Reaching out to racists

[EgalitarianJay]

Yep. Its partially why in order to argue against racism, the popular media goes for emotion instead of logic. For most people, they look at things like logic as something to use to feel more smug about their own beleifs.

Racism is commonly addressed from a moral standpoint. It's immoral to discriminate against people based simply on what they look like. When most people think of racism they think of someone hating you because you have a certain skin color or other superficial biological characteristics. Racists try to rationalize their racism and the logical arguments they use can be persuasive to the naive observer.

Exactly. Racist argue that it is more than color and skull structure.

I would argue to them that it shouldnt matter anyways, and thus atleast try to get the bigot to stop the discrimination.

Yes.

Even if there were mental differences between races I would argue that discrimination is not reasonable and that everyone should be judged as individuals.

But I also feel that they should not get away with peddling pseudoscience. What they are really doing with this "race-realist" research is arguing for a genetic basis to racist stereotypes which are very socially harmful.

[SWPIGWANG]

I think all this nondiscriminating talk just look like denial at times. Humans make (often harsh) judgments on others on every possible criteria as all of them are pieces of information.

I don't need to believe in biology or whatever to guess that a random black man I meet on the street as less educated, intelligent and likely to have a criminal record than, say, a random Jew. This is simply due to preobserved distributions correlating those traits used as a prior. Now, to be fair, this mechanism works for all pieces of information, from location, behavior, dress, and so on, and the human mind doesn't do the job of probabilistic inferencing perfectly, biased toward prototypes (stereotypes) as opposed to distributions. That said, ignoring pieces of information result in even worst evaluation, as visual characteristics is not random and have no correlation with everything else. People complaint about stereotypes, but they work reasonably well.

I sometimes wonder if "racists" are those that are aware of the above and actually try to justify themselves in a world that seems to demand some kind of justification for it beyond "that is what the current observed distribution is."

That said, "race realism" shouldn't be important to policy. If one needs to filter populations by IQ or whatever criteria, just actually test that instead of using the terrible method of race or other indirect group affiliation unless it is a exceedingly strong signal (race is not). Giving people IQ tests or evaluating their life history is not too expensive for most of the important decisions.

Many "Egalitarians" is in practice as racialist as the strongest racists in their thinking in that they believe that race is a important idea that divides people. Racial equality is a non-thing in a race-less view of the world. Instead of viewing the black/native-americans/whatever as oppressed by WASP, one can instead say the wealthy, the connected, the intelligent or whatever is holding power, and likes. Group identity can be built in many ways, most of them not on superficial traits of skin but more fundamental features of culture, lifestyle and social networks.

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I do not believe in the claim that in a "fair" world, that skin color and bone structure will have no correlation with wealth, power and status outcomes. First of all, populations have different distribution of traits in culture and biology subjective to random drift and historical pressures, which will result in different outcomes. It would require almost insane luck for all the important traits to work out to the same distribution.

Important differences in biology, in disease resistance, attitude adaption, sunlight adaption and food tolerance can be seen in population living in difference environments as selection pressures have applied on them for long enough. There has been enough time for meaningful differences to build, and all that is needed is different selection pressures. It would not be surprising if certain ecosystems selects for certain personality traits, or that certain local diseases forces a tradeoff between resistance and certain types mental ability. It really is long odds for all the important things to be equal. I think "Race realism" can be useful as a explanation of history even if it is not a good prescription for action.

Race is a very very crude measure, trying to use sunlight and random drift to correlate with all other traits. With the rapidly dropping in sequence costs, one can potentially obtain very significant information about all the important things from a study of the family tree or a genetic sample, as well as correlate more and more visual traits with important genotypes. Instead of harsh evaluations based on broad guesses, we can be harsh evaluations based on truth.

I think the latter will result in greater social and moral problems that few have answers today.

[madd0ct0r]

God I hope you're just trolling, because that's a very screwed up view of the world.

Why are you assuming intelligence is fixed genetically? Why do you think a local 'ecosystem' selects for genotype, but ignore phenotype expressions (from the same character 'traits' you have different options for a personality)

Why do you talk so much about random drift and conclude things can't be equal. How precisely equal does it have to be for you? Ever come across the tendency of random events to form a normal distribution? Who cares if the two means are 0.0005sigma different? 99.5% of the bell curves overlap, and for all practical purposes, are the same.

