Talk:Race and intelligence

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[edit] Are Blacks More Intelligent?

http://www.africaresource.com/content/view/528/236/

http://www.africaresource.com/content/view/528/236/

http://www.africaresource.com/content/view/528/236/ —Preceding unsigned comment added by 70.68.179.142 (talk) 23:55, 13 May 2008 (UTC)

Interesting but the article is not really comparing races, it is comparing immigrants and non-immigrants. The two sampls are chosen because of geographic reasons. Slrubenstein | Talk 08:36, 14 May 2008 (UTC)
there's no way that site could be used as a source, it's pretty blatantly biased. not to mention they claim the Egyptians were black. If this website counts as a source we'd better start citing niggermania.com 76.25.115.99 (talk) 05:54, 25 May 2008 (UTC)
It's about as unbiased as any other source claiming "racial" differences in "intelligence". All of these claims about so called "races" are made by people with a biased racist view of the world, indeed they can only be made by people who have zero understanding about human genetics, i.e. stupid racist bigots who's gibberish should be treated with the contempt it deserves. This is no worse than Jensen's racist gibberings. Alun (talk) 09:59, 25 May 2008 (UTC)
Actually, it's worth noting that James Watson, who received a nobel prize for assembling the "double helix" structure of DNA in the 60's said this about race: "He says that he is 'inherently gloomy about the prospect of Africa' because 'all our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours-–whereas all the testing says not really,' and I know that this 'hot potato' is going to be difficult to address. His hope is that everyone is equal, but he counters that 'people who have to deal with black employees find this not true.' He says that you should not discriminate on the basis of colour, because 'there are many people of colour who are very talented, but don't promote them when they haven't succeeded at the lower level.' He writes that 'there is no firm reason to anticipate that the intellectual capacities of peoples geographically separated in their evolution should prove to have evolved identically. Our wanting to reserve equal powers of reason as some universal heritage of humanity will not be enough to make it so."
I would say he has a pretty good understanding of human genetics. 76.25.115.99 (talk) 23:15, 25 May 2008 (UTC)
And by doing so you would reveal your own ignorance. Watson was a molecular biologist and not a geneticist. Molecular biology overlaps with genetics at the molecular level, e.g. Molecular genetics, but few molecular biologists would claim to be experts in Population genetics or Molecular anthropology, which are the relevant disciplines for studying genetic variation at the population level. Watson also stated: "To all those who have drawn the inference from my words that Africa, as a continent, is somehow genetically inferior, I can only apologise unreservedly. That is not what I meant. More importantly from my point of view, there is no scientific basis for such a belief."[1] Francis Crick, James Watson and Maurice Wilkins shared their Nobel Prize "for their discoveries concerning the molecular structure of nucleic acids and its significance for information transfer in living material"[2] and not for their model for the structure of DNA, which wasn't actually a proof, but a very good and robust model. Wilkins part in the prize was for his comprehensive work after the publication of the Crick-Watson model, which went a long way to validating the model. Watson also spent a lot of time studying RNA (he had been working on Tobacco mosaic virus, an RNA virus when he and Crick proposed their structure for DNA), and so he went on to work on RNA during the rest of the fifties, this work is recognised in his Nobel Prize as well, hence the reference to "Nucleic acids" and not deoxyribonucleic acid. I know something about this, I've spent a lot of time and effort on the Rosalind Franklin article in the past. Even very clever people can talk crap when they talk about things that they are not experts in, as Watson proved beyond any doubt. Alun (talk) 20:03, 31 May 2008 (UTC)
Of course he apologized, he had to in order to save his professional life. Anyway, I'm not going to bother fighting with you about all that because there's really no point in starting an argument about this. I think we can agree that this "are blacks more intelligent?" essay has no place in this article, and let's leave it at that. 76.25.115.99 (talk) 07:29, 3 June 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Expanding the section about genetic explanation

Hello, I added the following information:

Culture-only explanations such as stereotype threat, caste-like minorities and race stigma do not explain the low IQ of Africans south of the Sahara, where Blacks are in the majority. The Inuit, who live above the Arctic Circle and have higher average IQs than do either American or Jamaican Blacks even though their socioeconomic conditions are extremely poor.[89][90] [91]

Black children born to wealthy Black parents with high IQs have test scores 2 to 4 points lower than do White children born to low IQ, poor White parents. According to Jensen this is an anomaly for the culture-only theory but is explained by genetic theory through regression to the mean. Regression toward the mean is seen, on average, when individuals with high IQ scores mate and their children show lower scores than their parents. The children of Black parents of IQ 115 will regress toward the Black IQ average of 85, whereas children of White parents of IQ 115 will regress toward the White IQ average of 100. Black children from the best areas and schools still average slightly lower than do White children with the lowest socioeconomic indicators.[92] [93][94] Rubidium37 (talk) 20:34, 14 May 2008 (UTC)

This has been discussed before, in a number of archives. Your additions promote Rushton and Lynn's theories as if they were gospel, which they aren't. There has been grave doubt cast on the accuracy of much of the "IQ by nationality" type of research, mostly due to the poor sampling methods used. Also, while Rushton disputes that the Minnesota Transracial Adoption Study actually backs his genetic hypothesis, the very authors of the study interpret the results as saying just the opposite. Therefore, this presents a misleading, rather one-sided view of some of the data and represents undue weight.--Ramdrake (talk) 20:40, 14 May 2008 (UTC)
I didn't add anything new about the Minnesota Transracial Adoption study or "IQ by nationality". The information is about the the impact of socioeconomic status on IQ differentials between races. The fact that the children of poor whites outperform the children of wealthy blacks is very important and should be mentioned in the article. Both genetic and culture-only explanations should be included. Rubidium37 (talk) 22:01, 14 May 2008 (UTC)
Jagz, you're not being funny by trying to be someone else.--Ramdrake (talk) 22:35, 14 May 2008 (UTC)
It's not me. I'm done with editing this article for the year as I mentioned. --Jagz (talk) 22:37, 14 May 2008 (UTC)
Thank you for input Jagz, we will see you in a year.TheRedPenOfDoom (talk) 01:06, 15 May 2008 (UTC)
What if the genetic hypothesis is mentioned in other online wiki encyclopedias? Don't fall into complacency. --Jagz (talk) 18:42, 15 May 2008 (UTC)
Thanks, but I'm quite sure we don't want to follow Conservapedia's lead...--Ramdrake (talk) 19:16, 15 May 2008 (UTC)
I will add the information now. Rubidium37 (talk) 23:40, 14 May 2008 (UTC)
Sorry, but that's not how it works. Please discuss on the talk page and gain consensus there prior to reintroducing.--Ramdrake (talk) 00:22, 15 May 2008 (UTC)
If you think it is not accurate please provide an alternative viewpoint and an appropriate citation. I suggest as a compromise that both viewpoints should be included. Rubidium37 (talk) 00:55, 15 May 2008 (UTC)
It is inaccurate for the following reason: it presents IQ differences by nationality as a proven fact, when in fact it is at least highly disputed, and for the most part the methodology used to obtain these results has been discredited. Then, it presents on Rushton's viewpoint on the MTAS, totally oblivious to the fact that the very authors of the study say that this goes counter to the conclusions they reach. Lastly, by increasing the importance of the opinions of a very small minority of researchers (scientists who are fundees of the Pioneer Fund), it give undue weight to the opinion of a very small but very vocal minority.--Ramdrake (talk) 22:17, 15 May 2008 (UTC)
I did not even mention the Minnesota Transracial Adoption study or "IQ differences by nationality". Because your argument is a strawman I will restore the material. Rubidium37 (talk) 22:53, 15 May 2008 (UTC)
Well, the studies you are mentioning (even though you don't mention them by name) are the studies of Rushton and Lynn on IQ by nationality for the first part, and that of the Minnesota Transracial Adoption Study. If you are refering to other studies, please kindly link them here, but please do not restore against consensus, as this will be your 4th revert, and will get you blocked per WP:3RR.
I cited "Berry, 1966" and "MacArthur, 1968" for the first part. My edit included complete citations. The source for the school performance of the children of the wealthy blacks was "Jensen, A. R.. The g factor. Westport, CT: Praeger, 1998." Rubidium37 (talk) 18:02, 16 May 2008 (UTC)

Culture-only explanations such as stereotype threat, caste-like minorities and race stigma do not explain the low IQ of Africans south of the Sahara, where Blacks are in the majority. -Please note that this is taken directly from Rushton, one of the main researchers to claim that IQ varies racially and by nationality worldwide.

Black children born to wealthy Black parents with high IQs have test scores 2 to 4 points lower than do White children born to low IQ, poor White parents. According to Jensen this is an anomaly for the culture-only theory but is explained by genetic theory through regression to the mean. Regression toward the mean is seen, on average, when individuals with high IQ scores mate and their children show lower scores than their parents. The children of Black parents of IQ 115 will regress toward the Black IQ average of 85, whereas children of White parents of IQ 115 will regress toward the White IQ average of 100. Black children from the best areas and schools still average slightly lower than do White children with the lowest socioeconomic indicators. The basis for this claim is Rushton's reinterpretation of the MTAS.--Ramdrake (talk) 23:03, 15 May 2008 (UTC)

You make silly claims which have no basis in fact. I won't even address them because they are just your misinformed personal opinions which are not supported by any reliable sources. If you provide a peer-reviewed article disputing the information we may include another viewpoint. Please don't delete sourced information as per WP:EP. Rubidium37 (talk) 23:38, 15 May 2008 (UTC)
Sorry, but it is your sources which are challenged. The onus is on the editor wishing for inclusion to get consensus for his edits. Therefore, you must address these objections to the satisfaction of other editors. Your sources are mostly Rushton's work, which has been discussed at length and deemed WP:FRINGE therefore not a reliable source. Also, an you please quote the exact excerpt from WP:EP which you allege allows you to make WP:UNDUE edits against consensus?--Ramdrake (talk) 00:06, 16 May 2008 (UTC)
The source is a peer-reviewed paper published in the journal Psychology, Public Policy, and Law which qualifies as a reliable source as per WP:VERIFY.
WP:EP states:
Whatever you do, endeavour to preserve information. Instead of removing, try to:
  • rephrase
  • correct the inaccuracy while keeping the content
  • move text within an article or to another article (existing or new)
  • add more of what you think is important to make an article more balanced
  • request a citation by adding the {{fact}} tag

Please don't delete sourced information in the future. Rubidium37 (talk) 00:29, 16 May 2008 (UTC)

Ramdrake is the current self-appointed article sentinel, backed by the like-minded Slrubenstein. The only time I was able to make good progress with the article was when Ramdrake was out of action with health issues. Suggest you go to WP:RfC if you feel strongly about your edit. --Jagz (talk) 00:44, 16 May 2008 (UTC)
Slrubenstein serves as the article's ad hoc chief of propaganda. Anyone who does not come around to his way of thinking is a troll and/or a racist. --Jagz (talk) 12:18, 16 May 2008 (UTC)
Are you done yet with the repeated personal attacks? You've already been warned multiple times against making them.--Ramdrake (talk) 12:22, 16 May 2008 (UTC)

wow, that year went by fast!! Slrubenstein | Talk 09:25, 16 May 2008 (UTC)

He does not have any authority to censor the article. The section about the genetic hypothesis is currently not good. It is too short and uninformative. Would you agree that the information I added belongs to the article? Rubidium37 (talk) 02:05, 16 May 2008 (UTC)
  • ''Black children born to wealthy Black parents with high IQs have test scores 2 to 4 points lower than do White children born to low IQ, poor White parents. According to Jensen this is an anomaly for the culture-only theory but is explained by genetic theory through regression to the mean.
How does this make sense? from a genetic point of view the children of intelligent parents should be intelligent because they have inherited their intelligence genes. Any trait under genetic control will obviously be inherited by their children. Or to put it another way, the children of blue eyed people do not have brown eyes due to a "regression to the mean", they have blue eyes because they inherit them from their parents, their parents do not possess the genes for brown eyes. If the children do not inherit this trait then the obvious conclusion is that the trait is under environmental control. To claim that the observation that children of intelligent people are stupid supports a "genetic model" for intelligence is plain daft. It's basically claiming that these children are inheriting genes their parents do not possess. Indeed under this model we should expect the children of intelligent "white" people to regress to the "white" mean as well, which rather contradicts eugenics because we would never be able to stop this regression to the mean however many times intelligent people reproduced with other intelligent people. If intelligent people only procreate with other intelligent people, and intelligence is mainly due to genetics, then the children of intelligent people will always be intelligent. To claim that "genetic theory" explains the opposite effect is to show a complete lack of any biological nous whatsoever. If intelligent people have stupid children then this supports an environmental cause and not a genetic one. These wingnuts don't even seem to have a fundamental understanding of what genetics is. They seem to be implying here that genes are not transmitted from parent to offspring. It's frankly hilarious. Either Jensen is talking from his posterior orifice, or someone here is citing work they simply do not understand. I suspect the latter. Alun (talk) 13:04, 16 May 2008 (UTC)
Although parents pass on a random half of their genes to their offspring, they cannot pass on the particular combinations of genes that cause their own exceptionality. This is analogous to rolling a pair of dice and having them come up two 6s or two 1s. The odds are that on the next roll, you will get some value that is not quite as high (or as low). Physical and psychological traits involving dominant and recessive genes show some regression effect. Tall people have shorter children on average and intelligent people have less intelligent children on average. http://www.scc.ms.unimelb.edu.au/whatisstatistics/faso.html Rubidium37 (talk) 16:38, 16 May 2008 (UTC)
It seems reasonable to believe that two random gifted parents would be unlikely to have a gifted child but more likely to have a gifted child than two random non-gifted parents. --Jagz (talk) 22:21, 16 May 2008 (UTC)

[3] --Jagz (talk) 14:06, 16 May 2008 (UTC)

Note: What this article is discussing is a genetic hypothesis and not a genetic theory. A genetic viewpoint is not the same as the genetic hypothesis. --Jagz (talk) 15:37, 16 May 2008 (UTC)
We heard you the first time. Doesn't change the fact that it is WP:FRINGE stuff.--Ramdrake (talk) 15:50, 16 May 2008 (UTC)
Material published in a peer-reviewed journal cannot be fringe by definition. Rubidium37 (talk) 16:38, 16 May 2008 (UTC)
Ramdrake, be more specific, what exactly are you saying is WP:FRINGE? --Jagz (talk) 17:51, 17 May 2008 (UTC)
Jagz, this is about the twelfth time you're asking the same question, and you've been given an answer several times already. Therefore, I must conclude you're either repeating yourself on purpose or you're just plain unable to understand. I'm just trying to figure out if you're trolling or merely dense.--Ramdrake (talk) 19:50, 17 May 2008 (UTC)
What I mean is: When you say it is "WP:FRINGE stuff", are you referring to the genetic viewpoint or the genetic hypothesis? If you want people to know what you are talking about, try not to use the word "stuff". --Jagz (talk) 21:35, 17 May 2008 (UTC)

Here Ramdrake, I'll give you the quote directly from WP:FRINGE:

We use the term fringe theory in a very broad sense to describe ideas that depart significantly from the prevailing or mainstream view in its particular field of study. Examples include conspiracy theories, ideas which purport to be scientific theories but have not gained scientific consensus, esoteric claims about medicine, novel re-interpretations of history and so forth. Some of the theories addressed here may in a stricter sense be hypotheses, conjectures, or speculations.

