The IQ gap between countries is no evidence of an alleged IQ gap between races

On the effects of poverty on racial and ethnic differences in IQ

Stefan Molyneux: Now some your work has, you didn't mention race in your original formulation if I remember correctly, but some people of course have taken that and said the great challenge of intelligence is ethnic differences. Which again we talked about on this show before, that was originally I think a little bit more than 1 standard deviation between Whites and Blacks has now narrowed, fortunately of course, since the 1970s but that if the environment of poverty combines to produce IQ challenges that this may have some explanatory power as to the Black-White IQ gap and I was just wondering where you stand on that challenge.

Eric Turkheimer: Well I'm a very, very strong believer that racial differences as observed in this country nowadays are environmental in origin. As my fiend Richard Nisbett, who would be a great person for you to interview said, I'm not Agnostic on this topic I'm an Atheist. That's also a very big topic that would take a long time to explore the whole thing, but yes, if we know anything, completely aside from the genetic data and the fact that within "races," I'm not a big believer in the concept of race. But within skin color differences within the United States it's certainly the case that IQ scores run in families for in part genetic reasons but nevertheless we know that intelligence is malleable environmentally, we know it, that is unquestionably true and we know unquestionably that African-American people raise their children in circumstances that are much more difficult than Caucasian families, so-called, and that has an effect.

Now is that effect somewhat hard to quantify? Yes, it is. And it's not easy for a lot of reasons to say, "Here is the study that just shows that if you ended racism in this country the IQ difference would go away in two years." Those are not easy data to obtain and as a result of that that other hypothesis is always out there and it's hard to make that other hypothesis go away.

Stefan Molyneux: You mean the hypothesis that there are potentially genetic differences in brain size, brain potential, brain complexity, white matter and so on and it's something I subscribe to because to me it would require a smoking gun, a video with someone standing over the body for that case to be made because it is such a contentious case that we would never want to leap over and get ahead of the data.

Eric Turkheimer: I should watch Dr. Murray's interview, I don't know if he tried to make the case, but one of the things that have happened in the genetics of IQ literature in the last 10 years is that people have looked really hard to find particular genes that might explain a big chunk of individual never mind group differences in IQ and they can't find them. And that's because the genetic effect on IQ, I think we're absolutely certain about this now, is broken up in to tiny effects of thousands of genes. And to me it is very hard to see how that kind of genetic architecture, those kind of tiny individual genetic effects could produce a group difference of the kind we are talking about because you would have to have genetic differences on thousands of genes somehow coming together. So I think that hypothesis has gotten a lot less likely as we've gotten better biological understanding of the way genetics works.



Stefan Molyneux: As far as I understand it even something like height is the interaction of hundreds if not thousands of genes and I would assume, I'm no biologist, I would assume that the spine is not as complicated as the human brain which seems about the most complicated thing in existence so the idea that there's going to be any clearly smoking gun with regards to genetic influences on IQ let's get see to put it as charitably as possible it doesn't exactly seem imminent. So I think that we can do as much as possible to remediate circumstances until and cast that aside until better data is available.

Eric Turkheimer: And there other things is in biological time, or I mean even then more so in evolutionary time, the amount of time since Black people were slaves in this country is an instant, is a fraction of an instant! The expectation, that what's supposed to happen, that what was it 400 years ago we were pulling people under murderous circumstances out of Africa against their will, putting them in slavery in this country for 200 years then 100 years of Jim Crow after that followed by 50 years or whatever it is since the Civil Rights Act which has hardly made things perfect and that by now that important index of psychological functioning is supposed to be perfect is nuts to me.

Stefan Molyneux: Well ofcourse but the counter to that which I simply for forward to as the Devil's Advocate position the counter that is that there are Black populations or African populations that can be studied and be tested from an IQ standpoint that have not experienced direct European or Islamic enslavement and have not experienced colonization and so on and there are some people who say that there are still significant deficits. Although you have of course put out something relatively recently if you train Sun-Saharan Blacks on IQ tests you can get significant score improvements.

Eric Turkheimer: That's true. That's not my finding but it's true.

Stefan Molyneux: So the argument is that if you can train people to improve IQ then the great question is of g I want to touch on this briefly because Murray is a big fan of g and Flynn and yourself are significant critics of g, g being the general intelligence the idea that there is an underlying architecture of the brain that may include faster processing, better reaction times, more brain mass or whatever. There's an underlying intelligence that drives success on a variety on intelligence tests. I think you would say that this is not a fruitful area of exploration to put it as nicely as possible. Is that a fair characterization.

Eric Turkheimer: Well I don't think I'm absolutely against the concept of g. On one level g is just a statistical observation that mental tests of any kind are positively correlated which each other on average, if you do better on one test you're going to do better on other tests. And that's incontrovertible, that's simply a fact. The question of g is, why? Why does that happen? And the classical g, Charles Murray and people before him...Arthur Jensen, kind of explanation is that those things must go together because there is some kind of unified thing going on in the brain and ultimately in the genes that make it go together. And that is what I don't think is true and there are other reasons that have been very well spelled out, reasons by people like Jim Flynn environmental reasons why all of these abilities might go together that if you're good at one mental ability you're going to be exposed to environments that make you better at all mental abilities. If you're good at one thing you're going to get a job with other smart people around who are going to challenge you in other ways and get put in the classroom with the better teacher that going to make you better at all things. There are very detailed statistical models of how all that works and I find that there's a certain kind of coarse thinking to think "Oh yeah mental tests are positively correlated with each other, therefore there's a process in the brain that causes them to be correlated with each other." That's a hypothesis and I don't think there's ever been very good evidence develop for that hypothesis.

Stefan Molyneux: I'm going to give you a brief scenario or argument that I've heard about and again, pure devil's advocate position and if you could give me the counter...I think this came out of a Canadian Psychologist, I think his name was Rushton and he put forward an argument that said 50 or 100,000 years ago the races split and there was particular challenges that occurred for Europeans and Asians particularly cold climates, difficult farming and so on that he says could possibly select for greater forethought, better for delay of gratification, perhaps even greater intelligence and he says there has been ample time for the brains to go along different evolutionary paths, to whatever small degree and he puts forward that as a hypothesis and I'm wondering if you could provide the counter to that claim to that position. I'm sure you've heard of it here and there.

