Broadband Politics - Latest Comments in Is Gene Expression racist?

Re: Is Gene Expression racist?

razib — Mon, 20 Jan 2003 21:13:18 -0000

last word from me on this thread:

people shouldn't judge on appearences-but they do.

we are all equal before God and/or the law-but are all not all equal.

the greatness of "liberalism" (broad-sense) is that it takes the individual as the basic organizing unit of society and sanctifies it in a way that other societies have sanctified the family (china), corporative body (high medieval europe) or royalty (divine right of kings europe). that being said-in civil society, other levels of organization, religion, ethnos and race, still exist. we don't need to deny those truths even though they have no legal standing.

best
razib

Re: Is Gene Expression racist?

Richard Bennett — Mon, 20 Jan 2003 19:39:40 -0000

Race is an illusion, Jason - that's what I've been saying, not that intelligence is environmental or any such nonsense. In this modern world, nearly all of us inherit from a family tree that draws some several of the racial groups that were defined before we knew anything about the genome.

If you want to study human biodiversity, the first thing you have to do is discard the notion of race and replace it with the concept of population group, of which there are 2,000 (in CS's work) or more.

New World societies have achieved their hegemony in world affairs because we've been willing, more or less, to discard the notions of race, class, and caste that have weakened Old World societies and made them unable to capitalize on their human assets.

Just as you can't judge a book by its cover, you can't judge humans by their appearances.

Re: Is Gene Expression racist?

Jason Malloy — Mon, 20 Jan 2003 13:20:37 -0000

Thanks Rich!

You always were one of the good ones.

Re: Is Gene Expression racist?

Jason Malloy — Mon, 20 Jan 2003 12:13:10 -0000

"? differences between most sub-Saharan Africans other than Khoisan and Pygmies seem rather small."

Sailer misrepresents Cavilli-Sforza's findings, and even admits as much. . ."

Your challenge here is unrelated to what we were arguing, and leads me to believe you are left with little more to add to this dialogue than equivocation. You repeatedly used the argument that Africa was the most diverse continent, as a claim to counter the idea that its peoples could share any significant patterns of disributed traits. You were then challenged by several people on why you were misusing that claim. Razib himself challenged it on several separate occasions, yet you still continued to repeat the argument with an utter lack of concern for those important objections. I figured maybe a clarifying quote from Cavilli-Sforza (who's research I believe is responsible for your oft mis-used soundbite) might help to finally get you to pay attention:

"? differences between most sub-Saharan Africans other than Khoisan and Pygmies seem rather small."

This legendary diverity that you keep cheerleading, in the face of all reasoned arguments to the contrary, is in junk genes, Richard. But now the king of diversion, must sidetrack the larger debate and drag me down a whole new trail. Now I must defend Steve Sailer b/c I used Cavilli-sforza's quote off of his website (Oh no, another tainted source!).

At this point I am going to challenge your tangential objection, b/c I said I would, and be on my way. The reason for this is two-fold: 1)At the beginning of this conversation you stated your premises as to why nothing but an 100% environmental explanation for the achievement gap is possible. I feel since that time you have made statements that have respectively disagreed with each of your original premises, and that resultingly point more to our conclusion- the possibility of a partially genetic explanation. I might out-line this at a later date on the GnXp Message Board. 2)The pointlessness of this Sailer diversion leads me to believe you are no longer interested in the topic of the main conversation. I thought the point in dispute was African diversity? I use a C-S quote off of Steve's website, and now for some reason I have to answer for Steve's alleged (and completely unrelated) lie about Sforza's view on race. In on-going debate-style conversations like this such needless wandering will always result in a restrictive exponential increase in the amount of typing it will take to fully respond to all of your points. I feel that we have reached the ceiling of my post-length tolerence. Moving on. . . .

The funny thing about the word "race" is just that- it's a word. Like any word the idea it is invested with is dependent on the speaker. Mr. C-S discusses why he rejects "race" here:

"I don't like the word "race" because it corresponds to old subdivisions that are inconsistent with genetic reality and unjustifiable by a rational classification. Moreover, there is no real use of such classifications and, what is worse, there is always an associated racist flavor."

