> 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..
no we don't. 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 First I think the concept of race is a bit outdated.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.
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.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/f9/Principa...
Obviously some racial groups which are heavily socially constructed are not borne out by the data. There's no cluster for 'Latinos'. But in general I think there is quite a high correspondence with race as it is constructed in society and culture.
There are certainly some cases where the genetic data matches conventional thinking about race, but also many where they flatly contradict. It also suggests that saying something like "white people are genetically smarter on average than black people" is highly suspect. The group of people that we call "black" has a greater range of genetic profiles than the rest of the world put together, and the group we call "white" is kind of confused—to be genetically meaningful it would probably need to either include North Africans and Arabs or exclude Southern Europeans.
Looking at this
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_genetic_variation#/media...
It looks as though there are two rough clusters, Africans and everyone else, with Europeans and Middle Easterners in the intersection. Pretty much reflecting geography.
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).
What if some of the observed racial differences were caused by a lack of vitimin D, due to darker skin photosynthesising less of it? Vitamin D is essential for brain development. Black people in northern climates get less of it than evolution intended. This lack of vitamin D might be causing reduced brain development in black populations. If that is true, we could fix the prison crisis and racial IQ differences with a pill!
Sadly we don’t know because you can’t do the research to test the hypothesis.
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.
Correlation measures whether Y=mX+c holds with small error. I sometimes think that many people unknowingly assume that all dependencies are somehow straight-line ones. This is distinct however from "linear approximations" in physics, which can at least be justified sometimes.
I also suspect that correlations of 0.5 or lower are often just statistical noise.
Fundamentally my argument is maybe science can solve a problem, let’s at least try.
IQ tests have been revised several times to address things like that, like that they "unfairly" penalize dyslexia, or that they had lots of questions which were easier for people of specific social backgrounds. Every time they were, they naturally became less "predictive", since both dyslexia and not belonging to the California white upper middle class give you pretty obvious disadvantages in life outcomes.
So don't waste time on IQ, and don't waste time on other academic culture war BS either.
The research to ban lead in fuel relied on measuring IQ and measuring lead exposure, then showing a correlation between the two.
At the population level IQ is a very useful tool.
We don't have a good model of what intelligence is. But since IQ studies are fairly common, there's a lot of data collected that uses IQ, and since it IQ looks vaguely like "intelligence," a lot of researchers who are motivated to find reasons to declare particular people intelligent or unintelligent are more than happy to use that data to support their claims.
Answer this question:
> If you can’t study IQ how do you demonstrate that lead poisoning causes reduced intelligence?
It should be clearly evident that trying to use IQ to establish that "<insert ethnic group here> are stupid" is bad science. It's the same sort of science to establish that "<insert environmental factor here> causes stupidity," so we also need to reject it even if the environmental factor is clearly something problematic. The problem isn't the conclusion, it's the methodology.
It’s a good thing that measuring IQ enabled us to discover that trace amounts of lead in the environment causes reduced intelligence. That was a key piece of data for banning lead in fuel. The loss of IQ points happens to all kids living in cities, rich and poor. Rich powerful people didn’t want their kids made stupid by lead in the air.
I think that removing lead from paint and fuel has greatly improved the lives of billions of people.
> The loss of IQ points happens to all kids living in cities
No, it didn't. The reduced test scores happened _on average_.
I won't rule out that what you said is correct, in that it may well be the fear that "my child may lose 1-5 IQ points!" helped get lead banned, but if so, that's an indictment of society.
Tell me then, if someone scored low on a text-based IQ test and that's all you know, how do you tell if it was caused by dyslexia or concussion? I guess you break out that "battery of other tools"? What does IQ tests give you that those other tools don't give better?
Oh, I know one. An excuse to write someone off as simply stupid. An excuse to _stop looking_ for the things which might have helped them. Which is what it was historically used for.
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.
Intelligence is not just a single thing. We can assign a number by an intelligence test, of course, but there are lots of ways to look at it that are more nuanced. Generally, you're not going to say someone is better than everything you're going to find that someone is better at some things. And so can we direct people to the things you're better at for the better of everyone? Division of labor is a good thing.
But contrast, assuming that we find it's not true, then we can ask, well, why are we finding these differences in the data? if it's not genetic and perhaps we can find what it really is and then improve those groups that are currently disadvantaged.
The larger point is you have to know before you can make a useful adjustment.
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.
And I would say that the racist claim is that there is observable correlation and that genetic explanations are about as probable as other explanations. But I suppose many non-genetic explanations (eg cultural differences) would also be counted as racism, since in these kinds of discussions race and culture are often jumbled together.
The implication that if one group was shown to have a measurably lower intellect they are less “human” somehow is really worrying.
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 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).
The thing is that no matter how fancy your bicycle, I can still ride my shitty bicycle to a university, and you can ride your lubricated carbon fiber bicycle into a ditch, and then you're not so smart. If what you call intelligence is how fast your bicycle typically goes into the ditch, then sure, it can be measured on a scale and you have more of it.
There are other notions about the transfer of ideas: https://www.apa.org/monitor/2010/06/memory-transfer
Wait, cannibal worms that eat memories? My my.
It takes an enormous amount of engineering work to make an intelligent rock, and not all intelligent rocks are equally intelligent. This is very obvious.
(Rocks don't have ideas.)
Or it could be discrimination. There are studies that show that black and white mixed races children did not score any higher than children with two black parents, while white people score higher than black people on average, which may point to some discrimination impacting IQ.
* except in that being beaten around the head can make a person stupid.
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.
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.
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.
Talk about sampling bias lol.