The unwelcome return of race science

[Magical Realist]

That's the problem of denying findings. People will, in the explanatory vacuum, make up their own causation.
While IQ distribution is correlated to race, race is not the cause of the distribution. But pretending there is no race correlation at all opens the door to people using that pseudoscience to support their own.

My concern is why anyone goes out of their way to prove this bullshit about a dubious concept called race correlating to an even more dubious concept called IQ. What's at stake here for you? Why is it important to you? It's clear to me most people, usually rightwingers, just take the data and run with it, enforcing their assumptions that some races are more inherently limited than others. And as the article made clear, that's why race science is making a comeback, because of the surge in racist politics since the emergence of the online alt right. Like they say, a little information is a bad thing, and with this spurious field of research conclusions are quickly reached that aren't really warranted to begin with.

"Similarly, when Sam Harris, in his podcast interview with Charles Murray, pointed out the troubling fact that The Bell Curve was beloved by white supremacists and asked what the purpose of exploring race-based differences in intelligence was, Murray didn’t miss a beat. Its use, Murray said, came in countering policies, such as affirmative action in education and employment, based on the premise that “everybody is equal above the neck … whether it’s men or women or whether it’s ethnicities”.

Race science isn’t going away any time soon. Its claims can only be countered by the slow, deliberate work of science and education. And they need to be – not only because of their potentially horrible human consequences, but because they are factually wrong. The problem is not, as the right would have it, that these ideas are under threat of censorship or stigmatisation because they are politically inconvenient. Race science is bad science. Or rather, it is not science at all."

[C C]

I'm sure that it wasn't what CC meant when she started this rather trollish thread, but it does illustrate "junk science" when entire lines of inquiry are ruled out of consideration a-priori, for moral reasons. (Because if certain kinds of answers were true, that would be "bad".)

What say you, C C?  Where do you stand?

Just as superior running ability might be innate to some population group as the result of _X_ environmental / selective pressures, I can't dogmatically exclude all future empirical possibility of another one having an inherent mental advantage.

However, overall intelligence and its assessment seems dependent upon such a complex set of factors and the quasi-subjective POV of pre-conditional choices of what to evaluate beforehand (standards on the part of researchers)... That it would always seem insane to be slotting a specific individual's potential under a group category or generalization of any kind. (I.e., sapience is far less clear-cut than running's measurable physiological origins / explanations and the unavoidable fact or lack of dispute in a person winning a particular type of race -- a task whose completion is simple and straight forward enough to rarely be open to differing interpretations.)

- - -

[Syne]

Race would seem to qualify as subspecies, even if no one will admit it. The clearest characteristics that we use to define races did originate from the same geographic/reproductive isolation that we use to define subspecies. Phenotypes (observable characteristics) can differ where the genotype (genetics) does not, through different expressions of the same genes.

Your #1 fan thinks that there’s enough regional variation to constitute a human subspecies, do you agree?

Do your views align with George W. Gills'?

Does Race Exist?

Those who believe that the concept of race is valid do not discredit the notion of clines, however. Yet those with the clinal perspective who believe that races are not real do try to discredit the evidence of skeletal biology. Why this bias from the "race denial" faction? This bias seems to stem largely from socio-political motivation and not science at all. For the time being at least, the people in "race denial" are in "reality denial" as well. Their motivation (a positive one) is that they have come to believe that the race concept is socially dangerous. In other words, they have convinced themselves that race promotes racism. Therefore, they have pushed the politically correct agenda that human races are not biologically real, no matter what the evidence.

The politically correct "race denial" perspective in society as a whole suppresses dialogue, allowing ignorance to replace knowledge and suspicion to replace familiarity. This encourages ethnocentrism and racism more than it discourages it.

If genetics plays a part in determining intelligence, would the environment play an equal or stronger role?

"#1 fan"? I don't get it.

You understand that a subspecies is not a "lesser species", right?

Since mixed-race twins can be, phenotypically, one wholly black and the other wholly white, I'd have to rely on things beyond my expertise to determine genotypic difference.
So I would have to defer to anthropologists (for things like skeletal evidence) and geneticists (for things like disease propensity). Either way, I doubt that race can always be 100% determined by these. Personally, I'd like to see fewer people making a big issue of race, phenotype or genotype. Identity politics is moronic.

