I'm just arguing that it's possible (not certain) that race probabilistically determines life outcomes such as income partly for biological reasons, not only systemic racism or culture. Those other factors exist but I don't think they're obviously the only factors.
Measures to reduce black poverty can certainly help reduce black poverty, but I don't think it's known that they can bring blacks up to the same level of poverty as whites. So we may never completely solve the problem of black poverty with assistance.
> disproved over and over again
Can you identify even one of those disproofs? I've never found any and nobody who's tried to convince me they exist has ever produced any.
B) the race/IQ link doesn't line up with our modern understanding of genetics.
How is that?
C) the disparities we're studying show up in contexts that can't be explained by IQ.
There can be other differences besides IQ, and there are environmental and cultural factors.
D) the disparities we're seeing are larger than we would expect to see given IQ gaps.
That's consistent with my idea.
E) the IQ gap itself has decreased over time in ways that are inconsistent with a view that is purely biological.
Straw man.
> It's not intuitive or expected that a biological adaptation to sun level would affect the brain to the degree you're claiming.
I'm not talking about skin color but "black" in the commonly used meaning of the word. Indians and Australian Aboriginals don't count regardless of the color of their skin.
> You're claiming that there's a shared racial genetic outcome. So what are the shared genes for people with that race? Where are they?
I'm not claiming there are shared genes causing it. It might have appeared independently for different black ethnicities.
If the idea of a correlation happening independently is too far fetched for you then another possibility is their shared lack of recent Neanderthal DNA.
> You don't know what these genes are, or how they affect intelligence, and how they're linked to skin color, or even what percentage of the Black community shares them, but you're super-convinced that there's a strong link between our brains and our ability to get a sun tan.
You're putting words in my mouth. I'm not super convinced. I just think it's a realistic possibility.
Not knowing about the genes is not a reason to dismiss the possibility they exist. Even Darwin discovered evolution without knowing what genes were. Should that whole theory have been rejected until genes were discovered? Should dog breeders have stopped doing their job until genes were discovered? Of course not. This idea that we can't know it exists without identifying the genes is obviously ridiculous.
> Can you identify even one of those disproofs? I've never found any and nobody who's tried to convince me they exist has ever produced any.
Can I identify a proof that Black people can read and self govern? I mean... the modern world? Are you arguing that early race science claims haven't been disproven? Are you familiar with the early claims that race scientists made? You should look up some of them if you're not.
The vast majority of early race science claims can be disproven by your own claims. A 10-15 point IQ gap is not high enough to render someone unable to read, vote, or understand mathematics. If early race science claims were true, then we would expect to see a much larger gap than we currently see. And we don't.
So what's been happening is we've spent a large portion of American history (and pre-American history) listening to people make strong claims that Black people were biologically unable to accomplish certain tasks. Then Black people accomplished those tasks, and scientific racists moved the goalposts a bit and said, "okay, they could accomplish those tasks, but they won't be able to do these ones." And that's continued basically unabated to modern times, where the goalposts are now at, "okay, but they can't achieve equal pay/productivity, they don't have the genetics for that task."
And at no point has the race science community had the presence of mind to take a step back and think, "maybe given that all of our testable predictions have been proven wrong throughout history, we don't understand genetics as well as we think we do."
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> B) the race/IQ link doesn't line up with our modern understanding of genetics. How is that?
See the remaining paragraphs I wrote in that comment. If you need more clarification, our modern understanding of racial categories is that they are more socially designated than genetically designated (more on that below). Our understanding of intelligence is that it is enormously complex and not likely to be controlled by a small number of genes behind, say, skin color. Increasingly, modern scientists don't even really think of genetic intelligence as being reducible to a single number anyway. Most modern geneticists have rejected a race/IQ link. There's still a lot about intelligence that the scientific community is still learning, but the people in the labs right now doing that research on intelligence do not think your theories are likely to be true.
> C) [...] There can be other differences besides IQ, and there are environmental and cultural factors [...] D) [...] E) [...]
So what's your objection to the equality movement and racial activism? It sounds like you agree there are environmental and cultural factors that suppress Black outcomes, so it should be easy to get on board with eliminating those factors. We can have a debate about genetics after we've eliminated the external non-genetic factors that you agree exist.
We've had a really long conversation at this point for you to just now let on that you think Black outcomes are in fact at least partially influenced by external factors that aren't related to innate ability (ie, systemic racism and/or inequality).
> Indians and Australian Aboriginals don't count regardless of the color of their skin.
??? I'm not sure how to respond to this. African American skin color exists for the same reason that Indian skin color exists, it's an adaptation to living close to the equator. This is a pretty weird objection. It also doesn't change anything about the fact that African American genetics are also not uniform at this point. A large percentage of the Black community is multiracial, and your "commonly used" definition of Black is primarily determined by who looks Black, regardless of the percentage of African American heritage that person actually has.
