Mikemikev
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I addressed your arguments. And you are repeating the same arguments. The debate is over.
Have you run out of arguments already? We're only on the 8th page.
You racists usually keep these debates going until at least page 20.
Literacy is not a priority for you, is it?
Your nonsense aside, here's the basic point for OTHER posters who actually are interested in the topic.
Genes are not -- as often falsely and popularly misrepresented -- analogous to a blueprint for the human body. They're more like a recipe. The same DNA can be expressed in strikingly different ways based upon environmental influences as well as the actions of the individual (a twin who hits the gym every day will have a dramatically different form than his counterpart who does not).
Genes can and do code for differing levels of presence of biochemicals, receptors, inhibitors, etc....and then -- after what is often a staggeringly complex interplay of many causal forces -- we end up with discernible phenotypes. Imagined traits like "criminality" are not and indeed cannot be genetically coded for because someone's criminality is -- literally -- determined by human-created laws, not biology. So too with things like thrill-seeking. One may find a deeply contingent and qualified linkage between certain genes and an "adrenaline junkie" reaction to high-risk or very physically exciting activities (skydiving, contact martial arts, etc.), but there is absolutely NO SUCH THING as a "skydiving" gene. The addiction to adrenaline rushes some daredevil types seem to exhibit would, in different contexts, find very different articulation.
So can one find and make a case for genetic linkages to biochemical processes indirectly tied to specific activities? Sure.
Can one reasonably identify those specific activities as genetic? Absolutely not. Genes don't have any kind of conceptual or reflective capacity. So we may have genes for biochemical effects associated with the rush of risky behaviors (or conversely, with risk aversion), but we do NOT have genes specifically for such ridiculous notions as biological criminality, or (for that matter) for speaking German, or for preferring (specifically) strawberry ice cream over chocolate. We MAY, however, have genes for things like predisposition towards or away from the cognitive connections more vs. less conducive to learning and speaking languages of a structure similar to German (based upon the generalized patterns, not the specific language), or genes for predisposing us to positive responses to chemicals which happen to be in strawberries (or other foods), but not strawberries specifically.
The notion of genetic criminality is thus as absurd as arguing that someone has "a genetic proclivity towards reciting the Pledge of Allegiance while facing north on odd-numbered Tuesdays."
No you are wrong. Heritability is determined on a case by case basis. Of course we do not have a strong genetic predisposition to speaking German. Does this mean we cannot have a genetic predisposition to violence? Of course not. Your knowledge of the field of behaviour genetics is very poor.
Heritability is determined on a case by case basis.
Of course we do not have a strong genetic predisposition to speaking German.
Does this mean we cannot have a genetic predisposition to violence?
Of course not.
Your knowledge of the field of behaviour genetics is very poor.
I addressed your arguments. And you are repeating the same arguments. The debate is over.
No you are wrong. Heritability is determined on a case by case basis. Of course we do not have a strong genetic predisposition to speaking German. Does this mean we cannot have a genetic predisposition to violence? Of course not. Your knowledge of the field of behaviour genetics is very poor.
It's a stretch however to say that someone is more naturally aggressive therefore they are more likely to buy a gun and kill someone with it because they are acting on some primal instinct. Complex decisions like that are not mediated by genes.
Of course they are you ignoramus.
Summary
of
Literature
Extraversion .53 .49 .57 .56 .54 .49 .54
Agreeableness .41 .33 .51 .42 .42 .35 .52
Conscientiousness .44 .48 .52 .53 .49 .38 .40
Neuroticism .41 .42 .58 .52 .48 .41 .58
Openness .61 .58 .56 .53 .57 .45 .52
Twin studies of religious affiliation (e.g., Christian, Jewish, Muslim) have shown that variance in this trait is nearly completely environmental in origin, thus demonstrating that model-fitting is not intrinsically biased and can indeed show no genetic effects when that is the case (Eaves et al., 1990). Alternatively, frequency of church attendance, an aspect of religiousness, appears to be genetically influenced. Using the Virginia 30,000 sample (Americans representing 80 distinct kinship pairings), Maes et al. (1999) reported that 25 to 42% of the variance (depending on sex) in religious attendance was heritable, while 14 to 34% of the variance was associated with shared environmental effects.
