Racial differences largely genetic?

[Penumbra]

What do you make of the claim that most of the holders for world championship of lifting are Caucasian? What do you make of the claim that Europeans and the industrial revolution built the world we have now? This is where the alleged "White supremacist" tendencies stem from. I should know, I have a bunch of "white supremacist" (neo-Marxist buzzword) friends.

You have a bunch of white supremacist friends?

Why?

 

[biased]

You have a bunch of white supremacist friends?

Why?

Similar life philosophies, similar drug preferences, similar entertainment tastes. They are good people. I know, shocking, controversial but I love them. Sue me!

also I'm mostly friends with people who lean left but are racist. It's weird.

 

[Penumbra]

I agree with most of what you say, Penumbra, especially your last paragraph. We can certainly find physical differences between different human phenotypes. There may be cognitive differences, but I consider IQ tests to be a rather crude means of measuring them, given the cultural biases inherent in those tests. Intelligence is a very vague and amorphous concept to quantify. It depends on a range of cognitive functions--memory recall, perception, reaction times, linguistic skill, mathematical competence, factual knowledge, and so forth.

In my area of expertise--linguistics--the standardized IQ measurements are woefully naive. They tend to measure things like the ability to name objects, but the sociolinguist, Bill Labov, showed that African American children can talk up a storm under relaxed circumstances. Anyone the least bit familiar with African languages knows that they are every much as complex as other major world languages. Jazz may have some of its roots in African tone languages, which gave rise to the ingenious method of communication via "jungle drums" over long distances. Anyone would be hard-pressed to argue that rap artists lack for linguistics skills. Nevertheless, if you go back to the psychological literature on IQ and race in the 60s and 70s, you find all sorts of nonsense about "verbal deficits" in African American children.

I agree that IQ tests are biased. I nearly mentioned that in my post, but decided to skip that argument for now. I can even use myself as an example- I've taken a dozen or two IQ tests, with one of them being administered in person by a psychologist, and my score varies by as much as 30 points. And the main variable associated with that range is how much of that specific test is based on visio-spatial stuff. Some IQ tests have a few questions with, like, folding cube shapes that test my ability to mentally rotate it, and other IQ tests use tons of those types of questions. I suck at mental rotation of 3D objects, so if an IQ test has few of those questions, I'll score towards the higher end of my range, and if the IQ test is heavy in those questions, I'll score towards the low end of my range. Given that one variable can boost or subtract my tested IQ along a 30 point range, there could literally be one cultural variable, or even one small biologically innate area of difference, that throws off the whole average, without really indicating any difference in overall intelligence.

One would think that, say, an asian person being raised by a family of caucasians would negate any cultural advantages that asians might have that leads them to getting higher results on IQ tests, but according to that link, that's not the case, and asians raised by caucasians still outperform the caucasian average. It still could be something as simple as a single variable, a single type of intelligence, unless the specific study chooses to break the test down more specifically than that.

It would be better to at least apply something like a multiple intelligence test if this type of research is going to be done at all. There's math ability, language ability, emotional intelligence, musical ability, visual/spatial ability, and so forth.

 

[LegionOnomaMoi]

Let's not get into a internet slapfest over a fairly tangential issue in this discussion--exactly when the IQ debate started

I'm not interested over when it started. I'm interested in what matters: it's nature. Eugenics was the science motivating public policy before WWII. Many forget that Hitler was Times man of the year, but far more forget that America and England devoted millions of dollars, began government action, and reshaped academia all to solve the problem of "racial hygiene". That's because, in the words of novelist Michael Crichton:

"After World War II, nobody was a eugenicist, and nobody had ever been a eugenicist. Biographers of the celebrated and the powerful did not dwell on the attractions of this philosophy to their subjects, and sometimes did not mention it at all. Eugenics ceased to be a subject for college classrooms, although some argue that its ideas continue to have currency in disguised form."

The OP references on an article about a literature review co-authored by a psychologist who was fundamentally and thoroughly influenced by research from the years of eugenics. Intelligence testing developed hand-in-hand with often outright attempts to lend credence to a world-wide academic, intellectual, and social phenomenon: the idea that "inferior" "races" were polluting the gene-pool and the attempts to do something to "correct" this. Crichton seriously underestimates the influence Eugenics has today (which is to be expected; he's not a scholar), but he is correct about one thing: how thoroughly this movement was quietly swept under the rug. And it is thanks to this that despite having a "black history month" for most of my years of school I never once even heard the word "eugenics". Harlem renaissance? Sure. Civil rights movement? Absolutely. Forced sterilization of "imbeciles" in America sanctioned by the federal government? Not a word.

Why stop there? Why not go back to rivalries between tribes in ancient scripture?