In other words, he feels the word "race" connotates something platonic (essential) and Linnaeun (perfectly hierarchical and sub-divisible) and racist (pre-applied value judgements). The Anthropological Association of America rejected a similar definition of race:

"In the United States both scholars and the general public have been conditioned to viewing human races as natural and separate divisions within the human species based on visible physical differences. With the vast expansion of scientific knowledge in this century, however, it has become clear that human populations are not unambiguous, clearly demarcated, biologically distinct groups."

The problem or "squid ink", that Mr. Sailer was reffering to was the fact that rejecting a word, does not make the phenomenon it was used to originally describe go away. I could say I reject "love" b/c it corresponds to old ideas of intangible spiritual ideals and hokey sweetness. But then if I'm a neuro-psychologist who goes on to write an 800 page book on the origin and workings of feelings of "affection" in the human animal, without using the word "love", then I am being semantic and nothing more. Luigi Cavalli-Sforza is a "population" geneticist, and we can use the word "population" as a substitue for describing statistical genetic relationships, but like the switch from negro, to colored, to black, to African-American, shuffling terminology does nothing to rid the idea of its baggage in the minds of anyone. Steve Pinker wrote an article on this "squid ink" tactic called "The Game of the Name" for the New York Times.

So no, Richard, Mr. Sailer is neither a misrepresentor, or a liar, or a mind-reader, or a candidate for the "master-race" for that matter (he's half-Jewish), he just understands how language works, and "The Name Game" is fun but ridiculous.

And what of the connotations of race that the AAA and Mr. C-S were seeking to reject? Does Mr. Sailer invest his definition of "race" with the triple "errors" of Platonicism, Linnaeunism, and bigotry? In fact Steve has rejected all three: he has stated that race is neither essential or perfectly sub-divisible, and he has stated that value is indeed at the level of the individual. In effect Sforza and Sailer and the AAA all equally agree on what race is not. For a well-written manifesto of what race is to Mr. Sailer, I would recommend his essay on the matter titled: It's All Relative: Putting Race in Its Proper Perspective. I think in this essay he fairly well clarifies that he understands race neither to be Platonic or Linnaeun. Steve's definition of "race" is no more or less than what C-S means by a" population". Whatever word we use for the phenomenon it is relative in two senses: [From article. My comments are in brackets]

"First, it's all about who your relatives are. A modern Darwinian approach to race would start from the bottom up, with the father, mother, and baby. All mammals belong to biological extended families, with a family tree that features all the same kinds of biological relatives as you or I have?grandfathers, nieces, or third cousins and so forth. And everybody belongs to multiple extended families?your mom's, your dad's, etc.

Which leads to my modern definition of race:

A racial group is an extended family that is inbred to some degree.

That's it?just an "extended family that is somewhat inbred." There's no need to say how big the extended family has to be, or just how inbred

We know that humans have not been mating completely randomly with other humans from all over the globe. Most people, over the last few tens of thousands of years, just couldn't afford the airfare

. . .in anybody's family tree, certain statistical patterns will stand out. Just ask somebody, "What are you?" and they'll tell you about some of the larger clusters in their family tree, such as, "Oh, I'm Irish, Italian, and Cherokee."

. . . This is a scaleable solution. Do you want to know a lot about a few people? Then, the more inbred, the more distinct the racial group. Or, do you want to know a little about a lot of people? The less inbred, the larger the group. [remember Richard we can know a lot about the few people of West and East Africa, as you admitted, or we can clump them together and know a little, but still useful, less, because they are still share more genes with eachother than they do with the Japanese or Han Chinese]

. . .The bottom-up approach simply eliminates any compulsion to draw arbitrary lines regarding whether a difference is big enough to be racial. [in other words it doesn't matter "how many" races there are] With enough inbreeding, hereditary differences will emerge that will first be recognizable to the geneticist, then to the physical anthropologist, and finally to the average person. [this would be the continental sized groupings on Sforzas book cover]

. . .The second sense in which race is all relative: it's pointless to make absolute statements about the significance or insignificance of race. You always have to ask, "Compared to what?"

