Comment by Claudus | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Claudus | Hacker News Reader

The Flynn effect tends to be used to support the feeling that intelligence isn't something you're born with.

People who think that intelligence is innate will refer to the "g factor". http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G_factor_%28psychometrics%29

The racist (technically speaking) and controversial Jean Rushton believes that "gains in IQ over time (the Lynn-Flynn effect) are unrelated to g".

What's really going on with discussions like this is that humanity seems to have come to the conclusion that "smarter is better". Intelligence almost certainly exists, but is quite difficult to quantify exactly, and is further complicated by the fact that people resent others who are "better" than them. Given that there is a genetic component to intelligence to a certain degree, race becomes a factor and leads to a line of inductive reasoning that makes people uncomfortable:

  1) Smarter is better
  2) Intelligence is genetic
  3) Race determines genetics
  4) One race is better than another
  5) Hitler was right (or other outrageous conclusion)

As far as I can tell when you see terms like "g factor", "Flynn effect", "multiple intelligences", "crystallized intelligence", "fluid intelligence", "cultural fair IQ tests", "The bell curve"... people are really secretly arguing about one race or sex being smarter than the other, or not.

The idea of a measurable "G factor" isn't incompatible with Flynn's work. He simply argues that the value of G is determined by social context and background. So to go straight for the hotbutton interpretation: arguments of the form "Blacks are less intelligent than whites due to genetic factors, as measured by IQ scores" is unsupportable simply because those same whites are smarter than their own grandparents (i.e. the same gene pool) were at the same age, and as measured by the same tests. That is, there is clear proof that non-genetic factors can cause that effect, so absent specific evidence arguments for "racial intelligence" must be dropped via Occam's razor.

Points 1-2 are valid, though intelligence is not entirely genetic.

Your points 3-5 are completely wrong. Genetics determines race, not the other way around. Points 4 and 5 are just meaningless "racist" phrases, not statements in a line of reasoning.

It may be semantics, but genetics certainly does not determine "race" alone. If it did, "african american" and "hispanic" wouldn't exist as "races". The idea of classifying people like that doesn't work genetically. First, people have been interbreeding like rabbits throughout history; there are no "pure" stocks anywhere. And more importantly, the amount of genetic variation between any two individuals from the same "race" is much higher than it is, statistically, between the aggregate genetic profiles of distinct "races".

Basically, "race" is a cultural distinction. It's a label we apply as a proxy for other stuff (usually cultural). Scientists (well, except anthropologists studying that cultural stuff) don't use it, and for good reason.

You might fight about what name it's given, but someone's ancestry is definitely measurable and quite usable by whatever normal scientific tests you would normally come up with.

Just off the top of my head, there are over 93000 references in PubMed to "ancestry." They vary whether they call it "race" or "ethnicity" or "region of ancestral origin" but plenty of adults are quite happy talking about it.

You're strawmaning. I didn't say ancestry had no meaning. I said it wasn't determined genetically, which is 100% true. There's no blood test for "black", and I encourage you to cite one if you're aware of it. If you have a big population, you can do things like look at frequencies of specific gene variants and come up with a guess at where that population came from. But for one person there's just no way to do it. So: can a person, in isolation, be part of a genetic "race"? No.

There's no blood test for "black", and I encourage you to cite one if you're aware of it.

Now who is strawmanning? (BTW, there is no blood test for autism, yet scientists are pretty darn sure it's mostly genetic.)

I'm sure you can come up with a definition of "Polynesian" such that genetic tests would be useless. That more shows that people can some up with useless definitions. However, someone else can could up with a definition of "Polynesian" that is useful: people whose ancestors inhabited Polynesia (say) 1000 years ago. And genetic tests for any individual in isolation would be very very very highly correlated with the actual answer of their ancestors coming from Polynesia. (There are, of course, people of mixed ancestry, but this doesn't mean that ancestral measures don't exist no more than hermaphrodites mean sex doesn't exist.) "Black" would need serious subdivision, but nothing that makes a person on the street drop their jaw and say "I never thought of 'Black' that way."