While I doubt race plays a significant role in IQ (correlations being mostly cultural), I assume genetics and nurturing both play significant roles, although I couldn't guess at the ratio.

That's the problem of denying findings. People will, in the explanatory vacuum, make up their own causation.
While IQ distribution is correlated to race, race is not the cause of the distribution. But pretending there is no race correlation at all opens the door to people using that pseudoscience to support their own.

My concern is why anyone goes out of their way to prove this bullshit about a dubious concept called race correlating to an even more dubious concept called IQ. What's at stake here for you? Why is it important to you? It's clear to me most people, usually rightwingers, just take the data and run with it, enforcing their assumptions that some races are more inherently limited than others. And as the article made clear, that's why race science is making a comeback, because of the surge in racist politics since the emergence of the online alt right. Like they say, a little information is a bad thing, and with this spurious field of research conclusions are quickly reached that aren't really warranted to begin with.

"Similarly, when Sam Harris, in his podcast interview with Charles Murray, pointed out the troubling fact that The Bell Curve was beloved by white supremacists and asked what the purpose of exploring race-based differences in intelligence was, Murray didn’t miss a beat. Its use, Murray said, came in countering policies, such as affirmative action in education and employment, based on the premise that “everybody is equal above the neck … whether it’s men or women or whether it’s ethnicities”.

Race science isn’t going away any time soon. Its claims can only be countered by the slow, deliberate work of science and education. And they need to be – not only because of their potentially horrible human consequences, but because they are factually wrong. The problem is not, as the right would have it, that these ideas are under threat of censorship or stigmatisation because they are politically inconvenient. Race science is bad science. Or rather, it is not science at all."

Nah, most leftist just can't separate race from culture (which is why they can't imagine blacks who aren't Democrats). Most conservatives know that some cultures are objectively better than others, and that those cultures are not defined by race (but by decisions). Racism is making a comeback on the extremes of both sides. One side just pretends that blaming whites is any different from blaming blacks or Jews or anyone else.

They've taken that Murray quote out of context. It's trivial that people, even of the same race, aren't equal in all capabilities ("above the neck"). He goes on to say that affirmative action forces employers to hire without regard to individual capability, which could set some people up for failure when held to a common standard.

The correlations are science, and denial of that creates a breeding ground for racists to rightfully accuse an unscientific bias. But admitting inconvenient correlations allows us the intellectual honesty and authority to also forward actual causes, like culture and environment. Denial enables racists.

[Secular Sanity]

You understand that a subspecies is not a "lesser species", right?

Of course, but do you understand that our species has a recent common origin? Which group of people would you classify as a subspecies?  Which group of Homo sapiens were separated from the rest of humanity for a long period of time with no genetic interchange, hmm?

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Just as superior running ability might be innate to some population group as the result of _X_ environmental / selective pressures, I can't dogmatically exclude all future empirical possibility of another one having an inherent mental advantage.

However, overall intelligence and its assessment seems dependent upon such a complex set of factors and the quasi-subjective POV of pre-conditional choices of what to evaluate beforehand (standards on the part of researchers)... That it would always seem insane to be slotting a specific individual's potential under a group category or generalization of any kind. (I.e., sapience is far less clear-cut than running's measurable physiological origins / explanations and the unavoidable fact or lack of dispute in a person winning a particular type of race -- a task whose completion is simple and straight forward enough to rarely be open to differing interpretations.)

- - -

'Might be" is a good way putting it because there’s not a strong consensus within the scientific community. The African speed gene is as elusive as the smart gene because athletic performance is also highly complex and multifactorial.  Body type?  Higher altitude training?  Muscle composition? Diet, and so on?  

In fact, the most generally accepted model of the evolution of human intelligence was proposed by Richard Alexander, which may also explain why Kenyan runners dominate.  It suggest that once we mastered the hostile forces of nature, we became a force of nature ourselves, i.e., social competition.

