This is the elephant in the room that explains why IQ is such a controversial topic:
https://brainstats.com/average-iq-by-country.html
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-01-14/nobel-prize-winner-ja...
https://brainstats.com/average-iq-by-country.html
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-01-14/nobel-prize-winner-ja...
"We need to openly talk about race differences in IQ, lest the neo-nazis appropriate it and use it as recruitment propaganda" is a very common refrain, and pretty transparent in its intentions, as it itself acts as recruitment propaganda.
https://twitter.com/nntaleb/status/1116342266195476481 <- this Twitter thread addresses the country-IQ argument effectively, and I haven't seen it properly refuted so far.
Either you assume that IQ is 100% not genetic, or you have to admit that race seems to be correlated.
No human capability is likely to be 100% genetic.
But my concern is that if there is a genetic component to intelligence at all, that is a problem. 40 IQ points less on average is no joke.
High IQ may or may not correlate with success in our civilization, but considering that our civilization is highly dysfunctional and has positioned itself on the verge of numerous forms of self-destruction, how much does that really matter? There are clearly many more components than IQ-style intelligence that contribute to a good life and a stable society. Anyone who thinks that either a person’s or an ethnic group’s performance on an IQ test says anything about that person’s or group’s value to the world is an idiot regardless of what their IQ might be.
The fundamental problem with racists and group identitarians in general is that the things you know about a group don't tell you anything about the individual. The promise of the West is supposed to be (and i argue still is, despite Twitter) that we judge individuals by the content of their own character and not by their group memberships.
Which is why it's almost certainly junk science. 40 points on a scale normalized around 100 is an absurdly large disparity to try and hang on genetics. Are there any heritable traits that show that kind of variation between human populations?
Height is a pretty obvious one that ranges dramatically worldwide, but the gap is more like 13%, not 40%! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_average_human_height_w...
Which goes to say that no matter which genetic advantage you might have at birth there’s nothing that the socio-economic factors cannot surpass. In this particular case the socio-economic factors were very much in favor of an American runner being allowed to win an Olympic Games race while being doped, and that happened because the US is a huge market for all the athletics/related producers and almost all of the Olympic Games sponsors.
With male runners, doping would stilll be a factor, but there is less headroom for manipulation. You can't dope someone into arbitrarily high performance, and if you could, other physical characteristics wouldn't matter at all, which is clearly not the the case becasue we don't constantly see short, fat dopers popping up in elite contests.
Don’t know if it’s anywhere on the Internet but I remember an East German trainer saying something along the lines of: “It’s much easier to make a man out of a woman than it is to make a Superman out of a man”, all this in relation to East-Germany’s official doping policy. So I’d rather trust a professional in this matter (the East-Germans were truly the masters of doping) when saying that it is indeed easier to artificially increase the performances of female athletes compared to male athletes.
Not to end it all on a pessimistic note, there are also “happy” cases of naturally gifted athletes being at the right time and at the right place in terms of external socio-economic factors. The latest such example is the recent Tour de France winner, 22-year old Bernal, who won the Tour on its highest stage which I think reached 2700 meters, while he himself was born and grew up at 2800 meters of altitude. But he also won the Tour because he is a member of the infamous British team Ineos (the former Sky), which also gave the winner of last year’s Tour, Geraint Thomas, a guy born and bread in seaside Cardiff and who until last year’s victory had never had a Top 10 finish in any of the big 3 tours. He’s 32 now, if I’m not mistaken, cyclists much greater than him (like Pantani or Ulrich) were basically lynched by the public opinion for doing less egregious stuff (they at least were talented at climbing).
Kenyans/Ethiopians have held the world record in the marathon since 2003. An Ethiopian also held it for a few months in 1998, and most of a year in 1964. Were Kenyans not genetically dominant until 20 years ago? Or are there other factors that caused the rise of a large number of elite runners from a particular area of the world?
Running is one area where it is mindbogglingly obvious that there are significant genetic factors involved, yet there are clear and significant changes in running ability by country of origin for reasons that have nothing to do with genetics.
40 IQ points less on average is no joke, but also doesn't point the finger at genetics any more than it does at culture or primary education.
"50 Years Ago, Kenya Established Its Distance Running Dominance
The African country became a medal-winning power at the British Empire and Commonwealth Games in August 1966, and hasn’t looked back."
