Race and IQ differences

Discussion in 'The Cesspool' started by rayznack2, Apr 26, 2016.

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  1. rayznack2 Banned Banned

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    First let me start off by introducing myself.

    I was invited to the forum by a poster under the username EgalitarianJay who is member here and over at Politicalforum where we both post at.

    EJ asked if I would be interested in participating in the recent thread started by 'Phil' (a former member at Politicalforum) on this subforum.

    http://www.sciforums.com/threads/su...onal-differences-in-cognitive-ability.155804/

    I was not terribly interested at the time because many of the arguments have been re-hashed for the umpteenth time and I feel we are just repeating ourselves.

    However, I noticed 'fresh' arguments in the thread before it was locked.

    I would like to open a discussion on the ethno-racial IQ differences which exist and the most likely cause of the differences.

    I noticed, as did Phil, that members attributed the differences to environmental causes without evidence.

    For instance, 'toxic environment' was cited without evidence to the degree high heavy metal poisoning is supposed to impair IQ, how much Blacks are affected by heavy metal poisoning, or the incoherence/dismissal how heavy metal is supposed to follow Black communities around the world (and ignore the fact many Northeast Asians - eg., Chinese - have far higher heavy metal poisoning and higher IQ than blacks).

    I prefer to stick with one issue at a time.

    I propose the racial IQ gap is partly (perhaps not even primarily) explained by brain volume differences between Northeast Asians, Whites and Blacks.

    I also suggest heavy metal poisoning is a negligible cause of the IQ gap due to Chinese having higher heavy metal poisoning than blacks and higher IQ.

    BLL's in Hong Kong from 1987 - BLL's averaged 15ug/dL.

    http://dge.stanford.edu/SCOPE/SCOPE_31/SCOPE_31_2.09_Chapter14_217-233.pdf
     
    Last edited: Apr 26, 2016
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  3. rayznack2 Banned Banned

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  5. iceaura Valued Senior Member

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    That is not true. Nobody did that.

    Why do you think anyone did anything like that?
    If you don't know that lead exposure in childhood affects adult IQ, you have no business attempting to discuss sociological patterns in IQ test scores.
    All nonsense. The point made in that thread is that if you haven't controlled for such obvious factors, you have no idea what your correlations mean even if you do find some.
    The difference between Han and Mongol peoples was mentioned specifically by several people - nobody except Phill was trying to lump all the Northeast Asians into a "race".

    And nobody - much less Phill - was actually measuring childhood neurotoxin exposure in anyone. It's another factor that the IQ pattern explainers have to deal with.

    1) Hong Kong is not populated by Northeast Asians. It's an island south of China, populated mainly by Cantonese-speaking Han from the nearby coastal regions.
    2) Your study did not measure childhood lead exposure in people taking IQ tests, in Hong Kong or anywhere else.
    3) 15ug/Dl is not terribly high, as a population arithmetic mean (did they refer to geometric mean?) Although it is damaging, and if children are being exposed at that level their IQ scores will be affected on average: https://www.usa829.org/Portals/0/Do...Library/Lead-Effects-on-Adults-&-Children.pdf
    4) You refer fairly casually to Whites and Blacks, as if you had some definition handy that we could use. As far as has been established here, there is no such thing as the Black race, and I've never seen a decent definition of the White race that anyone measuring IQ could use reliably. So you have to provide such definitions, in order to use those terms meaningfully.
    Your quoted study for that did not control for body size. Can we just throw it out, on that ground alone, for the purposes of this thread?

    Suppose we don't: It also did not define its races, or control for the populations from which it drew its 44 "white" and 25 "black" subjects - cut to 33 white in the attempt to control for age. And its most statistically significant finding - according to the authors - was that the OFC region of "Black" subjects was consistently larger than the OFC region of "White" subjects.
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orbitofrontal_cortex
    As you can see, this region appears to be critical to making complex decisions - a major aspect of human intelligence that IQ tests seem to measure poorly if at all. Just fyi.
    And within human populations variously correlated with dozens of sociologically correlated ("environmental") variables, from birthweight and childhood lead exposure to maternal stress and diet.
     
    Last edited: Apr 26, 2016
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  7. Bells Staff Member

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    Welcome to the forum. EgalitarianJay is a much valued member of this forum and in particular, of this sub-forum because he does offer a lot of scientific support for his argument, whether we agree or not, so in that sense, he is respected for that.

