Race: Biological Reality vs. Social Construct

[mr friendly guy]

Oh, and before someone asks for all these studies suggesting that its an environmental rather than biological cause, yeah lots of them. Its so prominent that there is a phenomenon reported called the Flynn Effect.

Now before some says, ah the Flynn Effect just demonstrates that IQ has continually risen in human populations (from 1930 to present day) wah wah and doesn't make claim to environmental vs genetic causes, lets pause for a minute and revisit basic evolution. You know those concepts Creationists don't get.

You see, evolution doesn't quite occur that fast, ie within so few generations unless you advocate outdated theories of evolution like Lamarkianism or Saltations. Therefore the change in IQ testing scores cannot be biological. Thus environmental factors MUST play a role, and numerous ones have been proposed to explain the Flynn Effect.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flynn_effect

Now until you can correct for all these factors, you can't say the difference in intelligence must be genetic. Although those idiot racists, er I mean racialists will try. With laughable results.

[EgalitarianJay]

Of course, I am not highly informed on the topic, however if such studies exist please do point me to them.

Read this article:

HEREDITY, ENVIRONMENT, AND RACE DIFFERENCES IN IQ A Commentary on Rushton and Jensen (2005) Psychology, Public Policy, and Law 2005, Vol. 11, No. 2, 302–310

J. P. Rushton and A. R. Jensen (2005) ignore or misinterpret most of the evidence of greatest relevance to the question of heritability of the Black–White IQ gap. A dispassionate reading of the evidence on the association of IQ with degree of European ancestry for members of Black populations, convergence of Black and White IQ in recent years, alterability of Black IQ by intervention programs, and adoption studies lend no support to a hereditarian interpretation of the Black–White IQ gap. On the contrary, the evidence most relevant to the question indicates that the genetic contribution to the Black–White IQ gap is nil.

[Channel72]

Socio-economic status is not as visible, or as hard to hide, as race. While using race alone, we get:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_and_c ... s#Homicide
A 8 fold increase over base whites.

This is totally fallacious. Just because black people are statistically more likely to commit murder doesn't mean they're statistically more likely to kill you at random. The people they murder are usually other black criminals.

The offending rate for blacks was almost 8 times higher than whites, and the victim rate 6 times higher. Most murders were intraracial, with 84% of white homicide victims murdered by whites, and 93% of black victims murdered by blacks

So, you don't get an "8 fold increase" in safety by being wary of black people - unless, you're also a black person involved in crime, and associate with criminals who might have reason to kill you. (In which case you have bigger problems.)

Therefore, walking down the street and seeing a random black person tells you nothing about your personal safety.

[Channel72]

It should also be pointed out that if you're white, you're more likely to be murdered by another white person - meaning by your logic, you should be wary of other white people while walking down the street. (Of course, that would also be fallacious because skin color is usually orthogonal to homicide motives.)

[Simon_Jester]

Socio-economic status is not as visible, or as hard to hide, as race. While using race alone, we get:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_and_c ... s#Homicide
A 8 fold increase over base whites.

Ah, yes, that. I remember exploding that one rather fondly, because it's profoundly misleading to innumerate racists.

See, those statistics don't say what you think they say.

Note those rates of intraracial murder: 84% of white murder victims were killed by whites, which is actually pretty much what you'd expect if murders happen randomly because something like 70-80% of the population is white in the first place.

But 93% of black murder victims are killed by blacks. They're not a threat to you, they're a threat to themselves.

In other words, if you're white, you are far more likely to be murdered by a white person (probably someone you know or socialize with) than a black person. If you want to use those statistics correctly, rather than just being a bigoted pile of trash, you should be nervously watching your own friends and loved ones. Not random black people on the street.

So you can just shut the hell up about how we should be making proper use of statistics to inform our race-based decision-making. Because you obviously aren't competent to do that. You plan to use race to detect people who are likely to kill you- which means you will IGNORE people who are likely to kill you and AVOID people who are harmless to you.

That was a pass-fail test there, and you failed, by embracing people who will kill you and fearing harmless random people.

Simply, Racism is the easy discriminating method that everyone knows already, and its usefulness means it lingers on.

