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I'd be interesting to see a follow-up too, since any result other than a regression to a mean would imply that either the initial study or our very concept of IQ is flawed. With greater racial interbreeding ratios and selection pressures in that have returned to favoring fertility rates in people with high educational attainment, if there is any actual of race on intelligence, it should be gradually reducing.
You say fertility rates, but am I reading correctly that in your link the graph is of a raw birthrate in the age 15-50 bracket without controlling for age? How much of that result is just reflecting the fact that a lot more people are going to higher education than they used to? In Census data I'm seeing the ""College 4 years or more" column rise from e.g. 23% of the total "25 to 34 years, Female" section in 1992 to 45% of the total in 2022 (passing through 32.5% in 2002 and 37.5% in 2012). Unless I'm misreading something, women in their childbearing years are much more likely to be well educated than women a decade or three older, so we'd expect birth rates to skew much more strongly toward educated mothers than total fertility rates do.
I think you're right in that there's some fuzziness involved in determining the effect size, especially since the correlation between IQ and educational attainment is strong but not incredibly so. But the objection you bring up means that the graph I posted should be underestimating the size of the new more-smarts-means-more-babies effect, since in the past fertility rates were higher.
That is the bias you would see in a graph of TFR, but your graph is not of TFR.
The TFR data shows what we (sadly) expect:
https://stacks.cdc.gov/view/cdc/105234/cdc_105234_DS1.pdf
Non diploma women have high TFR of 2.7
high school diploma have 2.05
Then it sinks further with lowest the bachelor degree holders having 1.2 TFR
And then a little bump up again for master degree 1.4 and doctorate degree 1.5 (still brutally below replacement)
I saw the argument that TFR is artificially a bit worse than in real life, because TFR is not catching yet that women are moving their child bearing years up. Similar bachelor degrees having lowest TFR does not mean that women with a bachelor are (in the end) worse than master women in family formation (eg because they earn less money), but can also be explained by that students who have a bachelor and also doing their master additionally are avoiding getting pregnant while still in University.
How much of this is Hasidim, though? Like private religious schools don't always get an actual diploma for their graduates.
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Okay, I've found a graph from 2019 that compared against TFR: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1238575/total-fertility-rate-us-education/. There's also this graph that subdivides by race that shows different race-based curves, which is an objection someone brought up elsewhere.
The hook-shaped curve is evidence for what I'm talking about-- that selection pressures have returned to favor educational attainment (and therefore, by proxy, IQ). Especially since the true strength of the relationship is going to be obscured by older women with less education who already had all their children, and obscured by an inability to differentiate between then-young mothers who won't and will later get additional education.
Elsewhere someone brought up the objection that even if positive selection pressure in favor of education has begun to apply to whites and hispanics, it doesn't seem to apply to blacks, which would mean we should expect to see racial iq differences (if they exist) to continue to diverge. But I reject that reasoning on the basis due to the fact that base rates of education have always been lower for blacks for structural reasons (i.e., racism, poverty), that black TFR started from a higher modern basepoint and has dropped faster, and that therefore the existing obscuring effects of having an older, less-educated cohort would be stronger.
In the interest of honesty I also found this graph for birth rates in 2020 https://www.statista.com/statistics/195970/number-of-births-by-educational-attainment-of-mother-in-the-united-states/ but I'm having a hard time comparing it against the original graph because it splits things up into different brackets.
Thanks for these. I don't see much to argue about with them, though I'm suspicious about that since the hook-shaped curve flatters my priors from other vaguely-recalled studies. The zeitgeist of "I shouldn't have kids while I'm still struggling with the rat race" favors the people who've won (their idea of) the rat race, but not as much as it favors the people who just decide not to run.
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The Statista graph you linked doesn't show positive selection on educational attainment. The fact that the small minority of women with graduate degrees have slightly higher TFR than women with associate's or bachelor's degrees does not make up for the fact that they have lower fertility than the majority of women who have no college degree. It's still clearly the case that the majority of children are being born to women with below-average educational attainment.
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Fertility’s correlation to IQ and education varies quite a bit between American ethnic groups- for blacks it’s sharply negative, for whites it’s positive. Most data I’ve seen shows in particular that’s it’s extremely positive for conservative white men, mildly negative for liberal whites, and basically flat for conservative white women.
This is not a recipe for the races to converge in IQ.
At any given point in time and cultural context, a genetic trait might be positive or negative for fertility. But over the long run, everything reverts to the mean. If IQ is real, it should have some sort of consistent, visible effect visible over long time periods-- and 20 years is a fairly long time period. The reason I pointed to the graph of people with more educational attainment regaining their advantage in fertility is to display exactly this phenomenon. Truly dysgenic phenomenon are intrinsically self-defeating.
And it's worth considering that fertility rates based on genetic traits are a lagging indicator. That we're seeing evidence of a switch to benefiting probably-smart people means that the actual mechanism must have been in place for at least 20-40 years, since all the newly fertile PHDs must have had the genetic components of their IQs determined then.
