Comment by inglor_cz
10 hours ago
Politicization of science is never good.
The "pots aren't people" wave wouldn't be problematic per se (e.g. obviously a lot of non-Latin ethnicities adapted Roman way of life), rather because it sought to be the dominant theory.
We have a very similar "intelligence and nature-vs-nurture" situation in biology, caused by the very same thing - defeat of the Nazis, which made some ideas extremely dirty and other ideas very attractive.
This has an interesting consequence in that we do not know much about natural human intelligence today, which is coming back to bite us in the age of emerging artificial intelligence. The topic of human intelligence has been a political minefield for nearly a century now. It is probably safer and easier to study intelligence of octopuses and crows than that of humans. You're definitely freer from political repercussions there.
> We have a very similar "intelligence and nature-vs-nurture" situation in biology, caused by the very same thing
no we don't. intelligence isn't racial..
>intelligence isn't racial
And how do we know that? Any very controversial stuff like this will have people on both sides doing all in their power to convince everyone to their point of view. The truth gets lost.
To discuss this objectively we have to first agree on some basics. First I think the concept of race is a bit outdated. People have phenotypes and these phenotypes have various features (one may be skin color).
Also where did the idea there exists one feature responsible for "intelligence" came from? It seems to be accepted apriori, but I think the truth is closer to humans (and animals and AI) having various types of intelligence. Social, emotional, linguistical, math like, spatial (ability to imagine shapes etc) and probably few more.
And those intelligence types may very well have a genetic component and be present in one phenotype in a different mix than another.
But saying it is likely vs having actual proof are two different things so my view is that we simply don't know.
IQ differences between the racial groups is one of the most, if not the most, replicated findings in psychology.
Of course it is, creating that difference was the basis for IQ testing in the first place.
Are they consistent across time and cultures? Are they corrected for differences in health, education, culture, wealth, etc? How big are racial differences compared to differences between people from different social classes?
How do you define racial groups? its something that constantly shifts. I have an encyclopedia for the 1950s that defines South Asians as "Caucasoid" which is not how most people now think.
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Based almost entirely on racist studies, including some famous ones that were comparing white and black school children in apartheid South Africa. I wonder if there may have been some confounding variables there, but surely this is just my bias.
Plus, none of these studies actually spend the money to do any genetic testing, they simply assign people to "white" or "black" race based almost always on skin color (which, since the gene for dark skin is dominant, is a very poor marker of actual genetic similarity - the great grandchild of a dark-skinned person with otherwise only white-skinned relatives can still be dark-skinned).
Edit: and I'm not even mentioning the obvious publication bias, as essentially only racists care about this race vs intelligence discussion, at least enough to invest in creating studies about it. Plus the fact that IQ itself is actually a very problematic measure, when applied beyond its actual medical use (quantifying mental disability).
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Suggesting that intelligence might be (partially) inheritable always causes backlash.
Intelligence is inheritable.
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It causes backlash because there are huge fields of modern academia built around the implicit assumption that everyone has the same IQ and hence the worse outcomes encountered by black and brown people are due to a big societal conspiracy against them, when in reality their outcomes are almost identical to white people who score the same on IQ tests as those groups do.
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I just got a downvote for an opposing opinion, so at least one person feels keenly that intelligence is genetic and is unable to say why.
> intelligence isn't racial..
The same way as South-Koreans are by now taller than North-Koreans (because of material reasons) we could posit that "intelligence", i.e. the "workings" of our brain, can be distributed in a non-uniform manner across humankind, depending on the "local" material conditions.
And this is not about "race", because according to those that do believe in the "race" stuff both North-Koreans and South-Koreans are part of the same "race", it is about those material conditions that I've mentioned and which, in the end, by necessity end up modifying things in our (very material) brains, and hence in our "intelligence". Believing otherwise, meaning believing that are our brains are not affected by the material conditions under which we live our day-to-day lives, would be preposterous.
I don't think many people dispute the fact that the environment plays a role in intelligence. Not even many people dispute that there is some heritability to intelligence. What is in dispute is whether that heritability means that some races are on average genetically more intelligent than others (and another problem is how to define intelligence).
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Right, but the equation of workings of the brain to intelligence is the tricky bit. That's like equating the workings of my bicycle to my decision to ride to a particular place.
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If genetics had no impact whatsoever then great apes would have the same intelligence potential as humans, as human races are more diverse then you give them credit for.
The impact of it's culture and behavioral like inbreeding being acceptable probably plays a bigger role though, but denying genetic impact is just putting your head in the sand because you cannot face reality not being equal. Which it ain't. It's also almost certainly a range, with most of the curves overlapping. If studied, I'd expect there to be a measurable impact in the rates of high intelligence individuals with the median intelligence being pretty close across all groups, but obliviously just my personal experience from interacting with people.
Race is a combination of genetic, and cultural factors such as nutrition, early childhood care practices, social values, etc.
Humans are far more genetically homogenous than many animal species due to a population collapse at one point in our developmental history.
Cultural practices can have a big effect on intellectual development, so disentangling any possible genetic factors from cultural ones can be very difficult, but there is very little evidence for genetic factors related to race also being related to intelligence at the population level. Obviously certain genetic disorders can have a significant effect.
I say intelligence is ideas, so it isn't physiological* and doesn't have a quotient.
* except in that being beaten around the head can make a person stupid.
Every study that's been done shows a significant difference in mean IQ across races. Suggesting otherwise is anti-science, putting ideology over reality. That doesn't mean everyone of any particular race is stupid; Indians in America for instance on average have higher IQS than white Americans, in spite of the average IQ of India being significantly lower, because only the smarter Indians manage to immigrate to America.
Most studies of Indians done in famous IQ tests were of those Indians who lived in villages and suffered from diseases. Its been debunked so many times.
Those who immigrate to America are not smarter. They just had the where with all to pay for immigration. Even those who go on scholarship have to prove they have atleast land/housing back in India to even get a chance to immigrate.
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Lysenkoism predates the defeat of the nazis and it's pretty much the same pseudoscientific dismissal of nature for ideological reasons.
To be honest, I'm more interested in what ideology/religion lead to the Yamnaya Y line taking over a continent in a timespan of over thousands of years to almost utter replacement despite of the fact that, in the end, the "invaders" were almost identical to the "invaded", than I am in elucidating whether Llama 3 being less performant than Gemma 4 in benchmarks is due to the training corpus or the architecture.
I don't feel like being racist either way.
Regardless of how you feel about being racist, some people will accuse you of being uncomfortably close to a Nazi for talking about the Yamnaya Y line taking over a continent, because 19th and early 20th century anthropologists that the Nazis liked and amplified the ideas of really did think that the Yamnaya Y line took over a continent, they just called them "Aryans" instead of "the Yamnaya Y line".
There’s really only one way you totally replace male lineage.
Based on the evidence we have it seems that they simply killed most (in some places almost all) of the local men they could find?
Who is they? The Yamnaya never made it out of the Ukraine.
We know people often kill people. That doesn't even need explanation.
My argument is that it is thousands of years and dozens of mixed generations.
Why do you decide to participate in a thousand-years-long campaign to kill the neighbor who is also your second cousin?
There is no reason they couldn't have turned the other way and attacked their other second cousin.
My best guess is religion but it could also have also been a different kind of fanatic ideology.
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>(e.g. obviously a lot of non-Latin ethnicities adapted Roman way of life),
If you wanna tell the romans to GFY you're gonna have to adopt a lot of the structures that make them competitive in order to resist them. There's a fairly large "you wrestle the pig you get shit on you" factor going on.