Eric Turkheimer: Yes, of course I have. I should say that I'm not an evolutionary biologist. Some aspects of how a story like that would work is beyond my expertise. But first of all, 50,000 years as long as that seems, is very fast for an evolutionary process of that kind to take place (a). (b) I think my main response to that is, it's a nice story. But it's completely after the fact. So you observe that there are IQ differences among groups which of course there are and there is an evolutionary, well not even an evolutionary history; an ancestral history of mankind leading back to Out-of-Africa that is reasonably well established.

You could say that, yeah of course the former explains the latter but it's what they call in evolutionary biology or psychology a just-so story. You know, it's a justification made up after the fact that may be plausibly might explain it but doesn't meant it does explain it. I don't know if I've made this argument out loud but...there are group differences, group differences are common place among abilities. They're not a rarity...this is going to sound like I'm being facetious but I'm really not...almost all great table tennis players are Asian. Almost all (until very recently) chess players are Russian. Almost all great American little league teams come from California and Texas. You could tell the same story about how Asian people developed quick hands to play table tennis. But what would it mean if you told that story?...I don't see any evidence. It's a nice story, you can tell it but it doesn't prove anything. All we know is these differences exist now (a) and (b) intelligence test scores are malleable if we tried.

So despite Empress being dismissive of Turkheimer's comments in the video he does directly address all of her arguments and those typically made by racial hereditarians with the following key points:

1) Heritability estimates depend on the variance of genes and environment for a population which can change over time (So The Wilson Effect is completely irrelevant to whether or not genes play a role in group differences in IQ as Adult IQ is dependent on the quality of the environment children are raised in).

2) No matter how heritable a trait is it can be altered by external influences (e.g. IQ scores are malleable regardless of whether or not intelligence is highly heritable).

3) Recent research on the genetic effect on IQ does not support the idea that group differences in IQ are caused by genetic differences between groups.

4) Racism in America is a historical fact and the idea that progress in America in recent decades to provide equal opportunity for disenfranchised groups such as African-Americans could eliminate racial/ethnic differences in IQ, given the known physical, economic and psychological effects of racial injustice is absurd.

5) While there is plenty of evidence supporting the idea that intelligence in certain areas can help someone nurture their mental ability in other areas when living in a good environment the idea that general intelligence comes from some function of the brain is not scientifically supported when considering the environmental reasons for someone developing a balance of mental ability.

6) Evolutionary just-so stories of how human races evolved to have differences in mental ability are not supported by credible scientific research.

This scientific paper provides references supporting the arguments Turkheimer made above with research provided by him and his colleagues.

- Intelligence: New Findings and Theoretical Developments American Psychologist Vol. 67, No. 2, 130–159 (2012)

Link

I should also point out that research on twin studies is also one of Turkheimer's areas of expertise which was discussed in the video. Identical twins (nature's equivalent of genetic clones) do not score identically on IQ tests and can develop significant behavioral differences depending on how different their environments actually are. So pointing out that human populations are not genetically identical means absolutely nothing when considering whether or not they have the same genetic potential for intelligence.

While there are of course some observable biological differences between populations they are not necessarily related to mental ability nor should they have social importance. If you are more susceptible to getting skin cancer than I am because of your skin tone that is an important difference related to health but doesn't mean I should treat you unfairly because of that difference. Genetic differences between populations that are relevant to biomedical research should absolutely be studied and they do not support racist ideologies such as White Nationalism.

 

You always go back to crying racist when I make specific scientific comments which you can't answer which directly wrecks your thesis. This comes to your own racial biases which you're trying to shoehorn into legitimacy by quoting debunked scholar-activists, including Nisbutt and his circle.

The only reviews of Nisbutt's writings I've ever seen are always negative: In one way or another, they point out shortcomings, misuse of data, and leaps to conclusion. Not one reviewer has "agreed" with Nisbett's conclusions. You're emotionally invested in the tripe that Nisbett is marketing thus are back to try to float it. I understand your motivation.

Rushton certainly was also, but I've yet to see where you've accepted an iota of any of his work, even if its in the field of expertise from his own PhD.

As I said, that video was him talking about his views, admitting they clashed with others, and that's about it. His work with Nisbutt has been criticized and I've already pointed it out. Apparently I need to repost:

Ability differentials between nations are unlikely to disappear.

Abstract
Comments on the original article, "Intelligence: New findings and theoretical developments," by R. E. Nisbett, J. Aronson, C. Blair, W. Dickens, J. Flynn, D. F. Halpern, and E. Turkheimer (see record 2011-30298-001). This comment challenges Nisbett et al's argument that Flynn effect gains will eliminate cross-national IQ inequalities "by the end of the 21st century and falsify the hypothesis that some nations lack the intelligence to fully industrialize" (p. 140). The present authors find that this optimism is not justified by the evidence. In Europe and the United States, Flynn effects are indeed rare in cohorts born after about 1980. Furthermore, it is necessary to distinguish between accelerated childhood development and higher adult intelligence.

In other words, critics again found methodological problems in Nisbutt studies.

Posting a pretty bio of Turkheimer and making references to social popularity isn't a defense of his work, as I unfortunately had to point out about Nisbutt, but again, when someone lacks any other defense to critics, I guess they'll go with all that's left. Anybody can point to someone who likes them in a weak attempt to validate themselves - including Hitler.

Turkheimer's "response" about heritability of IQ is a mismash of nothing. He relies on a vacuous response centered on personal opinion, cites no data regarding whatever his non-statement of his opinion is while he rambles on. I could just as easily post Rushton's thoughts on IQ - since he's a PhD in psychology - however you'd dismiss them off-hand for ideological and not scientific reasons. I'm saying the issue revolves around established scientific evidence, not ideology or popularity.

I'm quite sure that if studies showed adult heritability of IQ was low, Turkheimer would be trumpeting it from the rooftops rather than making dismissive, noncommittal comments about what it is or isn't. Discussions on scientific topics aren't based on the "interesting" factor, but rather their furtherance of understanding human intelligence. Turkheimer here is openly admitting he's actively and consciously ignoring scientific evidence.

Imagine if a bunch of mathematicians were debating a point of Calculus back and forth, and one of them kept writing numerous papers intentionally omitting a certain type of calculation - such as Taylor series - after which colleagues write reviews of his work pointing it out and explaining how maths taken in toto do not validate his conclusions, but he does it anyway, and then doubles down on it in a radio interview.

