7 ms·

Turkheimer by no means represents a consensus view in genetic research. Moreover, I find some of his positions to be quite at odds with my view of what scientif

by ellyagg 15y ago

Turkheimer by no means represents a consensus view in genetic research. Moreover, I find some of his positions to be quite at odds with my view of what scientific philosophy should be. For example, he believes that the study of race and IQ is not a "legitimate matter for scientific inquiry". You can spin all the pseudoscientific rationalizations you want to make that claim, but as soon as you say that some subject is off limits, and that subject just happens to be very related to a taboo social and political topic, your motivations become suspect in my opinion. But then that's why, apropos of the linked article's ending, I'm a libertarian.

tokenadult 15y ago
Turkheimer by no means represents a consensus view in genetic research Who else would you suggest? One of the links I put in my first reply here is co-authored by Bouchard, Gottesman, and Johnson (all of whom I know personally, as they are based at the university where I join their discussions of human behavioral genetics research), and if they are not part of the mainstream, who is? What is the citation for the statement you attribute to Turkheimer and put in quotation marks in your comment? Where could an interested reader look up its context? I invite readers to take a look at Turkheimer's list of publications http://people.virginia.edu/~ent3c/vita1_turkheimer.htm http://people.virginia.edu/~ent3c/vita1_turkheimer.htm and see for themselves how his writings fit into current literature on human behavioral genetics. After edit: I just remembered that another reason I especially like recommending Turkheimer's writings, besides the fact that he is an eminent authority on the facts he writes about, is that he is a researcher who changes his opinion on the basis of evidence. I thought that Turkheimer is an especially interesting example for Eliezer in that regard, as Eliezer writes a lot about human beings examining their unspoken biases and fitting their thinking to evidence. Here is a link a bibliography to several scholarly, recent sources about genetic study of human populations, including how uninformative the socially determined category of "race" is in genetic investigations: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:WeijiBaikeBianji/AnthropologyHumanBiologyRaceCitations http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:WeijiBaikeBianji/Anthropol... Most bloggers don't look up scholarly sources like this, but my respect for my fellow HN participants prompts me to make use of my alma mater's university library and other libraries in my town to look up the most reliable sources and share them here.
lukeschlather 15y ago
Race and IQ are not scientifically precise tools. Both are fundamentally subjective. Why do we say that Barack Obama is a black man and not a white man? If we are to have a logically precise definition of race, both statements are true or neither is. In a genetic context, most African-Americans are just as much white as black. But in a study comparing disease rates among ethnic groups, African-Americans and Caucasians are treated as disjoint sets. IQ is just plain subjective. You would likely get similar results by sitting the designers of the IQ test one on one in a room with someone, and then having them rate the people they talked to by how much they were interested in the conversation. I don't think that Turkheimer is saying that you can't look at race and IQ in a scientific context. What he's saying is that the concepts of race and IQ are more grounded in opinion than fact, and when we see them in scientific studies we should be wary if they are not mentioned in the same breath as other subjective classifications like religion or political affiliation.
- Jach 15y ago
  Do you think that a person with measured IQ of 70 is going to have just as foo (e.g. "easy a life", "much success", etc.) as a person with measured IQ of 130? Your overall position sounds to me like you want crisp, 1-bit, binary, black-or-white definitions or measures for everything, which is a pretty absurd demand. The real-world is n-bit. If you're looking for mathematically rigorous tools, fuzzy logic and probability theory help a lot in this area. The race problem isn't that hard qualitatively, either: part of the reason we say Obama is a black man is because he says he is himself, another reason is because his skin is more on the darker side of the human skin scale, without prior tanning, than others. You can come up with other reasons I'm sure. You can also go down to the genetic context if you wish, but I'm sure you know the public has been beaten over the head enough times for the past however many decades that race in a genetic context isn't quite as visible as in a visual or cultural context. (Depending on your samples, anyway.)
  - lukeschlather 15y ago
    I don't want 1-bit binaries. In fact, I want acknowledgement of the n-dimensional n-bit nature of the phenomena we call human beings. IQ and race both are trying to fit classifications that properly involve kilobytes if not megabytes of data into convenient oversimplifications that comfortably sit in a single byte.
jberryman 15y ago
> For example, he believes that the study of race and IQ is not a "legitimate matter for scientific inquiry". Define "race" in a way that is scientifically rigorous and whose members can be classified in an objective, non-arbitrary way. To save you the trouble, after mucking around with measuring skull shapes etc. you'd eventually find the only objective classifications were based on the genes themselves and gene expression anyway, and none of the resulting classifications of people looked like your original notion of "race" anyway. It's probably possible to study "race" scientifically, but you probably don't learn much by doing so.
- barry-cotter 15y ago
  Genetic cluster analysis of the microsatellite markers produced four major clusters, which showed near-perfect correspondence with the four self-reported race/ethnicity categories. Of 3,636 subjects of varying race/ethnicity, only 5 (0.14%) showed genetic cluster membership different from their self-identified race/ethnicity.
  - huxley 15y ago
    One major factor to consider when talking about race isn't how YOU self-identify, but how other's identify you. So perhaps "self-identification" will correspond more closely to the markers than if I was to identify the racial category. As well, that study looked at the US population which is clumped by historical factors in ways that may not apply worldwide.
    - barry-cotter 15y ago
      On self versus other identification I would expect differences to exist, and that those differences would depend on society, culture and environment but within a pretty small range. Here's another study on distinguishing ancestry by continent An ancestry informative marker set for determining continental origin: validation and extension using human genome diversity panels: http://www.biomedcentral.com/1471-2156/10/39 http://www.biomedcentral.com/1471-2156/10/39 It only uses 93 SNPs and is also reliable, except for distinguishing South Asians from West Eurasians.

