January 1, 2019
"There’s a risk to thinking about genes all the time."
"He was a semiprofessional loose cannon... We become prisoners of our own persona," said Nathaniel Comfort, a science historian at Johns Hopkins University, quoted in "James Watson Won’t Stop Talking About Race/The Nobel-winning biologist has drawn global criticism with unfounded pronouncements on genetics, race and intelligence. He still thinks he’s right, a new documentary finds" (NYT).
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91 comments:
"He still thinks he's right" That's hilarious.
Ugly facts destroy beautiful theories
Hasn't anyone told Watson the Science Is Settled?
"Eric Lander, the director of the Broad Institute of M.I.T. and Harvard, elicited an outcry last spring with a toast he made to Dr. Watson’s involvement in the early days of the Human Genome Project. Dr. Lander quickly apologized. 'I reject his views as despicable,' Dr. Lander wrote to Broad scientists. 'They have no place in science, which must welcome everyone. I was wrong to toast, and I’m sorry.'"
science...must welcome everyone.
Except Dr. Watson.
...the Broad Institute...
At least they named it after a worthy topic of study...
If it's not an IQ difference, then whites are discriminating against blacks, and the racial agitator profit continues.
Easy to convince blacks, and you only need them mad to make money.
White supremacists also find that East Asians are smarter than whites. Maybe they're just scientists and not white supremacists.
You don't think about genes at all when blacks identify as American and not as black.
Watson: a crick in the neck of science.
Nothing comes between Watson and his kleine Calvins.
Isn’t this Watson guy a scientist? Won the Nobel? Aren’t scientist always right? Global warming, doncha know. Jerry Brown on MTP said it was bigger than the Nazis!
Biases in hiring by medical school science departments are well documented.
Yeah, they're totally the opposite of every other academic department in the country for the last 30 years.
Discrimination in biomedical research as well, where cognitive dissonance does not happen, one would assume. Also inability to understand averages:
“If he knew African-Americans as colleagues at all levels, his present view would be impossible to sustain,’’ Dr. King said.
If that is the case, it may not bode well for combating prejudice in biomedical research, where African-Americans represent just 1.5 percent of grant applications to the N.I.H. Biases in hiring by medical school science departments are well documented.
“It’s easy to say, ‘I’m not Watson,’’’ said Kenneth Gibbs, a researcher at the N.I.H. who studies racial disparities in science. “But one should really be asking himself or herself, ‘What am I doing to ensure our campus environments are supporting scientists from backgrounds that are not there?’’’
Obsessed with Race, [will not] stop talking about it and making unfounded pronouncements.
American progressive writers and television commentators.
The problem for the nurture wing is too much data.
It's not data, it's a problem to be remedied.
Not this shit again. Yes, no matter how you try to torment the data, the gap of a standard deviation remains between black and white IQ measures. No, this reality is NOT acceptable to "polite society", so posturing and angry denunciations must accompany any mention of said reality. But wait! Average I.Q. data do not give you a clue as to the intelligence of any individual you might meet. My dear old Dad, a psychometrician back in the day, laid all this out at the kitchen table for me and my siblings in the late 1960s. Nothing about the data has changed since then. By the way, the highest single I.Q. he ever personally measures was a black woman. It is odd that people who believe in evolution are unable to believe that average intelligence might diverge in isolated or semi-isolated populations. But whatever. Where Watson and the other pariahs of intelligence measure are correct is in the problems of assuming everyone is the same, when they may need different things to prosper. As an example, young black men have lower impulse control, and so traditional school is a poor environment for them. It doesn't mean they can learn algebra, but they aren't going to sit still for it as other demographic groups might. Nor will the numbers be the same in the tails of the distribution. It's just math. Accept it.
To measure discrimination, everybody today uses averages. But it's in averages that IQ differences between groups turn up.
This new created problem is solved with cognitivice dissonance and anger.
Especially anger.