Somewhere along the line, a reasoned person has to conclude this guy is a flaming retard and begin to question his motives.

Sure - such as with prolonged severe malnutrition, as studies have shown. That is a severe example not in existence in the West outside of eating disorders or terminal cancers. To lump that in with "discrimination" or "apartheid" is a hilarious stretch. Again, adult IQ is highly heritable and environmental impact on it is minimal.

Yes, because intelligence runs in families, as I've stated. His focus here is on childhood IQ which is more impacted by environment than adults. Again, as his critics pointed out, he needs to draw a distinction between accelerated childhood development and higher adult intelligence, which he hasn't done. There is no question of "environment" to this degree when discussing adult IQ since it's highly heritable as are other traits such as temperament. There are a number of genetic traits that more "switch on" in adulthood such as hair color, which is why kids' hair can often be lighter in childhood.

 

I just addresed this - again - for about the 5th time.

That study is methodologically flawed and makes equally flawed conclusions. Rather reposting the study and claiming it's valid, why not address the specific flaws that scholars have pointed out?

Otherwise, your argument is a house built on sand.

And as such it makes its even more ridiculous that he'd be so dismissive of data that other scholars have to keep pointing out.

We know that based on what? By what data have you seen that shows genetic drift caused humans to evolve differently except between the ears?

 

The crux of your argument is that you're trying to claim that mistreatment by whites has caused the black/white IQ gap, basically. You keep referring to "discrimination, etc." You have yet to prove that, and instead keep repeating the same small circle of people who write papers which are deeply flawed, and when you can't defend those flaws, double down on their being factual by making vague appeals to personal popularity.

This is a personal attack which has no place here. This is a scientific discussion.

Already have on this thread, not counting Lee and others. And again you don't address their remarks per the serious methodological flaws and instead seem more intent on pretending I never posted these to begin with.

Yes, I did present just now again a review of the very Turkheimer/Nisbutt paper for which you here falsely claim I did not provide any evidence for. You made this false claim while purposely avoiding quoting it in this silly response. I'll repost it here even though I've already done this about 6 times in the last 4 years:

Ability differentials between nations are unlikely to disappear.

Abstract
Comments on the original article, "Intelligence: New findings and theoretical developments," by R. E. Nisbett, J. Aronson, C. Blair, W. Dickens, J. Flynn, D. F. Halpern, and E. Turkheimer (see record 2011-30298-001). This comment challenges Nisbett et al's argument that Flynn effect gains will eliminate cross-national IQ inequalities "by the end of the 21st century and falsify the hypothesis that some nations lack the intelligence to fully industrialize" (p. 140). The present authors find that this optimism is not justified by the evidence. In Europe and the United States, Flynn effects are indeed rare in cohorts born after about 1980. Furthermore, it is necessary to distinguish between accelerated childhood development and higher adult intelligence.

More appeal to popularity fallacy. This is not a defense of his work against those who have pointed out specific issues with it.

Vacuous.

Regarding psychological topics which are his expertise as a PhD in psychology OR regarding tangential comments he made in the field of biology? Be specific.

What debate? You ran away for 7 months and then returned regurgitating the same bilge you couldn't defend months - and even several years - ago.

You're using someone who has collaborated with another person, both of which who have had multiple other scholars of relevant qualifications for addressing the issue dismantle the work by pointing out various methodological issues which undermine their conclusions.

Instead of defending the data on a scientific and methodological basis, you keep appealing to general social popularity.

Show us what scientific basis he has for ignoring the Wilson Effect and dismissing it because it's not "interesting."

This has already happened more than once. The question is why you are unable to answer when I point it out in specific and then come back later pretending I never showed such evidence and asking all over again like nothing was stated. This is a cheap tactic.

Yeah he did. He dismissed the Wilson Effect without qualifying it and he referred to it as "uninteresting."

Not relevant. Intelligence runs in families and is highly heritable. Period. Trying to reframe it into a racial ideology issue is a deflection.

Defend Turkheimer and Nisbett's work in light of critics of their methods and conclusions. It's been what, 4 years now and you've failed to do so?'

 

This is easily debunked.

Haiti and Ethiopia were never colonized. People in these countries have never been the victims of "racist discrimination", they're entirely responsible for the development of their country.

Haiti has an average IQ of 67. Ethiopia, 69.

Discrimination has no role in this IQ gap whatsoever.

 

My IQ is not that low and my nation's average is way above that of 65. So, the chances of me having a child with an IQ that low are nearly zero. Anyways, austic interpretations aside, I would pick the healthy and happy one.

 

Ethiopia was an Italian colony though and Haiti a French.

Just sayin'.

 

Wrong. They defeated the Italian forces, and have never been an Italian colony.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Ethiopia

"Ethiopia defeated an Italian invasion in 1896 and came to be recognised as a legitimate state by European powers. A more rapid modernisation took place under Menelik II and Haile Selassie. Italy launched a second invasion in 1935. From October 1935-May 1940, Ethiopia was under Italian military occupation. A joint force of British and Ethiopian rebels managed to drive the Italians out of the country in 1941"

Until they revolted in 1791, sent the French packing, and were completely free of colonialism or European influence for 200 years since then.

Now they're far poorer than the countries that were oppressed by the evil colonialists.

 

So, fact remains both were in fact colonies. But, that does not really matter and obsessing over colonialism is just as pathological as obsessing over IQ.

 

Jay has neither been able to nail down what "discrimination" exactly means - since a good amount of it IS in fact subjective - nor has he been able to show where discrimination in specific is a detectable, measurable influence in terms of human intelligence. Rather, he points to environmental impact on IQ in general - and tries to graft it to the "discrimination" argument. I've specifically asked Jay how such a thing is measured, and I've gotten no response. Jay has also repeatedly failed to follow his own standard - that being that a hypothesis is invalid if it cannot be tested.

To further this end, he's trying to deny the high heritability of adult IQ, rather favoring researchers who avoid the adult IQ topic like the plague and deny it against the general consensus.

