tatabanana: Race and IQ: the Case for Genes nationalvanguard.org/2017/01/race-and-iq-the-cas
tatabanana: Race and IQ: the Case for Genes https://nationalvanguard.org/2017/01/race-and-iq-the-case-for-genes/THIS ARTICLE will lay out the basic case for “hereditarianism” or the view that genes are an important cause of racial IQ differences. At this point, you may already be thinking something like “no reputable scientist would ever think this!”, “Race doesn’t even exist!”, “IQ tests are culturally biased and don’t measure intelligence anyway!”, “What about poverty, racism, single motherhood, education, etc.,!” all of which will be dealt with in this article. For the time being, just try to keep an open mind. Then, after reviewing the evidence fairly, you can decide whether or not I’m a crack pot.Race and IQ testsSome people are skeptical of the very ideas of “race” and “IQ”, so let’s deal with that first.Races are just populations that evolved in different environments. Racial groups correspond to genetic clusters and differ enough genetically such that differences in IQ are plausible. If you really doubt the basic existence of race, see this articledealing with that subject in isolation.Now let’s turn to IQ. The most popular IQ tests include items which test mathematical ability, pattern recognition, short-term memory, verbal comprehension, and vocabulary. They are not perfect measures of intelligence, but they predict how smart a person’s peers say they are as well as how well people do in school and on the job (Denissen et al., 2011; Palhusand and Morgan, 1997; Bailey and Hatch, 1979; Bailey and Mattetal, 1977). In fact, IQ is a better predictor of income and educational attainment than parental socio-economic status is (Strenze, 2006).It is uncontroversial that racial differences in IQ exist. Meta-analyses of data on more than 6,000,000 people have shown that Blacks in America score about 15 points lower than Whites do (Roth et al., 2001). IQ is also an excellent predictor of national wealth, and changes in national IQ over time predict changes in economic growth (Lynn and Vanhanen, 2012; Pietschnig and Voracek, 2015).Thus, these differences have social importance aside from the fact that human differences are inherently interesting. In fact, poor Whites do better on standardized tests than rich Blacks do.The Black-White IQ gap can cause in a society the growing of poverty, racism, education, or single motherhood.Another possibility is that differences in access to education cause the Black-White IQ gap. This is not possible because the Black-White IQ gap exists by age 3 which is prior to the beginning of formal education (Malloy, 2013). Moreover, the Black-White IQ gap remains after controlling for parental education (Prifitera et al., 2005, table 1.4; Weiss et al., 2016, table 5.6). Further still, Blacks with graduate degrees score worse than Whites without even a four-year degree on tests of cognitive ability (Faulk and Last, 2016). Clearly then, education is not the cause of racial cognitive differences. We know that genes impact intelligence through studies of identical twins raised apart and non-biological relatives raised together. Such studies show that the heritability of IQ rises with age and is well over 50% by adulthood (Last, 2016C). This is backed up by studies showing that genetic similarity between individuals predicts how similar their IQ scores will be and by recent studies showing that genetic tests can predict standardized test performance (Last, 2016C, Selzam et al., 2016). This research also shows that non-biological relatives raised in the same home are no more similar than average in terms of IQ despite a far more similar than average experience in home environment. This suggests that differences in home environment explain little to no variation in intelligence in adults. Furthermore, Blacks have smaller brains than Whites, who have smaller brains than East Asians (Last, 2016E). Contrary to what you may have heard, brain size does predict a person’s IQ score. Moreover, changes in brain size over time predict changes in IQ, and the same genes which influence IQ are known to influence brain size. A plausible explanation for this data is that variation in brain size causes variation in IQ. As mentioned earlier, the Black-White gap is also known to be present at age 3, and the Black-White IQ gap did not converge at all between 1920 and 1970 even though the social inequality between the races declined markedly between 1920 and 1970. This basic pattern of data is what we would expect if the underlying cause of the gap was genetic and makes explanations which appeal to environmental variables which impact people later in life, or are particular to a specific set of countries, unlikely. https://nationalvanguard.org/2017/01/race-and-iq-the-case-for-genes/ -- source link