Scholar J. Philippe Rushton argued that there are at least 3 major races: Negroids, Caucasoids & Mongoloids, and that on a great many traits (i.e. brain size, genital size, size of breasts and buttocks, mental stability, promiscuity, crime) , Negroids were at one extreme, and Mongoloids were at the opposite extreme, with Caucasoids being in the middle. Rushton believed this pattern was caused by the r/K evolutionary spectrum. In other words, he believed Mongoloids evolved a more K genetic profile (lower birth rate but lower death rate) while Negroids evolved a more r genetic profile (higher birth rate but higher death rate) with Caucasoids being in between.
Rushton mapped these differences on to the time period when each of the three races branched off the main trunk of the human evolutionary tree: Negroids first (about 200,000 years ago), Cacuasoids second (about 110,000 years ago) and Mongoloids last (41,000 years ago). Rushton used these splitting off dates to argue that evolution was progressive, and some populations are more advanced than others.
One trait Rushton didn’t focus on since it did not get as much attention until recently, is autism, however it seems likely to me that autism also follows Rushton’s racial pattern. I have no data to support this, but my subjective impression is that Mongoloids are the most autistic race, and Negroids are the least autistic race, with Caucasoids in the middle. I believe this occurred because as humans migrated out of Africa into colder and colder climates, there was an r/K evolutionary trade-off: social IQ (useful for attracting mates and having high birth rates) was reduced, while technological IQ (useful for survival) was increased. So not only did humans become more intelligent as we moved North, but the type of intelligence also changed.
However the corollary of Negroids being the least autistic is that they are probably the most schizophrenic race, and Mongoloids are probably the least schizophrenic race. This is because autism and schizophrenia are in many ways opposites. That is autistics tend to be oblivious to the fact that other people have minds; this results in low social IQ because they treat other humans like objects. But schizophrenics have the opposite problem, they are so good at recognizing the mental states of others that they often perceive mental states where they don’t even exist (i.e. the tree is trying to tell me something).
In psycholgy circles schizophrenia is sometimes called a black condition.
What all of this suggests is that autism is a K trait and schizophrenia is an r trait. Thus even within the same race, we tend to find the upper class are more autistic and the lower class are more schizophrenic. This is probably because the upper class tend to be more K and the lower class tend to be more r.
That is autistics tend to be oblivious to the fact that other people have minds; this results in low social IQ because they treat other humans like objects.
I dunno if this is indicative of maladjusted behavior, in fact, quite the opposite: it could be they treat people like objects because people behave that way.
I really dislike how people who talk about race have a tendency to only talk about 3 races. In my opinion there are 5 races. Caucasians, Africans, East Asians and Arctic peoples, Australoids, and the 5th race is either the indigenous people of North/South America or the Pacific Islanders.
One of my geneticist colleagues says there are only 2 races: Africans and non- Africans.
Very clever theory. I have colleagues doing genetic research on autism & I will link them to this post before someone beats me to it.
Hello Pumpkinperson,
I am commenting because you seemed very knowledgeable on Lion of the Blogosphere’s blog. I just wanted to point out that several sources state that there is significant overlap in the genetic architectures of autism and schizophrenia (which overlap partly with the architectures of practically all mental illnesses).
http://www.psychiatrictimes.com/autism/autism-and-schizophrenia
Maybe there are genes associated with disordered thinking in general, and then genes that specify specific diseases. Or maybe all mental disorders are connected by their association with high genetic load.
Maybe I should read harder. I see that you point out the genetic overlap in an older post.
I see that you point out the genetic overlap in an older post
Yes. My argument (and I could be wrong) was that autism and schizophrenia are multidimensional conditions, and so they are identical on one dimension, but opposites on the other dimension. They are perhaps identical in the sense that they both involve impairments in executive function, but they are perhaps opposites in the sense that autistics are K genotypes and schizophrenics are r genotypes.
But this is just my speculation.
You forgot to speculate that Ashkenazim have higher rates of Schizo disorders than others. Well, it turns out to be true after some Israeli scientists have discovered a gene of theirs that predisposes them to this kind of mental illness.
https://theuglytruth.wordpress.com/2014/12/27/scientists-discover-gene-that-predisposes-ashkenazi-jews-to-schizophrenia-2/
Yes, blacks also have high rates, and they share something in common with American Jews, they are the 2 most disliked groups in America.
