Comment by siva7
9 hours ago
> 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..
9 hours ago
> 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 First I think the concept of race is a bit outdated.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.
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.
You can do a dimensionality reduction on genetic variants and certain recognisable groups fall pretty clearly out of the data.
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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).
We care about racial differences in outcomes that are correlated to IQ, such as employment and imprisonment.
What if some of the observed racial differences were caused by a lack of vitimin D, due to darker skin photosynthesising less of it? Then we could fix the prison crisis with a pill!
If we block all research into a problem then we can’t solve it.
If you actually care about fixing a problem then we should bring all available tools to fix and solve it.
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Suggesting that intelligence might be (partially) inheritable always causes backlash.
Intelligence is inheritable.
Intelligence isn't even well defined.
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for the sake of DJT's offspring I hope not
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.
It is true any discussion of the subject marks you as a racist so how can we have an honest conversation in such environment? Just look at your own down votes?
Having said that, even if the academic outcomes of people with darker skin color were worse (no idea if that is true, or in which country) just knowing that is no proof. It may as well be cultural or even income based (pregnant mothers eating worse quality food for example, or same thing with young children).
Is the question even answerable? What kind of intelligence do we measure with "academic outcomes"? How do we adjust for income and quality of life as a child, things like having both parents, or grandparents? It's an absolute minefield of possible manipulation. Same data can probably be spun to "proove" any hypothesis you have.
Then imagine writing a proposal for such research. What benefits can you predict? If you find there is absolutely no correlation between skin color and academic outcomes after adjusting for all external factors will it convince people that are racist as part of their identity? I doubt it.
Lets say you do prove there is some correlation. What the result of that would be? Open discrimination and vindication of racist views. But even if the principle was true the average doesn't apply to individuals so you can't apply it to any particular person.
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What plausible mechanism is there to even approach the idea that skin color influences intelligence? Why not study the effects on intelligence of eye color, or blood type?
This is especially clearly just a racist concept once you realize that none of the studies of IQ vs race actually do any genetic testing, they only rely on phenotype. Which is absurd given the fact that the child of a black-skinned person born in sub-Saharan Africa and a white-skinned person born in a village in Ireland is extremely likely to be black-skinned, but is genetically just as much part of both populations. It's only the history of racism that assigns this child as black more so than white.
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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).
How do you define races? As I said in another comment definitions shift and they are different in different countries. I have an encyclopedia from the 1950s that defines South Asians as "Caucasoid". Some East Africans were also defined as "Caucasoid" historically.If we define races on the basis of genetic similarity then almost everyone whose ancestry is from Eurasia is the same "race", but people whose ancestry is African belong to multiple races.
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If we define intelligence as IQ then the evidence is overwhelming that the average differs among races. Even in Singapore, which has a very high standard of living, nutrition etc., we still see Chinese Singaporeans perform significantly better than Malay Singaporeans on various measures of intelligence, with Indian Singaporeans somewhere in the middle. The same pattern is seen among Chinese, Indians and native Malaysians in Malaysia, and globally when we compare the mean IQ scores of China, India and Malaysia.
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I don't understand how the precedents could lead to any question regarding the disputed conclusion
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.
> workings of the brain to intelligence is the tricky bit
I don't find it that tricky, intelligence does come from the brain.
> That's like equating the workings of my bicycle to my decision to ride to a particular place
Both one's brain and one's "intelligence" belong to the same person, like, physically and materially, which is not true when it comes to your bicycle example. More to the point, I find the comparison itself kind of self-describing, it's like deciding to "outsource" intelligence to some other external, non-ethereal entity (like a bicicle that is physically separate from a human being) in order to avoid those hard questions the OP was alluding to (hard questions that oftentimes also involve the political side of things).
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If you think any brain can be just as intelligent no matter how it works then why not extend that to things that aren't brains? If everyone's brain is equally good then isn't a rock just as good as well?
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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.
I remember looking up the source of the IQ data from Nepal a few years ago. It was a taken from an IQ survey of a school for mentally disabled children..
Talk about sampling bias lol.
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