Now please explain precisely what in this article applies to WP:FRINGE. Try to explain it without including personal attacks. Additionally, if you feel I have ever been given a precise answer to this then please provide the diff-link. --Jagz (talk) 00:57, 18 May 2008 (UTC)

Ramdrake, after you have posted your explanation, here is a quiz you can take: [4] --Jagz (talk) 14:42, 19 May 2008 (UTC)

Whomever Rubidium37 was, I'm pretty certain he wasn't JagZ and I know he wasn't me. But somebody blocked the guy. That's not very gentlemanly. How does one go about undoing that? Also, on the topic just above, he was right and Alun was wrong. It's called regression to the mean, the history of which highlights the interesting way that statistics and genetics share a recent common ancestor, so to speak. --Legalleft (talk) 04:39, 17 May 2008 (UTC)

Legalleft you don't even appear to have read what I wrote, or what Rubidium37 wrote. The Regression towards the mean article states that Regression toward the mean refers to the fact that those with extreme scores on any measure at one point in time will, for purely statistical reasons, probably have less extreme scores the next time they are tested.. That is not what what Rubidium37 said. What he said was that the children of high achieving "black" people will be less intelligent than their parents. The regression towards the mean article is discussing outlier performances that are not consistently repeatable by an individual, over the course of a series of tests an individual will produce a mean score, but on individual tests they will produce a few significantly higher or lower scores, but on the whole they will tend towards their mean test score. This is simple probability theory, throw a die a single time and get a six, this is not evidence that the die is biased, over a series of throws the die will tend towards the mean score, this will be true whatever the probability distribution. The same is clearly true of populations, a few people in any population will clearly produce extremely high average scores, but the population will always tend towards the mean, this says nothing about the children of consistent high performers, it only tells us that the population as a whole will tend towards the mean. This is a simple concept and I find it strange that you appear to be unable to grasp it. In a population with complete random mating we will expect the existence of any outlier highly intelligent people to be no more than the actions of chance. Because the population is randomly mating the descendants of the highly intelligent will tend towards the mean over several generations. But human populations mate assortatively, i.e. intelligent people tend to mate with other intelligent people. If we assume that intelligence has a high genetic component (i.e. not it's variance but it's cause has a high genetic contribution), then we must conclude that because intelligent people mate with other intelligent people their children are also likely to be highly intelligent whatever their "race". What Rubidium37 and you appear to be saying is that "black" people mate randomly, while non-"black" people mate assortatively, a spurious assertion. Alun (talk) 05:59, 23 May 2008 (UTC)
Um... no. The mid-parent v. child and the sibling correlations for blacks and whites aren't thought to be different because of differences in assortative mating (maybe assortative mating differences contribute if such differences even exist, but that's not what the researchers talking about regression are getting at). They are different foremost because the populations have different mean IQs. For any trait with a narrow-sense heritability less than 100%, there will be mid-parent -> child regression to the mean. The populations have different means and different regression equations. This finding is replicated many times, so the basic observation is not in doubt. The causal interpretation of that observation is quite interesting. I suggest reading sources and reporting what they say rather than making incorrect leaps of inference such as the one you made here. --Legalleft (talk) 21:54, 25 May 2008 (UTC)
Can't you even spot sarcasm? That was what my comment about assortative mating was, I suppose I shouldn't be surprised, given your stated racist views. The plain fact is that to claim that the children of people with a high IQ always "regress" to a "mean" IQ for the population is effectively claiming that IQ is not under genetic control. If IQ is under genetic control, and intelligent people mostly reproduce with other intelligent people, then the children of intelligent people will be above average intelligence. Thats simple genetics, if you claim that a trait is under genetic control, but that offspring can't inherit the trait from their parents, then you clearly know fuck all about genetics. You might as well claim that the children of blue eyed parents will "regress" to having brown eyes, it's just bollocks legalleft, and not even very convincing bollocks. Or to put it another way, if intelligent people are intelligent because they have more "intelligence genes", than the population average, then the children of intelligent people will also have a greater than average amount of "intelligence genes" than the population. If then we see that these children are of only average intelligence (ie have regressed to the mean), then we must ask the question "Given they are the children of intelligent people (with an above average number of intelligence genes) and therefore have an above average number of intelligence genes themselves, why are they displaying only average intelligence for the population?" The children of intelligent people will have their parents genes, including their "intelligence genes", if they are only of average intelligence then it implies that they have not inherited their intellectual abilities from their parents i.e. they are more stupid than their parents even though they share the genes of their overacheiveing parents. To claim that this observation supports a genetic hypothesis is ludicrous and could only be made by someone with no interest in science, only by someone interested in pushing racist ideology, which brings us back to your hero, the fascist Jensen. I suggest you stop talking shite about genetics, a subject you appear to know nothing at all about. I wonder how you will manage to avoid actually talking about the subject at hand this time. I can't remember you addressing a single point directly ever, it's all evasion and changing the subject. Alun (talk) 05:40, 26 May 2008 (UTC)
Although I am no longer active, I may report uncivil posts, personal attacks, provocation, unreasonable edit warring, etc. --Jagz (talk) 07:26, 26 May 2008 (UTC)
You should have reported yourself on a number of occasions then, as one of the most tendentious , trollish and incivil individuals ever to have edited here. Your hypocrisy is breathtaking. Alun (talk) 10:44, 26 May 2008 (UTC)

Unindent. It's simple Legalleft. Imagine two loci each of which has two alleles. Locus A' has alleles A and a, and locus B' has alleles B and b. let's assume that an average (mean) intelligence has a genotype of aabb (the wild type genotype which is very prevalent in the population), while alleles A and B each give a +2 IQ point advantage to any person who has them. Consider two parents, each of which has a genotype of AaBb, and therefore each has an IQ of 4 points above average. Assuming independent assortment, their gametes will segregate thus

× AB Ab aB ab
AB AABB AABb AaBB AaBb
Ab AABb AAbb AaBb AaBB
aB AaBB AaBb aaBB aaBb
ab AaBb Aabb aaBb aabb

Thus for two parents who both have genes that give them a +4 IQ advantage, their children will have genotypes of:
AABB = +8
AABb = +6
AaBB = +6
AAbb = +4
AaBb = +4
aaBB = +4
Aabb = +2
aaBb = +2
aabb = +0

Clearly the average IQ of the children is the same as that of the parents, +4 above the average for the population, but the overwhelming majority (15/16) of the children will still have an IQ above that of the average for the population because they have inherited the high IQ genes of their parents. The children will have probabilities of IQs of +8 (1/16), +6 (1/4), +4 (3/8), +2 (1/4) and +0 (1/16). The offspring can only have genes they inherit from their parents, if these genes confer an IQ that is higher than that of the mean of the population, then it makes no sense to claim that these children will tend to have an IQ that has "regressed" to the mean of the population, this is akin to claiming either that these children have miraculously not inherited their parents "intelligence genes", or that the cause of intelligence is not genetic. It's simple genetics. Alun (talk) 13:19, 26 May 2008 (UTC)

Um, Alun, that's not what 'regression to the mean' refers to. Sure, the offspring of the mating you describe above will have genotypes in the ratios you give; I am sure that even Jensen doesn't dispute this. His argument is that these offspring will mate with the general population, which means that their mates are statistically more likely to have 'lower case letter' genotypes (following your example), and so over the generations it is likely that that line of descent will have an increasing number of 'lower case letter'/'average intelligence' alleles in its genome.
To put it another way, if intelligence is genetic and does indeed follow some sort of normal distribution, then 'capital letter' alleles are statistically less common than 'lower case' ones in the general population. Thus, matings which feature two parents with 'high IQ genes' would, in general, be less likely than 'mismatched' pairings of high IQ/average IQ, and so the number of homozygous combinations would become 'diluted' over time to heterozygous combinations with no phenotypic effect (crucially, you have also assumed that high IQ is the dominant combination, when it is surely more likely to be the recessive).
This of course raises what might be a valid criticism against the 'regression to the mean' argument, namely that those of a high IQ are, for social reasons, probably more likely to mate with others with high IQs (including this argument in the article without citation would be `original research', I'd guess), but your own explanation here is certainly not valid. --Plusdown (talk) 16:18, 28 May 2008 (UTC)
Humans mate assortatively, high IQ people tend to mate with other high IQ people, this is no less true for African-Americans than for European Americans. Likewise highly intelligent people are likely to meet other highly intelligent people, for examply attending University together, or working in the same challenging environment. Unless there is some evidence that African American people mate randomly and European American people mate assortitavely, then it's just plain wrong. Alun (talk) 17:57, 1 June 2008 (UTC)
On the one hand IQ is meaningless, on the other it can have a real influence on the choice of mates? That's a bit of a contradiction. No-one is claiming that African people don't mate assortatively while Europeans do.
Nevertheless, while there is -- I couldn't agree more -- a correlation between the IQs of mating partners, unless this correlation is 1, there will be a net regression effect, which would be larger the smaller the correlation. That's a fairly simple statistical principle. While brighter people are definitely more likely to mate with other bright people, their intelligence will probably not be equal, and there will be other pairings besides (similarly with the lower end of the spectrum).
P.S. Thanks for changing that section heading, it was getting on my nerves as well. --Plusdown (talk) 19:26, 1 June 2008 (UTC)
Good luck with the article. It looks much better than it did in December for example. Perhaps this would have been impossible without Wobble/Alun's contributions to the Talk page. --Jagz (talk) 13:17, 26 May 2008 (UTC)
Rubidium37 was only reacting to the disruptiveness of another editor. --Jagz (talk) 17:55, 17 May 2008 (UTC)
Rubidium37 was being disruptive in his own right, so that's why he got indef-blocked.--Ramdrake (talk) 19:51, 17 May 2008 (UTC)

By the way, didn't a particular troll say he was going away for a year? I've been busy the past few days but it looks like Mr. Toll-a-lot just cannot stay away. Please, folks, can we stop feeding it? Slrubenstein | Talk 17:44, 20 May 2008 (UTC)

I'd rather be a troll than the north end of a southbound mule. --Jagz (talk) 19:20, 20 May 2008 (UTC)
What do you mean? Slrubenstein | Talk 20:08, 20 May 2008 (UTC)
SL, I think that you've been denigrated to a step below a horse’s ass, but since you see J as a troll, then how could you be harmed by his opinion. Cease fire guys, you are both better than that. Cheers! --Kevin Murray (talk) 20:45, 21 May 2008 (UTC)

[edit] This could be useful

Found this quote by Zack Cernovsky, himself a psychologist and a university professo (so properly qualified to judge this matter), about Rushton's work: Rushton's pseudoscientific writings perpetuate lay public's misconceptions and promote racism...Authoritarian statements "about the reality of racial differences," based on conveniently selected trends in the data, do not qualify as a scientific contribution. [5]

Maybe we could work this into the article? :)--Ramdrake (talk) 19:36, 21 May 2008 (UTC)

Cernovsky's paper was published in the Journal of Black studies which does not qualify as a reputable source in the field of psychology. Khurshid85 (talk) 07:23, 22 May 2008 (UTC)
The Journal of Black Studies is published by Sage and comes out of Temple University which makes it very respectable and it certainly is an authoritative source on racist science. Slrubenstein | Talk 10:12, 22 May 2008 (UTC)
@Khurshid85. The Journal of Black Studies has a Wikipedia article, it is also an academic publication. [6] Maybe it's not reputable for psychology, but this article is about "race and intelligence" and not about psychology. Since when were psychologists experts on "race"? The subjects covered by the journal are certainly relevant to this article. Alun (talk) 10:55, 22 May 2008 (UTC)

This too might be useful: taken from [7] (Race, racism and anthropology, G. Armelagos and A. Goodman, University of Michigan Press, p.368) Although Rushton's work is both unscientific and racist, it is amazing that some highly respected physical anthropologists are fascianted by it.--Ramdrake (talk) 12:30, 22 May 2008 (UTC)

1. The Journal of Black Studies seems to be a reliable source to cite for Cernovsky's opinion. Whether that opinion is worth noting is a separate issue. 2. Since when were psychologists experts on "race"? Well, they are the experts on the psychological issues related to race, such as intelligence. You can imagine that individual in a number of disciplines would have expertise at that intersection. I don't know whether Cernovsky is an expert on race re: psychology/intelligence, but that would be a point worth finding out. --Legalleft (talk) 23:43, 25 May 2008 (UTC)

[edit] A site on Iq and its environmental factors

heres a good site about the environmental factors of IQ. http://iqandenvironment.blogspot.com/ We should a section to the article about environmental factors.

http://iqandenvironment.blogspot.com/ —Preceding unsigned comment added by 81.154.150.215 (talk) 13:16, 27 May 2008 (UTC)

I read some of the article, and it looks good so far. One thing is, though, is that I don't see a point of having this quote. "Eugenicists have argued that immigration from countries with low national IQ is undesirable. According to Cattell, "when a country is opening its doors to immigration from diverse countries, it is like a farmer who buys his seeds from different sources by the sack, with sacks of different average quality of contents."" That quote seems oddly out of place and sort of random. I dont' see the purpose of some weird off hand statement that somebody made about his views of immigration. That quote serves no real purpose. Also I don't really see any other quotes in this article of a similar nature.

Also, under Caste-like minorities, I don't think its really necessary to have that chart labeled "Group Differences Around the World" on the race and intelligence page. I don't see any reason the chart needs to be in this article. The chart is just extraneous information that should be moved to the other page below. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inequality_by_Design:_Cracking_the_Bell_Curve_Myth

Thats all for now —Preceding unsigned comment added by 70.233.85.248 (talk) 01:10, 28 May 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Suggestion

I have a suggestion for the article which may help with its immense structural problems. Would it not work to try to dissect out all the information on the media portrayal of the debate, and put it in its own section, so that one has the scientific evidence on the one hand, and the media debate on the other? This would help keep things coherent, while also avoiding potential confusion.

