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from the maybe-they-only-surveyed-the-nimnobs dept.
Why can we talk about PISA results, comparing the performance of students in school, but we are not allowed to talk about differences in IQ? Bring this subject up, and you are immediately accused of racism. And yet. And yet, if there are substantial differences in intellectual capability, might this not explain some of the world's problems?
An update of a massive "study of studies" is underway; this article summarizes the work to date, and provides links to the work in progress. A quick summary of the answers to the questions no one dares ask:
- Eastern Asia (Japan, China): IQ around 105
- Europe/North America: IQ around 98
- Middle East: IQ around 85
- Africa: IQ around 70
In the first instance, it doesn't even matter why there are differences. They may be genetic, or disease related, or nutrition related, or something else. If these differences are real (and the evidence is pretty strong that they are), then we need to deal with them. Imagine if the low IQs in Africa turn out to be fixable - what would the impact be, if we could raise the IQ of an entire continent by 30 points?!
Sticking our collective heads in the sand, because the topic is not PC, is not going to solve any problems.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 03 2017, @05:41AM (8 children)
In Minnesota there was a large scale experiment [wikipedia.org] to prove exactly what you're saying -- that IQ is mostly just cultural and differences within a nation can be explained by environmental/cultural factors. What they did was track for more than a decade a variety of children adopted by privileged white households. The hypothesis is pretty obvious. These children should, more or less, end up with the same IQ. Similar levels of privilege, all raised in similar households, all given more or less the same education, and so on. It would finally seal the coffin on any sort of psuedo-sciency IQ to race correlation. The sad thing (at least in terms of believing in anything like a fair world) is that the study ended up showing the exact opposite. The performance of the children was tied almost entirely to their race. And there's an interesting characteristic of IQ. At younger ages we can affect it to a reasonable amount due to environmental conditions. But regardless of whether we're a genius or a rock when we're younger, as we age IQ becomes more and more a metric that's decided primarily by genetic characteristics, which I'm using as a euphemism for racial characteristics.
But wait! There's a very easy explanation for this. Being raised by a rich white family doesn't entirely remove cultural aspects. If black individuals are more drawn to lower performing cultures then even being raised by a privileged family does not necessarily mean they themselves would adopt a more productive culture - as other individuals reactions to them, and their own self identity, might not necessarily map to their family's. It's a stretch, but it's possible. Unfortunately, the study also had a phenomenal control group for this - entirely by accident. It turns out that a number of children who had one white and one black parent were mistakenly identified as having two black parents. Their parents believed they were "fully" black, they believed they were "fully" black. They substantially outperformed the children that were actually "fully" black.
It's sad, but real.
(Score: 2) by Arik on Friday November 03 2017, @08:08AM (7 children)
It actually doesn't. Circular logic proves nothing but itself, and this circle starts by assuming that the classification of the parents by 'race' corresponds to an actual racial division. It *does* correspond to a division, it's simply a social division, not a racial division.
It should not be in any way surprising or controversial that groups on different sides of social divisions have different characteristics. If the social division has been going on very long we should even expect biological differences - in a sense. Not any sort of difference of type, no, but 'statistically significant' variations in the incidents of tons and tons of specific alleles, absolutely.
And in fact, that's exactly what we see in human genetics. Virtually any set of groups you want to define have lots and lots of statistical differences, as groups. But there aren't actually any real natural fault lines, certainly no solid divisions, and the 'races' as conceived in 600bc, 1200 ad, or any of the 1890s variants, are all equally valid. Which clearly shows that none of them are valid at all. Think about it.
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 03 2017, @08:22AM (6 children)
Right. In the same way that a German Shepherd and a Chihuahua both share an extremely recent common ancestor (seriously, the earliest evidence of the wolf->dog transition is 40k years old --- humans, homo sapien, are 200,000 years old), but selective breeding led to the creation of genetically different but sexually compatible groups. In dogs we would call it a breed, in humans we would call it a race. In the same way you're not going to confuse a German Shepherd with a Chihuahua, you're not going to confuse a human of predominately 'black' ancestry with a human of 'asian' ancestry. Arguing that the fact these distinctions make people no different since we can clearly define them is rather nonsensical.
The interesting thing is if our species continued to develop, eventually we likely would have even become sexually incompatible. Evolution isn't some magic where a guy with a wand comes and taps a species turning them into another - it's just isolated samples of things, all of which share common ancestors, diverging. I mean we share a common ancestor with ants, or even amoebas if you go back far enough.
(Score: 2) by Arik on Friday November 03 2017, @08:49AM (5 children)
Roughly correct so far.
"humans, homo sapien, are 200,000 years old"
Confused. Modern humans are ~200k years old, yes.
Out of Africa is more like 70k years ago however. And isolation from Africa is shorter and more limited - ~40k in Australia and depending on who you listen to somewhere between 36-12k in the Americas.
plus:
"but selective breeding led to the creation of genetically different but sexually compatible groups."
In dogs, the first part is correct at least. But they aren't actually sexually compatible anymore.
This is actually a good example - canines are a good example of what we would see in humans if there were multiple races. There are multiple natural fault lines tending towards actual biological divisions. Wolves and german shepherds cannot normally mate, because their sexual triggers are different, their cycles don't even line up, they behave like different species. With human intervention, their sperm and egg can be brought into contact and offspring will result, but there is still clearly a sort of a biological division between them.
Just within domesticated dog breeds, we could take a Great Dane and a Chihuahua. They can't actually mate naturally either. A female Chihuahua cannot physically receive the larger male, the male Chihuahua cannot enter the larger female. Yes humans can cross them in vitro. The female Chihuahua should still not be implanted with the resulting embryo, as there is a large risk of a painful death terminating the pregnancy that would result.