 

Colonialism is a catch-all excuse to why many non-whites (specifically those of non-northeastern Asian origin) have historically socioeconomically lagged behind whites. It's the latest craze on campus and blaming-the-white is the basis for Critical Race Theory studies, because like so many others, such scholars are deeply emotionally invested in both the equality myth and also the Marxian strategy of blaming a demographic with more material goods as a great puppet master holding everyone else down.

As far as the IQ issue goes, I discuss it because of the endless tendency to scapegoat white people for the historical backwardness of low average IQ populations. White people are not why sub-Saharan Africa has been a toilet for thousands of years. White people are not why Native Americans were sacrificing and nibbling on each other for thousands of years who had their own version of brutal colonialism against weaker nearby tribes (Aztecs in specific). White people are not why Aztecs were building skull racks instead of schools. What is going on in modern society besides collective racial scapegoating is an active campaign to racially shake down white people and get them to give up the countries their forefathers built. In that context, IQ studies are very much relevant.

If only members of certain political and ethnic persuasions would look in the mirror before pointing fingers at white people, I'm sure many of us could get along better.

 

You're still stuck in the false dichotomy of "either it's oppression, or it's genetics".

Again : how about neither.

 

No, I never said that at all. I'm the one pointing out the false dichotomy of blaming everything on white people. IQ is a factor we must look at, especially since it's shown to be highly heritable, at least in Western societies. Obviously other factors are in play but to play make-believe we're cognitive equals when the science shows otherwise is denying science in favor of ideology.

And since northeast Asians and Ashkenazi Jews have higher average IQs than whites, it cannot be said I or any other white person that mentions this information as being "white supremacist."

 

Actually, YOU'RE the one stuck with the false dichotomy.. or rather Premise error.
If oppression isn't the reason.. what is?
RACE.

Since you must be familiar with the IQ by nation chart, take a peeky at the bottom 25.
Colonized/uncolonized/etc, they share RACE.
Doesn't matter who drew the arbitrary 'country' boundaries, it's RACE that explains the national IQ.
Refuting the upside-down OP.

You think "Haiti" and "Ethiopea", independent (or not), are accidents?
They share ONLY Race with the other bottom of the barrel countries.

For your opponent/ritter/and the record..
The Highest IQ country/area is Hong Kong. 108.
They were colonized by the British from 1842-1997.
It helped because they drew/built on it. And that's because of RACE.

It helped India too, where the trains (which wouldn't have been developed for 500 years), still run on time.
In Colonialized sub-Sahara the trains ROT in the Jungle. Except for South Africa, where White Rule kept them going.
It's about RACE.

PS: you are still welcome to answer my post to 'wyly' on the last page, which also takes on your idea.

`

 

People are seriously asserting this line are incredibly ignorant about both the concept of race and nature and limitations of IQ tests.

 

Educate us.

 

Straighten us out!

'Empress' and myself are very knowledgeable on this topic. Perhaps a decade each.
Why not Start with my post immediately above yours, which refutes the OP you just quoted?
`

 

Debunked by whom? You haven't provided any evidence that refutes the arguments of Turkheimer or Nisbett. Name-calling is not a rebuttal.

You must not have looked very hard. Nisbett et al. (2012) has over 650 citations. In previous discussions I pointed out that Nisbett is cited favorably in multiple academic textbooks on psychology including one you claimed you own.


If you haven't read any favorable reviews of Nisbett's writing when plenty are available that is your own fault. Of course all scholars have critics. What matters is the validity of the evidence presented that is relevant to this discussion which is coming from a reliable source.

Rushton was not a reputable scholar. He had a bad reputation as a biased researcher with poor quality sources, many considered to be racist as well as his research being financed by racist organizations such as the Pioneer Fund. As it is I discussed the problems with his work related to this subject in detail in previous discussions.


Special Pleading will not help you in this debate. Turkheimer's arguments refute all of your claims.

Using an expert to validate an argument on a scientific topic is all of a sudden....irrational?


What is the world coming to?

You are of course pretending that Turkheimer hasn't supported his arguments with evidence in scientific literature and fooling no one by claiming this.

Sure as soon as you provide evidence refuting the points I made in my post that are supported by the research I cited. Which of the 6 points I listed can you address with credible sources?

Turkheimer did not dismiss data. He responded to arguments and pointed out where he disagrees citing examples that counter those arguments. You are the one ignoring his actual research related to this discussion.

This has been discussed by me many times and supported by numerous sources from evolutionary biologists and geneticists. There is no evolutionary basis to claim that human genetic variation structures in a way that would lead to racial differences in mental characteristics. This has been known for decades but more recently has been supported by genetic data which was mentioned by Turkheimer in the video and the research of many other experts.


Examples:

Source: Genome-wide quantitative trait locus association scan of general cognitive ability using pooled DNA and 500K single nucleotide polymorphism microarrays Genes, Brains and Behavior, 7, 435–446 ( 2008 )


This is real science. You can not conceal your racist ideology by pretending that your opponents are being racist when they reject pseudoscientific claims of racial hierarchy in mental characteristics based on research only a few fringe scholars support that has been thoroughly discredited.

 

Regarding research and theories related to the topic of race and intelligence. Rushton's attempt to support his thesis, that human evolution resulted in a racial hierarchy in mental ability, with sources from a variety of disciplines. Experts in several fields have stated and shown that he misrepresented the research of others, cited sources with little to no scientific value as well as those that were blatantly racist. Rushton's racial bias destroyed his reputation in the scientific community and he has been widely denounced as a quack. What valid research he may have done in the field of psychology was overshadowed by his pseudoscientific, racist theories.

Here is an example of some of the problems with his research:

A scholar who presents pornography as legitimate scientific research is not someone that any scientifically literate or sane person would take seriously.

We're not really having a debate because you refuse to argue in good faith. You rely on logical fallacies, manipulation and ignoring evidence to create the illusion that you are winning the debate. Under these conditions one must consider whether or not it is worth their time to engage in these "debates." I don't have anything to prove to advocates of Scientific Racism. I only post when I feel like it and if you refuse to accept my argument because you don't understand it or don't want to that's not my problem.

You haven't actually responded to any of Turkheimer's arguments. Which of these arguments did you refute?


1) Heritability estimates depend on the variance of genes and environment for a population which can change over time (So The Wilson Effect is completely irrelevant to whether or not genes play a role in group differences in IQ as Adult IQ is dependent on the quality of the environment children are raised in).


