I think part of the problem that Murray has - in common with all of us recusants from the Social Justice religion - is that we have never really managed to quite pin down a comprehensive overview of the hugely seductive psychological complex that underpins the religion. Because, of course, race unrealism is just one part of the mix that makes up the whole fairytale of it. TS Eliot's weary observation about the unbearableness of reality for much of humankind is part of the answer. And I keep trying to get to the heart of it in my essays in Slouching Towards Bethlehem but I never feel sure I've quite got to the core of it either.
I've read The Bell Curve completely once, and in parts a few other times. I tried to play the Devil's Advocate, simply to give his very vocal, near-hysterical critics a fair shake: who knows? --maybe they're onto something.
To my mind, the book is well reasoned, with sound methodology and redundancies in approach, and I could only see that his most strident opposition tended to be sophistic in nature. At the time of my first reading, I was considerably more receptive to ideas of natural equality and the ascent of mankind as a sort of one world brotherhood. Not dogmatic, but reflexive--left over from my 60s college days.
I came to the conclusion that indeed IQ was significantly heritable, that these aggregated genetic traits showed up consistently in all major testing vehicles, and that I, myself, was not overly favored in this implied heritable hierarchy--if "hierarchy" is not too inflammatory a term here. I was likely an upper-mid range Caucasian, non-Levantine, and therefore statistically of less IQ than a corresponding east Asian--like my wife!
...but I already knew this anecdotally.
Levity (?) aside, this meant, if accurate, that to a very large degree Murray and Herrnstein's findings were good enough for use in my own worldview of how life works on the macro (but not necessarily micro) scale.
Thinking further I began to wonder *why* the book provoked the level of passionate criticism that it did--after all, the methodology was careful and seemingly non-controversial. I believe that I figured it out.
Parts 1 thru 3 show how they studied the problem and came up with their refined results. I *believe* that they would be grudgingly accepted by academics, with some entrenched resistance in the areas of sociology, but that Part 4, which is a conclusion combined with social prescriptions, was so bleak that it was emotionally unacceptable for many academics who at their core were enlightenment humanists holding the idea of the basic equality of mankind. If I recall, I came away from Part 4 with the idea that the authors said, in essence, most of what the current social policy programs in the US could have no lasting positive effect, due to differences in intelligence. It was a waste of time and money.
In essence, the dumber will always be with us.
I think that this was the read flag that attracted the attention of most academics. It was just an awful, awful impasse if true, and on an emotional level it undercut their ideas of the infinite perfectibility of Man. A lifelong, devout Catholic being told that there was no afterlife.
So that's where we stand now, in the recent past, and probably into the future so long as academia holds its present predominant belief system.
Interesting stuff Hairyhanded. My short answer to why academia reacts how it does to people like Murray would be the Saul Bellow quote above. We live in Alice Through the Looking Glass times, intellectually-speaking...... and one big aspect of that craziness is the need to disabuse ourselves of the delusion that non-STEM academia is still a place where educated and smart people congregate - where wise elders congregate. It has become a place where a kind of wannabe Social Justice priesthood congregate.
Given that it is easy enough to have complications at birth etc why isn’t the left side fat tailed? I would have guessed there would be more total imbeciles and normal distribution doesn’t accurately describe a population.
It could be as simple as there being a few percent of the population who don't get included in the population samples that participate in IQ test norming because they are obviously Funny Looking Kids.
There’s definitely more people on the left tail than the right. Things like Down Syndrome, people who suffered brain damage at birth, etc. They’re likely not included in IQ testing. There’s also increasingly fewer of them with prenatal testing and better medicine in childbirth. For example, there’s basically no more Down Syndrome kids in Denmark.
IQ test scoring is constructed so that the IQ cannot rise (the average is always 1.00) and the distribution is "normal". A genuine test of straight intelligence might be just as you expect, with a bulge at or near the left end due to birth defects, auto accidents, etc.
--Go to any country outside the West and people take differences in intelligence for granted. Go to, say, Kuwait, and everyone takes for granted that Africans aren't as smart as they are. You need a constant, daily expenditure of money and oppression to make people say that water runs upward when they can see that it doesn't.
--The proof that we are right about IQ and so many other things is that whenever the oppression is loosened, belief in the truth comes rushing back like you'd opened the floodgates. Look at the return of conservative and nativist thinking in Russia as soon as Soviet all-are-the-same dogma disappeared.
--There is an excellent book from 1999 called Easily Led: A History of Propaganda, by Oliver Thomson. I think Sailer would love it. It has tons of examples of how to shape public opinion, and sadly it's more about symbolism than facts. Actually, it's not so much about convincing people, but about showing them what they better subscribe to, or else. For example, the first time the emperor's picture was put on the Roman coins, so that suddenly everyone had his image, in a world mostly void of pictures. Or making everyone go to church every week even when they didn't understand the Latin sermon. Or public shaming by the Red Guards. Making everyone use propaganda words instead of the real words - a constant show of force. Symbolism, shaming, show of force. But the author Thomson acknowledges that the truth is a powerful factor in itself, when he says that the usurper needs more propaganda to claim that he has a right to the throne.
--Sadly, it takes courage to believe in the truth, and also interest, not just intelligence. Courage is in short supply. And there is physical courage and social courage, and we can easily see how there is more of the first than the latter: Almost all people would rather go die in an unjust war than say no and be imprisoned for a while, and shamed, along with the family.
--In college I listened to a speech by a rhetoric consultant. He said that 60% of people's beliefs are based on authority (ethos), 30% on emotions (pathos) and only 10% on facts (logos). For those few of us who base most of our beliefs on facts that is a tough pill to swallow.
(He called it Logos, Pathos and Ethos. But I put the depressing logos at the end, for a dramatic finish. See, even now I automatically follow the rules for capturing people's attention, rather than just writing the facts. Just like putting "--" before every point made, or likening things to water and floodgates.)
>Go to any country outside the West and they take differences in intelligence for granted.
To the extent this is true, I hardly see this being all that helpful. Racist Arabs being right about there being a cognitive gap between themselves and their southern neighbors aren't themselves terribly knowledgeable about general intelligence. There isn't even an Arabic-language Wikipedia article about The Bell Curve, let alone an Arabic-language translation. And the Arabic-language Wikipedia article on race and intelligence is at least as woke as the Anglo version:
Not that Arabic-language Wikipedia writers are a representative sample, but given that we can be sure they're on the right side of their own bell curves, we can trust their opinions matter much more than average. And smart Arabs sure don't look to be any more fans of HBD than smart Anglos nor smart Latinos.
"To the extent this is true, I hardly see this being all that helpful."
"There isn't even an Arabic-language Wikipedia article about The Bell Curve"
LOL
Your American book, if Arabs don't have a translation of it, how can it be helpful that people around the world know that different peoples have different intelligence! And they don't even know about the American internet concept HBD!!!
And what does "helpful" mean? I guess you took offense at me saying something that would be positive about Arabs. I don't see how it would be helpful if you think a fact is helpful or not.
"Doesn't matter what them dumb Arabs think because they don't know about the Bell Curve book or HBD." Your American fave-internet-debated concepts are the center of the universe. Practically no one I know has ever heard of that precious book or that US-internet-intellectual concept either, so I guess their opinion about intelligence is meaningless too. USA! USA! USA!
If there isn't even an Arabic-language Wikipedia page about the seminal popular-science work on general intelligence of the 20th Century, let alone an actual translation of the text, what reason have we to believe in there being a better popular understanding of HBD in the Arabosphere than the Anglo? What reason have we to believe in their having a healthier intellectual community period? Even if that were the case, it certainly wouldn't be for rreasons of attitudes on HBD.
I won't go as far as to say every Arab attitude about race is better or worse than the Anglo's. But if smart Arabs are drinking from the same race-communism pool as smart Anglos, why on Earth should we think their overall society's likely to be healthier on race in that regard? It makes more sense that they are in fact worse, though further behind us, and going through the same smartie-antiracist purge of dummy chudism that we've been putting ourselves through this last three generations.
Understand though, I don't think this means Arabs are bound by law of history to have to repeat all the same mistakes of Anglos. They can learn from our errors, too. They can avoid and even lessen them. But if they don't even know what errors we've been making; and if the smart Arabs are all being told their only problems are racism and capitalism, and they have nothing to do with HBD; they'll be much less likely to make smart decisions, and much more likely to err as painfully as we Occidentals.
No one knows what "HBD" is except for a few people online. To say that the observations of billions of people about races being different are "not helpful," meaning irrelevant, because they don't know about the U.S. HBD clique on Twitter and the U.S. Bell Curve book, is incredible. I have never read that book and I haven't read any website labeled HBD for eight years so I guess my observations are "not helpful" either.
Steve Sailer doesn't talk about "HBD" either, or if he does it's very rare, so I guess he doesn't know about IQ differences.
