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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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Right, but we're discussing the individual heritability of intelligence here, not the race-level heritability, so this is an area where the scientific consensus disagrees with the comment you linked. See e.g. this review, finding intelligence to be highly heritable through genes. This isn't a HBD guy, this is ". A Review of General Psychology survey, published in 2002, ranked Plomin as the 71st most cited psychologist of the 20th century.[1] He is the author of several books on genetics and psychology." and "Plomin was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in the 2023 New Year Honours for services to scientific research.[8]". There is a tremendous amount of mainstream literature on the heritability of intelligence, a lot of back and forth between various camps, and the consensus has ended up that there are large genetic components.

I don't doubt that intelligence is heritable; however on a group level there is very little actual diversity within the human population given the fact that our most common ancestor is very recent, and HBD is making claims about the average intelligence of different groups.

The simple way to settle this would be to:

A. Discover the genes responsible for intelligence. B. Genetically test a significant number of various groups to get a baseline rate of their presence. C. Derive the genetic difference in intelligence between groups.

Has anyone actually done this?

  • -11

Has anyone actually done this

As described before, the are thousands of variants responsible for variation in intelligence in existing populations (as distinct from 'responsible for intelligence', there are many more nucleotides sequences that are necessary for intelligence and don't have any variation in the population because you're disabled or dead without them). This is the only paper I could find: http://pfigshare-u-files.s3.amazonaws.com/2134951/NineHits__3_5.pdf and there's a graph inside it which shows that the populations HBDers claim are low IQ have lower polygenic scores for intelligence. Now, it's just one paper, I think it's as likely to be biased/wrong as it is to be meaningful. There isn't more research into this because as I said it's considered racist, and in order to do a proper study you'd need a lot of biobanks and research approval to get the data, and they don't want you to be racist. They even restrict research that's only tangentially related: https://www.city-journal.org/article/dont-even-go-there

You keep saying there's very little diversity. What counts as little? What's your scale? What would be enough diversity, and why that threshold?

There's very obviously enough that we can plainly notice it for some traits, and you haven't acknowledged this.

Modern humans are a lot alike--at least at the genetic level--compared with other primates. If you compare any two people from far-flung corners of the globe, their genomes will be much more similar than those of any pair of chimpanzees, gorillas, or other apes from different populations. Now, evolutionary geneticists have shown that our ancestors lost much of their genetic diversity in two dramatic bottlenecks that sharply squeezed down the population of modern humans as they moved out of Africa between 60,000 and 50,000 years ago.

See: https://www.science.org/content/article/how-we-lost-our-diversity

Yes, this is true.

Now, why is it enough to matter? If the problem was that the out-of-Africa bottleneck of ~10000 or whatever it was, was too small, is there some higher number at which it would make sense to talk about variation being relevant?

Being much more similar at a genetic level than average does not mean that they are similar along any particular trait, as has been pointed out to you repeatedly, and there is clearly enough variation that we can see some traits vary.

My point isn't to disagree that humans have lower genetic diversity than chimpanzees or whatever (especially if we are excluding the most genetically diverse groups like the pygmies, sticking to the majority of the world's population), that's just true, and you're right on that. But you keep bringing this up as evidence that genes can't matter, for which it is only very weak evidence, not at all a serious consideration.

But you keep bringing this up as evidence that genes can't matter, for which it is only very weak evidence.

I'm bringing it up because genes do matter, but there simply isn't nearly as much diversity within the human population which means the overall effect of genetics cannot be large on a population level. It tempers the overall impact of any kind of diversity, the fact that we humans are so similar. I simply do not believe that HBD as seemingly commonly held in this forum is nearly strong enough as a concept to use it as a battering ram to dismiss or deflect the mainstream or the left wing's position on this matter.

I thought I made the comment clear. You still didn't answer, but just repeated what you were saying.

I'll try again: You keep saying that humans have less genetic diversity, therefore there cannot be any substantial genetic effect. But you have yet to show that that's a valid inference. How do you know that the lesser degree of diversity in comparison to chimpanzees or whatever means they can't vary along relevant traits? Why isn't it the case that we have less, but still quite enough, diversity?

