One of the fun parts about these gormless discussions about race consists of people who talk as if we don’t really know anything about the phenotypes under discussion. Like, who really knows what intelligence is, and who really knows if groups vary in average intelligence, blah blah blah.
The funny thing is that a lot of those discussing these issues really don’t know. At this point, the average graduate student in physical anthropology doesn’t know that different populations have significant differences in average brain volume – so why would you expect Jerry Coyne to? Does he know that there’s a fair-sized correlation between brain volume and measured intelligence? Even if he doesn’t, he would immediately understand why that was highly likely. Is he moderately familiar with modern psychometrics? Probably not. Does he know that there is a one-std difference in IQ between blacks and whites, and that it shows up before kindergarten? I doubt it. James Heckman knows. There is of course lots of other evidence that clearly shows that schools are not the cause of that difference, not least the observation that blacks do poorly in the same prosperous, integrated, liberal schools (Shaker Heights!) where whites and northeast Asians do just fine.
How many know that the observed rank-orderings of groups are apparently the same everywhere? Bring in Japanese as farm workers, and they’re in the upper middle class in four or five generations. Bring the Chinese into Malaysia as illiterate tin miners, and they end up owning and running all the industry in the country (and the Communist party too, back in the day).
How many of those talking about clines and races know that black 12th graders in the US score lower than white 8th graders on reading and math? How many known that blacks are hugely underrepresented in the upper tails of the achievement distribution?
How many remember the tens of times that we’ve been told that some new intervention is going to erase these gaps, and then seen the story dribble away to nothing? While we’re at it, why do these interventions always consist of a bunch of liberal arts graduates talking with great sincerity – isn’t there anything else to try? Something new, something with at least a Chinaman’s chance of success? Modafinil? Trancranial magnetic stimulation? Caning? Tarts for nerds?
Parenthetically, none of these practical questions have anything to do with typological questions: a population that originated from the other end of a cline can be very different, and it’s the differences that matter, not whether there’s a natural seam between populations (like the Sahara, or the Himalayas). This is obvious to anyone who’s ever thought seriously about the matter. Both of us!
Since it is obvious that ‘clines vs races’ argument has no relevance to the real question – the enduring achievement gaps between different populations in the US and other countries – why do people keep bringing it up? I used to think that such people were blowing smoke, deliberately lying to make a point, but I am increasingly willing to consider the possibility that they’re just stupid. Mixed explanations are also possible: such nonsense has worked in the past, and the current practitioners are following a beaten path, rather than rationally planning a deception campaign.
Of course, when someone says that “Genes matter, but they are only a small part of the whole evolutionary picture”, you figure that he’s just an idiot.
West Hunter 
I was thinking exactly the same thing!, though as always you are the master of concision.
By which I meant I was thinking exactly the same thing here http://pseudoerasmus.com/2014/05/22/nicholas-wade-the-social-phenotype/
“James Heckman knows.
As does Christopher Jencks. The dumbest thing Wade did was follow Unz into IQ agnosticism. So his reasonable conjectures all became data-less speculations. And made him vulnerable to all those “where’s the allele for capitalism?” arguments that are now proliferating like flies in the scientist reviews.
The “where’s the allele” question is dumb as hell, nevertheless, as you pointed out a couple comments later.
when someone says that “Genes matter, but they are only a small part of the whole evolutionary picture”,
Who said or wrote that? I want to read it or hear it. Don’t deny us the fun.
Sounds like something Stephen Jay Gould would have said.
According to my friend, Google, it was a certain Agustín Fuentes.
We ought to have a contest to see if anyone can come up with a more self-evidently idiotic statement.
“Sure, black people consistently score lower in intelligence tests and achieve less academically, but since race doesn’t exist, black people are just as smart as everyone else.”
I would say I don’t hold my breath, but, but, just wait for the next few dozens of reviews. I guess it’s going to quickly degenerate into an orgy of idiocy (actually, it already has), because at first the idiot reviewers didn’t quite know what to do with it (they understood Wade and his arguments were more intelligent than themselves), but after reading other reviews, they could pick up the stupid ideas from each other, adding some even more idiotic things themselves (like this Augustín Fuentes, Ph.D., just did), and encouraging each other that their idiocy is actually wisdom.
They’re really piling on. They egging each other on. Based on my Google Alert results, it hasn’t peaked yet. Today brought a torrent of bad notices. A gloating tone is entering the discussion, as they seem to be assuming all reviews were bad, except the one by the utterly discredited (to them) Charles Murray.
I saw someone write, “I sure wouldn’t want to be Nicholas Wade” today.
Probably someone bringing up some stupid shit about “epigenetics” or some nonsense like that.
Augustin Fuentes also said this:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/agustin-fuentes/the-troublesome-ignorance-of-nicholas-wade_b_5344248.html
“Genes don’t do anything by themselves; epigenetics and complex metabolic and developmental systems are at play in how bodies work. The roundworm C. elegans has about 20,000 genes while humans have about 23,000 genes, yet it is pretty obvious that humans are more than 15-percent more complex than roundworms. So while genes matter, they are only a small part of the whole evolutionary picture. Focusing just on DNA won’t get you anywhere.”
What the fuck. How is this crackpot a professor.
And in this video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=66IeDfeGbzA)
He claims sex and violence are “not inherent in humanity” but cooperation is “human nature”
He also disproves genes play any part at all in violent behavior by constructing a strawman against MAOA. He disproves MAOA by taking part in a popular documentary and getting tested.
You can’t even make this shit up.
@HBD Anon:
“You can’t even make this shit up.”
He apparently did.
Why do you consider epigenetics “nonsense”?
To be exact, the idea that transgenerational epigenenetic inheritance is of any significance in humans is nonsense, because that’s what the vast majority of evidence in mammals and humans indicates. Plus you can’t imagine a mechanism, epigenetic states of genes expressed in brain tissue would have to be transmitted to the germ cells, then turned on at appropriate times in later life (not in early development!).
While we’re at it, people whose recent historical experiences involve the kind of trauma that would make your typical American die screaming do just fine, academically. You think that kids in Hiroshima and Nagasaki score like kids in New Mexico? Nope.
It’s up there with polywater.
“To be exact, the idea that transgenerational epigenenetic inheritance is of any significance in humans is nonsense, because that’s what the vast majority of evidence in mammals and humans indicates. ”
We are just beginning to compile evidence so how can you come to a conclusion like this? The recent studies (that show clear intergenerational effects) are no more bullshit than the twin studies. Very unscientific and unprofessional to refer to one line of evidence as bullshit and everyone who considers that line of evidence seriously as idiots.
People have been doing experiments aimed at detecting the kind of Lamarckian inheritance you mention for something like a century: if it exists, it can’t be common.
On the other hand, there have been a number of studies of identical twins (in humans), including several studies of separated identical twins. The results are solid and well known. Monozygotic twins are extremely similar, behaviorally as well as somatically.
And that’s the way it is.
You are putting words in my mouth especially when you use the word Lamarkian. In the recent experiments with mice, the fathers were stressed and their offspring were depressed. Not even the same thing. And it may wear off after a few generations. However a member of an oppressed group would deal with severe stress frequently. I just don’t understand the hurry. And no, the twin studies hardly disprove this effect!
If it isn’t adaptive, doesn’t result in useful changes, natural selection ought to eliminate the kind of epigenetic leakage you’re talking about, or at minimum make it extremely rare. It should be about as common as birds flying north for the winter.
Sometimes taking a step back and looking at a larger picture is helpful. There are people whose ancestors, over the last few generations, have experienced far more intense storms of crap than any group in the United States. Take China, for example: the present generation’s recent ancestors had to survive the Japanese invasion and occupation, the civil war between the Nationalists and Reds, the Korean War, the famine resulting from the Great Leap Forward (~30 million dead), the Cultural Revolution – all this while experiencing dire poverty, by US standards. Yet they do fine, academically. Better than typical US students – much better than US minority students.
I know a fair amount about 20th century history. There are a lot of places that where life was drastically harder than it was for anyone in the US, without having those score-depressing, crime-inflating effects. I mean, those negative effects aren’t there in Hiroshima or Nagasaki.. I hardly think that Jim Crow was worse than being nuked.
That all sounds very subjective. It is not just about “life being hard” in general, we don’t know much about it yet – you are twisting things again. I think one could never win in an argument here- and that is not good. I can think of a lot of objections to what you just stated but I won’t bother- life is too short.
Since black kids from prosperous families (making $160,000-200,000) have lower average SAT cores than white kids from families making under $20,000 (2008 data from the College Board), the kind of hardship we’re talking about may be subtle indeed.
Evidence that higher income blacks are smarter? Athletes, perhaps?
I would also love to see some hard evidence (not speculation) that being a farmer takes more smarts than being a hunter gatherer.
As far as the epigenetics study, one generation high income means nothing PLUS does not preclude ongoing stressful events. Do you think that a high income black in the u\US no longer experiences racism? Again, we were not discussing “hard lives” – you keep twisting things. And I am not suggesting that one study answers everything. I am suggesting that it is indicative of how little we know.
***Do you think that a high income black in the u\US no longer experiences racism? ***
@ Susan,
Do you think that Asian students experience racism? They appear to score higher than other groups on average. Also, note that in terms of self esteem African-Americans score higher than Europeans or Asians.