The fertility rate inversion we're seeing is also not just an american thing, but common cross culturally as more countries go through the stages of the demographic transition.
All that is to say, I trust Darwin and Rudolf Clausius way more than I trust anyone else. Any scientific paper has to get through them before it gets to me.
Unrelated hot take: while mixed race people, as a group, will continue to be average, we should expect the leading geniuses of the mid 20th century to be disproportionately mixed race due to the effects of hybrid vigor. And if theories about genetic intellectual differences between races are correct, we should be able to identify specific combinations likely to produce particularly intelligent hybrids.
I wrote a top level comment a few weeks ago arguing that ‘dysgenics’ was a spook and a dumb argument- oliganthropia is a potentially very serious problem, but dysgenic IQ selection from low fertility rates is not a real thing. I’m not disagreeing with you there.
What I am disagreeing with you is the idea that this will lead to some kind of average IQ convergence- more than likely the black/white gap will grow for a bit and then stay about the same.
There’s a large number of countries where mixed-race people are the majority(most of them Spanish speaking) and the best and brightest from these countries seem to, generally, be not mixed, often specifically descended from high-IQ immigrants. I’m not writing off that there’s going to be a lot of Hapas in the talented tenth of tomorrow, but probably not at a higher rate than Asians(which is what your theory would predict).
Can you give a summary?
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To the extent that any IQ difference is caused by genetics, we should expect to see that IQ difference decline as greater admixture rates have been achieved. To the extent that IQ differences are caused by environmental factors, we should expect to see that IQ difference decline as those environmental differences have been declining.
For the gap to stay the same or increase despite changes to the putative causative factors would imply that something is off about our understanding of IQ and/or racial IQ, though I couldn't say in advance what.
Including my responses to your other comment here
Re-reading my original comment, I think you're right that my hot take doesn't follow from its premises. So I'll alter it a little. "If theories about racial intelligence are correct* we should expect..."
(Here taking "theories about racial intelligence" to mean specifically theories about a genes that have reached fixation due to selection pressures at the race level.)
So far, you're right that we haven't actually seen much evidence of hybrid vigor in the domain of intelligence-- which is kind of the problem with these theories about racial intelligence. If you told me, "different corn breeds have different disease resistance capabilities," then I could posit that "it should therefore be possible to engineer hybrid varieties with superior disease resistance to any heritage line," and prove us both empirically correct. But I'm hearing "different races have different intellectual capabilities," and yet not seeing any of the superlative hybrid strains. I'm aware that isn't proof for the negative case (that no genetic intellectual difference exists), but it makes me unwilling to reject the null hypothesis.
If you (or the original study) do in fact convince me of racial differences, I'll switch to believing that hybrid vigour should occur, and that we just haven't tested the right crossbreeds yet.
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I don't think this is a major factor in humans. In fact there's plenty of reason to think the opposite might be the case, since different populations have evolved different complex sets of alleles to solve particular problems and a child with some of each is liable to end up without either being functional. A well-aligned mind is a difficult thing to code for.
But, there's also some reason to think it's true. Emil talks about that a little bit here.
https://emilkirkegaard.dk/en/2017/04/is-mixed-race-breeding-bad-for-you/
IIRC he thinks that certain recessive alleles may be hurting cognition, and 'outbreeding' would help with that. But as I understand the situation, even where that's the case, it's still most advantageous to mate with someone as genetically close to you as possible given that they don't share your deleterious recessives.
I don't think hybrid vigor would be a factor in every case, but alleles that manage to reach fixation in a particular population group likely make some sort of balanced tradeoff-- not optimizing for any one thing too hard because doing so would confer metabolic costs while producing no competitive advantages (against a population with the same genes.) So if racial IQ science is real* I'd suspect that in the right-tail of IQ distribution we'd see people with heterozygous alleles that were "intended" to perform some balanced function in isolated groups, but combined by crossbreeding lose any limiting factors and produce people exceptional in some way or another.
*To avoid concern trolling, I should be clear here that I do not have any particular faith in the existing racial IQ science. I can't rule out in principle that racial differences between IQ groups exist, but there are too many confounding factors, and in particular people who talk about race-based IQ support their claims with evidence that matches the pop-sci view of what "evolution" looks like, rather than what any plant or animal breeder would say actually happens in practice with genetics.
I mean, the hybrid vigor hypothesis for IQ specifically seems pre-falsified- most of history's greatest geniuses were purebred members of endogamous groups(many specifically Ashkenazi, but the Indian math geniuses as well. And I'd be remiss not to mention that the Meiji restoration was possible because hyper-isolationist Japan had an existing well of underutilized geniuses.). Additionally the heavily mixed populations of Latin America seem underrepresented in scientific and technical achievements compared to the members of high-IQ groups in those countries.
I'd be interested in watching what happens with hapas over the next few decades, but I don't think hybrid vigor is part of the winning formula. I'm not writing off the idea entirely that the key to producing super geniuses is with Ashkenazi/Tamil Brahmin hybrids. I'm just skeptical.
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