'I reject his views as despicable,' Dr. Lander wrote to Broad scientists.
Dr. Lander can't reject them as incorrect, so Dr Lander is speaking as a politician, not as a scientist. Go Dr. Lander!
Dr. Collins said he was unaware of any credible research on which Dr. Watson’s “profoundly unfortunate’’ statement would be based.
I hope Dr. Collins is lying because recent GWAS studies show that Watson is correct, and Dr. Collins should know about such things.
Everybody seems to have forgotten that ultimate human worth is measured by sense of humor.
As long as it is a bad thing to "act white," blacks naturally are going to score low on tests geared to measure "scholastic aptitude," i.e "whiteness."
The single most impressive person I have met in a long life was a Nigerian exchange student so black his skin looked bluish in some lights.
Why are we arguing about this? Watson says that studies support his conclusion; other scientists say that studies refute his position. They all need to study the studies, do new studies, or whatever, and resolve the issue. Get back to me when they’re done.
Biases in hiring by medical school science departments are well documented.
"New chart illustrates graphically the racial preferences for blacks, Hispanics being admitted to US medical schools"
Ignorance is Bliss said... the Broad Institute At least they named it after a worthy topic of study
What's the first thing you look for in a woman?
That depends which way she's walking
#thatsNotFunny
#itsFunnyBecauseItsTrue
@ Hagar - You can make the tests non-verbal and get the same results.
@ Fernandistein - Your charts should make everyone prefer Doctors of Color.
Mary complained... In the same way, girls in all-girls schools always get the top scores
In Heinlein's book Friday; the Democratic Republic of California realized there was A Terrible Problem!
IT turned out, that people with college degrees (on average) earned more money than those without.
The Republic solved this problem by issuing College Degrees to All Citizens. Problem Solved!
When i read that back in the '80's, i didn't realize it was an instruction manual
1) IQ exists, and matters.
2) There are distinct genetic differences in average IQ.
3) There are distinct genetic populations of humans.
This is solid, proven science.
In that view, the whites are winning.
They weren't enslaved like other races,
WTF? That's one of the dumbest and most historically ignorant statements I have ever read.
rhhardin said...
Everybody seems to have forgotten that ultimate human worth is measured by sense of humor.
That's not funny.
Why are we arguing about this?
Because a significant fraction of the "scientists" are lying.
Here's an example, also from the NYT:
And when a blogger at the far-right Unz Review noted that the DNA variations associated with high IQ in a 2017 study of Europeans were at the lowest frequency among Africans, the study’s lead author, Danielle Posthuma, wrote in a published reply that such cross-population comparisons were spurious.
“This,” she wrote, “is a very deep-rooted misunderstanding.”
Deep-rooted misunderstanding = a fact that we wish weren't true.
By claiming that cross-population GWAS studies are invalid, she's also claiming that African populations have very different brain genetics than Europeans - so they can't be different. Or something. Occam's Butterknife.
Here's the "blogger at the far-right Unz Review" which the NYT was afraid to link to.
1) I have not studied this topic, so I make no claims about nature vs. nurture regarding intelligence.
2) Unfounded is not the same as untrue
3) If blacks have a lower IQ on average, that does not preclude some individuals having very high IQ.
4) Statements along the lines of "If he knew African-Americans as colleagues" fail to account for the difference between average IQ and individual IQ
5) Watson's statement about "people who have to deal with black employees" is problematic for this same reason
Not all cultures are as squeamish about the topic as Western academia. When China and India make their scientific bones, and I expect they will in the coming century, things will change. My own solution is to ignore the group and judge the individual. I would also point out that by age two it was obvious that I wasn't the second coming of Gauss and I've never felt the urge to shoot myself on that account.
chuck:
… My own solution is to ignore the group and judge the individual.
This is fine (and makes sense) for you as an individual. But when countries are deciding public policy, i.e. deciding how to spend hundreds of billions of dollars, it's a good thing for them to understand the facts about populations of people, and what is likely to work and not work.