@Susan:
We are not trying to be mean here with the points we’re making. To be honest, you’re being a bit obstinate. I am Black myself, but I am realistic and understand that there is plenty of evidence for heritable group differences. Dr. Cochran has been graciously trying to give you an idea from basic evolutionary theory why transgenerational epigenetics is highly unlikely to be too big of a factor in the outcomes we see. You’d be wise to take heed.
In any case, please see this for a basic primer:
JayMan’s Race, Inheritance, and IQ F.A.Q. (F.R.B.) | JayMan’s Blog
I thought you’re tri-hybrid.
At the risk of appearing obtuse, black is the absence of visible light, not a race.
“for heritable group differences. Dr. Cochran has been graciously trying to give you an idea from basic evolutionary theory why transgenerational epigenetics is highly unlikely to be too big of a factor in the outcomes we see. You’d be wise to take heed.”
That sounds like a threat. LOL, I have a pretty good grasp of basic evolutionary theory, thanks anyway. That is why I am concerned about adding some rigor to the discussion. Especially pulling back and providing some hard evidence that farming takes more intelligence than hunting and gathering. Or more cooperation etc etc.
Or that “africans” are one race comparable to asians or europeans. People here keep saying with another organism there would be no such demands for rigor and specific definitions of groups but believe me, there would be.
” Do you think that Asian students experience racism? ”
Not even close to what black students experience I am sure.
Then you don’t know much.
You keep asking for hard evidence when you have provided nothing yourself, zilch, just an assertion. You can’t even suggest a credible biological pathway for transgenerational epigenetics.
Sorry, but if you want people to believe in fairies at the bottom of the garden, you need to do more than assert. Otherwise you’re just another windbag. Depressed mice – give me a break.
I grew up in a poorer family than most American ‘blacks’ (as you so ignorantly insist on calling them), there were plenty of nights when I went to bed with no dinner because there was no money for food, copped more than my fair share of class discrimination, beatings by the local gangs of bullies, I’m willing to bet more than most American ‘blacks’, and I did just fine, and I didn’t need any affirmative action, I did it by myself.
Give hard biological evidence of transgenerational epigenetics (which I know you can’t) and quit just making up crap. (What the hell would you know about discrimination suffered by Asians vs ‘blacks’? Evidence?) Windbag.
@Susan:
“I have a pretty good grasp of basic evolutionary theory, thanks anyway.”
Not from what I see here.
“Especially pulling back and providing some hard evidence that farming takes more intelligence than hunting and gathering. Or more cooperation etc etc. “
Spend some time with the San and you tell me.
“Or that “africans” are one race comparable to asians or europeans.”
You’re stuck on the top-down classification, which isn’t necessary. But, in any case, see here
“‘Do you think that Asian students experience racism?’
Not even close to what black students experience I am sure.”
Said to the Black man…
Funny, the enormous discrimination East Asians and Jews experienced in the America of the past didn’t seem to hold them down. And for that matter, being in a Jewish state didn’t close the gap of the non-Ashkenazi Jews and the Ashkenazis…
What’s wrong with “blacks”? Sandgroper, you sound bitter, and this conversation has taken a personal turn for some reason. I mean, what’s with all the insults? Windbag? Moron? Obstinate? Are you saying you are unaware of the epigenetic studies? I thought you were keeping up? You need links? I still don’t understand why you feel the studies are not credible. We are not going to hash out all the details on this thread, that hardly seems practical, or necessary.
Anyway, you are makig the assertions, so the onus is on you. Still waiting for some hard evidence that farming takes more intelligence than being a hunter gatherer. So many assertions don’t add up.
“Not from what I see here.”
LOL you strike me as a mere hobbyist yourself. Ever done any research?
“Spend some time with the San and you tell me.”
Why don’t you just say what you mean instead of making cryptic comments.
Just because you are Black (and asian and white apparently) you don’t speak for everyone and you don’t get to play the race card, we are having a scientific discussion.
@Susan:
“we are having a scientific discussion.”
Perish the thought. It’s actually more like me dropping a few crumbs under the bridge. But it’s look like I’m out of crumbs for today. Sorry…
Well maybe after you rest your brain you will be able to pull your thoughts together and express why you think farming takes more intelligence than being hunter gatherer. And why the recent epigenetic studies are “nonsense”.
Well maybe after you rest your brain you will be able to pull your thoughts together and express why you think farming takes more intelligence than being hunter gatherer. And why the recent epigenetic studies are “nonsense”.
Well, the fact that current farmers are generally smarter than current hunter-gatherers might be considered evidence that it takes more brains; you know, all that dull planning.
“What’s wrong with “blacks”?”
At the risk of repeating myself, “black” means the absence of visible light.
The people you are referring to are mostly hybrids or biracial (or in some cases tri-hybrids or tri-racial) – there are no “blacks” and “whites”. That is an artificial political/ideological dichotomy projected by people who wish to trade on it for their own political/ideological motives. It always has been.
“we are having a scientific discussion” – You could have fooled me. When are you going to start bringing some science into it?
JayMan never does play the race card – I have seen him around for years, and only recently found out circumstantially that he is not just plain white bread. If you care to read even a small fraction of the work he has published on his blog, you’ll realised he is a hell of a lot more than just a hobbyist.
As for farming and hunting – have ever done either yourself Susan? I’ve done both, and I’ve known many real live genuine hunter-gatherers in my life. I’m willing to bet you have never done either, and actually know nothing of what you are talking about, you’re just fabricating imaginings to push your own political/ideological agenda.
Which is not what scientists should do – from which I conclude you are not one. You may be a lot of things, but you are not a scientist.
Okay so we have one vague hypothesis: farming involves planning and HG life does not. Sorry, not convincing. Of course hunting and gathering involve planning also. It’s a complicated life, as not everything is just there for the plucking year round. Plants fruit at different times in different places, game moves around as well, hunts and moves to new camps need to be coordinated and executed. Lots of memorization as well. I’ve heard that HG kids know on average 500 plants and their uses by age 6. So we need more specifics.
What ‘HG kids’? How many hunter gatherers have you ever met, let alone their kids? You don’t seriously suppose that all hunter-gatherers are the same, do you?
I can talk about Australian Aboriginal people. It’s not just a matter of what they have memorised – the evidence, which is pretty clear, is that they have a whole different set of visual/spacial skills to other people, including acute vision, particularly distance vision, and enhanced spacial memory.
On a modern IQ test, they score a mean of 65 – in a modern industrial urban environment they are a disaster. In the Western Desert, they can survive, when you would be dead in less than 3 days.
It is unlikely that the same skill set applies to other hunter gatherers living in other environments, so stop talking collectively about hunter-gatherers as if you know something, because you don’t.
I suggest you quit being a know-all based on some cultural anthropological crap that you read somewhere, and learn something real.
No need to get so emotional Sandgroper, jeez. I never said any of the things you are now claiming I did. “all HG are exactly alike”?? how can a person even reply to such open hostility?
@Susan:
Visscher’s studies do not use twins or adoptees! Indeed some of them don’t even use people in the same family.
Let’s ignore the fact that it’d be mighty tough to explain how twin and adoption studies come to the same conclusions, even if each was individually faulty. Many standard behavioral genetic studies use neither twins nor adoptees (comparing half-siblings with full-siblings, for example). These produce the same results.
Let’s also pretend for a second that you had a point, and that the partial genetic explanation for human trait variation didn’t work, then what’s YOUR alternative?
Jesus, you are so damned ignorant and so apparently incapable of applying basic reasoning or logic (like Occam’s Razor) that it’s not worth my time to bother with you further.
If it were true for some particular kinds of organisms that stress-induced genetic damage was passed on to many succeeding generations then that would seem to be a huge evolutionary disadvantage. Wouldn’t natural selection strongly favor mechanisms to prevent this from being significant?
If black populations in places such as Haiti are still suffering from inherited genetic damage from the time of slavery, more than 200 years after the end of slavery, than that trait of inheriting stress-induced genetic damage would be a bigger biological disadvantage compared to other races than just being of lower average IQ.
Of course you won’t reply.
Of course, you could reply with competence and honesty, but I predict you won’t. You dismiss twin and adoption studies and the work of a lot of highly competent people with a wave of the hand, then dredge up some anecdote about ‘some HG kids’ from somewhere – no idea who or where. You want to be careful, indigenous people tend to be touchy about that kind of thing.
“Let’s also pretend for a second that you had a point, and that the partial genetic explanation for human trait variation didn’t work, then what’s YOUR alternative?
Jesus, you are so damned ignorant and so apparently incapable of applying basic reasoning or logic (like Occam’s Razor) that it’s not worth my time to bother with you further. ”
More rude, hostile attacks. Jesus, chill out man!
If by ‘human trait variation’ you mean behavioral traits, I suspect the answer is complex, like the behaviors. Genetics may play into it, but I strongly doubt it is as straightforward as it is made out to be by you all. I don’t think evolution (NS especially) would happen as straightforwardly as in physical traits because 1. the advantage will likely be much more subtle and apply to some individuals (eg leaders, or followers/workers) yet may be a disadvantage for others. 2. Situations that would lead to bottlenecks (epidemics or famines) that would leave a high incidence of the alleles in the resulting small populations are much harder to conjure up as opposed to the alleles for physical traits like lactose tolerance or sickle cell.