As evidence that there's probably enough, we notice variation attributable to genetics in all sorts of other things.

Relevant traits such as height, weight, intelligence etc? Compare Europe with Japan, they are very similar and yet separated by thousands of kilometers.

I see this HBD talk here constantly, yet it seems everyone assumes that it is true without bringing evidence, where is the proof for such a bold claim?

The HBD discourse is fueled by people freaking out over representation in high-status classes like successful CEOs, scientists and Ivy League applicants. People get into those by being outliers on a standard distribution in talent, and this amplifies small initial population differences. A relatively small difference in mean IQ between populations that looks inconsequential in everyday tasks can still end up making the tail of people capable of becoming theoretical physicists have a 2x overrepresentation of people from the higher mean IQ population.

Europe and Japan do have differences in height, weight, IQ, etc. on average, they just aren't huge ones.

We know that IQ is partially heritable. Doesn't that demonstrate that genes can be relevant?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Average_human_height_by_country#

Sort by height and notice how many shithole Balkan states are toward the top, and how far down you have to scroll to reach even the most prosperous Asian countries. Your hypothesis, that the human genome doesn't have enough variation to allow for meaningful population differences in genetically complex traits, is trivially falsified by the evidence you claim we're not bringing.

Once again, how do you explain height differences?

How much difference would you accept as reasonable based on genetics? Clearly, one standard deviation is too much. A half maybe?

You’re right about the overall limits of variance we are going to see among human populations.

However.

In the grand scheme of things, 85, 100, and 115 IQs are not a huge amount of variation for our species anymore than 5’5”, 5’10”, and 6’3” heights are.

At some point we will have exhausted plausible environmental explanations for the achievement gap.

In fact, we already have, as evidenced by arguments serving as excuses that it would take centuries to get past the effects of misfortune (an order of magnitude more than what the Supreme Court thought), and that ever-present “systemic racism” is behind any disparity, with no need to show actual evidence of racism.

The tide of the evidence is being pulled in one direction along multiple fronts, and so people want to pretend we have the same understanding of genetics as 50+ years ago when it was less clear and explicit oppression was far worse and more recent.

To my friends, everything; to my enemies, epistemic humility.

The average height of a Chinese man is 170cm and the average height of a European man is 180cm. The difference between the two is only a little above 5% on average with recent males being 175cm which indicates that much of this disparity is not genetic, but environmental. This represents populations that are separated by the largest continent in the world.

See: https://www.globaltimes.cn/page/202110/1235772.shtml

How much difference would you accept as reasonable based on genetics? Clearly, one standard deviation is too much. A half maybe?

Honestly, probably less than half a standard deviation but probably not nothing. It's not really that important though, because I believe that there are significant gains that can be had if the environmental influences are taken into consideration and ameliorated.

You've already been linked this list, but perhaps you missed some of the implications. Allow me to expand upon this by pointing out some fun facts.

  • Jamaica ranks three places higher than the United States.

  • Jamaica is also 5cm and like 75 spots on the list ahead of Japan.

  • Japan is essentially tied with Haiti.

  • Literally every single Asian country comes in behind Senegal.

All of which raises a huge problem for your position: Assigning more weight to environmental factors makes the genetic gap larger, not smaller. If the likes of Jamaica and Senegal had access to First World medical care and nutrition the same way Japan and South Korea do, how much taller would the former be then? And more to the point, what would nurture advocates blame the enormous difference on then?

The notion that the human genome doesn't have enough variation for large differences in complex polygenic traits between isolated population groups just doesn't hold water. You can ignore this post if you want, but expect to see it again next time you want to bemoan how HBDers won't dig down into the evidence with you.

Obviously much of the historic difference in height is environmental. Look how fast it changed once nutrition improved all over the world, and the longstanding gap that emerged between North and South Koreans.

But certain parts of Europe average close to 6 ft. It’s not like the Dutch have had some special nutrition better than say us in America.

My favorite part is that now you have to explain how we’re going to catch up to the Ashkenazim and their standard deviation advantage over whites.