No, stupidity and fear of the foreign means it lingers on, whether it makes sense or not. I mean, the theory of the four humours lasted for about two thousand years; that doesn't mean it was right or even useful.

This helps them in many ways- they can start out learning more advanced things, and they will learn them more rapidly and efficiently. They will be more able to concentrate on purely mental puzzles and vocabulary-building exercises, which gives them more practice in those areas, which in turn enhances IQ.

Now, the home environment does have an important effect on IQ in childhood, however such effects fades over time from twin studies.

The non-shared environment do remain a significant factor, however it is possible that this factor is just picking up noise and completely random factors that is not systematic (random bump on the head, random developmental differences, measurement error, etc).

Many of the 'random' factors are correlated with things that happen more often in certain homes. Preschool education is not 'random,' it is correlated with wealth. Getting physically abused is not 'random,' it happens more in poorer families. Having your school year disrupted repeatedly by your parent having to change addresses to hold down unsteady jobs is not 'random,' for the same reason.

Now, the environmental explanation for adult IQ is not impossible, however it seems implausible (given some set of background info). If we have strong studies showing racial attitudes of the area correlating strongly with minority IQ test results while factoring out parent IQ, then there is something to go on.

At this time, there are no places in America where you can say "this place has been free of racism for several generations, giving the victims time to recover from past discrimination." Therefore, such studies cannot be performed.

Absence of proof is not proof of absence, however it is evidence for it. There are many studies that could have been ran to support the large array of environmental explanation supplied by theorists, however there appears to be none that is sufficiently strong to be a "default go to" as a counter argument.

When there are dozens of potential explanations, it seems awfully convenient to assert that only the one you happen to like is likely to be correct.

Of course, I am not highly informed on the topic, however if such studies exist please do point me to them.

I am not clear about what kind of study you seek.

I think you will find that this child knows a hell of a lot less at eighteen, and is far more likely to have neuroses, behavioral problems, and poor learning habits than they would have if they'd grown up in a stable upper middle class lifestyle.

Physically, the children of the poor in America are basically healthy and fit. Mentally, they are often unfit, by the standards of the college-oriented, white-collar world of the American middle class. And yet there are masses of reasons for this to happen which have nothing to do with genetics.

I don't think this issue can be blamed on white racism. The black communities' internal dynamic is broken as intellectual pursuits is considered "acting white", criminals are considered high class and family formation ceases being the norm.

This is actually not true in a large number of black communities which you are totally ignorant of. I happen to teach at a high school smack in the middle of one of them.

So you can take your stereotype, which is a bland regurgitation of crap you happen to have heard about "this is what those awful black people do!" probably some time in the nineties. And you can cram it.

On these basis alone, one can discriminate. Anyone inside of "black" culture ought to be view not dissimilar to fundamentalist muslims, both have adapted a culture not matching with main stream values.

You wouldn't know black culture if it bit you on the ass, so you are not in a good position to say that. Of course, I doubt you know much about fundamentalist Islam either.

Thus, these ethnic groups are not a counterexample.

A mass group level comparison may be too crude. Perhaps a smaller demographics may help, for example tracking the progression of new African immigrants. Unless modern anti-african racism is worst then anti-asian/jewish racism a century ago, we ought to see similar progressions up the SES ladder if other assumptions of equality is correct.

The issue involved here is that historical racism has created the conditions for a present disadvantage. For instance, during the great suburban housing boom of the 1950s, blacks were effectively barred from buying homes, and had to rent. White families were building up mortgage equity on new houses, while blacks who paid the same amount for housing in rented properties were not. That had long term consequences when those homes were desirable real estate for resale in the 1970s and '80s, and on from there.

Alternatively, discrimination in other countries that parallels different groups better can be studied.

Yes. Look at, say, Koreans in Japan. They, too, wind up stuck as an intergenerational underclass that performs worse in schools and the economy. This despite the fact that Korean immigrants to countries other than Japan are seen as 'model minorities!' Clearly there's nothing genetic about this; if Koreans were genetically inferior to Japanese it would show everywhere, not just in Japan. But Japan is pretty much unique in their intense bias against and denigration of Koreans, and this has been the case throughout the two countries' modern history.

