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PaperclipPerfector  9mo ago (text post)   29231 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 19, 2024

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Human biodiversity is actually pretty low - Homo sapiens has been through a number of bottlenecks and when compared to other species, such as our closest relatives like chimpanzees, we'd look like inbreeds.

Sure, but this isn't super relevant, since there clearly is variation? We know a bunch of traits are heritable and vary between individuals.

Human migrations over the last thousand years have been such that literally everyone on Earth is a descendant of literally everyone that lived 7000 years ago whose offspring didn't die out. This is known as the Identical Ancestors Point (google it) and it's pretty uncontroversial if unintuitive. You can easily derive it by reasoning the other way around: simply put, the probability that anyone lived 7000 years ago and wasn't one of your ancestors given the amount of potential ancestors you'd be supposed to have (which is 27000/generation time) is low enough to be considered negligible. And 7000 years ago is a pretty conservative estimate.

This is obviously false. Consider someone living in brazil, 7000 years ago. Their only real chance of spreading genes outside the americas came in the 1500s. That's certainly not enough time. Secondly, it's irrelevant—that everyone at some point shared ancestry doesn't mean everyone is the same along any particular trait. This is really obvious when you consider that this would apply just as much to visual racial markers.

Africans have more genetic diversity than literally every other ethnicity on earth taken together, so any classification that separates "Africans" from other groups is going to be suspect.

People conflate a small handful of groups (Khoekhoe, Hadza, Pygmies, etc.) that are actually very diverse and different with subsaharan Africa as a whole. Nevertheless, I believe it is still true of subsaharan Africa that it's more diverse. But I don't think it matters. When the question is "can I treat this as a group to run statistics on", you can pretty much always do that, with whatever group you care about (left handed people would work just fine, and they aren't even endogamous). But it's also closer than that, as my impression was that in general, most subsaharan africans were more closely related to other (non-exotic) subsaharan africans than they are to the people who left Africa. That could be wrong, though.

Race isn't a valid construct, genetically speaking. It's not well defined; even HBD proponents disagree on how to classify people beyond Blacks/Whites/Asians. Most of the definitions are based on self reports or continents of origin, when we know what is considered "black" in the US may not be so in, say, Brazil, or that many people from Africa can very well be considered "white". Of course most HBD proponents are from the US and are hardly aware of other countries' existence apart from their national IQ so they just handwave it away.

Okay? Two different responses to that. (1) If race is just something we made up, that doesn't stop us from doing statistics on it, and that doesn't mean that the stats can't tell us averages of the people who happen to be in whatever made-up categories we throw them into. This is especially relevant when people are already drawing up racial stats on representation or whatever—there should be no problem with using the same categories, to show that it's actually not all discrimination! (2) Race isn't perfect, but it does act as a proxy for genetically closer clusters of people.

Intelligence is not well-defined and not construct valid. There's no single definition of intelligence on which people from different fields can agree. (Among other things, this is why AI specialists have been struggling with "general AI" for the better part of a century)

I've been led to believe that g is one of the psychological findings that holds up best. IQ tests are meant to measure "that statistical thing over there that shows up in everything."

IQ has a number of flaws that would make anyone outside the field of psychology not touch it with a ten foot pole. For starters, it is by definition Gaussian for no apparent reason. The g construct itself has no neurological basis and is purely an artifact of factor analysis.

I'm not familiar with how the Gaussian-by-construction biases things; I do find this a plausible concern but don't know enough stats to figure out what things like that would do. But that doesn't void it as a measure entirely, that just means that you can't really compare gaps very well. One standard deviation might mean different things at different places along the scale, but that doesn't mean that the order is invalid.

Evolution isn't just mutations + natural selection. To assume that diversity just arose from different populations adapting to different environments is already a pretty huge assumption that none of the HBD proponents cares to back up. Not every trait is an adaptation.

Okay? Your point?

There's no single genetic explanation that was ever put forward to account for traits purported to be "genetic" in origin by HBD proponents. This is because HBD proponents do not care about genes, and because they do not know about anything related to genetic mechanisms. Epistasis alone fucks up many behavioral genetics models and this is just scratching the surface of the complexity involved.

