Hacker News Reader

Comment by tsimionescu | Hacker News Reader

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.

View on HN

Skin colour almost certainly doesn't affect intelligence (much). There are plenty of dark skinned upper caste Indians who are intelligent, for example.

We can predict skin colour reasonably well on the basis of very few genes. We need many more to predict intelligence (and we can't predict it nearly as well).

On the other hand, however...

...there are a lot of people who happen to have whatever genes cause dark skin who also happen to have lot of other genes that do other things...

Some of those others things include a genetic protection against malaria. Others confer a genetic protection against a nasty parasitic worm that prefers to live in the kidneys. The downside is that that protection itself is a bit unhealthy for the kidneys.

And some of them do a might good job of seeming like they cause lower intelligence. If we use our genetic prediction models, then they do in fact predict a lower intelligence.

We know that people with red hair tend to metabolize anesthesia differently. It is not completely implausible that there is also a correlation between looks and other traits, although it seems almost impossible to me to untangle cultural, environmental and genetic effects.

Of course, any two traits can be correlated. But unless there is an obvious causal mechanism ("whiter skinned people get sun burns more easily", "darker skinned people tend to have vitamin D deficiencies at higher latitudes"), there's no reason to assume it and start looking for it to prove or disprove. It's a priori just as likely that there is a genetic link between toe shape and intelligence as skin color and intelligence. Yet no one is doing the science of measuring toe length correlation to intelligence, just skin color ("race").

As far as I know phrenology measured all kinds of things and claimed correlations. But they used highly dubious data (even for their time) and the field is now too unpopular to try (something similar) again with better methodology.

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.

Wouldn’t the racist claim be that because some group has a lower average IQ, they deserve fewer rights and freedom and less dignity?

The implication that if one group was shown to have a measurably lower intellect they are less “human” somehow is really worrying.

No, that would be ableist, or maybe eugenics.

And the way IQ is used in modern racist discourse is not this. Instead, the claims are "black people are not less well off on average because of racism in society, either old or current, they are less well off because they are dumber (have lower IQ) on average, so it's only a consequence of that, as dumber white people also tend to fail to get as much success". This is the argument being made, at least publicly, by most modern day scientific racists.

It is my understanding that it's only racist if the group somehow aligns with a race, but I don't know a good term for that belief when it doesn't align with races.

Is it racist, that we put gorillas in a zoo instead of a school because gorillas as a group have lower average IQ? Would we treat Gorillas this way if they had similar or higher average IQ?

What does it mean to be human?

"Skin color"? There's never been anybody with functional intelligence who thinks that skin color alone determines race.

Well, skin color, hair color, hair texture, certain bone structure features. But black skin color alone is 100% enough to be racially profiled in the USA, especially historically. Or do you think people in the deep South 1900s would have accepted a black-skinned blonde blue eyed neighbor?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com