I'm proposing it here because it is probably a much bigger overhaul than the few tweaks I have been doing on the article so far. Do let me know what you think. --Plusdown (talk) 16:55, 28 May 2008 (UTC)

I have started a new attempt at the article on a user subpage, User:Plusdown/RaceIQ. Anyone who wants to contribute should feel free to do so, or to make suggestions on its discussion page (already I have a general plan laid out there). --Plusdown (talk) 11:06, 30 May 2008 (UTC)

A hard data/interpretation distinction could be very helpful. One question that I've struggled with is how to present the issue of the factor structure of between-group differences -- i.e., the contribution of g versus second-tier factors. Its not clear to me whether this is important to bring out or not, but it does get to a main topic of Gould's book, so it has added importance in that sense.
There's certainly room for creative restructuring. A stronger firewall between the controversy regarding causal hypotheses and other social/political controversies might help to bring out some nuance. --Legalleft (talk) 23:46, 2 June 2008 (UTC)

[edit] lead section list

The existence of a meaningful correlation between race and intelligence depends on the acceptance of two assumptions, namely:[citation needed] That "race" is a meaningful biological construct[citation needed] That "intelligence" can be reduced to a unitary measurement[citation needed]

This is factually incorrect, thus the request for citations. The existence of race differences in any trait doesn't depend on a biological definition of race. Else the existence of all racial differences in every trait would be subject to the existence of a biological definition of race. The two are logically separate issues. Also, no one thinks intelligence is unitary -- everyone thinks its multidimensional. Most happen to think that there is a single factor with a disproportionate importance in intelligence differences between individuals. However, race differences in intelligence explicitly do not depend on any particular structure to mental abilities. Lastly, this kind of grand summary absolutely needs to be attributed and cited. NOR exists to keep editors from introducing mistakes like this. --Legalleft (talk) 19:08, 30 May 2008 (UTC)

I am unsure what you mean by "factually incorrect". I refer you to our policy on verifyability, which clearly states The threshold for inclusion in Wikipedia is verifiability, not truth — meaning, in this context, whether readers are able to check that material added to Wikipedia has already been published by a reliable source, not whether we think it is true. The verifyability of this statement is not in doubt. Ashley Montagu, in his essay "The IQ Mythology" makes this very same point, this essay is printed in the most important book published on this subject, "Race and IQ", something anyone claiming any expertise in the field should know.

"I have stated, and I think the statement long overdue, that both the term "race" and the term "IQ" are delusive because in the one case the social conception of "race" was the deliberate invention of a slave-owning caste attempting to justify its conduct, and in the other case because "IQ" tests do not measure what they have generally been claimed to measure, namely, innate intelligence ... The statistical treatment of data in any investigation may be quite unexceptional, but when unexceptional statistical methods are applied to the analysis of unsound data to begin with, based on assumptions that are equally unsound, one can only end up with conclusions that are equally unsound. Such are the erroneous constructs of "race" and "IQ"."-Ashley Montagu, "The IQ Mythology"; Race and IQ. ISBN 0-19-510220-7

You see, that wasn't so difficult was it? Alun (talk) 06:23, 31 May 2008 (UTC)

This doesn't answer my complaint as I intended it. The question is whether those two points are accurate summaries of what people believe to be true (not that they are given as statements of fact, rather than attributed opinion, so they should be noncontroversial). Not only do I not think they are an accurate summary of a general position, but I think they don't describe anything that anyone believes -- they are a bad summary. Perhaps there is some two-item list that is a good summary, but that list isn't it. My attempts to make this point so far haven't been understood, so let's try to focus on just what the problem is. --Legalleft (talk) 23:40, 2 June 2008 (UTC)

I really don't care what you "think", there are a plethora of cites that support these contentions, all from subject matter experts. Gould, Montagu and Graves all claim that an acceptance of "race" as a biological entity is a prerequisite for belief in "genetic" explanations for the differences. There are also numerous citations available regarding the validity of trying to reduce a complex trait like "intelligence" to a single meaningful statistic. There's nothing controversial here, this is just your usual tactic of rejecting every piece of evidence that does not support the racist ideology you want to promote. You claim that every piece of evidence that contradicts the racist pov is of little or no importance, or is marginal, but that's just crap, if the authors of the work cited claim it's important, then we say what they say and not what some pov-pushing editor wants to be true due to their own ideologically motivated fundamentalist beliefs in racist pseudoscience. Please desist from your pov-pushing, it's getting tiresome. Alun (talk) 05:13, 3 June 2008 (UTC)

1. I consider your characterization of me as having a racist POV to be a personal attack. 2. No, the citations don't support the formulation written in the article. Do you see what I'm saying? I'm not saying that you couldn't write those sentences in a different form somewhere in WP and that those citations could accompany them. I'm saying that the formulation doesn't reflect the reality of the debate. To pick a particular example, the dimensionality of intelligence plays no role in the race and intelligence debate. In another example, what the best definition of race is isn't a part of the debate. These formulations simply don't fit with this article. 3. The ideal solution is to find a formulation from a review article and use it instead. --Legalleft (talk) 05:58, 3 June 2008 (UTC)

Legalleft,notwithstanding this heated exchange, AFAIK it would just stand to reason that if "race" isn't a biologically meaningful construct, one simply cannot assign meaningful biological differences (such as differing levels of intelligence, which is an indicator of brain function, therefore a biological/psychometric quantity) to what isn't a meaningful biological construct. Race needs to be a meaningful biological construct for "race and intelligence" to have any meaning, no? Or are you saying that "racial differences" exist regardless of the meaninfulness of race as a biological construct?--Ramdrake (talk) 11:41, 3 June 2008 (UTC)
Logically, I can't see that being true at all. For race differences in intelligence to exist, there must exist both races and intelligence, but I can't see how race needs to be biological (except in the most meaningless sense of the term that anything about humans is biological). Consider an example of something about humans that isn't "biological" -- e.g. tenure or retirement or education or occupations -- those things don't have to be biological in order for them to a subject of research (about intelligence, or social science research or biological research). Why do races matter only if they are biological? The particular choice of wording is also poor. The larger problem with the text is the notion of assumptions -- science doesn't usually have assumptions, but it does operate in a background of "conclusions" which at tentatively accepted based on past study. An actual assumption which is debated might be that "race differences in [behavioral] traits are worth studying". could provide citations for that assumption. Looking for other purely logical requirements -- I think it is necessary for races to be genetically non-identical for it to be logically possible for a genetic explanation of group differences in intelligence. However, James Flynn et al. think there are race differences in intelligence and that they aren't genetic in origin, so he and others aren't logically committed to that position.
I don't disagree with the usefulness of crisp descriptions of various points of view in the lede, but he synthesis of them into a list of necessary assumptions just doesn't work -- on top of the fact that its an OR synthesis. I'm sure its possible to try to say the same thing in a way that doesn't generate false and SYN implications. Prose is probably the best weapon, rather than a list of "assumptions". --Legalleft (talk) 16:07, 3 June 2008 (UTC)
I think we're making headway into explaining each other's position on this. Race and intelligence can interact only if they interact on a same given level. If IQ was a social construct, I would concede the point that race not being a valid biological construct (but rather a social construct) is of little importance. However, IQ is generally seen as a high-order (read complex) biological phenomenon. If race exists solely as a social construct, one has to explain how a social construct can influence a biological phenomenon. Now, if race was a valid biological construct, the interaction would also be more plausible. But for now, I'm not aware of any social construct determining a biological parameter. Hope this makes the point more clearly.--Ramdrake (talk) 16:31, 3 June 2008 (UTC)
I think that's an interesting proposition, but I don't see that it has to be true for purely logical reasons, I think it's a novel proposition rather than be generally supported by the literature (but it may possibly be something that lots of people believe tacitly), and I think that most SES and cultural causal theories of group differences in intelligence specifically theorize that culture has feedback effects on the brain (which you might call biological), just as education has feedback effects on the brain. (The ecological studies where they cosmetically tweak animals and show that it affects their physiology owning to social feedback processes comes to mind.) So I return to the example of James Flynn -- I don't think Flynn would accept the proposition that race has to be biological for racial differences in IQ to exist. It sounds somewhat like the (mistaken) proposition that IQ measures "innate" intelligence and thus IQ differences are genetic (or the more common denial of the antecedent -- that because IQ measures developed intelligence that differences aren't genetic) -- the two concepts are logically separate. In the particular case of race, the groups being studied are specifically taken from self-identification, with all the cultural and social baggage that implies -- something that I think everyone in the debate recognizes as an enormous confounding factor. --Legalleft (talk) 16:52, 3 June 2008 (UTC)
That was a round about way of saying something that could have been demonstrated more simply by a well chosen example -- BW differences in low birth weight exist. Low birth weight is biological in a strong sense. The observation of BW differences in LBW doesn't require that races be biologically meaningful. --Legalleft (talk) 17:08, 3 June 2008 (UTC)
That's because in the case of LBW, BW differences are well understood to be a proxy for SES levels, which are a proxy for nutritional levels during pregnancy, which is a determining factor in LBW. No such causality link has been demonstrated for BW differences in IQ testing results, except through the SES/nutritional/maternal environment (read environmental throughout) route. The "hereditarian hypothesis" (most common name) is still invoking pretty much a black box system well intelligence is under the control of multiple genes, and we know few if any of them, but we'll nevertheless assume that somehow intelligence genes aren't evenly distributed on the very large scale (hundreds of millions of people) of racial groups. Admittedly, I'm caricaturizing here, but you get my meaning, surely. --Ramdrake (talk) 19:41, 4 June 2008 (UTC)

unindent You are both missing the point. Legalleft is making a false claim that there is a synthesis in the article. But I have included reliable sources that explicitly state that for "race" differences to have any meaning then "races" need to have biological validity. Whether Legalleft thinks Flynn, would accept the proposition is totally irrelevant. Legalleft's musings on the beliefs of some researcher are neither here nor there. Indeed Legalleft is mischaracterising the debate, people like Flynn are not saying that there are "race" differences, they are saying there are socially-excluded groups and that it is the social exclusion of these groups that causes the difference and not the "race" of these groups. Because some of these excluded groups are called "races" it does not follow that Flynn is discussing "race" and intelligence, it follows that Flynn is discussing "social exclusion" and intelligence. In this context African-Americans are not performing poorly because of their "race" but because of their social exclusion. I can't accept what Legalleft is saying he's conflating the concept of "race" differences with "social" differences". We can use "race" as a measure of social exclusion, just as we can use SES as a measure of social exclusion, but that is not the same as claiming that it is "race" which is the cause of the difference. As far as I can see Legalleft's argument is nothing to do with any synthesis, but more a general lack of understanding about the difference between a social and biological constructs on his part.

  1. Lieberman, Leonard; Alice Littlefield and Larry T. Reynolds. "The Debate over Race: Thirty Years and Two Centuries Later." in "Race and I.Q." (1975) Ashley Montague (ed.) ISBN 0-19-510220-7. ""Those who study I.Q. scores of different groups do so with the assumption that there are homogeneous races, when in fact that is not the case. Populations being very similar to each other to begin with, and being interbred with eah other - and humans have interbred throughout their evolution - makes it impossible to explain differences in I.Q. scores largely on the basis of heredity".
  2. ^ a b Montagu, Ashley "The I.Q. Mythology" in "Race and I.Q." (1975) Ashley Montague (ed) ISBN 0-19-510220-7: "I have stated, and I think the statement long overdue, that both the term "race" and the term "IQ" are delusive because in the one case the social conception of "race" was the deliberate invention of a slave-owning caste attempting to justify its conduct, and in the other case because "IQ" tests do not measure what they have generally been claimed to measure, namely, innate intelligence ... The statistical treatment of data in any investigation may be quite unexceptional, but when unexceptional statistical methods are applied to the analysis of unsound data to begin with, based on assumptions that are equally unsound, one can only end up with conclusions that are equally unsound. Such are the erroneous constructs of "race" and "IQ"."
  3. ^ a b Graves, Joseph, L. "The Race Myth: Why we Pretend Race Exists in America". (2004) Dutton, New York, New York. p174. "The Bell Curve's arguments are plausible only if one assumes that biologically defined races exist within our species and that they correspond to the socially defined American races, that IQ really does determine the majority of the differential in social stature in societies, and that IQ tests reliably measure all pertinent aspects of cognitive function and are unbiased.
  4. ^ Montague, Ashley. "Intelligence, IQ and Race" in "Race and I.Q." (1975) Ashley Montague (ed.) ISBN 0-19-510220-7. "..IQ tests, whatever their proponents may claim, do not measure intelligence. The truth is that no one really knowswhat the structure of intelligence is, and thereforethere cannot be anything even approximating a quantitative measure of intelligence, this abstraction of abstractions, that IQ tests purport to quantify. What is quite clear, except to IQ testers, is that many conditions enter into the making of these capabilities we call intelligence, and that without taking these factors into consideration such tests are quite valueless in providing a measure of "intelligence"
  5. ^ Gould, Stephen Jay "Racist Arguments and I.Q.". Natural History Magazine May 1974: "The confusion of within- and between-group variation. Jensen draws a causal connectio between his two major assertions - that the within-group heritability of I.Q. is 0.8 for American whites, and that the mean difference in I.Q. between American blacks and whites is 15 points. He assumes that the black "deficit" is largely genetic in origin because I.Q. is so highly heritable. This is a non-sequitur of the worst possible kind - for there is no necessary relationship between heritability within group and differences in mean values of two separate groups"
  6. ^ Jensen, Arthur. (1969) "..all we are left with are various lines of evidence, no one of which is definitive alone, but which, viewed altogether, make it a not unreasonable hypothesis that genetic factors are strongly implicated in the average Negro-white intelligence difference. The preponderance of evidence is, in my opinion, less consistent with a strictly environmental hypothesis, which of course, does not exclude the influence of environment on its interaction with genetic factors.
  7. ^ Lewontin, Richard. "Race and Intelligence" (1970) Science and Public Affairs. "To understand the main genetical arguments of Jensen, we must dwell, as he does, on the concept of heritability ... To contrast a "strictly environmental hypothesis" with "a genetic hypothesis which ... does not exclude the influence of the environment" is to be guilty of the utmost triviality. If that is the only conclusion he means to come to, Jensen has wasted a great deal of space in the "Harvard Educational Review". But of course, like all cant, the special languageof the social scientist needs to be translated into common English. What Jensen is saying is: "It is pretty clear, although not absolutely proved, that most of the difference in I.Q. between blacks and whites is genetical." This at least is not a trivial conclusion. Indeed it may even be true. However, the evidence offered by Jensen is irrelevant ... Is it not then likely that the [black-white IQ] difference is genetic? No. It is neither likely nor unlikely. There is no evidence. The fundamental error of Jensen's argument is to confuse heritability of a character within a population with heritability of the difference between two populations. Indeed, between two populations, the concept of heritability of their difference is meaningless. This is because a variance based upon two measurements has only one degree of freedom and so cannot be partitioned into genetic and environmental components. The genetic basis of the difference between two populations bears no logical or empirical relation to the heritability within populationsand cannot be infered from it..."
  8. ^ Graves, Joseph, L. "The Race Myth: Why we Pretend Race Exists in America". (2004) Dutton, New York, New York. p. 177. "The heritability of intelligence is not really the issue when addressing the race and intelligence question, however. All it states is that genes contribute to intelligence differences between families, but we have always known that. To make the racial hypothesis work, one needs to demonstrate which genes are responsible for high intelligence, and what are their frequencies in various human populations. Furthermore, to really make the case, one needs to explain why human beings should have drastically different frequencies of genes contributing to or detracting from intelligence. So far no one has advanced a credible theory.
  9. ^ Gould, Stephen, J. "The Mismeasure of Man" (1996) W.W.Norton and Company, New York, New York. "The central fallacy in using the substantial heritability of within group IQ (among whites, for example) as an explanation for average differences between groups (whites vs. blacks, for example) is now well known and acknowledged by all, including Herrnstein and Murray..."