    The reason the thread was locked was because Phill was utterly unable to find any scientific support for his arguments or claims.

    Okay.

    To start off, you will need to provide evidence that "race" and racial differences exists. Scientific evidence that each group can be classified as being "racial" groups..

    And you will need to explain and support arguments about how they are racially distinct from others.

    Then you will need to explain how one's race affects one's IQ. In short, you will need to support the argument that race is connected to intelligence and how and why. Explain how one's genes makes them racially distinct from others and how that affects or correlates to intelligence, as well as factoring in and explaining how much of a role environment has to play with it.

    That actually did not happen.

    I have to agree with the points that iceaura made above on this point.

    If you do not understand how exposure to lead, for example, can affect one's development, then perhaps this may not be the best thing for you to try to discuss. These factors need to be accounted for. For example, in the US, African Americans are exposed to toxic levels of lead throughout their lives. Their children are also affected and the problems continue in future generations. We know that exposure to such levels of lead will affect intelligence and other forms of development. And if you want to consider the level of exposure for African Americans:

    "This is a disease that primarily impacts African-Americans," Chachère said. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, children of color whose families are poor and who live in housing built before 1950 have the highest lead poisoning risk.

    On average, between 1999 and 2004, black children were 1.6 times more likely to test positive for lead in their blood than white children. And among children who tested positive for extremely high lead levels (≥10 micrograms per deciliter), the disparity was even more stark. Black children were nearly three times more likely than white children to have highly elevated blood-lead levels, the type of lead poisoning where the most damaging health outcomes occur.

    While some cities, such as New York, break down lead poisoning rates by race in city reports, jurisdictions aren't obligated to collect or report that information to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, meaning there are no large data sets that distinguish the differences in elevated blood-lead levels among races. In fact, some counties and cities don't report lead poisoning data to the CDC at all.

    In our analysis, a handful of cities stood out as having a high percentage of African-American residents and a high number of children with elevated blood-lead levels. Nationally, African-Americans make up 13 percent of the population, but in Savannah, Georgia, for example, which is 57 percent black, more than 5 percent of children had elevated blood-lead levels, compared to the 0.5 percent of children with elevated blood-lead levels nationally. Four percent of children in Montgomery, Alabama, and 3 percent of children in Birmingham, Alabama -- both of which are more than 50 percent black -- had elevated blood-lead levels.

    And if you cannot account for all factors that affect one's development, and they are numerous, then really, the discussion kind of becomes pointless and a repeat of the previous threads about this issue.

    Well, again, you need to establish that race exists. And how are you grouping each of these groups..

    But let's look at brain size..

    I have to say, this argument is old.. And somewhat baseless.

    Please do better than this, because this line of argument is just nonsense. There is no account for body size, maternal and childhood nutrition, what toxins they (and their parents) may have been exposed to, any genetic issue that may have been inherited that would account for brain size and how this correlates to intelligence.

    I agree with the points that iceaura brought up above.

    The paper you linked says nothing about "race" or skin colour. Are you able to prove what you mean by race? You lump all "blacks" together, like they are a specified group. Which appears as though you are going by colour alone, which, I have to say is ridiculous. Blacks from where? Which blacks? Asian blacks? European blacks? Oceania blacks? South American blacks? African blacks? Who are the blacks of which you speak of?

    The Chinese living in Hong Kong are not Northeastern Asians. You are kind of lumping everyone under these banners and the other thread demonstrated just how invalid such arguments are.

    If you wish to discuss this, then you need to do better. You need to define the terms you are using and provide scientific support for these definitions.. Such as "race" or "black" race.. What does this mean? How about Asian? What do you mean by an Asian "race"? Provide something to scientifically support that "race" exists. That each racial group is different enough from other groups to qualify as their being a different race of 'people'..
     
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  8. rayznack2 Banned Banned

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    I said Northeast Asian exposure to lead is higher than Black American lead levels. I used this fact combined with higher Northeast Asian IQ compared to Black Americans as a countervailing point for lead exposure in Black Americans being negligible for racial IQ differences.

    You're the first to claim Han Chinese are not Northeast Asian. But my use of Northeast Asian refers to people of Japanese, Chinese and Korean descent. I adopted this term after noticing academia in discussion of race and IQ using Northeast Asian to refer to those groups who are all genetically similar.

    So? If the average BLL (let's say arithmetic mean) is 15 ug/dL that is actually far higher than black American BLL during the time and a significantly lower national IQ for Hong Kong would be expected.


