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Monthly Archives: March 2015

An ideal study on heritability that could actually be done

29 Sunday Mar 2015

Posted by in heritability

≈ 86 Comments

For years commenter Mugabe has complained that studies of identical twins reared apart are meaningless because the identical twins are typically separated within the same country (i.e. America) so when two separated twins raised apart both have a high IQ, it doesn’t necessarily mean they have “high IQ genes”, it could just mean that they have genes that reach their full potential in America and Americans who are dumber than them, may have been smarter than them, had they been reared in China.  In other words, the intellectual rank order of people with different genotypes might change depending on what country they are in, a concept known as norm crossing.

To solve this problem, Mugabe has suggested doing a study on identical twins raised apart in many different countries, but the problem with that is when you increase the amount of environmental variation in a sample, and hold the amount of genetic variation constant, you end up with a ridiculously high correlation with environment (and thus low heritability), even if no norm crossing occurs.  This is known as the extended range problem (the opposite of the range restriction problem frequently encountered in IQ studies).

An idea that would correct for this, and one Mugabe has suggested many times, would be to convert IQ to Z scores relative to the country one was raised in, but this would only make sense if you could control for the genetic variation that exists between countries allowing the Z score to reflect only how smart one is relative to environment, and not how smart one is relative to the gene pool of the particular country.

An idea I had for doing this is instead of calculating Z scores relative to the population of the entire country, calculate Z scores relative to only the non-immigrant “pure” West African population of the country.  West Africans are an ideal international genetic reference group because not only do they live in many Third World countries, but they involuntarily migrated to other kinds of countries so you don’t have anywhere near the selective migration problem that occurs when other races live on multiple continents, as long as you exclude recent voluntary West African migrants.

So all that’s needed to do this study is a campaign to recruit 50+ pairs of identical twins (of any race) each raised from birth to age 40+ on different continents (or islands) in countries with a large enough involuntary “pure” West African population to use as a reference group for each participant’s Z score.

Of course the Z score correlation between these identical twins raised apart would still overestimate heritability because even identical twins raised on different continents shared the same prenatal environment. How do we subtract the effects of shared prenatal environment?

An idea I had would be to do a separate study on the Z score correlation between half-siblings adopted and raised from birth on different continents [update March 30/15: with biological parents living on different continents] where some of the half-siblings shared the same unknown biological father and others shared the same unknown biological mother.  The difference in correlation between the two types of half-siblings would provide an estimate for the effect of prenatal environment.

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Low IQ vs low functioning

28 Saturday Mar 2015

Posted by in ethnicity

≈ 19 Comments

Commenter and blogger destructure recently wrote on this blog:

…People from different groups who may have an individual IQ of 70 are not the same because different groups have different averages. The further away from the average one gets, the more likely it is to be the result of a defect. For example, a person with an IQ of 85 from a group that averages 100 is still within 1 stdv. There’s probably nothing functionally wrong with them or at least nothing serious. They’re just not very bright. If you go 2 stdv’s to 70 then it’s no longer an issue of being not bright. The deviation from the norm is so great that there is something wrong with them. However, a person with an IQ of 70 from a group that averages 85 is still only 1 stdv frm average. There’s nothing functionally wrong with them either. They’re similarly not very bright for their group. But you’d have to go lower, perhaps 60 or so, before you started to see the same kind of functional problems you would for someone from a group that averages 100.

To make the point, chimpanzees are often quoted as scoring from 35 to 50 on IQ tests. Yet they’re not defective.

destructure is 100% correct.  A Chimpanzee with an IQ of 40 is far more functional than a human with an IQ of 40 because chimpanzees evolved to function (in their narrow environment) with an IQ that low, and thus evolved other abilities that compensate for a lack of overall intelligence, including certain cognitive abilities as this video illustrates:

I also believe that low IQ human races tend to have certain other compensatory cognitive abilities such as relatively high social IQ, relatively high rhythm IQ or size constancy (the ability to estimate the size of an object at a distance).  Richard Lynn claims that Bushmen and pygmies have the lowest IQs of any human population but cites studies showing they have superior size constancy than whites and says “it implies that the ability may have deteriorated in European and East Asian peoples who gave up hunting about 8,000 years ago and adopted agriculture.”

