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We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11680335 and marked it off-topic.

It's great that you've thought this through, but I'm sure you would agree that your opinion on the set of people that people other than yourself should be allowed to marry is without consequence. That's what we're talking about here, not the race of the person you should marry, but whether you should be able to dictate that choice for others.

> And then, on a national level, mean IQ has a much more pronounced impact (law of big numbers). Averaging down the intelligence of your population is an irreversible process. Once you mixed it down, the only way (for now) to bring it back up would be to be actively reproduce smart people for it. Even if you are not smart yourself, having high IQ people is needed to maintain and improve your surroundings. If I remember correctly, the US Army doesn't accept people with an IQ lower than ~85 because it's counterproductive to have them around.

I think the poster is suggesting making that decision for (presumably) his race.

Though implicit is the assumption that the natural way to group people is by ethnicity, but you could argue for grouping by country, social class, income, education, etc. For instance, I feel way more connection with techy/nerdy people who grew up similarly than I do to, say, a gang member who spent years in jail but happens to be my ethnicity.

I'm pretty much a libertarian, so I don't have a strong opinion on what the laws should be. (At least for now.)

But I note that there are consequences.

Some people justify environmental laws because of their consequences on the future of a nation. I can easily see the same logic used to prevent the "degradation" of a population.

> future of a nation

> degradation of a population

Assuming we're talking about America (apologies if not) and segregating populations into races in america as they're recognized, I don't see how these two goals match up.

If you care about the nation of America, then the answer according to the data is to ship in a bunch of smart asians to raise the IQ.

Or am I under the false belief that anybody can be American, not just (I'm guessing since it's the majority group) white people?

Not an American, but I think you are right.

Preventing interracial marriage wouldn't change a thing for the country as a whole, because people would just continue to reproduce with their own race.

Nevermind, I was wrong.

I don't see how my personal race preference could be applied to a country.

> Then I learned how IQ is highly correlated to genetics (from 0.75 to 0.8).

The correlation of IQ to heredity varies based on the relation, and isn't nearly as strong for parent-child.

Same person (tested twice) .95

Identical twins—Reared together .86

Identical twins—Reared apart .76

Fraternal twins—Reared together .55

Fraternal twins—Reared apart .35

Biological siblings—Reared together .47

Biological siblings—Reared apart .24

Unrelated children—Reared together—Children .28

Unrelated children—Reared together—Adults .04

Cousins .15

Parent-child—Living together .42

Parent-child—Living apart .22

Adoptive parent–child—Living together .19[60]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heritability_of_IQ#Correlation...

> I don't think that I would personally want to have a child with someone of another race if I know that it would push down his expected average IQ from 100 to 92 or lower, in addition to potentially increasing his testosterone levels

Why not just have your mate do an IQ test? People don't mate at random: those who value intelligence will select intelligent mates.

For that matter, why pick race as your correlating factor? You could also correlate by college major, highest education attained, or wealth: http://www.statisticbrain.com/iq-estimates-by-intended-colle... https://brainsize.wordpress.com/2014/06/02/iq-years-of-educa...

Race is a tricky thing in the US. It encompases not only genetics, but also social status, wealth and access to resources, etc. It also isn't the end-all-be-all, since even with all these factors the top 1% of every race will beat the average of any race: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:WAIS-IV_FSIQ_Scores_...

> Why not just have your mate do an IQ test? People don't mate at random: those who value intelligence will select intelligent mates.

> For that matter, why pick race as your correlating factor? You could also correlate by college major, highest education attained, or wealth

There's a little problem with that, because from what I know, there's a regression to the mean in biology.

If two exceptionally tall Japaneses have children together, their children might be a little taller than their national mean, but they won't be as tall as the parents.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jpmlqtnrec8

I suppose the heart of the matter I'm getting at is this: you have claimed to have delved into IQ correlation data and arrived at the conclusion that interracial marriage is not a good thing. However I have tried to point out that the evidence doesn't lead you to this conclusion since other variables may correlate and you can simply pick smart people from any race, because assuming regression to the mean, if I pick a 160IQ black woman and a 150IQ white man, we'd expect their kid to be centered around 155, regardless of race.