[EgalitarianJay]

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I do not believe in the claim that in a "fair" world, that skin color and bone structure will have no correlation with wealth, power and status outcomes. First of all, populations have different distribution of traits in culture and biology subjective to random drift and historical pressures, which will result in different outcomes. It would require almost insane luck for all the important traits to work out to the same distribution.

Important differences in biology, in disease resistance, attitude adaption, sunlight adaption and food tolerance can be seen in population living in difference environments as selection pressures have applied on them for long enough. There has been enough time for meaningful differences to build, and all that is needed is different selection pressures. It would not be surprising if certain ecosystems selects for certain personality traits, or that certain local diseases forces a tradeoff between resistance and certain types mental ability. It really is long odds for all the important things to be equal. I think "Race realism" can be useful as a explanation of history even if it is not a good prescription for action.

Race is a very very crude measure, trying to use sunlight and random drift to correlate with all other traits. With the rapidly dropping in sequence costs, one can potentially obtain very significant information about all the important things from a study of the family tree or a genetic sample, as well as correlate more and more visual traits with important genotypes. Instead of harsh evaluations based on broad guesses, we can be harsh evaluations based on truth.

I think the latter will result in greater social and moral problems that few have answers today.

There's no scientific basis for assuming that mental traits are differentiated across geographic populations.

Psychometricians admit that intelligence is clearly a polygenic trait (e.g., Jensen, 1973). The existence of a continuous distribution of intelligence, although not necessarily a bell-shaped one, is itself an indication of a polygenic trait. Jensen advanced the argument that there must exist differences at literally thousands of loci that account for the African deficit in intelligence. Despite this assertion, he was never able to demonstrate mechanistically why or how the existence of genetic variation necessarily meant the deficiency of one population in a particular trait. Thus, his scenario was, in the final analysis, ridiculous. It is true that at the time he put forth his argument, data were just emerging on the measurement of genetic variation (polymorphism) in humans of various races (Nei & Livshits, 1989; Nei & Roychoudhury, 1982). However, anthropological data demonstrating that even morphological traits are not consistently differentiated between races had existed for centuries (J. Diamond, 1994, Brace, 1995).

Take the example of skin color, which varies on a cline from tropical to arctic. Several "racial" groups have dark skin, including non-European Caucasians and Australoids. A tree of human "racial" groups would have both of these populations on the branches farthest away from Africans (Cavalli-Sforza, Menozzi, & Piazza, 1994). Thus, clearly dark skin does not vary consistently with "racial" category. To modern population geneticists the idea that races differ consistently for any trait is nonsense. For example, there is more genetic variation among the people of the African continent than there is among all the rest of the human species combined (J. Diamond, 1994), and there is absolutely no reason to suppose that this variation excludes alleles that impact intelligence. Moreover, as Dobzhansky and Montagu (1975) so eloquently point out, natural selection for mental ability is overwhelmingly uniform throughout the world.

SOURCE: The Pseudoscience of Psychometry and The Bell Curve The Journal of Negro Education, Vol. 64, No. 3, Myths and Realities: African Americans and the Measurement of Human Abilities (Summer, 1995), pp. 277-294

IV. RACE

18. Jensen argues, in effect, that cognitive 'races' exist because genes related to human cognitive systems will have been subjected to diversifying selection in the same way as some superficial physical or physiological characters. He suggests that northern migrants would have faced particularly difficult conditions. As a result, groups of African descent will have lower frequencies of genes for superior cognitive abilities, compared with those of Caucasian or Mongoloid ancestry.

19. This completely misses the point. Our African hominid ancestors themselves evolved as a social-cooperative species in order to deal with conditions of extreme environmental uncertainty, as the climate dried, forests thinned, and former forest dwellers were 'flung out' onto the open savannah or forest margins. It is crucial to point out that when even as few as two individuals cooperate they create a new, social environment that is vastly more complex than anything experienced in the physical world. It is that complexity on the social plane which rapidly impelled the tripling of brain size and furnished the unique cognitive capacity for dealing with complexity in general - in the physical world as well as the social.

