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Comment by JKCalhoun | Hacker News Reader

> Wow, good genes!

Said with irony? I mean, the guy was into eugenics—thought some races are smarter than others.

A huge amount of American public school policy is grounded in noticing that there are massive and systemic discrepancies in academic achievement between students of different racial backgrounds, and trying to figure out what to do about that. If you paid any attention to the Algebra I controversy in San Francisco public schools recently, that was largely driven by bureaucrats and activists within the public education system who were concerned by racial discrepancies in the ability to do Algebra I work. "some races are smarter than others" is too reductive a claim, but claims pretty closely related to that are relevant to a lot of things in American life. I don't think anything Watson said about racial differences existing was obviously incorrect, regardless of whether you use the word "eugenics" to describe it or not.

If you say person X thought Y was true, ask yourself if Y was true would you accept it? If the answer is no you are not ready for this kind of discussion.

As for whether it's true or not, let's just say we don't know for sure because scientists either are not allowed or don't want to research this question.

Even if he was "into eugenics", there is strong evidence that your genetic makeup contributes significantly to your longevity.

And why wouldn't that be plausible given effectively all available cognitive data support this conclusion?

Of course I'm being facetious. I know why. No one wants to ponder that because of the stigma, so everyone puts their head in the sand and avoids the uncomfortable.

I mean, he lived to 97. Given what he's known for, it made me chuckle. Anyway, I thought it was Crick who was into eugenics. If it was both of them, I'm afraid I shall have to amend my opinion of both of them from "disturbingly troubling" to "unredeemable so let's just get them out of the textbooks thanks" right away.

By all means they should remain in textbooks. We have a lot of unredeemable people in history that we should not ignore.

If anything it's probably a healthy reminder that even "smart" people can have blinders on?

But isn't this true? Asians are proven to have the highest IQ

No.

Race isn't biological, it's a social and political construct. The social and political construct known as "Asians" comprises about 60% of the global population. Also, IQ is not a measure of intelligence.

There are cultural reasons why some people in some "Asian" countries may do better on average in academics, such as stronger familial bonds, peer pressure and a greater cultural value placed on scholastic achievement, but that's far from proof that "Asians" are genetically and intellectually superior to other races, much less that therefore eugenics (and by extension the white supremacist ideology it was created to normalize, which ironically considered "Asians" to be subhuman) is "proven true."

If it was a cultural thing it would be a multi modal distribution.

It's most likely a combination of both genetics and society - neither are absolutes. There is no concrete evidence that intelligence is purely a social construct, nor that it is genetic. We simply don't know.

People get cancelled not for saying that it is genetic, but for questioning whether it may be. Of course, we will never know if we're not allowed to ask. Cancel culture is anti-science.

Watson may have been racist, but questioning whether there is a relationship between genetics and intelligence by itself is not racism.

We are allowed to ask this question, and we have asked it, and we've found that the evidence does not validate the premise of inherent racial intelligence or other racial essentialist views[0]. Claims like "Asians have the highest IQ" are not meaningful or scientifically valid.

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_and_intelligence#Research...

This (https://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=171) US-government provided table of average SAT scores in the United States in 2023, which has breakdowns by race/ethnicity of the test-taker, and clearly shows Asians with the highest average score out of any of the racial categories in the chart, is evidence for something that you could pithily summarize as "Asians have the highest IQ". The relationship between SAT scores and IQ and intelligence in an everyday sense; and how representative people whose racial categorization went into this chart are of everyone on the planet who could also be grouped into that racial category; are more complicated questions. Nonetheless, the hypothesis that there are genetic differences between people of different racial groups that affect their intelligence in a similar way to how they affect more obvious racial correlates such as hair and skin color, is not obviously wrong.

> This US-government provided table of average SAT scores in the United States in 2023

If you look at their source[0], there's no information about how they controlled for confounders (because it's impossible as they acknowledge[1].)

There's a strong correlation between "education of parents" and "SAT score"[2] which implies that family wealth is a strong contribution to a child's SAT score (something we all know anyway); that's also backed up by [3].

(I'd suggest that [4] also contributes to the positive correlation between familial wealth and test scores but perhaps in a more oblique "the higher goals are aimed at by kids who have the backing to contemplate them because of family support structure, tutoring, ability to pay for the degree(s), etc." way.)

(Similarly for [5], I suppose - there's a distinct correlation between what I'd say was "perceived difficulty of major" and the mean SAT scores. Again probably down to familial wealth, support, tutoring, etc.)

Someone who's an actual statistician would probably rip this apart much more thoroughly and with more rigour than I, of course.

[0] https://reports.collegeboard.org/media/pdf/2023-total-group-...

[1] "Relationships between test scores and other background or Evidence-Based Reading and Writing (ERW) and Math contextual factors are complex and interdependent. Caution is sections of each assessment in the SAT Suite: warranted when using scores to compare or evaluate teachers, schools, districts, or states, because of differences in participation and test taker populations."

[2] Bottom of page 4: "Highest Level of Parental Education"

[3] Bottom of page 5: "Median Family Income"

[4] Bottom of page 8: "Degree-Level Goal"

[5] Top of page 8: "Intended College Major"

>There is no concrete evidence that intelligence is purely a social construct, nor that it is genetic.

There isn't even any concrete evidence that it's a good thing.

Intelligence has a significant genetic component, otherwise it couldn't have evolved.

"Intelligence isn't genetic" is the left's version of creationism.

No one is claiming that intelligence isn't genetic. Certainly not "the left."

The claim is that race as commonly understood and defined (specifically by eugenicists like Watson) has no genetic basis, and therefore claims which follow from that definition such as "Asians have higher IQ" are not scientifically valid, and do not prove the validity of Watson's racial views.

For some reason sparkie just decided to reframe my comment around a claim I didn't make and now here we are litigating a "leftist" strawman.

I'm so tired.

I thought we were beyond this argument, no? There are so many things with all the implications here it's hard to know where to start.

You do realize that picking a certain concept "intelligence", defining it to include certain characteristics, tying it to a certain notion of "fitness", defining "Asian", and finally, tying "asian" to "intelligence", are all matters of definition, choice, and perception and nothing fundamental about reality, right?

> the guy was into eugenics

So are you (probably). Do you think incest should be legalized?

> thought some races are smarter than others

What other conclusion can you reasonably come to based on the available data?

A biologist can correct me if I'm wrong, but I understand "race" in humans to be little different than, say, hair-color. Perhaps there's data showing that brunettes are smarter than blondes?

EDIT: Never mind, user krapp's comment is what I was reaching for, "Race isn't biological, it's a social and political construct."

It's not completely correct, though- "race" as we currently classify it has a strong correlate to genetic background and self-identified race is often used as a proxy for genetic background.

But it is biological. You can try to obfuscate and use big words all you want, but it is, in fact, biological.

No one said it wasn't biological. Hair color is also biological.

You:

> krapp's comment is what I was reaching for, "Race isn't biological, it's a social and political construct."

Race is obviously biological.. You can determine someone's ancestry and ethnicity by their DNA...

https://www.researchgate.net/figure/PCA-clustering-Principal...

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