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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   5896 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for January 22, 2023

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

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For the most interesting refutation of a black-white intelligence gap, read the series of articles Chisala Chanda wrote for the Unz Review. A large part of his argument is that modern transplant populations from Africa to the UK and USA, as opposed to the descendants of slaves, do not show an achievement gap with the native populations.

The most obvious refutation of that refutation would be that those populations are highly selected for intelligence. I am sure if someone like me who knows next to nothing about the topic can thing of this caveat, Chanda can think of it too. Does he address it?

Yes, he (why did I think Chisala Chanda was a woman?) does. @popocatepetl elaborates further in a sibling comment.

To tldr Chanda's hypothesis: non-African people (especially Europeans and Asians) have a more restricted (canalized) phenotype, as do women. American Blacks are stupider than African Blacks because they have genetic admixture from low-class Whites. The genes that make Seamus a bit stupid and aggressive make Tyrone very stupid and very aggressive, while Shaneequa won't be affected as much, but her sons will.

There are some studies I can think of that should be able to support or weaken this claim, like:

  • middle-class children of ADOS fathers and White mothers should be smarter and less aggressive than middle-class children of White fathers and ADOS mothers

middle-class children of ADOS fathers and White mothers should be smarter and less aggressive than middle-class children of White fathers and ADOS mothers

I don't see how that follows. Shouldn't our prima facie assumption be that the genetic information that contributes to [aggression and stupidity] is passed on patrilineally as well as matrilineally?

Since females are more canalized and we assume that ADOS genomes are saddled with Borderer alleles, an ADOS male of with a substantial IQ is more likely to have fewer of these alleles than an ADOS female with a similar IQ, since her phenotype is more restricted.

Since we are not restricting the selection to specific low-class groups, a White male and a White female with an equally substantial IQ are much less likely to bear a significant load of the alleles we're trying to avoid, so they should be coming from the ADOS parent if they appear in their offspring.

than an ADOS female with a similar IQ

Why are we comparing similar IQs? If the axiom you mention were true, we would expect to see lower IQ in ADOS men on the left tail of the distribution than in ADOS women on the left tail of the distribution, beyond what would be expected from the Greater Male Variability hypothesis. Is this the case?

Because I'm using different sexes having the same IQ as a proxy for having different genetic load: IQ 100 ADOS men probably have "cleaner" genes than IQ 100 ADOS women. If the children of ADOS women slip further left on the tail, then it's probably true. If the children inherit the same IQ, then it's probably false.

Ah, gotcha. Thanks.

It seems like the obvious issue with that is that African Americans mostly have white admixture that comes from the upper classes(mostly the sons of plantation owners), not the lower classes.

The plantation owners in question were presumably violent rapists, which is how much of the admixture happened in the first place.

Having a mistress literally owned by a close relative looks distinctly non consensual today, but that doesn’t mean that’s how it would have been understood as taboo in societies which accepted owning slaves, at least not in a way which was legibly close to rape.

My understanding is that there was a lot of straight-up rape, i.e., the man physically forcing himself on the woman, who of course couldn't resist because of her status. But admittedly I have no idea how much of the admixture is due to violent rape, how much was "borderline" as you described, and how much was consensual.

The best documented example of miscegenation in the antebellum south was plaçage, which featured very little violent rape but lots of elite males, but 1) slavery in French Louisiana was different and 2) that’s just the best documented example, presumably slave owners who raped their slaves didn’t write it down. So it’s up in the air how much white admixture was due to outright coercion and how much of it was the predictable result of high status males and low status females.

It’s also complicated by the fact that very few writers about slavery in the antebellum south were neutral on the practice- they were either abolitionists who generally picked the worst examples to write about, or apologists who were almost certainly lying.

(why did I think Chisala Chanda was a woman?)

Probably because the suffix -a marks something as feminine in romance languages, and, stop me if I'm wrong, russian.

The most obvious refutation of that refutation would be that those populations are highly selected for intelligence. I am sure if someone like me who knows next to nothing about the topic can thing of this caveat, Chanda can think of it too. Does he address it?

I thought the same thing. Half-way through the series, I recall Chisala citing a black refugee population that settled in California (rather than skllled educated immigrants) where their children achieved average results in school. My assumption is that this example was cherry picked from many hundreds of refugee communities that did poorly, but there it is.

Where in California? East LA or the Central Valley, or someplace where average results aren’t ‘shows up about half the time and can spell own name, with assistance’?

Sorry, it was Seattle rather than California. He was writing about refugees from the Horn of Africa (ethiopians, somalians, oromo), whose children performed above the domestic black average test scores depite not speaking English at home. The results weren't collected for intelligence research but as part of the city government's report on refugee education. Here is the exact part

So, how does one of the lowest IQ scoring groups in Africa, emigrating with the lowest evidence of any selection whatsoever (economically or academically), have their children score above black Americans in one of the highest scoring states for native black Americans, (some) even outscoring Hispanics who are assimilated, before they are even assimilated themselves? How do even the Somalian refugees brought in from a total failed state catastrophe outscore black Americans as soon as they just learn to read some English?

It can certainly not be explained by any of the recent HBD answers, individually or in combination

Thank you! I am very happy to finally see someone earnestly attempting to refute HBD arguments. For completeness' sake, here is an archive of the blog post, the source article and the presentation Chisala got his numbers from.

I remain unconvinced. There is no indication that the Somali sample is in any way representative of the source population. Here is Chisala's argument:

Their performance above American blacks (labeled as “English-speaking” blacks) defies the common sociologist explanation that higher achieving black immigrants are simply the most driven members of their source populations (some were just in refugee camps), and it equally defies the modern hereditarian argument that they are just the most self-selected in intelligence relative to their source populations, unless we now start extending this cognitive self-selectivity and “assortative mating” quality to people who run to United Nations refugee camps for protection. (It is not necessarily all who were from these camps, but that doesn’t matter since even those who were from there are performing above native black Americans).

Chisala seems to assume that most of the Somali sample comes from refugee camps. But the source article only mentions that "[The Somali children's] families came to the U.S. to escape their war-torn country, many by way of refugee camps.". Chisala puts this aside by saying that "It is not necessarily all who were from these camps, but that doesn’t matter since even those who were from there are performing above native black Americans". But I didn't get that from a cursory glance of the data, which only seems to report aggregate data. Even so, there are a whole host of different selection effects with those coming from refugee camps. As one commenter puts it:

In a country like Somalia, getting into a refugee camp may be more desirable than not being in one. And from there to be selected for relocation to America may also be more desirable than not.

As with most desirable things in life, those with a higher IQ or socioeconomic status may be better at working the system to their benefit to get them.

Chisala did, as far as I can see, not respond to this concern.

I have not yet looked at the UK data Chisala mentions.

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