It is often asserted that Black Americans have made no IQ gains on White Americans. Until recently, there have been no adequate data to measure trends in Black IQ. We analyzed data from nine standardization samples for four major tests of cognitive ability. These data suggest that Blacks gained 4 to 7 IQ points on non-Hispanic Whites between 1972 and 2002. Gains have been fairly uniform across the entire range of Black cognitive ability.
Source: Dickens, W.T. & Flynn, J.R. (2006) Black Americans reduce the racial IQ gap: evidence from standardization samples. Psychological Science 17:913-920
I did not say that genes have no impact on complex social behavior.
What I'm saying is that humans have the ability to make complex decisions and as such their complex behavior is not dependent on their heritable personality traits.
Personality can impact probability of behaving a certain way in certain situations but as humans are a species that develops creative behavioral patterns by learning how to behave rather than acting on instincts their environmental upbringing has a profound impact on the development of their personality to the extent that you can't assume differences in complex social behavior between groups living in very different environments are the product of major genetic differences in the inheritance of personality traits.
The closer the environment is the more observable differences in complex behavior may be impacted by personality but the more different the environment is the less dependable assumptions of genetic differences in personality traits between groups becomes. As I have said before this is a basic principle of quantitative genetics which you don't seem to understand. The hypothesis of genetic causality no matter whether we are talking partial or absolute for differences in phenotype is not testable if the genotypes of different organisms are placed in significantly different environments.
You must equalize environment to conduct any experiment that can credibly test your hypothesis of differences in phenotype being caused by differences in genotype.
That's why crime statistics for populations whose cultural environment is not equal is not a useful method of measuring genetic differences in heritable personality traits between the two populations. If you took two identical twins and placed them in radically different environments you will probably end up with two people with significantly different lifestyles even though they have the same genetic potential which equally impacts their intellectual potential and personality traits.
If the Nil Hypothesis is correct we should see gradual reduction in the IQ gap and Socio-Economic variables that impact major lifestyle trends between Black and White Americans as the difference in cultural environment, including education and family quality, is reduced. That is exactly what we are seeing.
You did say exactly that.
EgalitarianJay said:Even though it is evident that behavior is linked to personality traits which are mediated by genes complex behaviors themselves are not mediated by genes. Crime statistics are not valid evidence of genetic differences in personality traits because crime itself is socially defined and decisions to commit crimes are greatly impacted by environmental variables.
Well that's why you investigate fraternal twins at the same time. If it's all environment the fraternal and genetic twins should match. If it's genetic the genetic twins will correlate despite disparate environments. This is behaviour genetics 101. Twin studies are designed to control for disparate environments.
No. This is what I said:
Even though it is evident that behavior is linked to personality traits which are mediated by genes complex behaviors themselves are not mediated by genes.
their complex behavior is not dependent on their heritable personality traits.
Twin studies are reliable for making heritability estimates for a given trait because you can presume a commonality in genetic potential depending on the degree of relatedness. However just because two genotypes are different doesn't mean that they don't possess the same genetic potential.
I recall Cmakaioz mentioning two identical twins having very different body builds if one goes to the gym to work out everyday and the other does not. They have the same genetic potential to have a certain physique but if one puts his body through the conditioning to achieve it and the other does not
the are going to end up with different body types (phenotypes) despite being genetically identical (genotype).
Now suppose you have two different people who are not closely related at all. They have two unique genotypes. What happens if they go work out at the gym? Will they achieve the same results? They very well could if they have the same genetic potential. If they don't then no matter how equal the environment one is going to be greater than the other. But if the environment is never equal you're never going to get a fair comparison. Person A could have greater genetic potential to get in shape than Person B but Person B could go to a better gym and be more committed to working out than Person A thus getting better results. This is quantitative genetics 101.
We know that there is geographically based genetic variation between populations such as Europeans, Africans and Asians. We know that genes play a role in intellectual performance and personality and that variance in gene frequency leads to differences in intellectual potential and personality among individuals. However just because there is variance between populations and variance in how some genes are expressed that effect mental traits on an individual level doesn't mean that genetic variance between populations accounts for mental differences between those populations. Racialists assume between group heritability for mental traits to be significant for races without a valid biological rationale to do so or credible experiments that show that their position is correct.
And that is the point I made in the opening post.
For example, the assumption that twin resemblance due to common environmental effects is the same for MZ and DZ pairs is often made. Although some of these assumptions can and have been tested empirically [8,9], the use of twin data to estimate heritability, in particular for traits such as cognitive function, has been controversial [10].