Blacks didn't "form" those enclaves; they were left in them. At first, whites literally wouldn't let blacks move into the same neighborhoods as themselves. Even after that ended, once a significant number of blacks moved into an area, nearly all the whites abruptly moved out, real estate values plummeted attracting poorer occupants, and more often than not the place turned into something akin to a slum.

This had nothing to do with blacks being genetically incompetent, and everything to do with whites believing that they were icky and scary.

However what whites think should not matter when they are not present in any meaningful way. I mean if you ask ISIS, they'd call everywhere here evil infidels suitable for beheadings but it does not make us dumb or raise our crime rate.

If you take all the prosperous middle-class families and move them out of an area, and if most of the job-creating businesses move out of the city with them, and if they take the high salaries with them that would have paid high taxes to support infrastructure and services for the city...

Suddenly, the inner city turns into a hellhole. The fact that inner cities in America are often hellholes is massively related to the historical "white flight" that took place in the '60s and '70s when suddenly white families realised that (GASP) it was actually now legal for blacks to become their neighbors.

To pretend otherwise is sheer idiocy.

If blacks are poor because of white oppression, then attracting poor blacks to an area would not lower its quality of residents: it merely means more blacks escape the oppression and can quickly progress productively with freedom.

If the jobs move away along with the majority of the population, that doesn't happen.

The fundamental point here is that white flight basically guts a community economically. The fact that blacks are free to move into the gutted remnants of that community does not mean that they will be in any position to rebuild it. Most black families don't have the economic or social capital to do so.

Since all or nearly all the people shooting at them are white, and all the people condemning them for "overreacting" to what, as far as they know, is the shooting of an innocent young man, very possibly at the hands of a police department with a long history of abusing them... Exactly how inhuman do you expect them to be, to ignore the fact that YES, this violence and oppression directed against them because of their black skins is in fact coming at them from people who don't have black skins?

First of all, a black person is 8 times more likely to be a shooter per capita then whites, and the vast majority of blacks shot are by other blacks.

Yes, and if blacks respond to that by shooting back at black attackers, it increases the likelihood of them being "shooters," which in turn makes it easier for you to paint them as a race of primitive thuggish untermenschen.

There is a very different dynamic between institutional oppression and internecine crime. With black-on-black crime, there is nothing to protest, the problem is the existence of lawless gangs, and making the gangs go away takes a lot of organization and considerable money, along with a government willing to cooperate with the community.

With white-on-black police oppression, there is a very definite (and illegal) target to protest against.

The recent Ferguson shooting have all threat factors ticked: gender, age, race, size, possibly behavior, and the profiling successfully identified a criminal. I do not think the event was without cause even if it is not right or optimal.

So exactly how many innocent people is it okay to kill in the name of shooting as many criminals as possible?

Because the way you talk, you might as well say "shove them into gas chambers and have done with it," you seem to have no concept of why it's wrong to take an entire group of people and preemptively treat them all like criminals, resulting in endless harassment and antagonism between them and law enforcement.

.....The varying results can be explained to a large degree by the methods being uncertain with many possible confounding factors. As such they propose a method that they argue will remove all such observable and unobservable problems. They looked at the arrest rates for assault, robbery, and rape cases where the victims reported a black and white co-offending pair. They argue that differences in arrest rates should only reflect police bias. They found that the black offenders were 3% more likely to be arrested. Although this suggests some bias, it is insufficient to explain the large racial crime disparities.[81]

One very fast way for a white to lose the social privilege that makes him less likely to be arrested is to associate with blacks.

Also, the true measure of police bias is not in the rate at which people are arrested for serious crimes. It's the rate at which people are arrested for walking across the street wrong, or for 'obstructing traffic' by standing in front of their own apartment building for a moment at one o'clock in the morning. It's the measure of how many people are randomly "stop-and-frisked" for each actual lawful arrest, and to what extent "round up the usual suspects" has replaced actual police work.

[SWPIGWANG]

This is totally fallacious. Just because black people are statistically more likely to commit murder doesn't mean they're statistically more likely to kill you at random. The people they murder are usually other black criminals.