20. The uniquely adaptable, highly selected, socio-cognitive system that resulted was a prerequisite, not a consequence, of human migration patterns. Although inhabiting every possible niche, humans have only a quarter of the genetic variation of highly niche-specific chimpanzees (Kaessmann et al 1999). The system operates on a completely different plane from blind genetic selection - one which can 'model' the world conceptually, and anticipate and change it. If our heads get cold we invent hats, rather than wait for natural selection to reshape our skulls and increase the size of our brains (which is what Jensen suggests in one particularly questionable y line of argument). As Owens & King (1999) point out, what minor genetic differences exist are 'quite literally superficial... the possibility that human history has been characterised by genetically homogeneous groups ("races") distinguished by major biological differences, is not consistent with genetic evidence'.



Source: DEMYSTIFYING G Book Review of Jensen on Intelligence-g-Factor

[Dominarch's Hope]

To some degree, making quick observations and judgements without knowing somebody or a group of somebodies is a key part of human interactions and for good reason. The problem occurs when you are applying it the millions of people level. Now, saying a Literal Army that is the enemies wishes you nothing but suffering is reasonable, saying the same about "Muslims" or "Christians" isnt...anymore...well...

The Crusades up to the Rennaissance it might have still been reasonable to assume bad things about opposing religions in some cases. But those days are over for a reason.

Is it fair to say that all Republicans are Bible Thumping, Knuckle Dragging, Homophobic Racist? No. Do the Republicans have enough members who do that sort of thing to say that those people typically vote Republicans, with implications thereof? Maybe.

Is it fair to say that all of the Hells Angels are criminal scum and violently dangerous? No. Is it MUCH safer to assume so? Yes.

[EgalitarianJay]

Racialism is more than just stereotyping. The argument for a genetic basis to racist stereotypes is based on the ideological belief that races are different in socially important ways which rationalize racist discrimination. Whether we're talking racial supremacy, separation or any other motive the fundamental view of racists is that their racist perceptions are based on significant, innate differences which determine what kind of person someone is likely to be because of their race. What I find disgusting about this point of view is that many of the conditions that certain groups live in are heavily impacted by racist discrimination in the first place.

So first racists make society unequal and then they ponder why people live differently in the racially stratified society that they created.

[Dominarch's Hope]

Yeah, but by now, anyone who would have been convinced to give up racist discrimination based on being told its all their fault and such have already done so. Continuing to do so just drives the remainder further into it. The capacity of human beings to go "No. FUCK YOU AND YOUR SHIT" when told they are in the wrong is fairly long lasting. Sure, stubborn dickheadedness is childish. Its still a factor. Liking it and supporting it is irrelevant to the fact that its there.


At this point, for most of them, convincing them to simply stop discrimination in practical applications is what is neccessary. And for others, you just have to wait for them to die out.

[EgalitarianJay]

I agree. I don't recommend wasting time arguing with racists about their beliefs. You can only indulge them so far before you come to realize that they want to believe what they believe and you're not going to change their mind. For the people that encounter these arguments about racial difference and don't want to get involved in a detailed scientific discussion just tell any racists you encounter in real life that you believe that people should be judged as individuals and that mistreating people because of their race is wrong and that the validity of racial stereotypes or lack there of is irrelevant to this moral principle. That stops them dead in their tracks because in reality the rationalization for discrimination is all that matters to them any way.

[SWPIGWANG]

There's no scientific basis for assuming that mental traits are differentiated across geographic populations.

I would not be surprised if there were. In fact, I would expect it to exist. I expect differentiated distribution in traits if we slice the human population up in a huge number of "arbitary" methods, for example dividing people up by alphabetic order of names (corr. language groups), or time zone lived in and likes. Unless one really used an truely effective randomization process, I would expect correlations.

What I am NOT saying is that "race specific" genes is at play here. (it is only slightly less absurd then time zone specific genes) I don't think this is likely or significant. This is enough to torpedo traditional racism, but not sufficient to support the equalitarian assumption that "if the world is fair, there'd be zero correlation between racial apparance and life outcomes."

Let take a look at skin color example. In places with intense sunlight, dark skin color is selected for, while the inverse is true in places with weak sunlight. So if we give some time for population to adapt to location conditions then we'd expect people near the equator to be darker. A greater fraction of Africans live near the equator then other continents so the average color of African is darker and there is a greater fraction of africans that is dark relative to others if we sample on a continental basis. Now, of course, one can obtain more precise expectations for this trait by looking at at a individual's exact background linerage, looking for precise selection pressures and gene flows and we may find that some population in india can be expected to be darker then one in south africa. That said, just because there is no "racial gene" does not mean that different distributions can not araise out of differential selection pressures.