I accept that there are other alleles and regions of the genome under selection and that some of those may be behavioral traits but I just don’t hear anything convincing from you or others and a lot of it seems to come from some kind of agenda. As I have already pointed out I have a pretty hard time with the idea that farmers are more intelligent than HGs yet this is accepted as a given. Or migrants to cold climates or whatever.
Of course here you could say none of those objections matter “as long as it is a tiny difference in the mean” of some trait you have decided to measure it will still have significant effects, but I can’t agree that it follows that for example Africans can’t run their own societies because of this difference in mean IQ. There are still going to have plenty of high IQ people- they don’t need to be winning Nobel prizes. I think you are making too much of it and ignoring too much. And yes, making it all hierarchical – that is offensive. African societies were not allowed to evolve organically into their current structure so the transition is all the harder.
You also keep complaining yet refraining from simply explaining yourself. You still haven’t explained why you think epigenetic effects are “nonsense” (in this context anyway). I am very interested to know why you totally discount these studies. And by that I mean why do you feel the studies themselves are nonsense.
And yes I understand how to apply Occam’s Razor. It refers to the most parsimonious way to explain the evidence, but as I said, I think you are artificially paring down the evidence.
@Susan:
I don’t insult; I state facts. You are not only ignorant (wantonly ignorant at that) – you are not only apparently unable (or unwilling) to apply basic logic – you appear to be detached from reality.
Everything you need to understand this has been given to you. Spend a few days reading and learning and you’d know. But I suspect it wouldn’t be effective.
As for the reason lower mean IQs are so detrimental to national development, see La Griffe du Lion on that:
http://www.lagriffedulion.f2s.com/sft.htm
http://www.lagriffedulion.f2s.com/sft2.htm
(2004) Smart Fraction Theory II: Why Asians Lag
Oh and forgot to add that behavioral traits would not be as consistently selected for over long periods of time as physical traits would be because of the rapid spread of culture and constant societal change and so on in recent human evolution. I object to the assertion that people who accept physical differences in extant human populations are unscientific hypocrites to not accept all the claims of behavioral and cognitive differences. I think this hesitation is actually the more scientifically valid position.
I repeat I do not need an education from some anonymous guy on the internet- I’ve got that covered, thanks anyway. And yeah, I am familiar with the HBD lit as well. You continue to refuse to give a straightforward answer to a single question I have asked so I can only conclude you are incapable of doing so. I am not asking for links and I must say I am pretty shocked at your rudeness – that may explain why you never made it professionally. Good luck with your little hobby, Jayman.
Many examples can be found in the comments section below Jonathan Marks review’ of A Troublesome Inheritance. Jayman and several others do a valiant job of defending science, empiricism, and reason. But the shameless tactics of the opposition are simply breathtaking. Page after page of tautology, ad hominem, vitriol, and sheer stupidity.
The energy that these egalitotalitarianists devote to quell the pangs of cognitive dissonance is astounding.
Not to mention the Scientific American apparently deleting comments they don’t like on Eric Johnson’s appallingly dishonest review of Wade.
What was “appallingly dishonest” about his review?
Susan,
Read here for the details, and read the comments, too.
“clines vs races’ argument has no relevant to the real question”
That’s now the phase 2 of the reviews of Wade, looks like. At first Orr, Coyne, Gelman, etc. kind of acknowledged the population structure arguments in Wade, but attacked the speculative parts. Now there are several attacks focusing primarily on the population structure argument (Jennifer Raff and your favourite, the measure of the dog lady).
But as you say, why the hell does it matter, cline or cluster or discrete.
“But as you say, why the hell does it matter, cline or cluster or discrete.”
Because if you can’t pinpoint precisely where population differences begin or end then they must not exist, see?
Pingback: Roundup of Book Reviews of Nicholas Wade’s A Troublesome Inheritance | Occam's Razor
There’s a vast body of inferences in the biological and evolutionary-psychological literature that evolution by natural selection has occurred, most of which are not accompanied by evidences from the genome (especially for the higher animals), and those inferences have most often been assessed by data from phenotype using classical quantitative genetic techniques. Yet all these scientists shitting on Wade act as though none of that is the case, and demand that genetic inference arguments about race come attached with allele IDs and what not. Under such a standard I don’t think Dawkins or Coyne could have had a career.
The Veeck effect of the first kind.
I just found one of my favorite quotes of all time:
“Nowhere is this tendency stronger than among cultural anthropologists, who at times seem to have no reason for being other than refurbishing the reputations of cannibals.”
As a long time White Sox fan, that is awesome!
The reason for that standard is obvious- the confounding variable in humans of cultural transmission. Why assume genetics?
Another point, recent studies have revealed dramatic epigenetic effects in mice, such as depression that lasts generations after fathers have suffered stress. We are only beginning to learn about these effects. Sure epigenetics and the microbiome have become annoyingly trendy, but why dismiss them as nonsense? (Jayman above). Sounds like a potential alternative explanation for the twin and adoption study conclusions and why some underclasses take many generations to do well. Human culture is extremely complicated. What is the hurry to declare permanent genetic differences?
Also the idea that Europeans, especially British are relatively non-violent is hilarious. There are many ways to express aggression and violent tendencies.
The Veeck effect again,Susan, you just re-define violence when it suits your cultural marxist agenda: “many ways to express aggression” is a classic example of leftist weaseling, followed by expelling boys who draw pictures of guns. Fact is, certain minorities (e.g.) blacks ARE more violent, and there is a well-known genetic connection in the MAO-A gene, 2 copies.
Classic dishonesty of the sort we see everywhere now.
I mean there are many ways to express violence. And what’s with all the name calling? Calm down.
Why don’t you define your terms. What do you consider violence? What counts as expression of violence? How about having power over others, and misusing it- does that count? You think if you pull out some murder statistic from a specific time and place…make a real case that whites are non-violent. Good luck.
Interesting that the cultures that are supposedly non-violent enjoy incredibly violent entertainment. Repression maybe? Well there’s more evidence against genetic explanations 🙂
Susan,
Why assume culture? Yet many scientists accept cultural arguments without concerning themselves with the confounding variable of genetics. Tell me, when is the last time you saw a major book about social science questioned by more than a handful of reviewers because it didn’t talk about genetics?
Here we go with the bloody mice again.
I took one generation to leave the underclass. One. And I’m not a mouse.
What’s your hurry to dismiss clearly demonstrated genetic differences?
And hey, it’s not the Brits firing drones into Afghanistan, you moron.
Why don’t you define your terms. What do you consider violence?
That phrase reminds me the old “why don’ you talk about your mother?”. Same old shitty attempt to manipulate the world with magic spellings.
@Susan:
“The reason for that standard is obvious- the confounding variable in humans of cultural transmission. Why assume genetics?”
Nothing is assumed. Because behavioral genetics that’s why:
More Behavioral Genetic Facts | JayMan’s Blog
Even if that kind of epigenetic transgenerational inheritance did take place (which it doesn’t), you’re clearly clueless about the methods of behavioral genetics to think it overturns such results.
“Human culture is extremely complicated. What is the hurry to declare permanent genetic differences?”
I’d say sound knowledge of the facts and Occam’s Razor, but who am I kidding at this point to think that’ll mean much to you?
“Also the idea that Europeans, especially British are relatively non-violent is hilarious.”
Really?
” you’re clearly clueless about the methods of behavioral genetics to think it overturns such results.”
I never said it “overturned” any results. I said it suggests how much more there could be to the story (it’s just a few recent experiments after all) and does call into question the acceptance of twin and adoption studies as some kind of gold standard.
I still don’t see why you claim the results of these experiments don’t count and are nonsense. You haven’t stated why you think so.
“I’d say sound knowledge of the facts and Occam’s Razor, but who am I kidding at this point to think that’ll mean much to you?”
Well, your “facts” are cherry-picked and their selection seems heavily influenced by certain personalities you admire, and I don’t see where Occam’s razor comes in. Mindless, intentional simplification is not the same thing as seeking a parsimonious solution. In fact I think you are adding a lot of unnecessary complication on the evolutionary side and weirdly simplifying the cultural side.
Ever read Judith Rich Harris?
Why not – because she doesn’t fit the agenda?
What agenda? You seem to be the one with an agenda. I am simply not rushing to any conclusions. In a complex situation this is the best approach to a problem. I googled her name and again, we are back to the adoption studies. One problem I have with adoption and twin studies is that they are both based on unusual circumstances that come with a lot of baggage. They are interesting, and undoubtedly provide some useful data, but that’s it.
All this is the stuff I’ve said about the matter on my new page – great minds (sans the jabs at the ignoramuses sputtering on about the topic):
JayMan’s Race, Inheritance, and IQ F.A.Q. (F.R.B.) | JayMan’s Blog
Seriously, the nonsense that’s flying out there on this is utterly crazy.
And as for those jabs at those ignoramuses:
I’m not at all sure all these anthropologists can be classified as scientists.
Indeed, those who ignore or actively suppress the evidence in order to perpetuate their version of “truth” are not scientists, they are priests of a false religion.
Also:
I’m guessing the surging “clinialism” is mostly obfuscation: a way for people to avoid looking like gene-denying rubes without having to cough up any specifics regarding actual biological differences between clines.
“Parenthetically, none of these practical questions have anything to do with typological questions: a population that originated from the other end of a cline…”
A “cline” originally referred to a character gradient, not to a “population continuum” (meaning an overall genetic relatedness continuum resulting from primary or secondary intergradation). I suppose one could say “a population cline” to differentiate this from e.g., “a hair form cline”. But why introduce the conceptual confusion in the first place?