Any test you can devise, you cannot eliminate your own cultural prejudices from it.
"Do fish know they are wet?" etc.
The average says something about individuals at the extreme tail. The cutoff follows the average. But these guys are rare in any case.
"He still thinks he’s right, a new documentary finds"
Write like Yoda, they do.
There are two aspects to this. One is the actual science, and the other is the politics, and the resulting push for political correctness. The science, to me, is the more interesting. Why might those whose ancestors were raised in the tropics maybe less intelligent, on average, than those whose ancestors were raised in more temperate climates? Is it the climate? Or is it that many Caucasions and Orientals have Neanderthal DNA, and many Orientals have DNA from another human line, contrasted with races that never left Africa until recent times? Or is it that different traits have been selected for evolution by different environments?
Part of what got me thinking here is that we have a kitten, now around 5 months of age. He is smart. Scary smart sometimes. At four months he had figured out how to open inside doors that open the other way (he can get into most of the rooms in the house, but can't, yet, get out), and open the sliding glass door to get outside (which we don't want because outdoors at our MT house is very dangerous for cats, thanks to all the predators there). Etc. Keeps us on our toes more than any human kid ever did. My partner has had several pure breed Siamese, a Siamese mix, a Burmese, several other mixtures, and now this one, a Siamese mix, and this is very clearly the smartest of the bunch. The difference, maybe is that he was literally born in a barn. His mother was a barn cat on a farm. He came to us with worms and stuff in his ears, probably caught from her. We doubt that any of his siblings survived, since the small animal vet in the county hadn't seen them for their worms. In any case, it is probably a far more dangerous environment than faced by most domesticated cats, and that might explain his apparent smartness. On the other hand, we have had dogs that were way overbred, and dumb as rocks. A far cry from their wolf ancestors that they separated from 10k or so years ago. Of course, dogs and cats evolve much more quickly than we do, as they are capable of a new generation every year or two, and ours take much longer. But we have had many more millennia to evolve, and it shouldn't be a surprise if vastly different climates resulted in very different human evolutions.
Science must welcome everyone. Hilarious groveling. Quite "scientific".
Most people accept the evidence before their eyes that sub-Saharan descended western Africans dominate sprinting events. If there is enough genetic divergence in human population even between western African and eastern African (distance running) populations in extremes of running abilities, why is it impossible to have divergences in extremes of IQ between populations?
Doesn't become "unfounded" just because someone calls it that. If I were a journalist, and a Nobel prizewinning scientist were telling me something in his area of competence (ie not a geneticist telling me about global warming or labour policy), I'd be cautious about calling it unfounded.
> Why might those whose ancestors were raised in the tropics maybe less intelligent, on average, than those whose ancestors were raised in more temperate climates?
Health is probably more important than intelligence. If you die early, it doesn't matter how smart you are. Africa is a tough environment and one might ask why it is that the non-african peoples didn't migrate south. They migrated all over Eurasia and into the Americas, but apparently Africa was too tough for them.
Why might those whose ancestors were raised in the tropics maybe less intelligent, on average, than those whose ancestors were raised in more temperate climates?
It might be because the Sub-Saharan Africans didn't interbreed with other hominids like the other genetic populations did.
Re: Chuck:
Health is probably more important than intelligence. If you die early, it doesn't matter how smart you are.
Also, in primitive societies, above average intelligence probably doesn't confer much of a reproductive advantage. Arguably doesn't even today.
Anyhow, the average human of any race is already a genius compared to an ape. Particular environments may have created selective pressure in favour of slightly higher average intelligence. I would guess that the selection is comparatively recent, coincident with the development of large, dense, complex polities in the last few thousand years. I suppose it could be Neanderthal or Denisovan introgression (far, far earlier in prehistory), but we can already identify introgressed segments to some extent. Do any of them have anything to do with brain function?