Arab awareness of the importance and significance of I.Q. can't possibly be higher or better than in the Anglosphere. Not only have none of the major works on general intelligence been translated into Arabic, but to the extent any of these topics so much as have Wikipedia pages, you can reliably bet money the articles will be at least as woke as their English equivalents:
Are there more Arab chuds who have a better understanding of race and intelligence than the blue-pilled loonies who actually write Arabic-language Wikipedia articles? Yes. Are there more Arab chuds with a better understanding of race and intelligence than there are American chuds? Possibly and probably, but the future still belongs to the side of smart; and all indications show that smart Arabs, whatever ideological direction they're tratravelling, aren't going in any direction that will be friendly towards any form of hereditarianism. There wasn't even a complete Arabic translation of On the Origin of Species until 1964:
Since 9/11 24% of women in the military and 1.9% of men say they experienced sexual assault. The link is to Watson University, and they also say that "racial, gender, & sexual minorities face the greatest risk of assault". And do they spin this without facts? Of course: "experiences of gender inequality are most pronounced for women of color, who experience intersecting forms of racism and sexism".
So it's "racism" that makes Black women sexually assaulted. But almost all sexual assault in the military will be in dating, and they date Black men almost entirely.
Likewise:
"Independent data also confirm queer and trans service members’ disproportionately greater risk for sexual assault."
Except that it's OTHER HOMOSEXUALS who do the sexual assault on their fellow homosexuals. Which has actually been seen in some articles in the past. Such as an interview with a homosexual man who was drugged by another homosexual soldier at a dinner, then assaulted. But it's funny how the leftists only mention non-Whites and homosexuals as victims, not as attackers.
But what to expect by a university that writes about "gender, & sexual minorities" as if they'd be two different things. But that was the whole point when feminists invented the fake word "gender," to pretend that you can have a "gender" different from your sex.
Almost every process has a distribution. IQ is no different. Naysayers of Murray would like it even less if you laid a digital universe over IQ demographics…
I personally see each human as a sort of template at birth that had been designed and assembled by genetics, and that there is a genetic upper limit of every physical/mental attribute that can be fully attained by precise nurture. This implies a lot of "life luck", which I also believe exists as an additive factor to genetics.
I suppose also that "anti-nurture"--a psychotic and/or dysfunctional early childhood environment--would actively retard any positive growth potential.
My analogy is: Everyone gets a cup at birth. Some are larger. Some are smaller. There is no way to enlarge one, but they can be damaged. There’s no way to tell how large a cup is until you try to fill it. Filling it is mostly up to the individual. Sooner or later, tragically, it begins to leak.
> "Do these kind of Secret Decoder Ring articles ever work?"
Yes, they absolutely do. How do I know? I see it firsthand in my extended family, which includes the Director of a significant scientific institution at an important university. She is Ivy League-educated (but not in science) and networks with other such directors (mostly other women) and they all seem to agree about who is Good and who is Bad in The Science without any reference to—or possibly even any understanding of—the actual underlying science. But they do read Vox articles.
> "Does anybody ever finish the article and say to themselves, 'Yes, Charlie Murray is just as evil and stupid as I previously believed, but now I’m aware that 80% of what Murray says about IQ is Science and Good!'”
The first half, yes. The second half, no.
> "The basic problem is that the zeitgeist is just getting dumber and dumber as the dominant way of thinking gets more childish: Good Guys vs. Bad Guys. (And you determine who are the Good Guys and who are the Bad Guys not by something complicated like what they do, but by something simple: who they are.)"
You can say "the zeitgeist" or "Americans" or "people", but if you examine this subject with a bit of HBD-awareness, you may notice that it's not really everyone at the "zeit" or all "Americans" or all the "people", but rather certain particular subgroups who especially manifest this non-logical groupthink, which this "Secret Decoder Ring" rhetoric works on, and they happen to have gained a lot more say over The Science in the last 100 years or so.
In order not to be accused of anything, I won't be more specific than that, but if anyone needs a hint, there are internet-famous memes out there.
It's hard to believe that IQ scores will continue to rise given the current increasing social stupidity on display. Perhaps the Flynn Effect is cyclical and we happened to have discovered IQ testing during an upswing in social coherence/development. Lets test current college students in 2 years or so and see if we have a decline.
Read the works of Dr. Edward Dutton. Flynn effect likely caused by pushing up the nurture aspect as far as it can go in terms of the population. Proxies for biological iq and intelligence are dropping fast. Basically industrial civilization removes intelligence related selection pressures causing more genetically "stupid" people. Everyone gets educated though so this masks that genetic intelligence is dropping. Until it doesn't anymore and you get the reverse Flynn effect
Charles Murray and other like him’s arguments seem to have a glaring self contradiction: Within the confines of their arguments they seem to reference the field of Population Genetics in a way that asserts the fields epistemological authority when it holds a wide consensus within it.. But population Genetics holds that sub-Saharan Africa is an incredibly genetically diverse region, they even seem to suggest that its genetic diversity may exceed the genetic diversity of the entire rest of the world, absent them, combined. Yet, at least regarding their data from Africa, Murray and others like him rely on a miniscule number of samples. Also, in some cases, it seems that these samples may even be collectively obtained from a miniscule number of places.
I posit that is due to the same hard structures that are what enables the USA’s federal government to run perpetual and large budget deficits, perpetual and large trade deficits, and have high liquidity without inflation (even these recent years count in those regards); and those are imperial structures, They are economically suppressed. Every single country in sub-Saharan Africa is a net capital exporter to the West!!!! Planetary divisions of labor, remember, and they don’t even allow the the sorts of structures that, with the narrow scope of what they do, generate scientific and research opportunities, And they just import away from them so much of the far below potential scientific and engineering talent that they do produce. And promise there allot more items and more to each of the few items just listed. But the skinny of it is that these structures prevent diversified and heterogenous and very deep across sphere with redundancy economic systems from developing. But there is some reason to believe that right now under the radar and beneath the surface, things are brewing that may upend this.
The more pertinent question for me and you that if if that happens, then the USA’s will no longer be able to run perpetual and large budget deficits, perpetual and large trade deficits, and have high liquidity without inflation…. and what happens then?
We do, Nigerian Americans (mostly of Igbo descent) are actually the most educated immigrants group in the US by some measures. There are so few scientists/intellectuals in general that reach the level of notoriety where they’re a public figure, the fact that you can’t think of any doesn’t mean much…. But here are some famous Nigerian scientists:
Bennet Omalu- the “concussion” guy who discovered and first published findings on CTE in American football players
Bankole Johnson- psychiatrist who discovered/developed effective treatments for alcoholism
Kunle Olukotun- computer scientist and electrical engineer at Stanford.
Winston Soboyejo- mechanical engineer at Princeton
lol, Igbo Nigerians are the real übermenschen. Sometimes you’ll be watching college football, and you’ll hear something like “Uche Iwuchuku is on an absolute tear today! This kid cannot be stopped! He also can’t be stopped in the classroom where he maintains a 4.0 as a duel major in mathematics and computer science.” Nigeria could potentially have a good future if they weren’t bogged down by Islamic extremism and brain drain.
"But population Genetics holds that sub-Saharan Africa is an incredibly genetically diverse region, they even seem to suggest that its genetic diversity may exceed the genetic diversity of the entire rest of the world, absent them, combined. "
Can you provide some links to this?
I assume that you are emphasizing human diversity, and not fauna in general. Is this correct?
I can see intuitively how the main difference in genetic diversity between current sub-Sahara African human phenotypes and those of Western Europe, e.g., are logically derived from the "Founder Effect".
One can further imply that the Founder Effect is exacerbated by cultural tendencies toward serial monogamy, also.
One might further extrapolate that the Founder's Effect is most clearly demonstrated in New World populations, especially pre-European contact.
But WRT the completeness and size of samplings for the Bell Curve, practical constraints demand that one can only use existing samplings, do you won, at your own expense, or do not attempt to do a study, at all, simply because someone, somewhere, will say that the sampling was insufficient.
All such statistical research is a work in progress; the article even states this by implication. If your main point is, as it appears to me, that the H-M sampling was not representative of all/most existing groups, yes, but then the same can be said for virtually every other statistical study.
Does this seem to make sense to you? If that's not your point, what is it?
Hi. This may be my fault as perhaps I didn't write articulately enough in the reply I made which you initially responded to but the central point I was making is that within the parameters of Charles Murray's argument, there is an inherent contradiction. Murray and others like him invoke the authority of population genetics to back up their argument, which is couched in genetics. But Population genetics consistently shows that sub-Saharan Africa is extraordinarily genetically diverse, often more so than the rest of the world combined. Therefor, since Murray's work relies on a very limited and unrepresentative sample of African populations, its genetic claims, again, strictly within the parameters of his own argument, are contradictory. I take your point regarding the challenges of sampling in statistical research and that all stats based research is a work in progress, and so on; but those points are beyond the confines of his arguments and my critique of it being self contradictory. But how about we don't arguments that are so heavily reliant on complex statistical analysis for this, and also drop them for many other things too
This is an excellent and rational exchange and I am learning a lot from it, Mike.