It is know that different ecosystems favor different personality types. A farmer need to have good long term planning abilities, a hunter need better spatial intelligence to navigate far from home, a herder benefit from stronger feeling of vengence (see economist studies of culture of honor in herding communities) and so on. Now, personality is flexible, but still affected by inheritance and environment will exert pressures.

Moreover, as Dobzhansky and Montagu (1975) so eloquently point out, natural selection for mental ability is overwhelmingly uniform throughout the world.

I have not read them (just looked up the basic argument) but I don't think the thing works beyond the broadest sketch. I don't see why selection for mental ability, especially of certain specific kinds of skills, would be uniform. For example, mental flexibility is a highly valuable trait in complex and ever changing environments, but some humans have settled in stable ecosystems and may genetic drift and have a subpopulation lose this ability. Intelligence is expensive in energy and require a massive number of genes, and some other selection pressure (disease resistence for example, which kills entire populations and intelligence is of no help before modern biology) may be stronger push it aside. There is also the possibility of artifical selection due to historical accidents, for example, if the slavers killed most of the smart folks (or mostly only dumb folks got enslaved and sent over). Modern society is also a culture accident that resulted in a inverse relation between intelligence and reproductive success.

Now, I am not saying any of those scenarios have upset the gene pool enough to leave a visible mark, and in fact I would expect most of them as not having a noticible impact. However, that does not translate to there being no such event across the whole of history and the only way to know is to measure them.

None of that apply exclusively to continent scale geology. We might find differences in different castes in India, or differences between from people of different latitudes, historical lifestyles or other things that historically have fallen into ethic groups what not.

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If our heads get cold we invent hats, rather than wait for natural selection to reshape our skulls and increase the size of our brains

If your head never gets cold, there'd be no nature selection to get your brain bigger? Chimps are still pretty dumb despite its genetic tree having as much time on this planet to evolve? Or for that case, all other life on the planet?

[Dominarch's Hope]

There's no scientific basis for assuming that mental traits are differentiated across geographic populations.

I would not be surprised if there were. In fact, I would expect it to exist. I expect differentiated distribution in traits if we slice the human population up in a huge number of "arbitary" methods, for example dividing people up by alphabetic order of names (corr. language groups), or time zone lived in and likes. Unless one really used an truely effective randomization process, I would expect correlations.

Bro, stahp. No here, not ever here. Ever ever ever.

[EgalitarianJay]

I would not be surprised if there were. In fact, I would expect it to exist. I expect differentiated distribution in traits if we slice the human population up in a huge number of "arbitary" methods, for example dividing people up by alphabetic order of names (corr. language groups), or time zone lived in and likes. Unless one really used an truely effective randomization process, I would expect correlations.

There's simply no evolutionary basis for claiming it to be the case. If as according to all the archeological, anthropological and biological data indicates human intelligence evolved while humans lived on a single continent long before they migrated anywhere else then whatever variation exists within that polygenic trait would be continuous across those geographic populations. There is no reason to expect an uneven distribution in mental traits and no legitimate genetic explanation for why that should be the case as Graves and Richardson explained in the quotes I provided. Splitting people up arbitrarily and expecting correlations is really irrelevant to the point.

What I am NOT saying is that "race specific" genes is at play here. (it is only slightly less absurd then time zone specific genes) I don't think this is likely or significant. This is enough to torpedo traditional racism, but not sufficient to support the equalitarian assumption that "if the world is fair, there'd be zero correlation between racial apparance and life outcomes."

I don't know anyone who has ever made that argument. What the world would look like if it was 100% "fair" is speculation. Egalitarians such as myself simply oppose any form of bigotry such as racism and value fairness. What I oppose when it comes to racialism is the idea that nature has created differences between humans that result in large groups having less potential to succeed than other groups implying that their is a limit to one's ability to learn because of their recent continental ancestry. I know of no credible test which has demonstrated for instance that a person of majority Sub-Saharan African ancestry with physical characteristics that are commonly labeled as "Black" can't have occupation X because they're simply not smart enough. As a collective there may be less "Blacks" that end up getting occupation X which is likely due to a variety of environmental variables which have nothing to do with genetics.

