4 ms·

The elephant in the room here is ethnicity. Which is what eugenics usually equates to. Sure, I'm wary of the determinism, but I'm more wary of the prejudgement

The elephant in the room here is ethnicity. Which is what eugenics usually equates to. Sure, I'm wary of the determinism, but I'm more wary of the prejudgement of a person based on their ethnicity, and the scientific pretense that could be stacked onto that prejudice. > They surveyed almost 2,000 primary school teachers and parents about their perceptions of genetic influence on a number of traits, including intelligence, and found that on the whole, both teachers and parents rated genetics as being just as important as the environment This is precisely the kind of "begging the question" that makes me doubt the whole enterprise. What do grade school teachers know of the scientific literature? Isn't it more likely that they just see a minority kid in the class underperforming and think, "well, that's minorities for you"? And isn't it possible that a more rarefied form of this commonsensical stupidity is getting fed into such purely statistical pursuits as genetic research?

west725 8y ago
The elephant in the room is this: https://i.imgur.com/RvTi7gs.jpg https://i.imgur.com/RvTi7gs.jpg
Symmetry 8y ago
Because I think that the work being done on the genetic basis of IQ is good science and because I don't think that there are substantial genetic IQ differences I believe that research will serve to provide evidence against racism. Intelligence is pretty much always better unlike stuff like height or agreeableness. It's governed by a huge number of genes in complex ways. Humans went through a genetic choke-point not too long ago and we're very genetically homogeneous compared to most species. There are some important genetic racial difference but they all seem to be simple stuff involving single proteins, melanin production levels being a prime example.
- iguy 8y ago
  I'm not so sure. For example, the Tibetan adaptations to altitude are much better than those in the Andes... and when last I checked it was thought that this might come from Neanderthal or Denisovan ancestors. Or last week's news about adaptations to diving -- one tiny niche which happens to be relatively easy to study: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16883566 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16883566
  - Symmetry 8y ago
    And I was very surprised by the diving adaptation story last week until I got to the part where they found that the adaptation was just a single gene. And I wouldn't be surprised that some environmental adaptations might be better than others given that relatively little evolutionary time has passed and the barriers for the transfer of altitude adaptations from one high altitude region to another. But there are no such barriers to the transfer of IQ enhancing alleles, those will help you everywhere.
    - iguy 8y ago
      OK, single gene effects are the easy ones to find, so we find them first. We know height is massively polygenetic though. The point of the Tibetan story is that they (may) benefit from > 200k years of adaptation to that geography, via these ancestral humans. Whereas the Andean people had < 10k years. Re transfer of IQ, why is it always beneficial? There are always trade-offs -- more blood to the brain is going to make it harder to survive famines, for instance. Some monkey species are dumber than others because it was not profitable in their niche. Domesticated herbivores are dumb too. It could be that this doesn't apply to us, e.g. if we are the result of some recent breakthrough.
      - Symmetry 8y ago
        There are certainly tradeoffs with IQ. There one allele that raises your IQ a bunch but has a good chance of causing you to die early. And if you had a domesticated species of human I'd expect that that might hurt intelligence. But given that humans' primary competition has been other humans and given that this is true the world over I expect that IQ would be roughly equally valuable everywhere and so we shouldn't see big differences, genetically, between populations like you do with adaptations to other sorts of particular environments.
        iguy 8y ago
        In the western word, today's environment seems to select against IQ -- number of children anti-correlates. This wasn't true 200, 300 years ago. So that's one example of two environments which value this trait very differently. Sure, one of them is highly unusual... The flores island hobbits are another example, where it seems that humaniods evolved quite dramatically smaller brains. But islands are also unusual, obviously.
- khhh35575544 8y ago
  Not true. The latest work is showing that racial differences are real and determinant of IQ. I understand that this is unpalatable, and perhaps not something we should dwell upon too far. But if it comes to an argument we should admit the truth, however unpleasant.
nabla9 8y ago
White nationalists are currently discovering that pure breed is very rare thanks to 23andMe and other cheap genetic tests and going into denial. I suspect that sexual selection and social class will become bigger elephants in the room than ethnicity in the future. Traditional class societies had genetic bottleneck between social classes and ethnicity. There was small flow from small upper classes to lower classes (bastards) but upward selection was restricted for a long time. Smart, healthy and beautiful peasant was likely to stay a peasant and marry from the neighborhood. Stupid ugly aristocrat was likely to stay a aristocrat and marry someone from his class. People were not genetically that different. If there was genetic disadvantage it was with higher classes. In the last 100 years there has been more movement between classes and people move and travel more. Young educated people marry people around the world. There is a real fear that upper social class will have real gene advantage that makes them smarter, beautiful and healthier and lower classes will have relative disadvantage.