I can accept your objection that Murray-Herrnstein take their samples--a large number of samples from a limited geographical subset (mostly the US), and then they go on to draw conclusions that they extrapolate to being true for world-wide populations, most of which have provided no samples. This is an inherent, though not fatal, problem, the way I see it, because what they've done is show that for large sampling A, which is drawn from the US (e.g.) this generality holds true and (HERE'S THE LEAP OF FAITH) and we think the same would hold true if we were to have gotten samples from every represented group in varied geographical locations.
Is this your point? If so, I agree that the findings are not absolute and extensible, but relative only to the groups within the sampling area. So at worst, it does hold true for the US, and it *might* hold true globally, but this is yet to be determined.
Another assumption--and it's actually the one that caused me to comment first--is this: "Population genetics consistently shows that sub-Saharan Africa is extraordinarily genetically diverse, often more so than the rest of the world combined. "
I take that as true.
But because genetics are more diverse than anywhere else in a general sense, and among any other broad group, does this mean that there are genetic outliers in the sub-Saharan African genome that necessarily *exceed* the genetic norms, or even outliers, of other less diverse groups?
That's a mouthful, but here's what I mean...
Inhabitants of the Gobi desert ostensibly have less genetic diversity than sub-Saharan Africa, in part because of the Founder Effect. Perhaps they have within their genome the ability to mentally hold large numbers in their head, and add and subtract them quickly, useful in herding societies, perhaps. They also have the genetic ability to withstand frostbite. These genetic tendencies are expressed in individuals to greater or lesser degrees.
In s-S Africa, the genome may contain the ability to hold large numbers in memory, and find the prime numbers among these inventories, and this ability *exceeds* even that of the Gobi population. But these same s_S populations have no genetic tendencies to protect against frostbite over-and-above what their genome supplies, and this is markedly less than for the Gobi inhabitants.
All I'm trying to say is that to surmise that a more genetically diverse population has traits that *exceed*, or even equal these same traits in less diverse populations seems quite a stretch. Unless this has been solidly demonstrated somehow.
This common objection is really misinformed. There is more diversity between two chimpanzees from different groups than all of humanity, but that doesn't mean groups of chimpanzees are hugely short, tall, clever, fat etc. Most of the "diversity" in Africans is in DNA that doesn't code for anything - it's just noise. Most African's are from one small population - Bantu's. And when you observe African's you see there is very little diversity in appearance, personality, or intelligence. Non African's show far greater phenotypic diversity, and hence diversity in the genes that count.
Hi. Your reply contains both factual inaccuracies and flawed reasoning. 1) the idea African's have "very little diversity in appearance, personality, or intelligence" is, beyond skin color, super wrong to the point of me wondering if you've ever met more than some tiny number of black people. There’s huge phenotypic diversity, including in appearance, behavior, and cognitive abilities, among African populations, and that is truly just a hard fact. 2) the claim that "most Africans are from one small population - Bantu's" crassly oversimplifies things. There were other significant contributors to African genetic diversity; in fact there are numerous others, like the Nilotic and the Khoisan. 3) Saying non-Africans as having greater "phenotypic diversity" ignores the fact that many non-African populations represent a subset of the genetic diversity found in Africa, as humans migrated out of Africa. 4) the notion that "diversity in the genes that count" is higher in non-Africans is a misinterpretation of genetic data; the diversity you appear to to be referencing in non-African populations is derived from, and sometimes less than, the diversity within African pops.
Bushmen and pygmies largely broke off from the rest of humanity a long time ago, so their junk DNA is quite different. But there are virtually no African-American descendants of American slaves with much Khoisan or pygmy ancestry. And there aren't even many Nilotic old-school African Americans. Virtually all DOAS African Americans are West African/Bantu Expansion.
Hi. 1) Given the contexts, Black Americans are sort of out of the confines of the the points I was making in the post your replying to here, which was about in-general Sub-Saharan Africans and so pointing out that their predominantly of West African and Bantu Expansion ancestry doesntt negate the broader points about African genetic diversity. 2) Saying that Khoisan and Pygmy genetic material is largely "junk DNA" is misleading because many non-coding regions can still play very important roles in regulating gene expression and other genetic functions (see REF 1). 3) that "there aren't even many Nilotic old-school African Americans", yes thats mostly found in the east, but that statement is irrelevant to the points I made about broader Sub-Saharan African genetic diversity. 4) "Virtually all DOAS African Americans are West African/Bantu Expansion", so what? Thats just anoter over simplification. West Africa is still one of the most genetically diverse in the planet. It is home to a whole bunch of ethnic groups and genetic lineages. Same goes for areas that they were from where Bantu E descend was/is very common, the gen population of B E descendants is genetically diverse due to their interactions with many indigenous populations and having been spread over such a wide area with so much environmental variability for so long
The tl;dr is that the "Africa is most diverse" meme is false in two ways:
1) Africa being divergent (diverse) from the rest of the world is a consequence of the Out Of Africa theory, so it could equally be stated that the rest of the world is the most diverse from the African point of view.
2) The alleged within-Africa diversity is basically just an artifact of the very ancient Khoisan divergence from the rest of the human gene-line, but there are hardly any Khoisan left anymore, so if their "diversity" were tabulated per capita they would barely register. The Bantu population that actually composes most of Sub-Saharan Africa is not particularly diverse, showing less genetic distance over much wider geography than do, e.g., Italians and Germans.
And 2a) the Nilotic divergence isn't really African but is the result of non-African re-introgression back in to Africa. In other words, that "diversity" is the diversity of non-Africans, not of Africans, i.e., the diversity from 1), above.
Each point you've made here is either erroneous or irrelevant to the contexts of this conversation:
1) Yeah, from an African perspective, the rest of the world is genetically distinct, but this doesn't equate to the same amount of diversity. African pops are more genetically diverse because they have had a longer period of time to accumulate genetic variations.
2) The genetic diversity within Africa isnt just because of the Khoisan, the diversity in Africa is much broader. It includes numerous other ethnic groups, each with their own unique genetic variations. The Bantu-speaking pops, while more homogenous than some other African groups, still add to the overall Africa's genetic diversity.
3) Bantu spread a more consistent genetic signature across a large geography but Bantu pops still have a lot of genetic diversity due to local adapts, mingling with other groups, and the wide environmental variability within their geo spread. Also, their specific case is stil just a sub part of the overall diversity within Africa which has many other groups with genetic lineages
4) this is factually incorrect. The Nilotic are indigenous to Africa, specifically to regions around the Nile Valley, South Sudan, and East Africa. But even if it were to be correct it would be irrelevant since were talking about the range of diversity of africans, not the geographic sources of parts of that diversity
Yeah, I read that article. It only had one part that is relevant to this conversation and that part is factually incorrect. He labels all non-coding as "junk" in a way that suggests it is meaningless, but according to population genetics (and btw, I'm the first person to say that if you want to establish the consensus of a field and you think you have a leg to stand on, do it, but the context of this convo is that Murray et al, with the confines of their args, hold the fields consensuses to be authoritative) this simply is not true and in fact some non-codings can have profound impacts: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9949080/
> "The genetic diversity within Africa isnt just because of the Khoisan, the diversity in Africa is much broader. It includes numerous other ethnic groups, each with their own unique genetic variations."
The variations in other African ethnic groups comes from their admixture with Khoisan or with non-African populations, so this is just a restatement of my above points 2) and 1) respectively.
> "Bantu pops still have a lot of genetic diversity due to local adapts, mingling with other groups"
Again, "local adapts" are Khoisan and non-African admixture, so again just a restatement of my above points 2) and 1) respectively.
> "The Nilotic are indigenous to Africa, specifically to regions around the Nile Valley, South Sudan, and East Africa."
The supposed "diversity" of Nilotics (i.e. diverse from Bantus) stems from their admixture with non-Africans. That they were born in Africa ("indigenous") is genetically irrelevant.
> "He labels all non-coding as 'junk' in a way that suggests it is meaningless"
Yeah, I didn't think that was an important part of his argument either, which is why I didn't mention it. But if you think it was relevant, feel free to debate it with him directly.
"The variations in other African ethnic groups comes from their admixture with Khoisan or with non-African populations."
This is wrong. While some African pops have admixture with Khoisan or non-African pops, this isnt the only or even primary source of their genetic diversity. The huge diversity in Africa is from of thing, ancient lineages that evolved independently for 10s of thousands of years, adaptations to a wide array environments, and co mingling among a large number of African groups.
For the rest of it, I don't get what the points your trying to make about what the geographic origins of the diversity are. I never made any points regarding the geographic sources of African genetic diversity, just that there was a lot of it, it wouldn't matter if it came from Martians, the point is that it is there, where it came from is irrelevant to the contexts of the conversation.