Obviously (1) getting invited to the event and (2) learning the rules of a particular event are major selection factors when drawing conclusions from event results.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-altitude_adaptation_in_hu...
All we really know is that - not surprisingly - people who grow up at high altitudes tend to use oxygen a bit more efficiently than people who don't.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4037248/
Of course, genetics interact strongly with environment. That's precisely why someone raised in a high-altitude Ethiopian community but whose ancestors are from, say, the Netherlands would not be expected to be as well-adapted to altitude (or long-distance running) compared to their historically Ethiopian neighbours, all else being equal.
>That's precisely why someone raised in a high-altitude Ethiopian community but whose ancestors are from, say, the Netherlands would not be expected to be as well-adapted to altitude (or long-distance running) compared to their historically Ethiopian neighbours, all else being equal
You say "would not be expected to be" because, of course, no-one has actually done this experiment and no-one knows what would actually happen. Nor indeed would we be able to verify that any given individual from the Netherlands does in fact lack the putatively relevant genes, since we don't know what they are.
The abstract to which you linked points out that "Kenyan and Ethiopian distance-running success is not based on a unique genetic or physiological characteristic." That seems like a strawman, as I don't think anyone ever claimed that any single characteristic or gene has been making all the difference. The abstract calls out "favorable somatotypical characteristics lending to exceptional biomechanical and metabolic economy/efficiency." Sure, but how much of these characteristics and exceptionally favourable response to training and living at altitude is potentiated by genetics? The answer of "none" would be an extraordinary claim requiring extraordinary evidence.
> You say "would not be expected to be" because, of course, no-one has actually done this experiment and no-one knows what would actually happen. Nor indeed would we be able to verify that any given individual from the Netherlands does in fact lack the putatively relevant genes, since we don't know what they are.
I'm not aware of any interventional study that, say, separates high-altitude-native twins so that one twin grows up at low altitude but with everything else being equal. That sounds completely impractical. However, there exists observational evidence from human migrations to and from high altitude. Some examples:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4201282/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17329275
Finally, to address your earlier comment that "all we really know is that - not surprisingly - people who grow up at high altitudes tend to use oxygen a bit more efficiently than people who don't," this is a grossly inaccurate summary of scientific understanding of the multiple examples of convergent evolution that have produced genetically altitude-adapted populations in Kenya/Ethiopia, the Andes, and Tibet.
If you remove all constraints on effect size, then everything is a factor in everything. There is no strong reason to think that genes unusually prevalent among Kenyans play a large role in success at distance running. Note that this is not identical to the claim that genes do not play a large role in success at distance running. Certainly, performance in any given sport is significantly influenced by genetic factors (though the details are not well understood). But the following is not a good argument:
Genes significantly influence athletic performance
Keynans are great at distance running
|- Keynans have genes that make them better at distance running.
The article points out that Somalians and Kenyans don't (on average) have particularly similar somatotypical characteristics, and yet both nations have produced exceptional distance runners.
>Finally, to address your earlier comment that "all we really know is that - not surprisingly - people who grow up at high altitudes tend to use oxygen a bit more efficiently than people who don't," this is a grossly inaccurate summary of scientific understanding of the multiple examples of convergent evolution that have produced genetically altitude-adapted populations in Kenya/Ethiopia, the Andes, and Tibet.
This is just bluster. We know little about the genetic details, and even less about any possible effects on elite athletic performance.
This contradicts scientific findings.
> Genes significantly influence athletic performance
> Keynans are great at distance running
> |- Keynans have genes that make them better at distance running.
I've been discussing Kenyan and Ethiopian runners for brevity, but as you point out, I should have been more specific: this chain of reasoning should conclude with the much more compelling observation that "from 1980 on, ~40% of the top honours available to men in international athletics at these distances (Olympic medals, World Championships medals, and World Cross Country Championships honours) have been earned by Kalenjin." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kalenjin_people
> The article points out that Somalians and Kenyans don't (on average) have particularly similar somatotypical characteristics, and yet both nations have produced exceptional distance runners.
The Kalenjin identity predates modern borders of Kenya and Ethiopia, which torpedoes the "but multiple nations have produced elite runners" argument. They are massively disproportionately successful at distance running, and it's well-established that their specific genotypes are key to their success -- not the only key, but a major part.
