Spearman's hypothesis, g and explication of black/white IQ differences

[scorpiomover]

Although written nearly two decades ago, Arthur Jensen's critique of Charles Murray's work in The Bell Curve, and the popular (almost stridently incomprehensible) uproar over the statistically robust claims and correlations made therein, perhaps elucidates the chaos that some members are attempting to engender: name calling ("neo-nazi," "pseudo-scientific," "racism"), sidetracks ("but does IQ really measure intelligence?"), non-sequiturs ("specific genes for IQ have not been identified, so we can claim nothing about its heritability"), red herrings ("Hitler misused genetics"), falsehoods ("all the tests are biased"), hyperbole ("throwing gasoline on a fire"), and insults ("creepy," "indecent," "ugly"). The following excerpt was from an article which Jensen wrote ("Paroxysms of Denial") directly following The Bell Curve's publication.

Some people are biased. But you are human, and humans make mistakes. So you can be wrong about things, and about this as well. So you can't argue, that just because some people don't agree with you, that they are always automatically biased. Some people may be unbiased, and right, that you are wrong, and some people may be biased, and still be right, that you are wrong. Treating any scientific theory or any scientist like they are infallible, is not that rational.

In order to prove bias, and not fall prey to that mistake yourself, you have to prove bias, independently of their views. So, if someone else first takes a poll of people's views, and doesn't let you know the results, and then you ask them about your theory, and in every such discussion, it always turns out, that everyone who didn't express a bias in the first poll, happens to never express the view that your theory might be wrong, then one could say that those who happen to disagree with your theory, is probably biased.

But you have to do that, multiple times, before you can show it is a repeatable, and predictable, phenomenon, that one can consider scientifically reliable.

I didn't see you do that here. Therefore, there is every possibility that your theory may be disagreed with, by people who aren't biased, and we cannot discount that possibility.

The words are as poignant for this thread and the libelous ejaculations of some of its contributors as they were in the nineties for the United States' refusal to accept prevailing conditions, black/white IQ differences and statistical outcomes. Blacks report IQ scores, on average, one standard deviation (15 IQ points) lower than whites; consistent findings show that low IQ - irrespective of its provenance and creation (e.g., environmental factors) - is associated with childbirth out of wedlock, welfare, criminality and educability. The negative aspects of these correlations essentially disintegrate as one moves simply to average IQ levels. This is the current landscape of knowledge, which has been thoroughly studied, chronicled, disseminated and understood for generations, but enclaves of the lay audience appear to have their own narrative of enduring conditions.

If you want to accept this as a fact for yourself, that is your personal choice. But if you require that I do, without freedom of rational thought for others, to come to their own conclusions, then that would be a totalitarian situation, where even opinions contrary to your views, would be outlawed. I think such a situation would not be productive for science, and such theories as are invalid, probably would hold sway, because no-one would be allowed to disagree with them. That is exactly why so many people don't like "PC".

But, if you wish to have a discussion, based on an assumption that blacks score better than whites, because they are smarter, then we can do that, because that does not require that any of us accept your views without question and reason.

If that is what you meant, then I return to your original question:

For those who still believe that the black/white difference can largely be attributed to cultural bias, I have one question: why do East Asians perform slightly higher than whites on American IQ tests? Seemingly the cultural and educational, overarching environmental differences, are not subsumed solely be some factor which preferentially attacks blacks and leaves asians alone. Some critics then shift gears and argue that SES brings down IQ for blacks. Let's remember two things though: SES informs IQ, and IQ informs SES; second, when the statistical analyses are computed, SES only explains one third of the standard deviation difference between blacks and whites. What explains the rest? Genetics? Something else? I would love to hear your opinions.

You refused to accept that anyone who believes that the black/white difference can largely be attributed to cultural bias, is doing so, out of anything other than lack of reason, and cultural bias itself. So you don't believe such people hold any form of valid views.

Thus, your statement: "I would love to hear your opinions." doesn't make sense. Why would you want to hear the views of what you consider to be unreasonable, anyway?

If you would love to hear the opinions of those who disagree with you, but only to try and knock them down, and then, having failed, to claim they are biased, and thus only reject reason, then that's not exactly a winning argument. Far from it. Schopenhauer even pointed out that if you try to knock down people's views, even their wrong ones, they are just going to stick to them even stronger than they did before you spoke. Emerson pointed out similarly.

So why on Earth did you choose to ask the opinions of people you refuse to even discuss with?

Are you a glutton for punishment?

I would love to hear your opinions on why you bothered to ask for people to knock down your theory, when you refuse to listen to their objections.

 

[scorpiomover]

Snafupants,

About "the chaos that some members are attempting to engender", I think you forgot 'misdirection on purpose' like the post below. Seriously, from his collection of posts on this thread I can only think of it as 'engineered to mislead' material.