west725 8y ago

The elephant in the room is this: https://i.imgur.com/RvTi7gs.jpg https://i.imgur.com/RvTi7gs.jpg

Symmetry 8y ago

Because I think that the work being done on the genetic basis of IQ is good science and because I don't think that there are substantial genetic IQ differences I believe that research will serve to provide evidence against racism. Intelligence is pretty much always better unlike stuff like height or agreeableness. It's governed by a huge number of genes in complex ways. Humans went through a genetic choke-point not too long ago and we're very genetically homogeneous compared to most species. There are some important genetic racial difference but they all seem to be simple stuff involving single proteins, melanin production levels being a prime example.

iguy 8y ago
I'm not so sure. For example, the Tibetan adaptations to altitude are much better than those in the Andes... and when last I checked it was thought that this might come from Neanderthal or Denisovan ancestors. Or last week's news about adaptations to diving -- one tiny niche which happens to be relatively easy to study: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16883566 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16883566
- Symmetry 8y ago
  And I was very surprised by the diving adaptation story last week until I got to the part where they found that the adaptation was just a single gene. And I wouldn't be surprised that some environmental adaptations might be better than others given that relatively little evolutionary time has passed and the barriers for the transfer of altitude adaptations from one high altitude region to another. But there are no such barriers to the transfer of IQ enhancing alleles, those will help you everywhere.
  - iguy 8y ago
    OK, single gene effects are the easy ones to find, so we find them first. We know height is massively polygenetic though. The point of the Tibetan story is that they (may) benefit from > 200k years of adaptation to that geography, via these ancestral humans. Whereas the Andean people had < 10k years. Re transfer of IQ, why is it always beneficial? There are always trade-offs -- more blood to the brain is going to make it harder to survive famines, for instance. Some monkey species are dumber than others because it was not profitable in their niche. Domesticated herbivores are dumb too. It could be that this doesn't apply to us, e.g. if we are the result of some recent breakthrough.
    - Symmetry 8y ago
      There are certainly tradeoffs with IQ. There one allele that raises your IQ a bunch but has a good chance of causing you to die early. And if you had a domesticated species of human I'd expect that that might hurt intelligence. But given that humans' primary competition has been other humans and given that this is true the world over I expect that IQ would be roughly equally valuable everywhere and so we shouldn't see big differences, genetically, between populations like you do with adaptations to other sorts of particular environments.
      - iguy 8y ago
        In the western word, today's environment seems to select against IQ -- number of children anti-correlates. This wasn't true 200, 300 years ago. So that's one example of two environments which value this trait very differently. Sure, one of them is highly unusual... The flores island hobbits are another example, where it seems that humaniods evolved quite dramatically smaller brains. But islands are also unusual, obviously.
khhh35575544 8y ago
Not true. The latest work is showing that racial differences are real and determinant of IQ. I understand that this is unpalatable, and perhaps not something we should dwell upon too far. But if it comes to an argument we should admit the truth, however unpleasant.

nabla9 8y ago

White nationalists are currently discovering that pure breed is very rare thanks to 23andMe and other cheap genetic tests and going into denial. I suspect that sexual selection and social class will become bigger elephants in the room than ethnicity in the future. Traditional class societies had genetic bottleneck between social classes and ethnicity. There was small flow from small upper classes to lower classes (bastards) but upward selection was restricted for a long time. Smart, healthy and beautiful peasant was likely to stay a peasant and marry from the neighborhood. Stupid ugly aristocrat was likely to stay a aristocrat and marry someone from his class. People were not genetically that different. If there was genetic disadvantage it was with higher classes. In the last 100 years there has been more movement between classes and people move and travel more. Young educated people marry people around the world. There is a real fear that upper social class will have real gene advantage that makes them smarter, beautiful and healthier and lower classes will have relative disadvantage.