by ellyagg 15y ago

tokenadult 15y ago

Turkheimer by no means represents a consensus view in genetic research Who else would you suggest? One of the links I put in my first reply here is co-authored by Bouchard, Gottesman, and Johnson (all of whom I know personally, as they are based at the university where I join their discussions of human behavioral genetics research), and if they are not part of the mainstream, who is? What is the citation for the statement you attribute to Turkheimer and put in quotation marks in your comment? Where could an interested reader look up its context? I invite readers to take a look at Turkheimer's list of publications http://people.virginia.edu/~ent3c/vita1_turkheimer.htm http://people.virginia.edu/~ent3c/vita1_turkheimer.htm and see for themselves how his writings fit into current literature on human behavioral genetics. After edit: I just remembered that another reason I especially like recommending Turkheimer's writings, besides the fact that he is an eminent authority on the facts he writes about, is that he is a researcher who changes his opinion on the basis of evidence. I thought that Turkheimer is an especially interesting example for Eliezer in that regard, as Eliezer writes a lot about human beings examining their unspoken biases and fitting their thinking to evidence. Here is a link a bibliography to several scholarly, recent sources about genetic study of human populations, including how uninformative the socially determined category of "race" is in genetic investigations: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:WeijiBaikeBianji/AnthropologyHumanBiologyRaceCitations http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:WeijiBaikeBianji/Anthropol... Most bloggers don't look up scholarly sources like this, but my respect for my fellow HN participants prompts me to make use of my alma mater's university library and other libraries in my town to look up the most reliable sources and share them here.

lukeschlather 15y ago

Race and IQ are not scientifically precise tools. Both are fundamentally subjective. Why do we say that Barack Obama is a black man and not a white man? If we are to have a logically precise definition of race, both statements are true or neither is. In a genetic context, most African-Americans are just as much white as black. But in a study comparing disease rates among ethnic groups, African-Americans and Caucasians are treated as disjoint sets. IQ is just plain subjective. You would likely get similar results by sitting the designers of the IQ test one on one in a room with someone, and then having them rate the people they talked to by how much they were interested in the conversation. I don't think that Turkheimer is saying that you can't look at race and IQ in a scientific context. What he's saying is that the concepts of race and IQ are more grounded in opinion than fact, and when we see them in scientific studies we should be wary if they are not mentioned in the same breath as other subjective classifications like religion or political affiliation.

Jach 15y ago
Do you think that a person with measured IQ of 70 is going to have just as foo (e.g. "easy a life", "much success", etc.) as a person with measured IQ of 130? Your overall position sounds to me like you want crisp, 1-bit, binary, black-or-white definitions or measures for everything, which is a pretty absurd demand. The real-world is n-bit. If you're looking for mathematically rigorous tools, fuzzy logic and probability theory help a lot in this area. The race problem isn't that hard qualitatively, either: part of the reason we say Obama is a black man is because he says he is himself, another reason is because his skin is more on the darker side of the human skin scale, without prior tanning, than others. You can come up with other reasons I'm sure. You can also go down to the genetic context if you wish, but I'm sure you know the public has been beaten over the head enough times for the past however many decades that race in a genetic context isn't quite as visible as in a visual or cultural context. (Depending on your samples, anyway.)
- lukeschlather 15y ago
  I don't want 1-bit binaries. In fact, I want acknowledgement of the n-dimensional n-bit nature of the phenomena we call human beings. IQ and race both are trying to fit classifications that properly involve kilobytes if not megabytes of data into convenient oversimplifications that comfortably sit in a single byte.

jberryman 15y ago

> For example, he believes that the study of race and IQ is not a "legitimate matter for scientific inquiry". Define "race" in a way that is scientifically rigorous and whose members can be classified in an objective, non-arbitrary way. To save you the trouble, after mucking around with measuring skull shapes etc. you'd eventually find the only objective classifications were based on the genes themselves and gene expression anyway, and none of the resulting classifications of people looked like your original notion of "race" anyway. It's probably possible to study "race" scientifically, but you probably don't learn much by doing so.

barry-cotter 15y ago
Genetic cluster analysis of the microsatellite markers produced four major clusters, which showed near-perfect correspondence with the four self-reported race/ethnicity categories. Of 3,636 subjects of varying race/ethnicity, only 5 (0.14%) showed genetic cluster membership different from their self-identified race/ethnicity.
- huxley 15y ago
  One major factor to consider when talking about race isn't how YOU self-identify, but how other's identify you. So perhaps "self-identification" will correspond more closely to the markers than if I was to identify the racial category. As well, that study looked at the US population which is clumped by historical factors in ways that may not apply worldwide.
  - barry-cotter 15y ago
    On self versus other identification I would expect differences to exist, and that those differences would depend on society, culture and environment but within a pretty small range. Here's another study on distinguishing ancestry by continent An ancestry informative marker set for determining continental origin: validation and extension using human genome diversity panels: http://www.biomedcentral.com/1471-2156/10/39 http://www.biomedcentral.com/1471-2156/10/39 It only uses 93 SNPs and is also reliable, except for distinguishing South Asians from West Eurasians.