Survey of Expert Opinion on Intelligence: Causes of International Differences in Cognitive Ability

That's great. Can you specify which papers went into detail. "These papers agree with me" isn't an argument, and you shouldn't expect your opponent to trawl through the archives constructing your argument for you. Please specify where scholars identified variables responsible for racial and national IQ gaps, and quantified their effects. Incidentally, I wonder how they did this if race and IQ aren't valid concepts, but that's not the point we are addressing.

Again, quantify, where is the data. Your assertions are of no value.

Ah, Templeton 2013, referenced twice. "Race doesn't exist because it's below Fst 0.25", despite the human/chimp Fst being 0.18. How embarassing.

 

Log in or Sign up to hide all adverts.

OK, so you ignored the posts when they were posted and now you are complaining?

 

Log in or Sign up to hide all adverts.

Where were they posted? If you know link to them! Many links have been given in many contexts, "it was in papers I posted earlier" isn't good enough.

 

Log in or Sign up to hide all adverts.

Enviroment

 

Found another excellent post on why this entire subject is pretty dicey: http://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2016/04/08/nothing-but-us-big-fat-chickens-around-here/

 

Still waiting for that list of environmental factors.

 

From whom?

I've posted a couple of such lists, with upwards of a dozen separate factors (from lead exposure to breastfeeding regime to literacy to local income inequality) and your only reply has been to claim - falsely, and without evidence - that one of them (maternal, prenatal, or childhood lead exposure) had been controlled for. You have never even mentioned the others.

And my list was far from complete. Your main problem with controlling for environment is that your definition of population by sociological factors such as "race" or "nationality", on top of your decision to measure cognitive ability by a sociological feature (IQ test score), means that you are defining and measuring your populations by factors that themselves strongly correlate with sociological circumstance and culturally mediated features of various environments. So you have created for yourself dozens of environmental correlations that might not exist if you had a more biologically defined demarcation of your populations and a more biologically reliable measure in the first place.

They only thing anyone else has to do, to invalidate your argument, is to point at environmental factors that influence IQ scores and might plausibly vary by your - not their, your - population categories.

It's your job to show how your IQ score measurements controlled for them.

 

I'm just curious how all of your environmental factors combine to produce the same persistent racial difference all over the world. For example I'm guessing in Detroit it's just lead exposure, although that doesn't affect Hong Kong because of income equality or something, while in Haiti it's breastfeeding regime that causes the low IQ. I mean, you have a study that actually measures these variables in different nations and races? Obviously the consistent global pattern is not caused by genetics, but by myriad "environmental factors" all combining everywhere to produce high non-verbal IQ in adopted East Asians, uh, somehow. Just curious which "environmental factors" are doing that.

 

Trans-racial trans-national adoption, educational intervention programs having no effect, consistent global patterns. I think these control for all of them just fine.

One proposal for the consistent difference is genetics. Another is myriad mysterious "environmental factors" that follow races around everywhere. Which one seems more plausible to you?

 

Or income inequality and neurotoxin exposure and breastfeeding regime and literacy - four factors that at first glance appear to offer the same environmental pattern, pending actual measurement which one would of course have to actually perform - in all three places.

How many races are you talking about there, btw? I'm counting four or five on the scene by ancestry: Haitian black, Detroit black, Han yellow, Mongol yellow, Indonesian brown, and at least three different whites mixed in variously (French, English, and at least one Celtic).

The consistent global patterns are the supposed findings , not the controls.

Adoption itself does not control for any of that stuff - it's one of the most sociologically bedeviled practices imaginable. How would adoption control for maternal, prenatal, or even childhood lead exposure, for example?

Educational intervention might - if carefully designed and evaluated - allow one to control for educational variables, but there aren't many of them in those environmental lists.

 

We don't need to play a game of naming environmental variables to show that environment is the sole cause of racial differences in IQ. We only need to establish that there is no genetic component, therefore environment is 100% the cause of group differences. From there we can investigate which environmental variables affect IQ and by how much but once the environmental hypothesis has been validated the argument has been made.

Here is an excerpt from a Psychology book that addresses the problems with the hereditarian position:

• 
  

 

Cliffnotes:

1) The Black-White IQ gap is decreasing
2) Genetic research supports environment as a cause of racial differences in IQ
3) Race is socially constructed
4) The rise and fall of civilizations (one day they're in a golden age the next era they are not) does not support a genetic racial hierarchy in intelligence
5) Asian academic achievement appears to be caused by culture rather than genetics
6) Under the same environmental conditions Black and White test scores are comparable

The 100% environmental cause of racial differences in IQ have been established by the facts listed above.

The high heritability of a trait within a population doesn't necessarily mean that the cause of differences between populations has a partial or full genetic explanation. You can have two genotypes with the same genetic potential exhibit different phenotypes if they are reared in different environments.

Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!

 

Your assertions are all lies.

 

Prove it.

 

Why don't you? The burden is on the one supporting the assertion.

 

Yes actually you do if you want anybody to not see your claim as absurd. We are expected to believe a hodge podge of environmental variables all combine in different ways all over the world in all of the cultures and racial mixes and produce the same racial pattern every time? It's absolutely absurd.

 

No, they're not. And if they are you can refute each one point by point.

If there is no equivalence in environment between the groups anywhere in the world then environmental differences affecting all populations everywhere is not only feasible it is quite expected. And once again there is no consistent racial pattern. Remember, I posed several questions that challenge your assertion that there is a consistent racial pattern. You didn't answer them you simply said they would require a lot of writing to answer.

So to support your position you need to show that all of the evidence I provided for an environmental argument are wrong (these statements were backed up with sources) and answer these questions explaining why they don't invalidate your genetic hypothesis. I'm especially interested in your explanation for the golden age argument which Myers also made. How can there be a genetic racial hierarchy in intelligence if human history shows us that cultural achievement tends to vary across regions over time. One era you are on top the next you are not. How do you explain this?

 

I certainly don't.

 

That's obviously a generalization. His overall point that cultures rise and fall over centuries is a historical fact. How can you base a genetic racial hierarchy in intelligence on cultural achievement if this observation is true?

 

I'll just copy paste in my answer to your copy paste of your post.

I would also note that variation within major races is posited, eg. North East versus South East Asians. You seem to be bashing a strawman that anybody claimed otherwise. And of course Native Americans have been separated for 20,000 years, lending more support to the recent evolution of intelligence theory.