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

[iceaura]

From that premise (complete lunacy) there can be no racial differentiation of IQ because there is no racial differentiation.

Ok
hahahahaha
There are no races
People only look like there are different races because of social injustice.

There's a series of ads running on TV during the NCAA Men's Basketball tournament, that featured Spike Lee, Charles Barkley, and Samuel Jackson, in one car. How much money would you bet that I can't find three guys famous enough to have their pictures common on the net who each look more like one of those guys than those guys look like each other, and are not black?

John H. Komlos
"Height variations within a population are largely genetic"

And height variations between populations are not, according to his research. See how that works? It's the global/local distinction again - common throughout science.

"Komlos himself is on record as observing that as far as his work shows there is no significant variance in inherited height among the human populations on this planet."
is just silly

No, it's not. It was a quote I remembered from a New Yorker profile of the man and his research. He was properly careful - he did not say that genetics never made a difference at the population level in populations he had not studied, merely that his own research had dismissed the possibility in the populations he had studied. Which involved the major native and immigrant population groups of every inhabited continent except Australia.

John Komlos is an American economic historian

Yes. He established, for example, that median height in a society was an excellent proxy for overall economic prosperity, useful for comparing the prosperity of populations widely separated in time and space - that the differences in genetic heritage could be ignored, because they had little to do with the variance in median height over time or space.

The point is this: an overlooked set of environmental variables was dominating something almost everyone assumed was an inherited trait of entire populations. And very likely part of the reason these obvious (once noticed) variables were overlooked was racial bias in the assessments - all these short people were some other race than the scientists observing them.

 

[EgalitarianJay]

Well you are just making an argument from "authority". Whether Joseph Graves is any kind of authority outside your mind is another question.

So you've read the paper and you can see some IQ related genes and how they are distributed and you can't report that here in your own words? Why not?

I clearly said that I can summarize the arguments and findings of the article. The article contains tables with the names of the genes studied as well as their distribution between populations. I'm not arguing from authority I simply stated that Graves' article showed that IQ related genes showed no racial association. As far as his credibility as a source on this subject I asked him about his qualifications to review genetic research.

This is his reply. You can also review Graves' educational background and academic credentials here:

Dear (EgalitarianJay), my research is in the area of evolutionary genetics, now more accurately called evolutionary genomics. My PhD was granted in the area of Evolutionary, Environmental, and Systematic Biology. Professional scientists are always undergoing development during their careers, for example I added Next Generation Sequencing data analysis and various bioinformatics protocols to my tool set in the last 5 years.

Here is my summary in my own words:

The article Race, Genomics and Intelligence: Slight Return by Joseph Graves is a review of the scientific literature on race and intelligence with special attention paid to the definition of biological race and the evidence against the idea that intelligence is associated with racial differences. Graves shows that the psychometric literature on race and intelligence relies on socially-defined racial categories that do not have biological reality. Graves uses Rushton as an example of a psychologist who did not adequately define race but claimed that there was an evolutionary basis to racial differences in IQ score. He provides a brief overview of the fallacies of Rushton's arguments including the misapplication of r/K selection theory and the fact that his racial matrix was based on arbitrary groups of people. Graves goes on to list the various ways in which the race concept has been defined: essentialist, taxonomic, population, and lineage. These models are all conceptually flawed and do not accurately describe human genetic variation.

Graves cites Ernst Mayr's definition of subspecies which he states is synonymous with biological races. A subspecies according to Mayr is population within a species that is differentiated from other populations to the point of being on the cusp of speciation. Graves cites empirical evidence on population subdivision using Sewall Wright's Fst threshold for classifying subpopulations (Fst> 0.25) to show that human populations do not meet Mayr's criteria for the classification of biological races. Graves further explains that the human genome contains genetic variants called single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs). These SNPs can be used to
study gene frequencies in geographic populations. Graves references a study that identified 11 genes associated with general intelligence. He calculated Fst from the SNPs reported in these genes.

Table 1 of Graves article reports the mean and standard deviation for Fst within each of these genes. Out of the 11 genes 9 have mean values well below Wright's threshold.

According to Graves despite the problems with sampling these genetic variants across world populations the data does not support the position that there should be racially differentiated genetic variation for genetic variants associated with intelligence.

In Figure 1 of the article Graves shows a chart illustrating that some SNPs associated with variation in intelligence have high Fst. Once again the results do not show that there is a racial distribution between these genetic variants.

Figure 2 shows the distribution of delta values for SNPs in 7 genes associated with cognitive performance between Sub-Saharan Africa and East Asia.

Again the results do not show a racial association for the genes analyzed.

