Should Research on Race and IQ Be Banned?

[Cainkane1]

Professor Shockley once tried to say that African ancestried peoples tended to have lower IQ'S than other races. However several very brainy black people started to surface in the defense of their race and one girl who approached Dr. Shockley was a black girl at Harvard who had the highest grade point average of any other student attending the college.

We have Condoleesa Rice and Neal Degrasse and I'm sure they would not hesitate to step forward. I'm no scientist but I believe IQ is determined at least in part by environment and motivation. Smart people can look stupid in a bad environment.

I personally know a black man who was a dropout at age 19 who robbed a bank who got caught who got his ged and then a certificate in culinary science while serving time in prison. He was released on probation and he landed a job as a fry cook for the Ritz Carlton hotel chain and as years went by he eventually became master chef.

Sometimes you have to coax brains out of people.

 

[marting]

Here's some good background and FAQ on the study

http://ssgac.org/documents/FAQsRietveldetal2013Science.pdf

"Second, even if an individual genetic variant has a very small effect, many genetic variant"s taken together may have more predictive power. In one of our analyses, we estimate that when it becomes possible to analyze data from 1 million or more individuals—which is still several years away—many genetic variants taken together will be able to capture 15% of the variation across individuals in educational attainment. This amount of predictive power is still too low to be relevant for predicting any one person’s educational attainment, but it would be useful for controlling for genetic factors when studying the effect of an education-promoting policy."

 

[Delvo]

Being able to group certain traits doesn’t change the fact that differences among even family members are much larger than the differences between “races”

Simply false. If it were true, then mixed-race children's parents would be just as likely to make good tissue matches for transplants as in single-race families, instead of being particularly unlikely to be acceptable matches precisely because of being more distantly related to their own children.

...Unless you meant "family" in a very large-scale sense, using huge, very highly "extended" families. But, since that's all races are anyway, even that stretch still does no more to salvage your claim here than to merely make it redundant to this next one:

the variance within any “race” is much greater than the variance between “races”.

So what? After the countless times you and others have rererererererepeated this mantra, you'd think at least one of you somewhere would have eventually gotten around to the part where it has something to do with anything... at least, if it did have something to do with anything. On the other hand, what you do instead is exactly what it would look like if this factoid had absolutely nothing at all to do with anything at all. What an amazing coincidence!

There are multiple populations within Africa that are much more distantly related from each other that the supposed “races” are.

That's why they're separate races themselves. You can keep pretending as long as you want that "African" is supposed to be a race, but it won't magically make it true, or fool anybody.

The traits that separate these supposed “races” are basically irrelevant

That depends on what we're talking about their relevance to. They've been pretty relevant to, for example, natural selection. Relevance to intelligence... that's what the research that some people apparently want to ban is for.

and have no correlation to genes that control other things.

Wow. Genes for one thing that have no correlation to genes that control other things. What an amazing revelation.

Meanwhile, since you brought up correlation and the fact that most genes/alleles you have no correlation with each other... have you come up with an explanation yet for the strong correlations among hundreds of particular alleles (whose geographic distributions perfectly match those of the phenotypically-identified races that aren't supposed to exist), other than biological relatedness?

...mitochondrial groupings...

...don't matter a bit. (Finding correlations requires multiple separate bits of DNA that are free to recombine, not a single big one that isn't.)

We have Condoleesa Rice and Neal Degrasse

Examples of intelligent individuals in any demographic group would only disprove a claim that that demographic group contained no such individuals at all. Nobody makes such a claim in this case.

I believe IQ is determined at least in part by environment and motivation... Sometimes you have to coax brains out of people.

As do all intelligence researchers. That's not in dispute. You might be bringing this up because of an impression that observing a connection with race requires thinking of it as entirely genetic or even focusing on the genetic aspect of it, but it doesn't. Just the fact that there's anybody wanting to research the issue at all proves all by itself that a variety of potential causes of the observed disparities are being considered; if there were only one possibility, there'd be nothing to research because the answer would already be known.

 

[Dinwar]

the variance within any “race” is much greater than the variance between “races”.

This can't be true, mathematically. You're saying that variation within a subset is greater than the variation between all subsets--which would require the group "all subsets" to be equal to the group "subset". In other words, you're arguing that there's one race, which makes this statement nonsense.