Let take a look at skin color example. In places with intense sunlight, dark skin color is selected for, while the inverse is true in places with weak sunlight. So if we give some time for population to adapt to location conditions then we'd expect people near the equator to be darker. A greater fraction of Africans live near the equator then other continents so the average color of African is darker and there is a greater fraction of africans that is dark relative to others if we sample on a continental basis. Now, of course, one can obtain more precise expectations for this trait by looking at at a individual's exact background linerage, looking for precise selection pressures and gene flows and we may find that some population in india can be expected to be darker then one in south africa. That said, just because there is no "racial gene" does not mean that different distributions can not araise out of differential selection pressures.

The question here becomes, "What selection pressure has been identified that could explain genetically based mental differences between races that are alleged to exist?" Graves showed that Rushton's life history theory was invalid but further explained why there's no scientific basis to assume that human intelligence should be unevenly distributed in the first place. And that's important from a scientific perspective. Intelligence has equal survival value in any climate therefore we should see the same general cognitive capacity within the population of any species.

It is know that different ecosystems favor different personality types. A farmer need to have good long term planning abilities, a hunter need better spatial intelligence to navigate far from home, a herder benefit from stronger feeling of vengence (see economist studies of culture of honor in herding communities) and so on. Now, personality is flexible, but still affected by inheritance and environment will exert pressures.

You're talking about different occupations requiring different mental characteristics. I think that's true. People tend to gravitate towards things that they are good at which may be compatible with their personality and some occupations demand different mental abilities than others but that's a very different example from saying that because one group lives in the tropics for a long time and another group lives in temperate regions that they are going to end up thinking differently. They might live very differently and develop different cultures because of their surroundings but their basic survival strategies are the same.

I have not read them (just looked up the basic argument) but I don't think the thing works beyond the broadest sketch. I don't see why selection for mental ability, especially of certain specific kinds of skills, would be uniform. For example, mental flexibility is a highly valuable trait in complex and ever changing environments, but some humans have settled in stable ecosystems and may genetic drift and have a subpopulation lose this ability. Intelligence is expensive in energy and require a massive number of genes, and some other selection pressure (disease resistence for example, which kills entire populations and intelligence is of no help before modern biology) may be stronger push it aside. There is also the possibility of artifical selection due to historical accidents, for example, if the slavers killed most of the smart folks (or mostly only dumb folks got enslaved and sent over). Modern society is also a culture accident that resulted in a inverse relation between intelligence and reproductive success.

There's no reason for a population to lose certain abilities of the mind any more than they would lose their sight or hearing because they live in a different part of the world. When a group is completely destroyed and doesn't have offspring any unique genetic traits go with them but if they don't have descendants they don't have a future population to speak of so it's a moot point.

Now, I am not saying any of those scenarios have upset the gene pool enough to leave a visible mark, and in fact I would expect most of them as not having a noticible impact. However, that does not translate to there being no such event across the whole of history and the only way to know is to measure them.

I think mental testing can be good for assessing learning style and the quality of education a person is receiving as well as identifying people with actual brain disorders who may need special help but I see no reason to assume that some sort of non-evolutionary historical event has resulted in a deficiency in the mental abilities of a specific group.

None of that apply exclusively to continent scale geology. We might find differences in different castes in India, or differences between from people of different latitudes, historical lifestyles or other things that historically have fallen into ethic groups what not.

We might but the real issue is whether those difference are rooted in genetics as racists assert.

If your head never gets cold, there'd be no nature selection to get your brain bigger? Chimps are still pretty dumb despite its genetic tree having as much time on this planet to evolve? Or for that case, all other life on the planet?

Richardson's point is that humans have the ability to adapt to their surroundings due to unique evolutionary pressures that impacted our species which makes the need for natural selection to help advance a population's success unnecessary. We have the ability to learn our to plan ahead to survive in cold winters etc. Our brain was not so primitive that we needed to wait for nature to select the smartest amongst us in order to devise better survival plans that we supposedly weren't capable of coming up with in the first place. The evidence that humans have the ability change their surroundings in radical ways without the need for evolution to guide their cultural development is human history itself especially within the last 200 years. Cultural evolution happens at a much faster rate than biological evolution.

[Ziggy Stardust]

I have not read them (just looked up the basic argument) but I don't think the thing works beyond the broadest sketch.