Graves concludes his article by noting that the claims in The Bell Curve were thoroughly discredited. Despite this he says that racialist thinking in psychometry is alive and well. As an example he mentions the comments of Noble prize winning geneticist James Watson who stated that he was "inherently gloomy about the prospect of Africa" because "all our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours – whereas all the testing says not really." Graves states that there is overwhelming evidence that human genetic variation does not match our socially defined categories, but despite this some scholars seem to continue their desire to maintain racial thinking in sociology, biomedicine, and psychometrics. He says that new genetic research has further established that these claims are absurd. As an example he points out that claims of the genetic superiority of European and East Asians over Sub-Saharan Africans run afoul of the fact that these populations contain more deleterious genes. Graves further points out that genetic hypotheses for phenotypic variance require that genotypes are reared in equal environments for multiple generations to equalize maternal effects. He notes that this never happens in racially stratified societies.

Graves offers ideas on how to improve the conditions of demographic groups that have been historically discriminated against by providing equal education, nutrition, health care and freedom from exposure to toxic materials such as lead. He says that the more complex a trait is the more it is likely to be disrupted by poor environment. Finally Graves states that we will never be able to launch a credible research program on the genetic differentials of intelligence associated with genomic variation associated with ancestry, until this social justice is achieved. However this has never really been the aim of people most invested in this research.

 

[Dr_Toad]

Graves offers ideas on how to improve the conditions of demographic groups that have been historically discriminated against by providing equal education, nutrition, health care and freedom from exposure to toxic materials such as lead. He says that the more complex a trait is the more it is likely to be disrupted by poor environment. Finally Graves states that we will never be able to launch a credible research program on the genetic differentials of intelligence associated with genomic variation associated with ancestry, until this social justice is achieved. However this has never really been the aim of people most invested in this research

Thank you! You put that to bed succinctly, and even supported my previous post's suggestion concerning education, nutrition and environmental exposure to toxins.

 

[Bells]

Can you give us some examples? The people who contribute to Intelligence read like a member list of a white power conference?

Look at the names of the "Institutes" they sent notice to and sent the participants of one they sent the survey to.

Linda Gottfredson, for example, belongs to both organisations and has been soundly criticised for her racist ideology and frankly peddles pseudoscience.

If you want a better idea, just look at the list of people who receive money for research from the Pioneer Fund, a neo-Nazi organisation that peddles racism and pseudoscience and funds research into anything that claims that whites are superior to other races.

These people are peddling pseudoscience and it is racist pseudoscience at that.

It may be your opinion that it has been debunked. The point here is show how it was debunked, if you can. Certainly many scholars would disagree with you.

I take it you did not read the paper I linked which explains why such research is not only unethical, but will rarely ever give a proper result because of how it is conducted.

For example the survey you linked in the OP is based on a similar survey conducted by Mark Snyderman and Stanley Rothman. If you look at how they got their results from that survey, you would see just how they tweaked it to suit what they were trying to convey.

Some commentators have been more incredulous, particularly about the single question concerning race and intelligence, "Which of the following best characterizes your opinion of the heritability of black-white differences in IQ?" Amongst the 661 returned questionnaires, 14% declined to answer the question, 24% voted that there was insufficient evidence to give an answer, 1% voted that the gap was "due entirely to genetic variation", 15% voted that it "due entirely to environmental variation" and 45% voted that it was a "product of genetic and environmental variation". Jencks & Phillips (1998) have pointed out that it was unclear to them how many of those who replied "both" would have agreed with them that genetics did not play a large role; it was also unclear to them whether those responding were familiar with the literature on the subject.[24]Sternberg, Grigorenko & Kidd (2006), responding to a citation of the same question in a comment on one of their earlier papers, stated that they did not give "much credence" to the survey.​

It did appear in an actual science journal: Frontiers in Psychology. Again, we have your opinion and the opinion of someone that agrees with you. Good call linking "The Guardian" by the way.

The so called science journal that was started by two people who were fed up with having to go through peer review and so decided to start the journal to bypass scientific peer review?

It arose from a reaction to the severe restriction of knowledge distribution imposed by subscription publishing models, the bias in traditional peer-review, as well as the relatively old-fashioned and low-tech services offered to researchers.​

The Markram's have raised a lot of eyebrows with their "Intense World Theory" hypothesis after rat testing with valproic acid. I guess it stands to reason that they chose to start their own online journal to bypass strict peer review.

So good call to you linking a survey that was badly done, and published on a website that prides itself on bypassing strict peer review.

Not true. I think a lot of people are discussing this survey. But if it was, so what? Would posting something on Stormfront somehow prove it wrong?

It tells you the type of people it attracts. In other words, the rancid flies have gathered to try to provide this survey with support they feel will provide further credence to their beliefs that non-whites are less intelligent than whites.

Childhood IQ is found to be much more affected by environmental factors and stabilises due to genes in adulthood.

