SWPIGWANG wrote:Simon_Jester wrote:Those all sound like vagueness and the kind of "Just So story" crap that you get when laymen try to make up evo-psych arguments to justify their prejudices.
I could point out that childhood disease and high infant mortality were the universal norm for all pre-industrial civilizations and exerted ferocious selection pressure on us from the invention of agriculture up until the 1700s. So if we follow your argument about reproductive cycles to its logical conclusion, the most 'primitive' peoples should be the ones with the long reproductive cycles and lots of care taken to protect their children.
I agree that a lot of evopsych is just so stories, however to claim that there is no difference in selection pressures is absurd.
Lets take disease: The disease burden in different environments is different... Looking at the selection of sickle-cell anaemia and favism genes, it is something that can kill when individuals carries two copies. It would be plausible to have genes that adapt to similarly serious conditions and have side effects on mental function: it is far less harmful then simply killing you.
We know that many personality traits is 50% heritable. There are many predictions possible from evopsych and historical environment.
The catch is that most of those predictions can easily lead to mutually exclusive results, which is a hallmark of a field which is in a pre-scientific state. If evolutionary psychology were a science, it would be capable of reliably distinguishing truth from falsehood, and therefore would not lead to two mutually exclusive results at the same time.
(Seriously, if you haven't read Kuhn's
On the Structure of Scientific Revolutions, do)
The fact that we are talking about Rushton's comically crude results suggests to me that this line of research has not been pursued in depth. It is ABSURD to take a continent with every type of natural environment (mountains, forests, deserts, grassland, etc) with some of the greatest genetic diversity known to man and try to sum it up and get a good result out of it. This sort of thing needs to track very specific environments with inbred populations, ideally undisturbed with too much selection pressure from modern events.
Well, the catch is that few such populations exist. You CAN find genetically isolated groups in very unusual environments, but they're rare. Aside from that, people in different cultural and physical environments intermix. Farmers interbreed with herdsmen and vice versa. Romans who lived in a big city on the Mediterranean coast bought slaves, and interbred with slaves, from everywhere from Persia to Northern Europe to Egypt.
And it only takes a few generations of interbreeding to totally erase any 'bioregional' adaptations that a given group has evolved painstakingly over a hundred generations of selection pressure.
A good line of research would by the Pygmies, with have diverged genetically and live in specific environments. I have not yet seen good research showing or refuting personality differences of this group. From the "refuting social constructionism" point of view this can limited due to widespread discrimination against the pygmies, however it should still be interesting.
The lack of strong negative results of personality - historical environment research suggests to me that all the smart people left the field because "nothing good can come out of it" instead of data. I don't think proving "racists" theories is career advancing or even positive socially. I can't imagine any plan of this sort getting funding, that is for sure.
If the positive results you're looking for were anything
but stupidly hard to find on a scientific basis, they'd have revealed themselves long ago when this sort of theory was in vogue.
Perhaps you think it a coincidence that as we have learned
more about primitive societies, life under primitive conditions, human psychology, genetics, and physiology, and the overall nature by which a species differentiates into sub-populations... we have methodically moved
away from believing in sharp genetic delineations between "races" of human that are fundamentally different.
Me, I doubt it.
It's sort of like why you no longer see good research being done in global cooling. No one seriously thinks that's going to be a problem, because the science has been shown repeatedly to not support such an idea. The only people still working on it are the crackpots and cranks, and they aren't mentally competent enough to
do good work. If they were, they wouldn't be doing this.
So I would argue that the reason that racial evolutionary psych's greatest champion is an idiot like Rushton is that anyone less idiotic, and equally familiar with the science, would have abandoned the field as unproductive long ago. Political correctness alone is neither necessary nor sufficient to explain the process.
I could point out that aggression, clannishness, and xenophobia are norms in all areas of the world where large city-states did not exist, from the frigid mountainous lands of Norse Scandinavia to the jungles of New Guinea.
The reproductive advantage of successful murderers in the jungles of new guinea (from "the world until yesterday") in capturing resources and women provides a selection pressure towards aggressive traits. The same traits might not have worked as well in civilized areas with central authority imposing a monopoly on violence and harshly punishing those that fail to conform. It is suggested that places with long history of civilization have "self domesticated" and thus shifted personality traits. We know from domestication that given changed selection pressures, traits can change significantly in this time frame. (this from "10000 year explosion")
How long does this transition take for a human population? There are plenty of places where almost everyone lived in small feuding villages until a thousand years ago, or two thousand.
