[allovernow]

Hell, look at the insane, wholly unscientific public crucification of James Watson for commenting, totally reasonably, on this very subject. Stripped of a Nobel prize for suggesting that two and two may equal four. Find me one credible media outlet which even questioned such treatment!

Edit: sorry, I misread a headline about him losing the prize, it read stripped of "honors". Point still stands.

[wdbbdw]

'Dr. Francis Collins, the director of the National Institutes of Health, said that most experts on intelligence “consider any black-white differences in I.Q. testing to arise primarily from environmental, not genetic, differences.”

Dr. Collins said he was unaware of any credible research on which Dr. Watson’s “profoundly unfortunate" statement would be based.' [0]

I think this video [1], does a good job of attacking a lot of race science and intelligence, though at 2.5 hours long it may be a bit too thorough.

[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/01/science/watson-dna-geneti...

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UBc7qBS1Ujo

edited for formatting

[deogeo]

Dr. Francis is either unfamiliar with, or being profoundly misleading of, expert opinion, as surveys show:

"In the current study, EQCA experts wereasked what percentage of the US Black-White differences in IQ is, in their view, due to environment or genes. In general, EQCA experts gave a 50–50 (50% genes, 50% environment) response with a slight tilt to the environmental position (51% vs. 49%; Table 3). When EQCA experts were classified into discrete categories (genetic, environmental, or 50–50), 40% favored an environmental position, 43% a genetic position, and 17% assumed 50–50." - https://doi.org/10.1016/j.intell.2019.101406

> I think this video [1], does a good job of attacking a lot of race science and intelligence

'Attacking' is a good description, as the author of that video went to great lengths to mislead. For example, he says the author of The Bell Curve doesn't understand what 'hereditary' means. But the definition the video author gives for 'hereditary', and the definition given in the book he's reviewing, match almost perfectly. So how did he come to that conclusion? He went out of his way to find a live interview where the book author fumbled his answer, instead of giving the definition from the book he's reviewing, or as you more accurately put it, attacking.

[wdbbdw]

While the quote you pulled from that survey seems to contradict what Dr. Collins said in his statement, the two sentences before that one seem more problematic for the idea that there's even a difference in IQ that can be attributed to race:

"There was little to no support for separate subgroup norms for different racial, ethnic, or social groups or for people with different nationalities (natives vs. immigrants), with the percentage of experts favoring separate norms below 25%.

There was no clear position among experts regarding environmental and genetic factors in the US Black-White difference in intelligence."

Maybe Dr. Collins rubs shoulders with experts other than those surveyed here, who knows.

Looking at the SD in the survey responses suggests that the position of the researchers polled in this survey wasn't accurately represented by the quote you posted.

The example you use to critique the video I posted is also not very generous, and is a pretty lame rebuttal to what was a very extensive attack on the ideas presented in "The Bell Curve". Do you have any critiques on the more relevant points that the video actually makes? E.g. what is intelligence anyway and how can it be measured, if at all? Or, presuming that IQ is an accurate measure of intelligence, then how to square the supposition the Bell Curve makes about an idiocracy-style drop in IQ points with the Flynn effect?

Another relevant question is what exactly is the scientific support for "race" as anything other than a meaningless label[0]? For example, in the interview of Charles Murray conducted by Sam Harris for his podcast, Murray used Barack Obama as an example of a typical black man, saying that, and I'm paraphrasing, even supposing that there is a difference in IQ between the races, it wouldn't justify denying a job to someone like Barack Obama if he came in applying for one. But, like, why is Obama black and not white? Have you seen a picture of Obama's mom? She's the whitest white lady from Kansas. I was recently working on some cancer project and I had a spreadsheet of the subjects' self-reported race, as well as genetic ancestry results showing the percentage of African ancestry and European ancestry. Some of the respondents who self-reported as African American had 97% European ancestry.

[0] https://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/2018/04/race-gen...

[deogeo]

> Looking at the SD in the survey responses suggests that the position of the researchers polled in this survey wasn't accurately represented by the quote you posted.

