So let me clear my throat and say I deeply, deeply neither wish nor suspect that Murray is remotely right. My suspicion is that the genetic roots of what we call “intelligence” are multi-layered and ultimately overpowered by cultural factors anyway.
That said, the crude categories of “race” (erroneous as they are) are not just arbitraril…
So let me clear my throat and say I deeply, deeply neither wish nor suspect that Murray is remotely right. My suspicion is that the genetic roots of what we call “intelligence” are multi-layered and ultimately overpowered by cultural factors anyway.
That said, the crude categories of “race” (erroneous as they are) are not just arbitrarily based on skin color. A Cherokee, a Filipino, an Ethiopian, and an Afghani person could all have the exact same shade of skin and hair but we consider them 4 different “races.” To the extent that “race” has any meaning whatsoever, it is on the basis of how far back a group of people share a common genetic ancestor. Members of subpopulations that reproduced in isolation from other groups developed common genetic traits, like skin color but also muscle mass, hair texture, etc, that had evolutionary advantages for their shared circumstances. It seems like wishful thinking to assume that all of these traits could be fine-tuned within a sun population but brain function would remain exactly the same in all mankind. But I’m wishing it anyway. Goodness knows the subpopulations have been mixing and matching quite a bit over the past few hundred years, and any genetic differences are starting to blur to the point that I agree with Scott and Ebo- differences within populations likely outweigh most between them.
Regardless I do very much believe that even the idea of IQ is rooted in a European cultural view and there’s no way to debias it. I certainly, fervently disagree with Murray in his conclusion to not just throw up his hands and say “the differences are genetic, there’s nothing left to be done!” but also say “it’s important to disseminate this idea so that wokeism will stop destroying America.” He is so, so wrong, and I appreciated Coleman Hughes interview that challenged him on this directly.
" A Cherokee, a Filipino, an Ethiopian, and an Afghani person could all have the exact same shade of skin and hair but we consider them 4 different 'races.'"
Hmmm, if only that were true!😅 I think this is a theory of race that might begin to be approximately meaningful (although still not very useful). But I think the vast majority of people's understanding of race is far less nuanced.
Blacks, Whites, Asians, Native Americans, Hispanics. I don't think most people's understanding of "race" gets any more sophisticated than this. And it's judged almost entirely by taking a look at the colour of people's skin. Show most people someone from Kenya, someone from Sierra Leone, someone from Zimbabwe and someone from Jamaica, and they'll say they're the same "race."
I agree that it would be wishful thinking to claim there are no genetic factors to intelligence. And I don't mind not wishing it. If somebody finds definitive proof tomorrow that people with black skin have lower IQs on average than any other group, that's fine. I'd be no less intelligent than I was the day before. As I've said many times, if we'd decided as a species that hair colour, or dominant hand, or number of folds in the ear, were important, we'd find differences by these metrics too. We've become fixated on skin colour because it's such an easily detectable difference. But that doesn't make it more meaningful genetically speaking.
But as I say in the article, let's assume it's true. Let's assumee that black people have lower IQs than everybody else. The questions are a) is IQ more important than the many other aspects of person, like social skill, determination, confidence, etc. B) what is intelligence? And can it be measured by a few questions on an IQ test? And c) what policy decisions could we make on the basis of this finding that should be applied by "race" instead of by IQ score regardless of race. Why not just test everybody at 5 years old, and place them on a life-path based on their score?
Lewis Terman, one of the pioneers of IQ research, who very much believed in racial differences, performed the longest-running studies on IQ ever, and found that no, IQ doesn't equal success at all. His predictions for the study turned out to be completely wrong because human beings are far more complex than the results of a single test can capture. And that's before we even talk about the issues with IQ itself like the Flynn effect.