His points about "junk dna" are the only points he made in that article that are relevant within the contexts of this conversation
Most of of the alleged "huge diversity in Africa" is just the divergent Khoisan-type admixture re-admixed in various ways under various non-Khoisan names*, or is just non-African gene-lines re-introgressed back into Africa, mainly in two waves, one probably Stone Age and one probably closer to Bronze Age.
> "ancient lineages"
The "African diversity" partisans may have a kinda sorta point in that there is indeed evidence of an archaic "ghost" admixture in SS African populations, probably an extinct hominid of the Homo Erectus variety. But for the same reason, they usually don't want to draw too much attention to it.
> " I don't get what the points your trying to make about what the geographic origins"
I'm quoting Steve's article. It sounds like you didn't see the second page. The link to it is a very small URL in the lower left corner of the first page.
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* One could argue that I'm even incorrect to call the population "Khoisan" as the Khoi and San are both recent tribal names of people stemming from this older lineage, but since the older lineage doesn't to my knowledge have its own name, I'm just using "Khoisan" since it already has some currency.
None of what you just wrote is relevant to the comment I made which you have been responding to, here I'll repost it here: "Charles Murray and other like him’s arguments seem to have a glaring self contradiction: Within the confines of their arguments they seem to reference the field of Population Genetics in a way that asserts the fields epistemological authority when it holds a wide consensus within it.. But population Genetics holds that sub-Saharan Africa is an incredibly genetically diverse region, they even seem to suggest that its genetic diversity may exceed the genetic diversity of the entire rest of the world, absent them, combined. Yet, at least regarding their data from Africa, Murray and others like him rely on a miniscule number of samples. Also, in some cases, it seems that these samples may even be collectively obtained from a miniscule number of places."
One way around this problem would be to create a society in which anyone, regardless of IQ, who works hard and plays by the rules could realistically look forward to a rich and fulfilling life. In other words, unlike today, a society that fits the human material that actually exists, in which it wouldn't matter terribly much how smart you happened to be. Here's my idea of one such possible place: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00U0C9HKW
Charles Murray talks about having one’s contribution valued by the people around you. A janitor whose contribution is valued is much happier than an executive who gets dumped on, no matter how well the latter gets paid.
We _need_ janitors. We make it too expensive to employ them. People resent the expense instead of valuing their work.
The idea that someone like Roger Penrose is genetically better-disposed to theoretical physics than I am does not keep me up at night. I’m not sure it should keep anyone up at night (save maybe Stephen Hawking, when he was alive, and his other peers in the same field). I’m simply glad such persons exist.
That isn’t the point. Modern societies (with modern governments) add costs to employment that price the low end above its value to the employer. A dishwasher who works for a few weeks costs as much in paperwork as a skilled technician who works the whole year. Higher turnover increases the overhead per hour worked. A low wage worker’s marginal value to an employer is thin enough already. This increases the pressure to automate. The remaining low wage jobs are both undesirable and unappreciated.
Evidence for the association of genes and intelligence has become sufficiently strong (and embarrassing) that access to the relevant data needs to be restricted. The US government has started to limit access to the largest public genetic and phenotype (e.g. intelligence) database.
In the competition between attempts to suppress inconvenient facts and reality, my bet is on reality.
When I read "The Bell Curve" about a decade after it was published, a key insight I took away from it was not the race stuff, which was only one chapter (the 48-page Chapter 13, "Ethnic Differences in Cognitive Ability," part of Part III, "The National Context" which totals 120 pages out of 833), but the observation that in the modern world IQ had become monetized. In the past, IQ was just one aspect of an individual's personality, and throughout the land there was a mix of the dumb, the average and the bright. The blacksmith, not the mayor or preacher, might be the brightest man in the village and be respected and sought out for advice and counsel.
But once IQ became monetized, business, industry and academia swept through the country scooping up all the brights leaving the small towns and cities, ranches and farms bereft of their smartest and left to stagnate. Murray wrote that it was like taking the yeast out of the bread recipe and worried what it was doing to the country.
This struck me as a very astute observation. But since then something has happened that Murray didn't anticipate -- that now bright whites are shunned. Business, industry and academia do not want them, most especially those from "flyover country." There is lots and lots of overt evidence of this.
So men like Jay Forrester, Mancur Olson, William Allen White and my grandfather's friend since they met in the Navy during World War II, Alvin Kernan, now have no chance of developing their mental gifts and contributing to the larger society.
But maybe this will work out for the best. The yeast is remaining in the bread recipe. So "when the cities lie at the monster’s feet there are left the mountains," in Robinson Jeffers' phrase, the mountains will have the brights they need to restart civilization.
I didn't read _The Bell Curve_ when it came out because I was a clever young thing who read all the reviews that said it was nothing but a racist screed, and why would I want to read that?
Some time in the past decade I did finally read it and was genuinely stunned. It was not about what I had been led to believe it was about, at all. It wasn't mostly about race. It was about the damaging impact on American society of cognitive stratification, and it was 100% persuasive.
Taking the smartest people out of every community in the country and shipping them all off to elite colleges was great for those people. It was like Hogwarts come true: you get this special letter that says you are special, and it gives you entree to the secret train platform and the castle and the cool kids. Who are far more interesting than the folks at home: brainy, funny, clever, delightful. You hang out with them, make art and science with them, make babies with them, rule the world with them. It's fucking great!
For the smarties, that is. It's not great at all for everybody else, for the whole fabric of society. It has pernicious effects in *every* strip-mined community of every race. I decided at the end of the book that the campaign of denouncing it as a racist tome to discourage reading it was not about PC anything (to use the older term for wokeness) but instead about the guilty conscience of national elites. _The Bell Curve_ really had their number.
If people on the lower strata had the recourse to just recruit smart people directly, and to find their own ways of keeping them, whether paying more or just treating them better than elsewhere, this wouldn't be a problem. Or at least not one worth the price of its fixing.
But they don't. We actively forbid it with anti-discrimination law everywhere in the civilized world. Because anywhere that attempts to recruit with such an approach will be in breach of any meaningful anti-discrimination law to whatever degree protected groups differ in their average abilities.
Civil rights law has been the poison pill of the free society. You can't have meritocracy, freedom of association, freedom of expression, and race communism. And that's before you even try to also add sex communism; as we've seen with feminists, incels, and the TQ+ brigade in various forms. Our tremendous wealth and technological progress stemmed the bleeding, as well the White Great Migration of the post-Civil Rights Era; but none of it made the gaps go away. All we have left is even less tolerance for their existence and even dumber policies to attempt their erasure.
The effects of stratification wouldn't be as damaging if companies and institutions actually were free to directly select for general intelligence in filling positions. Then there'd always be at least some financial incentive for smart people to take the path less traveled. But we actively hamper that with such things as anti-discrimination laws, and didisastrous court decisions such as Griggs v. Duke.
Moreover, if you don't bring up HBD as the reason why anti-discrimination laws must always be both onerous to implement and anti-meritocratic in execution, your opponents will always assume chauvinism is the only motive you could have for opposing them. Hence why quietism never works.
"Reversing the Flynn Effect" would be a good title for dozens of iSteve posts.
I think part of the problem that Murray has - in common with all of us recusants from the Social Justice religion - is that we have never really managed to quite pin down a comprehensive overview of the hugely seductive psychological complex that underpins the religion. Because, of course, race unrealism is just one part of the mix that makes up the whole fairytale of it. TS Eliot's weary observation about the unbearableness of reality for much of humankind is part of the answer. And I keep trying to get to the heart of it in my essays in Slouching Towards Bethlehem but I never feel sure I've quite got to the core of it either.
What's the early R.E.M. song that seems inspired by that T. S. Eliot line?
Blimey...now there's a question. Half my brain is clogged up with Rock song lyrics but I can't place that one. Let me know if you do.
I found it ... "Talk About the Passion" from R.E.M.'s first album "Murmur" in 1983:
Empty prayer, empty mouths combien [?] reaction
Empty prayer, empty mouths talk about the passion
Not everyone can carry the weight of the world
Not everyone can carry the weight of the world
Talk about the passion
Talk about the passion
Very T.S. Eliotish ...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zCMy6kq5ZA0
Thanks. Now I come to think of it, Losing My Religion would make a good title for my original comment! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xwtdhWltSIg
On the topic of "TS Eliot's weary observation about the unbearableness of reality for much of humankind" ...
“𝘈 𝘨𝘳𝘦𝘢𝘵 𝘥𝘦𝘢𝘭 𝘰𝘧 𝘪𝘯𝘵𝘦𝘭𝘭𝘪𝘨𝘦𝘯𝘤𝘦 𝘤𝘢𝘯 𝘣𝘦 𝘪𝘯𝘷𝘦𝘴𝘵𝘦𝘥 𝘪𝘯 𝘪𝘨𝘯𝘰𝘳𝘢𝘯𝘤𝘦 𝘸𝘩𝘦𝘯 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘯𝘦𝘦𝘥 𝘧𝘰𝘳 𝘪𝘭𝘭𝘶𝘴𝘪𝘰𝘯 𝘪𝘴 𝘥𝘦𝘦𝘱.”