None of this is "bluster." We can politely disagree here all we want, but the fact is that we both have near-instant access to reams of supporting evidence for the fact that Kalenjin genes uniquely predispose them to distance-running prowess, similar to how the Bajau of Southeast Asia are genetically predisposed to have 50% bigger spleens as a free-diving adaptation (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sama-Bajau#Free-diving_adaptat...), or how Tibetans are adapted across multiple genes to thrive at high altitude in a different way from Kalenjin or Andeans (https://www.theguardian.com/science/2010/jul/02/mutation-gen...), or any of the other specific examples of genetic adaptation to ancestral environments whose existence might be uncomfortable to some, but are nevertheless real.
That's pretty vague. You keep saying that things are "well-established" by science, but don't provide proper citations. The literature on Kenyan athletic performance is mostly pretty speculative and inconclusive. The article that you yourself cite in an earlier comment (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4037248/) has a very tentative conclusion:
"A critical analysis of this unique phenomenon has shown that these athletes do not descend from a single isolated genetic profile.4 The data suggest that the genes most studied and associated with performance in aerobic endurance running (ACE and ACTN3) do not seem to fully explain the success of these athletes. It seems unlikely that Africa is producing unique genotypes that cannot be found in other parts of the world. So far, the evidence shows that the subjects’ phenotype (molded over time by several factors) seems to have greater influence than their genotype in their long-distance running success.4 While recognizing that this field of study is at an early stage of understanding, the available results show that the identified candidate genes for human performance neither determine nor exclude the possibility of athletic success. Although, the right choice of parents can help in the search for athletic success, this is not the deciding factor between success and failure in sport.4"
This is such a brilliant quote that I have to bring it in again:
"Another item that ought to prompt the thoughtful reader to question the very large discrepancy in intelligence that the authors assert to exist between various human sub-populations is the extraordinarily low average IQs assigned to many African nations. For example, the authors claim that the mean IQ in Equitorial Guinea is only 59, well shy of the threshold score of 70 below which the testee is classified as mentally retarded. Anyone who has spent significant time with an American or a European whose IQ is that low (as I did for a year while assisting in a special education program) can attest that such an individual is not capable of independently managing his own life, and will require constant caretaking to get on in the world."
[Edit: https://mises.org/library/does-iq-determine-wealth-nations And it's the Mises Institute.]
Giving "IQ points" any meaning at all, 40 of them is an obvious difference. As in, big enough that this shouldn't be an issue.
It's just a topic we really don't have a good grasp of, as is the case with most of medicine. We understand a lot of strategies, but our understandings of root causes is still very poor.
In other words, IQ does not measure how educated one is.
[1] https://www.jstor.org/stable/2294274?seq=1#page_scan_tab_con...
This phenomenan is especially notable nowadays where wealthy parents canb buy a diagnosis to givetheir children extra time on IQ tests.
And then of course ADHD drugs and other stimulants raise the question of what it means for a person to "have" an IQ, if that IQ (and/or test score) is influenced by doping. Stimulants and the brain question our notion of what is an "individual", much as the bacteria in our gut do. The idea of an "individual" is a very synthetic Western mathematical concept that does not have a strong basis in the science of the natural world.
https://www.sciencealert.com/this-tree-stump-is-mysteriously... "Scientists Find Weird, Zombie-Like Tree Being Kept Alive by a Forest 'Superorganism'"
I would expect this to be true of all environmental effects, unless they do permanent damage, or there is some critical window for learning.
Stability over a person's lifetime, regardless of experience, is what you'd expect of a genetic effect. Environment varies. Genetics doesn't.
* Human Accomplishment: The Pursuit of Excellence in the Arts and Sciences, 800 B.C. to 1950
* Losing Ground: American Social Policy, 1950–1980
* Real Education: Four Simple Truths for Bringing American Schools Back to Reality
* Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960–2010
Oh, and The Bell Jar, although that doesn't somehow imply that 1950 was the peak of White Culture.
and also, there is not a single piece of evidence on this planet that IQ is 100% hereditary.
Or, bear with me here, you have to admit that IQ tests can only measure trained skills that correlate loosely to raw intelligence.
The issue is that I think there is very little evidence to suggest that IQ is only measuring trained skills.
