Religion, Faith, and Spirituality : Race Realism

Or to give it it's proper name - pseudoscientific racist b/s, seems to be popular again. I often read a site called the genetic literacy project where I came across a blog post by an American geneticist who explained in layman's terms why the idea that low IQ or violent behaviour is associated with race is b/s. It's summed up by this

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It has often been noted that black people perform worse than white people, on average, on various standardized tests. Naturally, racists love to jump on this statistic as evidence for genetic interracial racial differences in cognitive ability. And of course, their logic is faulty. The scientific method says that you cant infer a genetic effect between two groups when you havent controlled for environmental factors. Im not even going to get into whole question of what IQ is, or whether IQ tests actually measure important neurological characteristics accurately.

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Bears repeating

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The scientific method says that you cant infer a genetic effect between two groups when you havent controlled for environmental factors

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That should be the end of it but he goes on to explain regression to the mean etc. He also brings up something that racists often forget, Sub Saharan Africans and particularly African Americans have greater genetic diversity than Europeans and Asians. This means if race and genes were a factor in IQ diversity, African Americans would have higher IQs than their European American counterparts as Dr Tenneseen points out - The fact that the observed pattern is in the other direction suggests that it has nothing to do with genetics. Of course it's blindingly obvious that African Americans grow up in a different environment to White Americans, even the well off middle classes.

https://adaptivediversity.wordpress.com/2016/12/10/race-ed/#more-1840

This doesn't mean there aren't genetic differences between geographical populations, of course there are, they just don't line up with the obsolete classifications of race. Skin colour is an obvious example. You can spot the difference between someone from Iceland and someone from Uganda, well done, they're separated by over 60 degrees of latitude. But where does white skin stop and black skin start? Nowhere is the answer, it's a continuum. In fact anyone who has read Tacitus will know he describes the Silures (a Welsh tribe) as dark skinned with curly hair.

There's been alot written about medicine and race recently and it's true some medical conditions are more common in some geographical groups, but that's not a great basis for assigning race as it doesn't exclude all other people or include all one race. It's probably more useful to know the geographical location of your relatives than what ethnicity you call yourself. Black people can get cystic fibrosis and white people can get sickle cell anaemia.

It's been a long time now since the Human Genome was sequenced and we now have thousands of whole genome sequences from every part of the world and there's still no scientific support for racist theories, just dubious, badly designed social science studies.

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Excellent post!

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Ȥ

You're welcome, I've been meaning to post about this for a while, I can't believe this crap has gained credence again.

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Have you ever thought to ask WHY this crap has gained credence, or WHY it has you feeling insecure?

"Race realism is racist!" This whole thing is just scientifically illiterate evolution denial. You read Anne Frank and now you think you can debunk holocaust denial.

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This whole thing is just scientifically illiterate evolution denial.

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Care to elaborate or is this your usual meaningless, scientifically illiterate ravings?

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You read Anne Frank and now you think you can debunk holocaust denial.

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You're equating reading Ann Frank with getting a PhD in molecular genetics?

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Your thread has now attracted two Mutha socks. Consider the source.

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Ȥ

I'm planning to respond with all 60 of my socks.

Noose.

Are they mutha socks? I lose track, moonunit is stupid enough to be his sock, the other one can write coherent sentences so I'm not convinced.

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I was accused of being a mutha sock once.

You're such a vicarious prag. But you already knew that.

It's also a 'comment chain' for pointing out your sock accounts. Try to keep up, mutha.

Noose.

Really? By who? Someone who didn't post here in the good old days I assume.

This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England.

Superdudedon't know much about him.

Yeah he still thinks I'm Mutha. Has anyone seen him around lately? He mainly just posts about Ada these days and then vanishes for a while.

I will try, but it's hard to have a discussion about something you are passive aggressive attacking while at the same time denying it exists. Very insular. Pick one or the other.

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He also brings up something that racists often forget, Sub Saharan Africans and particularly African Americans have greater genetic diversity than Europeans and Asians. This means if race and genes were a factor in IQ diversity, African Americans would have higher IQs than their European American counterparts as Dr Tenneseen points out - The fact that the observed pattern is in the other direction suggests that it has nothing to do with genetics.

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This is incoherent. It looks like you read something you didn't understand and are trying to bluster your way through it. Yes blacks have greater genetic diversity than other races. But this has no logical connection to higher IQs. It does mean they have greater variance (IQ diversity?), and race realists not only acknowledge this, they cite it for their own arguments. Asians have less variance than whites. So while Asians have a higher IQ than whites, there are fewer Asian geniuses hence we see less innovation from them. Whether this is true or not is another argument.

