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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   28172 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 26, 2022

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Since the average ADOS is a quarter white, if the explanation were purely genetic, black africans should be doing about 25% worse than ADOS.

I would assume that the people who were captured and sold as slaves and the people who voluntarily immigrate are somewhat distinct populations.

They would be, but the genetic differences between the two groups would have to dwarf the differences between other races and blacks to explain the reversal. African immigrants often do better on most social metrics than generic whites, so a genetic explanation has to posit that the genetic distance between recent african migration and enslaved groups is greater than the distance between africans and europeans. In a couple hundred years.

Which is to say, this did not happen.

I don't see how it would follow that in order for African immigrants to be more intelligent than Europeans and Europeans to be more intelligent than ADOS that African immigrants should have a greater overall genetic distance to ADOS than Europeans do. Only the intelligence related genes would need to be different. And suppose that the African elites and the unfortunates who were shipped off diverged only centuries before they were enslaved, two distinct populations could have evolved where one is more intelligent and one is less than the median European.

Selection (perhaps on both ends) is easily sufficient to explain this.

Selection effects may be strong for a short time, but regression to the mean makes the effect much weaker over centuries, especially given the admixture from other sources.

There's only one round of regression (first post-selection generation), so the centuries don't make a difference there.

You're ignoring admixture and subsequent regression to different means.

Admixture doesn't cause further regression to a mean unless the admixture was itself selective. If slaves were selected from the worse end of the African bell curve for some characteristic and recent immigrants were selected from the better end, we'd expect these the descendants of slaves, even after regression to the mean, to be worse in that characteristic than the recent immigrants. Admixture with a white population falling between those two groups would move the descendants of slaves closer, but wouldn't eliminate the effect.

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