Alun (talk) 06:15, 4 June 2008 (UTC)


Leaglleft, I didn't say you had a racist pov. I said you were pushing a racist pov. The continual downplaying of anti-hereditarian point of view, while actively promoting the hereditarian pov is not neutral, on Wikipedia we call it pov-pushing. The hereditarian pov is a racist pov, indeed it is a white supremacist pov, and you are pushing this pov. There are numerous problems with the hereditarian pov which have been highlighted again and again by scientists. These include criticisms of using IQ as a measure of intelligence, criticisms of the use of non-biological categories such as "race" to make biological claims, criticisms of the claim that high heritability estimates are an indication that a trait is primarily under genetic control (a simple lie), criticism of the claim that high heritability in one group can tell us anything meaningful about between group differences, criticim of the claim that high heritability estimates for one group indicate that it is therefore high in all groups (ie the treatment of heritability as if it were a quality of the trait (intelligence) whereas in fact it is a quality of the population (in this case "white" Americans), criticism of the computation of heritability, which cannot be calculated for traits in which environment-gene interactions correlate, such as in complex human traits such as intelligence (they effectively include environment-gene interaction effects within the calculation for heritability) and criticism of claims by Jensen that a high heritability indicates that the trait therefore cannot be modified by changes in environment (the thrust of Jensen's 1969 Harvard Educational Review article), again a simple lie. These are all important observations that have been made extensively by many and varied experts in anthropology, genetics, statistics, psychology and biology. Because they are criticisms made by experts published in reliable sources, we can include them in the article. As Graves states, any one of these shows the deeply flawed methodology of the so called "hereditarian" hypothesis, taken together they utterly destroy it. Even though these criticisms are well known and from impeccable sources, you have sought consistently to remove, or downplay their inclusion in the article. Indeed the article is currently very biased in favour of the unsupported "hereditarian" hypothesis, with the criticisms I have outlined above receiving very little attention. Furthermore your claim that these issus are not part of the "debate" is just an attempt to frame the article so that it only conforms to those parts of the debate that you with to include in the article. These claims are part of the debate, and we have citation from reliable sources to prove it. When we have reliable sources that make these claims they represent de facto evidence that this is absolutely part of the debate. So essentially you are claiming that we should not include these criticisms because you personally do not believe they are part of the debate, I would point out to you that in fact these are parts of the debate that you personally have no knowledge of. The fact that you personally are unaware of this part of the "debate" is not, in fact, a good reason not to include these observations. Alun (talk) 11:45, 3 June 2008 (UTC)
Says Alun: '...claims by Jensen that a high heritability indicates that the trait therefore cannot be modified by changes in environment (the thrust of Jensen's 1969 Harvard Educational Review article), again a simple lie.' That is indeed a simple lie. Jensen never said that. --Plusdown (talk) 13:31, 3 June 2008 (UTC)
I have about five reliable sources that say that this is exactly what Jensen said in his Harvard Educational Review paper, indeed I have provided the names of these papers and their authors to you in a different thread on this page. Like it or not a reliable source is a reliable source, the main criterion for inclusion on Wikipedia is verifiability, I can include this information and verify it, of course we cannot simply verify a contention from any old source, so we need to use sources that are reliable, hence the reliable sources guideline. But then as an experienced Wikipedia editor you should already know this. Remember The threshold for inclusion in Wikipedia is verifiability, not truth. - Wikipedia:Verifiability Alun (talk) 05:45, 4 June 2008 (UTC)
Yes, I'm sure you have those sources. But we can also quote Jensen himself, saying, for example, 'I have also attempted over the years to dispel the common, but unwarranted, assumption that heritability necessarily implies the inevitability or immutability of human differences' (link below). And Jensen is surely a reliable source about what Jensen thinks. So, by all means include those lies about Jensen, and cite them properly to their reliable sources whose views -- I have never disputed this -- are important...but their caricatures should be contextualised against what he has really said. --Plusdown (talk) 10:17, 4 June 2008 (UTC)
I don't know what "Jensen thinks", my specific point was about his claims in his Harvard Educational Review article, what he may or may not have said at other times is of course relevant to the article, but my statement was about his Harvard Educational Review article. On the other hand you stated that he did not make these claims in theHarvard Educational Review article, whereas in actual fact this article claims specifically that "Compensatiory education has been tried and apparently it has failed", he then goes to claim that this is because the heritability of IQ is high, and that this means that IQ is primarily under genetic control, both of these claims are fallacies, heritability is a quality of the population (in this case in the "white" population it is claimed to be 80%) and not "intelligence", likewise a high heritability does not measure the contribution of genes to a trait, but the contribution of genes to the variance of a trait, therefore high heritability tells us nothing about the genetic contribution to intelligence. These are the fallacies of the HER article and these are what I was discussing, there are also numerous citations backing this claim up. Alun (talk) 11:02, 4 June 2008 (UTC)

Debating the three bullet point items in isolation is not what I was getting at. It's what the sentence is claiming to summarize: The debate surrounding any meaningful link between race and intelligence centers on the acceptance of three assumptions. I suppose the confusion might stem from different interpretations of "any meaningful link between race and intelligence". As far as I can tell, that phrase simply means that race differences in intelligence are not artifacts of the data -- such as being simply the result of test bias. And it doesn't have anything to do with genetic versus environmental contributions -- when you're debating the relative contribution of genetic and environmental factors you are already talking about "meaningful" differences. Thus, the three bullet points don't follow as a summary of assumptions to regarding race differences as meaningful. As far as I can tell, the only assumption there is that you must find intelligence meaningful and that you must be concerned about the existence of racial disparities, or as I described above: "race differences in [behavioral] traits are worth studying". --Legalleft (talk) 20:33, 4 June 2008 (UTC)

So how about we change it to The debate surrounding race and intelligence centers on the acceptance of three assumptions then? That should address your concerns, no? Alun (talk) 05:54, 5 June 2008 (UTC)

Turing the list into a paragraph and replacing the idea of "assumptions" with "debated topics" or something like that was what I was looking for. --Legalleft (talk) 06:21, 5 June 2008 (UTC)

Moved around some text to provide an example of what i mean. A list seems redundant / more detail than necessary. Should focus on narrative summary. --Legalleft (talk) 06:30, 5 June 2008 (UTC)

One last thing -- even the text I moved is factually inaccurate. Describing the debate as being about "definitions" isn't accurate -- analytic philosophers debate definitions -- its about descriptions, measurements, theories, etc. --Legalleft (talk) 06:34, 5 June 2008 (UTC)

Ok, my only problem with this edit is your treatment of the so called "race" controversy, there is no "race" controversy, the idea of typological races died a very quick death in the 1960s and is still well and truly dead. Furthermore there is a strong consensus in the biological and anthropological academic communities that the human species is of very recent origin, arose in Africa, and that we are therefore genetically very homogeneous. There is little or no controversy, the fact that Jensen et al. have used a social construct to make biological claims is a throwback to the mid 20th century when anthropologists still though of the world in "racial" terms, their use of these social categories to make biological claims has been roundly condemned by experts in anthropology and biology. Attempts to classify people based on genetic variation today are proving as futile as attempts to classify people based on physical variation a century ago. Let's have a think about how we can better word this. Alun (talk) 19:37, 5 June 2008 (UTC)
Iterative improvements are great. Aside from your mischaracterization of Jensen, I agree with your general statement -- and so does Jensen -- races are not typological. Jensen (1998) chapter 12:
Wrong Conceptions of Race. The root of most wrong conceptions of race is the Platonic view of human races as distinct types, that is, discrete, mutually exclusive categories. According to this view, any observed variation among the members of a particular racial category merely represents individual deviations from the archetype, or ideal type, for that “race.” Since, according to this Platonic view of race, every person can be assigned to one or another racial category, it naturally follows that there is some definite number of races, each with its unique set of distinctive physical characteristics, such as skin color, hair texture, and facial features. The traditional number has been three: Caucasoid, Mongoloid, and Negroid, in part derived from the pre-Darwinian creationist view that “the races of mankind” could be traced back to the three sons of Noah—Shem, Ham, and Japheth.
But there are biological differences between self-identified racial groups, and some of those differences have a known genetic etiology. --Legalleft (talk) 22:57, 5 June 2008 (UTC)
Yes, there are obviously biological differences between populations from different parts of the world. The concept of "race" is considered fallacious because it does not accurately measure how human variation is distributed. The only real problem with the "genetic hypothesis" is that there is actually no genetic evidence to support it. Of course that does not mean it is wrong, it just means that the evidence is only circumstantial, and even this circumstantial evidence is generally considered decidedly weak. I am reminded of the statement that Watson made, "there is no firm reason to anticipate that the intellectual capacities of peoples geographically separated in their evolution should prove to have evolved identically." Which is a reasonable statement, but no more or less reasonable than the converse ""there is no firm reason to anticipate that the intellectual capacities of peoples geographically separated in their evolution should prove to have diverged." Just a thought. Alun (talk) 05:09, 6 June 2008 (UTC)
This is reminiscent of something which has long interest me about race...aside from the biological/anthropological work, one could write a very interesting philosophical analysis of the concept of 'race', from the point of view of a nominalist/universalist controversy. Not that I'm suggesting it for the article, since it would be a prime example of OR, as well as irrelevant (though if anyone knows if such a thing has been done, it could be an interesting addition to the 'Race (Classification of Humans)' article. Just a thought. (Since I'm something of a nominalist, it's probably why I have no problem talking about the classical 'races', since any word we care to use is simply a coarse-grained approximation to reality; and the coarse-grainedness of a word is often directly proportional to its utility but inversely proportional to its accuracy.)
And as for the fact that there is no genetic evidence to support the 'genetic hypothesis', that is possibly the most crucial, and damning, bit of criticism of it that there is; there is a lot of circumstantial evidence, but since no-one has found 'intelligence genes', much less studied their distribution across population groups (I seem to recall reading about some study which used a 5-level iteration to analyse people's genetic makeup for possible intelligence genes, but which came back empty-handed), it is still very much a hypothesis. But that's why I always insist that the matter is fundamentally undecided...because the counter-evidence is just as circumstantial (i.e. it has not been proven that there is not a set of genes which together go to determining intelligence), even though there's a Hell of a lot of that, as well.
Which is why it's silly to get worked about the whole issue; getting worked up about people misrepresenting science to support political agendas is, of course, another matter entirely (and something we should not let creep into what should be a factual article, no matter where the person sits on the political spectrum or how noble their views).
Btw, Alun, I probably lost my cool a bit with you before, and said some unreasonable things; I mean no harm [8]. I took a bit of a break, and am back feeling somewhat more calm. --Plusdown (talk) 08:25, 6 June 2008 (UTC)
No problem, I'm the same. Sometimes we all get too involved the argument and need to step back for a bit, I know I do sometimes :) Alun (talk) 10:22, 6 June 2008 (UTC)

There hasn't even been a solid admixture study based on genotypes (the few based on phenotypes are meaningless). But there are a few replicated candidate genes with associations with IQ: CHRM2 and DTNBP1 iirc. Of course, nothing you can really make a call on re: race. --Legalleft (talk) 16:09, 6 June 2008 (UTC)

[edit] genetics section

The genetics section previously contained no empirical details. Discussion of the science is meaningless without the crucial empirical details. Fix the section if there are NPOV issues, but don't delete cited and notable data. --Legalleft (talk) 19:14, 30 May 2008 (UTC)

This has already been discussed at length: the papers and theories you are quoting are fringe, therefore we should not give them undue weight. The mainstream theories to explain the B-W achievement gap are all environmental. Only a few researchers are championing hereditarian theories, and those have been widely criticized, if not utterly dismissed by the majority of mainstream scientists.--Ramdrake (talk) 19:19, 30 May 2008 (UTC)
You're wrong that a consensus was reached as several of us clearly disagreed. You're wrong about the facts at two levels. (1) The claim that these view are fringe is inconsistent with the Wall Street Journal consensus statement, the Snyderman and Rothman statement, and the persistence of researchers in examining the genetic hypothesis (pro and con) for decades. (2) You're wrong that a theory has to be in the majority to be notable. I don't know what the precise breakdown of expert belief is, but I know the distribution of discussion of these theories and empirical data in the literature. The level of discussion of empirical data for a genetic hypothesis is high and needs to be reflected in a summary of the topic (i.e., this article). --Legalleft (talk) 19:30, 30 May 2008 (UTC)
Put another way (re: 2) if something is discussed in the NY Times and other MSM sources, you should be able to go to WP to get a summary. Saying that only one view is correct and thus only one view should be presented is prejudging a live scientific debate. --Legalleft (talk) 19:34, 30 May 2008 (UTC)
You're not using the best examples: Gottfredson's statement in the WSJ represents only a relative handful (50 or so) signatories; the sample from the Snyderman and Rothman study was hand-pciked and therefore not representative. The APA statement and the AAA statement, both representative of memberships in the tens of thousands, are much stronger statements. Also, please note that consensus does not require unanimity, at least not on Wikipedia. Taken tgether that the hereditarian theory is championed by a very few researchers, that it is widely disputed and that it fails to make any readily falsifiable claims, all these are earmarks of fringe science, if not downright pseudoscience. There are very few followers of the hereditarian hypothesis, and this article should reflect that in its treatment of the subject.--Ramdrake (talk) 19:41, 30 May 2008 (UTC)
I think you're a very reasonable person, but I disagree with you. the sample from the Snyderman and Rothman study was hand-pciked and therefore not representative -- more than 1000 hand picked individuals? Lets stick to what's published, not innuendo. The APA statement had how many authors? And the AAA statement had how many authors? The authors and signatories count, but its impossible to attribute the views expressed in those publications to anyone put their authors. Many publications from professional organizations that I'm a member of have written things I disagree with. Hopefully its generally understood that membership in an organization doesn't entail support for all its products.
Your latter claims about fringe and pseudoscience are similarly just made up. Even if could present examples of published opinions to that effect, there's no way that that opinion can be taken as representative of a scientific consensus. Even if you are an expert on this topic, your opinion doesn't matter in your role as an editor. The reason that WP limits editorial bias with NPOV and NOR is for this very reason -- editors don't get to pick sides -- which you undeniably are doing, no? Stick to what's published and we'll be fine. --Legalleft (talk) 20:43, 30 May 2008 (UTC)
The sheer size of a sample doesn't make it reprsentative. I can poll 1000 people on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, and it will not be representative of the opinion of the NYC residents,much less of the residents of the State of New York, and even less of all Americans. The fact that they were "hand-picked" means nothing for the representativity of the sample. The APA statement has 11 authors, and had 11 responses published in the American Psychologist. The only response that disagreed with the report was that of Rushton and Lynn. Also, the number of authors of the AAA statement is unknown. The "Mainstream statement on intelligence" has only one author: Linda Gottfredson. Sticking to what's published means that each opinion is represented commensurately to its weight in the "real world". The hereditarian hypothesis is supported by a handful of researchers; the environmental hypothesis is supported by the vast majority of researchers.--Ramdrake (talk) 22:41, 30 May 2008 (UTC)
What you're doing is called confirmation bias -- disregarding negative data and giving undue weight to positive data (i.e., making up reasons to ignore WSJ [52 signatories] and S&R [1020 subjects] in favor of APA [11 authors + 11 responses] and AAA [?]). Proper implementation of NPOV and NOR should guard against this -- all relevant positions would be cited and attributed, not the OR products of editorial opinions about which scholars count and which don't. The people hurt by it are the readers. --Legalleft (talk) 23:16, 30 May 2008 (UTC)
Let me get this straight: an op-ed piece in a newspaper, written by one person and endorsed by another 50 scientists should be considered to have at least as much if not more weight than the official position of a large body of professionals, written by a panel of 11 experts, published in a peer-reviewed science journal, and representative of an association with over 100,000 members, right?--Ramdrake (talk) 00:25, 31 May 2008 (UTC)
Yes, because (1) the signatories were themselves experts and in fact a number of them were authors of the APA statement as well and (2) the WSJ statement was also published in a peer reviewed journal -- the two differ in detail (clearly), but not in importance in setting out the range of views. --Legalleft (talk) 05:41, 1 June 2008 (UTC)
Wow. Thanks, I stand corrected on one thing: somebody here is definitely doing confirmation bias; however, that's not me.--Ramdrake (talk) 13:36, 1 June 2008 (UTC)
Not to get distracted, but have you read the replies to the APA report (American Psychologist 1997 Volume 52, Issue 1). The get hit from all sides on their presentation of the issue of causal hypotheses in race differences ... ignoring criticisms of behavioral genetics, ignoring conflicting data on lead, ignoring problems with blood group data, ignoring brain size data, ignoring direct tests, ignoring SES effects, ignoring MTRAS, etc. The take away you should get from this is that it is a mistake to ignore lines of data that have aroused debate. --Legalleft (talk) 23:35, 30 May 2008 (UTC)