― Saul Bellow; "To Jerusalem and Back"
Yes, one of my favorites. In fact it's quoted in at least one of my STB essays.....can't recall which one(s) though
I've read The Bell Curve completely once, and in parts a few other times. I tried to play the Devil's Advocate, simply to give his very vocal, near-hysterical critics a fair shake: who knows? --maybe they're onto something.
To my mind, the book is well reasoned, with sound methodology and redundancies in approach, and I could only see that his most strident opposition tended to be sophistic in nature. At the time of my first reading, I was considerably more receptive to ideas of natural equality and the ascent of mankind as a sort of one world brotherhood. Not dogmatic, but reflexive--left over from my 60s college days.
I came to the conclusion that indeed IQ was significantly heritable, that these aggregated genetic traits showed up consistently in all major testing vehicles, and that I, myself, was not overly favored in this implied heritable hierarchy--if "hierarchy" is not too inflammatory a term here. I was likely an upper-mid range Caucasian, non-Levantine, and therefore statistically of less IQ than a corresponding east Asian--like my wife!
...but I already knew this anecdotally.
Levity (?) aside, this meant, if accurate, that to a very large degree Murray and Herrnstein's findings were good enough for use in my own worldview of how life works on the macro (but not necessarily micro) scale.
Thinking further I began to wonder *why* the book provoked the level of passionate criticism that it did--after all, the methodology was careful and seemingly non-controversial. I believe that I figured it out.
Parts 1 thru 3 show how they studied the problem and came up with their refined results. I *believe* that they would be grudgingly accepted by academics, with some entrenched resistance in the areas of sociology, but that Part 4, which is a conclusion combined with social prescriptions, was so bleak that it was emotionally unacceptable for many academics who at their core were enlightenment humanists holding the idea of the basic equality of mankind. If I recall, I came away from Part 4 with the idea that the authors said, in essence, most of what the current social policy programs in the US could have no lasting positive effect, due to differences in intelligence. It was a waste of time and money.
In essence, the dumber will always be with us.
I think that this was the read flag that attracted the attention of most academics. It was just an awful, awful impasse if true, and on an emotional level it undercut their ideas of the infinite perfectibility of Man. A lifelong, devout Catholic being told that there was no afterlife.
So that's where we stand now, in the recent past, and probably into the future so long as academia holds its present predominant belief system.
Interesting stuff Hairyhanded. My short answer to why academia reacts how it does to people like Murray would be the Saul Bellow quote above. We live in Alice Through the Looking Glass times, intellectually-speaking...... and one big aspect of that craziness is the need to disabuse ourselves of the delusion that non-STEM academia is still a place where educated and smart people congregate - where wise elders congregate. It has become a place where a kind of wannabe Social Justice priesthood congregate.
Given that it is easy enough to have complications at birth etc why isn’t the left side fat tailed? I would have guessed there would be more total imbeciles and normal distribution doesn’t accurately describe a population.
Good question.
It could be as simple as there being a few percent of the population who don't get included in the population samples that participate in IQ test norming because they are obviously Funny Looking Kids.
Or the answer could be more profound.
There’s definitely more people on the left tail than the right. Things like Down Syndrome, people who suffered brain damage at birth, etc. They’re likely not included in IQ testing. There’s also increasingly fewer of them with prenatal testing and better medicine in childbirth. For example, there’s basically no more Down Syndrome kids in Denmark.
IQ test scoring is constructed so that the IQ cannot rise (the average is always 1.00) and the distribution is "normal". A genuine test of straight intelligence might be just as you expect, with a bulge at or near the left end due to birth defects, auto accidents, etc.
A good article! A few notes to add:
--Go to any country outside the West and people take differences in intelligence for granted. Go to, say, Kuwait, and everyone takes for granted that Africans aren't as smart as they are. You need a constant, daily expenditure of money and oppression to make people say that water runs upward when they can see that it doesn't.
--The proof that we are right about IQ and so many other things is that whenever the oppression is loosened, belief in the truth comes rushing back like you'd opened the floodgates. Look at the return of conservative and nativist thinking in Russia as soon as Soviet all-are-the-same dogma disappeared.
--There is an excellent book from 1999 called Easily Led: A History of Propaganda, by Oliver Thomson. I think Sailer would love it. It has tons of examples of how to shape public opinion, and sadly it's more about symbolism than facts. Actually, it's not so much about convincing people, but about showing them what they better subscribe to, or else. For example, the first time the emperor's picture was put on the Roman coins, so that suddenly everyone had his image, in a world mostly void of pictures. Or making everyone go to church every week even when they didn't understand the Latin sermon. Or public shaming by the Red Guards. Making everyone use propaganda words instead of the real words - a constant show of force. Symbolism, shaming, show of force. But the author Thomson acknowledges that the truth is a powerful factor in itself, when he says that the usurper needs more propaganda to claim that he has a right to the throne.
--Sadly, it takes courage to believe in the truth, and also interest, not just intelligence. Courage is in short supply. And there is physical courage and social courage, and we can easily see how there is more of the first than the latter: Almost all people would rather go die in an unjust war than say no and be imprisoned for a while, and shamed, along with the family.
--In college I listened to a speech by a rhetoric consultant. He said that 60% of people's beliefs are based on authority (ethos), 30% on emotions (pathos) and only 10% on facts (logos). For those few of us who base most of our beliefs on facts that is a tough pill to swallow.
(He called it Logos, Pathos and Ethos. But I put the depressing logos at the end, for a dramatic finish. See, even now I automatically follow the rules for capturing people's attention, rather than just writing the facts. Just like putting "--" before every point made, or likening things to water and floodgates.)
>Go to any country outside the West and they take differences in intelligence for granted.
To the extent this is true, I hardly see this being all that helpful. Racist Arabs being right about there being a cognitive gap between themselves and their southern neighbors aren't themselves terribly knowledgeable about general intelligence. There isn't even an Arabic-language Wikipedia article about The Bell Curve, let alone an Arabic-language translation. And the Arabic-language Wikipedia article on race and intelligence is at least as woke as the Anglo version:
https://ar.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D8%A7%D9%84%D8%B9%D8%B1%D9%82_%D9%88%D8%A7%D9%84%D8%B0%D9%83%D8%A7%D8%A1
Not that Arabic-language Wikipedia writers are a representative sample, but given that we can be sure they're on the right side of their own bell curves, we can trust their opinions matter much more than average. And smart Arabs sure don't look to be any more fans of HBD than smart Anglos nor smart Latinos.
"To the extent this is true, I hardly see this being all that helpful."
"There isn't even an Arabic-language Wikipedia article about The Bell Curve"
LOL
Your American book, if Arabs don't have a translation of it, how can it be helpful that people around the world know that different peoples have different intelligence! And they don't even know about the American internet concept HBD!!!
And what does "helpful" mean? I guess you took offense at me saying something that would be positive about Arabs. I don't see how it would be helpful if you think a fact is helpful or not.
"Doesn't matter what them dumb Arabs think because they don't know about the Bell Curve book or HBD." Your American fave-internet-debated concepts are the center of the universe. Practically no one I know has ever heard of that precious book or that US-internet-intellectual concept either, so I guess their opinion about intelligence is meaningless too. USA! USA! USA!
If there isn't even an Arabic-language Wikipedia page about the seminal popular-science work on general intelligence of the 20th Century, let alone an actual translation of the text, what reason have we to believe in there being a better popular understanding of HBD in the Arabosphere than the Anglo? What reason have we to believe in their having a healthier intellectual community period? Even if that were the case, it certainly wouldn't be for rreasons of attitudes on HBD.
I won't go as far as to say every Arab attitude about race is better or worse than the Anglo's. But if smart Arabs are drinking from the same race-communism pool as smart Anglos, why on Earth should we think their overall society's likely to be healthier on race in that regard? It makes more sense that they are in fact worse, though further behind us, and going through the same smartie-antiracist purge of dummy chudism that we've been putting ourselves through this last three generations.
Understand though, I don't think this means Arabs are bound by law of history to have to repeat all the same mistakes of Anglos. They can learn from our errors, too. They can avoid and even lessen them. But if they don't even know what errors we've been making; and if the smart Arabs are all being told their only problems are racism and capitalism, and they have nothing to do with HBD; they'll be much less likely to make smart decisions, and much more likely to err as painfully as we Occidentals.
No one knows what "HBD" is except for a few people online. To say that the observations of billions of people about races being different are "not helpful," meaning irrelevant, because they don't know about the U.S. HBD clique on Twitter and the U.S. Bell Curve book, is incredible. I have never read that book and I haven't read any website labeled HBD for eight years so I guess my observations are "not helpful" either.
Steve Sailer doesn't talk about "HBD" either, or if he does it's very rare, so I guess he doesn't know about IQ differences.