It’s Henry Harpending who uses Clark’s “Genetically Capitalist?” paper in a class, right ? Read this review http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/primate-diaries/2014/05/21/on-the-origin-of-white-power/ ! The guy garbles Clark and thinks Wade has misrepresented him.
Upton Sinclair famously noted that “it is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it”. He wasn’t quite right, though. Many people can recognize the truth and yet deny it for a salary.
When we look at *interests*, however, particularly political interests, we fall deep into crimestop territory.
I’ve acknowledged the differences in I.Q by race for a long time but I’ve often wondered if evolution has an end goal of upholding intelligence above all.
Well, after reading many articles involving attraction by differences in race, I’ve come to the conclusion that evolution does not favor intelligence; It favors aesthetics and strength.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3276508/
The study above shows that women favor black males over white males in terms of facial attractiveness. This spans across white, asian and black women.
“The results replicate earlier findings that Black men are rated as more attractive than White men. It was further found that Asian men were rated as less attractive than either other race. For women the pattern was reversed with Asian women being rated as most attractive followed by White women and then Black women. The patterns observed occurred regardless of the race of the person doing the ratings.”
And the reason for why this came about?
“In order to provide a possible explanation for the pattern of attractiveness for Asian people, one can look to the evolutionary impact of the environment in which the races developed. Frost hypothesised that many of the visual features that distinguish White from Black people are a result of differences in patterns of sexual selection [30]. Further from the equator (for example in the arctic tundra of Europe 10,000 years ago), men would be less available for two reasons. First, they would have to hunt over greater distances with increased mortality. Second, polygamy would be less common due to having to provide over a longer winter. As a result, away from the equator, there would be greater competition between women for mates. This competition would lead to sexual selection for more feminine characteristics. While the sexual selection would be driven by competition between females, it would act upon both the males and females making them both more feminine. At the same time in the agricultural parts of Africa, females could contribute more to food production and so could be more easily supported. Men would be able to take more than one wife and so women would be competed for by males. Competition between males for mates would lead to sexual selection of masculine traits. Again, these traits would carry over into both the males and the females. This pattern of evolutionary development, therefore, provides an explanation for why White females and Black males are perceived to be more attractive than Black females and White males.”
It seems that humans have been and always will be at the mercy of their reptilian brains, damned be intelligence and everything else. I suppose one could learn that female Hypergamy is so insatiable, it will destroy everything just to fulfill a physical aesthetic. That includes bloodlines, civilization and kinship.
The future does not look bright, figuratively and literally speaking…
Would you like some cheese to go with that whine ?
Luckily most White women can count, and understand the difference between, let’s say, 67 and 100.
Those who can’t may not be much of a loss.
Gordo
It’s almost never the case that a random sample of group X intermarries with a random sample of group Y.
Their loss indeed.
“It seems that humans have been and always will be at the mercy of their reptilian brains, damned be intelligence and everything else. I suppose one could learn that female Hypergamy is so insatiable, it will destroy everything just to fulfill a physical aesthetic. That includes bloodlines, civilization and kinship.”
Well that escalated quickly. Did you miss taking your meds today?
Have you considered the possibility that male physical attractiveness may be more strongly selected than less obvious traits in environments where men do not help with child-raising? More precisely, in environments where it is feasible for women to raise children without significant help from their fathers?
Environments like SSA or Western welfare states?
I guess male attractiveness is mostly about physical strength, not so much facial attractiveness. so what makes faces of males with subaharan african ancestry attractive is not so much the face itself but rather the association with full phzsical strength
At the same time in the agricultural parts of Africa, females could contribute more to food production and so could be more easily supported. Men would be able to take more than one wife and so women would be competed for by males. Competition between males for mates would lead to sexual selection of masculine traits. Again, these traits would carry over into both the males and the females.
Then why did African-style sex roles and behaviors not arise in other parts of the world with similar climates, such as the Indian subcontinent and SE Asia?
Peter
Good question. Perhaps rice farming is involved?
“The study above shows that women favor black males over white males in terms of facial attractiveness. This spans across white, asian and black women.”
I call bullshit.
Diana, I couldn’t agree with you more. Baywatch was the most popular TV series at its time, not some african/african-american TV series, this says it all. Women go for white boy bands, not negro boy bands.
To speak for men, of course they don’t prefer asian women to european women, as stated in the article. Just look at what women cover the magazines men buy, they are curvy europeans, not asians.
black males were not perceived as such 30 years ago. But for the last 20 years , negroid men have been promoted non stop as a dominant product in media, so any person with object fancy reflex, people who overconsume, will consume the negroid male product too. To feel satisfied they have a highly promoted product in their lives, as with any other.
You seem to be anthroporphizing Evolution. It does no such thing.
The environment selects … and in some environments, human behavior is the primary selective force. In those, IQ is often selected for.
If intelligence was never selected for, we would be dumber than chimps. Actually, we would be dumber than earthworms.
On the feeding frenzy surrounding hostile reviews of Wade, it has now reached the point when freshly arriving putative reviewers are saying they are opposed to the last “social history” chapters without having read them (on the grounds that the other low quality reviews are in agreement on that point).
James Thompson @JamesPsychol May 21
@WiringTheBrain Do I understand you correctly that you have not read all of the Wade book yet commend a review of it as an evisceration?
Kevin Mitchell @WiringTheBrain May 21
@JamesPsychol You do, sir. That is exactly what I have done.
Is this as silly as assuming that the genetic code is a small part of evolution?
I hope that some sort of prize was being offered.
The only reason that the vast majority of the people who deny the existence of race even care about the issue is that they believe that if “race does not exist,” then, a priori, it is impossible for whites to be smarter than blacks. Make them understand that this isn’t so — or more pointedly, contrive to make it widely known that this isn’t so, so that the assertion loses its usefulness in public debate — and they would lose interest immediately.
I think you should be on guard about the kind of explanations you accept for why others disagree with you. I was once a Management Consultant. Management Consultants are usually called in when there is a stubborn and seemingly intractable dispute in management. The common observation is that both sides ascribe the differing opinions as being the result of the other side’s stupidity.
I suggested a way out of this last week. I will repeat my suggestion.
I happen to be on the same side of most of the race, genetic issues as you. Why is that? You’re smart. I’m pretty smart too. Is that it? We two surrounded by a sea of fools? Who could be that vain as to believe that?
It may very well be that you are smarter than almost all of your opponents but it is unlikely that you are smarter than everybody everywhere who adopts an environmentalist stance on race. People who are smarter than other people have better arguments for their core beliefs. They do not all agree on the same beliefs. It’s an error to think that.
But there are reasons why people hold the views they do and I suspect that those reasons are genetic. That means that you are in a position to figure out the how and why.
I read Coon’s book in 1965 and Jensen’s Harvard Education Review article in 1966. I naively expected that their powerful arguments would sweep away all opposition. It doesn’t work that way. Some people will believe one kind of argument no matter how stupid the argument is or how smart they are.
I think there must be a mechanism in the human genome that assures that half the population will consistently want to go one way when the tribe wanders in the woods, and the other half will just as adamantly demand to go the other way. I think without some kind of mechanism like this, political parties are inexplicable.
I think liberals and conservatives get ‘talking points’ from their genes. The correct rejoinder to some one with whom you disagree isn’t – “You’re stupid” but rather “You’re just expressing the political slant of your ‘XYZ-99’ genotype and this virus will fix that”.
What is “XYZ-99”?
Quoting myself from my latest post (More Maps of the American Nations, check it out, I make a decent jab at certain race denialist arguments):
“Indeed, the heritability of political orientation approaches 100% when one accounts for measurement error.”
Arguing political beliefs is like arguing eye colors.
That said, in the world of science, we should be free of certain a priori beliefs and agenda that color research, and should stick to finding the truth. So it is perfectly acceptable, and important, to rail against any scientist who puts agenda before the science.
“People who are smarter than other people have better arguments for their core beliefs.”
Not necessarily. They may just be illogically committed to certain ideas, haven’t properly considered some ideas etc.
Another interesting thing to note is that people who take contrarian positions and go against absurd group-think almost always seem to be men. I don’t think this is just an artifact of differences in IQ.
No it isn’t, women are much more predisposed to go with the group status quo, no doubt for genetic reasons related to protection of offspring.
“We two surrounded by a sea of fools? Who could be that vain as to believe that?”
Who could deny that every person is surrounded by a sea of fools? Some of us manage to occasionally not be foolish; that’s all.
Okay but do you accept that everything you just stated applies to yourself? And those who agree with you? Or just those who don’t?
On occasion, I find the people who disagree with me are right and I’m wrong. (This usually involves specific people, as well.) But generally, the people who disagree with me are actually incorrect. And most of the people who disagree, when they get around to explaining themselves, have stupid arguments and foolish reasons for their beliefs.
There are obvious reasons to be skeptical of the conclusion that you’re better than most people. There are also obvious drawbacks to failing to believe that when it’s actually the case.
LOL.
mel, Susan is a troll.
I know I’m smarter than most from IQ tests and life achievements, Susan. No doubt mel is the same.
If you are a dumb failure, it’s because you are a dumb failure, not because your mother was once scared by a mouse.