Hey, moron, when somebody shows you a scientific paper refuting your argument, your response should not be to waive your hand, refuse to read it, and dismiss its findings as wrong based on your own misinterpretations of how evolutionary genetics operates.

Chimps are still pretty dumb despite its genetic tree having as much time on this planet to evolve? Or for that case, all other life on the planet?

What makes you think that chimps, or all other life, are "pretty dumb"?

[SWPIGWANG]

Saying that there is no reason to believe different traits would have the same distribution across vastly different populations is strange. This should not happen even if there were no time for new adaptations to be created (by sheer random chance of copying errors) as the rest of the human population came from a small branch of Africans and does not have the genetic diversity of the continent, for example. Then there are things like the estimated 3% admixture with neaderthals which might have done something.

Intelligence has equal survival value in any climate therefore we should see the same general cognitive capacity within the population of any species.

There are ecosystems where primitive human and primate species managed to survive far before modern levels of intelligence. Now, they have other capacities and advantages over modern humans, but the fact that we still have chimps and monkeys around means that, due to the costs, intelligence in those environments is not a overwhelming advantage until very recently (where we gained ability to wipe them out). There are other environments where no other primate could hope to survive in without a large brain and advanced technology. No primate without the intelligence to maintain the extremely sophisticated technology of the inuit could populate in the artic circle. (without millions of years of new genetic adaptions at least) It is obvious that the survival value for intelligence is not the same for different ecosystems, though it is harder to say the same about reproductive advantages of intelligence which is what we care about in evolution.

Think about it this way: in a distant part of history there was a common ancestor to monkeys and humans. Obviously there was something that caused intelligence and other traits to differentiate over time (and environments) within that species which eventually resulted in new species branches with different intelligence. If we take your claim at face value, this can not happen and everything should be as intelligence as the first cell on the planet that is the source of all life.

The brain is also not a single functioned (general intelligence) abstract aphysical object.

The brain have many specialized functions that take place specific, physical, part of the mind. It does things like processing sensory input, coordinating movement, processing social stimulus (mirror neurons), act out instinctive behaviours, memory of various kinds and such on top of "not that generalized intelligence of IQ". If we look at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moravec%27s_paradox it is obvious the most developed and powerful mental capacities are the kind of thing that is considered utterly banal. Those capacities are also developed naturally with only very minimum outside training and must be largely genetic, as it is in other animals. The brain is also a big organ (which makes childbirth difficult for humans) and consume vast amounts of energy and every bit of capacity in those skills is not free.

When a environment is applying selection pressure, it is not selecting for "your brain works or not" but each of those mental abilities individually. If there is a gene variant that could improve one's ability to throw a spear accurately versus differentiating sounds, it obviously would be selected differently in different environments.

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While the genetics of intelligence is extremely complicated, probably the most complicated thing on earth since we don't understand intelligence very well, personality don't require such complexity to change. Look at all the mind altering substances available today, which works like "fixing computers by short circuiting" and is extremely crude, yet have real effects on functioning. Something like serotonin, dopamine, noradrenaline, oxytocin, testosterone levels have important effects on behaviour and is so simple to change via genetics and it would be impossible for biological variation to not exist. Tests showing on heritability of traits exists, and drug trials shows diversity amongst brain chemistry is common.

There's no reason for a population to lose certain abilities of the mind any more than they would lose their sight or hearing because they live in a different part of the world.

It can simply be an accident. Consider events like http://www.oliversacks.com/books/island ... olorblind/ where a local population do not have capacity to see a certain color because the original settlers just happens to be color blind as the functioning color gene did not exist there, granted a rather extreme case.

That said, loss of function is not uncommon when the selection pressure stopped, like human ability to synthesize vitamin C
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22294879. For many animals, ability to see is lost when they moved into environment that no longer require it, like in deep caves. http://www.biomedcentral.com/1741-7007/10/108/abstract Adaptations is a "use it or lose it" thing.

Richardson's point is that humans have the ability to adapt to their surroundings due to unique evolutionary pressures that impacted our species which makes the need for natural selection to help advance a population's success unnecessary.