Arab awareness of the importance and significance of I.Q. can't possibly be higher or better than in the Anglosphere. Not only have none of the major works on general intelligence been translated into Arabic, but to the extent any of these topics so much as have Wikipedia pages, you can reliably bet money the articles will be at least as woke as their English equivalents:
https://ar.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D9%86%D8%B3%D8%A8%D8%A9_%D8%A7%D9%84%D8%B0%D9%83%D8%A7%D8%A1
Are there more Arab chuds who have a better understanding of race and intelligence than the blue-pilled loonies who actually write Arabic-language Wikipedia articles? Yes. Are there more Arab chuds with a better understanding of race and intelligence than there are American chuds? Possibly and probably, but the future still belongs to the side of smart; and all indications show that smart Arabs, whatever ideological direction they're tratravelling, aren't going in any direction that will be friendly towards any form of hereditarianism. There wasn't even a complete Arabic translation of On the Origin of Species until 1964:
https://www.thefreelibrary.com/Reading+Darwin+in+Arabic%2c+1860-1950.-a0437059068
By the way Steve, I just saw a link at Antiwar.com to this page with statistics.
https://watson.brown.edu/costsofwar/papers/2024/sexualassault
Since 9/11 24% of women in the military and 1.9% of men say they experienced sexual assault. The link is to Watson University, and they also say that "racial, gender, & sexual minorities face the greatest risk of assault". And do they spin this without facts? Of course: "experiences of gender inequality are most pronounced for women of color, who experience intersecting forms of racism and sexism".
So it's "racism" that makes Black women sexually assaulted. But almost all sexual assault in the military will be in dating, and they date Black men almost entirely.
Likewise:
"Independent data also confirm queer and trans service members’ disproportionately greater risk for sexual assault."
Except that it's OTHER HOMOSEXUALS who do the sexual assault on their fellow homosexuals. Which has actually been seen in some articles in the past. Such as an interview with a homosexual man who was drugged by another homosexual soldier at a dinner, then assaulted. But it's funny how the leftists only mention non-Whites and homosexuals as victims, not as attackers.
But what to expect by a university that writes about "gender, & sexual minorities" as if they'd be two different things. But that was the whole point when feminists invented the fake word "gender," to pretend that you can have a "gender" different from your sex.
Almost every process has a distribution. IQ is no different. Naysayers of Murray would like it even less if you laid a digital universe over IQ demographics…
Remind us of the significance of Jensen, besides his Chrysler-powered Healey convertible and GT coupe.
Seems to me good nurture produces an individual upper limit determined by nature, while bad nurture could go all the way down, regardless of nature.
Yes.
I personally see each human as a sort of template at birth that had been designed and assembled by genetics, and that there is a genetic upper limit of every physical/mental attribute that can be fully attained by precise nurture. This implies a lot of "life luck", which I also believe exists as an additive factor to genetics.
I suppose also that "anti-nurture"--a psychotic and/or dysfunctional early childhood environment--would actively retard any positive growth potential.
My analogy is: Everyone gets a cup at birth. Some are larger. Some are smaller. There is no way to enlarge one, but they can be damaged. There’s no way to tell how large a cup is until you try to fill it. Filling it is mostly up to the individual. Sooner or later, tragically, it begins to leak.
> "Do these kind of Secret Decoder Ring articles ever work?"
Yes, they absolutely do. How do I know? I see it firsthand in my extended family, which includes the Director of a significant scientific institution at an important university. She is Ivy League-educated (but not in science) and networks with other such directors (mostly other women) and they all seem to agree about who is Good and who is Bad in The Science without any reference to—or possibly even any understanding of—the actual underlying science. But they do read Vox articles.
> "Does anybody ever finish the article and say to themselves, 'Yes, Charlie Murray is just as evil and stupid as I previously believed, but now I’m aware that 80% of what Murray says about IQ is Science and Good!'”
The first half, yes. The second half, no.
> "The basic problem is that the zeitgeist is just getting dumber and dumber as the dominant way of thinking gets more childish: Good Guys vs. Bad Guys. (And you determine who are the Good Guys and who are the Bad Guys not by something complicated like what they do, but by something simple: who they are.)"
You can say "the zeitgeist" or "Americans" or "people", but if you examine this subject with a bit of HBD-awareness, you may notice that it's not really everyone at the "zeit" or all "Americans" or all the "people", but rather certain particular subgroups who especially manifest this non-logical groupthink, which this "Secret Decoder Ring" rhetoric works on, and they happen to have gained a lot more say over The Science in the last 100 years or so.
In order not to be accused of anything, I won't be more specific than that, but if anyone needs a hint, there are internet-famous memes out there.
It’s da chicks.
It's hard to believe that IQ scores will continue to rise given the current increasing social stupidity on display. Perhaps the Flynn Effect is cyclical and we happened to have discovered IQ testing during an upswing in social coherence/development. Lets test current college students in 2 years or so and see if we have a decline.
Read the works of Dr. Edward Dutton. Flynn effect likely caused by pushing up the nurture aspect as far as it can go in terms of the population. Proxies for biological iq and intelligence are dropping fast. Basically industrial civilization removes intelligence related selection pressures causing more genetically "stupid" people. Everyone gets educated though so this masks that genetic intelligence is dropping. Until it doesn't anymore and you get the reverse Flynn effect
Secret Decoder Ring articles are VOXs specialty. It's like the NYT for kids. They should include coloring books.
Wokeness is destroying the scientific method.
Charles Murray and other like him’s arguments seem to have a glaring self contradiction: Within the confines of their arguments they seem to reference the field of Population Genetics in a way that asserts the fields epistemological authority when it holds a wide consensus within it.. But population Genetics holds that sub-Saharan Africa is an incredibly genetically diverse region, they even seem to suggest that its genetic diversity may exceed the genetic diversity of the entire rest of the world, absent them, combined. Yet, at least regarding their data from Africa, Murray and others like him rely on a miniscule number of samples. Also, in some cases, it seems that these samples may even be collectively obtained from a miniscule number of places.
If there are some populations of really smart folks in sub-Saharan Africa, why don’t we see them as successful scientists and so on?
I posit that is due to the same hard structures that are what enables the USA’s federal government to run perpetual and large budget deficits, perpetual and large trade deficits, and have high liquidity without inflation (even these recent years count in those regards); and those are imperial structures, They are economically suppressed. Every single country in sub-Saharan Africa is a net capital exporter to the West!!!! Planetary divisions of labor, remember, and they don’t even allow the the sorts of structures that, with the narrow scope of what they do, generate scientific and research opportunities, And they just import away from them so much of the far below potential scientific and engineering talent that they do produce. And promise there allot more items and more to each of the few items just listed. But the skinny of it is that these structures prevent diversified and heterogenous and very deep across sphere with redundancy economic systems from developing. But there is some reason to believe that right now under the radar and beneath the surface, things are brewing that may upend this.
The more pertinent question for me and you that if if that happens, then the USA’s will no longer be able to run perpetual and large budget deficits, perpetual and large trade deficits, and have high liquidity without inflation…. and what happens then?
India was colonized too. Yet they managed to reach the moon a few months ago.
We do, Nigerian Americans (mostly of Igbo descent) are actually the most educated immigrants group in the US by some measures. There are so few scientists/intellectuals in general that reach the level of notoriety where they’re a public figure, the fact that you can’t think of any doesn’t mean much…. But here are some famous Nigerian scientists:
Bennet Omalu- the “concussion” guy who discovered and first published findings on CTE in American football players
Bankole Johnson- psychiatrist who discovered/developed effective treatments for alcoholism
Kunle Olukotun- computer scientist and electrical engineer at Stanford.
Winston Soboyejo- mechanical engineer at Princeton
Akintunde Akinwande- computer scientist at MIT
That’s just Nigerians
^ What he said.
https://www.unz.com/pfrost/no-blacks-arent-all-alike-who-said-they-were/
https://www.unz.com/pfrost/the-jews-of-west-africa/
lol, Igbo Nigerians are the real übermenschen. Sometimes you’ll be watching college football, and you’ll hear something like “Uche Iwuchuku is on an absolute tear today! This kid cannot be stopped! He also can’t be stopped in the classroom where he maintains a 4.0 as a duel major in mathematics and computer science.” Nigeria could potentially have a good future if they weren’t bogged down by Islamic extremism and brain drain.
"But population Genetics holds that sub-Saharan Africa is an incredibly genetically diverse region, they even seem to suggest that its genetic diversity may exceed the genetic diversity of the entire rest of the world, absent them, combined. "
Can you provide some links to this?
I assume that you are emphasizing human diversity, and not fauna in general. Is this correct?
https://academic.oup.com/gbe/article/15/4/evad054/7092825
https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.1212380109
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/18593304/
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25470054/
Thanks. This was very informative.
I can see intuitively how the main difference in genetic diversity between current sub-Sahara African human phenotypes and those of Western Europe, e.g., are logically derived from the "Founder Effect".
