I say it is pseudoscience on the grounds that there is a scientific consensus that genetic explanations for racial iq-gaps are deemed pseudoscientific.
To anyone who sincerely wonders if there’s anything to the “race-iq realism” theory, I ask you to consider this great point point made Ezra Klein to Sam Harris when Harris embraced The Bell Curve: very rarely will you see any serious consideration of the possibility that environmental factors explain >100% of the black-white iq gap. In other words, on a purely genetic basis that black people may be more intelligent than white people is alien to the discourse.
And of course there’s all sorts of other issues that cloud this discussion about the arbitrariness of race, the poor correlation between “race” and genetics, black americans having substantial european ancestry owing to slavery etc etc.
Your source is a fringe twitter account, followed by alt-right accounts, cherry picking bits and pieces from journals. It doesn’t even properly link to the primary sources so I can’t even examine the the weakness/ context.
Worry more about my Jacobs’s sources contradicting your sources.
He links to a large number of research articles. It could be cherry picking, but the same thing could be said e.g. about linking to Vox articles, a source which is known to have a strong leftist bias.
There is no such consensus, though. Your links do not support your very strong claim.
E.g. Vox:
Do most experts think genes make a substantial contribution to the black-white difference in intelligence? There have been several surveys of expert opinion over the years. Perhaps the first was described in a 1988 book by Snyderman and Rothman. The most recent was described in a 2013 blog post about a conference presentation. The survey described in that post has resulted in two publishedarticles, neither of which presents data on opinions regarding the black-white difference. The studies do, however, report that only about 5 percent of people who were invited to participate responded to any one set of items. Given this very low response rate, along with the potential for bias in which scientists were invited in the first place, we doubt that these results are an accurate representation of the field.
Still, in both the Snyderman and Rothman book and in the more recent survey, more than half of respondents selected one of two response categories that included zero (one option was “0 percent of [black-white] differences due to genes” and the other was “0-40 percent of differences due to genes”). Much more important, however, is that respondents were not allowed to endorse what in my view is the only reasonable response: It is not possible to give a meaningful estimate of the percentage.
Education was rated by N = 71 experts as the most important cause of international ability differences. Genes were rated as the second most relevant factor but also had the highest variability in ratings
If anything, the consensus seems to be that genes play some role here.
To anyone who sincerely wonders if there’s anything to the “race-iq realism” theory, I ask you to consider this great point point made Ezra Klein to Sam Harris when Harris embraced The Bell Curve: very rarely will you see any serious consideration of the possibility that environmental factors explain >100% of the black-white iq gap. In other words, on a purely genetic basis that black people may be more intelligent than white people is alien to the discourse.
I do not see why this hypothetical is impressive? The best that could be said for it is that it is logically sound and novel. But heritability and norms of reaction impose limits on such explanations. If X percent of a trait’s variance can be explained by a factor, then there’s only so much you can get by changing the sum of non-X factors. Adult intelligence has roughly 80% heritability (equally within white and black populations; actually this alone invalidates the idea). For 1 d of difference in intelligence to be explained away by the environment, the gap in environmental quality must be 2.24 d. This is implausibly large for intra-national racial differences, contradicted by direct measures of environmental quality and indirect proxies of deprivation (such as stress and self-esteem), made suspect by the fact that there’s been a great deal of improvement in race relations and equalization of living standards since the 60s, yet no large narrowing of the IQ gap; and for the case where black people have higher “genotypic IQ”, environmental deprivation must be even greater than 2.24 d.
I say it is pseudoscience on the grounds that there is a scientific consensus that genetic explanations for racial iq-gaps are deemed pseudoscientific.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_racism
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_and_intelligence
To anyone who sincerely wonders if there’s anything to the “race-iq realism” theory, I ask you to consider this great point point made Ezra Klein to Sam Harris when Harris embraced The Bell Curve: very rarely will you see any serious consideration of the possibility that environmental factors explain >100% of the black-white iq gap. In other words, on a purely genetic basis that black people may be more intelligent than white people is alien to the discourse.
And of course there’s all sorts of other issues that cloud this discussion about the arbitrariness of race, the poor correlation between “race” and genetics, black americans having substantial european ancestry owing to slavery etc etc.
https://www.vox.com/the-big-idea/2017/6/15/15797120/race-black-white-iq-response-critics
The science is clear, it’s pseudoscience folks.
Thank you Bob Jacobs for your resources.
I just say that if you read the references I cited in the linked post you see they contradict that conclusion.
And why do you presume your sources are better.
Your source is a fringe twitter account, followed by alt-right accounts, cherry picking bits and pieces from journals. It doesn’t even properly link to the primary sources so I can’t even examine the the weakness/ context.
Worry more about my Jacobs’s sources contradicting your sources.
He links to a large number of research articles. It could be cherry picking, but the same thing could be said e.g. about linking to Vox articles, a source which is known to have a strong leftist bias.
There is no such consensus, though. Your links do not support your very strong claim.
E.g. Vox:
This does not allow to claim consensus, and the way it’s worded is obviously motivated by the desire to downplay the belief of experts in causal role of genetics. We have a newer survey they do not mention, too, Survey of Expert Opinion on Intelligence: Causes of International Differences in Cognitive Ability Tests, Rindermann, 2016:
If anything, the consensus seems to be that genes play some role here.
I do not see why this hypothetical is impressive? The best that could be said for it is that it is logically sound and novel. But heritability and norms of reaction impose limits on such explanations. If X percent of a trait’s variance can be explained by a factor, then there’s only so much you can get by changing the sum of non-X factors. Adult intelligence has roughly 80% heritability (equally within white and black populations; actually this alone invalidates the idea). For 1 d of difference in intelligence to be explained away by the environment, the gap in environmental quality must be 2.24 d. This is implausibly large for intra-national racial differences, contradicted by direct measures of environmental quality and indirect proxies of deprivation (such as stress and self-esteem), made suspect by the fact that there’s been a great deal of improvement in race relations and equalization of living standards since the 60s, yet no large narrowing of the IQ gap; and for the case where black people have higher “genotypic IQ”, environmental deprivation must be even greater than 2.24 d.