You have the nerve to call me incoherent??? I may not explain the extremely well known phenomenon of heterosis very well but I was paraphrasing the blog, the author http://people.oregonstate.edu/~tennessj/Jacob_A._Tennessen.html explains it much better than me, perhaps you should read it. So why do you think high intelligence can't be linked to genetic diversity? The author isn't saying it is he's just pointing out that from what we know about the benefits of genetic diversity, that would be the logical conclusion. What's your counter argument, other than 'no it isn't, so there'?

Asians and Jews may have higher IQs than Europeans but there's no evidence that it's due to genetics.

Do you want to elaborate on your comment about Ann Frank?

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It looks like you read something you didn't understand and are trying to bluster your way through it.

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"An aversion to homosexuality is called heterosexuality." - ErJen

Most race realists are perfectly willing to admit that Ashkenazi Jews and North-East Asians have higher mean IQs than Whites, but curiously, no article that aims to "debunk" HBD ever addresses that

Noose.

You must have missed this

The scientific method says that you cant infer a genetic effect between two groups when you havent controlled for environmental factors

Despite the fact I said it twice, that applies to Ashkenazi Jews and Asians as much as it does to African Americans and Europeans.

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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minnesota_Transracial_Adoption_Study

Noose.

And what exactly do you think the outcome of that study was?

EDIT: Or are you implying that this study controlled for environmental factors? Because it really, really doesn't do that.

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"One of the studies' findings was the IQs of adopted black children reared by white families did not differ significantly from that of black children raised by their biological parents."

- It controls for one type of environment.

Noose.

That's great but it doesn't control for all factors which is why there are too many confounders for it to be of any use. Do I really have to point out to you that African American children are still visibly African American no matter who adopts them?

EDIT: It also doesn't take into account something that we know now is very important to childhood development - pre natal environment.

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True, although to use the words of the authors themselves:
"Trans racial adoption is the human analog of the cross-fostering design, commonly used in animal behavior genetics research. There is no question that adoption constitutes a massive intervention"

- so I think it's unfair to just dismiss the study. Nonetheless, I'd like to make you aware that no serious hereditarian believes it's only genes that account for various human traits (like IQ) - most people in the HBD crowd are pretty okay with saying it's 50/50.

One of the major observations that I believe supports the race realist position is the universality of IQ scores. Blacks, Whites, Asians and Jews anywhere in the world tend to score quite similarly on IQ testsand the differences are strongest in the least culturally-biased tests, like Raven's Matrices. It's one thing to explain certain trends in one particular country, but it's another thing when similar trends keep presenting themselves in countries with radically different histories, politics, economies, cultures, and environments.

Noose.

The authors also admit there are too many confounders to draw any conclusions, there are other factors they couldn't take into consideration because we didn't know about them then, epigenetics being the obvious one. It just drives home the fact that you can't control for all environmental factors which means you can't draw any conclusions from them about genetics.

The author of the blog points out that he finds Human genetics boring to work on because there's so little genetic variation in our population. it's hard to find any meaningful difference between any populations, this is something you and other race realists or whatever you want to call yourselves ignore. There's a huge amount of data on whole genome sequences and no support for your theory. You also don't have an answer to his point about heterosis, if genes are important then the more diverse a group the better it should perform. Given that African Americans are an admixed population if genes were important then they should do better at IQ tests than European Americans.

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Not all hybrids exhibit heterosis.

But nonetheless, I would say analysis of racial admixture actually supports the race realist hypothesis, given that for instance the mean IQ of African Americans - a population with 20% European admixture - is the highest of all measured black population mean IQs (as far as I'm aware).
The Coloured population in South Africa - another mixed race population with European ancestry - scores higher than the African mean.
I expect similar trends for Mestizos and Pardos in Latin America (vs their "purer" native counterparts), but I haven't looked at that data.

Noose.

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Not all hybrids exhibit heterosis.

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If heterosis is vital for intelligence then shouldn't this apply to things like the border collie? They have a bunch of health complications, but animals like Chaser that are purebreds can nearly compete with humans (and probably better than many) at vocab retention and access.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaser_(dog)
https://www.quora.com/Which-is-more-intelligent-a-mutt-or-a-purebred-dog

I don't really have a dog in this race (pun sort of intended) and have really own read Coyne's (maybe now infamous) article about how perhaps classical race categories can be dropped but the concept of race should stay. I did see a Dennett video recently when he uncomfortably had to answer a question on this (the IQ stuff) from an audience member.
Anyway this is another Mutha just dropping by, 40 or so more accounts to go.

Hey Me!

Out of curiosity, what did Dennett have to say?

Noose.

Pretty much: "it doesn't matter some races are better at some things than others, I don't really believe in IQ/ it's science that has no place in modern society."
At least it was something similar to that. I'll dig up the link later.