The WSJ statement was a paid advertisement. It has no standing compared to a peer-reviewed journal article or a statement by a professional organization. Just because it uses the word consensus does not mean that it actually reflects a consensus. How many signatories have done primary research in genetics, published in established peer-reviewed genetics journals? Slrubenstein | Talk 19:59, 30 May 2008 (UTC)
The WSJ statement was a paid advertisement. Citation needed!! I know for a fact it was not -- it was an invited piece by the op-ed page editor, who requested a statement signed by several experts saying what the current state of knowledge is. I'll leave the rest of your comment to speak for itself in term of irrelevance. --Legalleft (talk) 20:43, 30 May 2008 (UTC)


Given the level of bias you have added, and continue to add, to the article Legalleft you will understand when I say that I am sceptical of any claims you make regarding fringe science. As someone clearly trying to push a racist pov, you can't expect that your claims are accepted as fair and unbiased. You have added significant amounts of hyperbole in support of the so called "genetic hypothesis", but have also consistently attempted to remove fully cited and relevant critisisms of heritability, while at the same time attempting to conflate heritability with heredity. Your attitude is to dismiss as ignorant those on the talk page who do not agree with you, and proceed with the edits you want to make anyway. This is not how Wikipedia works. If you want to invoke the NYTimes then here's Nisbett [9]. Last December there was a discussion on the radio about just this subject,[10] oddly no one mentioned this "genetic hypothesis" at all, so if it's so well established and enjoys the sort of support you claim, why does it not even get mentioned when people are discussing IQ and "race" on the radio? Or do we get the usual "conspiracy theory" claptrap? This "genetic hypothesis" gets attention from the media (due to it's shock value), and support from the political right (it justifies their tax cuts to the wealthy and leaving the poor to rot) but not much from geneticists or very many social scientists. You seem to be claiming that this theory has a great deal of support, but it's only within a small sub-section of the psychology community that really believes IQ testing is great, but I can't see that you have provided any sort of support for it from geneticists, who should be quite important in a debate about genetics. What about anthropologists, after all this is about human groups isn't it? It's clear that because this group of psychologists believe it you think that we should accept it as mainstream. That's just daft. This article is much more than just psychology and you don't even seem to understand that. Likewise you made a similar comment at Talk:Dysgenics "pubmed is not a suitable citation source for psychology" [11], but dysgenics is not part of psychology, it is part of biology. You should accept that other people who are not psychologists, but who actually do know what they are talking about, have an equal part to play in these articles. Alun (talk) 20:05, 30 May 2008 (UTC)
Given the level of bias you have added, and continue to add, to the article Legalleft you will understand when I say that I am sceptical of any claims you make regarding fringe science. -- I don't mind if you treat everything I say with rational skepticism, but please treat your own beliefs with the same skepticism. I think we'd all be fine if we stuck to what's actually published rather than what we think we might know to be true, and especially what we infer to be true from variegated sources. I know it makes for more difficult and boring writing, but it has the advantage of increasing factual accuracy.
Your attitude is to dismiss as ignorant those on the talk page who do not agree with you, and proceed with the edits you want to make anyway. -- Actually, I tried to make a different edit in hopes that it would satisfy previous complaints. Can I assume that you didn't bother to read what I actually added and instead treated any addition as unwarranted?
Re: psychology -- not to get Watsoned by revealing personal data, but I actually know a lot more about transcription factors than IQ -- I just try to stay well read. --Legalleft (talk) 20:53, 30 May 2008 (UTC)
So well read that you appear to be ignorant of the fact that this fallacy has been dispensed with decades ago, and that only a tiny minority of far right wing idealogues promote this gibberish any longer? That doesn't sound well informed, it sounds like someone who wants to promote only literature that supports their own bias, and then promoting that bias as if it were somehow academically rigorous, when in reality it's just propaganda. This article needs only to say a few simple things. There is a between group achievement gap between certain sections of society (let's call them "blue" and "green", for the sake of argument). One group (blue) has been disenfranchised for centuries, the other (green) has enjoyed a privileged lifestyle for centuries. This between group difference cannot be explained easily, though within the privileged high achieving "green" group heritabilities are high. Because analysis of variance can tell us nothing about between group differences (or we fall into the "within-group/between group heritability fallacy") we cannot draw conclusions about the heritability of "intelligence" within the "blue" group unless we measure it independently, when it is measured in a low SES environment (typical of the blue group), it comes out much lower than for the "green" group, indicating a more heterogeneous environmental effect on "intelligence" within this group.[12] Likewise the cause of the gap between the green and blue groups cannot be explained by heritability estimates, indicating that although genetics and family background have a strong influence on intelligence, heritabilities (analysis of variance) tell us nothing about between group differences. The "partial genetic hypothesis" is based on conclusions drawn from the falling into the "within/between group heritability fallacy", this is a citable fact and we should say it clearly and explicitly, without all the hedging in the article. This is not to say that there are not genetic differences between the groups, it is simply to say that there is no real evidence for claiming that the gap has any genetic aetiology whatsoever.As Nesbit clearly and explicitly states In fact, the evidence heavily favors the view that race differences in I.Q. are environmental in origin, not genetic ... The hereditarians begin with the assertion that 60 percent to 80 percent of variation in I.Q. is genetically determined. However, most estimates of heritability have been based almost exclusively on studies of middle-class groups. For the poor, a group that includes a substantial proportion of minorities, heritability of I.Q. is very low, in the range of 10 percent to 20 percent, according to recent research by Eric Turkheimer at the University of Virginia.[13] Let's say it how it is, this fallacy keeps raising it's head every few years, but the arguments against it now are the same as they always have been, the fallacy can't overcome it's own systemic flaws, that it is the product of a fundamentally "racist" view of the world that has precious little evidence to support it, as Stephen Rose states it's a classic example of GIGO Heritability estimates become a way of applying a useless quantity to a socially constructed phenotype and thus apparently scientizing it—a clear-cut case of Garbage In, Garbage Out. And even if the estimate did indeed refer to a material reality rather than a statistical artefact one might question its utility.[14]. One thing I will say, I do recognise people talking bollocks when I see it, and Murray, Herrnstein, Jensen and Rushton do talk an awful lot of bollocks. Alun (talk) 07:17, 31 May 2008 (UTC)

I do not get this thread of talk. Legalleft seems to be making one substantive point: Alun, Ramdrake, and others (I assume me too) are ignoring certain lines of evidence. I was not aware of this. Legalleft, can you either summarize or just give two or three concise examples of the lines of evidence to which you are referring, that we are discounting/ignoring/rejecting/ whatever word you wish? Slrubenstein | Talk 09:55, 31 May 2008 (UTC)