There's one or two charts in the article, showing how many experts believe the IQ gap is 0% genetic, how many believe it's 10%, and so on, up to 100%. There's a large spike at 0%, then a noisy, mostly equal distribution up to 100%, where it drops back down to near zero - i.e. almost no hereditarian believes environment plays no role. So yes, there's no consensus, but the view that IQ is hereditary is well represented among experts - moreso than the opposite.

The Flynn effect disproves nothing, much like the increasing average height doesn't imply height isn't heritable. As I don't believe IQ is 100% determined by genes, there's any number of explanations that are consistent with heritable intelligence - changes in culture, environment, upbringing, nutrition, air quality, levels of athleticism, etc. For example:

"Similarly, researchers have shown that differences in the ways boys and girls spend their time (e.g., playing with Legos) (Bornstein et al., 1999), toy selection (Goldstein, 1994), and computer videogame experience (Quaiser-Pohl et al., 2006) are responsible for differences in their spatial abilities, also loaded on g."

> The example you use to critique the video I posted is also not very generous

The example was to show the video author was being deliberately misleading, going out of his way to hide data that opposes his conclusion. Meaning everything else in the video is probably similarly cherry-picked.

> what is intelligence anyway and how can it be measured, if at all?

I don't see how minor fuzzyness in the definition of intelligence casts any doubt on clearly defined IQ scores, especially when IQ has been shown to be such a useful and important measure - IQ is very predictive for success at other tasks also considered to require intelligence, such as academic achievement - this is referred to as being g-loaded. Moreover, the more g-loaded a test is, the more heritable performance on it is [2].

> Another relevant question is what exactly is the scientific support for "race" as anything other than a meaningless label[0]?

Race is simply how closely related people are, at a very coarse level, where clusters correspond to races. See this post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22052174

[1] https://www.cato-unbound.org/2007/11/13/stephen-j-ceci/signi...

[2] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4437459/

[wdbbdw]

I'm confused about how you got to your first point. You cited figures from the survey paper that show a spike at 0% genetic (meaning that a bunch of the people surveyed think there's a very low genetic influence on intelligence), but then you say "the view that IQ is hereditary is well represented among experts - moreso than the opposite." Doesn't the figure you cite contradict your conclusion?

The HN post you referred to supporting the idea of "race" included a link to a paper [0] where these are the final 2 lines of the abstract: "Respondents educated in Western Europe, physical anthropologists, and middle-aged persons reject race more frequently than respondents educated in Eastern Europe, people in other branches of science, and those from both younger and older generations. The survey shows that the views of anthropologists on race are sociopolitically (ideologically) influenced and highly dependent on education."

I wouldn't call that scientific support for the notion of race as a meaningful category.

Ever since the idea of "white" people was invented, groups which have at one time or another been considered non-white include the Germans, Greeks, white Hispanics, Arabs, Iranians, Afghans, Irish, Italians, Jews, Slavs and Spaniards. [1][2]

I agree with you about the video I linked to cherry picking that quote from Murray about heritability. That section was taken from a critique [3] of The Bell Curve, and the paragraph it was pulled from ends with this: "The Bell Curve itself does not make these embarrassing mistakes. Herrnstein, the late co-author, was a professional on these topics. But the upshot of part of this essay is that the book's main argument depends for some of its persuasive force on a more subtle conflation of heritability and genetic determination. And Murray's confusion serves to underscore just how difficult these concepts can be, even for someone so numerate as Murray."

It doesn't seem like we will be convincing each other of anything here. For me, it's just about impossible to be schooled on the history of America and the incredible multifaceted assault on people that aren't white, which is still very much ongoing, and then argue that there's any way to say that there isn't an overwhelming environmental cause for disparities in socioeconomic status/IQ/incarcaration rates/etc between blacks and whites. Just falling back on ockham's razor, which seems more likely:

A - After humans migrated out of Africa and spread out over the globe, there was selection for genes that generated differing amounts of melanin in reaction to different amounts of sunlight at different latitudes. For some reason, genes linked with intelligence shifted as well so that there is now a strong correlation between skin pigmentation levels and intelligence despite a lack of any obvious reason for these things to be linked.