Apart from the obvious reasons, there is the issue with Pinker's latest popular book.

Spoiler: Race didn't exist in antiquity

The most glaring example of an almost complete failure to properly understand violence trends is his treatment of genocide. Pinker discusses the "genocides" in the Homeric epics, the Bible, as well as other ancient literature. The problem here is that the destruction of Troy, or slaughter of the Hittites, and ancient warfare in general isn't genocide. At least not in the way the term is used to day. Perhaps the most glaringly obvious way to demonstrate this is etymologically: the word is a combination of the Latin for killing/murder with the Greek genos. For the Homeric epics in particular, but also for ancient Greek in general, the word meant "tribe" or "family" more than "race." Ancient warfare (like most warfare in human history) was characterized by going into some other city, or the region occupied by some other tried, and slaughtering them. Usually this included rape, enslavement, etc,. but sometimes just destruction and wholesale slaughter. Yet the only way we can classify this as genocide is by thinking that "race" means living in a particular city.

This is primarily the afterglow of that big bang.

Only it isn't:

"the popularity and status of eugenic theories came to be seriously undermined by revelations after 1945 of atrocities committed in the name of ‘science’ by Adolf Hitler and his followers during the period of Nazi government in Germany beginning in 1933. Yet several decades after the end of the Second World War, it was still possible to find a minority of educationists and politicians putting forward ideas about education and society which had profound eugenic and racist implications. These ideas, though often based on flawed data and a set of equally dubious assumptions, soon exerted a powerful influence on policymakers on both sides of the Atlantic.
It was in 1969, the year that saw the launch of the first two Black Papers in Britain, that Arthur Jensen, Professor of Psychology at the University of California, published his controversial article in America in the Harvard Educational Review entitled ‘How much can we boost IQ and scholastic achievement?’ (Jensen, 1969). This very long paper, running to over 120 pages, soon acquired considerable notoriety because it set out to reiterate Cyril Burt’s theory of fixed innate intelligence in terms not only of ‘class’ but also of ‘race’...In Jensen’s view, just as working-class white children were inferior (in terms of measured intelligence) to middle- and upper-class white children, so black children were innately inferior to white children. Any attempt, however well-intentioned, to compensate for this ‘natural’ state of affairs was obviously a waste of time and money."
Chitty, C. (2009). Eugenics, race and intelligence in education. Continuum.

"To fully understand the violent dynamics of this we have to connect Jensen's change of mind to the prevailing Zeitgeist mode, in which the HER article surfaced.
3.2.2. Zeitgeist modes. The model therefore operates with four Zeitgeist modes: 1) A pre-1940 form where biological explanations were generally accepted, 2) a 1940-1980 blank slate form where Lysenkoism, behaviorism, and hostile anti-nature attitudes dominated, fuelled partly by communist ideology, partly by Nazi misuse of eugenics to promote nasty genocide programs 3) a brief 1980-1990 relational-interpretative form of anti-science interlude and, finally 4) a post-1990 period where new evidence from progressive neuro-biological sciences (molecular sciences, neurochemistry, neurophysiology, neuroimaging) and behavioral genetics slowly begin to make biological explanations partly acceptable to at least some researchers outside orthodox academic left circles."
Nyborg, H. (2003). The sociology of psychometric and bio-behavioral sciences: A case study of destructive social reductionism and collective fraud in 20th century academia. The scientific study of general intelligence, 441-502.


"Fortunately for eugenicists, there was an ever-growing pool of statistical evidence being accumulated and fabricated that far exceeded the limitations of a literacy requirement. Standardized tests were fast becoming cutting-edge methodology.
By the time Henry Herbert Goddard entered the scene as translator of Alfred Binet’s articles (Binet developed the first intelligence tests and administered them in France) and as proctor of the first IQ tests on American soil, there was strong precedent for linking race to a string of physical and behavioral traits deemed dangerous to the republic...
The Princeton League of Women Voters warned readers in its 1935 publication Heredity and Twelve Social Problems that

Tests in the schools in southern California show that the average Mexican child is as far below the average Negro child in abstract intelligence as the average Negro is below the average white child. Every one of these children born in the United States becomes an American citizen by birth. The 1930 Federal census showed 1½ million Mexicans in the United States.
​

Once again, Black inferiority was a given—so much so that its mere invocation served as an anti-Mexican rallying cry."
Ordover, N. (2003). American eugenics: Race, queer anatomy, and the science of nationalism. University of Minnesota Press.