Let’s talk about that’s not just going on about IQ. Although Greg could spin it into something that affects IQ as a novel evolved gene complex in Western Europeans or something, but this discussion is worth having for the knowledge and the potential in medical science alone.
I posted something similar at Razib’s blog before, he personally could maybe busy, uninterested, or irrelevant admins at the site level aren’t worth hassling with perhaps and it’s just a fine place to discuss it here.
So,
The evidence is quite strong that mouthbreathing, among able-bodied/normal humans and for life, is an inherited genetic trait, and furthermore this reveals severe deficits in a lot of anthropological knowledge and related evolutionary genetics.
Or in other words, the behavioural distinction between mouthbreathing and non-mouthbreathing is an inborn genetic trait much like lefthandedness.
Beyond that: the scientific literature is mostly blank. We don’t know anything about differences in human populations, or what genes play into this. It’s quite possible a specific haplotype could be identified, even an outside chance at a gene variant that exists in many independent ancestral human populations. How many Peruvian Indians are mouthbreathers? I wouldn’t be sure it’s effectively close to zero or one-hundred percent but it is astounding in an anthropological sense that nobody bothered to figure out. What could be said to be the default hypothesis on non-mouthbreathing being the ancestral allele (and traits like human noses aren’t wholely selected for by say sexual selection) is, if not literally entirely wrong, something that should be investigated.
Why the literature has nothing much on this not too much of a surprise, people aren’t creative or thoughtful for one anyway, and certainly not from the layperson side again. People have insane cultural superstitions and except for a few evolutionary biologists and geneticists other highly educated professionals like generic MDs are not better. Again, just like lefthandedness, laypeople aren’t more than a few decades out from the same sort of idea where, “If you loved Jesus and read the Bible enough you wouldn’t write with that devil’s left hand.”
First there’s the typical sort of stuff reporting on medical best practices for treatment of injuries, abnormal conditions etc… and irrelevant publications by specialties like dentists out there. Of course that’s fine, but it’s mostly irrelevant to genetic research and the few obviously terrible superstititious conclusions still exist among the dentist types can be discarded anyway (but then again who expects dentistry to be anywhere close to having proper methodology out of all of medicine).
For some reason however a small number of Brazilian researchers have done reasonable medical/sociological work on the general population here. You can find a couple dozen papers in the past decade on this, the citations are even on English language hubs like pubmed, though nobody made any genetic or evolutionary connections, and I don’t know who here can read Portuguese so I’ll summarize findings. Of course it’s not really ironic that nobody has actually published any data by race. However, their evidence (multiple independent studies often of hundreds of children) has pretty repeatedly shown that nothing else whatsoever is correlated with prevalence of mouthbreathing which is consistent and common (say, 50% from young ages among the Brazilian children, of all demographic backgrounds except race usually unknown). Significantly but not surprisingly, it’s at similar rates between sexes.
Everyone here gets this, you know, if you were to go and randomly sample groups of hundreds of children in a city you might find about exactly the same proportion of male and female children have blue eyes. That’s because having blue eyes is in short an inborn genetic trait, like lefthandedness or mouthbreathing. So the only studies available right now do provide strong scientific evidence about mouthbreating or non-mouthbreathing among the general able-bodied population and as mentioned there isn’t any good reason for people to argue the epigenetics/parasites/etc… of this as an innate biological trait, so it’s almost certainly genetic.
It would be an extremely interesting result among many related questions here, to find out if Out of Africa humans were mouthbreathers or non-mouthbreathers, since with all the scientific evidence available in the world we can pretty much say no one knows for sure right now. It is unfortunate that all existing genetic sequence datasets will not have corresponding behaviourla data and we’d have to start anew. As for the hypothesis that a non-ancestral allele arose more recently non-mouthbreathing versus mouthbreathing is at least at reasonably split phenotypic prevalence among White Europeans and Ashkenazi Jews and almost totally unknown for other human populations.
Can you post a few links containing a few of those Portuguese-language citations ?
Or, mouth breathing could just be the result of long-term, low grade sinus inflammation, easily corrected by a minor change in diet. That is my experience anyway. Mouth breathed until about age 35, adopted a new diet, now a nose-breather for 20 years.
Take this somewhere else.
…. that people were blowing smoke, deliberately lying to make a point … or stupid…
There is a third possibility: unconscious self-deception. About 15 to 20% of working Americans are employed in educational, community service and similar sectors. If you dedicate your life to educate brain-damaged children and pay the mortgage by it, then it is rather to difficult to convince you that “environment” does nothing. One in five Americans have an occupational, vested interest in the “genes are not all the story” meme. There are not stupid nor are they lying. The other four couldnt care less, they repeat the accepted dogma.
One of my friends teaches (mostly) young black men at a prison. He is convinced bad family environment (s) caused their problems and that he can help them. I’m trying to gently introduce him to the idea there might be a lot of genetics involved, but I’d be surprised if he ever admitted he was probably wasting his time. He strongly believes lack of a father caused their problems, and was quite surprised when I pointed to studies that it makes little to no difference when you account for genetics. Men whose married father died at an early age do not exhibit pathologies at any greater rate than kids from intact two parent homes.
Old man’s advice: Avoid the subject and keep your friend.
Jennifer Raff should know better than to quote Agustin Fuentes.
“In fact if you use the common level of genetic differentiation between populations used by zoologists to classify biological races (which they called subspecies) in other mammals, all humans consistently show up as just one biological race.”
I’ve pointed out on his Psychology Today post and on Raff’s post that this is incorrect. a) there isn’t a common level of genetic differentiation used, and if you are talking about Fst there are many sub-species that have less genetic differentiation than humans.
Yea, though the Raff review got net acclaim, it sucks mostly due to parroting bad sources.
About the Structure thingy. The clusters recovered are obviously not the same as either ‘old school’ races or phenotypic clusters inferred today from statistics. But the same is true also of languages and ethnic groups.
No one objects when a genetic cluster is labeled according to a linguistic or ethnic group by a correlation of distribution.
Likewise Wade only similarly recognised the geographical correlation between the K=5 and the established concepts.
It’s funny, because many years ago, when I was just the average indoctrinated layman, slightly leaning to the conventional Left (hey, I was born into the hispan (iberian) equivalent of one of those old-style blue-collar patriotic-“democrat” families) even then, when I was pretty much a staunch egalitarian, I already -intuitively- understood races as clusters and clines. By the way, I never found anyone thinking of them as discrete “walled” distinctions.
Some of the ethnophobes and racial denialists are stupid. Some others are disingenuous. And some are stupid and disingenuous at the same time. They come in all kind of flavours nowadays.
While geographical barriers like the Sahara are often cited as contributors to race formation (allopatry), mere distance and time suffice. Evolution is a kind of reaction (mutation)- diffusion (migration) system. There are many examples of patterns (races) arising automatically in such systems even when the initial state is homogeneous. So, the lack of races is what needs explaining, not their existence.
Viz,:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patterns_in_nature
for example and an intro to the literature.
(crossposting from iSteve in case someone here is interested):
Matt McGue at Minnesota is running a Coursera course on behavioral genetics (this is the third of eight weeks) and he is quite explicit that the influence of genetics on behavior is nearly as strong as influence on physical traits such as height. He hasn’t discussed racial differences (except in rates of dizygotic twinning) and I don’t know whether he will, but there will be a unit on IQ.
There is more to spontaneous pattern formation than the wiki link above. The whole universe is an example of differentiation starting from a homogeneous, indifferentiated state. Our host may explain it better. But Bob you are on something.
“The whole universe is an example of differentiation starting from a homogeneous, undifferentiated state”: I dare say, but how do you know?
I know because physicists have told me that the universe started as a big bang that inflated dis-uniformly in ripples, creating waves and atoms and the different molecules that (for a short time) are you. I know because it is written in ברשית : “In the beginning the earth was formless and void, and darkness was over the surface of the deep”. OK?
“I know because physicists have told me”: ha, ha, ha. How do they know?
“it is written”: what do fairytales from the Babylonian exile have to do with facts?
The demand for an allele is especially stupid because the majority of traits in the majority of organisms don’t depend on an allele – they depend on a vast number of genetic variations operating cumulatively.
Asking for an allele for IQ is like asking for the allele that distinguishes jellyfish from chimpanzees.
Good stuff. Reblogged and commented on here:
http://ex-army.blogspot.com/2014/05/reality-is-racist.html
I found a document online that may interest you, sort of a Carnival of Gormless Idiocy. I came across it while searching “behavioral genetics phrenology,” because after first coming across (a couple of months ago) b.g. being called phrenology I have seen it several more times. So, here is the RationalWiki (as in, I suppose, anyone who does not agree is irrational) entry on Biological Determinism. It is a compendium of the sorts of things that your and related blogs seem to be struggling against, or in your case simply slapping down. You may find it useful as a specimen collection, or just entertaining. In the past I have considered writing a parody document along this line, but I have been summarily preempted. I am sending a similar comment to several other blogs, this is too good not to share.
http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Biological_determinism
awhile ago I encountered someone who was a denier of behavioral genetics. Off the cuff I asked him if he thought that having two legs was genetic, and of course he agreed it was. I then asked him the allele that led to humans having two legs and got this blank stare. Been using that argument ever since.
For more fun like like to add that people learn to grow two legs and that we might be able to teach people to grow three or more.
something with at least a Chinaman’s chance of success
Chinaman is offenstive. Its as bad as Englishman or Irishman or Dutchman.