Testing IQ within a population is one thing. Testing between different countries is something else altogether and is absolutely unreliable because of the numerous factors that affect intelligence, such as wealth, health, nutrition, parental education, pre and post maternal health, upbringing. IQ does not accurately measure intelligence. You best be careful though, those links are to peer reviewed sites and discuss studies that went through strict peer review. I know it cannot compete with Frontiers, that was created to bypass such peer review to be published..

It seems you know less about this topic than you think. Please refrain from speaking for the board as if you know everything and everybody here agrees with you. Others may then be able to learn something.

I am fairly certain that I speak for most on this site when I say that what you are peddling here is racist and bigoted.

I just read through this and the entire argument is that we should ban research into race and IQ because it's "racist". No definition or expansion is given beyond this. Pretty hilarious.

But he is correct. Which is why such research is funded by groups like the Pioneer Fund and why they often appear on sites like Frontier, because it is so racially biased and flawed that it would get through peer review.

Quite. Let's dismiss entire fields of scientific enquiry by calling them meaningless names.

Or just dismiss it because it is flawed to begin with.

The questions are vague and are open to interpretation, the survey was sent to others who think just like they do, using flawed data. We do not know who these so called "experts" are.

This wasn't actual research. It was an internet survey sent to others who think just like them, asking them for their opinions to biased questions. It should be dismissed.

Did you even scroll down and read the whole article you linked? Even the authors of the paper advise:

The strongest rated factor across all countries, regions, and groups was genes-evolution (19.72%), followed by educational quality (14.69%), culture (13.71%), and educational quantity (13.60%; Table 1, last row). These four factors were followed by health (7.32%), wealth (7.27%), politics (5.56%), and modernization (4.90%). Other factors received weak ratings (e.g., geography, current climate, migration, discrimination), including methodological factors (e.g., sampling error, test knowledge, test bias). Nature and nurture compared, genes were rated as the most important factor, but the two educational factors combined (quality and quantity), and all environmental factors together (e.g., education, culture, wealth, health), were rated more strongly than genes.​

They broke it down to give the result they wanted. Because when all environmental factors were combined, it was rated more strongly than the genetic component. Gee, what a surprise.

rom that premise (complete lunacy) there can be no racial differentiation of IQ because there is no racial differentiation.

Ok
hahahahaha
There are no races
People only look like there are different races because of social injustice.

"Race" is a social construct. In biology, "race" is not really scientifically valid.

You can laugh as much as you want about it, does not mean you are correct.

 

[Phill]

I will explain this in a little more detail. It's not my argument that just because there are environmental variables that affect IQ that the cause of racial IQ gaps must be 100% environmental. My argument is that because there is no genetic component to racial IQ gaps the cause must be 100% environmental. The high heritability of intelligence in no way indicates that there is a genetic component to racial gaps in IQ. You can have a high heritability for intelligence and still have a 100% environmental cause. This can be explained through a hypothetical experiment.

Suppose we took a pair of identical twins each with a genetic potential to score 140 on an IQ test. Let's raise the first twin in the best environment imaginable. Great parents, great schools, great neighborhood, great nutrition etc. The best environment we can provide. Now let's take the other twin and raise them in the worst environment imaginable. No parents, no school, no neighborhood, poor nutrition etc. Basically raised in virtual isolation with no human contact and only enough nutrition to survive. Once they reach adulthood we give them an IQ test. The first twin scores a 140 on the test. The second twin's behavior is so feral they will not even understand how to take the test. They can't read. They can't speak. They simply aren't capable of matching their twin in intellectual ability. Same genes, different outcome. Environment is 100% the cause of differences in IQ.

Now let's look at an example of the real world. White and Black Americans score differently on IQ scores on average. We know that there is an environmental difference between the populations. Black Americans are descended from slaves brought from Africa to America. This enslavement lasted hundreds of years involving back breaking labor, beatings, rape and murder. Blacks during this time were given only the most basic necessities for survival, food, clothing and shelter. They were taught to speak English but it was illegal for them to learn how to read (why do you think that is?). Over generations these environmental conditions affected the psychology of African-Americans and their health. After slavery was abolished Blacks were then oppressed for about 100 years deprived of equal education, housing, jobs etc. IQ testing was invented in the 20th Century. When Whites and Blacks were tested Whites had a mean of 100 and Blacks a mean of 85. The environmental component to these scores is obvious.

After the Civil Rights movement environmental conditions for Blacks gradually improved. Research shows that the Black-White IQ gap was reduced from 1972 to 2002 by about 4-7 IQ points (Dickens and Flynn, 2006). So we know that the Black-White IQ gap is not immutable. In 2016 the Black American IQ average is estimated to be about 93 (Nisbett, personal communication). Research also shows that when controlling for certain environmental variables the Black-White IQ gap can be eliminated (Brooks-Gunn et al. 1996).

Taking all of that in to consideration it is evident that racial IQ gaps are 100% environmental in cause.