Re: Gahrie --
Quite likely that Sub-Saharan African lineages are just as mixed as Eurasians, we just haven't had as much data to work with. See here for a bit of discussion.
Any test you can devise, you cannot eliminate your own cultural prejudices from it.
Perhaps valid, if we were relying on a single test and did not account for cultural prejudices. However IQ has been measured worldwide many times, using many tests, many of which were designed to eliminate cultural prejudice. The results are consistent. Among the scientists who study IQ, the question is not validity, but the appropriateness of discussing the results. IQ is the most valid measure devised by social science.
But when countries are deciding public policy, i.e. deciding how to spend hundreds of billions of dollars, it's a good thing for them to understand the facts about populations of people, and what is likely to work and not work.
So maybe they shouldn't be spending those hundreds of billions?
Quite likely that Sub-Saharan African lineages are just as mixed as Eurasians, we just haven't had as much data to work with. See here for a bit of discussion.
That article suggests that there were several different human lineages in Africa, some that left and interbred with other hominids, and some that stayed and interbred with each other to produce modern Africans.
My own solution is to ignore the group and judge the individual.
That's fine on an individual level, and a philosophy I try to follow. But what do you do when an identifiable genetic population that comprises less than 5% of the population commits the majority of crime? What do you do when this same population has an average IQ of 85..which means half of them are unable to be productive citizens in a modern economy? Unpleasant questions, but we are going to have to answer them someday.
Re: Fernandistein:
By claiming that cross-population GWAS studies are invalid, she's also claiming that African populations have very different brain genetics than Europeans - so they can't be different.
Eh, I am of two minds here. I would guess that some of the mutations that correspond to higher intelligence are not present in archaic ancestral populations, and that even those that are have only been selected on recently. So I would not be surprised, for example, if it turned out that studies on European and Asian populations identified different genes associated with intelligence.
To throw out an alternative theory -- suppose the cause of these differences weren't the presence of positive mutations, but rather, the persistence of deleterious mutations. Sub-Saharan Africa already struggles with significantly higher genetic variation in the population than Eurasian populations. Add to that, the fact that they are in a high UV environment, and UV is mutagenic. A few generations of purifying selection can reduce the resulting genetic load, but if you're stuck with a high baseline rate of deleterious mutations in every generation, maybe the purifying selection effect just can't keep up (and in the modern world, there is a reduced selection effect, because we're not okay letting people just die). If you look at the March of Dimes table of incidence of birth defects by country, it sort of bears this out, with traditionally equatorial populations having the highest incidence (although in some cases, I think cousin-marriage is the problem, not mutation or excessive genetic distance). But this is all wholly speculative.
Perhaps in some places, there is just something in the water that causes these differences.....
The only exciting part of this subject is the data coming in linking specific genes to intelligence. Fernandistein linked to Even more genes for intelligence which is largely a comment drawing attention to several papers.
The three sentence summary is that 1,041 gene variants have been identified that correlate with IQ. Not surprisingly, almost all of the genes correlating with IQ are expressed in the brain, but there are also two clusters around the pituitary gland (right at the base of the brain) and the immune system. All of this comes from statistical samples of the human population and identifying a gene variant as positively associated with IQ means there has to be at least one other version of that gene that is negatively associated.
The hopeful but problematic thing about all this is that it will soon be possible to modify these genes at conception.
Fresh meat for racists to happily ring in the new year.
Fresh meat for racists to happily ring in the new year.
Yes, Howard, please show us how the good people, I assume that includes you, talk about intelligence.
> The hopeful but problematic thing about all this is that it will soon be possible to modify these genes at conception.
One of the reasons I suspect that China will pursue this research.
There seems to be a correlation between IQ and the rate of consanguinity in different societies.
https://www.arealme.com/iq/average-iq-by-country.html
http://www.consang.net/index.php/Global_prevalence
" ... scientists routinely excoriate Dr. Watson when his name surfaces on social media."
Just so you know, those aren't actually scientists. They're cringing bootlickers. And not one of them is fit to lick Watson's boots.