A whole lot of traits are very polygenic, and it makes sense that intelligence would be one of those. I don't get the point of your last sentence. Are you really arguing that "genetics is complicated, therefore it can't be genetic"?

Heritability does not imply genetic determinism. Many things are heritable and do not involve genes. These include epigenetic mechanisms, microbiota, or even environmental stress on germinal cells (this can carry over two generations if someone is pregnant - the stress then applies to the cells that would become the germinal cells of the foetus). That's not even addressing the environmental confounding factors. When confronted with their lack of an actual genetic explanation, HBD will fall back to utterly bizarre retorts like "uuuh you don't need to find genes for something to be grounded in genetics".

It was my impression that the epigenetics stuff was pseudoscience. Sure, microbiomes could be heritable (I think?), but I don't think "it could be different microbiomes, so it must not be genes, at all" is a valid conclusion.

Literally every public HBD proponent operates outside academia and is virtually unknown in the genomics community. They are known to make up their own journals (from Mankind Quarterly to OpenPsych) so they can publish in them instead of trying to get accepted in mainstream ones. "Everyone is in a conspiracy against me" only goes so far as an argument. On the other hand, literally every public figure in the genomics community has spoken against HBD. Generally speaking, HBD proponents are unqualified. Their understanding of genetics and evolution does not go beyond high school, none of them hold a degree in a discipline relevant to genetics and none of them has ever published in a high profile journal. (I'm going to be charitable and assume that high profile means IF > 4). HBD proponents are more interested in shitposting on the internet than publishing genetics papers and going to conferences.

And why, exactly, do you think they are outside of academia? Why are you putting the blame on them, and not academia? There's obviously a taboo. Noah Carl was ousted from academia for trying to do things like this, I believe. Is Razib Khan not a figure in the genomics community? I'm also pretty sure I've seen some survey showing that most academics in the relevant communities believe that the IQ gap is partly due to genetic factors. Talking about journal publications is problematic for the same reason.

Literally anyone who's been working on HBD stuff has been receiving funding from shady organizations like the Pioneer Fund whose express purpose is to prove a hierarchy of races and justify eugenics since the 1930s so their neutrality can be questioned.

Oh, and mainstream academic institutions are perfectly neutral. Tu quoque aside, "motivated people donated to them" is not the same as saying they're wrong, it just means you need a bit more caution.

Many public HBD figures have been found guilty of fraud. Cyril Burt would literally forge results, while Lynn would take the average of two neighbouring countries' IQ in order to derive "data" from a country's unknown national IQ. HBD proponents actually doubled down on this practice. People like Rushton would attempt to transpose pleiotropy mechanisms from some species to humans, despite the explicit insistence that such mechanisms were not adaptable because the genetics behind skin colors in humans are completely different from that of species governed by pleiotropy. Other people like Kanazawa would write a paper literally assuming the Earth was flat, and it was accepted in a "high profile" journal like Intelligence in three weeks.

Yeah, you shouldn't be extrapolating data and then treating that as if it were additional information, which is what I'm led to believe Lynn did. I'm not familiar with the other people.

Each one of those should be a debunking, but of course HBD proponents don't really care about any of those; as I said, none of them has ever been really involved in the actual scientific community. The whole point is to give an appearance of scholarship under the guise of clever sounding citations and lengthy papers, nevermind that those are in bogus journals from fields that are virtually unknown of the broader genomics community.

No, most of those were mostly irrelevant, and the rest were wrong.

I'd be open to being convinced that HBD is wrong, or at least, closer to being wrong, but it would need to be with better arguments, actually engaging with the data. Nothing that you've mentioned here has even addressed the point that these statistics vary by race, and attempted to explain it. Evidence of the effects of environmental factors, especially culture, could be helpful.

This is obviously false. Consider someone living in brazil, 7000 years ago. Their only real chance of spreading genes outside the americas came in the 1500s. That's certainly not enough time. Secondly, it's irrelevant—that everyone at some point shared ancestry doesn't mean everyone is the same along any particular trait. This is really obvious when you consider that this would apply just as much to visual racial markers.