Coyotes are a third case, and less well understood, so for this I'll just leave them out.
Considering only non-coyote canines, we arguably have one rather solid division that doesn't get crossed in nature, and another rather obvious fault line where extremes on either side also don't get crossed in nature.
In contrast, again, within humanity we have no clear divisions and no clear fault lines.
On a related note, we also do not have any long, sustained history of selective breeding, in the sense that has produced dog breeds.
Oh yes, it's been a common theme in fact, it's been attempted quite often. But the most basic element of it, the notions of which differences are 'racial' and which are not, varied constantly, wildly.
The current conception of 'race' in the USA is deeply rooted in the reality of the colonies circa 1640, and it literally did not exist prior to that.
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 03 2017, @10:39AM (1 child)
But if you tie up that bitch when she is in heat, the wolves will be all over her, and if they do not eat her, you got some damn good sled dogs. Exactly how far south are you, Arik?
(Score: 2) by Arik on Friday November 03 2017, @10:55AM
Good luck with the not eating her part.
You're better off tying and muzzling a female wolf. Still not all that likely to turn out the way you want.
"Exactly how far south are you, Arik?"
Are you trying to elicit clues to my physical location? *clucks tongue*
Denied.
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 03 2017, @02:07PM (2 children)
I wouldn't be so quick to try to create some sort of authoritative timeline out of Africa. Recent discoveries indicate individuals leaving Africa as far back as 270,000 [nytimes.com] years ago.
The point I was making was simply that we've been separated *far* longer than is necessary to begin to form unique 'breeds.' And breeds was an analog for races. In other words, same species sexually compatible groups sharing a common ancestor. E.g. I'm certainly not suggesting that any group of humans are different species. Rather that we're all simply different breeds. And these breeds do carry inherent and often times large genetic differences.
And yes, we do have a lengthy history of selective breeding. It's caused by continental divide. This is why many whites are considered of 'European' descent even though European is quite a bizarre notion given the vast array of diversity within that. But those groups 'trapped' on the continent were left to mate only among themselves and thus all share common ancestors much more recently with one another than they would for instance with any Asians, Native Americans, Indians, or Africans. Races, and breeds, on the tree of genetics are essentially cousins - sometimes quite distant. Another interesting example are the Japanese. The Japanese developed their own divergent traits as a result of isolation from other Asian groups. Nonetheless, they still share far more in common with a Chinese than they do with e.g. a Native American simply because their nearest common ancestor is much closer.
(Score: 2) by Arik on Friday November 03 2017, @06:22PM (1 child)
Your point was understood, it's simply incorrect.
"And yes, we do have a lengthy history of selective breeding. It's caused by continental divide. This is why many whites are considered of 'European' descent even though European is quite a bizarre notion given the vast array of diversity within that. But those groups 'trapped' on the continent were left to mate only among themselves and thus all share common ancestors much more recently with one another than they would for instance with any Asians, Native Americans, Indians, or Africans. Races, and breeds, on the tree of genetics are essentially cousins - sometimes quite distant."
This is extremely confused and in part flat out wrong. Let's try to unpack this a little. Your claim is that 'continental divide' generated the necessary division between populations, but as I've already noted, the only groups that were actually separated from the main population for significant amounts of time were the Australians and the Americans. And those groups aren't really any more divergent than the rest of us, despite having had arguably long enough periods of isolation for long enough for that to happen, for whatever reason, it did not.
Furthermore you have everything reversed here. Europeans are virtually homogenous in comparison with Africans, not the other way around. If we grouped humans by genetics and set the threshold down low enough to get a reasonable number of groups, you inevitably wind up with one big group that includes everyone outside of Africa and also many Africans. And the remaining groupings would all be primarily found in Africa. This is because human populations radiated out from the rift area in all directions, and only one direction led to a navigable coast line - the one to the northwest. They reached the coast, found the living good, and were able to expand across Eurasia, Oceania, etc. quite quickly by mostly sticking to the coastlines. Interiors were originally settled along rivers. This is a relatively fast process even starting from a small population. But backfilling inland areas was still a slow process.
Back in Africa, all the groups that went out in different directions were hardly idle. But they weren't skirting along coastlines, they were radiating out into enormous inland areas from the start. Southern and western parts of Africa have coastlines that are particularly uninviting. So it took a long time, many many generations, to get to those parts of the continent by land.
Anyway, the point was that the genetic differences exist but not in a way that actually lines up with your notion of race. As you stated pretty clearly here, your assumption (and you're far from unique) is that all 'black' is roughly the same, while the white and the yellow and the red etc. represent diversity. In fact, genetics reveals the truth is nearly exactly the reverse of that. Virtually all of our races genetic diversity is in Africa, while all the non-african populations are, to use your language, 'close cousins' not just with each other, but still with the African source population as well!
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 04 2017, @04:39AM
Yes, the tens of thousands of years humans were outside of Africa is far more than sufficient to develop into various breeds. The evidence is visible not only in physicality, but mentality, and numerous other even very high level measures. And of course the genetic differences are vast.
And no, I did not say or even suggest all blacks are mostly the same. Straw manning is a great indicator of your belief in your own words... I simply discussed the fact that as groups are isolated away from one another, they tend to merge into different 'breeds' with their differences becoming, aggregately, larger than the population they separated from. Japanese have [much] more in common with Japanese than any Asian individual, even though the period of their separation is only ~15,000 years. And Asian individuals, including Japanese, have more in common than they do with any 'black' individual.
The reason I use 'black' as a catch all (which I suppose is where you're getting your straw man from) is the same reason you use 'white' as a catch all. Skin color is more indicative of 'breed' than geographic location. Even in dogs - a German Shepherd is certainly no more German in location than an British Bull Terrier is British in location. And similar a white is no more European in location than a black is African in location.