If the transition takes a long time, in those places it shouldn't have happened yet.
If it takes a short time, then we can't draw useful conclusions from it, because it's a "here today, gone tomorrow" phenomenon. Especially when talking about a transplanted group like African-Americans who have extensively interbred with other populations.
This [social disadvantage leading to lack of education] is one possible explanation of the gap. The other possible explanation is that parents/grandparents didn't go to college due to mental traits that is manifestation of genes which is inherited by the children. Note this is not racial genetics, this is personal genetics: personal data is far more predictive then race.
When your grandparents could blatantly not afford to go to college because
nobody in your entire ethnic group, with a handful of exceptions, did... which hypothesis is more likely?
Plus, it's hard to distinguish the hypotheses, because it's hard to tell a genetically intelligent person with a bad education from a genetically stupid person with a good education. Many of the concepts we associate with advanced intelligence (formal logic, mathematical ability, precise delineation of one's thoughts, critical thinking) are things that have to be cultivated through education, and which do not develop if they are not thus cultivated.
How do you distinguish a 'naturally strong' person who never exercises from a 'naturally weak' person who has been exercising fanatically from infancy? Same problem. Sure, there
are genes that correlate with physical strength and stamina, but the effect of exercise on the development of your phenotype can swamp genetic differences very easily.
If an ethnic group (say, Poles) were culturally forbidden to exercise, while another group (say, Italians) were practically required to exercise if humanly possible, then you'd end up with physically weak Poles and strong Italians. The Poles would inevitably be unable to participate effectively in athletic games (due to the prohibitions) and would be gravely disadvantaged in heavy manual labor. Meanwhile, the Italians would produce all the highly successful athletes and strong workers.
In the next generation, very few Poles would encourage their children to play sports, while many Italians would do so, because people who like sports tend to promote sports and teach them to their children. Keep it up for several generations and, assuming minimal interbreeding between Poles and Italians, there will be a
totally unfounded stereotype that Poles are "genetically" weaker than Italians. Which is superficially supported by all those weedy/pudgy Poles and muscled Italians... but that doesn't tell us anything about the underlying DNA.
And then someone like you comes along and says "well, these are reproductively isolated populations, maybe there was some selection pressure that killed off the Poles with genes for strong physiques, while killing off the Italians with genes for weak physiques."
Which isn't true- it's reversing the logic and assuming that an observed effect must have a
particular type of cause.
Which is not strong given the data size required to get results, however is not "nothing at all" as some would claim. Something is there, it is just unknown how big it would eventually be.
Well, there's not "nothing at all" correlation between genetics and athletic ability either. That doesn't mean that we can easily identify
racial deficiencies in athletic ability between human populations, and separate it out from other causes like exercise, diet, and proportion of the population that leads an active lifestyle.
A minority that experiences all three of these things* is far more likely to underperform economically and academically than one that experiences none, or only one, of these things* *(like modern African-Americans, who have historically been deprived of education AND treated by society at large as though they are brutes, AND subjected to persistent police harassment regardless of their own individual guilt)
If there is major structure hurdles blocking a group from success, then it is reasonable that they are not successful.
However things like IQ tests, which is designed by psychologies to focus on biological performance as opposed to complicated things like social success, should be minimally effected by such things.
Except that real IQ tests are in fact not so reliable in this way, because it's hard to distinguish between what we are naturally good at as human beings and what we are good at
by training. Saying that one human is naturally smarter than another because they can think more effectively is like saying one human is naturally more fit than another because they can run faster and farther. Sure, there IS a genetic effect on how well you can run... but there's a huge element which depends on your physical training and how you experience and feel about running. Which is socially constructed.
All humans are descended from thousands of generations of reasonably successful runners, after all; aside from individuals with specific genetic defects
everyone should have genes for running, and running pretty well. But not all humans can run anything like equally well in physical fact.
Why should thinking be any different?