A chinaman has a very large chance of success since it is an off-break bowled by a left-arm finger-spinner.
For 10 bonus points, name the last international test cricketer who could bowl them.
For an extra 5 bonus points, I could ask you to name a Chinaman who can bowl chinamen, but that’s getting a bit hard. Oh yes, there are some Chinese who play cricket. Not many, but some. I know one very tall lanky half-Chinese girl who plays women’s cricket – good opening bat and a demon fast bowler.
“name the last international test cricketer who could bowl them”: dunno. There can’t be many who can because I see the term being applied instead (or additionally) to the conventional wrist-spin of the left-arm slows i.e. their off-breaks. I also see their leg-breaks being described as googlies, which seems fair enough.
I don’t know either, I was hoping you did.
Well, except that there’s a difference between a finger spinner and a wrist spinner, agreed? I don’t mind much what they call them, it’s just nice to know they’re doing whatever it is that they’re doing to work the magic that they do.
There seems to be a lot of resistance to letting the blank-slate nonsense and equalitarianism die as they attacking Wade everywhere and the number of references to Hitler is growing.
”Some” people suffering by ”abstraction prison syndrome”.
I heard about an island off the coast of South Australia near Adelaide called Kangaroo island.
It was said that when some French explorer visited the island around 200 years ago the kangaroos were unwary and were easy prey for the sailors with clubs. These days it is said that the Kangaroos are very wary of humans.
So, did the kangaroos learn to be wary or did we select for wary kangaroos by removing from the gene pool those genes that predisposed the kangaroos to be unafraid of strange animals?
No, that would be Englandman, Irelandman and Hollandman.
In fact “Chinaman” is a direct translation from the Chinese “China person” or literally “middle country person” and is only possibly offensive because it is aping the speech of Chinese people who do not speak English very fluently. In Chinese, “American” is expressed as “America person” (or literally “beautiful country person”), so…is that taken as offensive? Is it pejorative to call an Englishman “brave country person”?
I have Chinese friends who use “Chinaman” in English as a kind of self-deprecating joke, or even as a form of “Chinese Pride”, just like my own family including my own wife call me “foreign devil” – not in offence, but as an affectionate joke, or even as a form of respect – like “Send Sandgroper to deal with it, he’s not scared of Chinese ghosts because he’s a foreign devil and they dare not harm him” -historically it was used as a pejorative term, but not among modern Chinese, it is just vernacular for a non-Chinese person, and the pejorative sense has been lost. At school, my half-Chinese daughter’s Chinese friends called her “little devil sister” – this was not derogatory, it was friendly and affectionate. The Chinese sense of humour is big on this kind of stuff. When my daughter called her Indian school friend “Ah Cha” the teacher went to scold her for using a racial epithet, but couldn’t talk for laughing at the humour of a “little devil sister” using a Cantonese epithet for an Indian. (“Cha” means “tea”, so it is referring to someone who is the colour of tea. “Ah” is just an affectionate or familiar pre-fix.) One way to defeat racism and render it ridiculous and harmless is to laugh at it and use it as a joke.
“Little sister” is actually a polite friendly form of address for a female younger than yourself in Chinese, even for strangers, it’s just the Chinese way of saying “Miss”, just as “uncle” is a polite form of address for older males, or “grandfather” for very old males. I have been addressed politely as “uncle” by more Chinese kids than I can count, often kids I don’t know, when just by inspection I can’t possibly be related to them.
So, if someone’s name is Miss Chan or Miss Wong, the correct form of address would be “Chan little sister” or “Wong little sister”. Or for males, equivalently for males “Chan uncle” or “Wong uncle”. There is a formal expression for “Mr” but it is more formal and distant, less friendly. Family members are deserving of respect, so calling someone “uncle” is being friendly and respectful.
Similarly the expression “long time no see”, which is a direct word-for-word translation from Chinese, but no one seems to consider that offensive.
Whereas “ketchup” is a direct translation from the Chinese for “tomato sauce”, so people who say “tomato ketchup” are saying “tomato tomato sauce”, which is not offensive, just stupid.
Similarly, people who say “rice paddy” for a paddy field are actually saying “rice rice” instead of “rice field”, which is equally stupid.
You might often hear Americans say “rice paddy” when they are showing off how knowledgeable about the lingo they are, so you can use it as an opportunity to ridicule them and expose them for the brainless know-nothings that they really are.
So, maybe “Chinaman” will be taken as offensive by Chinese Americans, but no Chinese in China will be offended by it, unless he has been schooled in American political correctness – they have to be taught that “Chinaman” is pejorative.
If you want to be that politically correct in Chinese, you are going to have problems.
Suffice to say that most Chinese people do not suffer the delusions about race that the charlatan Fuentes peddles – they have to be carefully taught by propagandists-I-mean-experts like him that what they see very obviously and clearly with their own eyes is actually a visual delusion.
Like when I informed my wife that she is part Neandertal, 20% more than I am – she wrinkled her brow and said “You mean I am part cave man?” “Um – sort of.” Looked at my daughter, who’s advice she trusts because she is now a big clever grown-up Biologist who is qualified to know these things – “Am I?” Daughter: “Yes.” Wife: “OK.” *shrug* – no big deal. If foreign devil daughter says so, it must be so.
is only possibly offensive because it is aping the speech of Chinese people who do not speak English very fluently.
Not unlike Pennsylvania Dutch (deutsch).
It’s learned behaviour. Here is how I know.
When I was working on a wheat and sheep farm, sitting on a tractor driving in decreasing circles for endless days and weeks from first light until dark ploughing wheat fields prior to seeding the new crop, a flock of ravens would always follow the plough, to pick up the earthworms turned up by the plough.
I hated the ravens, because they would swoop down and peck out the eyes of new born lambs. So one day, I took my rifle with me on the tractor, and when I stopped for morning tea, I picked up the rifle, turned, aimed carefully at one of the flock of ravens feeding on the ground behind the plough, and shot it. Killed it. The rest of the flock took off.
After that, I took the rifle with me on the tractor every day, but whenever the feeding flock of ravens following the plough saw me pick up the rifle, they would instantly take off. I never got a chance to shoot a second raven, because they always took off before I had time to aim at them. They never took off when I stopped the tractor, only when they saw me pick up the rifle.
Learned behaviour, not selection.
Selection. One less raven with the Teela Brown gene.
“It’s learned behaviour. Here is how I know.”
Your rationale is horrible. An observed effect, a symptom if you will, need not have a single cause that applies universally in every instance. Your anecdote is the equivalent of saying “I sneezed once, I know it was a rhinovirus that did it, so every sneeze must be from a rhinovirus.”
Ravens are one of the more intelligent animals on this planet – naturally they quickly adapt to stimuli and quickly identify both potential threats and causal relationships.
Intelligence is one tool in nature’s box, but not the only one. The same end effect – fear of humans with guns – can be achieved regardless of intelligence simply with a few generations of selective pressure favoring skittishness. In nature the most intelligent types of animals will tend to react quickly and adapt via learned behavior, the least intelligent will have to be culled until the only ones left breeding run around in a state of terror as a rule, and many types of creatures will be influenced by both heredity and individual experience (sometimes pushing and pulling in different directions).
Your sneezing may due to allergies, a cold, or a photo-sensitive sneeze reflex (among other things), your flu-like symptoms may be due to the flu or fifty million other things, and dangit fear of humans with guns can be hereditary, learned, or both. It’s mind-numbingly wrong to assume that fear of humans MUST be learned and not hereditary.
I’d have used a shotgun.
Fintan: Kangaroos that have not been hunted have no fear of humans. The same species of kangaroo, same part of the country, possibly even the same mob (but I can’t positively attest to that) after they has been subjected to hunting – well, you either need to shine a spotlight in their eyes at night (a very unsporting exercise I refuse to engage in – where’s the skill in that?), or you’d better be a damned good stalker and an excellent shot, and have a good dog to help you find them in the gloom of dusk, because you won’t get anywhere near them.
Kangaroos are not known for their intelligence and excellent eyesight, unlike ravens.
I didn’t have a shotgun – I had a 1920s Fabrique Nationale single shot 0.22 with long rifle ammunition. That’s what I had. Superbly accurate, but not huge on knock-down power.
On the other hand, I also had an 1890-something Winchester 0.44 lever action carbine – short barrel, black powder cartridges, big heavy copper-jacketed lead bullets, low muzzle velocity. It could stop a charging bull if you could hit the damn thing, but I couldn’t hit the side of a barn with it.
“After that, I took the rifle with me on the tractor every day, but whenever the feeding flock of ravens following the plough saw me pick up the rifle, they would instantly take off”
I have noticed the same behavior in my budgies , who are caged at the foot of my bed. I once through my pillow at their cage to get one of them to stop making this infuriating sound. since then, i have been able to get him to shut up by just raising my pillow.
Whenever we let our budgie out of its cage for a fly-around, it would always land on my father’s head and shit on his head.
It never came anywhere near me – it knew a natural born killer when it saw one, whereas my father could never hurt a fly.