. . .You have to look at it relatively. If you were planning to climb Mt. Everest and somebody were to say, "The difference between Mt. Everest and sea level is insignificant, it's just a 0.15% difference in the distance from the center of the Earth," you'd roll your eyes. But, when somebody says the same thing about genetics, it's treated as a profundity.

Similarly, we are constantly told, "there are more genetic differences within races than between races." This is, in general, true. But it hardly means that the differences between races therefore don't exist.

. . .Keep in mind that 80% of the variation observed was within racial groups. Which is about what you'd expect from observing the world around you. In every racial group, there exists a wide variety of physical and personality types among men, from the most hyper-masculine to the most gentle.

Still, few who watch sports on television, follow Olympic running results, or examine interracial marriage patterns, will be surprised that blacks on the whole score highest on those androgen receptor gene alleles associated with greater masculinity. . .[-->whites-->asians]"

There is certainly no reason to think that "Sailer misrepresents Cavilli-Sforza's findings", and this applies esspecially to the "junk gene" African diversity that was the primary issue anyway. Furthermore, there is no reasonable contradiction that can be noted between Sforza's work and Steve's interpretation of that work. You took a superficial disagreement over nonclamenture and conflated it into some big phony scandal.

I would like to close by thanking you, despite the many ugly confrontations we had, for having such a frank and open dialogue. I am not trying to being cute or sarcastic, I genuinely like exploring issues with those who disagree, because it is the only chance for me to see issues from differing perspectives. I thank you for the time you spent in this conversation, and hope that you or anyone else who wishes to praise, add comment, or disagree will come over to the new GnXp Message Board and start a thread or join in on a conversation.

Re: Is Gene Expression racist?

razib — Mon, 20 Jan 2003 08:01:58 -0000

doubt it. but white females don't have bigger brains and have about the same IQ as while males. and whales have bigger brains....

(i'm assuming that body to brain size ratio matters)

Re: Is Gene Expression racist?

Richard Bennett — Mon, 20 Jan 2003 07:29:51 -0000

Do black females have bigger brains?

Re: Is Gene Expression racist?

razib — Sun, 19 Jan 2003 23:42:47 -0000

btw, for the record, i'm agnostic on whether higher black female IQs is genetic or environmental/cultural.

Re: Is Gene Expression racist?

razib — Sun, 19 Jan 2003 23:41:57 -0000

harmon-
1) human biodiversity effects your politics depending on what your politics are-i'm a libertarian by inclination, so it doesn't have that much effect. but most public policy is set by liberals or conservatives in this country-who tend to favor types of social engineering (liberals) or incentives (conservatives) that would be impacted by possible group differences

2) as far as your brilliant assertion that finnish designed IQ tests tend to show finns test well
A) Raven's Marticies
B) amazing how tests designed by WASPs seem to show that asians and jews do very well. better in fact than the WASPs that designed them!

To Richard:

...graduate from university in America, but the IQ tests tell us that males are generally smarter than females, and the male brain is certainly larger than the female brain.

Thomas Sowell says that says that black females have higher IQs.

Re: Is Gene Expression racist?

Richard Bennett — Sun, 19 Jan 2003 22:01:54 -0000

As I've stated before, if one accepts genetic group differences in athletic abilities, I don't understand why that same person can't accept the possibility of similar differences in IQ. And no, I don't think IQ is a "universal survival" trait as you seem to. It's clearly not, especially after a certain minimum.

If intelligence is not a universal value, why do we care about it? There's a qualitative difference between intelligence and sprinting ability, and neither is 100% nature or 100% nurture.

It's interesting that the group analyses of IQs tend to assume a normal distribution and only look for the peak of the bell curve, yet the two groups we know the most about - American males and American females - actually distribute intelligence differently.

I would submit to you that distribtion is more important to Mother Nature than is the peak of the bell curve, and that should become clear when you think about patterns of the distribtion of power in societies organized in various ways.

Re: Is Gene Expression racist?