Reality is that WITHIN SOME SUBPOPULATIONS the variation is greater than the diversity of ALL OTHER SUBPOPULATIONS combined. Problem is, those diverse subpopulations don't represent a single interbreeding population, but rather multiple subpopulations with varying degrees of genetic isolation--or, as the term has been used in this thread, different races.

There are multiple populations within Africa that are much more distantly related from each other that the supposed “races” are.

I know of no one who's arguing otherwise.

The traits that separate these supposed “races” are basically irrelevant

Medicine seems to disagree with you.

What happens to the genetic groupings when an Australo-Melanesia (comparable to Coon's Austroloid) and an Amerind-Jomon Pacific-Asia-Eskimo (Mongoloid), have a child? Wouldn't you lose the benefits of the classification system in a single generation?

Not necessarily. Hybrids are handled perfectly well in plant biology; I see no reason to assume that this can't happen within animals as well (though animals typically only successfully interbreed within a single species). And you don't lose the traits, or at least not all of them.

EVENTUALLY, yes, this system would break down due to interbreeding. But not in a single generation. It'd take a long period of interbreeding to accomplish this, and it would do so by essentially merging all subpopulations into one population.

 

[bpesta22]

Science, to remain science, MUST also try to use reliable means of measurement of objectively definable concepts. Especially if potential answers can be socially disruptive.

Actually, the guy who discovered / invented "reliability" was Charles Spearman. Waiting for someone to mention Mismeasure to kill the thread.

 

[Dinwar]

Waiting for someone to mention Mismeasure to kill the thread.

Why would it kill the thread? It was later found that Gould himself was inaccurate in his measurements.

Science, to remain science, MUST also try to use reliable means of measurement of objectively definable concepts.

Oddly enough, this isn't actually true. Science must criticize those who violate this principle, but there's no requirement that all researchers abide by it. Science is self-correcting; that means we accept that a certain amount of what we know is wrong, and that a certain number of our members are crackpots. Neither is nearly as significant as the fact that we oppose them--the fact that we are self-correcting (we are; every statement to the contrary that I've ever seen amounts to nothing more than "But it's not fast enough!!!") is the important bit.

 

[mike3]

Oddly enough, this isn't actually true. Science must criticize those who violate this principle, but there's no requirement that all researchers abide by it. Science is self-correcting; that means we accept that a certain amount of what we know is wrong, and that a certain number of our members are crackpots. Neither is nearly as significant as the fact that we oppose them--the fact that we are self-correcting (we are; every statement to the contrary that I've ever seen amounts to nothing more than "But it's not fast enough!!!") is the important bit.

However, if they must be targeted for criticism, then doesn't that mean they're not performing science correctly?

 

[Delvo]

This can't be true, mathematically. You're saying that variation within a subset is greater than the variation between all subsets--which would require the group "all subsets" to be equal to the group "subset".

I don't follow this, but I believe it must be referring to a different idea from the one you're responding to, probably based on a different mathematical interpretation of the word "variance".

There are hundreds of alleles that show differences between races (possibly something like 1 or 2 thousand, but I'm not sure). There are more thousands of alleles that show differences between individuals but not along racial lines (or correlated with each other in any other way either). So the latter outnumber the former.

The problem with it is its relevance. It's brought up as part of a claim to believe that races don't exist, but it just simply can't mean that. It would rely on the application of a rule that says that in order for a set to be divided into categories, those categories must be distinguished from each other in more ways than individual items in any category are. Of course, obviously no such rule actually exists, and nobody could really think it does, because there are so many things we all deal with categories of every day that don't follow it. So every single time anybody brings up this business about variance/variation in human groups, and uses it to claim "races don't exist" because of it, (s)he is just flat-out lying, beyond any doubt: claiming a rule about categorization that (s)he not only knows perfectly well isn't a rule at all, but couldn't even possibly not know it.

Reality is that WITHIN SOME SUBPOPULATIONS the variation is greater than the diversity of ALL OTHER SUBPOPULATIONS combined.

I'll have to see a source on that before I'll even buy that much. What I have seen so far looks more like eastern & western Eurasians each have around nine tenths as much as black Africans. Given also the fact that, as soon as people attach emotions to numbers in cases like this, their descriptions of the numerical comparison keep getting bigger and bigger from then on, my presumption is that this is just another case of that phenomenon.

 

[mike3]

@Dinwar: I'm curious. I'm not entirely sure exactly what your position is here on whether "races" are real or not. What is it?