Thanks for the reply, Steve. I agree with everything you say except the claim that it’s skin color and skin color alone that we use to classify people into races. We also use eye shape, facial features, and hair texture as clues to try to guess what a persons genetic roots are. The reason we put a Jamaican (presumably a descendant of slaves there), Zimbabwean, and Sierra Leone-ian(?) in the same bucket is they all can trace their ancestry to sub-Saharan Africa. Yet people from Ethiopia do tend to have lighter shades of skin than those from Kenya, just like some people from India have much darker skin than people from Japan despite our silly, shared racial categorization of “Asian”. (“Hispanic” is technically considered an ethnicity, not a race, by the US Government, which makes a smidge of sense as Spaniards are extremely similar to French and Italians, genetically speaking. But most people we think of as “Hispanic” are a genetic mix of Spanish or Portuguese colonizers and Indigenous populations in Central and South America. Again, silliness!!!!!) Anyway long story short, I still think skin color is one of the biggest clues we use to racialize someone else, but it’s not the only one, because we’re attempting to bucketize their genetic (and cultural) roots, not their shade of brown.
"I agree with everything you say except the claim that it’s skin color and skin color alone that we use to classify people into races. "
I didn't quite say that though. I said it's judged "almost entirely" on the colour of a person's skin. Which is true. Case in point, there is enormous diversity in eye shape amongst people we'd all label "white." We just don't really notice it because the "primary" differentiator of skin is similar enough.
Look at Steve Buscemi's eyes vs Benedict Cumberbatch's vs Matthew Mcconaughey's. Do we differentiate between them racially? Nope. In the overwhelming majority of cases we don't. Secondary characteristics like eye shape might be used on the rare occasions where skin colour isn't definitive (hair texture only in the case of black people really, you could shave everybody bald and it wouldn't make a difference to their "racial" categorisation). But again, I think you're significantly overestimating the nuance with which most people think about race.
And further, bucketising (great word) all people from sub-saharan Africa makes no more sense than bucketising Russians and Chinese people together. Or even Mongolians and Chinese people. I chose those countries in Africa because they're separated by enormous distances. Yet people still think that one "race" covers them all.
The primary thing those people have in common is ancestry from a part of the world hot enough that darker skin was evolutionarily advantageous. As you say, there is variation here too, because the amount of melanin required for the conditions varied. But if what you say about secondary characteristics were true, nobody would think I was the same "race" as somebody from Kenya. Or Uganda. Because our facial features are actually quite different. Same, as you say, for Asians. Although even the differences between Filipinos and Koreans, for example, are significant.
The frequency of the "Where are you from" that Asians get casts a bit of tension on skin color differentiation. My fairest skinned daughter got more of that than the darker one because momma's eyes are more pronounced with her.
More often hypersexualized as "exotic" than the black women shaking their ass on tic-Tok, you might be underestimating the influence of eye shape. And it can be a curse as many Asian women will testify.
"The frequency of the "Where are you from" that Asians get casts a bit of tension on skin color differentiation."
Yeah, but I think they're asking about national origin here. Not whether somebody is of the "Asian" race. I get asked where I'm from quite often too. But I don't think it's because they're wondering if I'm black.
Mixed "race" people are, I hope, the ultimate end to all this stupidity. Once we're all mixed together enough that we're really forced to grapple with the fact that nobody is simply "white" or "black" anymore, because we're obviously a mixture of all of them, maybe (hopefully) the whole concept just fades away.
Many of us are mixtures already of course. But it's not visually obvious enough to make a difference. Genetically, this whole issue has been settled for years.
Yeah, nobody is asking about "Asian race", they've already decided that. "Where are you from?" is the perpetual, "You are a foreigner", even if you are a 3rd generation Americans or longer. When the reply is "Florida" there is an instant "That's not what I meant."
I commented to Chris about other appearance characteristics than skin tone before I saw this. I the case of my wife (dark skinned), that meant less than hair, eyes, cheekbones, etc. in identifying tribal kin.
"It seems like wishful thinking to assume that all of these traits could be fine-tuned within a sun population but brain function would remain exactly the same in all mankind."
Thank you for breaching this delicacy. I've wondered about this more than half my life.
The characteristics of a population represent equilibria established by selection pressures. Notions of race focus too much on melanin content; melanin levels represent an equilibrium between two primary factors both bases on ultraviolet light:
1) protection from melanoma, favoring more melanin
2) promotion of ergosterol to vitamin D, favoring less
Equatorial people have no shortage of UV and so have no ssues with vitamin D; polar people are in little danger of melanoma but need UV for nutritional health.
Malaria affects equilibria in many characteristics; sickle cell anemia kills a quarter of those with two alleles yet malaria would kill them all; with SCA the blood cells burst open before the parasites are mature. Favism (allergy to fava beans) confers malarial immunity.