or

B - Africans, being better adept at surviving the malarial load of the new world due to a genetic predisposition [4] were recruited en masse for the trans-atlantic slave trade. The people running this slave trade, having at least a modicum of morality and most likely Christian, invented a theory of race that placed Africans below Europeans so that it became less morally repugnant to maintain the chattel slavery system. This theory of race pitted all of the poor people against each other, allowing people in power to maintain their positions. This theory of race also allowed for a prolonged (and ongoing) withholding of resources from an entire population of people (defined by having dark skin), and this deprivation is having a direct effect on the success of dark-skinned people in many different measurements.

For me, it's B all the way.

[0] https://researchers.mq.edu.au/en/publications/current-views-...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_people#United_States

[2] https://digitalcommons.law.yale.edu/ylj/vol109/iss4/4/

[3] https://www.nyu.edu/gsas/dept/philo/faculty/block/papers/Her...

[4] https://www.nps.gov/ethnography/aah/aaheritage/lowCountry_fu...

[deogeo]

> I'm confused about how you got to your first point. You cited figures from the survey paper that show a spike at 0% genetic (meaning that a bunch of the people surveyed think there's a very low genetic influence on intelligence),

No no no - the spike is not at "very low", but at zero. While the people that believe there's some genetic influence, are about evenly distributed between thinking that influence is anywhere from 10% to 90%. In total, more believe there's some influence than zero influence.

> I wouldn't call that scientific support for the notion of race as a meaningful category.

Neither is it a consensus debunking it. And what the idea used to be is irrelevant to the current understanding.

> argue that there's any way to say that there isn't an overwhelming environmental cause for disparities in socioeconomic status/IQ/incarcaration rates/etc between blacks and whites.

But I never argued that. A and B aren't mutually exclusive.

As for Occam's razor, well, claiming that of all the genetic distance caused by geographical separation for tens of millenia, none of it affects intelligence or personality - that just doesn't seem very likely to me. It's not the case for dogs [1], why should it be for humans?

[1] https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/canine-corner/201304...

[dragonwriter]

> Hell, look at the insane, wholly unscientific public crucification of James Watson for commenting, totally reasonably, on this very subject.

Watson wasn't crucified, or anything remotely analogous to it, his comments weren't particularly reasonable, and even his own near immediate apology explicitly noted that there was no scientific basis for them. (Though he has since returned to repeating them; the whole thing is weird since at the time he first made them, there was a very recent piece of work which could have been cited as support for the geography/IQ link he suggested, but in between then and the time he went back to issuing them that work had been torn apart for gross methodological errors, including deliberately excluding data to fit the intended conclusion.)

> Stripped of a Nobel prize for suggesting that two and two may equal four.

He wasn't stripped of a Nobel prize, and he absolutely wasn't suggesting two plus two may equal four; he made an at best thinly supported claim about geography and IQ combined with a completely unsubstantiated claim about the premises of development policy toward Africa, and drew a dire conclusion from that combination.

[barry-cotter]

You can’t be stripped of a Nobel prize.

[0xADEADBEE]

Looks like he sold his medal [0] to ameliorate his loss of earnings; perhaps that's to what GP was referring.

[0] - https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/science/11261872/James-Wats...

[wdbbdw]

He never actually sold it [0]; a billionaire just paid him some cash instead and Watson got to keep his prize.

[0] https://www.theguardian.com/science/2014/dec/09/russian-bill...

[tiles]

Rather than public crucifixion, it looks like James Watson actually did quite well for himself?

[Fishysoup]

"Two and two may equal four" being a bunch of nonsensical racist slandering based on no evidence. Every result ever has pointed that all races and genders are equally "intelligent" and well-suited to the same tasks. And trust me, there's been no lack of racist scientists. It's just that bullshit doesn't stick.

[barry-cotter]

> Every result ever has pointed that all races and genders are equally "intelligent" and well-suited to the same tasks.

