4 ms·

Is someone able to tell me what about the genetics, race and IQ stuff is backed by evidence and what part is pure prejudice?

nikanj 11mo ago
Probably not, because the evidence itself is not created in a vacuum. There is no objective way to measure IQ "stuff", so depending on the methods picked you get wildly different results
- focusgroup0 11mo ago
  >There is no objective way to measure IQ "stuff" SAT + GPA are proxies for "IQ stuff" and are highly predictive of future academic success: https://international.collegeboard.org/toolkit/sat-policy/understanding-sat/predictive-validity https://international.collegeboard.org/toolkit/sat-policy/un...
  - y0eswddl 11mo ago
    so is zip code...
  - cwmma 11mo ago
    So first off, no shit the college board things the SAT measures good stuff, it's their test. Second nobody said the SATs don't measure something, but that something is ability to take an SAT test which is highly predictive of how well you can take other tests. Which as our society puts lots of stock into tests isn't nothing but it's not measuring anything inate.
graemep 11mo ago
Given he said it in 2007, pretty much no evidence to back it up. Genetic differences between races are small compared to those within races, so much so that the concept of races does not really stand up scientifically. He seemed to have been basing the comments on IQ tests, which are not really a good way of comparing groups of people with different cultures or education. They score an individual within a group of comparable individuals. It is worth noting that if he had made the same statement in the first half of the 20th century it would have been mainstream science, but even then it was not so much supported by evidence but supported by a lack of evidence showing otherwise.
- EnPissant 11mo ago
  > Genetic differences between races are small compared to those within races. That is a very misleading statement. Height differences within sexes are also greater than between sexes, and yet most men are taller than most women.
  - cwmma 11mo ago
    No your the one that's being misleading, genetics isn't height and race isn't a coherent genetic category. It should be noted that Watson knew this hence why he was focused on the one thing you can say very definitely about black people in America, that they have darker skin then white people and thus was trying to tie melanin to to intelegence.
    - EnPissant 11mo ago
      Distributions are distributions. I have not stated anything on the race and intelligence issue. I am just calling out a statistical fallacy.
  - graemep 11mo ago
    There are multiple significant biological differences between the sexes. There are not between races. Different races do not have entirely different organs for a start!
    - EnPissant 11mo ago
      The parent to my post shared a common fallacy, and I’m just showing how distributions work in a way that most people will agree with and understand. You should appreciate my post if you are interested in proper statistical comprehension.
- schemester 11mo ago
  Nonsense. By 2007 it was already a settled matter. There had been decades of attempts to tease out environmental influences. We’d seen that no amount of education funding, government employment, government schools, adoption by white parents, or any other way of approaching the matter would boost black test scores close to whites’ in America. Nor could blacks find a way themselves to do it, not in any locality. It was also clear by that time that serious environmental influences on individuals were small relative to the observed performance differences between blacks and whites, which meant the theory that its environment would imply insane levels of deprivation that weren’t happening. Social scientists had already given up.
patall 11mo ago
He probably made up his own 'evidence', like white boys performing better than black boys when ignoring socioeconomic background. Today, I, as a geneticist, am not aware of any links between race (in the american sense) and intelligence. Jim Watson was, from my view, emotionally stuck in the fourties. Even if it was true, you wouldn't tell a female grad student to their face that they belong in the kitchen. Yet he did say that (less than 15 years ago) to one of my former colleagues.
morgengold 11mo ago
thanks graemep andand patall for taking the time. It is amazing to see a man of high intelligence like Watson is not able to base is views on the evidence. For me, I work usally with the assumption: "Even if there existed small differences IQ between races explained by genetics, it never tells you something about the individual before you." Would you say this is a valid belief?
- cwmma 11mo ago
  That's like saying: "Even if there was small differences in honesty caused by being a Spaniard, it never tells you something about the individual before you." When there is no actual evidence of Spaniards being dishonest and the only people making the argument seem to already have a beef with the people of Spain.
somenameforme 11mo ago
I think the Minnesota Transracial Adoption Study [1] is the most interesting study on this question. It was intended to be a study that would, once and forever, put to rest any question of race and intelligence. You had numerous well-to-do white families, with mean IQ a sigma above the mean, adopt children from a variety of different races. The study then tracked these families and their outcomes while working to ensure relative balance in education, opportunity, identical testing standards, and every other variable they could reasonably control. However, in the end there was a 18 point IQ difference, at age 17, between the adopted white children (105.5) and the adopted black children (83.7). Half white/black children fell almost exactly in between (93.2). The study also had some interesting accidental (?) control variables in that some children had been racially misclassified, but their IQs ended up aligning with their race rather than their identity. Of course one can still argue that this is environmental, by appealing to e.g. prenatal or social biases and the like, but I think there is no evidence based argument that there is no difference between races, even when every effort is made to eliminate as many viable environmental factors as possible. Obviously the mean doesn't define the individual. There are plenty of high IQ black individuals, and plenty of low IQ white individuals. But group differences are nonetheless very real. [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minnesota_Transracial_Adoption_Study https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minnesota_Transracial_Adoption...
- ghtbircshotbe 11mo ago
  Now find a state that is majority black where whites are treated as second class citizens and redo the experiment.
  - kkkqkqkqkqlqlql 11mo ago
    And an actual test for intelligence. Easy, right?
  - 1000units 11mo ago
    [flagged]
    - 11mo ago
arp242 11mo ago
Maybe being ginger is connected to IQ. Or maybe a particular ear shape or toe length or something is correlated. It's possible I suppose. But no one is looking in to that because everyone understands it doesn't really matter as not everyone with a high-IQ ear shape will be smart. You still need to judge them as individuals. Even if there is a connection between skin colour and IQ (which there is not, as far as I know) you'd still need to judge people on their individual merit. It's all about "on average, black people have a lower IQ". Even if true, you can't do anything meaningful with that in any liberal merit-based democracy. White people from rural Alabama might also score lower on IQ tests than white people from NYC. When pressed, even the racist assholes posting in this thread will admit that James Mickens is way smarter than the average white programming/computer scientist (never mind funnier). He certainly is smarter than me and I'm white enough to get sunburns in Ireland. I would say the entire focus on connection between race and IQ is almost entirely prejudice because it just doesn't matter. Barring than the occasional well-intentioned misguided soul, if you dig in to all the people focused on it then it rarely takes long to find some genuinely racist things well beyond their so-called "just looking at the objective facts".
- prmph 11mo ago
  This is exactly what I've been trying to put across; you said it better than I could have. I guess those so rabidly claiming that people are no allowed to study connection between race and "intelligence" are too dense to see their own biases and axioms.