Evolution of Human Intelligence (wikipedia.org)

It may be that there is some genetic advantage to being Kalenjin. But the fact that most of the great Kenya runners are from one of the Kalenjin tribes may have a cultural explanation as well, according to Benoit Gaudin of the Department of Sport Sciences at Addis Ababa University. One of his research projects involves interviewing elite non-Kalenjin runners and asking them how they gained their positions. They report that finding accommodation and joining a training camp are much more difficult if you are not Kalenjin.

Those who succeed do so by basically becoming Kalenjin. “Either they learn the language or they marry a Kalenjin girl or they have high-profile support inside the running community, and someone is helping them. Otherwise it’s very difficult, because they have their own specific language even within the Kalenjin group. For example, you can train with them today but you don’t know where the next training is tomorrow, because when it comes time to give this key information, they switch languages. If they want to close the business, they can do it very easily. They are protecting their niche. And this is very interesting because it is ethnicity, but it has nothing to do with genetics.

To date, these sorts of explanations for east Africa’s running dominance have been largely ignored. There may well be key environmental and physiological factors, such as diet or altitude or childhood foot travel. But history offers a warning against overstating these. As Bale and Sang note, when Finnish athletes dominated the global running scene in the 1930s and ‘40s, various theories about “climatic energy” and the vast wilderness where they lived—“like animals in the forest”—were offered for their success. So as we look to explain our losses, we should be mindful that Kenya and Ethiopia may not always be on top and that the seeds of victory may well be planted elsewhere. After all, as O’Connell—who ran the running program in Iten—told David Epstein, author of The Sports Gene: Inside the Science of Extraordinary Athletic Performance, "The genes didn’t go away in Finland, the culture did."

Running Circles Around Us

[Magical Realist]

Nah, most leftist just can't separate race from culture (which is why they can't imagine blacks who aren't Democrats). Most conservatives know that some cultures are objectively better than others, and that those cultures are not defined by race (but by decisions). Racism is making a comeback on the extremes of both sides. One side just pretends that blaming whites is any different from blaming blacks or Jews or anyone else.

So now it's not so much the race of blacks as much as their shitty culture? lol! You racists are all the same, finding fault with blacks in some way. Do you have some studies showing white culture to be superior to black culture? How do you define black culture when blacks and whites are both raised in the same American culture?

[Syne]

You understand that a subspecies is not a "lesser species", right?

Of course, but do you understand that our species has a recent common origin? Which group of people would you classify as a subspecies?  Which group of Homo sapiens were separated from the rest of humanity for a long period of time with no genetic interchange, hmm?

If you're asking that, then you don't understand what a subspecies is. All groups of people belong to one subspecies phenotype or another. Africans because they stayed in equatorial areas, Europeans because they migrated north, etc.. Travel time alone effectively isolated these populations. "The rest of humanity" is a nonsensical distinction. All groups of humans were equally isolated by distance. Very few were isolated by geography.

Nah, most leftist just can't separate race from culture (which is why they can't imagine blacks who aren't Democrats). Most conservatives know that some cultures are objectively better than others, and that those cultures are not defined by race (but by decisions). Racism is making a comeback on the extremes of both sides. One side just pretends that blaming whites is any different from blaming blacks or Jews or anyone else.

So now it's not so much the race of blacks as much as their shitty culture? lol! You racists are all the same, finding fault with blacks in some way. Do you have some studies showing white culture to be superior to black culture? How do you define black culture when blacks and whites are both raised in the same American culture?

There are whites who share the same shitty culture. The fact that you assumed the shitty culture to be isolated to blacks demonstrates your racism. It's not about groups. It's about individual decisions. For example, the poor of any race tend to make the same sorts of bad decisions, and have the same sorts of cultural justifications to reinforce those bad decisions from one generation to the next.

Cultures of personal responsibility are objectively better than cultures of blame, in every measure of success. And Democrat policies of low expectations just enable the justifications that ensure a permanent underclass.

[Magical Realist]

Cultures of personal responsibility are objectively better than cultures of blame,

I've never heard of cultures like that. I think you're making shit up again to blame blacks for their problems. God forbid they would have something to do with things beyond their choices like poverty, single parent raising, and racism.

