How Fragile Is Our Intellect?

IQ is predominantly genetic but it's well known how poor nutrition and upbringing can stunt it. There's lots of potential problems with this argument.

There is some evidence that the higher than average IQ of Asheknazi Jews is because of inbreeding. I posted about it on HN but people are wary of discussing such a sensitive subject.

Even discounting the genetics argument , it can also be considered as some kind of an accidental breeding for IQ as wealthier jewish families tended to have more children.

More here :

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ashkenazi_Jewish_intelligence

While it's good to point out that this also does not invalidate the conclusions, it's a rather different thing from what you've said.

A general feature of many scientific endeavors is to measure $CARDINAL_PROPERTY across $CATEGORY - beak length across birds, speed across big cats, lifetime across mammals, etc. Do you oppose all these fields of inquiry, e.g. ranking stars by their brightness?

Or are these questions merely forbidden to ask about humans, due to some privileged position granted to us by god (or whatever)?

I would frame your objection a bit differently: finding an Asian IQ advantage is in no way incompatible with racism or white supremacism. Many of these guys (Rushton for example) believe that Asians are inferior in areas other than IQ.

> It doesn't change the basic purpose of the endeavor, which is to purport to rank the peoples of the world by intellectual capacity.

Based on this statement, I suspect our fundamental disagreement is over whether it does more harm than good to consciously deny empirical evidence for something when it has the potential to be spun into harmful propaganda. My position is that, while saying some true things can lead to harm in this way, it's more damaging to suppress or deny this information. How can it possibly be more damaging to forbid people from saying something inflammatory, like "Asians are smarter than Europeans" or "Europeans are smarter than Africans", than to allow it? Because the biggest gift you can give someone with a harmful agenda is something that looks to the untrained eye like a rational argument with solid empirical support, and then attempt to silence them.

You might bristle, but, according to studies I've seen, a white supremacist is not actually wrong when s/he announces that "Black people are on average less intelligent than white people!". What is wrong is the implication that they intend: that black people therefore deserve less respect/money/rights/something than do white people. As I see it, by trying to make discussion of the empirical data itself taboo, well-intentioned equality-minded people are only feeding the mistaken belief that, were there to be a genuine, measurable difference, the implication of being less deserving would follow. Not only is this false, it gives the supremacist more firepower: they can now truthfully claim, in addition, that "Liberals don't want this information to be known!".

One of the underexamined issues here is the special role of intelligence in the popular understanding of what it means to be human. We aren't threatened to the same extent by people drawing group-level distinctions based on, say, athletic ability. Our attachment to the idea of intelligence as central to humanity is, I believe, simply an unfortunate habit of mind. Fortunately, we're not totally governed by it: we don't put a murderer in prison longer if they murder someone highly intelligent. We already collectively agree that there are fundamental things to which we're all entitled based on nothing more than our humanity. (It's unfortunately true that there are many gaps and inconsistencies still in existence, but my point is that we aspire to treat people equally in these respects regardless of intelligence, and that in some cases at least, we achieve it.)

This is the right way forward, I believe. We need to create a widespread understanding that, even if average-level group differences exist in traits as beloved as intelligence, this would not imply anything about that person morally -- that is, about what that person deserves in life. With this in place, a supremacist's boasts about their race's intelligence have no more recruiting power than yelling out "Black people have darker skin than white people!" or "An object at rest tends to remain at rest!", or any other empirically demonstrable fact.

As a specific example concerning Richard Lynn, his division of "three major racial groups" (see the SPLC article linked elsewhere here) falls flat in the face of numerous fallacies, among them that "negroid" isn't a single racial category (whatever that means), but as a collective of all indigenous populations of Africa is generally held to represent greater diversity than all other human populations combined.

It's just bad science.

If the assumption is that humans are destined to ever greater intelligence -- well, that may well not be true either. Evolution is not teleological, it is not goal-oriented. It is variation subject to selection.

I do think that the question of what selective pressures are being exerted on human populations presently is an open question. That genetic drift and the cost and complexity of sustaining our complicated brains is an interesting area for research. It's exceptionally fraught though. And the affiliations of the researcher and institutions in question, as well as my source on this, lead me to question its value strongly.