From the comments on WashingtonPost.com:
* Thanks for today’s installment of “Spot the Logical Fallacies in a WaPo Article”!
* It’s generally found that psychometric scores are highest in East Asia and lower in Africa. These trends seem to show up also in developed countries. If variation in the frequency of gene alleles linked to cognitive traits is part of the explanation isn’t it the duty of science to investigate it? For example, it appears that there are differences in allele frequencies between groups for height, which has similar heritability to cognitive ability.
The authors seem to overlook the prospect that in future gene therapies could actually benefit countries that are currently struggling.
* Simply look at the repeatedly-confirmed IQ distributions of blacks compared to whites: 50% of whites have IQ above 100. About 90% of blacks have IQ below 100. This is not news, to anyone willing to look at the truth. It’s too bad that the cowardly authors of this article refuse to face this basic fact of human biology. And it makes a huge difference as to how well the different races can function in a complex society like our our own.
Think of the millions of words expended; all the word-fog generated every day in every newspaper. All to avoid confronting this genetic and racial truth, presumably to spare black feelings, but actually guaranteeing endless strife and needless frustration. It’s madness.
The two authors of this article should be fired from their jobs.
* This article is the best example of Pro-Science science-denialism since that piece in NYT in which the author claimed that the “insidious” thing about the sciences is that it is concerned with solving problems and ascertaining facts rather than asserting the values of social justice.
Be warned: Forget about the Christian Right. Nobody ever lost a research grant or teaching position for refuting creationism or supporting marriage equality. But if political correctness requires that the moon be made of green cheese, you’d be well-advised to consider your career and your good name before objecting.
* The irony is that people who claim to believe in evolution often appear to overlook the possible implications. It’s something David Friedman has pointed out.
“I think there is a pretty clear pattern. Almost everyone on the left believes that he believes in evolution. Yet I find it hard to think of any proposition popular on the left that is deduced from that belief. And, as I think I have shown, important dogmas of much of the left are inconsistent with it.”
* Two ways to be condemned as “anti-science” by poetry majors:
– Acknowledge the role genetics play in racial difference
– Acknowledge that Caitlin Jenner is a naturally-born male.
* So now it looks like the SJW totalitarians from the Humanities are targeting the Sciences as a bastion of thoughtcrime.
* See the February 16, 2001 issue of Science magazine in which the sequence of the human genome was first reported. Robert Plomin and colleagues have a paper entitled “Toward Behavioral Genomics”. In this paper gives figures for the relative contribution of genetics to various conditions, including child and adult IQ. Approximately 60% of ones adult IQ is determined by ones parents. This does not mean there will be no variation within families. However, parents with high IQs tend to have children with high IQ.
* WaPo puts an article about race in a section called “The Monkey Cage”?
Are you using the Onion’s editor’s now?
* This denial of biological racial differences is the weapon used to attack white success as illegitimate or the product of “privilege”.
It is also used to attack white countries with replacement immigration since the success of those countries supposedly has nothing to do with the biological makeup of the people in those countries.
It is an impossible thing this equality between the races. And race denial only exists when there is a powerful ideological movement to deny race. Prior to Hitler, race denial didn’t exist outside of a few loonie Boasians and Marxists, and in China – which is resilient to western influence – race denial doesn’t exist at all.
In the former USSR and Warsaw Pact, a majority of anthropologists recognize race.
Today, in the west, there is a battle between the science of biological human races on one side, and on the other ideological maxims about “hate” and “prejudice”, overgeneralized narratives of history about Hitler and colonial empires, and naked anti-white race hate.
* This article smacks of Lysenckoism in the Soviet Union where certain research was banned and geneticists whose views clashed with official ideology were sent to gulags.
A more nuanced take is provided by Steve Hsu, a BGI Cognitive Genomics Project member. Hsu comments:
“Of course, we can get into endless arguments about how we define European or Asian, and of course there is substructure within the clusters, but it is rather obvious that there are identifiable groupings, and as the Risch study shows, they correspond very well to self-identified notions of race.