Yes, we've all heard the "there was discrimination in the past, it's that" argument. Your rendition of the experience of Negroes in US slavery in no way explains the global pattern. Your story about the twins is pointless. Do you have any data showing slave conditions cause a persistent IQ drop? I doubt it. You are just making up stories. Flynn himself has said that Blacks have made little gain in general intelligence. Your evidence for Black IQ in the USA is an e-mail from Nisbett? The Brooks-Gunn study was done on children where heritability estimates are unreliable. Furthermore "environmental variables" such as number of books in the house are just a proxy for parental IQ.

 

[Phill]

Table 1 of Graves article reports the mean and standard deviation for Fst within each of these genes. Out of the 11 genes 9 have mean values well below Wright's threshold.

What groups is he using to calculate Fst? Why do you think an Fst below 0.25 means no between group variation, when it obviously doesn't? How do you explain genes over 0.25 Fst meaning no between group variation? Graves seems to have taken Templeton's mispreresentation of Sewall Wright's Fst statistic applied to subspecies, and applied it to single genes as if it means no difference, when any non-zero Fst means a difference. What nonsense!

BTW, where was the article published?

 

[Bells]

Yes, we've all heard the "there was discrimination in the past, it's that" argument. Your rendition of the experience of Negroes in US slavery in no way explains the global pattern. Your story about the twins is pointless. Do you have any data showing slave conditions cause a persistent IQ drop? I doubt it. You are just making up stories. Flynn himself has said that Blacks have made little gain in general intelligence. Your evidence for Black IQ in the USA is an e-mail from Nisbett? The Brooks-Gunn study was done on children where heritability estimates are unreliable. Furthermore "environmental variables" such as number of books in the house are just a proxy for parental IQ.

The scientific research backs him up.

Even the survey you linked in your OP clearly states that the so called "experts" you are relying on, show environmental effects having a much greater effect on intelligence than their genes. The issue with how they portrayed it and how you are relying on it is that they broke up the environmental component to give the result that matches their (and your) ideology.

Parental IQ doesn't really have that much to do with it. It has more to do with parental education, nutrition, education, health and wellbeing. Not to mention the fact that the IQ tests themselves are culturally biased, which account for the difference in scores between different cultures because they fail to measure the very meaning of intelligence in different cultures and what other cultures even consider to be "intelligence". We are using Western standards in non-Western countries who have completely different cultures and cultural beliefs and forms of education. It is ludicrous.

The distinction between East Asia and the West is only one of many cultural distinctions that separate different ways of thinking about intelligence. Robert Serpell, PhD, who is returning this year to the University of Zambia after 13 years at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, has studied concepts of intelligence in rural African communities since the 1970s.

Serpell and others have found that people in some African communities--especially where Western schooling has not yet become common--tend to blur the Western distinction between intelligence and social competence. In rural Zambia, for instance, the concept of nzelu includes both cleverness (chenjela) and responsibility (tumikila).

"When rural parents in Africa talk about the intelligence of children, they prefer not to separate the cognitive speed aspect of intelligence from the social responsibility aspect," says Serpell.

Over the past several years, Sternberg and Grigorenko also have investigated concepts of intelligence in Africa. Among the Luo people in rural Kenya, Grigorenko and her collaborators have found that ideas about intelligence consist of four broad concepts:rieko, which largely corresponds to the Western idea of academic intelligence, but also includes specific skills; luoro, which includes social qualities like respect, responsibility and consideration; paro, or practical thinking; and winjo, or comprehension. Only one of the four--rieko--is correlated with traditional Western measures of intelligence.

In another study in the same community, Sternberg and his collaborators found that children who score highly on a test of knowledge about medicinal herbs--a measure of practical intelligence--tend to score poorly on tests of academic intelligence.

The results, published in the journal Intelligence (Vol. 29, No. 5), suggest that practical and academic intelligence can develop independently or even in conflict with each other, and that the values of a culture may shape the direction in which a child develops.

They also agree with studies in a number of countries, both industrialized and nonindustrialized, that suggest that people who are unable to solve complex problems in the abstract can often solve them when they are presented in a familiar context.

The end result of this research is twofold. As Sternberg has pointed out, lay theories of intelligence often lack the precision of scientific theories, but they can suggest new avenues of research, shed light on how people use intelligence in everyday life and highlight aspects of intelligence that scientific theories have ignored. Studying intelligence in different cultures can thus be a way of challenging conventional Western ideas about intelligence.

Research in non-Western cultures can also be directly useful to people in those cultures. It indicates the extent to which Western intelligence tests measure what those cultures are interested in measuring, and it may suggest alternative, culturally appropriate methods of assessing skills and abilities.

[...]

