10 ms·

How about a correlation between IQ and race. It seems that no one will touch the subject out of fear the it would end their career.

nitwit005 7y ago
A racial label doesn't tell you much of anything about their underlying ancestry or genetics. Here in the US you can easily find people who identify as white or black who have a mix of European, African and Native American ancestry. There are people looking for genes influencing intelligence, which is a more practical thing to look for.
- Animats 7y ago
  It's been tried using 23andMe genetic data for over a million people.[1] No one gene seems to have a large effect, “Yet when we analyze the combined effects of many genetic variants, taken together they can predict the length of a person’s formal education as well as demographic factors.” [1] https://blog.23andme.com/23andme-research/massive-study-on-the-genetics-of-educational-attainment/ https://blog.23andme.com/23andme-research/massive-study-on-t...
  - soyiuz 7y ago
    Or, it might be evidence of systematic racism. Would it surprise you that the genetic bouquet associated with people of color would also correlate with a long history of racism, which includes poverty and denial of education?
  - Nasrudith 7y ago
    Well yeah - at that point you could trivially start mapping relations in those groups which to families who are advantaged materially or culturally in the sense that nine year olds usually only have access to genetics textbooks and latest papers lying around their home if their parents are genetics professors. I am pretty sure the British royal family has distinctive combinations of genes which are of course strongly correlated with a college education!
- toasterlovin 7y ago
  > A racial label doesn't tell you much of anything about their underlying ancestry or genetics. It absolutely does, which is why medical practitioners ask for race. Different races have different susceptibility to various medical conditions, for genetic reasons (even if we don’t understand the causal mechanisms yet).
  - soyiuz 7y ago
    Please review your basic understanding of race as per my comments above. If you still think there are five races or whatever, you are living way in the past century.
    - toomim 7y ago
      Your argument is that people do not teach Race in the same way anymore. I think that your implication is that the previous way of teaching Race was wrong -- however, this very article is making the point that political activism is changing the way that people teach, and politics has certainly affected how we teach Race -- the most politically-charged topic of them all! So when you say "you are living in the past century", that could be a compliment -- it could say that the author is not being censored or brainwashed by a political orthodoxy. If you actually want to improve his understanding of Race, I'd suggest providing him with some data that contradicts his statements, rather than just dismissing him as old-fashioned. Because on the other side of that, it implies that you could just be getting lost in a fashion.
- barry-cotter 7y ago
  https://www.ias.ac.in/public/Volumes/jgen/089/04/0417-0423.pdf https://www.ias.ac.in/public/Volumes/jgen/089/04/0417-0423.p... Comparing genetic ancestry and self-reported race/ethnicity in a multiethnic population in New York City Self-reported race/ethnicity is frequently used in epidemiological studies to assess an individual’s background origin. How- ever, in admixed populations such as Hispanic, self-reported race/ethnicity may not accurately represent them genetically because they are admixed with European, African and Native American ancestry. We estimated the proportions of genetic admixture in an ethnically diverse population of 396 mothers and 188 of their children with 35 ancestry informative mark- ers (AIMs) using the STRUCTURE version 2.2 program. The majority of the markers showed significant deviation from Hardy–Weinberg equilibrium in our study population. In mothers self-identified as Black and White, the imputed ancestry proportions were 77.6% African and 75.1% European respectively, while the racial composition among self-identified His- panics was 29.2% European, 26.0% African, and 44.8% Native American. We also investigated the utility of AIMs by showing the improved fitness of models in paraoxanase-1 genotype–phenotype associations after incorporating AIMs; however, the im- provement was moderate at best. In summary, a minimal set of 35 AIMs is sufficient to detect population stratification and estimate the proportion of individual genetic admixture; however, the utility of these markers remains questionable.
dtoma 7y ago
What's the use about a study on _correlation_ between these two things? You could also have a study on correlation between IQ and poverty, IQ and access to education... Not to mention, what's the point of IQ anyway? Maybe no one is picking up the subject because it would be a waste of time?
- traverseda 7y ago
  Well IQ is an attempt to measure the mythical G (general intelligence, if there is such a thing), and more studies in that direction would allow you to better control for various factors relating to G, and figure out what interventions are best for increasing G. I'd personally consider those other studies to be more important than race and IQ, and certainly more palatable. I think it's possible that the race/IQ factor has made that whole field untenable though. I very much doubt it's because it's a waste of time, figuring out what interventions allow people to be smarter, to flourish, is pretty important. I'm pretty glad we got rid of lead paint, and leaded gasoline. That's a very visible and important intervention of the type that IQ research would help with. A lot of related research goes on, but it seems like it very rarely touches directly on the subject of IQ. That being said it's understandable when any IQ researcher's research would be immediately weaponized by racists, no matter how useful it could be. Most of the examples you cite (race, education, economic background) would not be useful in-and-of them-self (at least in a just world) but would be useful to help control for those factors in other research.
  - threatofrain 7y ago
    General intelligence is as dubious as general AI in that performance in one domain can predict performance in other domains, and the degree to which that’s possible is attributed to general intelligence.
    - JamesBarney 7y ago
      General intelligence was a statistical artifact discovered from testing. It basically a theory that if you do well on a history test you'll probably do well on a math test.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
tenpies 7y ago
Not even race, but just suggesting that evolutionary psychology is a valid scientific field can get you crucified in some circles. Somehow the human brain avoided all sexual selection forces, environmental pressures, and even difference between the sexes; but everything else in our bodies was at the complete mercy of these factors.
- stephencanon 7y ago
  But evo psych isn't a valid scientific field; there's no way to go back and conduct experiments to validate hypotheses. It's a bunch of nonsense just-so stories that appeal to people's existing biases. It's horoscopes-and-crystals-woo dressed up in the language of science.
  - gnaritas 7y ago
    > there's no way to go back and conduct experiments to validate hypotheses. That's not required to do science. The notion one must be able to go back in time to prove evolution is absurd. Evolution happens, that's a fact. No system in the body, including the brain, is untouched by its processes and consequences.
  - shard972 7y ago
    But we can test people who exist today who evolved independently over millenniums? Why is it nonsense to think that maybe humans who mostly existed in hunter gatherer societies for thousands of years would face different evolutionary pressures than agricultural societies? Is it really insane to believe the Sentinelese have a difference in genetic ability to engage in abstract thinking compared ashkenazi jews?
  - outlace 7y ago
    It's just as valid as evolutionary biology in general. You can say there are a lot of bad evo psych studies out there but that doesn't mean it's impossible to make scientific inferences about evo psych. You can run experiments with animal models and intervene on sexual selective pressures and see the outcomes.
  - 7y ago
dragonwriter 7y ago
> How about a correlation between IQ and race. It seems that no one will touch the subject out of fear the it would end their career. Uh, this has been and continues to be extensively studied (along with other correlates of each, causal mechanisms, etc.), so the “no one will touch it” claim is rather firmly empirically refuted.
wesleywt 7y ago
Because using a flawed test to make racist generalisations about Africans, who are the most genetically diverse racial group is not a good idea?