Richard Bennett — Sun, 19 Jan 2003 21:53:53 -0000

"WHY AREN'T THEIR MORE BLACKS IN MATH & SCIENCE?"

Indeed. In IQ and the Wealth of Nations, India is listed as having an average national IQ of 81, which would put it midway between average of African Americans (according to you folks) and Zambia (77). India produces a large number of skilled IT engineers every year, and is now one of the world's leading producers of software.

So why aren't there more blacks in IT, given that they're smarter than Indians, speak English, and have access to the American univesity system? Granted, India has a large population and all that, and it has the national exam system and the several IITs, but American blacks have the SAT system and a much larger pool of universities.

The question really gets interesting when you compare black males and black females in America with respect to university education in general. Nearly twice as many black females as black males graduate from university in America, but the IQ tests tell us that males are generally smarter than females, and the male brain is certainly larger than the female brain.

So these are questions that we are right to ask, and should be even more willing to ask than we are according to the facetious analysis I've provided here, which assumes your own positions, razib. Sweeping these questions under the rug of a facile and pseudo-scientific genetic analysis just doesn't cut it for me.

Re: Is Gene Expression racist?

Richard Bennett — Sun, 19 Jan 2003 13:38:05 -0000

If you look at the cover of the book I linked to, you'll see a color-coded map that relates very closely to those same old-fashioned racial categories your grandpa probably talked about

You can't judge a book by its cover, Jason. If you actually open the cover and read the book, you find some information that contradicts Sailer's theories about race. I've taken several science courses at the high school and university level, and I can tell you with some authority that the general practice of science education leans much more heavily toward reading text and numbers than it does to book cover analysis. I don't know that there's a general rule about such things, but I imagine most authors would tell you that the text wins out when there's a contradiction between text and book cover.

Similarly, when an author says someting, and some critic, like your man Sailer, says "the author really means the exact opposite of what he said", I would tend to hold the author's rendition of his findings in more esteem than that of the critic.

I'm funny like that.

Re: Is Gene Expression racist?

harmon — Sun, 19 Jan 2003 10:48:39 -0000

Razib, ol' Dude, from what I see, all you are doing is playing the liberal game with a different colored ball. In other words, "you are what your group is." Screw that.

Jason, my Dude, you are, of course, absolutely correct that knowledge is good stuff. But as Will Rogers would say, the trouble with the world ain't what people don't know, it's what they know that ain't so.

"Knowledge" couched in social terms like race and "gender" (ugh) isn't knowledge - it's politics. You want to talk about genetics, fine - talk about genetic markers & such. Go study up on the double helix. But don't come at me with social constructs.

And to both of you, the first thing you should do when you start talking about IQ tests is go take one - in Finland. You (and your brothers and your cousins and your aunts) would both come up low on the scoreboard, because you would find out that, on a Finnish IQ test, lo & behold, it's the FINNS who score the highest of all the groups who take it. Ergo, everyone else is a problem to be solved, but the Finns are alright.

Re: Is Gene Expression racist?

Jason Malloy — Sun, 19 Jan 2003 07:54:38 -0000

harmon,

I sympathize with your sensitivity to the issue, and I agree that human value is presupposed, and at the level of the individual. The biggest reason this issue is interesting to me is becuse I feel that any information about humanity is good information. I also believe that a world that will not address the likelihoods and possibilities of man's reality ends up inadvertantly putting a low premium on both man and truth. Perhaps if I paraphrase your concerns you can better understand why this is issue is truly important:

"Dude (I suppose that's the social correct salutation here..?)

Who cares about this stuff? I mean, when it comes down to it, let us suppose for the sake of argument that man did evolve from a friggin' ape. So where does that leave us? We're all still better than a bunch of smelly apes. Or worse, we look better too - double whammy! So now what?

All that matters is the individual person you are dealing with. The guy across the table, down the hall, around the corner. He's an individual unique person, & you deal with him as you meet him. THE FACT THAT MAN EVOLVED FROM CHIMPS, DOESN'T MEAN A THING!"

In other words, knowledge doesn't have to be justified by its relative utility, it is instead its own inherent virtue.