Recently, she and Ashley Maynard, PhD, now a professor of psychology at the University of Hawaii, conducted studies of cognitive development among children in a Zinacantec Mayan village in Chiapas, Mexico, using toy looms, spools of thread and other materials drawn from the local environment. The research convinced Greenfield that the children's development can be validly compared to the progression described by Western theories of development, but only by using testing materials and experimental designs based on the Zinacantec culture.

According to Serpell, simply translating a Western test into the local language is not enough. Instead, it is critical to tailor each test to the needs and values of the culture in which it is to be used.

Unless that happens, says Serpell, "you're just going to be able to pick out more efficiently those individuals who would be considered intelligent by Western standards, but you're not going to be able to answer the question of whether you're picking out people who are most intelligent according to the standards of their culture."

[Source]​

In other words, Westerners seem to believe that only their interpretation of "intelligence" matters and they apply these tests towards people of other cultures around the world and then they crow about how much smarter they are compared to everyone else. The reality is intelligence cannot be measured that way. What you consider to be "intelligent", others from other cultures would not and vice versa.

Westerners do better in the tests because they literally spend their educational lives learning exactly what these tests test, because the tests are suited to Western culture. People from other cultures and nationalities do not do that, and then you wonder why they might score lower? Perhaps we should stop enforcing our standards on other cultures. Hence why the earlier paper I linked distinctly pointed out why it is wrong to test between cultures and groups to compare. Because you cannot compare. You test within each group and culture and use tests that suit each group and culture. At present, we are making people complete tests that are not relevant at all towards them and never will be.

The Taiwan study can be found here: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0160289697900052

The Sternberg study can be found here: http://gom.sagepub.com/content/31/1/27.short

 

[iceaura]

Yes, we've all heard the "there was discrimination in the past, it's that" argument

There is also racial oppression and bigotry in the present, and hangover effects of similar in the past - such as stereotype threat, and neurotoxin exposure, and complexity of childhood environment, and so forth.

You have to control for these variables, and many others, or you cannot compare test results between populations. You also have to control for the obvious possibility of a genetic influence on vulnerability to these variables.

It's not an "argument" so much as an observation: these things affect the results of tests of cognitive ability, and they are unevenly distributed between populations. So you have to control for them. If you don't - and nobody has - you cannot draw valid conclusions about a genetic basis for any observed variance in cognitive abilities between populations.

You brought up the example of height - take a lesson from it. You don't even have a measurement problem with height, as you do with "cognitive ability".

 

[Phill]

You're playing the crank. Any credibility you had when you started this is gone. You keep claiming others have made no analysis while you do just that. Make no analysis. Crank whine Phill.

A claim has been made that IQ genes are evenly distributed among races and I am addressing that claim, among others. When these claims have been addressed I will address others, and perhaps make my own claims. There is quite a lot of counter argument here so forgive me if I don't address all of it at the same time, but I'll get to it. Be patient!

 

[Beer w/Straw]

In history, how smartz were the rest of the world in comparison to Mesopotamia?

 

[PhysBang]

Yes, we've all heard the "there was discrimination in the past, it's that" argument.

Of course, many racists believe that there is no discrimination today. Not that Phill is racist; he just likes to support racist positions with common racist positions and tactics.

 

[PhysBang]

A claim has been made that IQ genes are evenly distributed among races and I am addressing that claim, among others.

Well the, that's crazy right there. FIrst, who would ever take IQ to be reliable? Second, who would ever take it to be the only measure of intelligence? Third, who would think that there would ever be genes related to a specific human test? That's like thinking that there are SAT genes or Understanding-A-David-Lynch-Film genes.

There have to be a lot of genes involved in intelligence. And in order to work, these genes have to produce a number of complex proteins. These proteins can only be formed as part of processes that are highly dependent on the cellular environment, this cellular environment can very from cell to cell, this environment is also dependent on the overall environment of the organism.

I'm not saying that it's impossible to find super-important, swamp-any-environmental-effect intelligence genes, but it would be really hard to find these genes and really unlikely.

We already know that we can cause huge differences in intelligence through environment. We can create huge differences in intelligence just by using hindu-arabic numerals rather than roman numerals. Just by building the technology we have, both physical and conceptual, we have increased the mental abilities of humans far beyond what was possible two hundred years ago.

 

[EgalitarianJay]

Yes, we've all heard the "there was discrimination in the past, it's that" argument. Your rendition of the experience of Negroes in US slavery in no way explains the global pattern.

It wasn't meant to. I used the example of the history of African-Americans in the United States as evidence that environmental differences can have major effects on the nurturing of intelligence. Also I didn't just mention slavery but institutional racist discrimination (segregation, Jim Crow etc) which lasted for 100 years after slavery as a basis for claiming that the environment between Black and White Americans has not been equal throughout America's entire history.

There are historical reasons for environmental inequality across the globe as well.

Your story about the twins is pointless.

