" to be "too smart" if that makes sense. The right question is why is the environment selecting for these traits, whether they are passed down genetically or culturally.
[1] https://www.nature.com/scitable/topicpage/environmental-infl... [2] https://developingchild.harvard.edu/science/deep-dives/gene-...
>A less-intelligent population has conspired to control the activities of an institution in which they are famously underrepresented (even when considering their status as a numerical minority).
>Investigations have been funded and actually taken place in the past, with the results being inconclusive, or unremarkable, or having falsified the hypothesis.
>Suggesting such investigations reflects a misunderstanding of the capabilities of genetic studies as they currently exist. They will not be undertaken because they're fundamentally incapable of answering the question.
The taboos about races / genetics are largely held and enforced by white people, not (just) by minorities.
It has thus become increasingly apparent that physical "reality", no less than social "reality", is at bottom a social and linguistic construct; that scientific "knowledge", far from being objective, reflects and encodes the dominant ideologies and power relations of the culture that produced it; that the truth claims of science are inherently theory-laden and self-referential; and consequently, that the discourse of the scientific community, for all its undeniable value, cannot assert a privileged epistemological status with respect to counter-hegemonic narratives emanating from dissident or marginalized communities.
It is ultimately an irony that the epistemological position--that Civilization is fundamentally about domination and cannot stand marginalized or dissident narratives--has only and could only flourish under civilizations in their least-connected-to-quotidian-life institutions. It requires being sheltered to recognize that ultimately everything is a social and linguistic construct. Everyone else doesn't have the luxury and are just trying to survive.
Even further, the idea that everything reduces to social and linguistic games isn't new. It is one of the oldest ideas in history found in both Buddhism (through depedent coarising) and in Graeco-Roman philosophy culminating in Christianity (the Logos). Both institutions developed monasticism for precisely the same reasons.
This world isn't real. You have to be out of this world to see the illusion behind it and to be free from it.
Everyone does not have to stop pretending it's real for you to stop pretending it's real.
A king is only a social construct. One can still order your head cut off.
oh well.
That's your own biased judgment. Others may perceive what happened as Watson speaking truth to power, and paying the price for it.
He didn't choose it, reality handed it to him.
>inconclusive applicability to the capability in question
That's just your opinion.
> 2000: During a guest lecture at the University of California Berkeley, Watson shared his belief that thin people are unhappier than larger people, and therefore harder-working. He also said: “Whenever you interview fat people, you feel bad, because you know you’re not going to hire them,” according to the San Francisco Chronicle.
> In that same lecture, the Chronicle reported, Watson commented on the (nonexistent) link between sun exposure (and darker skin color) and sexual prowess: “That’s why you have Latin Lovers. You’ve never heard of an English lover. Only an English patient.”
> 2007: In an interview with Esquire, Watson said, “some anti-Semitism is justified.” He continued: “Just like some anti-Irish feeling is justified. If you can’t be criticized, that’s very dangerous.”
> In the same interview, he asked, “Why isn’t everyone as intelligent as Ashkenazi Jews?” and suggested that rich people should be paid to have children because “[i]f there is any correlation between success and genes, IQ will fall if the successful people don’t have children.”
> 2012: Of women in science, he said at the EuroScience Open Forum in Dublin, “I think having all these women around makes it more fun for the men but they’re probably less effective.”
Yes, I'm copying quotes from a Vox piece: https://www.vox.com/2019/1/15/18182530/james-watson-racist
Is there any reason to believe that they would have been more generous in giving credit, had the work been from a man? And are there not dozens of other researchers who Watson and Crick drew inspiration and results from, who are not listed on the Nobel Prize?
The what-ifs of one specific notable instance doesn't really matter. This is merely being used for illustrative purposes.
It is also the case that it is not just women who are denied credit, but until relatively recently it was common practice to not even think to give equal credit to women.
> And are there not dozens of other researchers who Watson and Crick drew inspiration and results from, who are not listed on the Nobel Prize?
This direct? No. Franklin generated the key bit of information from which anyone generally adept in the discipline of the time could verify the double-helical nature of DNA.
Stated more cynically, it's being used to craft a narrative in support of an agenda.
No. Her student did.
I feel there's a push now to go find people of the right race or gender that were adjacent to scientific achievement and somewhat exaggerate their contributions or their importance. Like Ada Lovelace or Katherine Johnson. There's even a British government employee who decided to write 1000+ wikipedia pages for early career scientists of the same gender as her [0].
I don't know how this trend is going to look back in retrospect, because to me this could have the side effect of reinforcing impostor syndrome for people of the same demographics.
> how can the father of genetic science be wrong about the influence of genetics on society?
What does Gregor Mendel has to do with this?
[0] https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/2022/10/17/jess-wad...
There is another aspect of this significance, however, in the way that James Watson's impropriety - in his work, and in his telling of the story of his work - reflects on, and is reflected by, his later racist and sexist intellectual misadventures. The myth of a singular - well, dual - genius who moves humanity forward lends credence to his bigotry - how can the father of genetic science be wrong about the influence of genetics on society? - while the truth dashes that credibility (without necessarily undoing the significance of his actual contributions). And it is a controversy that gets re-litigated perennially not because people truly care that much about the discovery or discovers, but because our understanding of these events underpin beliefs, our understanding of the world, that are as sharply relevant today as a shard of glass.
To retreat to attempting an exhaustive reconstruction of events might be comfortable, but it is also a bit dangerous - it assumes a totality of understanding that may be found wanting - and, more importantly, it misses the core of why the controversy exists in the first place. Peer esteem may be foremost on an academic's mind, but we've long left the ivory tower on this one.