Re: Is Gene Expression racist?

razib — Sun, 19 Jan 2003 06:59:04 -0000

harmon,

if you're curious why it matters, visit our blog.

a 12.75 point differene would mean about 15% of blacks have higher IQs than the average white (87.25 vs. 100)-that matters.

yes, ultimately we should be judged as individuals, but social policy effects US ALL....

every year the major news journals come out with an article roughly titled "WHY AREN'T THEIR MORE BLACKS IN MATH & SCIENCE?" (with no balancing articles like "WHY AREN'T THEIR MORE WHITES IN PRO-BASKETBALL?" "WHY AREN'T THEIR MORE ASIANS IN ENTERTAINMENT & THE ARTS?"). the implication is that our society must be dysfunctional, and more outreach is necessary to african-americans so that they will enter engineering & science, with are also often hinted to be racist havens. there are also articles that ask, "WHY AREN'T THEIR MORE WOMEN IN MATH & SCIENCE." i think a lot of conservatives would give a mixed biological & social reason for the latter. but they'll not stand to give the same for ethnic minorities, but tend to focus on social pathologies. but, what may be perceieved as social pathologies might be rational adaptations that build on prior social structures influenced by both environment, history & genes.

Re: Is Gene Expression racist?

David — Sun, 19 Jan 2003 05:35:11 -0000

Richard.

1) Jewish intermarriage rates are high. If you believe that Jewish people are more intelligent on average than gentiles, you could easily see marriage between a smart Jew and a smart gentile.
2) Jewish intermarriage rates contribute little to the overall intermarriage rate.
3) Historically, Jews and gentiles did not marry. The intermarriage rates you see now are just that--the current intermarriage rates. The children of these marriages won't be entering high school or college for a decade or two. (this also applies to other "mixed" marriages--they're much more common now, but the progeny won't be entering school for awhile)
4) If West African sprinting and East African distance running were "adaptations" to local conditions, why do West African descended Americans continue to excel, 400 years after leaving those conditions?

I'm confused. You seem to believe that IQ advantages can/would be "mixed" out by one generation of intermarrying, but athletic advantage can't be, even after 10-20 generations of living in different environments, and some not inconsiderable race-mixing.

By the way Richard. I'm not arguing what evolutionary reasons may have existed that produced IQ differences. I don't pretend to know. All I know is that the evidence indicates to me that it's hard to come up with a 100% "nurture" argument for the group differences in IQ. I'd love to see a good study that posited a plausible 100% nurture argument, but I haven't yet. As I've stated before, if one accepts genetic group differences in athletic abilities, I don't understand why that same person can't accept the possibility of similar differences in IQ. And no, I don't think IQ is a "universal survival" trait as you seem to. It's clearly not, especially after a certain minimum.

David

Re: Is Gene Expression racist?

harmon — Sun, 19 Jan 2003 05:02:59 -0000

Dude (I suppose that's the social correct salutation here..?)

Who cares about this stuff? I mean, when it comes down to it, let us suppose for the sake of argument that it can be scientifically undisputably irrevocably proven that blacks, as a group, are 12.752 points lower on the IQ scale than western Europeans. So where does that leave us? A whole bunch of blacks will be smarter than quite a few western Europeans. The smartest guy around could easily be a black guy. Or worse, a black woman - double whammy! The dumbest could easily be some guy from France, probably the prime minister. So now what?

All that matters is the individual person you are dealing with. The guy across the table, down the hall, around the corner. He's an individual unique person, & you deal with him as you meet him. YOUR RACIAL GROUP, HIS RACIAL GROUP, DOESN'T MEAN A THING!

Sheesh!

Re: Is Gene Expression racist?

Jason Malloy — Sun, 19 Jan 2003 01:14:58 -0000

Alright, I'm getting sleepy. I'll finish later, but I'll briefly say this: Cavilli-Sforza, Mr. Sailer, and I are actually all in agreement to the idea behind "race" (If you look at the cover of the book I linked to, you'll see a color-coded map that relates very closely to those same old-fashioned racial categories your grandpa probably talked about); the only dispute that may exist between us and cavilli-sforza is nothing but a superficial semantic one, which can be easily resolved. I will do that tommorow.