No, it's not pointless. The point was to show you that even with identical genes two people can have major differences in intelligence due to environmental factors. This is a basic principle of experimental quantitative genetics. In order to infer genetic causality from phenotypic differences exhibited by different genotypes you have to raise those genotypes in the same environment. Otherwise you can not conclude that there are differences in genetic potential based on different phenotypes.

Different genotypes can have the same genetic potential. This also applies to groups. You can have genetic variance between groups of people such as geographic populations and still have the same genetic potential for certain traits.

Do you have any data showing slave conditions cause a persistent IQ drop? I doubt it. You are just making up stories.

No, I gave you an example of how environmental differences can stunt IQ in a population. American slavery and discrimination causing environmental differences between Black and White Americans is just a fact. We know that factors like social discrimination, malnutrition and environmental toxicity can affect IQ scores. The disproportionate poverty rates of African-Americans was caused by slavery and institutional racist discrimination. Slavery caused the African-American population to be poor from the beginning. Discrimination enforced by the government for 100 years ensured that many of them stayed poor.

Despite environmental improvement in the last few decades due to laws against racist discrimination we are still seeing the effects of past racist discrimination today. The Civil Rights Movement created new opportunities for Blacks but it did not eliminate inequality. More work needs to be done to improve the environment for all people.

Flynn himself has said that Blacks have made little gain in general intelligence.

Did he? According to the study I cited Flynn said that Blacks have made significant gains in g (general intelligence).

Table 2 shows that the estimated g gains of Blacks on Whites were 91.13% of the comparable IQ gains on the WAIS (2.57/2.825 .9113) and 94.73% of the comparable IQ gains on the WISC (4.67/4.935.9473). The average of the two is 93%. Multiplying that value by the IQ gain indicates that between 1972 and 2002, Blacks made a g gain on Whites equivalent to 5.13 points.

Source: Black Americans Reduce the Racial IQ Gap Evidence From Standardization Samples Psychological Science Volume 17—Number 10 (2006)

Your evidence for Black IQ in the USA is an e-mail from Nisbett?

Yes. Nisbett has done reliable research on this subject. I asked him this last year because the article where he said the IQ gap was about 10 points is 10 years old. I have read that Black test scores improved in recent years (Obama Effect) so I wanted to know by how much.

This is what he said:

Dear (EgalitarianJay), Thanks for your note. I know of no recent IQ data. However, academic achievement data track IQ data quite well and the difference is now about .5 standard deviation for that now, suggesting that the IQ gap would be around 7 or 8 points now.

Apparently there is no reliable IQ data on race any more. We can look at achievement data for ourselves to see if they verify Nisbett's claim.

The Brooks-Gunn study was done on children where heritability estimates are unreliable.

That doesn't matter. We are not talking about heritability but rather the influence of environment on IQ. Studies on children give reliable indicators of how the learning environment affects people.

Furthermore "environmental variables" such as number of books in the house are just a proxy for parental IQ.

You could say that controlling for environmental variables simply controls for the intelligence of the parents and therefore this research only represents the upper limits of genetic potential in the Black population however the abstract clearly says that maternal education does not reduce the ethnic difference further.

A white in the top socioeconomic quintile based on income has more than twice the wealth of a black in the top quintile.12 A still more important point is to note what happens when one adds to the socioeconomic measurement of opportunity several measures of the environment that include family and neighborhood structural and resource measures including measures of the learning environment. When this adjustment is made, the blacks at a given "opportunity level" are now very close to the whites at a given level.13 Herrnstein and Murray note correctly that such attempts to equate for the full range of environmental variables are based on purely correlational data: it could in principle be the case that mother's IQ drives the other variables. However, the same regression equation that produces the results just presented predicts nothing more when mother's IQ is included. The data are thus more consistent with a purely environmental interpretation of the B/W gap than with one that leans on a genetic interpretation.

Source: The Bell Curve Wars p. 43

This is some of the most reliable research we have that racial IQ gaps are caused by the environment.

 

[EgalitarianJay]

Continued.....

What groups is he using to calculate Fst? Why do you think an Fst below 0.25 means no between group variation, when it obviously doesn't? How do you explain genes over 0.25 Fst meaning no between group variation? Graves seems to have taken Templeton's mispreresentation of Sewall Wright's Fst statistic applied to subspecies, and applied it to single genes as if it means no difference, when any non-zero Fst means a difference. What nonsense!

The groups he used came from 50 populations varying from regions identified as Africa (sub-Saharan Africa), Europe, Asia (Middle East and Eurasia), East Asia, Oceania, and the Americas. Fst is a measure of population substructure and is most useful for examining the overall genetic divergence among subpopulations. What Graves did is analyze genes related to IQ and calculate their Fst values to see how much genetic divergence they exhibited between populations. He used Sewall Wright's threshold of 0.25 designed to determine fixation of different alleles in subpopulations. Most of the SNP's analyzed did not meet the threshold therefore their divergence does not meet criteria for identification of a trait (intelligence) that is differentiated between populations.