2) No matter how heritable a trait is it can be altered by external influences (e.g. IQ scores are malleable regardless of whether or not intelligence is highly heritable).


3) Recent research on the genetic effect on IQ does not support the idea that group differences in IQ are caused by genetic differences between groups.


4) Racism in America is a historical fact and the idea that progress in America in recent decades to provide equal opportunity for disenfranchised groups such as African-Americans could eliminate racial/ethnic differences in IQ, given the known physical, economic and psychological effects of racial injustice is absurd.


5) While there is plenty of evidence supporting the idea that intelligence in certain areas can help someone nurture their mental ability in other areas when living in a good environment the idea that general intelligence comes from some function of the brain is not scientifically supported when considering the environmental reasons for someone developing a balance of mental ability.


6) Evolutionary just-so stories of how human races evolved to have differences in mental ability are not supported by credible scientific research.

The Wilson Effect has no implications for the cause of group differences in IQ. Turkheimer explained this in detail in the beginning of the video, which I quoted and which is supported by several of his papers and those of his colleagues. A trait can be highly heritable and still be malleable. If you don't understand how this relates to racial differences in IQ then you just don't get it. But it has been explained to you.

Yes it is relevant! This is what you asked....

You specifically asked me for data which showed that human evolution did not result in races differentiated in genes that determine intelligence. I not only gave you a quote from an expert on evolutionary biology explaining why natural selection and genetic drift can not be invoked to explain racial differences in IQ.....I gave you actual genetic data which supports that position! You ignored it. Again if you don't understand the argument that's not my fault. The relevant research was presented to you.

As soon as you provide research directly relevant to the topic of this thread I will respond to it. I cited Turkheimer and Nisbett's research supporting the position that there was no genetic component to racial differences in IQ. Disagreements over whether Flynn Effect gains can result in the elimination of IQ gaps for nations or groups doesn't directly address whether or not genetic differences are a cause of the gaps.


Whether we can eliminate IQ gaps and whether or not genetic differences are a partial cause of the gaps are two different issues. It is entirely possible for group differences in IQ to be 100% environmental in cause and there not be a practical solution to eliminating them because the environment between groups can not be equal. This was actually addressed in the video. Both Turkheimer and Molyneux agreed that from a moral standpoint people should give their best effort to create societies that that values equal opportunity and justice (Egalitarianism) so that intelligence can be nurtured to maximize the genetic potential of all individuals. Turkheimer just like Nisbett simply maintains that the actual cause of group differences in IQ is 100% environmental and 0% genetic. A claim supported by a mountain of evidence from various disciplines and supported by reputable scholars represented the most credible organizations of relevant to the topic (ex. The American Anthropological Association, The American Psychological Association, The Genetics Society of America).

I have explained to you before that discrimination is a valid concept. There is no reason why we would need discrimination to measurable in order to validate its existence. Discrimination is certainly detectable and comes in many forms. If you make laws that restrict certain groups from voting, living in certain neighborhoods, getting certain jobs or organizing peacefully to oppose injustice against their group then you are discriminating against them and this can have real world effects on their well-being including their social status, economic status, mental health and culture.


You could attempt to measure some forms of discrimination in terms of loss of life, property damage or statistics such as incarceration rates of innocent suspects compared to other groups, as well as number of people injured or dead as a result of policy brutality and see if there is a correlation between the statistical data and racial bias in the criminal justice system. There is plenty of measure evidence for some forms of discrimination.


The psychological effects of racism are not as easy to measure. No one can determine what lasting psychological effects for examples the legacy of slavery, jim crow and segregation has had on the minds of African-Americans who grow up as children learning about the abuse their ancestors suffered at the hands of the ancestors of White Americans and how that will influence their ability to function in modern society or react when they face racist discrimination themselves (in the form of bullying, harassment, hate crimes, policy brutality, workforce discrimination, racist messages in media etc.).


Some people will react differently to certain forms and degrees of discrimination. So discrimination can not be reliably measured from a psychological standpoint. That doesn't mean it is not real or can't be defined or identified. Also it is highly offensive to act as if racial discrimination is a real and an important social topic considering the documented history of atrocities committed against many groups.

I did no such thing. I simply stated that the high heritability of IQ has no implication for the cause of group differences in IQ. You ignored the statements for this and the evidence supporting it.

 

You haven't provided any scientific evidence to support this claim and have in fact ignored evidence that directly refutes the claim. What you are really doing is saying that because intelligence is highly heritable and runs in families the idea of racial differences in IQ having a genetic component is a legitimate scientific question and anyone who poses the question does not deserve to be called a racist or White Supremacist. You're also playing victim by saying that being challenged on this issue and told that your arguments are based on pseudoscience designed to support a racist ideology is discrimination against White people who are being blamed for the failure and dysfunction of low IQ races.

Basically you are insulting the intelligence of different groups of people and acting like you are being insulted and YOU are being mistreated in this discussion!

How can this position be taken seriously considering comments like this?

This comment denigrates the cultures of the ancestors of modern Native Americans and Africans, insults the intelligence of these groups and politicizes the discussion by claiming that people of European descent are being scapegoated when anyone states that the atrocities committed by the ancestors of modern Europeans against groups such as Native Americans and Africans had a major impact on the societies of these groups. We're talking about chattel slavery, genocide, terrorism and institutional racism (laws and policies designed to enforce racial discrimination) and acting as if this had no significant impact on the IQ or standard of living for these groups.

The position is also a strawman. Who in this thread has claimed that White people are to blame for all of the problems in the world or the way that people think and act today? Claiming that other people were stupid before contact with Whites and promoting racist pseudoscience is really just a defense of the truth that will help all people get along is offensive and ridiculous.

People are responsible for their own actions. Individuals can change and so can society as a collective. That in my opinion is the most responsible way to approach human behavior and improving the quality of the lives of all groups of people. We would all get along better if we stopped hating and started cooperating. Sadly I know that what I say here will most likely fall on deaf ears. But at least I have shown other posters and readers how to stand up to people with positions like yours.

 

Posted on January 27, 2010
Advocacy by Omission: Richard E. Nisbett’s Intelligence and How to Get It
J. Phillippe Rushton, VDARE.com, January 25, 2010
https://www.amren.com/news/2010/01/advocacy_by_omi/

In his book, Intelligence and How to Get It, Richard E. Nisbett, a social psychologist at the University of Michigan, asserts that cultural factors alone are sufficient to explain all the race differences to be observed in IQ and educational achievement.

