"Of course humans and chimps have a common ancestor! We have looked at the genetic code, and found that more than 95% is shared. Give up, it's over." The right will hate you for saying that.
"Of course there is inherited variation in intelligence, no matter how you define it! Otherwise evolution, in particular evolution of intelligence, could not possibly work. Give up, it's over." The left will hate you for saying that.
"Of course our moral intuitions come from game theory, not apriori reasoning!" And now everyone hates you, both the left and the right.
If you see a 15 point difference and immediately attribute it to genetics, you're making an unwarranted assumption.
> I guess everyone and every group finds certain truths uncomfortable. It's especially sad that the theory of evolution seems to make literally everyone uncomfortable.
In context, this is a claim that race and IQ is a consequence of the theory of evolution. If you don't see this, then you don't understand communication with humans, or are being disingenuous.
There are a myriad of factors that might influence that IQ score, and I haven't looked at the studies. Lack of wealth/opportunity I think is definitely a factor in the healthy development of the grey matter, as is access to good education.
Long/short, not sure. I'd be surprised if the colour of your skin objectively made a difference in IQ. Same with gender. Though, if the latter is true, I would probably use it with great exuberance on certain people I know e.g. my ex.
It's actually not possible to make a genetic argument, because genetically there are no non-trivial markers that robustly correlate with "black" or "white."
http://web.mit.edu/racescience/in_media/what_dna_says_about_...
Suggesting otherwise is simple ignorant bigotry.
For comparison, the Flynn effect demonstrates you can get 20-30 points difference in the same gene pool, with the difference being social circumstances. So any difference under 30 points doesn't necessitate invoking genetics.
"One was: their skin color looks fecal. The other was: their bone structure doesn’t look human. And they’re just off-reference enough to be much more creepy than if they looked less like people, like bad CGI or shambling undead in a B movie. When I paid close enough attention, these were the three basic data under the revulsion; my hindbrain thought it was surrounded by alien shit zombies."
Not true. Something can be factually true but uninteresting or of no consequence; pushing that 'truth' forward as something that other should acknowledge betrays an agenda beyond just 'the search for truth'. (Note that this is not a judgement on ESR per se, just a comment on your specific point)
Thus, if someone wants to claim that "black people have lower IQs because they are black", they need to dissolve the concept of race entirely and not only find much broader evidence than studies on African Americans who are, after all, something like half "white", but in fact just cut to the fucking chase and locate the relevant genes.
But of course, if you located the genes and alleles that make some ethnic groups smarter or stupider, you could invent a gene therapy that would make everyone as smart as the smartest ethnic groups, or at least understand what sort of trade-offs are involved in genetic treatments of that sort (ie: Africans often carry a gene that helps them resist malaria but can cause sickle-cell anemia if you get two copies of the recessive allele). If you located the genes and alleles, then within 10 +/- 5 years (depending on how quickly your treatment gets funded) we could eliminate all genetically-caused racial gaps in intelligence.
This, of course, would greatly displease the racists, who don't actually want people to get smarter; they want to justify a peculiar social hierarchy. This is why you always see certain people waving their hands at "racial IQ gaps" and "heritability" but not funding research into intelligence-enhancing gene therapies.
Let's say that some kind of link between race and intelligence were proved and universally acknowledged, what possible positive outcome could entail?
Intelligence enhancement would become a cheap, simple, universally-available gene therapy, since we would have found that it only relies on a few alleles of a tiny number of genes, so simple that it can differ significantly between ethnic groups that can still interbreed, rather than being a complex, many-gene feature that evolved chiefly among the species as a whole.
> And the part that, if you are a decent human being and not a racist bigot, you have been dreading: American blacks average a standard deviation lower in IQ than American whites at about 85. [...] And yes, it’s genetic; g seems to be about 85% heritable, and recent studies of effects like regression towards the mean suggest strongly that most of the heritability is DNA rather than nurturance effects.
So is the problem with him saying this that (a) this is factually false or (b) that it's an inconvenient fact that should be glossed over? He seems to be saying that it's factually true since he obviously read it in some or other study. If it is factually true it's disingenuous to label him as a racist.