And what do you think the implications are of the results of race-IQ connection research for both science and society? I'd also be interested in hearing Delvo's answer to this question as well.

 

[bpesta22]

Why would it kill the thread? It was later found that Gould himself was inaccurate in his measurements.

Yes, but he writes so well that what he speaks must be truth.

My point is that armchair dismissals of IQ research are easy to generate, but they then imply that researchers in-field are utterly incompetent (it's never occurred to any IQ researcher that cultural bias / reliability / differences in income, education, environment, nutrition, etc., might co-vary with scores on an IQ test? Instead, we just give our English IQ test to non-native speakers and smile at the results?).

So, 100 years of data on this topic can be dismissed because someone on the internet sees an obvious problem with interpretation. The problem's so obvious; except to anyone who has devoted his career to this line of study...

Ignore the rich literature on any of the above-mentioned potential confounds. If only we would have considered reliability 100 years ago, this thread wouldn't exist...

 

[AlBell]

IMO the better argument is that IQ as a single number makes no sense. Our Sol invictus has made that comment in other threads in a way that seemed to me irrefutable.

I've pm'ed him this post.

 

[marplots]

Yes, but he writes so well that what he speaks must be truth.

My point is that armchair dismissals of IQ research are easy to generate, but they then imply that researchers in-field are utterly incompetent (it's never occurred to any IQ researcher that cultural bias / reliability / differences in income, education, environment, nutrition, etc., might co-vary with scores on an IQ test? Instead, we just give our English IQ test to non-native speakers and smile at the results?).

So, 100 years of data on this topic can be dismissed because someone on the internet sees an obvious problem with interpretation. The problem's so obvious; except to anyone who has devoted his career to this line of study...

Ignore the rich literature on any of the above-mentioned potential confounds. If only we would have considered reliability 100 years ago, this thread wouldn't exist...

I'll bite.

After a hundred years, what solid, data-driven results can "anyone who has devoted his career to this line of study" share? Certainly there would be at least one "take home" I could understand, even though I'm not in the field?

Does IQ vary by race? A simple chart would suffice.

 

[Diogenes]

...

So, 100 years of data on this topic can be dismissed because someone on the internet sees an obvious problem with interpretation. The problem's so obvious; except to anyone who has devoted his career to this line of study...

...

As an aside this did happen through 19th century and far into 20th century evolution work when it came to the question of female promiscuity. There was an obvious...obvious to us...human cultural bias with how we speculated female animals were conservative when it came to mating opportunities as a rule. It sound reasonable...increased parental investment, we can even throw a variable at it when considering fitness...but turns out it isn't a rule at all.

There are many other examples of ideas that were held to be true that were later shown to be wrong.

 

[Jono]

Jono,
I didn't want to copy your whole post just to ask this:

What happens to the genetic groupings when an Australo-Melanesia (comparable to Coon's Austroloid) and an Amerind-Jomon Pacific-Asia-Eskimo (Mongoloid), have a child? Wouldn't you lose the benefits of the classification system in a single generation?

In sense of the classification system being mainly biological, as opposed to just "a social construct" makes that question comparable to what happens when a german sheperd and a siberian huskey have a pup. I.e the offspring will be, strictly speaking, part of an overlap (and overlaps do not negate the concepts of biological groups, sub-groups, breeds, types etc) but without nullifying the concept of dog-breed.

Aren't you then left trying to solve a new suite of problems about linking IQ to genes that may or may not appear in offspring?

The issue about IQ being mainly/mostly hereditary is a bit of a sidepoint to the above, and not dependant either way on it but... I do think that people confuse one fact (intelligence is mainly genetic) with the added controversy over differences in intelligence inbetween groups being mainly enviromental or genetic. The two are not interchangable, and some appear to deny the former when they're really talking about the latter.

 

[Jono]

Meanwhile, since you brought up correlation and the fact that most genes/alleles you have no correlation with each other... have you come up with an explanation yet for the strong correlations among hundreds of particular alleles (whose geographic distributions perfectly match those of the phenotypically-identified races that aren't supposed to exist), other than biological relatedness?

^^This.

 

[marplots]

In sense of the classification system being mainly biological, as opposed to just "a social construct" makes that question comparable to what happens when a german sheperd and a siberian huskey have a pup. I.e the offspring will be, strictly speaking, part of an overlap (and overlaps do not negate the concepts of biological groups, sub-groups, breeds, types etc) but without nullifying the concept of dog-breed.

