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naraburns  nihil supernum  2yr ago (text post)   33194 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 10, 2022

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If HBD were true, there would be no Flynn Effect - there's no way the genes of the Western nations have changed that much so quickly.

Do you feel changes in diet couldn't explain much of the difference? To pick just one example, we know iodine deficiency during pregnancy results in adult IQ for the child almost a standard deviation lower than pregnancy without iodine deficiency.

I find it easy to tell a story where elites have always tended to have access to varied and nutritious food, and thus be close to their maximum genetic potential, while peasants would frequently have vitamin deficiencies and have their height and IQ stunted. Then industrialization and the scientific revolution happen, humans figure out most of the food problem and figure out how to address the most important vitamin deficiencies in the population, and you see the Flynn Effect for several generations, which eventually tops out at the point where people's natural genetic potential lies.

If this explanation is true, it would be very easy to try to hypothesize something like: black people tend to not absorb certain vitamins as well as white people, so many of them might have deficiencies that go unnoticed that lead to lower IQ. I tend to recall looking at data for iodine levels in black mothers in the modern US, and they have the lowest levels of any ethnic group - though still above what is considered adequate for the IQ effects. It doesn't require that many epicycles to propose the hypothesis that what is adequate iodine for other groups might not be adequte iodine for black mothers - or that the scientists got the initial number wrong, and more iodine is needed to make up for the deficit.

And even without such speculation, it would be very simple to speculate about vitamin deficiencies in general in the US black population. This would allow for a "cultural" explanation for low black IQ that has a "biological" solution (force black people to eat different food/offer some product that has bioavailable versions of the missing vitamins.)

I find it easy to tell a story where elites have always tended to have access to varied and nutritious food

even if this was true, random drift would sort things. But give 'joe the plumber' person a lot of iodine and he's not gonna become einstein. There certainly were a lot of people in the past who were very smart but, by chance, were peasants. But that doesn't mean the elite weren't very sorted for genetics of various sorts!

The explanation might not be iodine. Black people have high rates of vitamin D deficiency, for example.

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