Re: Is Gene Expression racist?

Jason Malloy — Sun, 19 Jan 2003 00:50:59 -0000

Ah, the return of those ever so fair and persuasive klan and nazi references. When arguments all fail its time to fall back on the methods of juvenile emotional debate.

"But when we're comparing sub-groups of humans, with the ability to transer adaptive mutations, this logic no longer applies, unless you're now trying to say that black people aren't human."

Maybe it's my fault for making a previously unclear argument, or perhaps I just have low reading comprehension, but I honestly, honestly, have no idea what you're trying to communicate here. You made a theoretical argument Richard, that argument was that there was some sort of "optimal" level of intelligence that would be more beneficial to have in ANY possible set of environmental circumstances. Maybe in a Cartesian world this might be true (though I'm not too certain why "a little more" intelligence wouldn't always be better in that universe), but in the real world having a bigger and/or more intelligent brain involves trade-offs (some known- others not) that could make selection for this trait either beneficial to survival or not beneficial to survival depending on the specific environmental circumstance. The "transfer of adaptive mutations" and all of those distractions has nothing to do with, and no bearing on my actual argument. There is no a priori assumption that intelligence is the "best" solution, because it is all contextual. If I'm confusing you by jumping around to forking chimps and neanderthals, I will try to clarify: the point of the analogies was that survival doesn't necessarilly require any trait. That is as far as my analogy goes. Please don't take it further. Just trying to get you to look around and see that humans aren't the only living creature. None of this "maybe you think blacks aren't human" inflammatory garbage. Whether it's at the level of phylum, class, order, family, genus, species, or race, no trait should be considered somehow "universally optimal" or beyond contextual benefit to the organism. Get it? Context. You have a bad evolutionary theory Richard. You have already admitted that populations can and do have different statistical distributions of genetic traits (regarding west and east africans). Also, aptitude, personality, and behavior are some of those traits that you have attested to as having genetic components, and that individuals differ in those components. I am telling you right now that no level of intelligence, no kind of personality trait, and no behavioral proclivity that can be found in the entire spectrum of human variation is objectively optimal in EVERY possible selection environment. There is no circumstance what-so-ever where it will be reasonable for me to accept your statements to the contrary. It's ludicrous. There is absolutely no reason to think that different selection environments wouldn't work to select for different distributions of these aptitude, personality, and behavioral traits that are within the catalogue of normal human variance.

Summary: "Now the interesting thing about intelligence is that it's universally a survival value, as I understand intelligence, so there's no genetic reason that one group would develop more or less of it than any other group; it's not something that has localized importance."

In Richard's Manachaen world, evolutionary traits actually are "inferior" and "superior", because he has personally defined them in absolute Platonic values. But in the universe of prudent evolutionary theory, the "superiority" or "inferiority" of a trait, or collection of traits, or distribution of traits within a population is determined by contextual selection pressures. Survival is the only goal, and there are some generally reliable, but no hard-and-fast rules on how to get there. This applies esspecially, and this should go without saying, to all the diversity that exists within normal human variance. Despite what Richard would have anyone believe, no normal human is "inferior" from the stand-point of the universe, and given the right contextual environment anyone of us could have been the template for darwin's optimal survivor.

Re: Is Gene Expression racist?

Richard Bennett — Sat, 18 Jan 2003 22:19:45 -0000

Is Sailer's mind-reading ability symptomatic of his membership in the Master Race, Jason?

Re: Is Gene Expression racist?

Richard Bennett — Sat, 18 Jan 2003 22:14:01 -0000

Jason says: "As Cavilli-Sforza says in "History & Geography of the Human Genes" [via Mr. Sailer]:

"? differences between most sub-Saharan Africans other than Khoisan and Pygmies seem rather small.""

Sailer misrepresents Cavilli-Sforza's findings, and even admits as much in this quote (from Sailer himself):

The New York Times has hailed "Genes, Peoples, and Languages", the new book by Professor Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza, the dean of population geneticists, for "dismantling the idea of race."