nitwit005 7y ago

A racial label doesn't tell you much of anything about their underlying ancestry or genetics. Here in the US you can easily find people who identify as white or black who have a mix of European, African and Native American ancestry. There are people looking for genes influencing intelligence, which is a more practical thing to look for.

Animats 7y ago
It's been tried using 23andMe genetic data for over a million people.[1] No one gene seems to have a large effect, “Yet when we analyze the combined effects of many genetic variants, taken together they can predict the length of a person’s formal education as well as demographic factors.” [1] https://blog.23andme.com/23andme-research/massive-study-on-the-genetics-of-educational-attainment/ https://blog.23andme.com/23andme-research/massive-study-on-t...
- soyiuz 7y ago
  Or, it might be evidence of systematic racism. Would it surprise you that the genetic bouquet associated with people of color would also correlate with a long history of racism, which includes poverty and denial of education?
- Nasrudith 7y ago
  Well yeah - at that point you could trivially start mapping relations in those groups which to families who are advantaged materially or culturally in the sense that nine year olds usually only have access to genetics textbooks and latest papers lying around their home if their parents are genetics professors. I am pretty sure the British royal family has distinctive combinations of genes which are of course strongly correlated with a college education!
toasterlovin 7y ago
> A racial label doesn't tell you much of anything about their underlying ancestry or genetics. It absolutely does, which is why medical practitioners ask for race. Different races have different susceptibility to various medical conditions, for genetic reasons (even if we don’t understand the causal mechanisms yet).
- soyiuz 7y ago
  Please review your basic understanding of race as per my comments above. If you still think there are five races or whatever, you are living way in the past century.
  - toomim 7y ago
    Your argument is that people do not teach Race in the same way anymore. I think that your implication is that the previous way of teaching Race was wrong -- however, this very article is making the point that political activism is changing the way that people teach, and politics has certainly affected how we teach Race -- the most politically-charged topic of them all! So when you say "you are living in the past century", that could be a compliment -- it could say that the author is not being censored or brainwashed by a political orthodoxy. If you actually want to improve his understanding of Race, I'd suggest providing him with some data that contradicts his statements, rather than just dismissing him as old-fashioned. Because on the other side of that, it implies that you could just be getting lost in a fashion.
barry-cotter 7y ago
https://www.ias.ac.in/public/Volumes/jgen/089/04/0417-0423.pdf https://www.ias.ac.in/public/Volumes/jgen/089/04/0417-0423.p... Comparing genetic ancestry and self-reported race/ethnicity in a multiethnic population in New York City Self-reported race/ethnicity is frequently used in epidemiological studies to assess an individual’s background origin. How- ever, in admixed populations such as Hispanic, self-reported race/ethnicity may not accurately represent them genetically because they are admixed with European, African and Native American ancestry. We estimated the proportions of genetic admixture in an ethnically diverse population of 396 mothers and 188 of their children with 35 ancestry informative mark- ers (AIMs) using the STRUCTURE version 2.2 program. The majority of the markers showed significant deviation from Hardy–Weinberg equilibrium in our study population. In mothers self-identified as Black and White, the imputed ancestry proportions were 77.6% African and 75.1% European respectively, while the racial composition among self-identified His- panics was 29.2% European, 26.0% African, and 44.8% Native American. We also investigated the utility of AIMs by showing the improved fitness of models in paraoxanase-1 genotype–phenotype associations after incorporating AIMs; however, the im- provement was moderate at best. In summary, a minimal set of 35 AIMs is sufficient to detect population stratification and estimate the proportion of individual genetic admixture; however, the utility of these markers remains questionable.