nikanj 11mo ago

Probably not, because the evidence itself is not created in a vacuum. There is no objective way to measure IQ "stuff", so depending on the methods picked you get wildly different results

focusgroup0 11mo ago
>There is no objective way to measure IQ "stuff" SAT + GPA are proxies for "IQ stuff" and are highly predictive of future academic success: https://international.collegeboard.org/toolkit/sat-policy/understanding-sat/predictive-validity https://international.collegeboard.org/toolkit/sat-policy/un...
- y0eswddl 11mo ago
  so is zip code...
- cwmma 11mo ago
  So first off, no shit the college board things the SAT measures good stuff, it's their test. Second nobody said the SATs don't measure something, but that something is ability to take an SAT test which is highly predictive of how well you can take other tests. Which as our society puts lots of stock into tests isn't nothing but it's not measuring anything inate.

graemep 11mo ago

Given he said it in 2007, pretty much no evidence to back it up. Genetic differences between races are small compared to those within races, so much so that the concept of races does not really stand up scientifically. He seemed to have been basing the comments on IQ tests, which are not really a good way of comparing groups of people with different cultures or education. They score an individual within a group of comparable individuals. It is worth noting that if he had made the same statement in the first half of the 20th century it would have been mainstream science, but even then it was not so much supported by evidence but supported by a lack of evidence showing otherwise.

EnPissant 11mo ago
> Genetic differences between races are small compared to those within races. That is a very misleading statement. Height differences within sexes are also greater than between sexes, and yet most men are taller than most women.
- cwmma 11mo ago
  No your the one that's being misleading, genetics isn't height and race isn't a coherent genetic category. It should be noted that Watson knew this hence why he was focused on the one thing you can say very definitely about black people in America, that they have darker skin then white people and thus was trying to tie melanin to to intelegence.
  - EnPissant 11mo ago
    Distributions are distributions. I have not stated anything on the race and intelligence issue. I am just calling out a statistical fallacy.
- graemep 11mo ago
  There are multiple significant biological differences between the sexes. There are not between races. Different races do not have entirely different organs for a start!
  - EnPissant 11mo ago
    The parent to my post shared a common fallacy, and I’m just showing how distributions work in a way that most people will agree with and understand. You should appreciate my post if you are interested in proper statistical comprehension.
schemester 11mo ago
Nonsense. By 2007 it was already a settled matter. There had been decades of attempts to tease out environmental influences. We’d seen that no amount of education funding, government employment, government schools, adoption by white parents, or any other way of approaching the matter would boost black test scores close to whites’ in America. Nor could blacks find a way themselves to do it, not in any locality. It was also clear by that time that serious environmental influences on individuals were small relative to the observed performance differences between blacks and whites, which meant the theory that its environment would imply insane levels of deprivation that weren’t happening. Social scientists had already given up.