Thank you for your directed and helpful question. I mean, as plainly as I can be, that in addition to describing the theoretical framework that Jensen initiated in the 1969 paper, it is important to point out especially widely-discussed empirical evidence that has been debated since then, such as that which I added to the genetics section. Given that I tried to work on it quickly and was piecing together a number of sources, I cannot vouch for the absolute necessity of every data point, but I think its a starting point. Please evaluate each claim therein per NPOV, rather than judging the entire topic irrelevant and reverting. Perhaps you'll find that some parts really are important. Indeed, I'm quite certain that a fair number of the points I added come up in various descriptions of the debate, and so should be described here. --Legalleft (talk) 05:41, 1 June 2008 (UTC)
Nonsense, you massively expanded a section in an article that is already very long. This massive expansion added no more value, it didn't say anything that was not already said, it just said it a bit differently. You just want to give huge undue weight to tiny minority racist idealogues. You are not interestied in neutrality, only in promoting this far right ideology for apparently political reasons. Alun (talk) 06:36, 1 June 2008 (UTC)
Dude, I'm a liberal Democrat, and given our locales, I'm sure I have more black friends than you do (and probably have had more black girlfriends) -- which is to say, I resent your comments. But I'm also a scientist, so I respect reasoning and evidence. Find something else to do instead throwing around ad hominem. --Legalleft (talk) 07:41, 1 June 2008 (UTC)
I'm a scientist as well, which is why I understand that what Jensen and his ilk are producing represents neither evidence nor lucid reasoning. Any impartial reading of the available texts illustrates the clear lack of any evidence and the blatant flaws in their analysis. As I said earlier, only the terminally ignorant or those with a fundamentalist belief in white supremacy could fall for this blatant nonsense. I didn't make any ad hominem comments, I just said that your edit added no value to the article, that's a comment on the edit and not on you. Your edit history clearly shows a propensity to expanding the sections advancing the racist point of view of the likes of Jensen, while removing criticism of this fallacy, so the comment about pushing the pov of the racists is simply an example of WP:SPADE. Still I appologise for any offence, Wikipedia talk pages on subjects like this do attract people with strong opinions, and of course we wouldn't be here if we did not intend to express these opinions. This subject is fundamentally a political one and not a scientific one. The fact that any of us are here is not based on "science", an interest in this subject is inextricably about our political views and anyone who claims they are only interested in the "science" is probably deluding themselves. Alun (talk) 11:26, 1 June 2008 (UTC)
Lest you be surprised by that, I know that Watson and Jensen are also vanilla liberal Dems like myself. Flynn is a self described socialist, so maybe the debate is between liberals and socialists. However, Snyderman and Rothman surveyed political views, and found that they explained less than 10% of the variance in science responses. --Legalleft (talk) 07:49, 1 June 2008 (UTC)
I'm not sure what a "vanilla Dem" is, someone who votes for the Democratic Party I suppose. But if Jensen describes himself as a liberal I can only assume it's in the same way that members of the NSDAP were "socialists"? Let's remember that Pim Fortuyn claimed not to be a racist, but clearly actions speak louder than words. It is what one does and says that defines one as a liberal or a socialist and not what one claims. Alun (talk) 11:26, 1 June 2008 (UTC)
Please see Defamation. --Jagz (talk) 15:06, 1 June 2008 (UTC)
Please see WP:TROLL. You might also like to read Defamation yourself, I have made no "false claims", but have simply drawn an analogy. Maybe you'd like to read Freedom of speech. Alun (talk) 17:24, 1 June 2008 (UTC)
Please see WP:NAM and WP:DBF. --Jagz (talk) 01:51, 2 June 2008 (UTC)
Irrelevant. Alun (talk) 07:17, 2 June 2008 (UTC)
I could not disagree more with Alun that this article is (or should be) primarily about politics, or that people's reasons for editing it must be primarily political. Some people prefer to draw political conclusions from science, rather than let their political views dictate what science should be taken seriously and what science avoided.
Moreover, the issue of whether or not there is a link between race and intelligence is not really politically meaningful, unless one is to ascribe more worth to humans who are more intelligent. As to whether or not that is a viable idea, well that has nothing to do with this article. Social policy considerations should, of course, be formed based on what scientific knowledge we have about the issue, but this article isn't about that, either.
Finally, while I acknowledge it is difficult, and that everyone does have political opinions which will dictate what facts they are comfortable accepting, that should not get in the way of editing this article, because it is not a platform for the advocacy of the editors' private political opinions, whether they be white male eugenicists, or Marxist social justice activists. Dismissing scientific results because they are 'racist' is just as idiotic as dismissing Gould's arguments because they are 'left-wing'. It is fallacious, and does no credit to the seriousness of the discussion. Scientific results cannot, by definition (unless we are to go down the very slippery slope of postmodern scepticism), be political opinion: they are dispassionate statements about the real world, which can be either true or false. If it can be shown, without ad hominem arguments, that the results of Rushton etc. are not scientific, then so be it. But it is doubtful that that can be done, given their publishing histories (yes, they may include Mankind Quarterly, but they also include some of the most respected journals in their field). The most that can be said is that in some people's opinion (not the 'majority opinion', the 'consensus opinion' -- there is no consensus on this issue at the moment, in any field -- or any other grouping), the results have racist implications or undertones.
I don't mean to be confrontational, but I do think we need to focus on the facts and not get bogged down in silly arguments about politics and who's a racist and who's a liberal.--Plusdown (talk) 15:30, 1 June 2008 (UTC)
The facts are simple. There is a measurable test score gap between African-Americans and European-Americans. Some people claim that these tests measure "intelligence", others claim that these tests are culturally biased. Some people claim that the difference is due to innate "biological" differences between "races", but experts on "race" (biologists and anthropologists are experts on "race" but psychologists clearly are not) claim that this is fallacious, "race" is known to be a social concept. Assuming that the test score gap is "real", there are several theories to explain it. One collection of theories can be collectively termed "environmental", although they do not occur as mutually exclusive environments. One can be exposed to several environments, all of which tend to reduce one's score on any given "intelligence test", there is no mysterious "factor X" as Jensen calls it, there are a multiplicity of factors that act in concert. The other, much less well accepted theory is sometimes called the "genetic hypothesis". This theory is essentially based on the fallacy that within group estimates of heritability can tell us something about the differences in achievement between groups. The fact that this "theory" is based on a fallacious interpretation of the data is not in doubt. This is an encyclopaedia article, it is not a review article. As such we do not need to give a tedious presentation of the results of every single study ever produced that merely shows that the test score gap exists, indeed we should not reproduce all of these results that essentially say the same thing. All we need to do is explain that the test score gap is reproducible, we can cite as many sources as you like to support this claim, but we definitely shouldn't go into detail explaining all of the papers published in the field, this is an encyclopaedia and not a review of the research. This ariticle could well be about 25% of it's current size, except that supporters of Jensen and his pseudoscientific henchmen seem to be under the impression that we need to give equal weight to their dingbat ideas. Wikipedia doesn't work like that. The analogy with ID is correct, the claim that within group heritability can tell us anything useful whatsoever about between group differences is about as scientific as ID, and should be treated as such. This is the essence of the so called "genetic hypothesis", and as Richard Lewontin points out Is it not likely then that the difference is genetic? No. it is neither likely nor unlikely. There is no evidence. The fundamental error of Jensen's argument is to confuse heritability of a character within a population with heritability of the difference between two populations. Indeed, between two populations, the concept of heritability of their difference is meaningless. All else the supporters of the "genetic hypothesis" say is meaningless, all they are doing is saying the same thing over and again, but they are still pushing a fallacy. Now let's get this straight, this does not mean that the genetic hypothesis is wrong, but it does mean that their statistical analysis does not represent evidence in favour of the hypothesis, it says nothing about the hypothesis at all. Alun (talk) 17:23, 1 June 2008 (UTC)
That's Lewontin's view, yes. Lewontin is certainly a renowned and respectable population geneticist; he is also a noted critic of sociobiology, evolutionary psychology and similar fields. His position, while certainly worthy of serious attention, cannot be taken to be representative of everyone in his field. He is not the be-all and end-all on questions of race etc. (while certainly an authority, he is not the authority; nor is his position that of a consensus, AAA statement notwithstanding, given that there are many notable dissenters from that position). Other scholars, as respected as Lewontin within their field (if not as well known publicly, or as idolised, perhaps) would vehemently disagree that the issue is one of science vs. pseudoscience; they would say it is one of one scientific hypothesis versus another. Not even everyone who disagrees with the genetic theory believes that that theory is pseudoscience. That stance is primarily polemic - no matter how mistaken the genetic hypothesis may be, that doesn't make it pseudoscience, any more than twistor theory is pseudoscientific because it isn't as likely to be true as string theory. But just as we do not need to give a tedious presentation of every study that shows a racial IQ difference, we don't need to give a tedious presentation of every study that shows that those differences might be attributable to environmental factors; yet the article does just that (well, not every study, of course, but there is a sizeable number of them compared to the weighting given to the genetic hypothesis). Most of the new material under discussion here is not repetitious, but refutations (valid or not) of the very sorts of points you made above, such as the perceived cultural bias of IQ tests (the chronometric testing), of socioeconomic/environmental explanations, etc. While many people dispute the accuracy of IQ tests, most psychologists -- specifically psychometricians, hence experts in the area -- do seem to think they tell us something useful about something interesting. Your argument about psychologists not being experts on race could equally well be applied to geneticists/anthropologists and intelligence.
What you wrote above is essentially the creed of one point of view, interspersed with a few needless ad hominems, arguments to authority, and assorted other fallacies. That point of view is important and notable. But it is not the final say on the matter, you have to accept that.--Plusdown (talk) 19:19, 1 June 2008 (UTC)
Actually it's a statistical fact, go and check it, Heritability: In genetics, Heritability is the proportion of phenotypic variation in a population that is attributable to genetic variation among individuals. Read Montagu's "Race and IQ" where this point is made again and again by numerous psychologists, geneticists and anthropologists. Even Legalleft doesn't deny that within group heritability cannot be used to explain the gap, though he has tried to downplay the significance of what Stephen Gould has called the central fallacy of the "race and intelligence" argument. If one does not even understand this significant fact then one cannot claim to have any sort of grasp of this subject. Furthermore heritability does not measure the contribution of genes to a trait, it measure their contribution to the variance of a trait within a group, though pseudoscientists always try to conflate heritability with heredity, two very different concepts. There is also a great debate about the validity of heritability estimates, with many geneticists/biologists doubting their utility, Stephen Rose has called heritability as a "useless quantity".[15] Lewontin also states "The fallacy is that a knowledge of the heritability of some trait in a population provides an index of the efficacy of environmental or clinical intervention in altering the trait either in individuals or in the population as a whole. This fallacy, sometimes propagated even by geneticists, who should know better, arises from the confusion between the technical meaning of heritablility and the everyday meaning of the word."[16] (i.e. we should not confuse heritability with heredity). As Peter Taylor confirms "High heritability of a trait does not imply that it is hard to change through environmental changes. Lewontin invokes the case of curable ‘inborn errors of metabolism’, referring presumably to the dietary amelioration of the effects of homozygosity for the gene for phenylketonuria (PKU)."[17] As for the claim that this is a "single point of view", it depends what you mean. There are several problems with racialist arguments for the test score gap. One is that "races" do not represent biologically discrete populations, this is not disputed by biologists or by anthropologists, but it is apparently by a small sub-section psychologists. There is a consensus in biology and anthropology that "races" are social constructs and not biological entities, but people who promote the "genetic hypothesis" cannot accept this because it shows the fallaciousness of their argument. Another is the idea that IQ measures something called "general intelligence", there is no consensus regarding the existence of such a thing as "general intelligence" as far as I can see, and without it the "genetic hypothesis" is also in serious trouble. Thirdly the claim that heritability accurately measures the contribution of genes to a trait is not correct, and this is not in doubt, it is a fact. Indeed Lewontin and Layzer show clearly that not only does it not measure the contribution of genes to a trait, but that it does not accurately measure the contribution of genes to the variance of a trait. As Jeremy Freese points out "The lucidity of Lewontin's arguments has historically proven no match for the allure of overly simple characterizations of outcomes as being x% due to genes and (1 – x)% not due to genes.2 Moreover, Lewontin's main points speak beyond questions about genetics and could even be said to prefigure the best parts of more recent complaints about regression analysis as a tool for causal inference in observational studies"[18] As Lewontin points out, the claim that we can accurately measure the contribution of genes to the variance of a trait is based on the assumption that when genes and the environment interact they do so independently, but the evidence indicates that this interaction is not independent, "The reason why the partitioning of variance does not partition causes is that changing the distribution of genotypes will also change the environmental variance, while changes in the distribution of environments will also change the genetic variance. Moreover, neither the magnitude nor the direction of these changes can be predicted from the analysis."[19] Thus even the claim that heritability measures anything useful is questioned by experts in genetics. Finally the fallacious claim that within group heritability is a measure of between group difference has been addressed above. So in actual fact Lewontin is speaking from the point of view of statistical and genetic orthodoxy and has the support of biologists and geneticists. There is no support for the "genetic hypothesis" from actual geneticists, biologists or anthropologists. I repeat, the point is not that the "hereditarian hypothesis" is necessarily wrong, the point is that there is no evidence for it. I am not asking that this hypothesis not be included in the article, I am saying that we need to have a balanced article that does not give undue weight to a theory that moat geneticists, biologists, psychologists and anthropologists say is not supported by any evidence. I can't see any ad hominem remarks about other editors in my above post, the closest is "pseudoscientific henchmen", but this is just a claim that the work is pseudoscience (and can be cited as such), it is a comment on the work, take a look at WP:SPADE. Alun (talk) 06:56, 2 June 2008 (UTC)
Um, no. More straw men. No-one (at least no-one who knows what they are talking about) has said that there is not a complex interaction between a heritable trait and the environment. No-one. That's why, generally, those who assert a genetic basis to IQ generally prefer to have their position described as 'interactionist' and not 'hereditarian' -- and there is also a general consenus that this interaction is complex and non-linear...not a stupid caricature like 'the heritability of IQ is 0.6 thus 60% of my IQ comes from my parents and 40% from my environment'. That's absolute rubbish.
However, look, for example, here [20]. Now this paper is outdated (1979), but it shows that already then attempts to understand the interaction between heredity (i.e. a polygenic trait which is inherited from parents), socio-cultural transmission (parental care, etc.), other environmental concerns, and even the phenomenon of assortative mating, were meeting with success. With remarkable accuracy (they're out on their estimate for monozygotic twins, but that is attributable to the small sample available at the time). So you needn't bother coming with Lewontin's straw men like 'x% due to genes and (1 – x)% not due to genes'.
As for Rushton, he doesn't use the concept of heritability (as a measure of what is attributable to genetic variation within delineated populations) to explain differences between those populations. He uses it to show that a significant amount of phenotypic variance is attributable to genetic variation, which is what the statistic is for. His argument about between-group differences is based on other things. Heritability statistics for IQ simply go to show that much variation is probably attributable to genetic variation within the populations being measured.
And that is a 'consensus position' among psychometricians: that IQ has a high heritability, and even that IQ is a good measure of 'general intelligence'. There are, of course, dissenters -- Gardner's rather unscientific multiple intelligence theory being the most prominent example -- just as there are dissenters from the 'consensus position' among anthropologists vis a vis race. The issue of between-group differences is a bit more contentious, but it is important not to confuse the issues. The only time that black/white differences enter Rushton's discussion on heritability is to show that the same pattern applies to both groups (which shouldn't even really be disputed by those who don't like the idea of race, since they would say that that much should be obvious). Again, I point out that the arguments regarding between-group differences are different, and don't appeal to the heritability of IQ alone.
Right, next. Lewontin has a number of ideas about population genetics, statistics, etc., which are not universally accepted (far from it). A comparable figure would be Chomsky in linguistics: both are giants in their field, but both are also advocates of some very bold ideas which are not really established as gospel truth. So citing him on topics like that only go to show what his particular school of thought believes. Moreover, he is a critic of sociobiology and evolutionary psychology in general: many of his arguments against the race/IQ issue are actually specific implementations of his complaints against those two fields. Cogent as his arguments may be, they are not the final word on the matter.
And then, for example, we come to people like E.O. Wilson (just as venerable and respected a figure as Lewontin, except for in the eyes of the radical left, perhaps, but then they argue from politics not science), who say that they find Rushton's work to be 'solid evolutionary reasoning' and similar.
The point is that you are trying to claim here a sort of universal validity for everything that Lewontin and his collaborators, such as Rose, write, when if you are honest you will acknowledge that their opinions do not carry quite so much weight. Take, for example, the idea that heritability may not actually measure anything useful. While it is necessary to take cognizance of Lewontin's critique of heritability, there have been many responses -- most of which come from the field of population genetics, not psychology or whatever, and are totally unrelated to this debate -- which argue that while heritability doesn't give us any information about individuals, it is still the best contender at the moment for what it is meant to do, Lewontin's 'norm of reaction' idea being totally unworkable in the light of the complexity of human beings. His word is not the last one, and nor is it always the consensus position (in some cases it is, but often it is not).
Finally, about the (non-)existence of race as a meaningful category. That tells us nothing about the validity of applying heritability estimates. For as long as we define our population and keep our workings to within that population, the statistics will come out right. It may well be that in our definition of populations (African Americans, etc.) we are drawing lines in the wrong places; but that is only to do, then, with the importance (or not) of the results, not the validity of the analysis (for example, we could study the heritability of IQ within the population of people with detached ear lobes, and those without, and come to the same conclusion regarding its heritability: it would just be that that conclusion wouldn't be very interesting).
But this brings me to the final point. Lewontin is quite correct that if single human traits are considered, then drawing lines along the traditional 'racial boundaries' is quite silly. But if groups of traits -- and not just the most contrived examples of such groups we can find, but traits of actual interest -- are considered, then we find that cluster analysis shows statistically significant groupings which correspond, roughly, to the traditional 'races'. This is not a 'consensus position' either, but the results which show Lewontin's reasoning to be fallacious in this regard have been published, by respected population geneticists, in publications like Nature Genetics.
Thus you can stop trying to steamroller this discussion with relentless citation of Lewontin -- his view is definitely notable and needs to be taken seriously, but while he does, as you say, 'have the support of biologists and geneticists', he is not speaking for all of them, nor even all respected, mainstream biologists and geneticists (or probably even most, not that census statistics really matter -- as Pinker pointed out). You are giving his opinions undue weight. It's that simple. --Plusdown (talk) 12:42, 2 June 2008 (UTC)
Have you actually read what I wrote? Possibly you did but did not understand. You don't seem to be making any sort of argument as far as I can see. You claim my arguments are "straw men", indicating a lack of basic understanding on your part of the concepts under discussion. What do you mean by a "complex interaction"? I did not claim that anyone has made the claim that there is no complex interaction. I have stated that when environment and genes correlate dependently then one cannot sensibly partition variation. It's not a question of complex interactions, it's a question of non-independent correlated interactions. When this partition cannot be made, attempting it produces nonsense results, and this partitioning has bee attempted, and has produced nonsense results.
Yor comment about Rushton using heritability to "show that a significant amount of phenotypic variance is attributable to genetic variation" displays ignorance. The high heritability of within group IQ test scores only applies to "whites" and is not applicable to "blacks". Again the fallacy is to assume that high heritability in one group can be taken as evidence for high heritability in a different group. If Rushton really does make this claim, then he is making the same mistake. If a trait is estimated to be hghly heritable in one population, then it is not a statistically valid claim to say that the trait is therefore highly heritable in a different group. Indeed if you had read what I wrote earlier you would have understood this, read the heritability article, "In genetics, Heritability is the proportion of phenotypic variation in a population that is attributable to genetic variation among individuals." In this case the population measured is American "whites", the heritability of IQ scores has been shown to be much lower in other populations. "The hereditarians begin with the assertion that 60 percent to 80 percent of variation in I.Q. is genetically determined. However, most estimates of heritability have been based almost exclusively on studies of middle-class groups. For the poor, a group that includes a substantial proportion of minorities, heritability of I.Q. is very low, in the range of 10 percent to 20 percent, according to recent research by Eric Turkheimer at the University of Virginia."[21] Don't breach the central tennet of what heritability means, heritability can only tell us something about the group in question.
Your claims for Lewontin are incorrect, he is expressing orthodoxy in population genetics and statistics, he's certainly no "rogue" scientist, it is the psychometricians and eugenicists who are the pseudoscientists here, your attempt to portray Lewontin as some sort of maveric is ludicrous.
More unfounded claims about Lewontin, what are these responses for population geneticists you write about? You seem to be merely giving your opinion of Lewontin and not anything concrete. Lewontin doesn't say anything controversial, yes population geneticists do still used heritability measurements, but they will all also agree that it is only used because it is convenient, molecular genetics is not yet mature enough for us to study the actual effects of genes on traits, when we can population geneticists will drop the concept of heritability like a hot potato. It's used because it's all we've got, but no geneticist would dispute it's limitations as expressed by Lewontin. Why do you call Stephen Rose a collaborator of Lewontin? Stephen Rose is a neurobiologist in the UK, Lewontin is a population geneticist in the US, they do not work in the same academic field, I doubt they have collaborated. Furthermore I haven't stated anywhere that there is a "universal validity to everything Lewontin has written". Indeed Lewontin's claims about human genetic variation in the 70s are not correct as Long and Kittles (2003) and Edwards (2003) have independently shown. Essentially Lewontin claims that 85% of human genetic variation is within group, but this is not the case, the amount of human genetic variation is "on average" 85% within group, in fact Africa contains 100% of human genetic variation while the further from Africa a human population lives, the less variation it has, for examplt Long and kittles estimate that Papua New Guineans only have about 60% of the variation that occurs in the human species. Of course this supports the RAO model, with variation decreasing with distance from Africa. With regards to heritability, Lewontin is correct in what he says and no one has disputed this.
"Finally, about the (non-)existence of race as a meaningful category. That tells us nothing about the validity of applying heritability estimates. For as long as we define our population and keep our workings to within that population." Can you really not see the contradiction in what you write? The very fact that "races" don't represent biological entities means that our populations are not well defined biologically, we are not measuring biological differences, we are not measuring "racial" differences, because the "races" as defined by Jensen and Rushton do not represent robust biological entities. When geneticists study differences between groups, in say disease susceptibility, they are advised not to use "racial" categories, but when they do they are expected to justify it's use and advised to use a rational rational system to identify their categories, socially defined "races" do not represent rational biological categories. So you are incorrect, using "race" as a proxy for measuring differentials in "intelligence" genes is a big problem for the psychometricians. [22][23]
Maybe Rushton's work is solid evolutionary reasoning, but there is no evidence to support it. Theories can be rational and still be unsupported by any evidence. Indeed the use of r/K selection is not used in biology any more because it is though to represent a flawed concept. See Joseph L. Graves "The Race Myth" for en more detailed account of why r/K selection is no longer considered of any value.
Clustering analysis is interesting, but it does not support the concept of "races". Clusters are relative groups, their existence depends as much on the genes used, the populations sampled, the number of loci studied and finally the algorithm used to do the analysis. The work of Rosenberg clearly shows this, where using the same algorith he has produced five, six and seven different clusters for humans depending on the sites sampled and the number of alleles used in the analysis. Furthermore a recent paper produced different clusters again when it used SNPs instead of STR's and used a different algorithm. A better representation of the distribution of human genetic variation can be understtod from the paper of Witherspoon et al. 2007 then by studying clustering analyses. This si because Witerspoon et al. studied the misclassification rate between pairs of individuals rather than relying only on genes that are known to vary geographicall. That is that use the concept of the disimilarity fraction: "the probability that a pair of individuals randomly chosen from different populations is genetically more similar than an independent pair chosen from any single population.". They conclude "... even when the most distinct populations are considered and hundreds of loci are used, individuals are frequently more similar to members of other populations than to members of their own population."
I don't really know what your problem with Lewontin is, but his observations are in line with many publications. As I said if you read "Race and IQ" edited by Ashley Montagu you will discover that Lewonton's comments regarding heritability are common. The claims that heritability cannot be used to infer between group differences, or that high heritability of a trait in one environment does not indicate high heritability of the same trait in a different environment is absolutely incontrovertible, even though you have tried to imply that it is not. Indeed this point is made in the article as it currently stands, and no one who knows what they are talking about would contest it. Alun (talk) 13:54, 2 June 2008 (UTC)
I'll try to keep this short.
  • The heritability of IQ is significant in all population groups...Rushton does not say that because it is true for whites (i.e. in one population) it must be true for blacks (i.e. in another population). Nor did I, if you bothered reading what I wrote above. The measured statistics are remarkably similar for both populations. So once again, a straw man, as you try to characterise me as saying that because it is heritable in one group 'therefore' it is heritable in another (heritability is slightly lower, according to some analyses -- Turkheimer's being one of the more extreme results -- in low SES environments; this, too, is common ground, however: no-one has said that heritability is the same across all possible environments; and IQ is more heritable in black middle-class groups, just as it is in white middle-class groups).
  • Quoting the New York Times is not really the best way to settle a dispute like this. Journalists are not renowned for their subtle understanding of science. It is not the case that heritability of 60-80% is an assumption, it is a result. Big difference. The article you link to also caricatures the sampling methodology; whenever possible, groups are delineated according to SES etc.; and white middle-class people are not the only ones who have been studied, and nor have the other groups -- even prior to Turkheimer -- been studied in such abysmal detail that the statistics are not adequate.
  • Yet another straw man re my characterisation of Lewontin. Nowhere did I say he was a maverick or a 'rogue scientist'. On the contrary, I was very careful to point out that his opinions are respected and important. However, what I was saying was that while some of what he says represents the orthodoxy, some of what he says also does not: this does not mean that he is a 'rogue scientist'; it means that he is adherent to one school of thought, while other people -- equally respected and eminent -- adhere to another. That's part of how science works.
  • I call Steven Rose a collaborator of Lewontin simply because he has collaborated with Lewontin on some important work, e.g. Not in Our Genes, in which they laid out some of their opinions which are not representative of a consensus or orthodox position (someone just as eminent as Lewontin called the book a 'bizarre conspiracy theory of science'). I can't imagine what your problem with my incidental mention of Rose as a collaborator would be; it goes to show their particular common viewpoint, and how it is not universally accepted. You have not explicitly said that you consider Lewontin the 'final authority', but your constant citation of him and appeals to his authority do seem to suggest that you have that opinion. Maybe I'm wrong.
  • I, too, acknowledged that in many respects Lewontin's critique of the naive use of heritability is quite correct, but that it is the most workable concept based on current understanding. At least we agree on that.
  • Re the well-definedness of races in heritability analyses. Of course, simply grouping people into 'African-American', 'white', etc., is a little 'rough-around-the-edges'. Nonetheless, there is a sufficient degree of commonality within these populations to treat them, in the interim, as entities: see the continuum fallacy. A complete analysis would no doubt be much, much more subtle, but this a viable basis for working on in the interim, as long as results are contextualised properly. This is probably the nub of the matter, I think.
  • You say: 'The claims that heritability cannot be used to infer between group differences, or that high heritability of a trait in one environment does not indicate high heritability of the same trait in a different environment is absolutely incontrovertible, even though you have tried to imply that it is not.' I have never tried to imply that. I wouldn't. I repeatedly said above that heritability cannot be used to infer between-group differences, and I never even discussed the issue of heritability varying over environments. Please stop misrepresenting my position (or, read what I write more carefully).
OK, I'm not going to get bogged down in trying to combat any more sophistry. I am beginning to think that this article is a hopeless cause. I just wish, however, that you would try to stop bringing in strawmen, and mischaracterising what I am saying. It is important, however, if this article is to have any semblance of neutrality or scholarly integrity, that authorities are given their due --nothing more and nothing less; steamrolling one side or the other of the argument is a gross misrepresentation of the state of the field: while this isn't a review article, it is an encyclopaedia article, and hence should present a fair overview of the most salient aspects of the topic. This means not caricaturing one side while presenting the other side's perspective as if the matter is settled. It is not. --Plusdown (talk) 14:48, 2 June 2008 (UTC)