But these are physical characteristics. Selection pressure for intelligence is cultural. It's only weakly advantageous to a society of hunter-gatherers. It's a lot more advantageous now.
Much though I detest Murray's foregone conclusions, it does seem a little absurd to presume that cultures as different as tropical aboriginals and urban Europeans would experience identical selection pressures for intelligence.
But now the selection pressures are based mostly on pretty. SF writer CM Kornbluth wrote two short stories ("The Marching Morons" and "The Little Black Bag") in which the world of the future if populated with a tiny minority of hyper-intelligent people and a majority with IQs around 45 on our modern scale.
A Bell Curve has that shape with random data. Anything that creates a bias creates a deviation from the nominal which changes the shape of the curve. If the bias created a new value with a different nominal value and its own sharp standard deviation the curve would have two peaks with one likely to be greater than the other.
It's been years since I read that book, but I think they observed that. The question then becomes, what caused that bias? They did a bunch of controlling for various factors deemed to isolate the cause of the bias to be average IQ for the mean values of the "races" being compared. It looked good. That is standard stuff in methodology, but the question remains, were there factors they did not control? With something as complex as humans and all influences, no doubt they didn't control all biases that lead to a result other than innate "race" attributes, so the question becomes a matter of their significance.
A larger issue in my mind is, is there a single aggerate value for intelligence that is a valid concept? A savant might not be able to tie their shoes but be able to do some "thing" at a level beyond the capability of an IQ genius. Scaled back toward norms there are certainly people with lower IQs than me who I would hire to perform tasks that they have expertise in that I don't. Smarter about what? If the test itself has a bias to favor a certain group, a comparison of the groups is bogus, even if it could mean something valid if unbiased. In my opinion it probably doesn't.
So let me clear my throat and say I deeply, deeply neither wish nor suspect that Murray is remotely right. My suspicion is that the genetic roots of what we call “intelligence” are multi-layered and ultimately overpowered by cultural factors anyway.
That said, the crude categories of “race” (erroneous as they are) are not just arbitrarily based on skin color. A Cherokee, a Filipino, an Ethiopian, and an Afghani person could all have the exact same shade of skin and hair but we consider them 4 different “races.” To the extent that “race” has any meaning whatsoever, it is on the basis of how far back a group of people share a common genetic ancestor. Members of subpopulations that reproduced in isolation from other groups developed common genetic traits, like skin color but also muscle mass, hair texture, etc, that had evolutionary advantages for their shared circumstances. It seems like wishful thinking to assume that all of these traits could be fine-tuned within a sun population but brain function would remain exactly the same in all mankind. But I’m wishing it anyway. Goodness knows the subpopulations have been mixing and matching quite a bit over the past few hundred years, and any genetic differences are starting to blur to the point that I agree with Scott and Ebo- differences within populations likely outweigh most between them.
Regardless I do very much believe that even the idea of IQ is rooted in a European cultural view and there’s no way to debias it. I certainly, fervently disagree with Murray in his conclusion to not just throw up his hands and say “the differences are genetic, there’s nothing left to be done!” but also say “it’s important to disseminate this idea so that wokeism will stop destroying America.” He is so, so wrong, and I appreciated Coleman Hughes interview that challenged him on this directly.
" A Cherokee, a Filipino, an Ethiopian, and an Afghani person could all have the exact same shade of skin and hair but we consider them 4 different 'races.'"
Hmmm, if only that were true!😅 I think this is a theory of race that might begin to be approximately meaningful (although still not very useful). But I think the vast majority of people's understanding of race is far less nuanced.
Blacks, Whites, Asians, Native Americans, Hispanics. I don't think most people's understanding of "race" gets any more sophisticated than this. And it's judged almost entirely by taking a look at the colour of people's skin. Show most people someone from Kenya, someone from Sierra Leone, someone from Zimbabwe and someone from Jamaica, and they'll say they're the same "race."
I agree that it would be wishful thinking to claim there are no genetic factors to intelligence. And I don't mind not wishing it. If somebody finds definitive proof tomorrow that people with black skin have lower IQs on average than any other group, that's fine. I'd be no less intelligent than I was the day before. As I've said many times, if we'd decided as a species that hair colour, or dominant hand, or number of folds in the ear, were important, we'd find differences by these metrics too. We've become fixated on skin colour because it's such an easily detectable difference. But that doesn't make it more meaningful genetically speaking.
