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Comment by LudwigNagasena | Hacker News Reader

This is a really good article. Framing discussion of IQ differences as "the reasons why black people are just so damn stupid" is disingenuous and hostile.

If you think few IQ points difference (whether it is or it is not so) is enough to denigrate the entire race as stupid or worthless, you are a part of the problem.

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Well, one standard deviation is far more than just "a few IQ points". One general problem is that much of this stuff tends to be very US-centric. If you look at British data related to poverty [1] and the IQ of children [2], you get a somewhat different picture. You even have two different black populations with shared genetic ancestry, but different economic outcomes and different average IQ. (And Black Caribbeans weren't doing as well when they first arrived, but a few generations later, the gap seems to be closing.)

More importantly, as pointed out in an article by Kevin Mitchell [3], a professor of genetics and neuroscience in Dublin, we do not really know of any plausible mechanism by which such differences could have evolved. In the end, if you want to do science, you have to propose a theory by which an effect can be explained and then test that theory. What Murray & Co. have never done is to provide a testable theory that explains how cause and effect are supposed to be related.

[1] http://www.poverty.org.uk/low-income-and-ethnicity/

[2] http://www.unz.com/jthompson/intelligence-of-5-year-olds-in-... (not keen on citing James Thompson here, but I didn't find an open access source for the data)

[3] https://www.theguardian.com/science/blog/2018/may/02/why-gen...

Article [3] is pretty terrible, he doesn't make very many coherent arguments. IQ is subject to the same mixing, complex influences, mutations and trade-offs as other heritable traits (such as physical strength and lifespan, which also have no immediately obvious downsides), and writing a long article doesn't invalidate that. For example, this line is utter stupidity:

> This constant churn of genetic variation works against any long-term rise or fall in intelligence.

How did humans evolve then?!

Yes, this is exactly the kind of garbage that Quillette peddles. "Look, can't you be reasonable, can't we just discuss the reasonable possibility that blacks are cognitively inferior to whites like reasonable people?"

Hi dang, can we please get bans for people trying to mainstream racist pseudoscience on HN?

Why isn’t it reasonable? And wouldn’t such people also want to discuss that the mean IQ of Southeastern Asians and Ashkenazi Jews is higher than that of whites?

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