Nisbett criticizes the nature + nurture model Arthur Jensen and I presented in 2005 in Psychology, Public Policy, and Law [Thirty Years of Research on Race Differences in Cognitive Ability (PDF)]. Nisbett claims the heritability of IQ is lower than assumed, that Blacks have substantially narrowed the gap on Whites, that any remaining differences can be eliminated through educational and social intervention, and that any assertion of a mean IQ of 70 for sub-Saharan Africans is “desperately wrong.”

The dust jacket blurb puts Nisbett’s book in the tradition of Stephen Jay Gould’s Mismeasure of Man (1981, 1996). What is striking, however, is how much ground the egalitarians have given since Gould’s effort to debunk race, genetics, and IQ.

Nisbett concedes that general intelligence exists, that IQ tests predict success at both school and work, that scores are influenced by genes, and that in White populations, genes contribute to social class differences. He even accepts that IQ is related to brain size and that “Blacks are sometimes found to have smaller brains than Whites.” Gould must be spinning in his grave!

Such is the state of expert opinion today that Nisbett simply had to make these concessions lest his book be disqualified as serious scholarship. But while he admits that genes play a role in accounting for within-group differences, he still maintains they play no significant part in between-group differences.

Nisbett acknowledges that measured group differences exist: Jewish (mean IQ = 113), East Asian (107), White (100), South Asian (87), Hispanic (87), African American (85), and sub-Saharan African (70), although he erroneously claims that South Asians score as highly as East Asians. But Nisbett asserts that family pressure for success leads East Asians and Jews to high levels of achievement, while low expectations and a lack of opportunity lead Hispanics and Blacks to much lower levels of achievement.

Jensen and I have provided a long point-counterpoint review of Nisbett’s book in The Open Psychology Journal [Race and IQ: A Theory-Based Review of the Research in Richard Nisbett’s Intelligence and How to Get It (PDF)]. We found much that was admirable and informative in it, such as the cost-benefit survey of the literature on educational interventions and what can be done to increase school performance. But, sadly, we concluded it was mainly a work of advocacy, not scholarship.

Nisbett misrepresents much of the available information using highly selective reviews of the literature. Especially egregious are his many errors of omission. For example, while complaining of unrepresentative samples in a 1991 review paper by Richard Lynn, Nisbett side-stepped the very much larger compilation of data in Lynn and Vanhanen’s 2006 book. Nisbett completely ignores the adoption studies of East Asians, as well as those on brain size showing a genetic contribution to their high achievement.

I’m going to group Nisbett’s flaws under seven heads:

1. The malleability of IQ scores
According to Nisbett, Blacks closed the IQ gap by 5.5 points (35%) between 1970 and 1992. At the same time, Blacks narrowed the gap in educational achievement by a commensurate 35%. Nisbett argues that educational interventions such as the Milwaukee project, the Abecedarian project, and the Infant Health and Development Program, imply the gap could be eliminated altogether.

Contra Nisbett, however, Jensen and I found that IQ differences between Blacks and Whites have been steady for nearly 100 years, at between 15 and 20 points (about 1.1 standard deviations). After re-analyzing the data on which Nisbett relied, we found that the most optimistic assessment of the Black IQ gain was 2.1 points (14%). Using a wider array of tests, we found no narrowing at all. [See The Black-White Test Score Gap and the New Math Results By Charles Murray, AEI blog, October 15, 2009.]

Nor has there been much (if any) narrowing on tests of educational achievement. Furthermore, the most powerful intervention strategies result, at best, in moving people from the 16th to the 25th percentile at the cost of millions of dollars per person.

2. Adoption studies
Nisbett reviews several adoption studies to demonstrate the power of environmental intervention on IQ. He claims that poor children adopted into wealthier homes made huge gains—between 12 and 18 points. But he omitted to mention the finding that by late adolescence, these effects have dissipated.

Nisbett’s tendency to omit crucial information is particularly apparent in his discussion of the well-known Minnesota Trans-Racial Adoption Study in which White, Mixed-Race, and Black children were raised by upper-middle-class White parents in Minnesota. This was the largest study of its kind ever undertaken, and the only one with a longitudinal follow-up component, testing the same children at 7 years (in 1975) and 17 years (in 1986).

Nisbett describes how adopted White children averaged an IQ of 112 at age 7, but he omits that on follow-up at age 17, the IQ of these White children had fallen to 106. He did note that the Black children on follow-up had dropped from a mean IQ of 97 to one of 89;which he attributes to the psychological disturbance and “identity problems”they suffered from being raised by Whites!

Compounding his sins of omission, Nisbett neglects to mention three trans-racial adoption studies of East Asian children. In contrast to the Black children, the East Asian children adopted by White parents, despite being malnourished at birth, grew to excel in both intelligence (mean IQ = 10 and educational achievement.

3. Heritability
Nisbett presents a vivid analogy of tossing genetically identical corn seeds into rich soil or poor soil. The average height of the two groups of plants, he says, would differ greatly and would do so entirely because of environmental factors. Nisbett argues that because most heritability studies used middle-class samples (“good soil”), they overestimated the heritability of poorer people and Blacks (“poor soil”).

In support of his analogy, Nisbett cites a twin study by Eric Turkheimer in 2003 in Psychological Science [PDF] that found the heritability of IQ was about 70% for children whose parents were upper-middle-class but only about 10% for children whose parents were of lower social class (over half of them African-American).

But Nisbett omits the studies that have been unable to replicate Turkheimer’s results, including one of over 2,000 twin pairs by Robert Plomin and colleagues published in 2005 in Intelligence. He also omits the studies finding that heritabilities in Blacks were the same as those in Whites, such as Osborne’s study of several hundred pairs of Black and White twins. Osborne found heritabilities of about 50% in both groups on the Basic Test Battery, the Primary Mental Abilities test, and the Cattell Culture Fair Intelligence test.

cont'd
`​

 

cont'd

4. Black-White differences are greater on the more heritable and g-loaded tests
Heritable g is at the core of the debate over how much Black-White IQ differences are due to the genes and can be expected to narrow. However, Nisbett declares that the studies by Jensen and myself finding that Black-White differences are more pronounced on the more heritable and more g-loaded IQ tests were a “red herring.”