In the New York Review of Books, Jared Diamond salutes Cavalli-Sforza for "demolishing scientists' attempts to classify human populations into races in the same way that they classify birds and other species into races".

Cavalli-Sforza himself has written, "The classification into races has proved to be a futile exercise"; and that "The idea of race in the human species serves no purpose."

Don't believe any of this. This is merely a politically correct smoke screen that Cavalli-Sforza regularly pumps out that keeps his life's work -- identifying the myriad races of mankind and compiling their genealogies -- from being defunded by the commissars of acceptable thinking at Stanford.

Frankly, you'd have be seriously deficient to take the racist Sailer's account of Cavilli-Sforza's work over that of Cavilli-Sforza himself. Cavilli-Sforza rejects the idea of race; Sailer embraces it. Cavilli-Sforza recognizes that racial boundaries are arbitrary, and that any way you want to slice it, there is more variation within races than between them.

So how many continents are there, and why?

Re: Is Gene Expression racist?

Richard Bennett — Sat, 18 Jan 2003 21:54:21 -0000

Of course Pioneer wouldn't fund adoption studies, Razib, the whole idea of "race-mixing" is something they're vehemently oppposed to, and in any case these studies have sample sizes too small to prove anything that isn't common sense.

Check the footnotes in The Bell Curve and you'll find everybody the Pioneer Fund supports among them, with the exception of the ones they support to do Holocaust Denial. That's one reason that it's not academically respectable.

Jason, you're still mixing apples and oranges. There are environments where non-humans do better than humans, that's obvious, and the oceans would be one of them. But when we're comparing sub-groups of humans, with the ability to transer adaptive mutations, this logic no longer applies, unless you're now trying to say that black people aren't human. While you may believe that, saying it won't increase your credibility, and saying that black people have smaller brains than white people doesn't do much for it either.

If intelligence isn't a universal survival value in humans (even black ones!), what good is it? Bear in mind that I'm using the term in a broad sense, not merely in a test-score sense, so I would include creativity, intuition, induction, estimation, and long-term memory in the mix as well as the traits measured by IQ tests, which would be short-term memory, vocabularly, analogy, summary, and deduction.

Re: Is Gene Expression racist?

razib — Sat, 18 Jan 2003 20:50:11 -0000

from a private e-mail i just received on non-Pioneer IQ studies:

None of the work by Sandra Scarr, Richard Weinberg and colleagues on the Transracial Adoption Studies were funded by Pioneer. Indeed, no transracial adoption study involving Blacks and Whites has been funded by Pioneer (one on East Asians reviewed by Richard Lynn probably was; the others on East Asian
adoptions by Whites were not).

The great majority of Black-White IQ studies were not funded by Pioneer, including The Bell Curve, or any of the other work by its two authors Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray. The best current review of all that literature, using military, corporate, and higher education samples (N = millions) is

Philip. L. Roth et al., Ethnic Group Differences in Cognitive Ability in Employment and Educational Settings: A Meta-analysis, 54 PERSONNEL PSYCHOL.,
297, 310-14 (2001).

No-one on the Roth et al team were supported by Pioneer.

Only two of the two dozen or more studies of Magnetic Resonance Imaged brain-size/IQ relations showing a 0.40 correlation between brain size and IQ were funded by Pioneer.

The great bulk of work done in behavioral genetics in Intelligence has nothing to do with Pioneer e.g., none of the work done in the Colorado Adoption Project, the Virginia 30,000, the Austrlian Twin Registry, or any of Robert Plomin's work.

Re: Is Gene Expression racist?

Jason Malloy — Sat, 18 Jan 2003 20:25:59 -0000

"Species split off from ancestral lines when a mutation leaves them unable to reproduce with the ancestor species, and that's why humans and apes don't get married, generally speaking."

This is irrelevant to what I was saying or disputing [now, watch the emphasis]:

Richard said: "Now the interesting thing about intelligence is that it's universally a survival value, as I understand intelligence, so there's no genetic reason that one group would develop more or less of it than any other group; it's not something that has localized importance."