dtoma 7y ago

What's the use about a study on _correlation_ between these two things? You could also have a study on correlation between IQ and poverty, IQ and access to education... Not to mention, what's the point of IQ anyway? Maybe no one is picking up the subject because it would be a waste of time?

traverseda 7y ago
Well IQ is an attempt to measure the mythical G (general intelligence, if there is such a thing), and more studies in that direction would allow you to better control for various factors relating to G, and figure out what interventions are best for increasing G. I'd personally consider those other studies to be more important than race and IQ, and certainly more palatable. I think it's possible that the race/IQ factor has made that whole field untenable though. I very much doubt it's because it's a waste of time, figuring out what interventions allow people to be smarter, to flourish, is pretty important. I'm pretty glad we got rid of lead paint, and leaded gasoline. That's a very visible and important intervention of the type that IQ research would help with. A lot of related research goes on, but it seems like it very rarely touches directly on the subject of IQ. That being said it's understandable when any IQ researcher's research would be immediately weaponized by racists, no matter how useful it could be. Most of the examples you cite (race, education, economic background) would not be useful in-and-of them-self (at least in a just world) but would be useful to help control for those factors in other research.
- threatofrain 7y ago
  General intelligence is as dubious as general AI in that performance in one domain can predict performance in other domains, and the degree to which that’s possible is attributed to general intelligence.
  - JamesBarney 7y ago
    General intelligence was a statistical artifact discovered from testing. It basically a theory that if you do well on a history test you'll probably do well on a math test.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

tenpies 7y ago

Not even race, but just suggesting that evolutionary psychology is a valid scientific field can get you crucified in some circles. Somehow the human brain avoided all sexual selection forces, environmental pressures, and even difference between the sexes; but everything else in our bodies was at the complete mercy of these factors.

stephencanon 7y ago
But evo psych isn't a valid scientific field; there's no way to go back and conduct experiments to validate hypotheses. It's a bunch of nonsense just-so stories that appeal to people's existing biases. It's horoscopes-and-crystals-woo dressed up in the language of science.
- gnaritas 7y ago
  > there's no way to go back and conduct experiments to validate hypotheses. That's not required to do science. The notion one must be able to go back in time to prove evolution is absurd. Evolution happens, that's a fact. No system in the body, including the brain, is untouched by its processes and consequences.
- shard972 7y ago
  But we can test people who exist today who evolved independently over millenniums? Why is it nonsense to think that maybe humans who mostly existed in hunter gatherer societies for thousands of years would face different evolutionary pressures than agricultural societies? Is it really insane to believe the Sentinelese have a difference in genetic ability to engage in abstract thinking compared ashkenazi jews?
- outlace 7y ago
  It's just as valid as evolutionary biology in general. You can say there are a lot of bad evo psych studies out there but that doesn't mean it's impossible to make scientific inferences about evo psych. You can run experiments with animal models and intervene on sexual selective pressures and see the outcomes.
- 7y ago

dragonwriter 7y ago

> How about a correlation between IQ and race. It seems that no one will touch the subject out of fear the it would end their career. Uh, this has been and continues to be extensively studied (along with other correlates of each, causal mechanisms, etc.), so the “no one will touch it” claim is rather firmly empirically refuted.

wesleywt 7y ago

Because using a flawed test to make racist generalisations about Africans, who are the most genetically diverse racial group is not a good idea?