"Founded in 1937, the Pioneer Fund has provided millions of dollars to researchers working for “racial betterment,” particularly in the area of race-based intelligence and similar eugenics enterprises." (ibid)

"Eugenics, the science of breeding better human beings, saturated U.S. culture during the 1920s. It seeped into politics. It permeated social science and medicine. It shaped public policy and aesthetic theory. It influenced the nation’s literature. It affected popular culture. Eugenic thinking was so pervasive in the modern era that it attained the status of common sense in its most unnerving Gramscian sense. From eugenics’ inception in late-nineteenth-century England to its peak in the United States during the postwar years of the late 1910s and 1920s, few challenged the notion that modern nations, especially those beset by immigration, must improve their human stock in order to remain competitive, indeed viable, in the modern world. G. K. Chesterton, H. L. Mencken, Nella Larsen, Angelina Weld Grimké, and a few representatives of the Catholic Church were among the handful of oddly disparate protestors against the utopian idea that a nation’s human stock, like its livestock, could and should be improved on—with some professional, state, and institutional intervention, that is. Margaret Sanger, Alice Dunbar-Nelson, W. E. B. Du Bois, and T. S. Eliot, on the other hand, were among the scores of equally disparate American activists and writers who endorsed some form of eugenics in the 1920s"

English, D. K. (2004). Unnatural Selections: Eugenics in American Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance. University of North Carolina Press.

You may not have noticed that this is neither a professional forum nor a suitable venue for that type of discussion.

I notice that every time you don't know what you're talking about (which isn't frequent) the above is one of your go-to moves, and I recall enjoying reading some of your rather lengthy, detailed off-topic posts on subjects (and people) you know well. Apparently what this venue is suitable for changes depending on the subject matter and your familiarity with it.

 

[Copernicus]

OK, Legion. I really have no interest in pursuing the discussion you want to pursue. We simply don't have anything to say to each other on this subject, at least not from my perspective. If you feel you must insult me, then carry on.

@Penumbra: My reservation about that study was stated in an earlier post: It did not take anything other than adoptive patterns into account, and it still showed an environmental impact on IQ. The experience a child has in the school system--e.g. the expectations of teachers and/or peers--can have a tremendous impact on a child's intellectual development, although most parents would like to feel that they are in control of that. Lots of factors can determine how individuals respond to their environment, and skin color has a big impact on human interactions in our society.

 

[LegionOnomaMoi]

We simply don't have anything to say to each other on this subject, at least not from my perspective.

Fair enough.

 

[Poeticus]

The OP references on an article about a literature review co-authored by a psychologist who was fundamentally and thoroughly influenced by research from the years of eugenics.

^This obliterates, destroys, eradicates, demolishes, annihilates, and decimates the OP's post, especially since eugenics is a pseudo form of science that justified colonization and even birthed genocides such as Hutu vs Tutsi.

Once again, Legion, you post a wonderful response filled with extensive research that has yet to be challenged properly.

The only downside is that such an important response was posted in a trollsome thread. Nonetheless, you have done superb in dispelling the myth that is eugenics. Bravo, sir, bravo!

 

[FranklinMichaelV.3]

So when it says Genetics, isn't that an assumption that the gene pool of African's have not changed throughout the years? No new genes have been introduced? No environmental pressures have been pushed, epigenetics have had no role to play?

I think it's rather weird to talk about IQs based on race (as if it's easily defined) and ignore all the things that make up and influence genetic variations....

 

[George-ananda]

So when it says Genetics, isn't that an assumption that the gene pool of African's have not changed throughout the years? No new genes have been introduced? No environmental pressures have been pushed, epigenetics have had no role to play?

I think it's rather weird to talk about IQs based on race (as if it's easily defined) and ignore all the things that make up and influence genetic variations....

Who's making the "assumption that the gene pool of African's have not changed throughout the years."? I guess I don't get your point. Who's saying race is easily defined? And who doesn't think this is a very complex subject?

African Americans are on average 15-20% Caucasian. All scholars are aware of that.

 

[FranklinMichaelV.3]

Who's making the "assumption that the gene pool of African's have not changed throughout the years."? I guess I don't get your point. Who's saying race is easily defined? And who doesn't think this is a very complex subject?

African Americans are on average 15-20% Caucasian. All scholars are aware of that.

Hence the question marks.

The article at least what was posted seems to head in that direction.

 

[DallasApple]

So if a person is 1/2 black and 1/2 Asian they are 1/2 smart?

 

[DallasApple]

I'm sorry they are 3/4 smart...

 

[Father Heathen]

Regardless of whatever genetic influences that may exist, it's foolish to think you can access someones character or intelligence with a mere glance at their physical characteristics.

 

[George-ananda]

Regardless of whatever genetic influences that may exist, it's foolish to think you can access someones character or intelligence with a mere glance at their physical characteristics.

Agreed. With such significant overlap in traits and abilities it wouldn't be wise to assume.