Unindent

  • I really don't think you actually read what I write. But there is a central fallacy in your reasoning. The heritability of intelligence may well be significant in all populations, I wouldn't dispute this contention, but significant is not the same a large, significant just means that the heritability estimate, whether large or small, is not the product of chance. Heritability is a measurement for a population and not for a trait. Heritability of intelligence can be significant in black populations and still be as little as 10%, significance just means not due to chance in statistics. The fundamental fact is that high heritability does not mean that the trait is mostly under genetic control, as Jensen claims, and it does not mean that environmental intervention is pointless, as Jensen claims. Heritability is not a measure of the contribution of genes to a trait, it is a measure of the relative contributions of genes to the variance of a trait within a specific environment, in a different environment the heritability of the same trait will be different because heritability is a property of the population and not a property of the trait. As I pointed out above, heritabilities for IQ are high in white middle class environments, possibly 80%, but are low in low SES environments, possibly 10-20%. Their significance is not in doubt, that's just a measure of chance, but their magnitude is not a fixed quantity.
  • I didn't quote a journalist, I quoted a psychologist who was writing in a newspaper. Read the article, it states at the bottom of the page "Richard E. Nisbett, a professor of psychology at the University of Michigan, is the author of “The Geography of Thought: How Asians and Westerners Think Differently and Why.”" I don't know where you get the word assumption from, Nisbett says the 60-80% figure is an assertion i.e. it is something hereditarians assert. It is not contested that this figure is based on the study of only "white" populations, except by you. You have a habit of making sweeping statements without providind sources to support these statements, I urge you to provide sources for your claims, and quotes if possible, it's the only way to support what you are saying, and your comments will carry more weight if you can back them up.
  • OK, provide evidence that other population geneticists and statisticians disagree with his analysis of heredity. Again a sweeping statement, that he is a proponent of a particular "school of thought", but that many disagree with his analysis of heredity measurements. Name the "school of thought" and name the people who have published explicit papers disagreeing with his treatment of heritability. If you read Dacid Layzer "Heritability Analyses of IQ Scores: Science or Numerology?"[24] you will see the same reasoning, see also: Biesheuvel (1972) "An examination of Jensen'e theoriey concerning educability, heritability and population differences"; Theodosius Dobzhansky (1973) "Genetic diversity and human equality"; Urie Bronfenbrenner (1975) "Nature with nurture: A reinterpretation of the evidence"; Peggy R. Sanday (1972) "On the causes of IQ differences between groups and implications for social policy", all make the same point, that for heritability to be accurately measured then there can be no correlation between environment and genetic contributions, but that this is not the case for complex human traits. As Layzer clearly states "..the contributions of interaction to phenotypic variances and covariances cannot, in general, be separated from the contributions of genotype and environment, and heritability analysis cannot, therefore, be applied meaningfully." What this means is that what heritability analysis is measuring for IQ in human populations is the effect of genes on variation and the effect of gene-environment interactions on variation, and that these cannot be sensibly partitioned. What if, in the white population the effect of genes alone is 20%, the effect on environment is 20% and the effect of gene-environment interactions is 60%? We just would not know, and no one does know, but hereditarians pretent that the effect of gene-environment interactions on the variance in intelligence in the "white" population can be sensibly included in the heritability estimate. All of the sources I cite expose this as a fallacy, as do Lweontin, Freese and Rose.
  • You are wrong, I cited his paper as a convenient example, there are a cornucopia of papers that support his contention, which is biological orthodoxy.
  • Incorrect, "races" are social constructs and not biological constructs. Any biologists that used such absurd constructs and then claimed that they represented "biologically defined populations" would not get their paper published. It speaks volumes that Jensen doesn't even understand that "race" has no biological validity. Biology as a science does not recognise the existence of human "races", we are all Homo sapiens sapiens for very good biological reasons. The criticism of the use of socially defined "racial" concepts and them pretending that these are meaningful biological distinctions his relevant and pertinent and has been made and can be cited. Whether you personally think this division is acceptable is irrelevant, Wikipedia does not publish work based on teh opinions of it's editors.
  • Please be consistent, i said that you implied it, not that you said it. All you have to do is clearly say that you did not mean to imply it and that I misunderstood. If I say that you have implied something then that is my perception, if you did not mean to make such an implication then just say so, I didn't misrepresent you, I misunderstood you, or rather I stated what I thought you had implied. There's no need to get so shirty.
  • Sophistry? All I've done is cite reliable sources. If these sources don't support white supremacy, then that's not really my problem. I might suggest that it is the fundamentalist beliefs that hereditarians hold that are at faulty and not the sources that overwhelmingly don't support them. As I said intelligent design is a good analogy for the "race" and "intelligence" debate, because those that believe in this guff really are "true believers" with total "faith" in this belief, even though the evidence is about as convincing as it is for ID. Alun (talk) 06:23, 3 June 2008 (UTC)
  • Regarding the straw man argument of between-group/within group heritability, which arises again and again: 'Nor have I ever claimed that the well-established heritability of individual differences in IQ within races proves the heritability of differences between races.'; or 'Group racial and social class differences are first of all individual differences [i.e., they are the statistical averages of individual measurements], but the causes of the group differences may not be the same as of the individual differences'; and again 'I myself...have attempted in several publications from 1969 to 1982 to explicate the illogic of trying to prove the heritability of mean differences between groups from a knowledge of the heritability of individual differences within groups.' -- Jensen (1982) responding to Gould's caricatures [25]. From the horse's mouth. We also find Jensen saying 'I have also attempted over the years to dispel the common, but unwarranted, assumption that heritability necessarily implies the inevitability or immutability of human differences.' In other words, he is pointing out that a trait with high heritability isn't the same thing as a trait which is fixed in stone from the moment of conception; and by implication, environmental influences will have an impact on the expression of that trait. You say 'The fundamental fact is that high heritability does not mean that the trait is mostly under genetic control, as Jensen claims, and it does not mean that environmental intervention is pointless, as Jensen claims'. Evidently you don't actually know what Jensen claims (possily because you haven't bothered reading what Jensen has written).
  • It is not just me who says that the 60-80% figure is based only on the study of 'white' populations -- see, e.g., Loehlin (1975) -- yes, already then a significant amount of research had been undertaken on other populations (the reference is a review article); or Osborne's Georgia twin study. Turkheimer's study may be one of the more recent, but by itself it does not invalidate all previous studies; it simply falls on one particular end of a spectrum of results.
  • I didn't quote the NYT as saying that the heritability estimate is an 'assumption': but that was certainly the implication of the article. To say that someone 'begins with the assertion that...' is essentially similar to saying that 'in their argument they assume that...'; Webster's (not my favourite dictionary, but at least available free online) tells us that 'assert implies stating confidently without need for proof or regard for evidence'[26]. Thus I was absolutely correct in taking the implication of the word 'assert' as it was used there to intimate that high heritability of IQ is an unjustified (or unjustifiable) assumption. Words have connotations, and we would all do well to appreciate them. I confess I was wrong in attributing the piece to a journalist, however. I should have looked further.
  • You asked for this. The 'school of thought' to which Lewontin belongs is one of a paranoid, obscurantist left-wing clique who believe that using genes to explain human behaviours and abilities is part of the conspiracy of white males to oppress women and minorities, and who go about arguing this point by misrepresenting their opponents and being selective with the evidence. That is citable, too [27]. It may sound crude, but since you aren't exactly pulling the punches when you call Jensen and Rushton 'racists', 'pseudoscientists' and 'fascists' (I'm not sure if you have called them fascists explicitly, but the 'fighting fascism' section on your links page certainly indicates that that is your view of them, aside from showing that you don't really understand what fascism is). Therefore, any of Lewontin, and his comrades', critiques of genetic explanations of behavioural/psychological traits needs to be seen in this light: it is not epresentative of 'biological orthodoxy'.
  • I have not said that Lewontin's ideas on heredity (of all things) are disputed: I spoke of heritability. You yourself gave me such a pious lecture on the difference between heredity and heritability, therefore I would have thought that you wouldn't confuse the two. If you're interested in seeing criticism of Lewontin's ideas of heritability, this would be a good place to start, in particular chapter 2 (it provides the main argument, and gives further references to chase).
  • You say: 'Incorrect, "races" are social constructs and not biological constructs. Any biologists that used such absurd constructs and then claimed that they represented "biologically defined populations" would not get their paper published.' Bollocks. [28], for one, off the top of my head -- it speaks of 'self-identified' racial groupings, and how these correspond remarkably well to meaningful biological groupings -- indeed, they are more indicative of genetic makeup than analysis of random clusters (perhaps unsurprisingly, since racial groupings are based on easily observable features of populations, not nearly invisible components of their makeup). Since in some respects IQ research is similar to epidemiological research, this even has bearing on that discussion (not that it needs to in order to refute your pathetically incorrect point that biologists who use biological definitions of race all fail peer-review). Certainly the 'social constructionist' view of race is important, but it is not universally accepted.
  • Your reference to homo sapiens sapiens is another example of sophistry. 'Race', when used to refer to biological classification of human beings, does not mean the same as 'race' when used, say, to categorise cabbages (i.e. taxonomic subspecies). Because of the social history of the term -- and no-one denies that it has a social history -- the same word is used in English to describe two different types of classification. But just because we are all members of homo sapiens sapiens does not mean that there is no meaningful way of genetically partitioning our species' population along lines that correspond remarkably to the traditional racial categories -- and anyone who insists that the different human races represent different human subspecies (in the taxonomic sense) is, of course, wrong.
  • You say: 'Sophistry? All I've done is cite reliable sources. If these sources don't support white supremacy, then that's not really my problem.' How very ironic. You claim not to be indulging in sophistry, but then offer in support of that claim a thinly-disguised ad hominem. I have refrained from calling into question your own political beliefs -- which judging from your userpage appear to be pretty extreme -- and how they may affect your bias with regards to this article; yet you obliquely accuse me of being a white supremacist (which is absolute nonsense, anyway -- if I were, I'd say so, this is the Internet, for God's sake). What you have been doing is citing sources which do not actually address the concerns, except through straw-men; or where they do have real bearing, we seem to be either in agreement as to their validity, or to agree that the opinions contained in your sources merit conclusion. Where we differ is in the weighting to be attributed to them: you seem to think that they are representative of some sort of 'orthodoxy'. They are not (except in some, almost trivial cases). That can clearly be realised by looking at the frequency with which dissenting opinions are published in the scholarly, peer-reviewed literature.
  • You say that this issue is similar to ID; that couldn't be further from the truth. How many ID papers have appeared in the scholarly literature? None - OK, one, if you count that anomalous Behe thing. How many papers about race and IQ -- supporting genetic hypotheses -- have appeared in the literature? Countless. The furore around ID is an artificial controversy. The controversy around this issue is genuine.
  • Now if you will excuse me, I have some workers to exploit and minorities to oppress. Your tone, and your refusal to actually look at the evidence, are beginning to fray my nerves not a little. I have tried to remain civil; I have acknowledged where I have made mistakes, been wrong, etc.; and I have tried to maintain a balance: i.e. not suggesting that just one POV is correct or worthy of inclusion, but always acknowledged the importance of the other side. You have not done any of these things; indeed, I am seriously beginning to wonder whether there is not an element of wilful mendacity and tendentious editing going on here. I hope, however, that the points I have raised here will be contribute to dispelling any notions that there is a 'consensus' among editors here as to what to include in the article...it is an empirical fact that there isn't. --Plusdown (talk) 13:24, 3 June 2008 (UTC)
Alun and Ramdrake[29], please see Straw man. Alun, please see Sophistry and Ad hominem. --Jagz (talk) 18:05, 2 June 2008 (UTC)
Jagz, if the only contribution you can make to this discussion is playing la mouche du coche, may I respectfully suggest your refrain? It adds nothing to the discussion and is disruptive.--Ramdrake (talk) 18:45, 2 June 2008 (UTC)