Two groups that form distinct clusters are likely to exhibit different frequency distributions over various genes, leading to group differences.
This leads us to two very different possibilities in human genetic variation:
Hypothesis 1: (the PC mantra) The only group differences that exist between the clusters (races) are innocuous and superficial, for example related to skin color, hair color, body type, etc.
Hypothesis 2: (the dangerous one) Group differences exist which might affect important (let us say, deep rather than superficial) and measurable characteristics, such as cognitive abilities, personality, athletic prowess, etc.
As scientists, we don’t know whether H1 or H2 is correct, but given the revolution in biotechnology, we will eventually.
It is important to note that group differences are statistical in nature and do not imply anything definitive about a particular individual. Rather than rely on the scientifically unsupported claim that we are all equal, it would be better to emphasize that we all have inalienable human rights regardless of our abilities or genetic makeup.”
* “Such an argument places the history and future of human conflict in genes, as if human interaction and environmental influences cannot match their power.”
Actually, genes play a much more crucial role – at least at the individual level – than all other factors combined, in the vast majority of areas. Myriad twin studies (and similar types of studies) have showed as much time and time again. Once again, this is sloppy “science” writing, thanks to journalists – professional writers, not professionals at anything else – attempting to cover science, something they do not really understand all that well. (But think they do, because many journalists are arrogant.) The reason race isn’t a good predictor of future potential (in any area) is because race is a LOT less reliant upon, and indicative of, a person’s genetics than one might think. “Race,” essentially, boils down to skin color. Ie, the number (and activity levels) of melanocytes in a human being’s skin. That’s it. There are so many other genes, completely independent from those, in every human that it’s just ridiculous to assume that race is a predictor of anything. Even human *height* is more multi-genetic than “race.” But make no mistake, despite what this journalist – who likely has next to no educational background in nor comprehension of the natural sciences – seems to think, genes play the largest role of all factors in most domains of an individual’s development, identity, and behavior, and so it is not a stretch to extrapolate that genes probably play a powerful, if not utterly dominant, role in societal behavior, human history, etc.
* Yes, colonialism proceeds from domination, conquest and arrogance, but devastating effects? You mean the British and the French conquering much of Africa and imposing a culture technologically 400 years ahead of the local tribes? When they left, some 130 years later, the children, the aged and the poor all bemoaned their departure. In spite of all their sins, British and French cultures pushed Africa’s development forward by several centuries. Under their rule the water was safe to drink, schools were open and functioning, ethnic cleansing and genocide were stopped, the rule of law protected women and granted them political equality. Religious diversity was allowed, as were differing political parties, the right to vote and to dissent. Hospitals were open, and Western health care and vaccinations cut childbirth death rates by 80% and increased overall life expectancy by 51%. Slave trading and the sale of children were abolished and rape and murder rates were drastically curtailed, while literacy rates were improved across all age groups. Yes, colonialism and cultural takeover were imposed by force, but their ills were no worse than those suffered by the French and the British at the hands of their Roman conquerors some 2000 years before. The same Romans had won their freedom from their Greek masters long before that. Colonialism is as old as this earth, but historically it is what makes a culture stronger. You either repel the invaders, as Europe did when it drove back the Muslim invasion in 800 AD, or you lose, get colonized and grow stronger in the sharing of your conqueror’s might, as the same European did when invaded by the Vikings. The more developed countries in Africa or the Caribbeans today are typically those which have retained the advanced features of their former conquerors’ cultures.
* Do you ever want to go back and punch a new math-er who gave us a generation of academics that presuppose an outcome based on their own internal biases, and reject statistical correlation when they don’t match up?
These professors would have killed BiDill in its crib before we could use it to tackle cardiac disease in the self identified black population, which kills 85,000 african americans, or about 3x more per capita than the honkies.
Gentlemen, you are quite literally killing people with this nonsense.
* The authors are professors of Pan-African studies and sociology, and they think racism is everywhere, even in fact based science. Shocking. Absolutely shocking.
* Anyone who says race doesn’t exist should look up the definition. As Professor Jerry Coyne comments:
“What are races?