And FYI, all this talk about "on average" and "individuals" is more cringing boot-licking. There are certain genes that are found only in certain populations. An individual cannot have those genes if none of his forebears were members of that population. He doesn't have a "low probability" of having those genes, he has zero probability of having those genes.
This thread makes me ask: is there ANY genetic evidence to support the claims of transgenderism?
Has a "gay gene" ever been found?
It just dawned on me how huge this is. I mean this is an oh my god! moment.
For years I've been trying to imagine how it is there could be a significant statistical difference in IQ between different populations that is consistent with how evolution works. I mean it's not exactly plausible that there should be any real difference.
After all Adam, the genetic Adam, was alive about 150,000 years ago. And Eve, the genetic Eve, was alive about 200,000 years ago. All of the DNA of everyone alive today, ignoring mutations, comes from either the genetic Adam or the genetic Eve. If we estimate 25 years per generation, then it's only 8,000 generations since Eve and 6,000 generations since Adam. (The reason Adam is younger than Eve is that men are more strongly selected against than women.)
That just doesn't seem to give enough time for any real and substantial genetic differences to arise between tribes. (Tribes because for almost all the time people have existed, we have been literally organized as tribes.) So I have always imagined that if there really was a genetic mutation that effected IQ it had to be just a few genes. Maybe three genes because it just doesn't seem like there are enough generations for anything more than that.
But that's not what we are seeing at all! The data is showing 1,041 genes correlated with IQ. There are only 20,000 to 25,000 genes. So between 4 and 5 percent of our genes have been changing to support higher IQ!
That's incredible. In fact it seems unbelievable. It means we have been selecting for IQ at an incredible rate. This means that IQ is just about the only story that matters. This is what has been happening to the human species for the last 200,000 years.
Now I have a suspicion that Adam and Eve that I have looked up dates for are not the real thing. I suspect that the nominal Adam is the Adam for the Y chromosome and the nominal Eve is the Eve for our mitochondria. If this is true then real Eve and the real Adam, the ones for all our DNA, would go back deeper in time.
But even if the real Eve is a million years old, the fact that some huge percent of our genes are involved in this shift to a higher IQ implies a staggeringly rapid rate of genetic change.
“If he knew African-Americans as colleagues at all levels, his present view would be impossible to sustain,’’ Dr. King said.
Wait, Watson should generalize anecdotal data (black scientists) to the general population (people of sub-Saharan African descent)? That's lousy science.
Watson never said that all black people are dumb. He said that, on average, black people have a lower IQ. That doesn't rule out black geniuses, it just posits that there will be fewer, proportionally, than in European or Asian populations.
And given the current state of affairs, it isn't hard to see how he'd come to that conclusion.
Nurture can become nature. Isn’t that a tenet of evolution? We now know, too, that the brain is plastic. You’re not doomed to your DNA, you can change it with effort. I like to think of the old theological debate about predestination and free will in this way: if you’re not predestinated, do something about it, for God’s sake.
Fresh meat for racists to happily ring in the new year.
Howard shows us exactly why people are afraid/reluctant to discuss the facts of these matters.
mandrewa said...
"That just doesn't seem to give enough time for any real and substantial genetic differences to arise between tribes."
Yep. That's why it's so hard to tell the tribes apart. They all look exactly alike.
M Jordan said...
"Nurture can become nature. Isn’t that a tenet of evolution?"
No, it isn't. What does that even mean?
From many things I've read, it is impossible to design any written test on any subject in any language where blacks will do better than whites or Asians. Even if the test is about black history.
And then there are some non-written competitions that use brains, not brawn.
Top 100 world chess players- zero blacks
Top 100 US Chess players- zero blacks
Top 100 Go players- zero blacks
Top 100 professional poker players- zero blacks
Top 100 world female chess players- zero blacks
The top 100 Scrabble players includes quite a few blacks. All from Nigeria. http://www.wespa.org/aardvark/cgi-bin/rating.cgi
Why would Scrabble be an exception? And why just Nigerians? BTW, there are measurable IQ differences between different African tribes. Sometimes quite large differences.