One can further imply that the Founder Effect is exacerbated by cultural tendencies toward serial monogamy, also.
One might further extrapolate that the Founder's Effect is most clearly demonstrated in New World populations, especially pre-European contact.
But WRT the completeness and size of samplings for the Bell Curve, practical constraints demand that one can only use existing samplings, do you won, at your own expense, or do not attempt to do a study, at all, simply because someone, somewhere, will say that the sampling was insufficient.
All such statistical research is a work in progress; the article even states this by implication. If your main point is, as it appears to me, that the H-M sampling was not representative of all/most existing groups, yes, but then the same can be said for virtually every other statistical study.
Does this seem to make sense to you? If that's not your point, what is it?
Hi. This may be my fault as perhaps I didn't write articulately enough in the reply I made which you initially responded to but the central point I was making is that within the parameters of Charles Murray's argument, there is an inherent contradiction. Murray and others like him invoke the authority of population genetics to back up their argument, which is couched in genetics. But Population genetics consistently shows that sub-Saharan Africa is extraordinarily genetically diverse, often more so than the rest of the world combined. Therefor, since Murray's work relies on a very limited and unrepresentative sample of African populations, its genetic claims, again, strictly within the parameters of his own argument, are contradictory. I take your point regarding the challenges of sampling in statistical research and that all stats based research is a work in progress, and so on; but those points are beyond the confines of his arguments and my critique of it being self contradictory. But how about we don't arguments that are so heavily reliant on complex statistical analysis for this, and also drop them for many other things too
This is an excellent and rational exchange and I am learning a lot from it, Mike.
I can accept your objection that Murray-Herrnstein take their samples--a large number of samples from a limited geographical subset (mostly the US), and then they go on to draw conclusions that they extrapolate to being true for world-wide populations, most of which have provided no samples. This is an inherent, though not fatal, problem, the way I see it, because what they've done is show that for large sampling A, which is drawn from the US (e.g.) this generality holds true and (HERE'S THE LEAP OF FAITH) and we think the same would hold true if we were to have gotten samples from every represented group in varied geographical locations.
Is this your point? If so, I agree that the findings are not absolute and extensible, but relative only to the groups within the sampling area. So at worst, it does hold true for the US, and it *might* hold true globally, but this is yet to be determined.
Another assumption--and it's actually the one that caused me to comment first--is this: "Population genetics consistently shows that sub-Saharan Africa is extraordinarily genetically diverse, often more so than the rest of the world combined. "
I take that as true.
But because genetics are more diverse than anywhere else in a general sense, and among any other broad group, does this mean that there are genetic outliers in the sub-Saharan African genome that necessarily *exceed* the genetic norms, or even outliers, of other less diverse groups?
That's a mouthful, but here's what I mean...
Inhabitants of the Gobi desert ostensibly have less genetic diversity than sub-Saharan Africa, in part because of the Founder Effect. Perhaps they have within their genome the ability to mentally hold large numbers in their head, and add and subtract them quickly, useful in herding societies, perhaps. They also have the genetic ability to withstand frostbite. These genetic tendencies are expressed in individuals to greater or lesser degrees.
In s-S Africa, the genome may contain the ability to hold large numbers in memory, and find the prime numbers among these inventories, and this ability *exceeds* even that of the Gobi population. But these same s_S populations have no genetic tendencies to protect against frostbite over-and-above what their genome supplies, and this is markedly less than for the Gobi inhabitants.
All I'm trying to say is that to surmise that a more genetically diverse population has traits that *exceed*, or even equal these same traits in less diverse populations seems quite a stretch. Unless this has been solidly demonstrated somehow.
This common objection is really misinformed. There is more diversity between two chimpanzees from different groups than all of humanity, but that doesn't mean groups of chimpanzees are hugely short, tall, clever, fat etc. Most of the "diversity" in Africans is in DNA that doesn't code for anything - it's just noise. Most African's are from one small population - Bantu's. And when you observe African's you see there is very little diversity in appearance, personality, or intelligence. Non African's show far greater phenotypic diversity, and hence diversity in the genes that count.
Hi. Your reply contains both factual inaccuracies and flawed reasoning. 1) the idea African's have "very little diversity in appearance, personality, or intelligence" is, beyond skin color, super wrong to the point of me wondering if you've ever met more than some tiny number of black people. There’s huge phenotypic diversity, including in appearance, behavior, and cognitive abilities, among African populations, and that is truly just a hard fact. 2) the claim that "most Africans are from one small population - Bantu's" crassly oversimplifies things. There were other significant contributors to African genetic diversity; in fact there are numerous others, like the Nilotic and the Khoisan. 3) Saying non-Africans as having greater "phenotypic diversity" ignores the fact that many non-African populations represent a subset of the genetic diversity found in Africa, as humans migrated out of Africa. 4) the notion that "diversity in the genes that count" is higher in non-Africans is a misinterpretation of genetic data; the diversity you appear to to be referencing in non-African populations is derived from, and sometimes less than, the diversity within African pops.
Bushmen and pygmies largely broke off from the rest of humanity a long time ago, so their junk DNA is quite different. But there are virtually no African-American descendants of American slaves with much Khoisan or pygmy ancestry. And there aren't even many Nilotic old-school African Americans. Virtually all DOAS African Americans are West African/Bantu Expansion.
Hi. 1) Given the contexts, Black Americans are sort of out of the confines of the the points I was making in the post your replying to here, which was about in-general Sub-Saharan Africans and so pointing out that their predominantly of West African and Bantu Expansion ancestry doesntt negate the broader points about African genetic diversity. 2) Saying that Khoisan and Pygmy genetic material is largely "junk DNA" is misleading because many non-coding regions can still play very important roles in regulating gene expression and other genetic functions (see REF 1). 3) that "there aren't even many Nilotic old-school African Americans", yes thats mostly found in the east, but that statement is irrelevant to the points I made about broader Sub-Saharan African genetic diversity. 4) "Virtually all DOAS African Americans are West African/Bantu Expansion", so what? Thats just anoter over simplification. West Africa is still one of the most genetically diverse in the planet. It is home to a whole bunch of ethnic groups and genetic lineages. Same goes for areas that they were from where Bantu E descend was/is very common, the gen population of B E descendants is genetically diverse due to their interactions with many indigenous populations and having been spread over such a wide area with so much environmental variability for so long
REF 1: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9949080/
That's a popular misconception. See my review of superstar geneticist David Reich's book:
https://www.takimag.com/article/ghosts_of_africa_steve_sailer/
Didja read Steve's Takimag article? Both pages?
https://www.takimag.com/article/ghosts_of_africa_steve_sailer/
The tl;dr is that the "Africa is most diverse" meme is false in two ways:
1) Africa being divergent (diverse) from the rest of the world is a consequence of the Out Of Africa theory, so it could equally be stated that the rest of the world is the most diverse from the African point of view.
2) The alleged within-Africa diversity is basically just an artifact of the very ancient Khoisan divergence from the rest of the human gene-line, but there are hardly any Khoisan left anymore, so if their "diversity" were tabulated per capita they would barely register. The Bantu population that actually composes most of Sub-Saharan Africa is not particularly diverse, showing less genetic distance over much wider geography than do, e.g., Italians and Germans.
And 2a) the Nilotic divergence isn't really African but is the result of non-African re-introgression back in to Africa. In other words, that "diversity" is the diversity of non-Africans, not of Africans, i.e., the diversity from 1), above.
Each point you've made here is either erroneous or irrelevant to the contexts of this conversation:
1) Yeah, from an African perspective, the rest of the world is genetically distinct, but this doesn't equate to the same amount of diversity. African pops are more genetically diverse because they have had a longer period of time to accumulate genetic variations.
2) The genetic diversity within Africa isnt just because of the Khoisan, the diversity in Africa is much broader. It includes numerous other ethnic groups, each with their own unique genetic variations. The Bantu-speaking pops, while more homogenous than some other African groups, still add to the overall Africa's genetic diversity.
3) Bantu spread a more consistent genetic signature across a large geography but Bantu pops still have a lot of genetic diversity due to local adapts, mingling with other groups, and the wide environmental variability within their geo spread. Also, their specific case is stil just a sub part of the overall diversity within Africa which has many other groups with genetic lineages
4) this is factually incorrect. The Nilotic are indigenous to Africa, specifically to regions around the Nile Valley, South Sudan, and East Africa. But even if it were to be correct it would be irrelevant since were talking about the range of diversity of africans, not the geographic sources of parts of that diversity
Yeah, I read that article. It only had one part that is relevant to this conversation and that part is factually incorrect. He labels all non-coding as "junk" in a way that suggests it is meaningless, but according to population genetics (and btw, I'm the first person to say that if you want to establish the consensus of a field and you think you have a leg to stand on, do it, but the context of this convo is that Murray et al, with the confines of their args, hold the fields consensuses to be authoritative) this simply is not true and in fact some non-codings can have profound impacts: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9949080/
> "The genetic diversity within Africa isnt just because of the Khoisan, the diversity in Africa is much broader. It includes numerous other ethnic groups, each with their own unique genetic variations."