If you didn't agree with what I had to say, then please address the points that I made, preferably remembering that I use Ti and Ne as my primary methods of analysing and understanding the world. If you think that Ti and Ne are deliberately misleading, well, then I would like to ask why you posted on a site full of people whose primary cognitive skills are those?

I was not going to answer your other post. As I said in my first post, we should separate the people in this thread into levels of acceptance of race differences (you believe race is skin colour).

No, I don't. I just don't see how you CAN separate people purely on skin colour. Genetic homological patterns, yes, but not skin colour. I would have the same problems in you comparing intelligence based on hairiness or height.

You are trying to paint a picture for us that the scientists we cited here are the authority, that they are popular, that genetics is everywhere...
When in fact its the other way around. We live in a society that is in fear and its a reaction of WW2, Nazi, eugenics, etc... No reasoning, just reaction.

"Some bad stuff happened in that period with some policies, so today we are going to do everything thats diametrically opposed to those old evil things and silence/isolate everyone that slightly touches that stuff with a neutral perspective. And by doing this we should be fine"This is political correctness. And this is the authority and popular thing today.

The scientists we present here are the ones questioning the authority. And they are not popular at all doing this. Maybe in the scientific community (in a neggative way), but not for us the people.

Do you live in the UK?

There are some times when PC goes too far, and lots of british people have complained about it. We're not all gung-ho about PC-ness, over here. It might be different where you are from.

There are certain countries that are known to be generally insular of the full gamut of human experience of the entire world. I gather Americans banned stem cells for the reasons above. But British people didn't feel quite that way about it. Neither did Muslims in a theocracy like Iran, if the Washington Post was right when it reported that Iran at forefront of stem cell research.

If you live in one of the countries that are known to be insular, then you might be coming to this discussion with a prejudicial view of everyone in the globe, that probably only applies to your country, and even then, probably only really is strongly prevalent in SOME parts of your country, probably your own. But it would not be reasonable to expect everyone is like your neck of the woods, and to do so, is itself insular, which would make you an open example to others, that others would be likely to imitate, of the very behaviour that you feel is doing science such a disservice.

Put up, or shut up. If you act insular towards me, then expect others to see that you think it is OK to act insular towards you, and then that is what you will get, not necessarily from me, or from everyone, but statistically, from a lot of people.

Be the change.

If snafupants didnt open this thread, lots of people here would never know about these guys.

I feel sorry for lots of you, then. The topic of genetics and intelligence has been discussed again and again in the UK. It was broadcast several times, one of them on BBC2, about 2 years ago. But you might not realise that.

Well of course you know about Darwin, but you just use him to give Christians a hard time here.

I'm not a neo-atheist. If anything, I give atheists a hard time about Darwin. I don't really give Xians a hard time over Darwin at all. So you clearly are making assumptions about me, that just are not true, and this implies you could be making more untrue assumptions about me as well.

You are not prepared for all implications of the Evolution Theory as you believe race is just skin colour.

Millions of people, including a large part of my mother's family, were exterminated because of those implications. For me, the implications are life and death. My life is on the line. So I HAVE to accept those implications, however evil or horrific they are. You may not like the implications of such a theory. But I know them, only too well.

But I'm suspecting you know all this, you know that race is much more than skin colour; and your work here is to misdirect people.
The only 3 names you provided for this thread are misleading. Richard Lynn and Kevin MacDonald are scientists that use the valid data we are providing here to write books with their own perspective/interpretation which might be anti-semitic, nazi,etc, whatever you may call it. Satoshi Kanazawa, I never heard about him, but I read your link, hes a joke in my opinion.

The thread is full of Darwin, Galton, Spearman, Rushton and Jensen references. And you come here with these 3 guys?

Well, Darwin and Galton are not considered in the same league as Lynn and MacDonald.

Galton used to go around the UK, measuring people's hat sizes, to determine who was smarter, as his opinion was that a smarter person has a bigger brain. Galton believed that intelligent people ought to be paid money to breed. Darwin wrote to Galton about his book on intelligence and had much praise for it. Galton's views, and others of similar view, were the basis of the "Feeble-Minded Persons' Control Bill". It almost got passed in the UK. So if you want to point to people who argue for eugenics on the basis of intelligence, you can look to Galton and Darwin, as being much more in favour of eugenics, than Lynn and MacDonald.

The thing is, if you were really interested in debating our data, you would have cited the other scientists you encounter in your own links. The ones that are criticizing Lynn and MacDonald works at least. Or the famous and typical citation in threads like these: Jared Diamond, Richard Nisbett, James Flynn, etc.

Flynn throws out the whole concept of IQ. I could have cited him. But given your own views that my views are rejecting the facts, I would have thought that you would be even more likely to claim that Flynn was biased.

