I think the study is controversial because there is huge bias in the way people are educated in these different countries.
No human capability is likely to be 100% genetic.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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"
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.
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...
In other words, IQ does not measure how educated one is.
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.
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'"
[1] https://www.jstor.org/stable/2294274?seq=1#page_scan_tab_con...