It doesn't nullify the concept, but we were talking about usefulness and whether or not the experiments would be.

Let's run with the dogs here. Say you've determined that German shepherds generally (in a statistical way) have 10% better smelling than huskies. You are presented with a pup that combines traits of both breeds. Now, you can certainly look at the phenotype here and see it looks more like the sire (the shepherd) than the dam. So you might expect it has a better chance of having a good nose, although, without testing, you don't really know.

But here's the problem. We skipped the part where we figure out which genes determine smelling skill. We associated nose ability with a certain phenotype but failed to figure out if the visual cues (or bone structure or whatever) are linked with nose power. We just don't know. We know there's an association, but how strongly is that linked and is the whole thing decoupled in a mixed offspring? Maybe the pup gets all the visual cues that tell us it looks like a shepherd, but happens to get the smell-ability of mom instead of dad. We could even have a 99% shepherd and still have a bad husky nose.

Phenotype only confuses the issue, unless you can claim that the property you are interested in also has a phenotypic expression. If, for example, I can show that down syndrome kids look a certain way (which they do) and this is dependent on the same genes that give rise to the syndrome, I'm home free. But that's the step that I think is getting skipped here.

 

[Delvo]

IQ as a single number makes no sense.

Then perhaps here and now would be a good place and time to provide an alternative explanation for why:

1. Whenever tests are conducted on the idea of any way to separate general intelligence into narrower "talents", the separation doesn't show up in the actual results; instead, people who are bad at one thing are bad at the others and people who are good at one thing are good at the others.
2. Not only is a singular general ability reflected in test results, but it's also correlated with real-life outcomes of people's choices and behaviors, often more strongly and persistently than all of the proposed alternative explanations.
3. Not one single opponent of the idea ever produces one single argument against it from research data; the one single thing they ever do instead is respond to facts they don't like with a flurry of logical fallacies. (This one also applies to race denial as well as intelligence denial.)

And what do you think the implications are of the results of race-IQ connection research for both science and society? I'd also be interested in hearing Delvo's answer to this question as well.

Does IQ vary by race? A simple chart would suffice.

Yes. How much of the difference is genetic and how much is environmental isn't completely clear, but there is no serious dispute that it exists. If you want to see it graphed, a search for online images using "race IQ" or such will yield multiple images illustrating it. When I just did that a few minutes ago, the first three results were exactly the kind of line graphs I was expecting, as are a bunch more farther down the page. Some of the other results were either tables or maps going nation-by-nation, which is a different issue. The two (that I spotted with a quick glance through the results page) with the most interesting implications, though, were the sixth and ninth, which go a step beyond just the fact that the differences exist and illustrate sociological implications.

The sixth shows how the effect of a difference between averages is magnified farther away from average: the subsets with the highest and lowest intelligence have the most lopsided group representation. (You can see why in the overlapping line graphs if you draw a vertical line through the space above any given IQ number and look at how much of the line is under one curve compared to how much of the same line is under another curve; farther from 100, a vertical line tends more and more to be predominantly under one curve and not under another.) Because various quality-of-life outcomes are so closely linked to intelligence, this effect in IQ distribution magnifies the differences in those outcomes between any two groups with different average IQs, so more is at stake than one might think from averages alone.

The ninth image shows how two groups' IQs and the difference between them vary with "SES" (socioeconomic status). ("By decile" means the population was divided into 10 groups: the 10% with the lowest set of SES scores, the 10% with the second-lowest set of SES scores, the 10% with the third-lowest set of SES scores, and so on to the 10% with the highest set of SES scores.) The fact that the "black" and "white" lines both slope up to the right just means that higher intelligence and higher SES generally go together, which isn't news, but notice that the "difference" line also slopes up to the right, from about 9 to 16. That means that higher SES is associated with a larger difference between the two groups here. (If that last fact makes you want to explain it and/or figure out how we could deliberately affect it, then you should be in favor of research to investigate it, because just blurting out whatever feels right/obvious in your gut doesn't cut it. Gut-blurts have a bad track record on these kinds of issues.)

Say you've determined that German shepherds generally (in a statistical way) have 10% better smelling than huskies. You are presented with a pup that combines traits of both breeds. Now, you can certainly look at the phenotype here and see it looks more like the sire (the shepherd) than the dam. So you might expect it has a better chance of having a good nose

Not if you "one" knew anything about genetics and crossbreeding.