To maintain his claim, Nisbett withholds from his readers the data showing that while g and genetic estimates correlated significantly positively with Black-White differences .61 and .48 (P < .001), respectively, they correlated significantly negatively (or not at all) with any secular rise in IQ scores over time (r = -.33; P < .00001) and .13 (ns). The (mostly heritable) cause of the one is not the (mostly environmental) cause of the other.

Most recently, my colleagues and I found the relation between heritable g and Black-White differences in a 2007 study published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society of London[PDF]. We examined data from 152 pairs of twins from the Minnesota Study of Twins Reared Apart and calculated separate heritabilities for each of the 58 diagrammatic puzzles on the Standard Matrices and found they correlated a mean .40 (P < .05) with the pass rate differences (on the same puzzles) between Whites, South Asians, Coloreds, and Blacks in South Africa.

5. The sub-Saharan African IQ of 70
Nisbett cites a critique of Richard Lynn’s compilation of 57 studies showing a mean IQ of only 70 for sub-Saharan Africans by University of Amsterdam psychologist Jelte Wicherts.[/b] In the journal Intelligence [PDF]. Wicherts found several studies showing much higher IQs for Africans than Lynn provided.
His re-analysis raised the African IQ to 80, although that is still a very low 1.25 standard deviations below the White mean.

Lynn has replied to Wicherts (also in Intelligence) [Subscriber link], countering that Wicherts included elite samples in his analyses, which can mislead when estimating the IQ of a general population. After considering all the evidence, Lynn’s best estimate of African IQ remains 70.

Lynn corroborated an African IQ of 70 with tests of educational attainment such as the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS). This test is standardized with a mean of 500 and SD of 100 on representative samples of 14-year-olds with Ns = 2,000 to 10,000. On the 2003 TIMSS for England, Botswana, Ghana, and South Africa, the results were 503, 355, 278, and 268, respectively. Thus sub-Saharan Africans are 2 standard deviations below Whites in both IQ scores and tests of educational achievement.

6. Race Differences in Brain Size
Nisbett agrees that the correlation between brain size and IQ could be as high as .40 and that Blacks are “sometimes” found to average a smaller brain than Whites. However, he argues there were too many anomalies to take the race differences in brain size seriously as an explanation of IQ differences.

He points out that Blacks do not always have smaller brains than Whites, that the causes may be environmental, that the relation between brain size and IQ may not be causal, that men and women differ in brain size yet have equal IQ, that in Ecuador, there is a sample of people with very small head sizes who do better in school than normal individuals, that the evolutionary direction of brain size over the last few thousand years is down, and that Einstein had a smaller brain than the average reported for Blacks!

But, contra Nisbett, we found that each and every one of these points was either false or misleading. The race differences in brain size have been corroborated in dozens of studies from the 1840s to the present using MRI, endocranial volume from empty skulls, brain weight at autopsy, and external head size.
Averaging all the data: East Asians = 1,364 cm3; Whites = 1,347 cm3; and Blacks = 1,267 cm3. Thus, East Asians averaged a 17 cm3 larger brain than Whites and 97 cm3 more than Blacks.

Nisbett omits all the brain size data on East Asians, who average a larger brain than Whites at birth, 1 year, 7 years, and adulthood. Since the East Asian samples are the smallest in stature and lightest in weight, and the Black samples the tallest in stature and heaviest in weight, these data contradict Nisbett’s claim that the smaller brain size in Blacks is due to lower birth weight and poorer nutrition.
​

Brain size is highly heritable. One MRI study in 2002 in Nature Neuroscience examined 112 extended twin families and found heritabilities of 82% for whole-brain gray matter volume, 87% for whole-brain white matter volume, 86% for IQ, and 100% for the relation between them. Each cubic centimeter of brain tissue contains millions of brain cells and billions of synapses. Hence, race differences in brain size help to explain the IQ differences.

7. Racial admixture studies
Nisbett agrees that the U.S. Black population has about 20% European admixture and that Blacks with more European genes should have higher IQs. However, he argues that the correlation between IQ and skin color (about .20) is too low to support the genetic hypothesis. Any such small relationship, he says, would be due to the social advantages that accrue to Blacks with lighter skin.

Nisbett omits several more recent results. For example, a study in 2002 by Richard Lynn examined a National Opinion Research Center (NORC) survey of 442 Black adults who were asked whether they were “very dark”, “dark brown, “medium brown”,“light brown”, or “very light.” The correlation between these self-ratings and a 10-word vocabulary test score was .17 (P < .01).

Data from South Africa also supports the hypothesis. The Mixed-Race population known as the “Coloreds” (their preferred term) have an average IQ of 85, intermediate to the respective African and White means of 70 and 100.

The brain weight data on mixed-race populations also support the racial admixture hypothesis. Robert Bean found (in 1906, in the American Journal of Anatomy,) [PDF] as did Raymond Pearl (in 1934, in Science) [Subscriber], that the greater the amount of White admixture in Blacks (judged from skin color), the higher the mean brain weight at autopsy. A 1997 study in Intelligence found mixed-race Eurasian children fell intermediate in brain size and IQ to the two parental groups.

In 2006, Donald Templer and Hiroko Arikawa (also in Intelligence) found a negative -.92 correlation between IQ and skin color for 129 countries. The darker the skin, the lower was the IQ. Skin color was measured by expert ratings and by skin reflectance.

Subsequently, Templer found IQ and skin color correlated with geographic latitude and mean winter temperature (r = .80). He conceptualized skin color as a multi-generational adaptation to colder climate, which selected for higher intelligence and larger brain size because of the greater cognitive requirements for survival.

Our conclusion: Predictions that the Black-White IQ gap will narrow are acts of blind faith.A much stronger dose of skepticism is required than Nisbett manifested in regard to the power of educational and social interventions.​

`

 

"I frankly don't take Rushton seriously. Jensen would be a different matter, but I have been told he is in his cups and Rushton just signs his name to everything he writes." - Richard Nisbett


https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/extremist-files/group/vdare

VDARE​

Originally established in 1999 by the Center for American Unity, a Virginia-based nonprofit foundation started by English immigrant Peter Brimelow, VDARE.com is an anti-immigration hate website "dedicated to preserving our historical unity as Americans into the 21st Century."