It should also be pointed out that if you're white, you're more likely to be murdered by another white person - meaning by your logic, you should be wary of other white people while walking down the street.

There is no good general tool for estimating the threat a individual poses to you. However given the information that blacks murders more, it is not unreasonable to conclude that an average black are likely more dangerous to you in absence of other information.

The high numbers of intra-racial violence is well explained by orders of magnitudes higher levels of contact within a race due to a number of reasons. (including white flight) It is not particularly convincing claim that criminals have highly specific racial targets that they would hold off interracial crime somehow.

One can always find gaps of knowledge to run into, however simple explanations works best for understanding the world. Sometimes if it looks like a spade, its a spade. (until shown otherwise)

Now, the home environment does have an important effect on IQ in childhood, however such effects fades over time from twin studies. The non-shared environment do remain a significant factor, however it is possible that this factor is just picking up noise and completely random factors that is not systematic (random bump on the head, random developmental differences, measurement error, etc).

Examples of these twin studies. Please don't tell me its one of those by John Philippe Rushton.

I am going off by this study http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23919982

which is summarized in this chart

Now, I am not well equipped to critique studies, however it does not seem like a outier within human behavior genetics research.

Read this article: HEREDITY, ENVIRONMENT, AND RACE DIFFERENCES IN IQ A Commentary on Rushton and Jensen (2005) Psychology, Public Policy, and Law 2005, Vol. 11, No. 2, 302–310

The study is cut off at the age 15. If we take the twin studies before as valid, it is not conclusive as adults move steadily towards their genetic potential. That said, a number of other studies is discussed and it will take me some time to go through it.

Therefore the change in IQ testing scores cannot be biological. Thus environmental factors MUST play a role, and numerous ones have been proposed to explain the Flynn Effect. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flynn_effect

It is obvious that IQ is not entirely genetic, however it is also obvious that IQ is heritable as well. There are known genes that causes a large depression in IQ mostly new mutations that leads to genetic disease. Current methods are not very good at finding genes that have a low effect on a trait and it is not surprising we haven't found much. Certain anything without human genes can't even compete.

I have not yet seen a highly convincing, full explanation of the flynn effect that also addresses twin studies results. In any case, it appears that we have reached the end of the line for the flynn effect and perhaps the environment is no longer the limiting factor for a decade or two in developed countries. Granted this can still be explained via stagnating lower/middle class....etc

I must say that my priors leans towards innate explanations for intelligence and some personality traits due to personal experiences as observed experiences fail to explain, within the context of reasonably healthy individuals. I also have a extended family with many members caught up in a war that resulted in extremely screwy family lives that led to mental illness in children, however it does not appear to depress their IQ.

[Simon_Jester]

There is no good general tool for estimating the threat a individual poses to you. However given the information that blacks murders more, it is not unreasonable to conclude that an average black are likely more dangerous to you in absence of other information.

Except that this is roughly as innumerate and stupid as thinking pi equals three because of rounding.

Blacks commit more murders, and are murdered more often, because a handful of criminal gangs, who recruit from dirt-poor blacks in inner cities, war on each other. Not because any normal black person is more murderous. And certainly not because they're killing whites, which they aren't.

The high numbers of intra-racial violence is well explained by orders of magnitudes higher levels of contact within a race due to a number of reasons. (including white flight) It is not particularly convincing claim that criminals have highly specific racial targets that they would hold off interracial crime somehow.

But they also don't target random strangers. They target people they know. I.e. you, because you obviously have made a lifelong career out of not personally knowing anything about blacks, so it's a fair bet you don't know ANY black people who want to kill you. Probably because they aren't aware of your bigotry.

One can always find gaps of knowledge to run into, however simple explanations works best for understanding the world. Sometimes if it looks like a spade, its a spade. (until shown otherwise)

In this case, people have explained in excruciating detail why your "simple explanation" is a lousy explanation. Failure to notice would indicate... thickness, honestly.

I must say that my priors leans towards innate explanations for intelligence and some personality traits due to personal experiences as observed experiences fail to explain, within the context of reasonably healthy individuals. I also have a extended family with many members caught up in a war that resulted in extremely screwy family lives that led to mental illness in children, however it does not appear to depress their IQ.

