The Specter of Difference

NRODT, via The Derb's homepage ^ | John Derbyshire

[RightWingAtheist]

Also available in the latest print edition of National Review, I cut out the middle to get down to the conclusion, and added bold to Derbyshire's most important comments. You can read the entire article by clicking on the link.

[RightWingAtheist]

Ping-worthy?

[Junior]

I left my database at home. I'll add this in tonight.

[PatrickHenry]

Ping-worthy?

Definitely! I'm cranking up the ping machine ...

[PatrickHenry]

EvolutionPing

A pro-evolution science list with over 310 names. See the list's explanation at my freeper homepage. Then FReepmail to be added or dropped. See what's new in The List-O-Links.

[Right Wing Professor]

Funny coincidence: I was reading Dawkins on the evolution of race just last night (in The Ancestor's Tale)

Dawkins attributes the confusion about the genetics of race to Lewontin, who's a Marxist as well as a mathematical geneticist. Lewontin was one of the first to make the observation that the average differences in genomes between the races is smaller than the average genetic diversity within any single race, and claimed that meant that race is insignificant. Dawkins points out that that's just self-evidently false; line a dozen Swedes, a dozen Nigerians, and a dozen Japanese up side by side, and you can be 100% sure you can identify every single one of them to the correct group. The reason you can is that the differences within the races are largely random, whereas the differences between the races tend to be non-random, and in fact, the result of natural selection. Evolution, as we all know, changes populations, not individuals, so differences between populations are far more significant than differences within populations.

Dawkins then goes on to state (1) that there are no socially important average differences between the races (which seems to be utterance of a conventional pious hope rather than a statement of scientific fact) and (2) that even if there were, humans deserve to be treated as individuals, not as members of a group (on which I hope we all agree). Interestingly, for all the abuse he gets here, Dawkins rejects affirmative action (or positive discrimination, as he calls it) precisely because it betrays the latter principle. In this respect, he's more conservative than George W. Bush.

In re Derbyshire's article; yes, there are serious social issues we have to confront here, but the confrontation would be a lot less traumatic if as a society we'd accepted the principle of equal opportunity rather than equal outcomes. If one could answer the finding that group A has on average a 10 point lower IQ than group B by 'so what? I don't care about groups, I care about individuals', then the finding wouldn't have the potential to be so socially and politically divisive.

[Pharmboy]

Dawkins attributes the confusion about the genetics of race to Lewontin, who's a Marxist as well as a mathematical geneticist. Lewontin was one of the first to make the observation that the average differences in genomes between the races is smaller than the average genetic diversity within any single race, and claimed that meant that race is insignificant. Dawkins points out that that's just self-evidently false;...

And Lewontin's fellow leftist at Harvard, the late Stephen Jay Gould, used to beat this "fact" to death.

[PatrickHenry]

I've never really thought this stuff through to any solid conclusions. Race certainly exists, but I think it's fairly trivial. Mostly cosmetic. There hasn't been enough time since the first appearance of Homo Sapiens for any significant speciation-type of divergence. And now that we can easily travel the globe there will probably never be such divergence. (Biological divergence will happen, given interstellar travel and settlement, because the distances between groups of humans will become too great to circumvent, but that's not our problem today.)

Most of the behavioral differences attributed to race are probably cultural. IQ differences are ridiculously irrelevant. The average IQ of my race is as meaningless to me as the average IQ of my zip code. Race is the playground of politics more than any other discipline.

[furball4paws]

"Science is a Daddy Discipline, not a Mommy Discipline"

I like that.

[furball4paws]

I noticed he left out Creationists from the ID of Pseudoscience and wishful thinkers.

Purposeful? (probably, no need to rile the ranks)

[js1138]

I would be willing to bet that financially successful people, as a group, have lower IQs than academically successful people. The required skill set is not the same.

[Right Wing Professor]

The average IQ of my race is as meaningless to me as the average IQ of my zip code.

Well, I've noticed that the people most convinced their own race is more intelligent are usually the ones holding up the low end of the Bell Curve :-). I've never met a White Supremacist who wasn't dumb as a rock.

[Right Wing Professor]

No, and IQ isn't the only thing, or even the most important thing. But if you're trying to hire physics Ph.D.s, and your adminitrators want strict proportionality to the general population, and there are racial differences, you're in a bind.

[Hardastarboard]

Where is the monkey that can . . . . pass a law

Um, I can name some names here, if anyone is interested. They're mostly based in Washington, DC.

[js1138]

Several decades ago I did a review of the literature for my Masters degree. My personal conclusion was that the lower average black IQ was a social and cultural phenomenon. At the time there had been a rather expensive early childhood intervention experiment that brought the group IQs of black children to the national average.

These group improvements diminished over time, after the kids found themselves back in a culture that scorned academic achievement.

Affirmative action is a poor way to achieve results, but I'm not smart enough to know what the best approach would be. Personally, I believe that self-imposed apartheid is a disaster. And some subcultures are just plain broken and are hurting kids.

[Republican Wildcat]

[jennyp]

Ah, I think you snipped out the best paragraph of all:

(And as a further aside, fans of the Intelligent Design movement should note that none of the arguments presented in the Science papers goes against anything they believe. Sophisticated IDers do not deny the reality of evolutionary change within species, which is what these papers are talking about. ID denies only that evolution can account for new species, an idea that is not in play here. So far as the human organism over the past 50,000 years is concerned, the egalitarian Left has much more serious issues with evolution than the religious Right has. Prior to that date, the anti-Darwinian Right has all the problems, the Left really none. As a simple Darwinian rightist, I myself can glide serenely past all this illogical nitpicking . . .)

[RightWingAtheist]

He has riled them before here and here, as well as on The Corner regularly. Just check out the creationut ravings on those threads :).

[MonroeDNA]

Actually, "G," the most abstract and telling IQ measure, has nothing to do with culture.

[King Prout]

not bad. bookmarkworthy