We are not yet brains in a tank that moves things by ESP. Human intelligence, as powerful as it is, can only do so much. It does not help if you are a Native America and has the misfortune of contacting the human weapon of mass destruction that is Europeans who carrys disease that will kill you with 90% certainty. It does not help in case of crop failure and you simply do not have enough body fat to last till the next year. It does not help if you a large, about equally intelligent guy decides to poke you with a sword. It does not help you if the environment you live in is heavily lacking in oxygen, and so and so on.

Consider the different pressures. There are hard filters like disease that if you lack genetic resistence of very modern medical treatment (hardly one century old), you will likely die. There are also weaker selection pressures, where you might survive, but another person that is more suitable for the environment will reproduce more and alter the genetic distribution.

If we are talking about mental capacity, I see quite a few traits like being white while living in the tropics: sure you'll get quite dark in the end and adapted to the environment, but probably never as quite as dark as those born black, and you'll get sunburned quite a bit before you adapt, and will have elevated chance of skin cancer over your lifespan, a obvious disadvantage.

The quoted line of thinking is just a extreme form of human exceptionalism that I can not accept. Mental flexbility is expensive anyways since it means more time needed to learn stuff. If one could hardcode useful skills, one could become effective and functional far faster, and examples of specialized function of the brain is example of it.

It is only in the last 2 century where population growth have become untethered from nature pressures. It is also so short of a time that the genetic legacy of previous selection events easily remain.

We might but the real issue is whether those difference are rooted in genetics as racists assert.

Intelligence and other mental traits is genetic:
Take IQ
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/gnxp/ ... QsFnnaOWJM

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phenylketonuria <--- granted harmful mutations of this severity is quickly removed by nature selection, but in the chart below you can indeed see a difference in distribution

Take mental illness
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heritability_of_autism

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Now there may or may not be group differences, but difference in ability due to genetics is well established.

What I oppose when it comes to racialism is the idea that nature has created differences between humans that result in large groups having less potential to succeed than other groups implying that their is a limit to one's ability to learn because of their recent continental ancestry. I know of no credible test which has demonstrated for instance that a person of majority Sub-Saharan African ancestry with physical characteristics that are commonly labeled as "Black" can't have occupation X because they're simply not smart enough.

I agree, race is far too loose a test and not conclusive since correlations proves nothing. We can do better now. In the not too far future when the genetics of mental traits is sorted out, we'd have tests tell you, EXACTLY how much potential you have as a INDIVIDUAL to succeed in your particular set of genes.

I think it'd make the problems of racism (even racists are not "that racists" compared to what powerful scientific discrimination can make perfectly reasonable people do) look tiny.

[madd0ct0r]

Moreover, as Dobzhansky and Montagu (1975) so eloquently point out, natural selection for mental ability is overwhelmingly uniform throughout the world.

then

when somebody shows you a scientific paper refuting your argument, your response should not be to waive your hand, refuse to read it, and dismiss its findings as wrong based on your own misinterpretations of how evolutionary genetics operates.

your entire argument is based on the idea that hard coded stuff is less costly then mental plasticity. given the ancestors of humans moved around a great deal (you know, both being nomads and the whole spreading over the world a few times) AND the world's climate changed a great deal over the same period, plus the slow growth of technology, herding domestication, boats ect, AND human wrought changes to ecosystems they're passing through, I really don't think your assumption is correct.

again.

[Ziggy Stardust]

Uh, madd0ct0r, who are you addressing? Because you quoted me, but I never made an argument about mental plasticity or anything of the sort ... so ... I'm a bit confused.

[Ziggy Stardust]

In the not too far future when the genetics of mental traits is sorted out, we'd have tests tell you, EXACTLY how much potential you have as a INDIVIDUAL to succeed in your particular set of genes.

That's pretty unlikely. First of all, gene expression isn't deterministic. As you yourself admitted, there isn't an intelligence gene. What we refer to as intelligence is the end result of a complicated interaction of hundreds of probabilistic factors. Even assuming complete understanding of those factors, we still would not be able to exactly measure "potential" or "success" (whatever the fuck those terms even mean in this context). And this isn't even getting into epigenetic and environmental factors - did you know that if you were to map the DNA of two people who were born identical twins they wouldn't have the same exact patterns of gene expression? There is a lot to genetics that is not hard-coded.