I suspect this is as far as constructive discussion has gone, so I'm going to stop here if that's okay.

Arrgh. I still think you're fundamentally missing my point. You can't treat "black" via subdivision. The problem is mixing (i.e. most "blacks" are "half white", etc...), not imprecision. Basically you can't treat "black" at all. The term will never be useful to scientific study. The fact that there exist some identifiable ancestral groups will never (!) tell you anything useful about a typical "black" woman in america.

The same is true of "polynesian" -- sure, they might have been isolated at one point but by now almost every "polynesian" you meet in Hawaii has a ton of white and japanese ancestry too (substitute appropriate mixing for Maori or Samoan and Fijian, etc...), so what use is it to talk about the potential IQ effects his great-great-grandparents might have had?

Yet the argument at hand (that, as far as I can tell, you are in support of) is that somehow the "race" of real people can, because it is "genetically determined", be correlated with something like IQ, which it just can't. It's far too polluted a data set.

You're falling into the fallacy of the excluded middle. Just because "black" doesn't tell you everything about a person doesn't mean it can't tell you something useful.

That typical (now there's an overgeneral term!) black woman will have a darker skin color than a typical white woman. She will be less susceptible to sunburn. She is more likely to suffer from certain genetic diseases like sickle cell anemia.

Now, none of these are absolute statements. They are all probabilities. That does not make them useless. If someone comes into the ER with severe pain in their extremities, it is very useful to know that they're black. They may or may not have sickle cell anemia - that can be determined conclusively through a blood test and thorough medical examination. But knowing whether they're likely to is very useful information, because it lets you determine whether it's worth putting in the extra effort to diagnose it conclusively. (Similarly, even if they carry the genetic marker, they might not be having a sickle-cell crisis, and it could be a blood clot or some other medical condition. But it's pretty damn likely.)

It's a fallacy to believe that just because the data you're working with can't tell you everything, it tells you nothing. Rather, you should recognize the limitations of what you know, and use them to determine what else you need to know. Race tells you something. It doesn't tell you a whole lot, because there's a lot of individual variation within a race. But that doesn't mean it tells you nothing, either.

Here is the blood test for black:

http://www.wired.com/politics/law/magazine/16-01/ps_dna

Which didn't work: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DNAPrint_Genomics http://dash.harvard.edu/handle/1/3008240

It doesn't even pass the smell test. Seriously: would Obama (who's turning into quite the counterexample here) show up "black" or "white" on that test? If the answer isn't "both" (it has to be, as he's almost literally 50/50) then the test can't work. If it is "both", then what meaning did "black" have again as a genetic grouping?

People insist on misinterpreting me here. I'm not saying that it's impossible to tell if someone has ancestry from africa or east asia or wherever. I'm saying that blocking real people (i.e. not members of an isolated subgroup with pure ancestry) up into a "race" like "asian" or (especially) "black", doing studies on them (like an IQ test) and arguing that this is "valid" because those groups are "genetically defined" is wrong. It's bad science. Please stop.

Thanks for the links. Here's my thoughts, take them or leave them: First, it's a big leap to go from the Harvard article's "here are theoretical issues with this test, not knowing any specifics of how it works" to "this doesn't work." There appear to be two components to the test, a genetic admixture, and predicted phenotypic characteristics that manifest with specific allele groupings, within a certain threshold of accuracy. Genes are not all equally heritable, there are dominant characteristics, so it can't be said that if someone is 50% one ethnicity and 50% another that you can't make any predictions about their appearance. This doesn't represent a rigid genetic definition of "race" I agree, but if it works for its intended purpose (matching phenotypic characteristics we generally associate with race to a genetic makeup) it opens the door to doing a blood test, finding someone's peak intelligence (assuming intelligence is heritable and measurable) according to some metric, and, possibly, associating that with a heritage/ethnicity/declared race, again within a certain accuracy threshold. (On the other hand, it may not extend all the way to heritable intelligence, or, the blood test might not even work for its intended purpose.) I also agree this would never mean that someone could say to an individual "you are a member of this race, therefore your intelligence peaks at IQ X" but you could use it to make predictions about an ethnic group in the aggregate.