Let's just try to stick to a civil conversation. Legalleft, you now say you are refering to empirical evidence you added to the Genetics section. Since there has been so much back and forth editing, I again ask that you just provide me here with two or three specific examples. What is the empirical evidence you are referring to? if it is a lotl, just a couple of examples would suffice to help me follow your point. Slrubenstein | Talk 10:05, 1 June 2008 (UTC)

I really wish we could stick to one thread at a time. I asked Legalleft to provide me with examples of empirical evidence he wished to add to the genetics section. Is the data from the Minnesota Twin Study it? Legalleft said "empirical evidence" and I really just want to know, from him, what precisely he is referring to. Slrubenstein | Talk 16:46, 1 June 2008 (UTC)

A little over my head in work now, but I would like to answer your question. Let me get back to you later in detail. Briefly, three strands of evidence should be included. Evidence against the effectiveness of common environmental factors, evidence for the lack of factor X variables (maybe better described as lack of evidence for factor X variables), and evidence from non-psychometric measurements. (It goes without saying that none of these on their own is taken by anyone as proving anything.) At least one example of each should be given. For the latter two, I think I know exactly the right examples (structural equation modeling and elementary cognitive tasks). For the former, it's all a bit squishy, but MTRAS perhaps the most commonly cited so probably the one to mention, but the cross cultural stability of group differences also fits in that category. I avoided any details of Spearman's hypothesis in what I wrote because its so flipping technically complicated (correlations of vectors), but that is a big thing too. --Legalleft (talk) 21:00, 2 June 2008 (UTC)

Sorry, I did not think this would be over your head since we are referring to material you wrote and claim was removed from the article - I thought it would be very easy for you to summarize one or two examples of what you were referring to. Be that as it may what you mention aove is a little vague (no offense) - I was hoping for specific examples. But as far as i can tell, none of the types of evidence you mention are "genetic" so it seems to me they should go in another section. "The cultural stability of group differences" certainly is not genetic evidence. Slrubenstein | Talk 12:14, 3 June 2008 (UTC)

I mean I have too much work to do in real life. -- Most evidence for a genetic explanation isn't "genetic" evidence, and molecular genetic evidence has essentially never been examined. -- plusdown took the time to summary what I wrote for me (cut and pasted below this entry). --Legalleft (talk) 16:14, 3 June 2008 (UTC)
OK, I've gone and looked at the diffs (which are horrible to dissect, at least on my system, because they don't line up clearly). In essence, it looks like Legalleft has been wanting to introduce new material into the genetics section, including:
  • Arguments offered by 'pro-genetic' people as to why socioeconomic factors don't tell the whole story
  • Analyses which seek to establish/rule out causes based on differences in development across races
  • Rushton's explanation of 'regression to the mean' -- which has sparked most of the argument above; Alun is vehemently opposed to this one in particular, from what I can gather, because he considers it to be nonsense based on his personal understanding of genetics.
  • An expansion on the Minnessota Twin Study section, which is probably one of the more important empirical studies with bearing on this topic.
  • And finally a section on testing, e.g. chronometric testing, which is argued to be the most accurate cross-group approach, etc., etc.
I would argue that all of those points are worthy of inclusion (how they should be included is another matter). They are all important, notable aspects of the 'genetic' side of the argument, and so deserve inclusion. None of them are the maunderings of a lone crackpot, nor are they sourced from Nazi party propaganda leaflets, so there shouldn't really be argument against them from that angle. If Alun doesn't like the 'regression to the mean' argument, he is welcome, of course, to provide a citation to an article that criticises Rushton's research on those grounds. But from what I can make out from his arguments above, he has the wrong end of the stick regarding what Rushton is saying (though the explanation in the article as Legalleft had it could probably do with improvement; yet that's the better way to work with a wiki, isn't it, to improve things rather than just delete them outright?); Alun is certainly right about genes not coming out of thin air, etc., but his analysis of the situation is something of a straw man, whether deliberate or otherwise (I'll assume not).
The 'environmental' section of the article is vast, with at least 7 sub-sections laying out that side of the argument. There is no good reason why the genetic section should be any different. I understand that some people are of the opinion that a genetic explanation is a 'fringe theory', or that IQ is a discredited concept, but it is not quite as simple as that. The WP:FRINGE idea was dreamt up originally as an attempt to stop the likes of intelligent design loonies and 'theory of everything' physics cranks littering otherwise uncontroversial articles with their nonsense. This topic is not nearly as clearcut. Simply trying to steamroller ideas which editors personally find objectionable is not an acceptable approach. The truth of the matter is that the topic is not settled 100% one way or the other, and there are probably as many explanations/opinions of the empirical data as there are researchers. Broad trends can be distinguished, but that is all. Both sides here need to receive fair and ample coverage: there is no reason for the article to be weighted to one or the other. --Plusdown (talk) 16:02, 1 June 2008 (UTC)
Oh, I just saw this. Yeah, this is correct. And I certainly accept the blame for any confusion introduced in what I wrote. --Legalleft (talk) 21:04, 2 June 2008 (UTC)


Everyone, may I suggest you familiarize yourselves with the WP:TLDR essay? This discussion is becoming increasingly hard to follow.--Ramdrake (talk) 13:32, 3 June 2008 (UTC)
Also, WP:NVC and WP:ROWN. --Jagz (talk) 21:20, 3 June 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Article topic not appropriate for Wikipedia?

Wikipedia's strength of egalitarian contribution, which is effective on most articles, may also be its greatest weakness on others.[30] This article is proving to be too divisive for the creation of an informative article with stable content. The non-egalitarian implications of this article stand in contrast to the principles Wikipedia is built on. Maybe Wikipedia is not the proper forum for this article. --Jagz (talk) 13:55, 2 June 2008 (UTC)

most of the problems seem to stem from people who have trouble accepting intelligence differences between races, not wikipedia's format itself. 76.25.115.99 (talk) 07:31, 3 June 2008 (UTC)
Here is a view from The Monitor (Uganda), written by Ugandan journalist Timothy Kalyegira.[31] Note the critical comment at the bottom of that webpage as well, perhaps written by an American. --Jagz (talk) 13:45, 3 June 2008 (UTC)
That's a very interesting perspective (the article, that is, not the drivel posted underneath it) -- especially coming from an African. But why not include that article in the wiki article? After all, if we can have the NYT or Washington Post, then isn't it systemic bias to deny the same level of coverage to prominent papers from Africa? Though of course, the journalist in question is obviously an Uncle Tom, and hence his opinions are not worth considering. --Plusdown (talk) 13:57, 3 June 2008 (UTC)
Couple of problems here: first off, Mr Kalyegira is a journalist, not a scientist, and his piece is very much an op-ed piece, therefore to be taken with a grain of salt. This is what I could find about him: Timothy Kalyegira, one of Uganda's most controversial journalists, has long set off my "crazy" radar. He's a vocal denier of the thousands of political murders perpetrated during Idi Amin's reign, for one. Even more strange: he's claimed for almost two years that he has access to a "seer" who predicts the future of African politics.[32]--Ramdrake (talk) 14:23, 3 June 2008 (UTC)
Evidently you missed my tongue in cheek. Lighten up a bit. :P --Plusdown (talk) 14:41, 3 June 2008 (UTC)
Here is a Google search of "Timothy Kalyegira":[33]. --Jagz (talk) 16:20, 3 June 2008 (UTC)

WP:DNFTT Slrubenstein | Talk 14:30, 3 June 2008 (UTC)

Please see WP:NPA. Your comment is a personal attack such as this:[34]. --Jagz (talk) 15:49, 3 June 2008 (UTC)

This is a comment that was left on my Talk page in January. The article has been modified quite a bit since the comment was written.

"You are fighting a group of some the most effective blockers on wikipedia. The subject it really very emotive and goes to the heart of many peoples core belief systems. You are performing valiant work in the face of extreme personal attacks and I commend you. Try to ignore such attacks on your intelligence and competence and so on. The article as it stands is a shamble of POV and weasel words and fails to describe the debate in any coherant fashion, and this is by design... 22 January 2008 (UTC)"

--Jagz (talk) 12:56, 3 June 2008 (UTC)

Wikipedia is not censored. Wikipedia does not censor material. The article is in your opinion unstable because people wish to censor information that may offend. Wikipedia is not censored. Best, Metagraph 09:25, 4 June 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Mediation?

Sorry to butt in, but I'd like to request a show of hands of all those in favor of mediation, following the current discussion at ANI. Thanks folks!--Ramdrake (talk) 18:54, 6 June 2008 (UTC)

  • Accept mediation.--Ramdrake (talk) 18:54, 6 June 2008 (UTC)
  • Ambivalent...I'll go along with it, but I'm not convinced it's necessary. --Plusdown (talk) 19:24, 6 June 2008 (UTC)
  • Accept Slrubenstein | Talk 21:27, 6 June 2008 (UTC)
  • comment I dont consider myself actively involved as an editor of this page any more (there are a number of people actively engaged whose knowledge of the subject far outweighs mine). However, I am willing to be an official participant in mediation if my participation would seem necessary to the process considering my history - otherwise (if the number of active editors is such a large number that additional participants makes the process too unwieldy) I am willing to abide by the results of the mediation without being a participant. -- The Red Pen of Doom 11:00, 9 June 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Discussion

Perhaps it would be helpful to articulate just what exactly needs to be mediated? A couple sentences summarizing the issues, or a (short) list of bullet points. --Elonka 19:36, 6 June 2008 (UTC)

Agree, everyone interested should read through the article and note what they think is missing and should be included, and what they think is irrelevant but is included. Then try to consolidate this into a coherent discussion on the talk page about the relative merits of any contested info. If we do this and we get stuck, possinly then we should go to mediation? Certainly we need some specifics. Elonka herself has noted that there is little discussion of "race" as a concept in the article, though this form one of the arguments against the "genetic" hypothesis. Likewise I think there are whole sections about specific reports that themselves need only be used for verifiability. I also think we need to point out the historical malleability of "whiteness", for example the way that Jewish, Italian, Irish people were regarded as "genetically" inferior in their "intelligence" in the 1920s in the USA, but magically became "clever" when they gained acceptance into the socially dominant group in the USA. Alun (talk) 20:10, 6 June 2008 (UTC)
My own problems with the article are relatively few, but rather deep:
  • Structurally, it is broken and is going to lead to further problems
  • It is riddled with weasel words, arguing with itself, unnecessarily disparaging in places/laudatory in others
  • The genetic explanation is misportrayed in many respects (I'll give details later if necessary)
If those three things could be addressed, I'd feel that some headway has been made. --Plusdown (talk) 20:28, 6 June 2008 (UTC)
Don't necessarily have solutions for these:
  • Dilemma of being both concise and hitting the full range of POVs -- if the article is too long, no one will read it, making it worthless.
  • Lots of material is repeated in multiple places.
  • The public controversy distracts from the scholarly controversies.
  • The genetic explanation is misportrayed or otherwise left unexplained.
  • Misconceptions and other problems in original sources are translated through, making the article look inconsistent and badly written.
  • The article will probably have to get worse on the way to getting better.
--Legalleft (talk) 21:02, 6 June 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Missing reference: Reynolds et al.

The first illustration cites "Reynolds et al. 1987", but I could not find the corresponding citation in the "References" section. The full list of authors is given in Image:IQ-4races-rotate-highres.png as "Reynolds, Chastain, Kaufman, & McLean, 1987". I found an article that cited the same paper by googling the names. I added the reference, because I am 99% sure this is the right paper. However, I wonder if someone who is familiar with the literature in the field could just double check that this is the right reference? Thanks. ---- CharlesGillingham (talk) 07:57, 7 June 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Some problems

1The minnesota transracial adoption study used black children who were adopted later than the white children. I do not know where to find this information but it's worth mentioning. Then there's the fact that children adopted later have lower iqs. 2I also wonder why the article has removed the criticism of the jensen report from 2003. They were here a while ago but now I can't find them. I have seen them added here but they were removed for sounding "weird" or "irrevelant" without any discussion. 3The article assumes that the only views are wholly environmental or mostly genetic. This is just plain wrong. Most scientists don't believe this sort of bull. I remember a table showing gradual increase towards genetic influence but was also removed. 4Are the iqs of middle easterners used to measure the iqs of whites? What about southeast asians and pacific islanders when discussing asians and finally 5The article is too dam long.YVNP (talk) 08:15, 9 June 2008 (UTC)