But as I say in the article, let's assume it's true. Let's assumee that black people have lower IQs than everybody else. The questions are a) is IQ more important than the many other aspects of person, like social skill, determination, confidence, etc. B) what is intelligence? And can it be measured by a few questions on an IQ test? And c) what policy decisions could we make on the basis of this finding that should be applied by "race" instead of by IQ score regardless of race. Why not just test everybody at 5 years old, and place them on a life-path based on their score?
Lewis Terman, one of the pioneers of IQ research, who very much believed in racial differences, performed the longest-running studies on IQ ever, and found that no, IQ doesn't equal success at all. His predictions for the study turned out to be completely wrong because human beings are far more complex than the results of a single test can capture. And that's before we even talk about the issues with IQ itself like the Flynn effect.
Thanks for the reply, Steve. I agree with everything you say except the claim that it’s skin color and skin color alone that we use to classify people into races. We also use eye shape, facial features, and hair texture as clues to try to guess what a persons genetic roots are. The reason we put a Jamaican (presumably a descendant of slaves there), Zimbabwean, and Sierra Leone-ian(?) in the same bucket is they all can trace their ancestry to sub-Saharan Africa. Yet people from Ethiopia do tend to have lighter shades of skin than those from Kenya, just like some people from India have much darker skin than people from Japan despite our silly, shared racial categorization of “Asian”. (“Hispanic” is technically considered an ethnicity, not a race, by the US Government, which makes a smidge of sense as Spaniards are extremely similar to French and Italians, genetically speaking. But most people we think of as “Hispanic” are a genetic mix of Spanish or Portuguese colonizers and Indigenous populations in Central and South America. Again, silliness!!!!!) Anyway long story short, I still think skin color is one of the biggest clues we use to racialize someone else, but it’s not the only one, because we’re attempting to bucketize their genetic (and cultural) roots, not their shade of brown.
Adding this, because it’s neat: https://www.grida.no/resources/7125
"I agree with everything you say except the claim that it’s skin color and skin color alone that we use to classify people into races. "
I didn't quite say that though. I said it's judged "almost entirely" on the colour of a person's skin. Which is true. Case in point, there is enormous diversity in eye shape amongst people we'd all label "white." We just don't really notice it because the "primary" differentiator of skin is similar enough.
Look at Steve Buscemi's eyes vs Benedict Cumberbatch's vs Matthew Mcconaughey's. Do we differentiate between them racially? Nope. In the overwhelming majority of cases we don't. Secondary characteristics like eye shape might be used on the rare occasions where skin colour isn't definitive (hair texture only in the case of black people really, you could shave everybody bald and it wouldn't make a difference to their "racial" categorisation). But again, I think you're significantly overestimating the nuance with which most people think about race.
And further, bucketising (great word) all people from sub-saharan Africa makes no more sense than bucketising Russians and Chinese people together. Or even Mongolians and Chinese people. I chose those countries in Africa because they're separated by enormous distances. Yet people still think that one "race" covers them all.
The primary thing those people have in common is ancestry from a part of the world hot enough that darker skin was evolutionarily advantageous. As you say, there is variation here too, because the amount of melanin required for the conditions varied. But if what you say about secondary characteristics were true, nobody would think I was the same "race" as somebody from Kenya. Or Uganda. Because our facial features are actually quite different. Same, as you say, for Asians. Although even the differences between Filipinos and Koreans, for example, are significant.
The frequency of the "Where are you from" that Asians get casts a bit of tension on skin color differentiation. My fairest skinned daughter got more of that than the darker one because momma's eyes are more pronounced with her.
More often hypersexualized as "exotic" than the black women shaking their ass on tic-Tok, you might be underestimating the influence of eye shape. And it can be a curse as many Asian women will testify.
"The frequency of the "Where are you from" that Asians get casts a bit of tension on skin color differentiation."
Yeah, but I think they're asking about national origin here. Not whether somebody is of the "Asian" race. I get asked where I'm from quite often too. But I don't think it's because they're wondering if I'm black.