I tried to qualify my statements here very carefully. I'm not claiming a strict genetic definition of race. I'm also not defending this specific blood test, I only know about it from that Wired article. But the theoretical possibility of what I have mentioned seems to exist, if that test or one like it actually works. Or am I mistaken?

Actually, there is an objective test for "black". It uses an instrument called a spectrophotometer.

Maybe I should have said "genetic clustering" instead of "race".

Out of curiosity, when you say "people have been interbreeding like rabbits", does that mean that you believe that rabbit "breeds" are also a cultural distinction?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_rabbit_breeds

Are you trolling? No. Animal breeds are pure, because their reproduction is controlled and only the desired stock is used. "Races" aren't like that at all. Saying something like "blacks have low IQ" is completely unscientific because the people you are labelling "black", unlike animal breeds have little to no genetic relation. I'm too lazy to look this up, but the median "african american" has less than half of their ancestry from subsaharan africa.

So please, don't say things like "race is genetically determined". You're right that a "genetic cluster" or "ancestral group" is better defined. But those IQ results weren't corrected for that, so again: non-science.

> The idea of classifying people like that doesn't work genetically. [...] Basically, "race" is a cultural distinction.

No, it's not, and classifying people "like that" makes sense.

> In one of the most extensive of these studies to date, considering 1,056 individuals from 52 human populations, with each individual genotyped for 377 autosomal microsatellite markers, we found that individuals could be partitioned into six main genetic clusters, five of which corresponded to Africa, Europe and the part of Asia south and west of the Himalayas, East Asia, Oceania, and the Americas

http://www.plosgenetics.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal...

These guys http://genome.cshlp.org/content/19/5/815.long even have a picture http://genome.cshlp.org/content/19/5/815/F2.large.jpg

I think you're aggressively agreeing with me.

Please find me the "races" on that chart. I don't see any. This is a chart of "genetic clusters". Which one does, say, Barack Obama (most famous mestizo I could think of, but frankly you could put almost all of the non-white population of the US into similar buckets) belong to? He doesn't fit. Most people don't fit. (Editted to point out: it's specifically a study of a small number of individuals of "pure" background.) Yet, and this is important, he does have a "race". Everyone, including himself, agrees that he's "black".

So where does "black" go on that chart? It doesn't. So "race" is non-scientific.

> So where does "black" go on that chart?

In the cluster on the left.

Yikes... Did you actually read what I wrote? Or the study? You're completely misinterpreting it. It's not saying that "everyone belongs to a genetically determined race", it's simply saying (duh) that these genetic clusters can be measured, and it shows some relationships between them that might be indicators for recent shared ancestry, etc...

This is specifically a chart of individuals with "pure" ancestry. People with mixed ancestry (i.e. almost all of us) have no spot on it. It doesn't tell us anything about our "race".

To get back to the example. If "blacks" belong on the bottom left than Obama (with his northern european mother) isn't black. So either he has a "race" or he doesn't. Which is it?

Stop thinking about "race" as a measurable thing, it isn't.

There are clear, genetic clusters corresponding with what we generally call races.

The fact that some people, mostly from the former European colonies, won't perfectly fit doesn't change that. The fact that this distinction is blurred, emphasized, or altered for political reasons doesn't change that. The fact that outward features, which are often used as proxy for the underlying genetics, can sometimes be misleading doesn't change that.

Also, I don't think "almost all of us" or even most of us wouldn't fit into those clusters. Do you have a source?

I understand that Obama is not exactly technically black; that legal, political or self-identified race may not align with those clusters or even known ancestry but it doesn't invalidate the concept. Just like there are people who are legally blind, and a subgroup who really can't see anything.

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