> If the idea of a correlation happening independently is too far fetched for you then another possibility is their shared lack of recent Neanderthal DNA.
Your research is once again out of date, recent studies suggest that early African Americans also had Neanderthal DNA.
And again, if your ancestry claim was true we'd expect to see very different outcomes in individuals with mixed ancestry, and... we don't see that. So I'm still waiting for an explanation for why mixed-ancestor Blacks with European ancestors have the same outcomes as everyone else in Black communities. That is not a result you would expect to see if this was genetic.
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> Not knowing about the genes is not a reason to dismiss the possibility they exist.
Yes, it is. I don't know how else to get this across to you, so maybe an analogy will work. I'll entertain your idea once you're able to disprove to me that the the liberal/conservative divide in our current country is based on innate intelligence.
You say there are other explanations for rural/urban income gaps and college demographics that fit that data better? You say that class divides, culture, and location are obviously better explanations? I'm sorry, I'm sure those are contributing factors, but until you conclusively disprove the genetic connection, then we have to entertain the possibility, even though the evidence is spurious and it doesn't really make sense as a causal relationship in the first place. You say that even if it was true, it shouldn't derail conversations about bias or political equity or censorship? That's certainly a perspective, but maybe we should bring the theory up on every conversation about liberal bias anyway. I'm not saying it's the reason, just that it's a realistic possibility that no conservative has ever conclusively found proof against.
Do you see the problem here? It's really easy to make silly and even outright harmful claims like the above and then retreat back behind "just asking questions". That's why (particularly when we're dealing with a field like race science which has a history of being incorrect and harmful) we demand a certain standard of evidence. Like a set of genes. Or at least a correlation that can't be better explained by external stimuli.
> Should that whole theory have been rejected until genes were discovered? Should dog breeders have stopped doing their job until genes were discovered? Of course not. This idea that we can't know it exists without identifying the genes is obviously ridiculous.
But not half as ridiculous as the idea that now that we know genes exist we should ignore them. We have better standards now. This is like arguing that we don't need to identify viruses because some people in olden times washed their hands occasionally.
And to be clear, we knew that dog breeding worked because we could run experiments and see it working. We knew that evolution existed because we could make testable claims and predictions that were proven true. Both of those things are a million miles away from "I have no evidence for this, but you can't disprove it." Evolution was not running around claiming that it should get the benefit of the doubt until it was disproven. It brought real evidence and testable predictions to the table that made sense based on what we knew about the world.
That's clearly not what we're talking about. Why would you mention that something obviously false has been disproven? It's a strawman. It's hard to read so much of your writing when you can make such extreme misinterpretations of what I'm saying.
> African American skin color exists for the same reason that Indian skin color exists, it's an adaptation to living close to the equator. This is a pretty weird objection.
That's quite simply not what black means in common language. It doesn't matter what the cause of the skin color is, the correlations with IQ and income are not the same.
> early African Americans also had Neanderthal DNA.
Yes. That's consistent with what I wrote. Again, you seem to be intentionally misunderstanding me. This is getting frustrating.
> So I'm still waiting for an explanation for why mixed-ancestor Blacks with European ancestors have the same outcomes as everyone else in Black communities.
Oh. didn't know that. Reference?
Anyway, still no clear evidence against "Blacks are genetically predisposed to being poor.". So I assume it doesn't exist.
> That's clearly not what we're talking about. Why would you mention that something obviously false has been disproven?
Look, it's not my fault you don't know the origins of race science or what the claims were that your predecessors were making. If the origins of your theory are embarrassing to you, then... I mean, I don't know what to tell you, maybe reflect on why those origins are embarassing.
More recently, the modern wave of race science has been largely driven by people like Murray, who posited in the Bell Curve that the 10-15 point IQ gap is primarily genetic and highly heritable. Murray suggests that social interventions are unlikely to significantly lower that gap, and that instead we should focus on eugenics (he uses nicer language of course).
You and I have already disproven Murray's theory in previous comments by noting that gaps decrease when race is hidden from hiring managers, and by noting that wage gaps persist in industries where success does not have a high correlation with intelligence. So we don't need to rehash that theory, you're already on board with me that Murray is wrong to say that the current IQ gap can be mostly explained by genetics. You've already softened that claim, and now you say that the current gap is partially explained by genetics.
The point is, the entire history of race science has been people like you making claims about Black inferiority, getting those claims debunked, and then shifting the goalposts a little and making the same exact claim just to a slightly lesser degree. There's a pattern here.
> That's quite simply not what black means in common language.
Yes, it really is; the person on the street is not using ancestry tests to determine what percentage "Black" people are, the common denominator is skin color. Black communities do not have the uniform genetic background you're assuming, and common metrics people on the street use to determine "Blackness" do not line up with ancestry.