Otherwise people could get much, much better at IQ tests given practice, but this does not seem to be the case.
I have taken multiple (3) professionally administered IQ tests, and my highest score achieved was on the first of those, when I was eight years old.
I don't think that means anything, but there you go.
But that does not mean "races" have to have different inherent average IQs.
Right?
No, it is not. "Races" are identified by a range of superficial characteristics relating to appearance and by language and cultural background. The connection to genetics is very loose. The idea that black people in Africa all belong to a single "race" would seem quite absurd to most Africans, for example.
Sure, racists are interested in race and everything related to it because they feel they are superior, and conveniently disregard the things that don't support them being superior.
But race is not a cultural construct, as evidenced by the fact that you can't culturally adapt your skin to change colors.
It is entirely possible to note the differences between men and women without being sexist. It is also possible to be interested in and note the differences between different parts of the human population without being racist.
But people who believe in "races" don't think that it's just a matter of skin color. They think that skin color (or whatever other feature) is a marker of some deeper difference. That's where the mistake lies. Otherwise racial differences would be of no more significance than, say, differences in hair or eye color.
Racial categories are nowhere near as objective as you suggest. For example, Italians used not to be considered "white" in the US. Many Americans who self-identify as "black" would not be considered black in many parts of Africa.
And then of course with ever increasing mobility, the differences are probably 'smoothing out' so to speak.
>Otherwise racial differences would be of no more significance than, say, differences in hair or eye color.
Interesting example, because red haired people generally have more sensitive skin and are prone to burning in the sun. This is an example of the kinds of differences that it is actually interesting and helpful to study.
No, it's completely correct, in the sense that there is no objective or scientific definition of "race". Every cultural construct is based on something.
>This is an example of the kinds of differences that it is actually interesting and helpful to study.
And of course, these are exactly the differences that people obsessed with "race" aren't interested in.
2. Racists can't point to actual genetic variation to establish their ideas.
3. Racists can go fuck right off.
It's also very hard to research since actual IQ is strongly affected by environmental factors like nutrition etc.
But come on, it's weak. The relationship that chart shows clear as day is wealth. Wealth is super correlated. The top of the chart are exlusively industrialized democracies. The bottom are exclusively impoverished (and mostly unstable) backwaters.
And within those cohorts, sure, you can kinda/sorta say that east asians sit above europeans, maybe. Or maybe not. Four points of IQ are nothing -- it's like three decades of development per the Flynn effect, or maybe one decade of really focused investment in education.
There are counteless other good hypotheses for a weak signal, and this isn't an area amenable to direct experiment, so realistically we're never really going to know.
And the same stuff is true of the linked article. It's poking holes in specific statements by finding rigorous numbers that "disprove" it, but only very weakly. Basically, the point to the article isn't that "IQ is solid science", it's that Taleb's paper was too aggressive in its conclusion. Which is sort of a yawner, and not really a good excuse to bring race into the discussion.
But yeah. It's possible that darkies are dumber or that the gooks are smarter. It's possible. What drives those of us on the left absolutely bonkers isn't the possibility that you might be right, it's the fact that you look at messy data like this and immediately go to the least tolerable conclusion as if that's what you want to be true. And... yeah, yuck.
(Edit: and right on cue three quick responses about "but that doesn't prove race isn't correlated, here's another hypothesis for why race might be correlated!", which sounds to me suspiciously like "I really want race to be correlated with IQ!" The truth is we just don't know, we might never, even if it is it's weak, and I for one would rather live in a world where people don't want this to be true than the one I'm stuck in. )
Just a thought. What's that quote from the Big Lebowski again?
And that's what horrifies us. Is that really a worldview you want to have?
Compare with the distribution of GDP per capita: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Chinese_administrative...
Honestly, this could be put to rest fairly "easily" (obviously this wouldn't be that easy and is never going to happen) if you took 1000 expectant mother's who have just become pregnant from Equatorial Guinea and transplanted them to various wealthy countries. Then measure the children's IQ as they grow up and compare them to the rest of the local population.
I have a feeling the difference in IQ would be negligible, and that the vast divide can be attributed almost wholly to nutrition/etc in early development, but you can't maintain that this is the case until you've actually tested the hypothesis, which as far as I'm aware has not been done.
I'm not entirely sure how the Flynn effect is relevant, unless the claim is that certain countries (African ones mostly) are not being retested at all, but European countries are. Is that the idea?