Half standard deviation is still a substantial gap, by the way. The shift in direction really affects the tails and it would be noticeable. Asians have to be discriminated against at Harvard for a reason.

Japan is tied with Haiti for height. Environmental effects aren't even pushing in the direction he needs them to.

Now consider the difference between Pygmy populations in Africa and Nordics. There's nothing you can feed the former, barring Human Growth Hormone, that will make them reach similar average heights.

And if your (Questionmark's) point isn't about the African pygmies, because they are among the most genetically diverse groups, consider those who are outside of Africa, who are more closely related—there are several groups with average male height under 5 feet.

(to both of you) I'll note that the question as to how much variation is possible, referring to standard deviation, is rather strange, as the standard deviation depends on the variance. I suppose it's possible if environmental factors play a large enough role?

There's plenty of room in the human genome for large differences in polygenic traits or Japanese and Norwegians would be the same average height.

Edit: Not to pile on to this comment excessively, because this applies equally well to many others, but posts like this were what really turned me into an HBD guy. You present a fully general argument against population level genetic differences in literally anything, apparently without noticing that there are plenty of such differences that are completely uncontroversial.

our most common ancestor is very recent

People often mean very different things when they say "most common ancestor".

Do you mean the person such that every single person living today has as an ancestor somewhere in their family tree? This person is a mere 3,000 years ago: http://www.stat.yale.edu/~jtc5/papers/CommonAncestors/NatureAncestorsPressRelease.html

Do you mean the time from which every person living back then was an ancestor to everyone living today. That's about 7,000 years as you mentioned.

Do you mean the person from which a certain locus in all modern living humans descends from? This person is about 50,000 years ago (this is highly dependent on the locus though)

Do you mean the person from which all of a large block of the DNA of all living people comes from? This person is about 300,000 years ago (see e.g. Y-chromosomal Adam, the guy who all modern extant Y-chromosomes are descended from) and isn't even an anatomically modern human.

Do you mean the person from which all of our DNA is descended from? This organism is many many millions of years old and isn't even human.

The first two cases really don't mean much when looking at modern humans. For instance you could have gotten a fragment of Chromosome 1 from this person while I got a fragment of Chromosome 17 from this person (if we even got any DNA from him in the first place, which in itself is pretty unlikely), and it's perfectly possible that people living in East Asia preferentially got Chromosme 1 fragments from him while people in Europe got Chromosome 17 fragments from him (because his descendeds which moved to those locations carried those specific parts of his genome there).

Same with the second case, just because every human being at that point was both our's ancestors doesn't mean anything about what proportion of those ancestors we have and these proportions can be very different, from Wikipedia:

This is illustrated in the 2003 simulation as follows: considering the ancestral populations alive at 5000 BC, close to the ACA point, a modern-day Japanese person will get 88.4% of their ancestry from Japan, and most of the remainder from China or Korea, with only 0.00049% traced to Norway; conversely, a modern-day Norwegian will get over 92% of their ancestry from Norway (or over 96% from Scandinavia) and only 0.00044% from Japan.

Thus, even though the Norwegian and Japanese person share the same set of ancestors, these ancestors appear in their family tree in dramatically different proportions. A Japanese person in 5000 BC with present-day descendants will likely appear trillions of times in a modern-day Japanese person's family tree, but might appear only one time in a Norwegian person's family tree. A 5000 BC Norwegian person will similarly appear far more times in a typical Norwegian person's family tree than they will appear in a Japanese person's family tree.

It's the third and further things which matter for how much genetic variance there is between two groups, becuase at that point you can directly point to specific portions of the genome and say that for both of us that ancestor provided the DNA at this location.

Those numbers are way too low.

The 3000, if you read the link you put, is using a way oversimplified model.

The 7000 is clearly false given the separation of the Americas long before that, and very low rates of admixture since aside from the last 500 years.

You don't actually need to have any DNA from any specific people generations back in your ancestry, the recombination could and often does go the wrong way.

Your overall point is good, though, that things go far enough back to matter, and that mere common ancestry doesn't mean an enormous amount.

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