Nonetheless you have repeatedly brought it back to race, which means that this is tremendously important to you. On that topic I'm curious why. You're probably pretty intelligent (though introspection is a skill separate from observing the outside world), so I have high hopes for a good analysis ;)

I am aware that white men have the highest suicide rate of all races, so there's something going on there. I've also heard explanations like "lack of culture", and I personally suspect much of it comes from attacks from activists (offline and online) in what amounts to a social power struggle, and that the natural response to being attacked is to band together and really delve deep into your cultural identity.

Many of us pick race in the US (apparently especially in US prisons), but I've somehow straddled race, tech, and maybe internet culture.

> However I have tried to point out that the evidence doesn't lead you to this conclusion since other variables may correlate (...)

They may correlate, but genetic is by far the biggest driver. Identical twins (same DNA) have between 0.76-0.86 correlation between their IQs. The 0.76 is raised separately; a completely different environment and they are still almost identically smart!

The other numbers you've written are the effect of moving away from perfectly identical DNA. (You could argue that part of the difference is cultural, but that doesn't change anything if we don't know which part of the culture is negatively impacting the child.)

>because assuming regression to the mean, if I pick a 160IQ black woman and a 150IQ white man, we'd expect their kid to be centered around 155, regardless of race.

No, see my Japaneses example. Two geniuses of 160IQ will most probably have children returning closer to the mean (tho probably a little higher). In this case, the mean is different for every race.

If I'm a white with a IQ of 100 and I have a child with a black with a IQ of 100, the expected result is not 100, because the black is an outlier at this IQ.

> Nonetheless you have repeatedly brought it back to race, which means that this is tremendously important to you. On that topic I'm curious why. You're probably pretty intelligent (though introspection is a skill separate from observing the outside world), so I have high hopes for a good analysis ;)

I do too. :-)

I brought race because that was the topic at hand and because we are talking biology here (reproduction). Obviously "white" isn't my only criteria. I could speak at length how I like girls with a fighting spiring, but that'd be a little out of context.

Like I said in a parent post, my previous position was pretty much "all races are the same". It took -months- before I really changed that. What really prevented me from accepting the various studies was the survivor bias: All the individuals from the other races I ever saw was on TV. Actors, political commentators and such. If they got their job, it's because they were good. I wasn't looking at the average here.

The same apply for people of the same race by the way. Many people of IQ 120+ went to university and their entire social group is composed of smart people. They don't realize (and can't conceive) that a huge part of the population is less intelligent.

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> I am aware that white men have the highest suicide rate of all races, so there's something going on there.

I have no clue why that is, but I'd very much like to know.

> Regression to the mean

Well, firstly racial studies demonstrating the need to protect the white race was kind of this guy's specialty... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._Philippe_Rushton

But onto the topic at hand, the original theory was based on an incorrect understanding of genetics, where a child's genes were based on both the parent and the "ancestors". The reality is that children inherit directly from parents, including some genes that were unexpressed, which can cause changes. But they're still more likely to be smart. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regression_toward_the_mean#His...

If regression to the mean dominated 100% of the time, evolution would not be possible. http://biology.stackexchange.com/questions/41982/regression-...

Over time if you keep breeding smart people, you can expect to see smart children. If you did this and ignored ethnicity, you'd overtime breed yourself a new "race".. after all how do ethnicities form in the first place but by separation, drift, and natural selection? Also if you did this long enough you might breed superhumans, but I suspect that genetic engineering would come first and beat you to the punch ;)

> I brought race because that was the topic at hand and because we are talking biology here (reproduction)

I keep bringing it back to America since that's all I know, but race in America is more social construct than biology, and keeps changing over time. For instance the Irish, Italians, or eastern europeans were at some point not considered white. In other countries, race is seen differently as well (though this has changed due to western media)

White today includes a lot of people who have historically not been considered white, and IQs will vary by those subgroups. For instance: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ashkenazi_Jewish_intelligence is measured to be especially high. (Also randomly, I find it especially strange that the stormfront crowd seems so eagar to separate themselves from jews. I never understood that)

Anyways, the desire for protectionism seems like a never ending quest to me, since we will always find ways to divide ourselves. Even when america was mostly european, this sentiment still existed, and was directed at the Irish, italians, jews, etc.

https://www.google.com/search?q=anti+jewish&source=lnms&tbm=...