At the same time I think you are all people from First World Countries and may have in your TV everynight some CSI-crap.

I used to love CSI. Seemed really cool. Then I watched the news, when there was a report on the UK's Forensics Science Service. They showed a forensic scientist, of reasonable maturity to have experience of his job, processing a trainer for DNA samples. They asked him how long it would take. He replied "About a month". Knowing that a single trainer would take a month to process alone, the idea that a few people could process a whole crime-scene, in a few days, was absolutely laughable. After that, I just kept seeing flaws, and the whole programme became a parody of science to me, pure fiction, that has no relation to reality. That killed any enjoyment of the programme for me.

Do you think the forensic scientists there are lying when they say "from the skull analisys: negroid male"? They are guessing? Its a blind bet cause race is just skin colour?

The first thing I thought, when I read this, was that I watched the film of "King Solomon's Mines" with Stewart Granger, with black people:

I also watched some of "Lost", and there was a black guy in that:

The shape of the head, and the body, are VERY different.

So I looked up "negroid skull". See on Wiki. There are 6 different head shapes displayed. The Negroid skull shape, is probably pretty common amongst some groups. But it's quite clearly not ubiquitous for all African groups. The article explains that actually, there are different skull shapes amongst Africans, and consequently, amongst blacks everywhere. Even more so with blacks in the West, because many whites and blacks had sex and had children as a result, and the result is that blacks in the West, have a significant amount of white genes, which would include the genes for intelligence.

You have a good strategy; if you keep repeating "melatonin" in every post in this thread I will eventually get tired and not post anymore.

I would feel badly in that happens. I would like the topic to be analysed more, just in a more objective, and less presuming fashion.

Your mission here is to associate our data with anti-semitism, nazism, racism, slavery,etc. Mislead people.
And also negate race differences.

My mission here, is for good science.

Intelligence is too multi-faceted to be tied down to a single factor. One has to consider cognitive skills, and how much they are used, and in what ways.

Race is also too much of a simplification, because too many people from one race, have had sex, and impregnated, those of another. One has to consider ethnogamous groups, and individual genes common to those groups, but uncommon in other groups.

If you want to discuss individual cognitive factors amongst ethnogamous groups, then I would be happy to discuss that.

If you want to discuss the potential applications of those cognitive factors, and their actual application, and how they differ, I would be only too happy to discuss that as well.

If you want to discuss the implications of one group having a much higher intelligence over another, and what that results in, I would be only too happy to discuss that one as well, particularly as the ethnogamous group that I was born into, has several centuries of data on, and I personally have a huge amount of personal experience on that.

 

[snafupants]

Those were a shrill two posts. Do you have any data supporting your quaint views? Also, what precise race and ethnicity are you? There's really little data I could provide that would dissuade you from your position; you would, in other words, niggle with anything and then impugn the presented researchers; I've been down that road before.

 

[scorpiomover]

Those were a shrill two posts. Do you have any data supporting your quaint views?

Interesting choice of words, considering your viewpoint, and its history.

Also, what precise race and ethnicity are you?

Jewish.

What's your race, ethnicity, and relationship to the subject? Are you by any chance in the field of evolutionary psychology?

There's really little data I could provide that would dissuade you from your position; you would, in other words, niggle with anything and then impugn the presented researchers; I've been down that road before.

Probably. It's not like this topic hasn't been discussed many times, in the UK.

What country are you from?

 

[Ex-User (5841)]

I'll wager this has quite a bit of relevance:

Neanderthals had a 5% larger cranial cavity and developed more advanced tools than H. sapiens at the time. Modern Eurasians share 1-4% Neanderthal ancestry (1), equal to one great-great-grandfather. It's been hypothesized that Autistic individuals have higher percentages of Neanderthal DNA (2).

However, South African indigenous populations share 1-5% unknown Archaic human ancestry, probably H. erectus, which is far less intelligent than H. sapiens (3).
Meanwhile, Aboriginal Australians and Melanesians have up to 6% Denisovan DNA (3) (4) and up to 4% Neanderthal DNA. That's up to 13% archaic human admixture, mostly less intelligent Denisovan.

Sources:
1. Richard E. Green et al (2010). "A Draft Sequence of the Neanderthal Genome". Science 328 (5979): 710–722
2. http://www.rdos.net/eng/asperger.htm
3. http://www.sott.net/article/235281-First-Aboriginal-Genome-Sequenced
4. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/23/science/23ancestor.html?_r=0

*EDIT: Also, potentially exploration-worthy:
http://www.newscientist.com/article...anderthals-taught-us-skills.html#.UlzHs1DIX0Y

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/...eanderthal-cave-paintings-spain-science-pike/

http://politicalblindspot.com/scientists-reveal-the-first-european-faces-were-not-white/

http://atala.fr/

 

[Ex-User (5841)]

Something else I've been thinking about is the amount of time spent by various races within the structures of "civilized societies" within which measures of intelligence were derived...