This isn’t true. Ashkenazi Jews and East Asians have higher IQ scores than whites. Male and female scores on IQ tests are identical by construction. They have different scores on the component sub tests.

http://www1.udel.edu/educ/gottfredson/reprints/1997mainstrea...

Mainstream Science on Intelligence: An Editorial With 52 Signatories, History, and Bibliography

Since the publication of “The Bell Curve,” many commentators have offered opinions about human intelligence that misstate cur- rent scientific evidence. Some conclusions dismissed in the media as discredited are ac- tually firmly supported. This statement outlines conclusions re- garded as mainstream among researchers on intelligence, in particular, on the nature, ori- gins, and practical consequences of individu- al and group differences in intelligence. Its aim is to promote more reasoned discussion of the vexing phenomenon that the research has revealed in recent decades. The follow- ing conclusions are fully described in the major textbooks, professional journals and encyclopedias in intelligence.

[soyiuz]

I suggest going back to school on your basic terms. Skin color taxonomies such as "white" and "black" are weak proxies for genetic diversity. Races are not taught this way anymore. This article in Scientific American puts it well in summarizing that "the mainstream belief among scientists is that race is a social construct without biological meaning."^1 "Ashkenazi Jews ... have higher IQ scores than whites" is a nonsensical statement from that perspective. You are mixing categories of ancestry and skin color. The authors of Bell Curve made the same basic mistake and were rightly skewered for it.

1. https://www-scientificamerican-com/article/race-is-a-social-...

[deogeo]

Apply principal component analysis to human DNA, and not only does race pop out, it even coincides with the 'socially constructed' categories [1,2,3]. A 2009 survey of physical anthropologists in Europe by Katarzyna Kaszycka found that 51% (N=123) recognize biological race - 33% in Western Europe, and 70% in Eastern Europe [4]. In a review of China's only biological anthropological journal Acta Anthropologica Sinica, 324 article from the 1982-2001 period that dealt with human variation. The researchers found that "all of the articles used the race concept and none of them questioned its value" [5].

[1] https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Principal_compon...

[2] https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Individual-level_hum...

[3] https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:3D_PCA_plot_of_Xavan...

[4] http://sci-hub.tw/10.1111/j.1548-1433.2009.01076.x

[5] https://lesacreduprintemps19.files.wordpress.com/2011/07/on-...

[Chris2048]

Do you have studies that use better taxonomies of "race"? Or do you mean any statement about race is so confounded by social factors it becomes nonsensical.

Also, The original claim was:

> Every result ever has pointed that all races and genders are..

If you muddy the water wrt race, it invalidates the above claim also.

[jdauriemma]

Those bell curves don't control for environmental and other non-genetic factors, making your statements - insofar as they are based on the document you linked - irrelevant to the conversation.

[toomim]

He wasn't commenting on which factors cause difference in test scores. He was simply saying that the test scores are different.

But it's become an unfortunate pattern that when people bring up the difference in scores, other people (like you) presume that mentioning the correlation data itself is akin to arguing that they are caused by genetic factors, and then attack them for not mentioning the environmental factors.

[Eldt]

This is disingenuous. Did you miss where he mentioned "whites" without any context of location/upbringing/...

[toomim]

There you go again, attacking him for not mentioning the environmental factors.

You are too predictable. You just did exactly the behavior I criticized, in response to my critique!

[deogeo]

> Every result ever has pointed that all races and genders are equally "intelligent" and well-suited to the same tasks.

Really? The strongest rebuttals I ever saw boiled down to "it has not yet been conclusively proven impossible that all races are equally intelligent". Large meta-analyses certainly always find correlation, this one goes a long way towards showing there is causation as well: https://doi.org/10.1111%2Fj.1467-9280.2006.01803.x

[rfdbsd]

> Large meta-analyses certainly always find correlation

No legitimate study has actually shown that such correlations are caused by genetic factors. However, numerous studies have shown that social factors (i.e. not having access to good schools, not having access to decent healthcare, etc, which statistically and historically correspond with racial divisions) play a major role.