What we call race has formed mostly for social reasons: we look similar enough, share enough cultural similarity, and we're under attack by the "other" so let's band together. Asians in asia all hate each other. They all get along in the US. Pakistanis and Indians don't get along in their home countries. They're best friends in the US. Same story: you arrive in the US, you band together with people most like yourself to help you when faced with pressure.

Edit: I'm sorry you're receiving downvotes even though you're being civil. I suspect that this is the type of "under attack" that I mentioned in my last paragraph that gives rise to strong same-race stickiness to begin with.

> If regression to the mean dominated 100% of the time, evolution would not be possible.

> The reality is that children inherit directly from parents, including some genes that were unexpressed, which can cause changes. But they're still more likely to be smart

I think we are talking past each other (that or I'm terrible at explaining myself).

I made sure to specify that the offspring would return close to the mean while probably being higher.

Many characteristics are dependent of many genes (such as apparently IQ). You mention unexpressed genes and I agree with you on this. You have a pool of possible combinations of expressed/unexpressed genes. In a given population, all the combinations will cluster around a given mean; this gives you a bell curve. Now, if an Asian is born with an IQ of 70, this means that this particular combination was bad, but the rest of his genetic baggage is still able to produce other combinations which are more likely to be within the average.

Let's take a simpler example. Say my current genes would allow these results in a given characteristic: [1, 5, 5, 5, 5, 5, 10]. Of these results however, only 1 is truly expressed per generation. It so happens that I got lucky and got the value of "10".

Then I mate with someone of a mean "8" having the following combinations: [8, 8, 8, 8, 8].

Our children would be more likely to be between 8 and 5 than between 8 and 10. It would take generations of selective breeding to bring my descendants back to the mean of "8"

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> I keep bringing it back to America since that's all I know, but race in America is more social construct than biology, and keeps changing over time. For instance the Irish, Italians, or eastern europeans were at some point not considered white.

It's not a social construct, it's just that the resolution at which people are looking at it changed.

It's like trying to name species through evolution. When did rabbits become 'rabbit', rather than their ancestor species? It's a continuum, we just decide that after a threshold of differences, we change the name. It doesn't mean that differences between species don't exist.

There are many differences between those we usually call "whites". People in the Netherlands are taller than those in Ireland; depending on the resolution they could probably be called diffrent races/subspecies.

> For instance: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ashkenazi_Jewish_intelligence is measured to be especially high.

Yes and if the genetic hypothesis is correct they apparently had 2 major factors helping this: A selection for intelligence AND a strong cultural tendency to marry within the group. (See a few Kosher rules designed to make sure Jews don't eat/socialise with gentiles.)

> Also randomly, I find it especially strange that the stormfront crowd seems so eagar to separate themselves from jews.

Do you know if they want to distance themselves genetically or from the people with this culture? For example, are they opposed to marrying secular Jews?

> Anyways, the desire for protectionism seems like a never ending quest to me, since we will always find ways to divide ourselves. Even when america was mostly european, this sentiment still existed, and was directed at the Irish, italians, jews, etc.

Well sure, but that doesn't change anything in my desire to not knowingly reduce the chances of my children. It's not just a "I support my local sport team" mentality.

In addition, it seems that most people think that some differences are worth preserving. I would probably be judged as the devil himself if I had a plan to mix the Jews or Native Americans with Africans until they were one indissociable group.

> Edit: I'm sorry you're receiving downvotes even though you're being civil.

It's HN, I wasn't expecting anything else. ;-)