However if we observe a population where no competitive success appears to exist anywhere on this planet and its recorded history, one can't help but get suspicious. Like I said in a past thread, if a powerful success is observed, it would be a powerful counterexample that would shut all this down, however it hasn't happened. Incapacity is a elegant explanation for this observation, then claim that all people oppress at all time in all of history in all places with exactly same result everywhere.
Except that there are no such groups. There is nothing meaningful to distinguish the 'success' of Africans (or anyone else) in 1000 AD from the 'success' of people in other parts of the world. If you look only at the present time, some places are successful and others are not- but which groups succeeded and which groups failed has to do with history and not genetics.
If one population swoops down upon another and carries off much of the population as slaves, it will cause ruin for
both the country that suffered the enslavements
and the diaspora of enslaved people. This does not mean that the victim-population was somehow genetically inferior just because neither of those two (now separated) populations succeeds at a later date.
The microaggressions may not operate by lowering self esteem. For instance, they may operate by making people short-tempered, defensive, suspicious of those who attempt to teach them or help them.
Social science issues are nonlinear: when A causes two units of something and B causes two units of something, it does not guarantee that combining A and B will produce exactly four units of something.
It is not a very elegant, Occam razor's theory. It may still be true, but IMO its unlikely because the select group do not fail to become highly competitive in just one environment.
When you have a complicated theory with many moving parts, you need evidence to support each part. The microaggression into bad personality into bad test results with many nonlinearities will need many studies demonstrating each part which haven't materialized in sufficient strength.
The genetic incapacity argument will need many studies demonstrating ONE part, which haven't materialized in sufficient strength.
What does Occam's Razor say about a hypothesis that is simple but unsupported by evidence other than "this is the simplest hypothesis?"
TheFeniX wrote:Maybe I'm being stupid (definite possibility) but can someone explain to me how I'm supposed to believe the average IQ of a black person is 65 which is getting into the range of mental retardation?
I don't think research has pointed to values like this for well nourished populations. Most point to average IQ of 90-ish, which isn't "that dumb", just not enough to reach parity.
An IQ gap of ten points isn't enough to explain the achievement gap on standardized tests, because students of identical background who are ten points apart will routinely score closer together than that.
Moreover, IQ
is itself a standardized test, so no goddamn wonder IQ is correlated with success on standardized tests. It's like saying that there's an achievement gap on bench-presses that indicates a genetic incapacity in the tricep muscles of a particular ethnic group. There are a lot of other explanations that are just as plausible.
Zixinus wrote:Easy really: the people proclaiming this are racist and have only ever seen black people from a distance, on TV, books or through a computer screen, with the latter two preselected to show black people stupid.
... you are beginning to see how much self-delusion and stupidity it takes to be consciously and openly racist nowadays.
The most racists people live in the south where there is more black people. Everyone is anti-racists in gentrified areas whose cost of living excludes blacks and everyone know of the group from 2nd hand information.
The most racist people deliberately eschew contact with blacks and perpetuate unbelievably ignorant ideas about them that are objectively false. Just because they live in the same state as black people doesn't mean they know anything
true about them.
This is a strawman. All brain size data is suggestive as it is consistent with other parts of the data he collected.
A big brain might not be smart, however am small one have upper limits unless human data processing is aphysical, not that physical limits necessarily is important here.
That said, if homo sapian sapians is actually genetically similar, we shouldn't except major differences in design architecture or average tissue-eneregy/mass efficiency. A bigger brain is expensive energy wise, and if it is not defective it'd better do something or it'd be selected against. There is a correlation between brain size and IQ test results.
If you see someone with twice the muscle mass you'd expect a stronger man, or is your first instinct is that "zomg obviously his muscles are half as efficient and he is weak." It may still be true, but one wouldn't normally assign it high probability.
If you see someone with twice the
physical total mass of an average man, your conclusion is normally "he is fat" and you can't really say whether he's twice as strong as another man.
The problem is that the correlation between big brains and high intelligence isn't as strong as we'd expect if it were as simple as "twice the engine equals twice the horsepower." It's more like "twice the brain mass equals 10% more brainpower" or something, while there are vast differences in brainpower between people with otherwise identical brains. So clearly if this is all genetic, there are
other genetic factors in play that can render a difference in brain size irrelevant. In which case measuring brain size as a proxy for intelligence won't work, unless you measure those other hidden factors.
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