[Secular Sanity]

If you're asking that, then you don't understand what a subspecies is. All groups of people belong to one subspecies phenotype or another. Africans because they stayed in equatorial areas, Europeans because they migrated north, etc.. Travel time alone effectively isolated these populations. "The rest of humanity" is a nonsensical distinction. All groups of humans were equally isolated by distance. Very few were isolated by geography.

Nope. We're not pure. There was migration periods and you know how you guys are.

Got anything showing that human races should be classified as a subspecies?

[C C]

'Might be" is a good way putting it because there’s not a strong consensus within the scientific community. The African speed gene is as elusive as the smart gene because athletic performance is also highly complex and multifactorial.  Body type?  Higher altitude training?  Muscle composition? Diet, and so on?

Searching for a single gene being responsible for a trait is often a red herring, anyway. A characteristic of polygenic origin can fall in a "range" of possibilities outputted by the multiple gene relationships, thus sometimes evading both reliable prediction and any confident determination / identification of the specific contributors (or in just discerning the complete set of those responsible). Yet that trait or working combination of attributes still being -- IF the case -- the result of an unstable (in terms of results), molecular "blueprint" that a more or less isolated population group is carrying.

In fact, the most generally accepted model of the evolution of human intelligence was proposed by Richard Alexander, which may also explain why Kenyan runners dominate.  It suggest that once we mastered the hostile forces of nature, we became a force of nature ourselves, i.e., social competition.

Evolution of Human Intelligence (wikipedia.org)

The timidity of the West on the subject may make it difficult to sort genuine scientific commitment from extraneous social-conscience contamination. Extending the uncertainty indefinitely into the future. That's arguably all good and well anyway, if hypotheses should have competition or downright contrarian opposition (regardless of the actual source providing the motivation).

Max Fisher: Talking about the greatness of African athletes can be fraught in the Western world. Generations of American slavery were justified in part by arguments that Africans were "specialized" for physical labor, and whites for mental work, ideas that have persisted in American paternalism and racism through today. For a white writer like myself (or a white researcher or a white anthropologist) to talk about the physical attributes of black men and women can echo some of the worst moments in modern history. And there is something distasteful about reducing Africans to the prowess of their best athletes. After all, Kenya's contributions to the world include, for example, great writers, environmentalists, and politicians.

It's hard to talk about the subject without revealing some bias, or giving the impression of trying to explain away their success, or hitting on some still-fresh cultural wound from centuries of exploitation. This may be why definitive answers seem so hard to find, and why we tend to embrace theories that downplay legitimate biological distinctions and emphasize the idea that Kenyans simply work harder. But this kind of thinking, though clearly well intentioned, is a kind of condescension in itself. We're so afraid of reducing Africans to their physical attributes that we've ended up reducing them to an outdated stereotype: Cool Runnings, the barefoot village boy who overcame.

~

[Syne]

Cultures of personal responsibility are objectively better than cultures of blame,

I've never heard of cultures like that. I think you're making shit up again to blame blacks for their problems. God forbid they would have something to do with things beyond their choices like poverty, single parent raising, and racism.

Of course you haven't. You wouldn't know a culture of personal responsibility if it bit you.
Again, the fact that you associate blacks with a culture of blame, even though I just told you that culture exists among all races, demonstrates your racism.
People only have to do three things to avoid lifetime poverty. Graduate high school, get a job, and get married before having children. Anyone can do these, regardless of background. The only real obstacle is a culture that looks down on education and parental responsibility.

If you're asking that, then you don't understand what a subspecies is. All groups of people belong to one subspecies phenotype or another. Africans because they stayed in equatorial areas, Europeans because they migrated north, etc.. Travel time alone effectively isolated these populations. "The rest of humanity" is a nonsensical distinction. All groups of humans were equally isolated by distance. Very few were isolated by geography.

Nope.  We're not pure.  There was migration periods and you know how you guys are.

Got anything showing that human races should be classified as a subspecies?

Who said anything about being pure? Race and subspecies are both classifications of phenotype (appearance and behavior). In humans, we call it "race", but in every other species, we call it "subspecies". But it's the exact same differentiating criteria in either. IOW, race and subspecies are classification synonyms.