    I look forward to comparing BLL's between black American and Chinese populations later in the day.


    Seems a red herring. What definition of white could matter in this argument? Is not the conventional view of who is white good enough for this discussion? Would you prefer we stick to Northern European? It does not matter to me as it does not change the facts either way.

    Well, actually, no. You haven't shown a sizable body size difference between blacks and whites to justify throwing away a study that did not measure body size.

    I note the incoherence of your argument.

    Blacks have one subregion of their brain that was found to be larger than whites that is apparently immune to any environmental variable.

    How is that?

    How do you explain blacks having a larger subregion than whites if blacks and whites are equal?[/QUOTE]
     
  9. origin Heading towards oblivion Valued Senior Member

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    Do you guys think Trumps racist rhetoric has emboldened racist to speak up and bother normal people? It seems so to me.
     
  10. Billy T Use Sugar Cane Alcohol car Fuel Valued Senior Member

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    One important factor, not often mentioned, is the cultural bias in the IQ test, which by-and-large are constructed by whites.

    Try to pass the "Chitlins Test" at: http://wilderdom.com/personality/intelligenceChitlingTestShort.html

    It was constructed by some black educators during the civil rights movement of the 60 and purposely used terms and items that the typical urban black encountered in their daily life. As I was active in the civil rights movement and had a lot of contact with blacks, I almost passed it back then.

    I'll even give you some help: Chitlins are fine chopped pig gut that is fried, and a very cheap protien source most blacks ate back then.

    The Chitlins test was written in response to the typical test used back then: A multiple choice IQ test designed by whites where one was asked to find which description applied to the given word, such as "stirrup." This example was taken from an IQ test in use back then. (99+% of urban blacks had never ridden a horse. How would they know?)
     
    Last edited: Apr 26, 2016
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  11. Edont Knoff Registered Senior Member

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    I believe that Einstein is a prime example of a highly successful thinker with a fairly small brain:

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Einstein's_brain

    So even if there is a correlation between size and intelligence, other factors can play a significant role, too. It is clearly possible to be highly intelligent while having a small brain.
     
  12. Edont Knoff Registered Senior Member

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    Nice example. Particularly for an european whose mothers tongue is not english, this illustrates the cultural bias of such tests very nicely. I failed completely

    Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!

    Thank you for the link!
     
  13. rayznack2 Banned Banned

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    I responded to your post earlier this morning before work but do not currently see it.

    In academic discussions on race and IQ, Koreans, Japanese and Chinese are referred to as Northeast Asians. Therefore, Han Chinese who merely speak Cantonese in southern China are still Northeast Asians.

    I provided their BLL's as countervailing evidence to your assumption higher BLL's in black Americans is not negligible.

    You would have to explain how higher BLL's in Chinese does not reduce their IQ below black Americans.

    Your comment on not controlling for body size in the brain size study will be disregarded until you provide the data on the correlation between brain and body size.

    You need to provide evidence as opposed to throwing around speculation if you criticize me for supposedly doing that.

    After work, I will also provide a large study which measured head and body size in children and race showing smaller East Asian children had larger head size than did white than did black children.
     
  14. rayznack2 Banned Banned

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    How do you explain Northeast Asians taking these tests in the West or in Asia outperforming whites these tests supposedly favor (which you did not support)?
     
  15. Bells Staff Member

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    It's been a long day and frankly, all that I can possibly say to this is provide scientific evidence for the claim that "blacks have one subregion of their brain" that is not only larger than whites, that makes them immune to environmental factors..

    Because really, all that springs to mind at the moment is bullshit. Pure and utter bullshit!

    I have seen some pretty dumb claims made to justify racism, and congratulations. You have won. You are now top of the list. Because you are now claiming that one's skin colour affects one's brain in this manner.

    Let's begin to break this down, shall we?

    Which part of the brain? And provide scientific evidence for this.

    How does it make them immune? And again, provide scientific evidence for this.

    Who are these "blacks"? Because there are many groups around the world, who are "black". Or are you just going by skin colour alone here?

    As for the rest of your post, well, let's just say that you are that much closer to my closing this thread and seeing you on your way. Support your claims.
     
  16. exchemist Valued Senior Member

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    An interesting hypothesis.