Do you have accurate and detailed measurements of their academic performance relative to genetically similar or identical people with a more favorable upbringing?

The plural of "anecdote" is not "data."

[SWPIGWANG]

Cross posted here:

Some context:
- I am not white. I also did not live in the USA since decades ago. Most of my knowledge is 2nd hand.

If there is any reason that "blacks" would be more foreign, it would be their lack of representation within my intellectual and media circle. With the internet, this can only reflect different interests, culture and mental processes. Granted it is hard to estimate race across the internet and overestimation of WASP background is likely.

At this time, there are no places in America where you can say "this place has been free of racism for several generations, giving the victims time to recover from past discrimination." Therefore, such studies cannot be performed.

If IQ were a function of racism, then differing levels of racism over historical times should predict black IQ. Places that had active KKK attacks on blacks should result in lower IQ of those in the region. Hell, one can simply track families that were seriously harmed by displays of racism and track their IQ as well while have a comparison group of those that did not. One can track IQs in developed countries that stopped slavery in different times, one can track IQs of new groups being oppressed (after civil wars what not) in natural experiments. There is lots of things. One can track new African immigrants, who was not oppressed by whites (not in a direct way) and compare their IQs after correcting for confounding factors.

There is no way in hell that this topic can not be measured and have to be taken on faith. The USA is not the entire world, and the USA is not homogeneous. Any difference anywhere may serve as a data point.

Many of the 'random' factors are correlated with things that happen more often in certain homes. Preschool education is not 'random,' it is correlated with wealth. Getting physically abused is not 'random,' it happens more in poorer families. Having your school year disrupted repeatedly by your parent having to change addresses to hold down unsteady jobs is not 'random,' for the same reason.

Human behavior genetics research have consistently (and shockingly) suggests low impact of families on the outcomes of children in many mental factors. You will need to overturn a lot of research to asset what you are saying is of critical importance.

If you take all the prosperous middle-class families and move them out of an area, and if most of the job-creating businesses move out of the city with them, and if they take the high salaries with them that would have paid high taxes to support infrastructure and services for the city...

If blacks are stopped merely by white oppression, they could start their own businesses and exploit low salaries as a major competitive advantage and grow their sub-economy that way, until it is productive enough to match the rest of society. Why do they need white run businesses to have an economy?

In addition, if there is a untapped pool of human resources, then nonracists wealthy whites (or black/asian/robots) could move in and take advantage of low salary and make a killing. This has happened for misogynist societies as egalitarian business giant advantages hiring women.

The alternative to low productivity hypothesis would be "literally everyone wealthy is super racist even if they could make money otherwise" idea.

This is actually not true in a large number of black communities which you are totally ignorant of. I happen to teach at a high school smack in the middle of one of them.

So you can take your stereotype, which is a bland regurgitation of crap you happen to have heard about "this is what those awful black people do!" probably some time in the nineties. And you can cram it.

Do tell me about your experiences.

Do you really see that white racism as having major, mind breaking impact on your students and how does it work? Or is it something more systematic, working though socioeconomic deprivation? Is there actual barriers to high performers?

It would be good to know of better mechanisms then things like "microaggressions" or effects that apply to other racial groups as well and can be studied apart, for example poverty. Do poor people become dumber or dumber people become poor? A longitudinal study would probably figure this out.

They, too, wind up stuck as an intergenerational underclass that performs worse in schools and the economy. This despite the fact that Korean immigrants to countries other than Japan are seen as 'model minorities!'

There is also the question of whether Korean expat IQ is depressed due to discrimination. Also there is a selection effect, is Korean immigrants into a discriminating country representative of the whole?

It is not surprising that oppression and discrimination reduces outcome. However, the thing with blacks is that there is no visible pocket of superior performance.

All these racial speculation would probably go "lol counterexample" if Nigeria (or whatever) grow into something that looks like an Asian tiger economy with a human resources intensive world class high tech sector. It was this event that shut the anti-asian racists up, for the most part.

A lot of racist ideas is not immune to counter examples, it just happens so that the obvious counter examples have not materialized.