Until now, it has been impossible to exclude a possible confounding between genetic and non-genetic causes of family resemblance. We propose an alternative approach to estimate genetic variance that is based upon the observed proportion of the genome that is shared by relatives and does not make any assumptions about the variation between families.
Our estimates are based upon realized relationships between very distant relatives and not on pedigree relationships between close relatives. This breaks up a possible correlation (confounding) between genetic and environmental factors, since the variation in realized relationships given pedigree relations is large for distant relatives. Our estimates of the phenotypic variance explained by all SNPs are ~0.4–0.5, and we therefore conclude that the narrow-sense heritability for human intelligence is large and consistent with the inference from twin and family studies.
[...]
In summary, we report the first study to show that a large proportion of the heritability estimate of intelligence in middle to older adulthood can be traced to biological variation using SNP data. It is the first to show biologically and unequivocally that human intelligence is highly polygenic and that purely genetic (SNP) information can be used to predict intelligence.
Of course what you want is a mathematical proof that the difference is genetic.
To prove your claim is valid you would need to test the hypothesis. You haven't presented any sources that have conducted credible experiments that validate your assertion.
And since he (and other racists) would need a time machine, a pocket universe, tens of thousands of years, dictatorial political power, and/or mind control powers in order to simultaneously set up the extreme conditions needed to isolate the (imagined) variable under study, there's not exactly a need to hold one's breath.
The correct experiment involves DNA ancestry tests combined with visual ancestry estimates and seeing which one IQ correlates most closely to. That could be done anytime now.
Joseph Graves said:Graves and Place (1995) outline the only true experimental approach that could resolve the psychometricians' dilemma once and for all. They suggest a classical transplant experiment: place Euro-Americans under the conditions that the majority of African Americans have been and are forced to suffer. How would the results of such an experiment affect the measurement of cognitive performance? One can only surmise, but such an experiment would reveal the true nature of the psychometric program. Psychometricians focus their arguments on the implausibility of environmental effects improving cognitive function. This we might readily concede, but it is not even the issue. If a measurable depression in mean African American performance on specific cognitive tests exists, it is undoubtedly the result of the destructive physical and social environments in which the majority of African Americans have been forced to live in the United States over time. Without the elimination of the toxic conditions to which African Americans have been and are exposed, the debate concerning genetic differentials in generalized intelligence is scientifically mean- ingless. Apparently, those who engage in this debate do so only because they have a hidden (but now, revealed) political agenda. That agenda is the continuation of a political economic system that maintains the Euro-American in a position of privilege-thereby maximizing their genetic potential, health, and cognitive performance-and the African American in a position of underdevelopment, thus depressing their genetic potential, health, and cognitive performance. No other conclusion is possible.
Source: The Pseudoscience of Psychometry and The Bell Curve The Journal of Negro Education, Vol. 64, No. 3, Myths and Realities: African Americans and the Measurement of Human Abilities (Summer, 1995), pp. 277-294
So why aren't racialists conducting that experiment?
The problem with that experiment is that correlation does not equal causation.
How strong of a correlation one way or another would one have to have to conclude that the experiment supported the racial hereditarian hypothesis?
Jane Elliott's famous blue-eye / brown eye exercise (within one day) actually produced differences in quantitative and qualitative performance among the privileged and targeted groups within her class. The students wearing the collars (marking them as inferior/less-than/other/unintelligent, etc. for having the wrong color eyes) performed all kinds of mundane tasks at a slower rate, with less accuracy, and more frequent disengagement from the assignments at hand.
The most remarkable result, however, was that after the exercise was concluded, the performance of both the (previously) targeted AND the previously privileged students increased beyond their pre-exercise levels after the exercise was concluded.
From the beginning of this whining about unfair treatment, those who were proud of America pointed out that Jews, Irish, Italians, and other ethnics were once treated like hopelessly inferior people here and were able to overcome all that without government force used to end discrimination.
In fact, the original settlers of the American colonies had been treated like inferiors in the country they came from, but when given an opportunity to make their own way soon proved that they were even better than the European aristocrats who had despised them for millennia.
This whining is really a misdirection done to discredit the American achievement. Those who pose as friends of the racial minorities are really motivated by a disguised desire to put down those who make it on their own. Even the TV show,"The Jeffersons," proves that, while its twin weapon, "All in the Family" puts down a Silent Majority working-class man who is far more valuable to society than the people he criticizes.