Interesting. Do fill me in
if you get the link. I know Sam Harris has expressed some (quasi?) race realist sentiment before (to my own dismay given back then I was a liberal). Dawkins as well seems to coast alongside Coyne ("race is real but it doesn't matter").

The funny thing is most people in the HBD sphere really aren't "supremacists", in fact there's a bizarre number of Indians with interest in this (like Razib Khan).

The way I see it, just as inequality/difference exists between individuals, it exists, on average, among social groups - which are essentially collectives of individuals.
HBD is only a problem if you have some deeply held a priori belief in the cult of "sameness".

Noose.

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HBD is only a problem if you have some deeply held a priori belief in the cult of "sameness".

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It's only a problem for people who are interested in objective empirical reality, and not interpreting it to fit their own biases. A pretty small number of people, I know, and no one really pays attention to them anyway, but they're out there.

Okay.

Noose.

I mean, just wanted to set the record straight. Carry on.

Okay.

Noose.

you're not really good at this "insulting" thing, are you?

I think the important take home message is that you can't control for all environmental factors so these kind of studies are meaningless. Genetic diversity is very low in the Human population and we only diverged from our original population in Eastern Africa 100kya at the most. Thousands of Human genomes have been sequenced and the small differences between geographical populations are related to digesting different food, resistance to local diseases etc. No evidence that intelligence has evolved differently or faster.

If you want to argue about science then you do have to come up with some actual evidence.

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Nobody said they did and you still haven't got your head around The scientific method says that you cant infer a genetic effect between two groups when you havent controlled for environmental factors.

But we do have data from thousands of genomes and if you want to argue about science then you really need to come up with evidence rather than racist wishful thinking or wandering into Darwinian fantasy land. There's evidence that some geographical populations have evolved to be resistant to local diseases or to digest some food better but none that show regional differences in intelligence.

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You said I didn't have an answer to his point about heterosis - and you kept emphasizing this talking point - that's why I pointed out that not all hybrids exhibit heterosis.

Noose.

Nothing in science is absolute but in general heterosis is beneficial and so is genetic variation. In the absence of evidence to the contrary that stands, unless you think your hand waving explanation is evidence?

This has nothing to do with what you called a priori convictions about equality, it has to with evidence. My opinion, based on the evidence, is that there just isn't enough variation between populations or enough time for something as complex as intelligence (or other behaviours) to have diverged to a measurable degree. All it will take to change my mind is evidence.

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If you're looking for substantial evidence for a hereditarian view of racial differences in intelligence then you ought to consult Rushton & Jensen's "Thirty Years of Research on
Race Differences in Cognitive Ability" paper.

It looks at 10 categories of evidence:
1) the worldwide distribution of test scores
2) g factor of mental ability
3) heritability
4) brain size and cognitive ability
5) transracial adoption
6) racial admixture
7) regression
8) related life-history traits,
9) human origins research, and
10) hypothesized environmental variables.

Some of these are essentially the same points I've made. The authors make a case for how the evidence points to some genetic component in BlackWhite differences in mean IQ.

Noose.

If consistent differences completely controlled for the the various biases could hypothetically be established, what do you think the practical consequences would be?

Heterosis only applies to F1 hybrids though, doesn't it? After that 1st generation, the alleles segregate and heterozygosity is reduced.

b l u e
g r e e n

I think that's true for some individual offspring but for the population as a whole heterozygosity has increased. New alleles have been introduced to the population

This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England.

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EDIT: It also doesn't take into account something that we know now is very important to childhood development - pre natal environment.

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You have a doctorate in a biological science and you are unaware that the brain develops with priority over the body? In the event of malnourishment, the brain is preferentially spared, while some part of the body is sacrificed, for instance rickets. Blacks are stereotyped as gifted athletes. They also have a fundamentally different developmental curve than other races. They learn to walk earlier. Their brain development plateaus earlier and degenerates earlier, consistent no matter the environment. There are similar male female differences, quantitative and qualitative. Are males and females gestating in unequal wombs?

Evolution predicts this seamlessly. Whatever the alternative theory is, (poverty, discrimination, ghetto culture, etc) it requires endless unique exceptions for every little observation.

I got my undergraduate degree in 1996 when the first really important papers on epigenetics were coming out and it's this effect that I was referencing along with other critics of the work. Uterine environment affects epigenetics which even you must know means non genetic effects.

The rest of your post is just your usual rambling crap though I'd like to know exactly what you think 'evolution seamlessly predicts'.?

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Or to give it it's proper name - pseudoscientific racist b/s, seems to be popular again.

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See Brexit and Trump.

Where did I say race doesn't exist? I said - This doesn't mean there aren't genetic differences between geographical populations, of course there are, they just don't line up with the obsolete classifications of race. Sociologists and Human population geneticists can call those populations what they like I suppose, that's not really my point.

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Race doesn't exist biologically.

formerly known as Saoradh