    Mind you, it does seem to me that there may have been a degree of self-censorship in science, about researching factors that may have a bearing on human aptitudes of various sorts. It is not a very PC line of research, after all. So Trump may have been the trigger for an overdue correction. It seems to me intuitively likely that mental skills may be inherited, just as other traits are. (But that of course is not at all the same as trying to make generalisations about whole ethnic groups, based on skin colour, hair type or the lengths of their noses.)
     
  17. Bells Staff Member

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    That is because you did not use the quote function properly and your response is embedded in the quote itself.

    Your classification of North East Asians is interesting.. So you are grouping them by geographic location?

    As for IQ levels in Chinese children (not from Hong Kong as your previous link looked at), are directly and negatively affected by the lead they have been exposed to.

    As for "black" Americans, there are other issues that need to be acknowledged, that do have a direct impact on their IQ levels. This was discussed and supported with much much evidence in the other thread. Perhaps you should peruse the studies and papers posted in that thread before you ask such a question.

    On to correlation between body size and brain size... really?

    You have made some pretty ridiculous claims without a single piece of evidence to support any of it. I'd suggest you start providing your own before you start criticising others for not taking your ridiculous claims seriously.

    So let's put this to bed, shall we..

    On the matter of brain size and your claims that "blacks" have smaller brains compared to whites:

    The evidence cited by supporters of the genetic view that has received the most attention is the claim that because brain size is related to IQ for both Whites and Blacks and because Blacks have smaller brains than Whites, lower IQ for Blacks is genetically determined and mediated by brain size. As indicated above, it is not clear that the brain size correlation with IQ is genetically mediated. Moreover, a within-group correlation does not establish that between-group differences have the same origin. Brain size differences between men and women are much greater than the race differences in brain size, yet men and women have the same average IQ. Brain size of full-term Black and White infants is the same at birth (Ho, Roessmann, Hause, & Monroe, 1981), and several postnatal factors known to reduce brain size are more common for Blacks than for Whites (Bakalar, 2007; Ho et al., 1981; Ho, Roessmann, Straumfjord, & Monroe, 1980a, 1980b). Finally, sheer brain size is a rather blunt measure of brain differences, which may be less predictive of IQ than measures of the size of particular regions or measures such as the ratio of gray matter to white matter. It is noteworthy, for example, that at a given level of IQ, Chinese have smaller frontal cortexes than Americans (Chee, Zheng, Goh, & Park, 2011), although Chinese brains as a whole may be larger than those of Americans (Rushton, 2010). Even with brain size equated between Chinese and Americans, the frontal cortex is larger in Americans (Chee et al., 2011).


    On the matter of why Asian's may score higher in IQ tests compared to other groups:

    The differences in achievement between Asian Americans and White Americans are not hard to explain on cultural grounds. East Asians are members of cultures having a Confucian background. An endemic belief in those cultures is that intelligence is primarily a matter of hard work (Chen & Stevenson, 1995; Choi & Markus, 1998; Choi, Nisbett, & Norenzayan, 1999; Heine et al., 2001; Stevenson et al., 1990). For thousands of years in China it was possible for the poorest villager to become the highest magistrate in the land through study. Families with a Confucian background exert far more influence on their children than do most families of European culture (Fiske, Kitayama, Markus, & Nisbett, 1998; Markus & Kitayama, 1991). They can demand of their children excellence in education and preparation for high-status careers and expect their children to try to comply.
     
  18. rayznack2 Banned Banned

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    Did you bother to click the link or read the other poster's message confirming that black Americans in the MRI study had a larger subregion than whites while all other subregions were smaller?

    Quite frankly, this doesn't speak well to your ability to moderate when you ban and threaten to ban because you can't click links and/or comprehend plain language.

    I'd encourage more attention to detail if you're going to ban members for these reasons.

    I hope to respond to the rest of your 'arguments' after work.
     
  19. rayznack2 Banned Banned

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    Once again, this is the classification used by academia when discussing this issue.

    I find your link to brain and body size in the animal kingdom a joke.

    Whale and hummingbird brain and body size is irrelevant to this topic on human brain and body size.

    It speaks volumes I need to explain this.

    I am not here to do your homework. You need to show my data is faulty with actual evidence that consists of correlation data and statistical evidence of the groups in question.

    You have none of that and merely toss around named and unnamed environmental variables as if that were an argument.

    You have not provided evidence a Confucian background results in higher IQ. I could easily demand you to qualify the elements of the Confucian learning environment supposedly resulting in higher IQ, demand data for your claim, and simultaneously torpedo your hypothesis with Korean adoption studies of Korean infants raised to adulthood by white middle class families who had higher IQ than white children raised by white middle class families.