This is broad scientific consensus, the position of the AAPA since the late 90s can be summed up as: "Race does not provide an accurate representation of human biological variation. It was never accurate in the past, and it remains inaccurate when referencing contemporary human populations. [...] Notably, variants are not distributed across our species in a manner that maps clearly onto socially-recognized racial groups."[0] This is the general consensus of people who are actually studying genetics and anthropology in the real world.
And in fact, when you actually go over the studies even from race scientists, what you find is that in the majority of cases the racial phenotype even they use to categorize their subjects also lines up with the AAPA's view. You know how the majority of these race science studies determine who is and isn't Black? Skin color and heckin self-reporting of racial identity. So it's just pure revisionism to claim that "actually, we meant something different by Black the entire time".
If you are trying to make a claim here based on purely percentage of African American heritage, then you need to throw a lot of existing race research out and start over, and that includes books like the Bell Curve which were almost entirely based on metrics like self reporting and not actual measurements of ancestry.
> That's consistent with what I wrote. Again, you seem to be intentionally misunderstanding me.
My deep apologies. Just to make sure I understand, when you said that "another possibility is their shared lack of recent Neanderthal DNA", what you actually meant was that African Americans do have recent Neanderthal DNA?
And not to keep harping on this, but "shared" is putting in a lot of work here, because as I keep mentioning, African American populations do not have the genetic uniformity you claim.
> Oh. didn't know that. Reference?
Take a look at stats released from companies like 23AndMe and Ancestry. Our best guess is that the average African-American genome is about 20-30% European (although we've only recently started really measuring this, so those numbers might change over time). That range can vary drastically as well, it's not that all Black people are uniformly 25% European, they might be close to 50%, or as low as 10%. I'm not sure what kind of reference you're looking for with that, but there have been a couple of press releases and cooperative studies using 23andme data that go into detail on their findings.[1]
It's pretty clear that the Black IQ gap is consistent across demographics and geographic regions in the US, which... like I said, leads us to question why we're not seeing more variation, even in studies from people who believe in scientific racism -- because the actual racial makeup of those groups is not consistent across geography.
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> still no clear evidence against "Blacks are genetically predisposed to being poor.". So I assume it doesn't exist.
And still no clear evidence against "Conservatives are genetically predisposed to being lower education/poorer than the average population", so I also assume that evidence doesn't exist.
I will make you understand how burden of proof works. If you believe that it's my job to disprove that Black IQ gaps are genetic, then I want you to disprove to me that rural/urban Conservative/Liberal IQ and wage gaps are genetic -- or I want you to explain to me why you think that theory shouldn't be factored into every discussion about university bias, voting rights, and industry discrimination against Conservatives.
And of course, I'm still waiting for a response to the below quote:
> So what's your objection to the equality movement and racial activism? It sounds like you agree there are environmental and cultural factors that suppress Black outcomes, so it should be easy to get on board with eliminating those factors. We can have a debate about genetics after we've eliminated the external non-genetic factors that you agree exist.
You say that you agree with me that a purely biological difference, even if it does exist, is not enough on its own to explain the gap we see. So you should be fine with progressive policies that attempt to eliminate the non-heritable reasons for inequality.
Measures to reduce black poverty can certainly help reduce black poverty, but I don't think it's known that they can bring blacks up to the same level of poverty as whites. So we may never completely solve the problem of black poverty with assistance.
> disproved over and over again
Can you identify even one of those disproofs? I've never found any and nobody who's tried to convince me they exist has ever produced any.
B) the race/IQ link doesn't line up with our modern understanding of genetics.
How is that?
C) the disparities we're studying show up in contexts that can't be explained by IQ.
There can be other differences besides IQ, and there are environmental and cultural factors.
D) the disparities we're seeing are larger than we would expect to see given IQ gaps.
That's consistent with my idea.
E) the IQ gap itself has decreased over time in ways that are inconsistent with a view that is purely biological.
Straw man.
> It's not intuitive or expected that a biological adaptation to sun level would affect the brain to the degree you're claiming.
I'm not talking about skin color but "black" in the commonly used meaning of the word. Indians and Australian Aboriginals don't count regardless of the color of their skin.
> You're claiming that there's a shared racial genetic outcome. So what are the shared genes for people with that race? Where are they?
I'm not claiming there are shared genes causing it. It might have appeared independently for different black ethnicities.
If the idea of a correlation happening independently is too far fetched for you then another possibility is their shared lack of recent Neanderthal DNA.
> You don't know what these genes are, or how they affect intelligence, and how they're linked to skin color, or even what percentage of the Black community shares them, but you're super-convinced that there's a strong link between our brains and our ability to get a sun tan.
You're putting words in my mouth. I'm not super convinced. I just think it's a realistic possibility.
Not knowing about the genes is not a reason to dismiss the possibility they exist. Even Darwin discovered evolution without knowing what genes were. Should that whole theory have been rejected until genes were discovered? Should dog breeders have stopped doing their job until genes were discovered? Of course not. This idea that we can't know it exists without identifying the genes is obviously ridiculous.