Watson's observations are well founded, not unfounded. Reality is often uncomfortable. There are differences between men and woman. There are differences between ethnic groups. None of that takes away from the American ideal- every individual has equal rights under the law. And every individual should be treated as an individual, not as a group member. This will, inevitably, lead to what looks like discrimination, but isn't. It's uncomfortable reality.
Here's an uncomfortable reality. Blacks avoid black doctors. They didn't used to. But once upon a time, affirmative action didn't exist, and a black doctor was presumed to be just a qualified as a white doctor. No one wants to be treated by an affirmative action doctor.
Re: Gospace:
Here's an uncomfortable reality. Blacks avoid black doctors.
Really? I had never heard that before. In fact, somewhat to the contrary, one of the rationales for affirmative action in medical school that I had heard was that there were a lot of racist Black patients who simply wouldn't trust White or Asian or Indian doctors.
Jay Elink said...
This thread makes me ask: is there ANY genetic evidence to support the claims of transgenderism?
Has a "gay gene" ever been found?
===
No, and no and now just STFU!!!
If either gene existed support for abortion right would go out the window IT. COULD. NOT. BE. LEGAL. to abort fetii with gay or transgender genes.
John Henry
Who among us wouldn't happily shave ten or fifteen points off his IQ in return for an extra 100k a year in the real estate industry. I've read that many dumb fucks make money in real estate. Stupidity actually gives you an edge in that lucrative business. Also, I wouldn't be surprised if a pornable penis wasn't a greater factor in human happiness and contentment than a high IQ. Smart people tend to overvalue smartness, but there are more important things I bet Lenin had an IQ that was off the charts, way higher than Warren Harding's. Still, Harding was right about most things, and Lenin was wrong in a way that caused millions to die...,..,,,,It would be amazing if IQ was the only measurable human characteristic that had nothing to do with hereditary factors. That said, the presumption of someone's IQ based on their race can be quite pernicious and harmful.
Balfegor said...
Re: Gospace:
Here's an uncomfortable reality. Blacks avoid black doctors.
Really? I had never heard that before. In fact, somewhat to the contrary, one of the rationales for affirmative action in medical school that I had heard was that there were a lot of racist Black patients who simply wouldn't trust White or Asian or Indian doctors.
That's the rationale you've heard. Now go look at actual behavior. Not surveys. Behavior.
I do know that almost no one wants a foreign health care professional who doesn't speak clear English, regardless of race or religion. I've changed doctor's offices for that reason. Imperfect communication leads to poorer results.
“If he knew African-Americans as colleagues at all levels, his present view would be impossible to sustain,’’ Dr. King said.
But there is nothing in his "present view" that would be contradicted or challenged by having black "colleagues at all levels".
It's really disturbing to see scientists so willing to play dumb like this. It's one thing when you get some ignorant/dimwit layman or politician mischaracterizing someone's statements as "sexist" or "racist". When this is done by a "leading geneticist", and other people who should know better, it suggests a spreading intellectual and institutional rot that just ain't funny.
chuck: My own solution is to ignore the group and judge the individual.
Good luck with that. The law and allied cultural pharisees will come down on you like a ton of bricks if your judging people as individuals results in you, say, employing more white and Asian males than "PoCs" or females.
In a society where all the institutions of law and education have decided that any and all "disparate impact" is strictly the result of various (ever more arcane and invisible) forms of "discrimination" practiced by members of the unprotected class against individuals of protected classes, your solution is only a "solution" at the personal level. And probably not for long there, either.
I don't know why people continue to make this blithe pronouncement, as if they were completely unaware of this pernicious reigning ideology.
This is also where statistical ignorance comes into play.