Now run by the VDARE Foundation, the site is a place where relatively intellectually inclined leaders of the anti-immigrant movement share their opinions. VDARE.com also regularly publishes articles by prominent white nationalists, race scientists and anti-Semites.


In Its Own Words


"But there's no doubt that something in that book got to [President Donald Trump], because the way his speech was set up. His announcement speech went to the question of Hispanic crime, specifically rape. And [Ann Coulter]'s book is a very powerful statement of the fact that crime in this country is ethnically variegated. There's ethic specialization in crime. And Hispanics do specialize in rape, particularly of children. They're very prone to it, compared to other groups."
— Peter Brimelow on President Trump's immigration policies at the American Renaissance conference, 2017


"America was defined — almost explicitly, sometimes very explicitly — as a white nation, for white people, and what that means is that there is virtually no figure, no law, no policy, no event in the history of the old, white America that can survive the transition to the new and non-white version. Whether we will want to call the new updated version ‘America’ at all is another question entirely."
— Sam Francis, VDARE.com, July 21, 2003


VDARE also publishes essays by prominent academic racists. For example, a column by Jared Taylor, who has argued elsewhere that black people are incapable of maintaining any kind of civilization, dismisses "the fantasy of racial equality," claims the Civil Rights Act of 1964 "stripped Americans of the right to make free decisions," and says that "lacks, in particular, riot with little provocation," unlike the far more peaceable white race. He has also published pieces by J. Philippe Rushton, the head of the Pioneer Fund, which gives financial backing to academics who specialize in race and IQ studies.
— Jared Taylor, VDARE.com, July 4, 2008


The financial backing of Scientific Racism by the Pioneer Fund, whose leader was Rushton before he died, is well known as is the fact that Rushton wrote articles on racist websites such as Vdare. Discussing the credibility of sources is absolutely necessary in a thread such as this especially considering Empress' characterization of Nisbett as an "exposed fraud" (post #32). Rushton was twice reprimanded by the University of Western Ontario for unethical research practices including, among other things, asking his students to fill out an unauthorized survey full of inappropriate questions such as how often they have sexual fantasies and how far they can ejaculate. This and survey questions of random people in a shopping mall is part of the "original research" Rushton did to obtain "scientific data" in support of his racial theories.

https://fair.org/home/racism-resurgent/

“More Brain or More Penis”

Rushton (who’s gotten more than $770,000 from Pioneer) has transformed the Victorian science of cranial measurement into a sexual fetish—measuring not only head and brain size, but also the size of breasts, buttocks and genitals. “It’s a trade-off: More brain or more penis. You can’t have everything,” he told Rolling Stone‘s Adam Miller (10/20/94), explaining his philosophy of evolution.

Rushton was reprimanded by his school, the University of Western Ontario, for accosting people in a local shopping mall and asking them how big their penises were and how far they could ejaculate. “A zoologist doesn’t need permission to study squirrels in his backyard,” he groused (Rolling Stone, 10/20/94).

Despite his insistence on East Asians being at the top of his racial hierarchy Rushton once spoke at a White Nationalist conference where he entertained the ideas of David Duke, former Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, who asked Rushton if it was possible for Whites to still be more capable of civilization building and having a higher quantity of geniuses among their population despite having lower average IQs than Asians because they also had average higher testosterone. Rushton acknowledged this as a legitimate possibility.

In other words he favored the Goldilocks argument....too much testosterone makes Blacks violent, sexually aggressive savages with small brains and low IQs rendering them incapable of functioning in a Western society (with a few exceptions whose inherited superior IQ genes from Caucasians). Too little testosterone restricts the creativity and ambition of the East Asians leading to cultures where the average person may be smarter than Europeans but they lack the drive to create civilizations that significantly advance world progress. White European genetic stock is "just right" enabling them to maintain the best civilizations due to the right blend of mental ability and hormones that allows them to become adventurous conquerors and brilliant tacticians whose civilization is a gift to the inferior mud races and sub-human mongrels.

Rushton was the laughing stock of debates in real academic settings and Duke, who endorsed President Trump because of his racist political policies was recently portrayed in a Spike Lee film referencing his past as a leader of the KKK who was once fooled in to accepting a Black man in to the organization who pretended to be a White Supremacist during an assignment as an undercover detective.



Rushton's arguments have of course been refuted in previous discussions on this forum.

Examples:

Politicalforum.com - The Pseudoscience of J. Philippe Rushton

Politicalforum.com - Why Scientific Racism shouldn't be taken seriously

Politicalforum.com - Why don't race realist ever come up with solutions?

These internet debates will never end so long as people choose to talk about this. But for advocates of "Race-Realism" I have just one question....who among the scholars you cite is promoting your position in a REAL academic debate? The videos of Rushton getting shut down and humiliated by Suzuki and Graves are very old at this point. Who is your champion today?

 

So NO answer to a Categorical DESTRUCTION of Nisbett, including using Nisbett's own Admissions.

So unless Nisbett wants to accuse Rushton of Libel, the Refutation stands.

Just the usual ad hominem attack/Smear of Anyone who acknowledges race differences.
This leftist SPLC smear exists for just about anyone who does.
So debate is meaningless unless you can debate the truth of the matter.
`




But No rebuttal to a complete and categorical Destruction of Nisbett, who, btw, points to Wicherts' 80 IQ for Sub-saharans instead of Lynn's 70.

SPLC is the refuge of those who can't debate people like Charles Murray, Foremost IQ expert Linda Gottfredson, and so many more.
It's a Cop out POS
See my new thread on the SPLC BS.

 

Pity there were no IQ tests before the last couple of centuries. It would be interesting to see how the “IQ and wealth of nations” crowd would assess the IQ of people living hundreds or thousands of years ago. Do they believe, for instance, that ancient Egyptians or Kushites had lower IQs than the rural tribal societies of northern Europe during the Bronze Age? How would those Europeans in turn compare with the ancient Greeks, Romans, Phoenicians, or Mesopotamians?

I’m just sayin’, these IQ-and-race guys seem to think that the more industrialized a society is, the higher its citizens’ inborn IQ. How do they explain historical fluctuations in economic power disparities between regions?