In the US the people we talk about (and again, suspiciously, tend to be the focus of this IQ stuff) as "african-american" or "hispanic" are members of predominantely creole populations with staggeringly broad genetic backgrounds. Which you'd think would get them thrown out as obvious confounding outliers, but yet...
But not every population is genetically diverse, and if intelligence is genetic, this could obviously manifest itself in an entire, non-genetically diverse population. Watson himself seems to be racist based on his later comments (where he did specifically mention black and white), but I think it is worth pointing out that his 2007 comments, for which he first earned the racist badge, made no mention of race. Rather, he said he was "inherently gloomy about the prospect of Africa" because "all our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours – whereas all the testing says not really".
He was not talking about African-Americans / black people in general there, but rather about Africa and Africans, which as a whole have been more genetically isolated than the rest of the world. Africa has always had a hotter climate (which many have argued is less evolutionarily selective for intelligence than colder climates) and worse nutrition due to less arable farmland. If intelligence is at all genetic, all of those factors could have a serious impact over 1000s of years on what the "baseline intelligence" is. Obviously regional IQ tests are not sufficient on their own to show that this is the case, but the argument itself is not inherently flawed. We just don't have the data to point in one direction or the other.
Claiming that race is a good indicator of such is flawed, as race and genetic diversity are not inextricably linked as the racists want to claim, as you have pointed out. But postulating that Africa as a region is less genetically intelligent due to a variety of evolutionary factors is not flawed in the same way.
Trivially disprovable by looking at children adopted into wealthy families. Spoilers: they stay wealthy.
You seem to be talking about the fact that in many societies, inheritance and an ossified hierarchy exist. This is obviously true, but not really a trivial disproof of the above.
The wealth of the family had to be generated from somewhere. Are you saying that the progenitor of this wealth was just as likely to be unintelligent as intelligent?
But not as much as their non-adopted siblings. Correlation of 0.23 vs 0.33
https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/07/rich-pe...
So, to say that "wealth comes from intelligence" is false implies that, whatever it is that allows one to get wealthy, making better decisions is not the decisive factor... which I may agree with in many cases, but not as a general rule... and when measuring the wealth of a whole country, the general rule would certainly tend to dominate. Geography and resources availability also play a big role, of course, but as we can see easily, many countries that are quite unlucky with regards to those things still manage to score very highly on the wealth rankings - and perhaps not coincidentally, have high average IQ.
"Let's look at Germany. Lynn and Vanhanen cited four studies that found that West German IQ scores ranged from 99 to 107, whereas East German IQs were as low as 90 back in 1967, and later studies pegged their scores at 97 to 99 points. Taking the extremes, these data imply a gap as big as 17 IQ points between West and East Germans. How to account for the rise East Germany in less than a generation of 7 to 9 points? After all, East and West Germans are not all that genetically different. Lynn's data now show an average German IQ of 102 points. Similarly Lynn and Vanhanen report that average Greek IQs were 88 in 1961 rising to 95 in 1979. An increase of 7 IQ points in 18 years, as Unz points out, "is an absurdity from the genetic perspective." " (https://reason.com/2012/08/07/nations-smart-rich-wealth-crea...)
"Another item that ought to prompt the thoughtful reader to question the very large discrepancy in intelligence that the authors assert to exist between various human sub-populations is the extraordinarily low average IQs assigned to many African nations. For example, the authors claim that the mean IQ in Equitorial Guinea is only 59, well shy of the threshold score of 70 below which the testee is classified as mentally retarded. Anyone who has spent significant time with an American or a European whose IQ is that low (as I did for a year while assisting in a special education program) can attest that such an individual is not capable of independently managing his own life, and will require constant caretaking to get on in the world." (https://mises.org/library/does-iq-determine-wealth-nations)
> Honestly, this could be put to rest fairly "easily" (obviously this wouldn't be that easy and is never going to happen) if you took 1000 expectant mother's who have just become pregnant from Equatorial Guinea and transplanted them to various wealthy countries.
Even if you got full consent for everyone involved, can you not see the absolutely massive confounding factors around cultural support? To do this experiment, you'd have to cover up all the physical differenes beween the Guineans and the locals (including visual appearance and phemeromones and gut biology), adopt the babies into local families without their knowledge, and never telal anyone what happened, without adding other confounds.