Shifting the mean just a bit eliminates the tail overlap. Yes, IQ, as with most other human characteristics isn't a perfectly normal distribution, but shifting a mean IQ just a few points to the left all but eliminates the freaks of the right tails that are the top 100 chess players, mathematicians etc as pointed out above.
Similarly, shifting a mean a few percentage points for calf length, fat distribution, fast twitch fibers leads to 100% of 100meter sprinting champions being descended from western sub-saharan Africans.
If a slight change in mean sprinting ability leads to the Olympic results we see, why is it unbelievable to think populations might have a different mean IQ?
William said: the presumption of someone's IQ based on their race can be quite pernicious and harmful.
Absolutely correct. But the study of group differences is prompted by our concern over the large and persistent black/white earnings gap. The appropriate remedies depend on the causes of this gap. "Environmental" causes suggest environmental policies, such as scattered-site housing. "Discrimination" as a cause suggests anti-discrimination policies, such as affirmative action. "IQ" as a cause argues strongly against affirmative action, especially in education, since people whose best option is a trade can be made worse off by being induced to get a liberal-arts degree.
If IQ plays a major role in earnings, then the main way to close the racial gap is to limit the role of market forces in determining earnings. IOW, socialism. Thus, the displacement of "class" by "race" in contemporary socialist rhetoric, and the transition of hillbillies from victims to deplorables.
Jupiter said...
M Jordan said...
"Nurture can become nature. Isn’t that a tenet of evolution?"
No, it isn't. What does that even mean?
*****************
He could be referring to epigenetics.
https://www.whatisepigenetics.com/fundamentals/
Excellent blog post by Steve Sailer, on the article, along with links to his faqs on iq and race.
http://www.unz.com/isteve/just-when-i-thought-i-was-out-they-pull-me-back-in/
Lysenko's descendants have won. What are current fashions about gender fluidity and gender reassignment surgery but Lysenko's ideas applied to human beings? Watson gets pretty much the same treatment as dissident Soviet scientists.
Some 10-20 years ago, there was a trend of attributing discomfort with one's gender and even homosexuality to chromosomal and genetic abnormalities. Some people are born this way! But probably in the meantime it was discovered that, other than a few special cases, anomalous behavior has no clear-cut genetic reasons.
I am writing this because the genetic roots of sexual behavior are no longer emphasized; this theory must have been quietly dropped. Gender is a social construct now! Hence the current emphasis on subjective feelings, bordering on mystical experiences.
Genetics is of no further use to progressive causes. Watson is like a living fossil.
William said...
"I wouldn't be surprised if a pornable penis wasn't a greater factor in human happiness and contentment than a high IQ. Smart people tend to overvalue smartness, but there are more important things."
All true, and I have yet to meet a person with Downs' Syndrome who wasn't happier than I am almost all of the time. But that is not the issue. The reason the Left Fascists are so insistent upon the absolute nonexistence of innate behavioral differences between races is that they want to blame all differences in outcomes on racism.
>Jupiter said...
M Jordan said..."Nurture can become nature. Isn’t that a tenet of evolution?"
No, it isn't. What does that even mean?>
What I meant was that the environment selects the traits that can survive and eventually the species owns those traits. Iow, the environment nurtures the species forward.
Hey, I’m no biologist, I’m a pontificator. Cool it with the quibbling. Big picture here.
@MB,
Lysenko's descendants have won.
In the scheme of American intellectual institutional memory, it has been deliberately forgotten that the Marxists hated Darwin & the Nazis loved him.
The purpose of Darwinian evolutionary theory in American cultural life was as a stick to beat the Christians. When evolutionary psychology started to come to the fore in the 90s, the Left found its results unpalatable to their mission & quietly dropped Darwin from the fold just like they dropped Freud under pressure from the feminists years before.
Angle-Dyne, Samurai Buzzard said...
"I don't know why people continue to make this blithe pronouncement, as if they were completely unaware of this pernicious reigning ideology."
