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Comment by Tor3 | Hacker News Reader

The concept of "race" is social, and not used in science. The vast majority of biologists will laugh you out of the room if you start blabbering about "race".

To go from genes varying the amount of melanin in your skin to then divide humans into "races" is crazy. I've worked all over the world through all of my long career, with people from all over, and if there's one thing I have learned it's that people are people, everywhere, you find all kinds of personalities, but the thing is - it doesn't matter if you're looking in your neighbourhood street or somewhere on the other side of the globe.

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I understand what the poster is trying to suggest but it's still not normalizing the right things.

Children with "bigger brains" perform better because they've matured faster and have better executive control than their peers.

That's why you can strongly correlate childhood academic performance on birth month. The ones that do better don't have "larger" brains as adults.

If you take people with equal economic opportunities and the same social advantages, you cannot stratify that population based on brain mass and correlate it with anything meaningful.

Besides, if this was true then, say the staff at MIT would be NBA sized giants working their big brains and little persons would all have severe cognitive impairments. None of this is the case.

Even on strict IQ, which is what these people like to use, it still doesn't work. The highest IQ scorers are normal sized, normal shaped people. They aren't walking around with giant deformed skulls

The logical implications of the hypothesis simply don't exist and every study I've seen that tries to demonstrate it gets criticized as actually just showing a proxy measurement for things like nutrition, age, economic status, etc

It's also why the phenomena only appears in large population studies. Taller people, on average, grew up with more advantages and access to resources which is why they're taller. As a population, they will do better then their disadvantaged peers. Duh.

Not true at all. Brain volume correlates with intelligence after stratifying by socioeconomic status, and the relationship can be seen by doing within-family comparisons.

Such a correlation is a very repeated finding in all sorts of data sets.

Maybe you could chase down some of the references at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuroscience_and_intelligence#... .

One interesting fact I found on that page right now is that the correlation has also been found in Chimpanzees.

Even there, the most solid study would be the twin one, which is here https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7440690/

The two population cohorts are 11-year olds and 17-year olds so regardless of what they say, we're still just measuring shoe size.

I'm guessing they published these two groups because their adult cohorts showed zero difference and that's not a publishable paper.

In fact, they admit it

"Two previous studies taking this approach, each with a sample size of about 35 sibling pairs, failed to find a significant correlation"

Right before they say "chill, let's cheat":

"We reexamined this empirical issue in a Human Connectome Project (HCP) (Van Essen et al., 2012; Van Essen et al., 2013) sample of 1,022 young adults"

^ it's a shoe size study from here out so of course they find something.

Wow, an n=35 study didn't have the power to find a signal while the ones with thousands of people do.

That must mean we have vestigial neurons.

I've gone over this multiple times.

It appears in larger populations because it's a weak proxy for other things.

It disappears in smaller populations because it's a weak proxy for other things.

The same relationship would exist with the MSRP of the car the test subject arrived in or the cost of their socks.

In a small population study you'd see no real correlation between how someone did a test and the price of their car.

But over say 100,000 people you would because the cost of someone's car weakly correlates with a number of things that are, in aggregate more advantageous for testing and so the confounding phenomena would arise.

In fact, the circumference of someone's head probably has about the same correlation with the price of their socks as it does with whatever intelligence metric your want to use because it's all measuring the same thing - social class, opportunities, economic arrangements, things like that.

It's a physical consequence of our unequal society that then gets used as if it's a biological reason for the perpetuation of the vary inequality that produced it.

Eugenicists called this biological determinism, it's an old idea that doesn't stand up to scrutiny.

Nope, you're just making stuff up with no factual basis behind it.

> It's a physical consequence of our unequal society that then gets used as if it's a biological reason for the perpetuation of the very inequality that produced it.

Nicely put!

The concept of there existing groups of humans with divergent genes is well established, its just that the classical "racial" groupings are quite bad and we can do way better.

Humans have divergent genes, it's just that there's no particular grouping to talk of. You can find that generally speaking people from Thailand are mostly lactose intolerant while people from India are mostly not, to take one example. But you don't find general correlations between more than samples of certain genetic features. We haven't been through selective breeding like dogs have. And the genetic diversity between humans as a whole is quite low, lower than for many other primates - presumably due to a population bottleneck before "out of Africa" even happened. Chimpanzees are much more diverse genetically than humans (https://academic.oup.com/gbe/article/13/11/evab247/6426081), ref. the common "two humans from across the globe are closer genetically than two chimps from the same forest".

The research I'm referring to, with intra-race comparisons, as I stated, would avoid the question of racial factors affecting or not affecting the results.

So your reply is a complete non sequitor.

What you're saying makes no sense. Humans don't have "races". So there's nothing to compare in the first place.

The comparisons, being intra-race, are between people of the same race.

How does that mean there's nothing to compare?

The point is: There is no biological concept of "race", therefore you can't have "race research" or "comparisions". "race" is a purely social construct more common in certain countries than others.

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