Even historically isolated populations have had significant selection pressure and intermixture with Eurasian peoples. The average age of the most common past ancestor has been put at between 5,000 and 15,000 years ago, so in biodiversity terms human beings are closer to Cheetahs than they are to Chimpanzees. There isn't a significant amount of 'diversity' within the population to start with.

Okay? Two different responses to that. (1) If race is just something we made up, that doesn't stop us from doing statistics on it, and that doesn't mean that the stats can't tell us averages of the people who happen to be in whatever made-up categories we throw them into. This is especially relevant when people are already drawing up racial stats on representation or whatever—there should be no problem with using the same categories, to show that it's actually not all discrimination! (2) Race isn't perfect, but it does act as a proxy for genetically closer clusters of people.

It also acts as a proxy for environmental and sociocultural factors as well. Melanin levels as far as I am aware have little to know direct impact on brain development, but it still has a clear and measurable effect on social and cultural factors.

I'm not familiar with how the Gaussian-by-construction biases things; I do find this a plausible concern but don't know enough stats to figure out what things like that would do. But that doesn't void it as a measure entirely, that just means that you can't really compare gaps very well. One standard deviation might mean different things at different places along the scale, but that doesn't mean that the order is invalid.

I.Q. tests are designed for instance to give men and women the same I.Qs on average -- 100. Recent 'gains' by women that raised their relative I.Q. compared to men, IIRC 100 vs 104, would that indicate that women as a group are smarter than men on average, or does in indicate that the factors that lowered women's I.Q. in the past were removed and the test's adjustment hasn't taken that into account yet?

Even historically isolated populations have had significant selection pressure and intermixture with Eurasian peoples. The average age of the most common past ancestor has been put at between 5,000 and 15,000 years ago, so in biodiversity terms human beings are closer to Cheetahs than they are to Chimpanzees. There isn't a significant amount of 'diversity' within the population to start with.

Not quite plausible, though getting much closer. The oldest American sites are from right around 15000 years ago. I wouldn't expect too many people to have Native American ancestry. (Yes, if I remember correctly, Athabaskans and Inuit etc. peoples are later, but I don't think that's enough to matter.)

Humans have much, much more diversity than cheetahs*, though also quite a bit less than chimpanzees. Cheetahs are extremely low in genetic diversity. It's silly to say that there isn't a significant amount of diversity when it's obvious that humans vary substantially among many traits that we might consider significant, and when many traits are heritable.

It also acts as a proxy for environmental and sociocultural factors as well. Melanin levels as far as I am aware have little to know direct impact on brain development, but it still has a clear and measurable effect on social and cultural factors.

Yes, of course. Disambiguating would take some care, investigation into what effects environmental/sociocultural factors have, etc. It would be odd not to recognize the possibility (and I would expect it would have some effect). And as pointed out, race can act as a proxy for genetic ancestry, since non-exceptional subsaharan africans will, I believe, look genetically more like each other than they do like non-subsaharan africans. It would also be odd not to recognize that genes could play a factor.

I.Q. tests are designed for instance to give men and women the same I.Qs on average -- 100. Recent 'gains' by women that raised their relative I.Q. compared to men, IIRC 100 vs 104, would that indicate that women as a group are smarter than men on average, or does in indicate that the factors that lowered women's I.Q. in the past were removed and the test's adjustment hasn't taken that into account yet?

Assuming that IQ tests match sufficiently well on to our usual concepts of smartness (probably, but with only a 4 point difference, and IQ tests evened by construction, I'm less confident than usual), then yes, it would follow that women would be smarter than men; the tests said so. We could investigate causes, sure, to see whether they're innately smarter or due to the environment, but that wouldn't change that there'd be a difference.

You could investigate to what extent groups differing in whatever factors might be lowering IQ would differ in IQ. (Adoption studies could be one avenue to pick up on some sources of variation, different countries, etc.)

*the graph on page 91

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