[SWPIGWANG]

Blacks commit more murders, and are murdered more often, because a handful of criminal gangs

You would want to say that the problem is localized, in space, in those who commit crime and their victims. I do not believe you, not without more evidence.

Looking at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statistics ... ican_males
It does not look like the problem is localized, instead a huge part of society is stuck with the criminal justice system.

Now one can quickly point to war on drugs and the likely highly biased application of the law in this sector for this. That said, its been shown criminal record makes rejoining society difficult and many are forced into a life of crime.

I do not think it would be wrong to think that it is more likely to suffer from crime by being close to blacks. Murders may be targeted, however property crimes are situational (and can transition into violence).

This does not need a genetic explanation. The fact that they are poorer and have less options is sufficient.

Being black is correlated with low Socioeconomic class which is correlated with crime which is correlated with being dangerous.
----------------
If you can show that serious crime is committed by a smaller fraction of the black population, then there is good reason to revise my assumption of somewhat generalized threat. However it also means increasing my estimation of threats posed by those that look like gangsters as even if I were not targeted, it is still dangerous being near potential crossfire.

Do you have accurate and detailed measurements of their academic performance relative to genetically similar or identical people with a more favorable upbringing?

The plural of "anecdote" is not "data."

Genetically similar people with different upbringing? That is what extended families are right?

The plural of anecdote is data with weak statistical power. However it is hard to see into the black box of many studies at a glance, I can only assign limited trust into them. In any case, the things I have raised here are almost all possible to refute given a set of data.

[mr friendly guy]

I am going off by this study http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23919982

I am not going to pay $45 just to look at that study. I have requested the study from the author on researchgate, however it might be easier if you just upload it on a file sharing site such as Scrib where everyone can see it without needing to download it.

However a quick search reveals the author joined some other researchers in publishing Intelligence knowns and unknowns report which criticises the "Bell Curve" bullshit which you seem to love. Oh, and they also say this about IQ differences between blacks and whites.

The Flynn effect shows that environmental factors can produce differences of at least this magnitude, but that effect is mysterious in its own right. Several culturally based explanations of the Black/White IQ differential have been proposed; some are plausible, but so far none has been conclusively supported. There is even less empirical support for a genetic interpretation. In short, no adequate explanation of the differential between the IQ means of Blacks and Whites is presently available."

Now I am going to hazard a guess how you extrapolated the research beyond its means. Of course I can't really know until I see the article, but this is a reasonable guess. You assumed that the environmental differences between the twins are equal to the environmental differences between the average Black person and the average White person, without showing it.

Now, I am not well equipped to critique studies, however it does not seem like a outier within human behavior genetics research.

When the author draws an opposite conclusion to how you drawn it, a little voice goes in my head saying, hey something is funny with this SWPIGWANG character.

It is obvious that IQ is not entirely genetic, however it is also obvious that IQ is heritable as well.

Correct. However you have failed to take into account the environmental factors and attribute the difference purely to genetics. This is pseudoscience at its finest. You do know you have to control for variables right?

There are known genes that causes a large depression in IQ mostly new mutations that leads to genetic disease.

Please give an example. Wait, you're going to use the example of Phenylketonuria right?

Current methods are not very good at finding genes that have a low effect on a trait and it is not surprising we haven't found much. Certain anything without human genes can't even compete.

That's great, however since we are comparing intelligence between humans...the last statement is utterly irrelevant.

I have not yet seen a highly convincing, full explanation of the flynn effect that also addresses twin studies results.

When the author of your own quoted twin studies thinks its not a genetic basis, you're up a creek without a paddle.

I must say that my priors leans towards innate explanations for intelligence and some personality traits due to personal experiences as observed experiences fail to explain, within the context of reasonably healthy individuals. I also have a extended family with many members caught up in a war that resulted in extremely screwy family lives that led to mental illness in children, however it does not appear to depress their IQ.

Of course there are innate characteristics why a person may be smarter than another person. However what you are doing is extrapolating this to entire racial groups, which is a whole different kettle of fish. This is like saying Bruce Lee is great at martial arts, therefore all Asians are good at martial arts. I trust you can see why this is fallacious thinking.