Oh wow, this is my first comment on this blog.
Those were the good old days.
*this was
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That’s an interesting argument and I’m quite agree with it. Indeed, people of different races have different symptoms of shizophrenia and autism and each of these disorders manifest themselves in varying degrees depending upon the race of a diseased person.
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Epidemiology of autism by race and birth country
Thanks for your excellent research. There all kinds of cultural and socioeconomic confounds in who gets diagnosed with what, but taking the stats at face value, it doesn’t look good for my theory.Not sure how to interpret the schizophrenia map though.
Thank you.
You should have been more serious Pumpkin Person. In science, conclusions only come after evidences.
It was a hypothesis not a conclusion. Hypothesis comes first. Then data tests the hypothesis. So far the hypothesis seems to be failing the test. If this continues, conclusion is to reject the hypothesis.
I agree with that, And this is far from being the only HBD hypothesis that fail to be supported by non self-made data.
Here’s a bit of autism data that kind of supports it (if we ignore Hispanics who don’t fit neatly into any of the 3 major races and who are not yet assimilated)
:
Prevalence also varied by racial/ethnic group, with non-Hispanic white children 30% more likely to be identified than non-Hispanic black children and 50% more likely than Hispanic children.
http://aapnews.aappublications.org/content/early/2014/03/27/aapnews.20140327-1
Another autism study that kind of supports it:
So, although every group’s rate was going up, the rates of groups other than black students were increasing much faster.
That switch from over-representation to under-representation was “pretty remarkable,” said study lead author Jason Travers, Ph.D., an assistant professor at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst. Although it remains unclear why this is happening, some hypotheses are that minority students are being diagnosed with disabilities other than autism or they may be getting identified later than their white peers.
The likelihood of Asian students being diagnosed with autism was also higher than that of the overall student population for all of the years that were studied, coming very close to the risk index for white students.
http://psychcentral.com/news/2013/05/25/minority-children-less-likely-to-get-autism-diagnosis/55243.html
If they limited the Asian category to East Asians or at least to Mongoloids, they might be more autistic than whites.
Look carefully, your hypothesis is fully supported by my data if we only consider US born mother’s children. However, the US situation can’t be seen as representative of worldwide evolutionary patterns as shown from the differences among the immigrants.
That’s a little of topic but do you have an idea of how race and IQ correlate. I mean what is the correlation in IQ between two unrelated persons of the same race and two unrelated persons of different races ? If we take skin color, the correlation is obviously above 0.97 for two full blooded persons of the same race, but in my opinion, the correlation for IQ is something like 0.2 for two persons of the same race and 0.18 for two persons of different races. I put the correlation quite high since IQ is an ordinal value designed to have the bulk of a population scoring similar.
Would you agree with my hypothese ?
Before I contemplate your questions I want to just quickly post this data in support of my theory:
the highest recorded autism prevalence is from a 2008 study in Japan, which calculated a whopping 181 cases per 10,000 people.
http://sfari.org/news-and-opinion/news/2011/researchers-track-down-autism-rates-across-the-globe
http://psychcentral.com/news/2012/12/16/vitamin-d-may-lower-autism-risk-in-children/49191.html
Lack of vitamin D suspected to increase the risk of autism.
on another topic, I think the main error made by HBDers is not understanding the way genetics interact with environment. With your ideological leanings, you are tempted to have a deterministic interpretation of the role played by genes when in actuality, genes (except in the case of genetic disorders or fixed traits selected for adaptation) only determine one’s sensitivity to environmental influences.
This is why environment will always be the most meaningful explanation for human variation because populations varry in the environments they are exposed to and may varry in their genetic sensitivity to each environment.
That’s a little of topic but do you have an idea of how race and IQ correlate. I mean what is the correlation in IQ between two unrelated persons of the same race and two unrelated persons of different races ? If we take skin color, the correlation is obviously above 0.97 for two full blooded persons of the same race, but in my opinion, the correlation for IQ is something like 0.2 for two persons of the same race and 0.18 for two persons of different races. I put the correlation quite high since IQ is an ordinal value designed to have the bulk of a population scoring similar.
Not sure I understand the question. If I took fifty pairs of randomly matched people who all belonged to the same race, the correlation between their IQs should be 0. If I took fiftey pairs of randomly matched people from different races, the correlation should still be 0.