Mixed "race" people are, I hope, the ultimate end to all this stupidity. Once we're all mixed together enough that we're really forced to grapple with the fact that nobody is simply "white" or "black" anymore, because we're obviously a mixture of all of them, maybe (hopefully) the whole concept just fades away.
Many of us are mixtures already of course. But it's not visually obvious enough to make a difference. Genetically, this whole issue has been settled for years.
"𝘠𝘦𝘢𝘩, 𝘣𝘶𝘵 𝘐 𝘵𝘩𝘪𝘯𝘬 𝘵𝘩𝘦𝘺'𝘳𝘦 𝘢𝘴𝘬𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘢𝘣𝘰𝘶𝘵 𝘯𝘢𝘵𝘪𝘰𝘯𝘢𝘭 𝘰𝘳𝘪𝘨𝘪𝘯 𝘩𝘦𝘳𝘦. 𝘕𝘰𝘵 𝘸𝘩𝘦𝘵𝘩𝘦𝘳 𝘴𝘰𝘮𝘦𝘣𝘰𝘥𝘺 𝘪𝘴 𝘰𝘧 𝘵𝘩𝘦 "𝘈𝘴𝘪𝘢𝘯" 𝘳𝘢𝘤𝘦."
Yeah, nobody is asking about "Asian race", they've already decided that. "Where are you from?" is the perpetual, "You are a foreigner", even if you are a 3rd generation Americans or longer. When the reply is "Florida" there is an instant "That's not what I meant."
I commented to Chris about other appearance characteristics than skin tone before I saw this. I the case of my wife (dark skinned), that meant less than hair, eyes, cheekbones, etc. in identifying tribal kin.
"It seems like wishful thinking to assume that all of these traits could be fine-tuned within a sun population but brain function would remain exactly the same in all mankind."
Thank you for breaching this delicacy. I've wondered about this more than half my life.
The characteristics of a population represent equilibria established by selection pressures. Notions of race focus too much on melanin content; melanin levels represent an equilibrium between two primary factors both bases on ultraviolet light:
1) protection from melanoma, favoring more melanin
2) promotion of ergosterol to vitamin D, favoring less
Equatorial people have no shortage of UV and so have no ssues with vitamin D; polar people are in little danger of melanoma but need UV for nutritional health.
Malaria affects equilibria in many characteristics; sickle cell anemia kills a quarter of those with two alleles yet malaria would kill them all; with SCA the blood cells burst open before the parasites are mature. Favism (allergy to fava beans) confers malarial immunity.
But these are physical characteristics. Selection pressure for intelligence is cultural. It's only weakly advantageous to a society of hunter-gatherers. It's a lot more advantageous now.
Much though I detest Murray's foregone conclusions, it does seem a little absurd to presume that cultures as different as tropical aboriginals and urban Europeans would experience identical selection pressures for intelligence.
But now the selection pressures are based mostly on pretty. SF writer CM Kornbluth wrote two short stories ("The Marching Morons" and "The Little Black Bag") in which the world of the future if populated with a tiny minority of hyper-intelligent people and a majority with IQs around 45 on our modern scale.
A Bell Curve has that shape with random data. Anything that creates a bias creates a deviation from the nominal which changes the shape of the curve. If the bias created a new value with a different nominal value and its own sharp standard deviation the curve would have two peaks with one likely to be greater than the other.
It's been years since I read that book, but I think they observed that. The question then becomes, what caused that bias? They did a bunch of controlling for various factors deemed to isolate the cause of the bias to be average IQ for the mean values of the "races" being compared. It looked good. That is standard stuff in methodology, but the question remains, were there factors they did not control? With something as complex as humans and all influences, no doubt they didn't control all biases that lead to a result other than innate "race" attributes, so the question becomes a matter of their significance.
A larger issue in my mind is, is there a single aggerate value for intelligence that is a valid concept? A savant might not be able to tie their shoes but be able to do some "thing" at a level beyond the capability of an IQ genius. Scaled back toward norms there are certainly people with lower IQs than me who I would hire to perform tasks that they have expertise in that I don't. Smarter about what? If the test itself has a bias to favor a certain group, a comparison of the groups is bogus, even if it could mean something valid if unbiased. In my opinion it probably doesn't.