Some types of crow (not to be confused with its much larger cousin, the Raven) make and use tools. They have been known to mourn their dead by gathering silently in trees above their fallen comrades, and then teach their young and other crows to avoid areas where their brethren had been shot or trapped.
http://www.oregonlive.com/portland/index.ssf/2013/03/the_urban_crow_highly_visible.html
Czech deer still wary of iron curtain boundary
Areas where Czechoslovakia had three electrified fences now avoided by generation of deer who never encountered them
http://www.theguardian.com/science/2014/apr/23/czech-deer-iron-curtain-fences
For a goose to migrate, it must be taught the flight path by its parents. Therefore, all following generations of nonmigratory Canada geese will also be nonmigratory, or resident geese, which will stay year-round in the vicinity where they were born.
http://wdfw.wa.gov/living/canada_geese.html
Either epigenetics or CSN’s Teach Your Children
Whoops. Make that one less raven without the Teela Brown gene.
Niven was inbreeding psionics to pure Author Control to cull them from science fiction.
I had to look up Teela Brown, and I might never forgive you for wasting that 30 seconds of my life.
Human neurological uniformity is very important culturally and politically. It was a response to social Darwinism, promoted by no less than William Jennings Bryant, a towering figure of liberalism now ridiculed by liberals. The thing is, HNU works, HNU is true, *if you are talking about Europeans*. Poor Catholic peasants were not dangerous savages, there’s a good chance you can send one to college and make an engineer or accountant of him. US society is built, very successfully, on this idea. When you try to extend it to Africans or Native Americans it doesn’t work though.
Wrong – poor Catholic peasants *are* dangerous savages. US society is built on stupid superstition, violence, cheating, thieving and bullying – probably what you would call ‘social progress’.
US society is built on stupid superstition, violence, cheating, thieving and bullying
That’s an interesting statement for a number of reasons.
1. Superstition: Lots of countries/groups contain superstitious subgroups. The Chinese, for example, at least in my experience, are superstitious. What sort of superstition are you referring to in the US?
2. Violence: There are violent subgroups in the US. African Americans and non-European Hispanics tend to be much more violent than people of European descent in the US.
3. Cheating and thieving. Have you looked at DoJ statistics?
So, what about the US outweighs other countries and how could a country grow to have the largest economy in the world if it was more dysfunctional than any other contender?
1. Americans are far more religious that the essentially secular Chinese and Japanese (not to mention a whole string of smaller countries) – it is one of the most religious countries on earth. “The Chinese, for example, at least in my experience, are superstitious.” – you can’t be serious – based on your usual sample of 2 or 3? I’m talking about 1.4 billion.
2. How many countries can you name in the past 20 years who have perpetrated internationally illegal invasions of other countries, and who continue to fire armed drones into allegedly friendly countries which kill more innocent civilians than ‘enemies of America’?
3. Cheating and thieving -> global financial hegemony. You haven’t forgotten 2008 already, have you? Well, nothing has been done to fix it. Try working for an American company – absolutely rapacious, vampire vultures, totally lacking in ethics while constantly trumpeting to the world about how ethical they are.
The US will be overtaken as the world’s largest economy later this year. In what way does the US outweigh other countries, other than in military aggression, bullying, illegal business practices and espionage? The US response to this event is to move military forces closer to the western Pacific – bullying, threat of violence or what?
“US society is built on stupid superstition, violence, cheating, thieving and bullying – probably what you would call ‘social progress’.”
When looking at the Corruption Perceptions Index the US stands at rank 19/177 and in the Press Freedom Index the US has the rank of 46/180, while not perfect Id say that its still pretty good, and way better than the scores the other contenders got.
You seem to be confused.
For example, it is not the ignorant superstitious Christian (and other sects) masses that are launching drones against other countries or even launching invasions on those countries.
It’s not?
Goodspeed, you’ll notice it’s called a Corruption *Perception* Index, and it’s called a Press Freedom Index, not a Press Truth Index. It just means that Americans are free to peddle whatever pack of lies they wish.
“Goodspeed, you’ll notice it’s called a Corruption *Perception* Index, and it’s called a Press Freedom Index, not a Press Truth Index. It just means that Americans are free to peddle whatever pack of lies they wish.”
Anatoly Karlin looked at other studies and the US still looked good:
http://akarlin.com/2011/05/corruption-realities-index-2010/
I see your point on the Press Index issue, and truth surely hasnt been important in the medias eyes recently, but there is something to be said for a nation that allows people to publish books which go completely against the state/academia/common peoples views.
Crony capitalism is a form of corruption. You are surely not going to suggest that America scores well on that.
Books, yes, but they lack immediacy. Independent bloggers are about the best thing that could have happened.
I’m not even that smart, but Greg’s point is obvious to me.
We know beyond doubt that the distributions of alleles differ from population to population. This is simply a fact that is true regardless of race’s existence or non-existence.
If this is true, and it is, then the very thing that alleles code for– (PHENOTYOES)– cannot be equal form population to population.
” I cannot imagine that the attractiveness of males of westafrica ancestry and the nonattractivenes of east asian ancestry has not any genetic basis. ”
The complexion of females, in any race, is, on average, 4% fairer than the males. From this is follows that, in any race, men have a preference for fairer women.
If men have a preference for fairer women, then the fairest of women, east Asian women, are the most attractive women.
Of course African men find their African women attractive, but if east-Asian women immigrated to Africa ,then i am sure that they would get more than their representative share of African Men.
“If men have a preference for fairer women, then the fairest of women, east Asian women, are the most attractive women.”
OF course, this is contingent on all else being equal, which it is not. Some men prefer big butts and big breasts, so this could trump the fairness of Asian women, who tend to have smaller breasts and smaller butts.
I have the sheer misfortune to be most attracted to dark skinned women (the darker the better) with small breasts and small butts.
There are excellent reasons why NS would favor lighter skin in females, no real reason to bring in sexual preference.
It would also have to disfavor it in males somewhat strongly to get the results we observe. So, what are your reasons that explain both, and why are they better than observed sexual preference
“OF course, this is contingent on all else being equal, which it is not. Some men prefer big butts and big breasts, so this could trump the fairness of Asian women, who tend to have smaller breasts and smaller butts.”
I thought about this a little more.
Theory:
If it’s universal that men prefer fairer women, then perhaps the men of dark races will compensate for their women’s darker skin by valuing larger breasts and butts. This explains why Africans are obsessed with twerking and big butts.
This table in wikipeida is interesting.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_history_of_the_buttocks
Asian men don’t care much for big butts and breasts. Who needs big butts and big breast when you have the fairest women of them all?
Why does this guy keep calling Asian women “the fairest of them all”?
High fertility does not mean high reproductive success. r vs k.
Just ask rabbits in Australia.
This will probably lead also to mass immigration to the rest of the world from subsharaafrica.
What makes you think that the excess will be able to migrate and that places like India or China etc will let them in?
Indeed, it would appear to be cultural suicide to allow such immigration, not to mention likely food shortages. Only the west has been dumb enough to take such immigrants, at least up til now.
Sandgroper
Measuring a nation’s religiosity is tricky, because of what Timur Kuran calls “preference falsification”: people’s tendency to tailor their declared choices to what’s perceived as acceptable in their society.
When Russia had an officially atheist government, more Russians claimed to be atheists; but now the Orthodox Church is back and being promoted, declared religiosity is also up.
Judging by statistics, Saudi Arabia is the most religious society on earth: officially 100% of Saudi citizens are Sunni or Shia Muslim (though many foreign guest workers are Hindu, Christian etc). Pakistan comes close behind, with 95-98% claiming to be Muslim. I expect both societies really are deeply religious – way more so than the USA is. But you have to allow for the fact that there can be terrible consequences for Saudis and Pakistanis who publicly declare their lack of belief. If those sanctions were removed, the statistical measure of religiosity would fall somewhat.
Around 20% of US citizens declare themselves to be religiously unaffiliated. That’s lower than Sweden (82%), China (60%), a bit higher than Ireland (15%), and a lot higher than India (0.6%). But, pace Kuran, there may be social pressure in the US, Ireland and India to feign religiosity, and in Sweden and China to conceal it. Remember that the government of China is officially atheist, and it has persecuted groups like Falun Gong which, at its height, had way more members than the Chinese Communist Party. One estimate suggests the group had 100 million followers at its height.
You conflate “religion” with “superstition”. I don’t think that’s entirely fair. As an atheist I disagree with John Polkinghorne’s Christian beliefs, but he’s not superstitious in the sense that someone who believes in Chinese medicine or homeopathy is.
Falun Gong is a political and deeply racist cult. If you do not know what they are like first hand, don’t comment. They are not just some bunch of harmless peace-loving loonies, they are deeply dangerous and offensive people.
Homeopathy is crap. No question.
Not all of Chinese medicine is crap, but the problem is that it is unregulated, and the herbal drug treatments used have not been subjected to clinical trials, or not yet – of those that have, some have been found to have real beneficial effects, some are totally useless, and some are positively dangerous. Don’t throw all of it in the waste basket, some of it is genuinely worth something, particularly for serious conditions for which Western medicine has no effective treatments at all (check diverticular disease as an example – Chinese medicine has effective treatments, Western medicine has nothing except removal of parts of the bowel when it gets too bad). Things will improve on that score, there are now combined/integrated schools of Western and Chinese medicine where it is being properly investigated and integrated where it is found to be useful. People who just brand all of Chinese medicine as voodoo either do not know what they are talking about, or have a vested interest.
Acupuncture is crap. You can just throw that away. I see that now huge amounts of money are spent in America on acupuncture for pet dogs – well, if you have to pointlessly stick needles in something, I guess it may as well be the dog.