Templeton by the way did not misrepresent Wright's Fst statistic and neither did Graves. Graves explained to me by email the significance of Wright's threshold for subspecies classification.

From: (EgalitarianJay)
Sent: Thursday, July 23, 2015 11:35 PM
To: Joseph L. Graves
Subject: Wright's threshold for subspecies classification

Dear Dr. Graves,

I have encountered another racist opponent on a message board who says that he analyzed your recent paper, "Race, Genomics and Intelligence: Slight Return" and found a critical error. He says you provide no citation for the claim that population geneticists use a threshold for identifying the existence of biological races (FST> 0.250). He says that you cite Sewall Wright's 1978 book which he claims to have in his possession and Wright doesn't make any claim of a threshold for classification of biological races. According to my opponent you didn't say that Wright said there was a threshold for classification of biological races but didn't give a citation for the population geneticists referencing this threshold which leads readers to believe that this is Wright's threshold for subspecies classification.

Could you please provide me with a source or sources that clear up this matter?


Sincerely,

(EgalitarianJay)

From: Joseph L. Graves (gravesjl@ncat.edu)
Sent: Mon 7/27/2015 10:37 AM
To: (EgalitarianJay)
Subject: RE: Wright's threshold for subspecies classification

Dear (EgalitarianJay), This is a common error I have dealt with many times in the past. Wright discusses the level of variation in Fst and its meaning on page 85 in the chapter entitled: Genetic Variability in Natural Populations: Methods. On that page he does not mention the terms "race" or "subspecies". Instead he talks about F = 0.25 as an arbitrary value above which there is very great differentiation.


Sewall Wright was clearly a racialist (one who believed that biological races existed within our species). This is demonstrated by his discussions of Racial Differentiation in Mankind in chapter 10. He recognized that Fst in humans was pretty small, for the genes he examined in that chapter Fst = 0.1248, and he understood the principle of discordance (see discussion on 449--450.) While I did not know Wright personally, I know and work closely with many people who knew him and worked closely with him. The determination that Fst = 0.250 for the boundary of racial/subspecies identification is really a post-Wright phenomenon.


Sincerely,




Dr. Joseph L. Graves Jr.

Associate Dean for Research & Professor of Biological Sciences

Joint School of Nanoscience & Nanoengineering

North Carolina A&T State University

UNC Greensboro

2907 E. Lee St.

Greensboro, NC 27401

Off. 336-285-2858

Mobile: 336-707-1556

The issue here is not that there is absolutely no difference in the frequency of genes but how much statistical difference is there that we can determine to be significant. If the difference is statistically very low then the evidence does not point to a racial association for a given trait. What population genetic theory would predict is that a polygenic trait like intelligence would be represented by genes that are scattered throughout the population. So the genes that determine high intelligence would be present in some individuals more than others and because intelligence is highly heritable these genes would run in families but they would not be concentrated in one population over another. That's what the data that Graves presented indicates.

BTW, where was the article published?

The article was published as a chapter of a book on the role genes and environment play in influencing IQ.

Full Citation: Graves, J.L, Race, Genomics, and IQ: Slight Return for Intelligence Quotient: Testing, Role of Genetics and the Environment and Social Outcomes, Ed. Joseph Kush, Nova Scientific Publishers, pp. 69 –86, 2013.

 

[Phill]

Templeton by the way did not misrepresent Wright's Fst statistic and neither did Graves. Graves explained to me by email the significance of Wright's threshold for subspecies classification.

Can you reference any other geneticist using Fst 0.25 to dismiss a gene as insignificant? I mean your email where Graves reviews himself is nice and all, but to me applying an Fst measure to dismiss genes just seems like some ad hoc contrived nonsense, based on nothing. So anyone else using Fst at all to dismiss genes would add some nice support to the method. I mean you do understand that Fst is just a distribution or differentiation measure, which has no connection to significance of effect sizes? You do get that, right?

Incidentally, have you read this: A review of intelligence GWAS hits: Their relationship to country IQ and the issue of spatial autocorrelation

 

[Phill]

Of course not. Where would you get that? I said it means you have to be very careful about how you define those populations, and completely thorough in dealing with confounding variables, to have the slightest hope of discovering valid genetic correlations even - let along causes.

And since this care has not been taken, and the due diligence not performed, the relationship between population genetics and population cognitive abilities is at the present time speculative.

How do you square this with us all being genetically the same height as you assert below? If we consistently see the same patterns between ancestry and outcome, is not the default hypothesis genetics? It would be for any other trait. Populations can be well defined, can you explain how they are not? What variables specifically are you concerned about? The magnetic field of Jupiter as it passes? Are you sure your vague objections about all possible variables are not applicable to any study, but you only demand these impossible standards for race related studies?