We skipped the part where we figure out which genes determine smelling skill. We associated nose ability with a certain phenotype... but how strongly is that linked and is the whole thing decoupled in a mixed offspring?

Nobody's saying individual genes for individual traits shouldn't be sought (and the answer to your question could only be found by doing research), but that isn't a step that got "skipped" here; it's just a separate question of its own. Your original question was about the sense of smell of the mutts, so the step you're actually skipping is to just test the mutts' sense of smell. Your metaphor actually just ends up calling for research on human races, with a particular focus on how some racially-identified trait(s) get(s) distributed among people of mixed race.

If, for example, I can show that down syndrome kids look a certain way (which they do) and this is dependent on the same genes that give rise to the syndrome, I'm home free. But that's the step that I think is getting skipped here.

Not a good example. For one thing, the "syndrome" includes all of its symptoms, not just the reduced intelligence (the existence of which, BTW, immediately single-handedly disproves all claims that intelligence isn't a real thing), so the differences in appearance aren't just linked to it; they're part of it. More importantly, Down's Syndrome is caused by an extra copy of a whole chromosome, which contains a lot of genes. It's not caused by any particular gene or set of genes unless there's one that makes chromosome separation during meiosis fail, and no such gene or set of genes is known (or likely to exist, given that the syndrome's distribution in the population doesn't look like the distribution of a gene-based disorder). But on top of that, the biggest flaw in this comparison is that the visible traits that make people with Down's Syndrome look like they have Down's Syndrome are not inherited from their ancestors and do not indicate relatedness among people with Down's Syndrome as a group, which makes those traits entirely different from visible racial traits.

 

[marplots]

(much snipped)
But on top of that, the biggest flaw in this comparison is that the visible traits that make people with Down's Syndrome look like they have Down's Syndrome are not inherited from their ancestors and do not indicate relatedness among people with Down's Syndrome as a group, which makes those traits entirely different from visible racial traits.

Is intelligence heritable?

 

[jakesteele]

I'm fairly certain that they wouldn't, but this sort of begs the question of IQ. Is it a pure measure of "intelligence" or is it skewed by cultural bias unwittingly built into the test?

I have heard the term 'cultural bias' many times and I still don't know for sure what it means.

Does anyone know how Asian kids do on the 'cultrual bias' tests?

 

[blutoski]

Is intelligence heritable?

Obviously. Chimps are 96% genetically identical to humans but I'll give you $1000 if you can teach one to pass a driver's test. Chimps raised in human households do not seem to keep up with their human siblings in terms of educational achievement. I don't think it's going out on a limb to propose that it's that 4% difference in their genomes that's mostly to blame.

The question should be quantitiative at this point: how much of our operative intelligence is genetically inherited; how much is biologically predisposed due to effects of fetal environment; how much is influenced by post-birth environment? How does this vary among categories of individuals, because different factors are involved and must have different impacts and elasticities?

I agree with most of Delvo's points, and would like to emphasize that it's pretty clear that IQ varies with race in most regions; the value of research is in isolating the root causes.

Fetal environment and post-birth environment seem to have generous opportunities for raising IQ without moral jeopardy. There is a risk of failing to pursue this in an effort to avoid potential blowback about simultaneously discovering that there are opportunities to improve IQ through genetics (which would probably be immoral, although there is possibly room for debate depending on the situation).

To address the OP: the quoted author's proposal that IRBs should reject research that promotes 'racial theories of intelligence' has some good points: IRBs already exist and routinely weigh the probable benefits and harm involved in research on human subjects. I think it's reasonable to ask them to consider whether this type of research would traumatize the subjects.

Ultimately, I can't support the proposal. The author is making a request for IRBs to identify and reject research that is not likely to be fruitful (ie: poor quality research) - which is not within the existing skillset of IRBs - and also asking an IRB to reject promising research for appearance reasons.


I think the author is either very cynical or harbours an unconscious prejudice. He seems to feel there is no realistic probability that research into racially predisposed IQ - bogus or legitimate - will produce a result that shows visible minorities are whites' equals. He seems to be taking it for granted that bogus research will publish lies about blacks being biologically disadvantaged and legitimate research will publish truths about blacks being biologically disadvantaged. His proposal is based on the foregone conclusion that research in this field will necessarily lead to further trauma for historically suppressed ethnic groups.

I'm more optimistic.