I would suggest that it is because
a) They have managed to arrange their own lives so that the burdens of this ideology do not fall on them, and
b) They don't like the idea that there are things they believe which they do not dare to say.
It's okay to say African Americans excel athletically, in general.
It's okay to say Asian Americans excel academically due to upbringing and culture, in general.
Considering the possibility, out loud, that African Americans are at a disadvantage academically due to upbringing and culture or genetics is racism.
Anyone who says this out loud is worse than Hitler. And more racist.
> In the scheme of American intellectual institutional memory, it has been deliberately forgotten that the Marxists hated Darwin
Lysenko was a Darwinian, but not a Mendelian. The twenties and thirties was the period in which the modern synthesis was taking place and there were people who did not subscribe. Marx himself was happy about Darwin because the theory of evolution spit in the eye of established religion.
M Jordan said...
>Jupiter said...
M Jordan said..."Nurture can become nature. Isn’t that a tenet of evolution?"
No, it isn't. What does that even mean?>
What I meant was that the environment selects the traits that can survive and eventually the species owns those traits. Iow, the environment nurtures the species forward.
Hey, I’m no biologist, I’m a pontificator. Cool it with the quibbling. Big picture here.
****************
Darwin didn't his theory a "Theory of Natural Selection" for nothing.
Now epigenetics is showing that Lamarck, long rejected for believing that environmental forces in an individual's life could lead to heritable traits, wasn't completely wrong,
I have an in-law who's a post-doc in genomics, who can discuss in depth the workings of Darwinism and epigenetics, but only goes "humina humina" when I ask about genetic evidence for homosexuality (which I bet someday we find, at least for males) and transgenders (not!).
IQ just measures your academic potential - nothing about your empathy, emotional potential or other physical strengths ( athletics, musical ability, grace). But it is real and anyone who claims otherwise should show the data where it "proves" lower than 100 IQ can received earned university degrees in rigorous subjects but force of will (nurture). Nature sets the potential - nurture just subtracts generally.
If money were the answer too - why isn't DC public schools graduating class after class of high achievers -since they spend more than anyone?
As to Howard - a racist judges ALL in a group to be the same. Anyone with a grasp of statistics knows that is silly in populations - you always have those at the end of the curves in any group. It's the mean that sets how many relative to other groups though - so you may have a larger number of really smart folks relative to others (azhenkazi jews win that lottery).
It's more racist to pretend differences DON'T exist and try to structure systems to reach and teach those that can handle more or less.
> IQ just measures your academic potential - nothing about your empathy, emotional potential or other physical strengths
Above a certain basic intelligence, I find the freakish talents more interesting. People with 20/10 vision, or who can see stars in daylight, or play music after a single hearing, or remember exactly conversations that took place years ago. Those all reveal a human potential that few possess.
Re: Gospace:
That's the rationale you've heard. Now go look at actual behavior. Not surveys. Behavior.
It's all very well to say that, but do you have a source? I come from a medical family (father, grandfather, grandmother all physicians) and I have literally never heard that Black patients avoid Black doctors. I'm not saying you're wrong, just that it's surprising to me since it doesn't accord with what I've heard in the past from people who would have reason to know.
It occurs to me I've probably made a mistake in what I said earlier. The more I think about it I doubt that these 1,041 variant genes that correlate with higher IQ are actually actively spreading through the human population. Perhaps some of them are, but I'll bet that for most of them the prevalence is about the same in all populations.
What the 1,041 number does tell us is that a surprisingly large proportion of our genes, between 4 and 5%, are about intelligence. And it may mean that our ancestors, probably going back ten million years or so, have been selected for intelligence.
But for most of these genes, natural selection is probably just about maintaining what we already have. Almost everyone probably has the right version, the one that goes with high IQ, and only a few people have a wrong version or one that goes with low IQ.
Of course it shouldn't be that difficult to figure out which of these 1,041 genes are actively changing since in that case many people will be carrying the wrong version.
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