There is pressure in America to feign religious affiliation, which you admit, which makes America a religious country, far more so than many. Much is perpetrated under the guise of religious hypocrisy.
I don’t decry any person for genuine personal religious belief, I am not one of those atheists who goes around trying to ram it down people’s throats and I detest people like Dawkins who do, pompous narcissistic little shit that he is – religious belief is a private, personal thing, and everyone is entitled to believe whatever he/she believes, as long as they keep it out of my face. But of the self-declared Christians I have known, only *one* actually behaved like a Christian and tried to live his life accordingly, and he was a genuinely good man – he also happened to be one of my uncles, and the only one of them who was worth anything. Most of them are just straight out arseholes, hypocrites, self-serving liars, thieves and bullies, and that goes for America. Not all Americans, there are some good ones, but collectively.
I do decry the major organised religions – without exception, they are all a bunch of thugs, and the people who subscribe to them are subscribing to organised thuggery, and worse.
I don’t know what happened to America – in WWII Americans were regarded as the world’s heroes, and deservedly so. They saved a lot of people’s bacon in a hugely self-sacrificing way and I for one am not ungrateful – I once stood in the middle of the American war cemetery in Manila and just boggled at the sheer scale of self-sacrifice in the name of freedom. But since then, something seriously pathological has set in in America, much of which seems to be not much more than self-serving arrogance and greed.
“self-serving arrogance and greed” is not the central recommendation of Jesus.
(That sounds like one of the lines from “A Fish Called Wanda”.)
“Bring in Japanese as farm workers, and they’re in the upper middle class in four or five generations. Bring the Chinese into Malaysia as illiterate tin miners, and they end up owning and running all the industry in the country (and the Communist party too, back in the day).”
But did you ever stop to consider that maybe they possess “asian” privilege, and sort of emit a kind of “force field” of repression causing all other groups around them to be less economically competent?
I agree. Conversely, some groups emit a force field of repression upon themselves, causing the individuals to be less economically competent. clearly, force field data need to be gathered & compared with invisible privilege rays & anti-privilege rays.
If they do it’s a lot bigger advantage than merely having higher IQ’s.
As the ascension of the tiny minority of Japanese in Brazil (<1%) to top performers illustrates, significantly higher IQ than the natives is all you need.
as I like to play the devil´s advocate:
we should not forget that not every outcome in social and educational life is determined by IQ and genes. Consider for example the International Math Olympiad. In the last decade the participants from the USA where approximately 70% of chinese ancestry.
But when we assume that suceeding in IMO requires having an IQ of 150 or better, and that Chinese Americans have an average IQ of 105, and Euro Americans an average IQ of 100 one would expect that at least 1.5 times more Euro American students participate in IMO than Chinese Amercians given the population numbers. So Chinese Americans do much better in IMO than one should expect if ONLY inherited IQ would matter. For sure it does matter, but there have to exist some other non-genetic mechanisms.
You have to consider that the Chinese have a tendency to higher spatial ability (which has links to math skill) and that their migrant streams are unusually heavy in terms of educational attainment at the bottom and top compared to the normal Chinese population.
http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/news/regions/asia-pacific/china/121220/chinese-immigrants-america-united-states-schools-education
“According to the 2012 Annual Report of Chinese International Migration published this Monday, China is undergoing a mass migration of its citizens overseas, with the United States being far and away the top destination. (Canada and Australia were second and third.) In 2011 alone, nearly 90,000 Chinese were granted US permanent residency.
“Affluent and educated elites are the main force in emigration,” the report said,
This exodus has particularly drawn on China’s richest and best educated. One in four Chinese who are worth more than $16 million have emigrated, and another 47 percent are considering emigrating, according to recent findings by the Hurun Report.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/alexnowrasteh/2012/07/09/the-rise-of-asian-immigration/
Almost half of all Asian American adults have a college degree, compared to just 28 percent of all Americans. Reflecting their skill and education, 27 percent of Asian immigrants from major source countries get employment based green cards (for highly skilled immigrants) compared to just 8 percent of all other immigrants.
74 percent of all U.S. Asian adults are immigrants because they are a relatively new immigrant group.
Click to access Xie-Goyette.pdf
A substantial portion of the widening gap between Asians and whites in college completion was driven by foreign-born Asian Americans, particularly those who immigrated after 1965.
The impact of changes in immigration laws, which established preferences for skilled workers, is seen in the dramatic differences in college completion among foreign-born Asian Americans from 1960 to 1970. In 1960, 19% of both foreign and native-born Asian Americans had attained a college degree. In 1970, this percentage jumped to 46% for the foreign-born. Although some foreign-born Asian Americans were educated in the U.S., the immigration of highly educated Asians is largely responsible for this jump.
By comparison, the percentage of college completion among native-born Asian Americans in 1970 was 26%, while whites’ college completion was at 16%.
You can bring Chinese in as tin miners and pretty soon they’ll out compete the native population. Especially if the native population is Malay or Thai or Brazilians – it’s harder if they’re French or German, but they’ll do it, just by a smaller margin.
Having a disproportionate amount of lots of doctor’s sons and daughters, as the post 1965 Asian migration wave does, makes the effect a lot faster and stronger.
But the IQ difference between whites and East Asians in the spatial-visual component is considerably greater than 5 points. I don’t know if you’ve taken that into account in your estimate.
Then their is the question of whether Chinese-Americans are representative of the general Chinese population or whether because of immigrant self-selection they average higher IQ than the general Chinese population.
Erik – It may be that greater East Asian academic achievement in part reflects greater diligence in studying. But even if that is the case it is not necessarily all non-genetic. Personality traits like conscientiousness, persistence and diligence have themselves genetic components.
Those pesky japs. It’s because of their Asian privilege oppression force field I tell ya!!
Bring in Japanese as farm workers, and they’re in the upper middle class in four or five generations. Bring the Chinese into Malaysia as illiterate tin miners, and they end up owning and running all the industry in the country
But no matter where blacks are, they prove one thing: they’re lazy.
http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702304788404579519631654112594
And no matter where blacks are, they prove one thing: they’re stupid:
http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/09/27/senegal-water-idUSL5N0HN1L320130927
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I wonder if the biggest phenotypical differences can be not found between Subsharaafricans and the rest but between East Asians and the rest. For example consider the very impressive videos of Dan Freedman of newborn babies which were linked on this blog some months ago. The outliers were the East Asian babies (and with them the native American babies), not the Subsharaafrican Babies or the Australien Aboriginal babies. And while Caucasoids (which includes South Asians, West Asians, Europeans etc.) and Subsharaafrican Africans have a more likewise body frame East Asians are built much more gracile.
A somehow related topic is the question if Subsharaafrican can compensate their possible lesser average genetical determinde IQ by physical advantages like higher bone density and higher muscle tonus. Again, regarding those features bone density and musle tonus, the difference between Caucasians and East Asians seems to be bigger than the difference between Subsharaafricans and Caucasians.
Is everyone here too young to have seen the classic John Huston movie, THE AFRICAN QUEEN? After the Germans destroy the mission to which he had devoted his life, the Robert Morley character goes crazy and ventures into the midday sun to plant seeds before it’s too late.
Hepburn replies, “But dear, this is Central Africa. It doesn’t matter when one plants.”
I always thought that was a very profound observation.
Good one!
The Southern Poverty Law Center takes their shot at you guys:
Troublesome Sources: Nicholas Wade’s Embrace of Scientific Racism | Hatewatch
What do people make of this criticism?
There are deep divisions between populations in sub-Saharan Africa: the Bantu are genetically closer to generic groups outside sub-Sarahan Africa than they are to Bushmen. Of course they’re still more distant from those extra-African groups than any are from each other…
And there have been significant back-migrations into Africa: the people in the Ethiopian Plateau are about half derived from an old-fashioned Middle Eastern population.
So things are typologically messy. Now, what does this imply for genetically-caused differences in academic potential between the well-known racial groups in the US and other countries, which is the practical point of this all these maunderings? Nothing. They’re still theoretically possible, which is a good thing, given that they exist.
Look, no matter what I find out about the deep ancestry and phylogeny of dachshunds, they’re still going to be shorter than wolfhounds. You can’t make the facts go away by arguing, and you’re nuts to try.
“Look, no matter what I find out about the deep ancestry and phylogeny of dachshunds, they’re still going to be shorter than wolfhounds. You can’t make the facts go away by arguing, and you’re nuts to try.”
Well…
Glad to get your opinion on Raff’s review (it was one of the more popular ones, and it has been praised by so many “heavy hitters” out there). Her stuff keeps getting cited in the “2nd generation” reviews. Amazing considering it’s obfuscatory nonsense…
Someone answered to the above:
*** corpse lacking any skin to distinguish race or ethinicity, and lacking DNA testing, it would be virtually impossible to determine what the racial or national heritage of the corpse was. Is this just wishful thinking on my part or is there a basis in fact***
In fact forensic anthropologists can often identify the race of a person from their skeletal features.
I couldnt have said it better. For me, that ends the discussion about race.
A skinned body, sans DNA, contains more information than a mere skeleton. If forensic guys routinely had skinned bodies to work with, they could obviously do a better job of identification than they could with the skeleton alone.
For forensic guys a skeleton is enough to establish race (although a skinned body is more talkative). Yes, I know that race is a social construct.
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How many black Nobel Prize winners?
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