Society and its various needs, wants, and perceptions, acts as a selective evolutionary force upon its constituents.

So in the mean time imma take a stab by inserting my own stimulus and using it as an excuse to talk about what I want to talk about.

The Flynn Effect. Resource availability drives technological innovation, which in turn influences society, its perceptions, its division of labor, etc. Society drives evolution of the human consciousness by forcing individuals to comprehend and utilize a greater quantity of increasingly more complex information as a prerequisite for continued existence. This has its own implications on the resulting form of human society, because not all individuals are capable of the same level or means of comprehension; ultimately the result will be a wide disparity in cognitive ability among populations of humans, which will likely lead to violent uprising as well as violent stepping-upons, because there will be a disparity between actual human populations (personality types, careers, etc) and niche space within the division of labor demanded by the environment.

 

[WALKYRIA]

It's all about the task and the direction towards which the complexity goes.
Many tasks have different directions of complexity(imagine a three dimensional model of complexity with different kind of complexities(x,y,z,...) and the IQ tests gives the upper hand to a certain way of thinking. Life is more complex than an IQ test or an academic test.

 

[Nick]

I'm 2.6% Neanderthal. Do I win a cookie?

 

[JansenDowel]

I would be surprised if this disparity could be accounted for by genetics. It makes more sense that this difference is rooted in culture. We know, for instance, that abstract reasoning is related to the availability of various mental categories (eg that objects are bounded, continuous forms. That relationships between objects can be described as having temporal or spacial proximity. bla bla bla).

The idea here is that categories that improve your ability to reason exist as a means to an end. Perhaps, in some cultures, these ends do not exist.

It's all about the task and the direction towards which the complexity goes.
Many tasks have different directions of complexity(imagine a three dimensional model of complexity with different kind of complexities(x,y,z,...) and the IQ tests gives the upper hand to a certain way of thinking. Life is more complex than an IQ test or an academic test.

Exactly! Agreed.

 

[Nick]

So do we still keep striving to see who the 'smartest'?

Measure brain volume and density? The interconnection of neurons?


I still think we're not at the point of understanding how anything really works and our intelligence can't be correlated with the empirical units we've derived thus far.

 

[Absurdity]

Yes! It must be culture! This probably applies to computers too! Watson just needs to Baby Einstein products.

Fortunately, the Chinese are not so laughably delusional:

But in his lab at BGI, 21-year-old Zhao has no such squeamishness. He waves it away as “irrational,” making a comparison with height: “Some people are tall and some are short,” he says. Three years into the project, a team of four geneticists is crunching an initial batch of 2,000 DNA samples from high-IQ subjects, searching for where their genomes differ from the norm. Soon Zhao plans to get thousands more through Renmin—his former high school—as well as from other sources around the world. He believes that intelligence has a genetic recipe and that given enough samples—and enough time—his team will find it.

 

[Ex-User (9086)]

Many active research projects show the difference that genetic inheritance has on IQ, athleticism, or sociability.
It is idiotic how the balance is maintained politically not to upset the various prioritised and sheltered groups of voters.

Genetic screening in babies could be the priority for the future civilisation and is a rational choice over having people struggle with inferior traits just to keep the average.

 

[Reluctantly]

^ Well, the problem with putting so much focus on genes is that it ignores the developmental process that people go through by completely disregarding the effect that nurture can have. Because someone could have good genes, but lock them in a cellar for most of their life and they probably won't have actualized their genetic potential. They probably won't be very smart, capable, independent, or adjusted to life.

So using it to say that some people are more intelligent than others isn't always going to be true, regardless of the politics involved in making such statements. But if we're talking about the potential to be intelligent, then I'm sure certain genes help with that over others and I'd agree. Is this more what you mean?

 

[Ex-User (9086)]

I didn't say we should immediately neglect our children because they are just fine with superior genes. I don't see research on children education and parenting but it can contribute a lot if we are talking about the difference of neglect/normal childhood.

I don't think it's a potential. People are intelligent and what you tried to mention was their potential to attain knowledge, which depends on intelligence that people already have that makes every learning process take less time and effort.
That said, people can train their short and long term memory and other areas of their cognition, which effectively would result in higher output.

 

[Hitla]

I'm pleased to see like minds going against the politics of catering to the weak and unintelligent. No more! Eugenics FTW. Science will finish what I couldn't!

 

[Cavallier]

I'm pleased to see like minds going against the politics of catering to the weak and unintelligent. No more! Eugenics FTW. Science will finish what I couldn't!

OUT DAMN SPOT!