But if you’re asking what is the correlation between IQ and race; it’s about 0.48 within the United States. Correlation between IQ and skin colour would probably be similar/.
Just a thought I once had: how could different populations have evolved different frequencies of various alleles known to have major impacts on phenotype if genes didn’t play a predominant role in human behavior? (long-ass run-on sentence, I know) If environment predominated in determining behavior, then populations would not vary as much as they due in non-neutral genes.
It’s good you look for studies that support your theory but I also hope you put the same effort in looking for data that may dismiss it.
Taking a quick look at your map, I think your evidence is pretty weak because the 181/10k found in Japan contrasts with the 16/10k found in Hong Kong. Same race, same year but enormous difference.
*as much as they do
If we take skin color, the correlation is obviously above 0.97 for two full blooded persons of the same race,
I see…you seem to be thinking of correlation as similarity. Just to be clear, if there were a perfect 1.0 correlation between the skin color of husbands and wives, it wouldn’t mean they have the same skin color. All the husbands could be ten times whiter than all the wives. But what it would mean is that the darkest husband was married to the darkest wife and the lightest husband would be married to the lightest wife etc…but it tells us nothing about how similar a man is to his wife. Instead it’s just a measure of how closely two variables rise and fall together, not their similarity to one another.
“But if you’re asking what is the correlation between IQ and race; it’s about 0.48 within the United States. Correlation between IQ and skin colour would probably be similar/.”
No, this is not what I asked and this hypothesis is non-sense. Races do not exist, only people exist as palpable realities and happen to be classified by race.
So what I asked is the correlation that may exist in IQ between randomly matched people from the same race or from different races. I didn’t think your answer would be so extreme however, it is impossible for the correlation to be 0. since IQ is designed to have 2/3 of the population scoring between 85 and 115.
I wanted you to imagine how the correlation between unrelated persons could increase with the degree of racial relatedness. Just to see how much you thought race could predict one person’s IQ.
“If environment predominated in determining behavior, then populations would not vary as much as they due in non-neutral genes.”
They don’t varry as much. Just imagine homicide rates were 100% genetic in origin.
African Americans with a 30/100k homicide rate are one of the most murderous black population on earth, ahead of Africans and Caribbeans, maybe only surpassed by Black and Multiracial Brazilians. Wow, they look terrible, but that’s when you see the glass half empty. When it’s half full, you realize that less than 1/3333 African American has killed someone due to his genes in the year for which this figure was valid. In a population for which the rate is 3/100k there is one murderer for 33 330 people. So there is variation but it only affects a very small fraction of each race and it surely can’t support any evolutionary theory even if 100% genetic in origin.
More large-scale differences in tendency for some behavior have a name: culture, which has little to do with genetics.
“I see…you seem to be thinking of correlation as similarity.”
Yes I do this confusion, my bad. From kindergarten to my law school graduation, I just never ever studied this notion and information in French on the web is so scarce about that I never really figured out what those correlation coefiscient actually meant.
If you appreciate my honesty, I would like you to acknowledge that you produce your theories out of your ignorance of the many historical and social factors (both external and internal) that lead different groups to their current average situation.
If you appreciate my honesty, I would like you to acknowledge that you produce your theories out of your ignorance of the many historical and social factors (both external and internal) that lead different groups to their current average situation.
I acknowledge that that is certainly possible. These are extremely complex issues and anyone who thinks they have all the answers is ignorant…which is why I try to always make clear that these are just my theories and NOT PROVEN FACTS…and I greatly appreciate skeptics like you giving opposing theories so that people can hear both sides and decide for themselves.
Yet I need to know, in your opinion, how much is race predictive of IQ and if race is as predictive of IQ as skin color is.
“which is why I try to always make clear that these are just my theories and NOT PROVEN FACTS…”
Yes but you present them as unbiased, objective and scientifically rigorous. And you also act like your theories were needed, like the differences you point to have not been explained with greater accuracy by other fields of study, by other researcher than Rushton, Lynn & cie.
At the individual level, race is not very predictive of how someone will score on an IQ test. Assuming African Americans have a mean IQ of 85 with an SD of 12, then if you were trying to guess the IQ of someone and all you knew about him was that he/she was a black American, you could say with 95% confidence that his IQ is anywhere from 61 and 109.
By contrast, if all you knew was that he/she was a white American, then all you could say with 95% certain is he/she is anywhere from 70 and 130.