If it is possible to affect IQ by discrimination,
it doesn't necessarily mean it happened in the case of the racial difference.
Are black Americans really "transformed – into timid and subservient children,
including those who had previously been dominant in the class"? Personally I'm not sure telling a bunch of intelligent kids they are stupid would make them stupid,
and I also doubt that black American kids face this level of discrimination today.
How does this discrimination theory explain the low IQ of black run nations?
And anyway, I have conceded that it may be possible for discrimination to affect IQ, but the consistent pattern across times and places indicates it doesn't very much. The only way to know for sure is to do the experiment.
If by IQ you mean performance on IQ tests, then of course. IQ itself is not a trait, nor is it scientifically valid in the first place.
If you are denying the fact of massive discrimination against nonwhites -- past AND present -- then your position is delusional.
If you are instead arguing that it may not necessarily have been the case that the discrimination waged against nonwhites (in your mentioned case, "blacks") is the sole specific factor in accounting for differences in scores on IQ tests, well of course that's possible. It's rare for results to come from any one cause. Simply eating a good breakfast or not can shift a score on a test.
Literally speaking, of course not. In terms of specific contexts, however, YES. There is plenty of evidence, not the least of which is hundreds (if not thousands) of formal research interviews in which "black" people confirm the "double life" phenomenon describe by W.E.B. DuBois and other social critics with regards to nonwhites playing what amount to character roles in a white-dominated racial mythology. This takes many forms, including, but not limited to, walking a tightrope of expectations (i.e. don't act too smart or you'll be seen as being "uppity" or having an agenda, don't act too dumb or you'll be interpreted not as individually unqualified, but as a racial exemplar of why nonwhites generally are not to be considered -- by racists -- to be qualified, etc.). Naturally, when dealing with adults, the specific form this kind of character-acting takes will be quite different from the impulses followed by the children in Elliott's original exercise.
Certainly not permanently, but playing DOWN to underwhelming low expectations is -- once a gain -- a well-documented finding not confined to grade school children. You could practically grab any management professional with more than a year's experience and they can tell you the same thing from firsthand observation.
The severity and consistency has changed, but not the basic character of the discrimination. For my own part, every last nonwhite person I know or have worked with for an extended period of time has either had several such occasions, or I have seen it happen to them right in front of me. Keep in mind that you must have developed some level of trust before people will just spill out their painful experiences and allow themselves to have that kind of vulnerability around you, but even in my own relatively small circles, I still regularly encounter nonwhite professionals who can easily recall numerous occasions where their basic competence was challenged or presumed lacking in ways where their "white" colleagues were not.
Go look up "isolation of the variable under study" and get back to us in a few years. This has already been dealt with. While you're at it, IQ is itself also not an actual trait, but a deeply contingent and narrow metric.
Any experiment with the purported goal of isolating factors leading to disparities in scores on IQ tests (or any other metric) vis-a-vis "race" would -- in order to isolate the variable under study -- have to involve centuries of placing "white" people under the heel of racist oppression and maintaining an imposed life of degradation and artificially constrained opportunities in order to see if "white" people would fare any better if/when the tables were turned on them (on the axis of "race"). Because we still live under white supremacy, such arrangements aren't likely to be done. As such an experiment (oppressing people just for the sake of trying to settle an argument) is profoundly unethical, it shouldn't be done. In any case, the level of dominance and institutional power needed to implement such an experiment in the first place would already be more than sufficient to vanquish racist oppression generally -- ending the negative effects of racist oppression, period -- rather than preserving an unnatural and unnecessary set of harmful institutions (thus providing another compelling reason to not even attempt such experimentation).
I have a question.
So far as I can tell, having read some posts, skimmed more, and totally avoided others...
And with the caveat that I don't completely trust IQ tests as an accurate measure of human ability/potential.
The question:
Is this statement accurate? "If any measurable difference exists between the average IQ of one "race" over another, it is so small a difference that minimal study and work would easily overcome any disadvantage that may exist."
I have a question.
So far as I can tell, having read some posts, skimmed more, and totally avoided others...
And with the caveat that I don't completely trust IQ tests as an accurate measure of human ability/potential.
The question:
Is this statement accurate? "If any measurable difference exists between the average IQ of one "race" over another, it is so small a difference that minimal study and work would easily overcome any disadvantage that may exist."
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