patall 11mo ago

He probably made up his own 'evidence', like white boys performing better than black boys when ignoring socioeconomic background. Today, I, as a geneticist, am not aware of any links between race (in the american sense) and intelligence. Jim Watson was, from my view, emotionally stuck in the fourties. Even if it was true, you wouldn't tell a female grad student to their face that they belong in the kitchen. Yet he did say that (less than 15 years ago) to one of my former colleagues.

morgengold 11mo ago

thanks graemep andand patall for taking the time. It is amazing to see a man of high intelligence like Watson is not able to base is views on the evidence. For me, I work usally with the assumption: "Even if there existed small differences IQ between races explained by genetics, it never tells you something about the individual before you." Would you say this is a valid belief?

cwmma 11mo ago
That's like saying: "Even if there was small differences in honesty caused by being a Spaniard, it never tells you something about the individual before you." When there is no actual evidence of Spaniards being dishonest and the only people making the argument seem to already have a beef with the people of Spain.

somenameforme 11mo ago

I think the Minnesota Transracial Adoption Study [1] is the most interesting study on this question. It was intended to be a study that would, once and forever, put to rest any question of race and intelligence. You had numerous well-to-do white families, with mean IQ a sigma above the mean, adopt children from a variety of different races. The study then tracked these families and their outcomes while working to ensure relative balance in education, opportunity, identical testing standards, and every other variable they could reasonably control. However, in the end there was a 18 point IQ difference, at age 17, between the adopted white children (105.5) and the adopted black children (83.7). Half white/black children fell almost exactly in between (93.2). The study also had some interesting accidental (?) control variables in that some children had been racially misclassified, but their IQs ended up aligning with their race rather than their identity. Of course one can still argue that this is environmental, by appealing to e.g. prenatal or social biases and the like, but I think there is no evidence based argument that there is no difference between races, even when every effort is made to eliminate as many viable environmental factors as possible. Obviously the mean doesn't define the individual. There are plenty of high IQ black individuals, and plenty of low IQ white individuals. But group differences are nonetheless very real. [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minnesota_Transracial_Adoption_Study https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minnesota_Transracial_Adoption...

ghtbircshotbe 11mo ago
Now find a state that is majority black where whites are treated as second class citizens and redo the experiment.
- kkkqkqkqkqlqlql 11mo ago
  And an actual test for intelligence. Easy, right?
- 1000units 11mo ago
  [flagged]
  - 11mo ago

arp242 11mo ago

Maybe being ginger is connected to IQ. Or maybe a particular ear shape or toe length or something is correlated. It's possible I suppose. But no one is looking in to that because everyone understands it doesn't really matter as not everyone with a high-IQ ear shape will be smart. You still need to judge them as individuals. Even if there is a connection between skin colour and IQ (which there is not, as far as I know) you'd still need to judge people on their individual merit. It's all about "on average, black people have a lower IQ". Even if true, you can't do anything meaningful with that in any liberal merit-based democracy. White people from rural Alabama might also score lower on IQ tests than white people from NYC. When pressed, even the racist assholes posting in this thread will admit that James Mickens is way smarter than the average white programming/computer scientist (never mind funnier). He certainly is smarter than me and I'm white enough to get sunburns in Ireland. I would say the entire focus on connection between race and IQ is almost entirely prejudice because it just doesn't matter. Barring than the occasional well-intentioned misguided soul, if you dig in to all the people focused on it then it rarely takes long to find some genuinely racist things well beyond their so-called "just looking at the objective facts".

prmph 11mo ago
This is exactly what I've been trying to put across; you said it better than I could have. I guess those so rabidly claiming that people are no allowed to study connection between race and "intelligence" are too dense to see their own biases and axioms.