Exactly... one may conclude from this one of two things:
* countries become wealthy for unrelated reasons, allowing its populace to get wealthier and achieve a higher IQ. * people with higher IQ can generate more wealth, hence countries with higher average IQ become wealthier.
I think that the first hypothesis may be true in certain cases, e.g. oil-rich places... but it seems more likely to me that the second hypothesis is correct, after all I would expect a group of more intelligent people to achieve more than a group of less intelligent people, or is that a polemic claim?
Imagine if a bunch of "more intelligent" people invent a nuclear bomb and blow themselves up (might yet happen), or discover the amazing properties of lead and poison their brains across an entire civilization (already happened). then the less intelligent people might achieve more, eh?
Let's dive right into a big racial/IQ claim: Jews have above average IQ. Assuming that, that makes them more successful as a group, perhaps? On the other hand, starting from say 1930, Jews were absolutely horrific at average achievement, thanks to the Nazi Holocaust. If the Jews were less intelligent, perhaps they would have blended into society better (after all, Jews don't look especially different, except for Jews that kept their mating pools limited) and been less noticeable by the Nazis.
For instance, average height of a population is not a fixed value but changes with the progress of a country. Presumably due to the diet improvement in the mother's generation.
Another consideration: parasites, I would be surprised if they don't influence the development of child intelligence.
First is that there are plenty of environmental factors to consider, especially with regards to 3rd world countries. In rural parts of Africa where people are predominantly subsistence farmers, there is a very high rate of prenatal and neonatal malnutrition. And that can cause mental retardation. And so can getting malaria and a variety of other infectious diseases in infancy.
Second point is that you are assuming that race is a well-defined genetic construct. But it isn't, it's largely a social construct. Population genetics for humans is a continuum, and we just arbitrarily draw the lines.
Two tall people aren't guaranteed to have a tall kid.
Two intelligent people aren't guaranteed to have an intelligent kid.
Two empathetic people aren't guaranteed to have an empathetic kid.
Two white people are pretty much guaranteed to have a white kid.
Basically, if you try to divide people up into broad categories of race, you will find individuals in race A that are more genetically similar to some individuals in race B than other individuals in race A. You can define race in terms of the handful of genes controlling skin color, eyes, hair etc, but all the other genetic differences between people won't generally fall into that same pattern
When using the more accurate definition of race, people are usually talking about different but highly related species. For example Chimpanzees and Bonobos are different races. African and Indian elephants are different races. The Neanderthals was a different race of humans. With this understanding there is currently only one race of humans.
Claiming the existence of some Irish race (and let alone white race) is at best confusing, but usually wrong.
Genuinely curious: isn't this an example of cherry-picking outliers in an attempt to refute the overarching rule? So what if it's technically possible to find a minority of non-Irish who exhibit some traits that are much more common among Irish people, and it's possible to find Irish people who are phenotypic outliers? In general, the fact that clusters in a dataset are fuzzy and imperfect doesn't imply that the clusters are meaningless.
I don’t believe that is the case. I think all we need to do is show that a race categorization is neither necessary nor sufficient in order to demonstrate the uselessness aspect of it. And we do that by showing that there exists a non-irish person that has enough traits generally regarded as belonging to the Irish race (not necessary), and that there exist a person of Irish heritage that doesn’t nearly all of these traits (not sufficient).
But regardless of it being guilty of cherry-picking. As long as the dataset is fuzzy, I think the opposite opinion will necessarily have to be arbitrary to define which traits, how many, and how consistently they inherit in order to be defined as a race. I know the technical definition is also arbitrary (when are two populations distinct species?) but at least the arbitrariness is consistent with how we view the rest of the natural world. That is we don’t consider gray wolfs with darker coats to be a separate race from gray wolfs with lighter coats. We correctly differentiate them as belonging to separate populations. Applying this only to humans is arbitrary.
The controversy is from folks trying to take that correlation, reframe it as causation, and then attribute it to genetic factors.
There are tons of non-genetic factors that can affect IQ and are correlated with race: exposure to pollution, economic situation, nutrition, etc.
Then there is the test itself. I’m not sure how localization happens, but it’s a pretty hard problem that lends itself to biases.