In my own field of evolutionary biology, races of animals (also called “subspecies” or “ecotypes”) are morphologically distinguishable populations that live in allopatry (i.e. are geographically separated). There is no firm criterion on how much morphological difference it takes to delimit a race. Races of mice, for example, are described solely on the basis of difference in coat color, which could involve only one or two genes.
Under that criterion, are there human races?
Yes. As we all know, there are morphologically different groups of people who live in different areas, though those differences are blurring due to recent innovations in transportation that have led to more admixture between human groups.”
* This is a “Let’s pretend everyone is exactly the same” story. Genetics provides innate capabilities and limitations; and that is often correlated with race. This is a fact.
Evolutionary selection happens. It is the basis of evolution. Humans are animals too.
Sickle cell anemia is predominately an African evolutionary trait that helps resist against Malaria. There are Europeans whose ancestors survived the plague and evolutionary selection provides them with some resistance to or even immunity to HIV because of chemical similarity. Some southwest Native Americans were selected by evolution to survive scarce food supply; and therefore easily become fat on a normal diet. The ones that didn’t have the store fat gene were more likely to die of starvation. It is easy to prove these are genetic with racial correlation, yet people do not wish to believe there can be genetic racial correlation with behavior and ability.
As a society, we should strive for equality before the law and equal opportunity. Equality of outcome can only be achieved under theoretical Marxism. But Marxism does not work in reality, since it does not consider human behavior.
There is certainly inequality in innate ability, but that has nothing to do with inequality of outcome. I can crush Kobe Bryant on solving a system of partial differential equations, but his ability to put a ball through a hoop is $24,600,000 more valuable. He decided to work very hard to develop his innate abilities and good for him. If more lower class people did the same, we would have a lot fewer lower class people.
A fair society is not one in which all are equal, and equally poor off. A fair society is one which all can do their best and keep what they earn, which allows everyone to be better off.
* Race gives you a lot of information about a person’s genetic makeup. That is why campaigns to treat certain blood diseases like sickle cell are concentrated on black communities. And, when it comes to the brain, that is why black schools don’t improve their performance even when the Zuckerberg pours 100 million dollars into a few selected ones.
Liberals have had 60 years to prove that the environment can determine intelligence and all their programs have failed horribly. Meanwhile, the children of Vietnamese refugees that lived entire lives of fears and persecutions immediately rise to top spots in americans and european schools.
* In 2010 Christian Lemaitre became the 446th person to record a time in the 100 meter dash of less than 10 seconds. He also became the first person to accomplish this feat who was NOT of West African descent. Unless you think that this is one of the most remarkable anomalies in the history of athletics and statistics, you would probably conclude that people of West African descent have a genetic and physical predisposition to speed. I’d submit that you would have to either be an idiot or a racist to draw any other conclusion. You’d be a racist to believe that these 445 men of West African descent simply work harder than every Asian, South American, European or East African who has ever trod the Earth. In effect, you would be saying that every child of a different ethnic background simply isn’t training hard enough. So which is it?
* When modern Bolsheviks use words like pernicious, noxious or odious, they mean “truth that is forbidden to know, write or speak.”
Donald Trump knows and speaks forbidden truths. And that encourages others. Bolsheviks no likey.
Comes a Trumpening.
* Has anyone else noticed that articles denouncing upsetting science often seem to endorse the very same upsetting science? (Or perhaps a barely distinguishable version of it?) It’s as if they’re trying to edge their way toward admitting the unpleasant things (because they actually do want their views to be scientific) while denouncing along the way, naming and shaming the villains etc There was a Guardian article on race a while ago (Steve may have linked to it) which seemed to simultaneously claim that group differences are widely understood and accepted by the relevant scientists, and that believing in group differences was satanic thoughtcrime.
* The obvious point about Drs. Byrd and Hughey is that their careers absolutely depend on marginalizing Wade and Richwine (and Steve Sailer of course.) Coming up with fantastical, sparkly, abstract, improvable theories for why nothing is as it seems is the new norm for soft science professors.