[deogeo]

So showing a correlation between environment and intelligence is clear proof that environment plays a role, but the same kind of correlation with ancestry tells us nothing? Even when economic [1] and environmental factors [2] are corrected for (to the best of our ability), and the differences persist?

No matter what the data is, you can always construct some convoluted theory by which ancestry doesn't play a role, just like you can keep adding spheres to make a geocentric solar system work.

[1] http://www.jbhe.com/latest/news/1-22-09/satracialgapfigure.g...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minnesota_Transracial_Adoption...

[steveeq1]

Ok, someone's a racist. So what? At the end of the day, it's a belief system. As long as that person treats people with respect, I have no problem with it.

For example, if you are, say, a Christian and some other guy is a Muslim and your offended by that belief, well, that's on you. It shouldn't discredit a scientific theory. Evidence is supposed to do that.

[netsharc]

The fact that your comment is gray means to me there are a lot of racists on HN. Sigh...

And worse, they're thinking they're not racist because they think they have scientific backing for their beliefs..

[non-entity]

It was just the other day where I someone on here unironically mention social darwinsism in a positive light on here. Honestly I probably need to quit HN because despite the number of informative articles and comments I read, it's more of less just becoming a collection of shit show comment sections (albeit that may be a product of me clicking on threads that encourage this). Perhaps I'm wrong, but it seems a number of these arctlces wouldn't have ever been allowed on the site a few years ago, but I wasnt as active back then as I am now.

[Chris2048]

> When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names.

If you disagree, show your reasoning, or your credentials.

[shard972]

Oh here comes the racist brigade to yell down moral proclamation upon the unwashed masses.

You know what, who cares if Watson was a flaming racist? He has done more than almost any other person to save the lives of millions of Africans but he makes one opinion about intelligence and hes slagged off and completely discredited?

Cancel culture has been in science a lot longer than people know.

[wesleywt]

Should someone be excused from dubious behaviors because he did one thing in his youth? The DNA model would have been elucidated by someone eventually. I also doubt it helped 'millions' of Africans.

[Fishysoup]

For "Africans"? Really?

Everyone is aware of Watson's contributions (though there is of course ample evidence that he stole a lot of the work from Rosalind Franklin and gave her no credit for it, then said things like "of course Franklin couldn't envision the structure of DNA because jewish women can't see in 3D - he said this in front of a preeminent female jewish structural biologist too). The discredit isn't against his scientific achievements, it's against his racist-ass opinions. That's why people don't invite him to talks much anymore, because he just goes and says made up racist shit.

[selimthegrim]

He said that about Jews, not just about Jewish women

[saagarjha]

> He has done more than almost any other person to save the lives of millions of Africans

How?

[tasogare]

Yes, intelligence is 100% environmental and cultural factor, that’s why genetic affliction such as the Down syndrome has absolutely no effect whatsoever on the subject intelligence... It’s incredible how far some people will bury their head from evidences because of their ideological beliefs.

On the contrary, when some facts put a positive light on certain groups (for instance the better maximal physical performance) there is magically no taboo about it at all, and no pressure groups asking for "affirmation action".

[Can_Not]

Strawman aside, down syndrome is just as common in black people as it is in white people, so you know, nobody was denying genetics play a role, they're just pointing out there isn't a proven correlation between "the white gene" and IQ like so many racism apologists want to believe.

[PleaseLoveMe]

If this were about "white racists", why would they rank themselves firmly below east asians and ashkenazi jews?

[Can_Not]

IDK, just sounds like more racism to me.

[lawnchair_larry]

You think it is racist to be curious about IQ variance across races? Why?

[Can_Not]

I am curious, it just turns out the world is more fluid and diverse (billions of people, millions of non-isolated genetic populations), and more interesting, than over simplified and debunked ideas like "5 races with known IQ stats".

[Eldt]

He didn't say anything about curiosity - where did you get that from, exactly?

[paganel]

You would have think that him winning a Nobel prize would have made him aware that IQ tests are a scam, apparently he didn’t.

[specialist]

You're claiming that Watson's views of IQ, genetics, and race are scientific?