The variations in other African ethnic groups comes from their admixture with Khoisan or with non-African populations, so this is just a restatement of my above points 2) and 1) respectively.
> "Bantu pops still have a lot of genetic diversity due to local adapts, mingling with other groups"
Again, "local adapts" are Khoisan and non-African admixture, so again just a restatement of my above points 2) and 1) respectively.
> "The Nilotic are indigenous to Africa, specifically to regions around the Nile Valley, South Sudan, and East Africa."
The supposed "diversity" of Nilotics (i.e. diverse from Bantus) stems from their admixture with non-Africans. That they were born in Africa ("indigenous") is genetically irrelevant.
> "He labels all non-coding as 'junk' in a way that suggests it is meaningless"
Yeah, I didn't think that was an important part of his argument either, which is why I didn't mention it. But if you think it was relevant, feel free to debate it with him directly.
"The variations in other African ethnic groups comes from their admixture with Khoisan or with non-African populations."
This is wrong. While some African pops have admixture with Khoisan or non-African pops, this isnt the only or even primary source of their genetic diversity. The huge diversity in Africa is from of thing, ancient lineages that evolved independently for 10s of thousands of years, adaptations to a wide array environments, and co mingling among a large number of African groups.
For the rest of it, I don't get what the points your trying to make about what the geographic origins of the diversity are. I never made any points regarding the geographic sources of African genetic diversity, just that there was a lot of it, it wouldn't matter if it came from Martians, the point is that it is there, where it came from is irrelevant to the contexts of the conversation.
His points about "junk dna" are the only points he made in that article that are relevant within the contexts of this conversation
Most of of the alleged "huge diversity in Africa" is just the divergent Khoisan-type admixture re-admixed in various ways under various non-Khoisan names*, or is just non-African gene-lines re-introgressed back into Africa, mainly in two waves, one probably Stone Age and one probably closer to Bronze Age.
> "ancient lineages"
The "African diversity" partisans may have a kinda sorta point in that there is indeed evidence of an archaic "ghost" admixture in SS African populations, probably an extinct hominid of the Homo Erectus variety. But for the same reason, they usually don't want to draw too much attention to it.
> " I don't get what the points your trying to make about what the geographic origins"
I'm quoting Steve's article. It sounds like you didn't see the second page. The link to it is a very small URL in the lower left corner of the first page.
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* One could argue that I'm even incorrect to call the population "Khoisan" as the Khoi and San are both recent tribal names of people stemming from this older lineage, but since the older lineage doesn't to my knowledge have its own name, I'm just using "Khoisan" since it already has some currency.
None of what you just wrote is relevant to the comment I made which you have been responding to, here I'll repost it here: "Charles Murray and other like him’s arguments seem to have a glaring self contradiction: Within the confines of their arguments they seem to reference the field of Population Genetics in a way that asserts the fields epistemological authority when it holds a wide consensus within it.. But population Genetics holds that sub-Saharan Africa is an incredibly genetically diverse region, they even seem to suggest that its genetic diversity may exceed the genetic diversity of the entire rest of the world, absent them, combined. Yet, at least regarding their data from Africa, Murray and others like him rely on a miniscule number of samples. Also, in some cases, it seems that these samples may even be collectively obtained from a miniscule number of places."
One way around this problem would be to create a society in which anyone, regardless of IQ, who works hard and plays by the rules could realistically look forward to a rich and fulfilling life. In other words, unlike today, a society that fits the human material that actually exists, in which it wouldn't matter terribly much how smart you happened to be. Here's my idea of one such possible place: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00U0C9HKW
Can anyone think of another?
"...look forward to a rich and fulfilling life."
That's so subjective that I doubt it could ever happen.
Charles Murray talks about having one’s contribution valued by the people around you. A janitor whose contribution is valued is much happier than an executive who gets dumped on, no matter how well the latter gets paid.
We _need_ janitors. We make it too expensive to employ them. People resent the expense instead of valuing their work.
The idea that someone like Roger Penrose is genetically better-disposed to theoretical physics than I am does not keep me up at night. I’m not sure it should keep anyone up at night (save maybe Stephen Hawking, when he was alive, and his other peers in the same field). I’m simply glad such persons exist.
That isn’t the point. Modern societies (with modern governments) add costs to employment that price the low end above its value to the employer. A dishwasher who works for a few weeks costs as much in paperwork as a skilled technician who works the whole year. Higher turnover increases the overhead per hour worked. A low wage worker’s marginal value to an employer is thin enough already. This increases the pressure to automate. The remaining low wage jobs are both undesirable and unappreciated.
Whatever became of the “systematic racism” argument? Racist IQ tests, that sort of thing.
Evidence for the association of genes and intelligence has become sufficiently strong (and embarrassing) that access to the relevant data needs to be restricted. The US government has started to limit access to the largest public genetic and phenotype (e.g. intelligence) database.
In the competition between attempts to suppress inconvenient facts and reality, my bet is on reality.
https://www.city-journal.org/nih-blocks-access-to-genetics-database
When I read "The Bell Curve" about a decade after it was published, a key insight I took away from it was not the race stuff, which was only one chapter (the 48-page Chapter 13, "Ethnic Differences in Cognitive Ability," part of Part III, "The National Context" which totals 120 pages out of 833), but the observation that in the modern world IQ had become monetized. In the past, IQ was just one aspect of an individual's personality, and throughout the land there was a mix of the dumb, the average and the bright. The blacksmith, not the mayor or preacher, might be the brightest man in the village and be respected and sought out for advice and counsel.
But once IQ became monetized, business, industry and academia swept through the country scooping up all the brights leaving the small towns and cities, ranches and farms bereft of their smartest and left to stagnate. Murray wrote that it was like taking the yeast out of the bread recipe and worried what it was doing to the country.
This struck me as a very astute observation. But since then something has happened that Murray didn't anticipate -- that now bright whites are shunned. Business, industry and academia do not want them, most especially those from "flyover country." There is lots and lots of overt evidence of this.
So men like Jay Forrester, Mancur Olson, William Allen White and my grandfather's friend since they met in the Navy during World War II, Alvin Kernan, now have no chance of developing their mental gifts and contributing to the larger society.
But maybe this will work out for the best. The yeast is remaining in the bread recipe. So "when the cities lie at the monster’s feet there are left the mountains," in Robinson Jeffers' phrase, the mountains will have the brights they need to restart civilization.
I hope.
I didn't read _The Bell Curve_ when it came out because I was a clever young thing who read all the reviews that said it was nothing but a racist screed, and why would I want to read that?
Some time in the past decade I did finally read it and was genuinely stunned. It was not about what I had been led to believe it was about, at all. It wasn't mostly about race. It was about the damaging impact on American society of cognitive stratification, and it was 100% persuasive.
Taking the smartest people out of every community in the country and shipping them all off to elite colleges was great for those people. It was like Hogwarts come true: you get this special letter that says you are special, and it gives you entree to the secret train platform and the castle and the cool kids. Who are far more interesting than the folks at home: brainy, funny, clever, delightful. You hang out with them, make art and science with them, make babies with them, rule the world with them. It's fucking great!
For the smarties, that is. It's not great at all for everybody else, for the whole fabric of society. It has pernicious effects in *every* strip-mined community of every race. I decided at the end of the book that the campaign of denouncing it as a racist tome to discourage reading it was not about PC anything (to use the older term for wokeness) but instead about the guilty conscience of national elites. _The Bell Curve_ really had their number.
If people on the lower strata had the recourse to just recruit smart people directly, and to find their own ways of keeping them, whether paying more or just treating them better than elsewhere, this wouldn't be a problem. Or at least not one worth the price of its fixing.
But they don't. We actively forbid it with anti-discrimination law everywhere in the civilized world. Because anywhere that attempts to recruit with such an approach will be in breach of any meaningful anti-discrimination law to whatever degree protected groups differ in their average abilities.
Civil rights law has been the poison pill of the free society. You can't have meritocracy, freedom of association, freedom of expression, and race communism. And that's before you even try to also add sex communism; as we've seen with feminists, incels, and the TQ+ brigade in various forms. Our tremendous wealth and technological progress stemmed the bleeding, as well the White Great Migration of the post-Civil Rights Era; but none of it made the gaps go away. All we have left is even less tolerance for their existence and even dumber policies to attempt their erasure.
The effects of stratification wouldn't be as damaging if companies and institutions actually were free to directly select for general intelligence in filling positions. Then there'd always be at least some financial incentive for smart people to take the path less traveled. But we actively hamper that with such things as anti-discrimination laws, and didisastrous court decisions such as Griggs v. Duke.
Moreover, if you don't bring up HBD as the reason why anti-discrimination laws must always be both onerous to implement and anti-meritocratic in execution, your opponents will always assume chauvinism is the only motive you could have for opposing them. Hence why quietism never works.