    I'll provide the Korean adoption studies after work.

    I ask you to provide evidence for Confucian background effecting high IQ. If you do not provide said evidence then I will report you.
     
    Last edited: Apr 26, 2016
  20. origin Heading towards oblivion Valued Senior Member

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    Oh, sweet Jesus, not that! Please don't report one of the moderators!!

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  21. iceaura Valued Senior Member

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    1) You said "Black", not "Black American"
    2) You didn't define either one of those two much different classifications
    3) You used Hong Kong Han instead of "Northeast Asians"
    4) You offered no evidence of actual lead exposure in childhood of anybody except the Hong Kong Han, and that was circumstantial rather than measured, as well as being uncorrelated with IQ testing.

    In other words: no evidence.
    You need to get out more. Lots of people claim that the migration to North America was from Northeast Asians, for example, but those people were not Han and would not be happy to be classified as Han.

    Well, there's your problem: you are getting confused between sociological and biological classification schemes. If you were following Phill's similar confusions in the other thread, you must have run into his really nice 3D rotating graph of Principal Component Analysis of the human species - notice what it does to your "Chinese, Japanese, and Korean" category? Starting with lumping the Japanese with the Malaysians, and splitting the Mongols from the Han? That's what actual evidence does to "biological" racial classification schemes for humans.

    And that's years before you try to figure out what those Principal Components were - since to my eye they are probably indistinguishable from whatever one would turn up by graphing a "teenagers finding their neighbors really interesting, and sailors discovering the local port culture" connection web.
    Yeah, we noticed. So quit doing stuff like that, Ok? Before - that's in advance, independently, and on some kind of reasonable grounds - you try to measure population differences in IQ, you have to have some reasonable idea of what your populations are. And yours are not "races".
    If you are comparing the sizes of body parts, and you don't control for overall body size (both height and weight, as well as build type), you are fairly limited in the conclusions you can draw. Bigger people have bigger heads, hands, and feet, in general - they'd look kind of funny, otherwise, no?

    The purpose of the study was not your purpose, and it was perfectly adequate as far as it went - I'm not criticizing the study. But you simply can't draw the kinds of conclusions you are attempting from such - to your purpose - meaningless data. They measured 25 people somebody identified as "black" from the local population of "black" people - for all you know fifteen of them were from one extended family of low birth weight bottle-fed crackheads that live in the same building as their cousin the night janitor of the lab involved. Or maybe they overrepresented "black" or "white" grad and medical students - one would presume correlations between body size and college student status, somewhat different among different populations. There is a hint that such may have been the case - they excluded various types of medical issues more common among less educated "black Americans", and they ended up with a study population of "black" people that was much younger than their "white" group initially - but we don't know.

    You are talking about "race" here? Please.
    The other poster, me, pointed out that since they hadn't controlled for body size, birthweight, population source, neurotoxin exposure, maternal and infant nutrition, childhood medical history, and so forth, none of the size comparisons meant anything in this thread. Anything at all. They are completely meaningless here.

    That the only item of interest in the whole thing for this thread was the observation - the most statistically significant observation reported by the authors - that the OFC (and left amygdala) of the supposedly "black" people they measured was larger compared with the rest of their brain than that of supposedly "white" people. And if you actually took any of the racial bs you are spamming with seriously, you would recognize that you now have a real problem evaluating your IQ tests as measures of "intelligence" across different "races". Because IQ tests don't measure OFC performance very well, and amygdala size is not only known to affect test performance in general but to be sensitive to all kinds of environmental factors - such as social stress, childhood trauma - that are very difficult and expensive to control for across different populations.
     
    Last edited: Apr 26, 2016
  22. joepistole Deacon Blues Valued Senior Member

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    I think this whole issue is essentially worthless. I don't see any point in it. Studies have been conducted and median IQs have been established for various ethic groups. But how is that information useful? Are you going to use it create social policy? Are you going to use it to deny access to educational or job opportunities? If so, you would be wrong to do so for a variety of reasons. One, not everyone is a median. People are not medians, and they shouldn't be treated as such. Half the population is above the median. Race shouldn't be a determinate for access to education or to employment or anything else. I just don't see any value in this, and I see the potential for much harm. Every person should be treated as an individual regardless of race.
     
  23. rayznack2 Banned Banned

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    As opposed to equal treatment?

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    I note your
     
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