The top 5 highest scoring countries, Hong Kong, Singapore, South Korea, Japan, and China all have a cram school culture that prepares them for the endless rounds of standardized tests they have to take to secure a position in society.
I would expect people trained from infancy to excel at standardized tests, to excel at standardized tests.
Many of the reasons I listed would explain why, in the US, the states of West Virginia (98.7) and New Hampshire (104.2), despite having very similar demographics have such different average IQs. One state is richer than the other.
It would also explain why Hawaii, which demographically is comprised of people (about 1/3rd) who share genetic lineage with people from high IQ nations, has a relatively low average IQ. Hawaii has a pretty bad public school system.
Until someone locks two children in an Edu-Pod from birth to adulthood and feeds them the same stream of information and nutrition and measures their IQ when the pod ejects them at the end of the test, we'll never know for sure, but my gut tells me that all of the people who think "genetics is destiny" are losers.
Try doing a sport competitively at a high level, where the whole team is eating the same, working out the same, and some plateau at a 315 deadlift and start getting injured all the time and others keep going to 450 without any problems.
And that's ignoring obvious things like deformities, asthma, insulin resistance, etc.
That covers maybe 1% of the population. Meanwhile the other 99% of us have environment effects (nutrition, education and training, role models, weather, exposure to niche opportunities and advantages) that are greater sources of variation than genetics.
The schools tend to be very heavy in STEM subjects, which does not seem an implausible source for high IQ test performance, which favor the kind of abstract, logical thinking that STEM subjects strengthen.
So, IQ could be a measure of abstract thinking capability, and it might be the case that one's ability to think abstractly can be developed through proper education.
Additionally, there is also my anecdata of improving my SAT score purely through study.
A side note: Taleb's writing ability goes to hell when he rants.
Well ... perhaps in some way:
Since 1991 there has been the presumption that persistent heat affects the IQ over
generations. It was initially assumed that living in lower temperatures requires a higher
physical fitness and causes higher social demands. Richard Lynn, a professor at the
University of Ulster in Northern Ireland, also assumes that the colder temperatures
increase the brain volume. Whether brain size is at all related to intelligence, is
controversial.
In general, a hot climate is considered a disadvantage for the development of
intelligence. The reason is nowadays primarily seen in the high physical energy demand
and the resulting stress.
Another study suggests infectious diseases might be a cause for lower IQ scores. In that case, perhaps infectious diseases spread more easily in hot climates?
See: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-is-average-iq...
Why is this sad, and isn't it obvious that we already have? I mean, it's been well proven that humans are smarter than many other species, even when those animals are raised in "human-like" conditions.
It seems completely obvious to me that, since we see genetic-based differences even within species in numerous traits (height, strength, speed, memorization ability, etc.), why would we think intelligence would be any different.
I'm skeptical of the IQ heat idea - it'd be readily demonstrable if it existed - but the numbers available, particularly outside the US/Europe, are largely current/recent, not from pre-1950s.
> A paper recently published in the journal Psychological Reports concludes that of the 48 contiguous United States, those with cooler average temperatures tend to have populations with higher IQs.
https://psmag.com/education/a-compensation-for-cold-weather-...
As everyone knows, the world is big, only ~4.3% of people live in the US. Unfortunately for you, the US it's not the center of the world. By the way, I couldn't care less about a study correlating the whitest and darkest states in the US, a country that shines in racism, academics in there probably go out of their way to make brown people look bad, like that pseudo scientist James Watson.
Quoted from your article:
> the ancestors of Swedes and Norwegians who were clever and resourceful enough to survive in that harsh climate passed down those heightened mental abilities to their descendants.
That's really funny, since the smartest people in the world are Asians and Italians. What northern Europeans are superior though, in the US mostly, is assuming they are better. Going out of their way with mental models to consider themselves superior.
[0] https://newleftreview.org/issues/II97/articles/mike-davis-th...
"The assertion that IQ measures human intelligence in any general sense, or that the source of variance in IQ scores is primarily cognitive in nature, remains unsubstantiated after decades of investigation.": https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/0382/3398d781543cd0edcf51f1...
https://www.cell.com/neuron/fulltext/S0896-6273(12)00584-3
If you're going to try to convince people of your "race realism" bullshit on this platform you're gonna have to try a lot harder than unsubstantiated shit posting.