Interesting example. Recent work by John Komlos and others have pretty much blown the long accepted and "scientific" estimates of the heritability of height at the population level. Komlos himself is on record as observing that as far as his work shows there is no significant variance in inherited height among the human populations on this planet - that aside from a couple of known physical subtypes of humans such as the Bushmen tribes in central and southern Africa, we are all genetically about the same height. The illusion was created by an uneven distribution of overlooked environmental factors.

Really? Could you explain how it contradicts Visscher's work in the area? You can find references to it in this excellent paper: Still Missing, by Eric Turkheimer. "We are all genetically about the same height". It's probably just my biases that are causing me to laugh. I'm sure his reasoning is sound, after all, you agree with him.

You are missing the point. That only gets you the individual, and their ancestral community - not the race. You can discover that one person's ancestry is a coastal community in Norway, and another person's is a coastal community in Portugal, and a third is descended from a coastal community in Sierra Leone. Evenly spaced along the eastern Atlantic ocean. But you cannot, from the cluster membership alone, assign two of them to one race and the third to another. You have to find out, first, what race those clusters belong to. And that will require sociological information.

The "genetic clusters" are gene pools, usually geographically located. They are not races. All the sociological races feature - within them - many such clusters. You can only identify the race associated with a particular cluster by gathering racial information - sociological racial information - about that community or geographical area.

Or as I put it: most people know what race other people think they belong to. So if you have a gene cluster, and you want to assign it to a "race" for some reason, the way to do it is by asking the members of that cluster what race they are. Or asking their neighbors. Or looking at photographs of the people who live there. Or guessing based on geography and history. Or guessing based on the sociological race assigned to some cluster you think is similar. Or some such method. You can't make the assessment from the genetic data alone, because there are no genetically defined races. No one has taken the human genetic heritage and divided it up into races based on its internal relationships and natural clustering. The species is divided into races first, sociologically, mostly on essentially trivial criteria known to be subject to rapid evolutionary change such as skin color, and only then are the "genetic clusters" assigned to one race or another - regardless of their genetic similarity to each other.

Not at all. It's really very simple. Sample people all over the world, take their genotypes, identified only by a random number, and then plot them according to similarity (PCA is good for this). You'll see the Blumenbach partition: East Asians, Caucasoids, SS Africans, and Native Americans. Of course you'll get a lot of mixed people scattering between, but those major clusters will be very distinctive. So if you want to partition human variation to operationalise it, that's your first partition. And then of course you can break it down further, to Europeans, South Asians, etc. Nobody ever puts India and China in the same cluster, based on phenetics, genes or appearance. That's because a natural division simply isn't there. And then post facto, after making the clusters, you can see that all of the people in or near the SS African cluster are what we call Blacks or Negroes in the "social race" concept. Of course Americans have a tendency to call mulattoes Black, but I think you get the point. So the clustering is independent of any cultural information. It just happens to match quite nicely "social race", so the same labels could be used, although Caucasoid race would often be called West Eurasian population, but they are the same thing.

 

[EgalitarianJay]

Can you reference any other geneticist using Fst 0.25 to dismiss a gene as insignificant? I mean your email where Graves reviews himself is nice and all, but to me applying an Fst measure to dismiss genes just seems like some ad hoc contrived nonsense, based on nothing. So anyone else using Fst at all to dismiss genes would add some nice support to the method. I mean you do understand that Fst is just a distribution or differentiation measure, which has no connection to significance of effect sizes? You do get that, right?

Incidentally, have you read this: A review of intelligence GWAS hits: Their relationship to country IQ and the issue of spatial autocorrelation

Graves doesn't use Fst to dismiss genes only to analyze their genetic divergence within subpopulations. I haven't read that article before although I have heard of David Piffer who has published articles in Mankind Quarterly, a journal notorious for publishing studies regarded as Scientific Racism. I see that this one was published in Intelligence. I will take a look at it and try to get Graves or a geneticist familiar with this type of research to look at it.

 

[Phill]

Graves doesn't use Fst to dismiss genes

That's exactly what he does. Why not get a geneticist to look at Graves' paper?

 

[EgalitarianJay]

That's exactly what he does. Why not get a geneticist to look at Graves' paper?

I can do that as well.

 

[Phill]

I can do that as well.

Please do.

Squaring phenomena that are continuously distributed and sporadic with Mendelian genetics was accomplished with the Fisher–Wright (FW) model, which is the foundation of modern quantitative genetics. The FW model assumes that complex human traits are the result of a very large number of segregating genes, each with very small, indeed infinitesimal, effects.

Source

Surely dismissing every gene not differentiated by the large amount of Fst 0.25 would dismiss every gene contributing to a highly polygenic trait. It's clearly something Graves made up to dismiss race IQ genes, and has been applied nowhere else. In short, the Graves paper is garbage.