And that is just looking at the genetic side of things. Nevermind the fact that something like intelligence or success are actually social metrics, not biological ones. How we classify people as "intelligent" or not isn't a matter of IQ or anything like that: physical appearance, demeanor, vocal and non-vocal cues, eye contact, relative height, accents, and I could go on and on. It is the end result of the interplay of dozens of factors, each of which is vague enough on its own. Even if you somehow had 100% knowledge of a persons DNA and all the epigenetic variables that modified it (which is by no means assuredly possible), you still wouldn't come up with any metrics of "success" or "intelligence" that are radically different or more empirical than the ones we currently use.

I think it'd make the problems of racism (even racists are not "that racists" compared to what powerful scientific discrimination can make perfectly reasonable people do) look tiny.

What scientific discrimination?

[madd0ct0r]

i was addressing spigwang, reminding him (as you did) he can't really handwave the paper and say 'but they're wrong' without actual evidence.
forgot to atribute quotes.

[Ziggy Stardust]

i was addressing spigwang, reminding him (as you did) he can't really handwave the paper and say 'but they're wrong' without actual evidence.
forgot to atribute quotes.

That's what I thought, I just wanted to make sure.

[EgalitarianJay]

God I hope you're just trolling, because that's a very screwed up view of the world.

Why are you assuming intelligence is fixed genetically? Why do you think a local 'ecosystem' selects for genotype, but ignore phenotype expressions (from the same character 'traits' you have different options for a personality)

Why do you talk so much about random drift and conclude things can't be equal. How precisely equal does it have to be for you? Ever come across the tendency of random events to form a normal distribution? Who cares if the two means are 0.0005sigma different? 99.5% of the bell curves overlap, and for all practical purposes, are the same.

Here's a good quote for this thread which further solidifies the fact that there is no scientific basis for supposing that there are genetic differences related to intelligence between races. Natural selection and genetic drift cannot be invoked to explain supposed differences.

In the end, the data that the psychometricians rely on to demonstrate racial difference in intelligence are simply the racial differences we already observe. William Shockley, for example, proposed that skin color was the metric by which we could measure intelligence. This despite no established physiological link between the loci that determine skin pigmentation and those that determine any aspect of mental functioning. Nor have the psychometricians been able to advance any credible evolutionary genetic mechanism to explain the origin of the consistent racial differences.

We know that genetic differences among populations are created by the combined action of natural selection and genetic drift. The selection clines involved in producing human genetic variation differ independently from one another. There is no reason to suppose that these differences should have produced intellectual inferiority only in sub-Saharan Africans. Genetic drift cannot be invoked either, since drift events are random, and thus allelic variation related to intelligence that results from drift should also be scattered throughout human populations, as the case of the B allele illustrates.

Thus to explain the consistency of inferior IQs in sub-Saharan Africans, one would have to suppose some form of natural selection that was operating only on these populations. J. Philippe Rushton attempts to accomplish this by utilizing an r- and K-selection scenario to explain the life history features of the three major races. Briefly, he argues that the human races fall on the r- and K-continuum. The theory of r- and K-selection was devised in the late 1970s to address why some species had short lives and reproduced slowly. Examples of organisms on different ends of the scale would be weeds which grow rapidly, but invest little in their bodily structures (r-selected) and trees, which grow slowly and invest large amounts in their structures (K-selected).

According to Rushton's view of the human races, Negroids are considered "weeds," with high investments in reproduction, and thus less to invest in bodily structures such as brain mass, thereby having lower intelligence. Alternatively, Caucasoids and Asians are more "treelike," with high investments in brain mass and thus greater intellect, and lower inputs to reproduction. I have examined his scenario and have argued that he fails.¹⁵ This failure results from both an improper use of life history theory and a flawed analysis of the available data.

The psychometric argument gets weaker when we examine the genetic variability within the human species, particularly the greater within-group than between-group variation. On solely genetic grounds one would expect these racial groups to be indistinguishable for a complex behavioral trait like intelligence. Indeed, even if intelligence were highly heritable, the establishment of differences in intellectual capacity among family groups within a supposed race would not mean that there would be differences among races. The argument for consistent genetic differentiation for IQ among races suffers from all of the points that I have raised. Each alone is a fatal error, and when taken together they invalidate the racist program of Shockley and his co-conspirators.


Source: The Emperor's New Clothes: Biological Theories of Race at The Millennium chapter 10 The Race and IQ Fallacy p. 168-170