Most studies suggest white IQ is more variable than black IQ, hence the greater error band.
I have no data on skin color but I suspect it would be equally poor
And you also act like your theories were needed, like the differences you point to have not been explained with greater accuracy by other fields of study, by other researcher than Rushton, Lynn & cie.
Well, you’re entitled to your opinion that other researchers are more accurate than HBDers, but we must always know that our opinions are not facts.
Treating our opinions as facts is called dogmatism and studies have linked that to low IQ, so I try to be flexible..
Yes but you present them as unbiased, objective and scientifically rigorous.
I’ll work harder on making clear that they are not scientifically rigorous.
Sorry but are you trying to make me believe that you can’t predict one’s skin color from one’s race ?
Like you know I’m a black guy but you think possible that I have olive skin or freckles ?
When I talk about race and skin color, I talk about full blooded people, not a mixed race population like African Americans. But tell me seriously, I hope you are not trying to make believe that it is as difficult to predict a randomly chosen person’s IQ as to predict his skin color if the only piece of information you have is his race !
You said:
Yet I need to know, in your opinion, how much is race predictive of IQ and if race is as predictive of IQ as skin color is.
So I thought you were asking how well colour predicts IQ, but really you’re asking how well race predicts colour. Race predicts colour extremely well. If you know someone’s black, then you can say with extremely high confidence that their skin is dark
If your point is that races differ much more in colour than in IQ, I agree 100%
Well I knew we were misunderstanding each other a lot in this exchange 🙂 .
I will go further, not only are races more different in skin color and other fixed traits but they are defined by these traits. IQ or any kind of estimate of intelligence is not a racial phenotype since we can’t define intellectual phenotypes that fit racial categories based on visual observation.
I hope you also realized that the IQ range in which there is 95% chances to find people of one race is extremely high, like almost meaningless in real life.
However, you could have seen the things like this: 50% of whites score higher than 80% of blacks. But even seen like this, it is hard to believe that this can be due to the kind of natural selection that made the following statement true: 100% of blacks are darker skinned than 100% of whites.
“Well, you’re entitled to your opinion that other researchers are more accurate than HBDers,”
At least, these other researchers have used traditional anthropologic methods to to understand the populations they were studying. They made song term direct observations in almost all possible situation of life, interviewed people asking them how they explained their choices and attitudes, they repeated this over and over until they could identify common patterns that could serve as bases for further reflexion. On the contrary, HBDers create IQ estimates from tests that were not even administered and that actually reflect nobody’s intellectual performance.
“I have no data on skin color but I suspect it would be equally poor”
Lynn and Vanhanen (2006) is used however. The correlation between skin color and IQ is -.92, for mean high winter temp it’s -.76, for mean low winter temperature it was -.66, and for real gross domestic product per capita it was .63.
epidemiology of schizophrenia
I think this map backs up Pumpkin. Schizophrenia seems more prevalent among r-selected tropical people according to this.
Well not really, just look at the difference between Subsaharan Africa whose population is completely selected for a tropical environment and South-East Asia where population mostly come from sub-tropical Asia.
I think that the information here is that a higher level ove development lowers the risk of schizophrenia.
If we take race into consideration, nothing really solid emerges from this map. Mostly white Argentina has a much higher prevalency than mostly white Australia while the two countries have quite similar climates. Among East Asians, South Korea has a much higher rate than Japan. Black countries however have similar rates which are close to the world average. So only a distorted reading can lead to a racial interpretation and it’s even more true for autism.
By the way, did you imply that Mongolians and Chinese were r selected tropical populations or that Poles had more tropical genes than the Italians ?
Generally tropical countries are more schizo, but you’re right, there’s some outliers.
Lion, the whole reality is an outlier with this hypothese ! Come on, look at China at least.
Sorry Pumpkin Person but your but it appears that your post was a waste of time and brainpower.
wiki says that Oceania and East Asia have high incidences of Schizophrenia
:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epidemiology_of_schizophrenia#By_country
They might be including Southeast Asia in their definition of East Asia. Southeast Asians mixed with Australoids (which are more or less Negroid if you go by phenotype)
The highest prevalence is in south-east Asia, but China and South Korea surpass every Subsaharan country.
You haven’t clicked the link, you shouldn’t be discussing something that you don’t even bother to read.
And Japan has the highest incidence in the developed world after New Zealand which has a high proportion of Polynesians and East Asians.