Jason said: "Let me put it like this Richard: SOMETHING has to account for, in all those many eons of human evolution, why an ape population could fork, one part of the split could grow more intelligent and survive, while the other part of the split could stay the same in intelligence and survive."

Regardless of the mechanism (which was not in question, or in any way related to my point), higher intelligence in no way has to be thought of as a "univers[al] survival value". Clearly, animals survive that lack it, and ones that have it don't. Did the Neanderthal out-live the chimp? To quote myself:

"Trade-offs, especially the ones necessary for intelligence, are one of the great stories of evolution. A brain is actually a very expensive thing: it eats a lot of energy, it takes a long time to develop, etc."

Do you really believe that the relentless caloric demands of a brain and the 12-15 or so years of care that it takes for a human to become self-reliant aren't going to be liabilities in some evolutionary environments?

If the answer is "yes, I concede that this could be a liability to be selected against in some environments", then your original idea that "there's no reason that one population would be selected for more intelligence than any other group", is theoretically false. You ignore the trade-offs of greater intelligence as if they didn't, or even couldn't exist.
And this doesn't even include the high rates of depression, myopia, and schizophrenia and other "harmful baggage" that go along with greater intelligence, increasing its liability.
And even that doesn't include a million hypotheticals as to why your bold assertion that "EVERY group would select for the SAME DISTRIBUTION of intelligence in ANY POSSIBLE environment" is evolutionary hog-wash.

"I would remind you that African genetic diversity is actually greater than that of any other regional group."

Yes, that makes for a great soundbite, Richard, and you keep repeating it [even after Razib and Troy disputed it], but it only holds true for junk genes. You know, those genes that don't actually do anything but allow scientists to make forensic geneological trails back in time. As Cavilli-Sforza says in "History & Geography of the Human Genes" [via Mr. Sailer]:

"? differences between most sub-Saharan Africans other than Khoisan and Pygmies seem rather small."

Summary: 1)Yes, mutation is nifty but it has nothing to do with this conversation. 2)The idea that there is an "optimal" intelligence that every environment would select for if it could is bogus. 3)The famed genetic diversity of Africa is a myth.

Re: Is Gene Expression racist?

razib — Sat, 18 Jan 2003 20:23:54 -0000

richard,

yes, what you are talking about is the genetic diversity of mtDNA and other neutral genes. there are many lineages. but this sort of thing starts become confusing, because what we mean by "diverse" depends on the subset of genes we look at.

for instance, jason is correct that studies of mtDNA or y-chromosome indicate a lot of genetic diversity & a close relationship between the khoisan & non-khoisan peoples of sub-saharan africa-but what about polymorphic traits dependent on genes that DO SOMETHING and so might result in sharp phenotypic divergences between the khoisan and non-khoisan? some of henry harpending's work indicates that the non-junk genes can give us a more detailed adaptive history of a population than the more steady lineage info we are getting now.

also, as far as genetic diversity goes-i would also suspect from what i know of the history & archaelogy that mtDNA & y chromosome diversity would be much greater in the arch of west africa up to igbo-land (i believe the mande speaking region)-while the great swath that stretches eastward toward the indian ocean and down around the rift toward the cap that is "bantu speaking" would be more uniform as it is the result of a more recent demic expansion.

as far as this statement is concerned:
And as to the assertion of yours that "there actually is very little genetic diversity within Africa" I would remind you that African genetic diversity is actually greater than that of any other regional group.

this depends on what sub-set of genes you are looking at. even though africa populations have been relatively stable for longer than other populations, and so developed many mutations that result in many differentiated lineages-it does not follow that they will be simulteanously diverse in physical adaptation.

Re: Is Gene Expression racist?

Richard Bennett — Sat, 18 Jan 2003 16:54:24 -0000

And as to the assertion of yours that "there actually is very little genetic diversity within Africa" I would remind you that African genetic diversity is actually greater than that of any other regional group.

This is generally ascribed to its longer history, and it's about point 2 or 3 in Genetics of Human Populations 101.