What this suggests is that low IQ populations may actually be smarter when it comes to adapting to certain situations than high IQ populations , but the real test of intelligence is the cognitive ability to adapt in a wide range of environments and situations.  Brain size tripled in 4 million years of evolution to make room for more and more cognitive abilities, and increasingly general cognitive abilities (i.e. abstract reasoning) until humans had a large and flexible enough behavioral repertoire to adapt in almost any environment on Earth, and perhaps some beyond.

Does the Flynn effect imply blacks are genetically smarter than whites?

27 Friday Mar 2015

Posted by in ethnicity

≈ 32 Comments

Commenter Mugabe writes:

black Africans today and whites in 1900 scored the SAME. AND present day Africa is A LOT shittier IN EVERY WAY than 1900 in the West.

If what Mugabe is asserting here is true, then according to the Phenotype = Geneotype + Environment model, blacks must have a higher genetic IQ than whites, because given an inferior environment, they have an equal phenotypic IQ. But is Mugabe’s assertion true?

According to scientist Richard Lynn, on a scale where the white mean in Britain is set at a 100, “studies of the most satisfactory representative samples on the Standard Progressive Matrices give an IQ of 66” for black Africans. Of course Richard Lynn’s claim is controversial, but that’s a whole other topic. For the sake of argument, let’s take the IQ 66 figure as the best estimate of today’s black Africa’s IQ.

How does this compare to how whites scored in 1900?

In one study (see figure 2) the top 10% of British people born in 1877 (by definition those with IQ’s above 120 for their era) performed the same on the Raven as the bottom 5% of British people born in 1967 (by definition those with IQ’s below 75 for their era). In other words, performance on the Raven had increased by the equivalent of 45 IQ points in less than a century! Of course it wasn’t a level playing field because those born in 1877 took the test when they were a somewhat elderly 65 while those born in 1967 took the test when they were young sharp 25 year olds, however Flynn cites longitudinal studies showing that Raven type reasoning declines by no more than 10 points by age 65. That still leaves us with 35 points to explain.

Another source of inaccuracy was that although the test was not timed for either group, those born in 1877 took the test supervised while those born in 1967 got to take the test home. This could potentially make a large difference; not necessarily because the unsupervised group would cheat, but because they would probably take more breaks since they were in the comfort of their homes. They would probably return to challenging items after they had time to relax and see those items from a fresh perspective, while those who took the test supervised in some strange room were probably more likely to rush through the tasks so they could go home. I would estimate that being allowed to take an test home improves test performance by about 5 IQ points on average, though this is just a guess.

But that still leaves a huge difference of 30 IQ points. In other words, by the standards of modern British whites, whites born in 1877 had IQs of 70 (only 4 points higher than blacks score in sub-Saharan Africa today).

Correcting the IQs of Victorian whites for years of schooling

But it’s important to note that the British born in 1877 probably completed no more than eight grades of schooling on average, while modern whites average more than 12 years of schooling, and not attending high school may reduce IQ scores (though probably not real intelligence) by 8 points. It may seem unlikely that schooling could influence a test that seems as culture fair as the Raven, but some people argue that the Raven is actually culturally biased. Richard Lynn argues that it requires basic math skills like addition and subtraction and believes the rise in education explains part of the adult Flynn Effect. At the very least, people with more schooling might be more likely to take the test from a mathematical perspective or with more motivation, confidence, and persistence. So correcting for their lack of schooling raises the IQs of British Victorians from 70 to 78.

Correcting the IQs of modern black Africa for years of schooling

Black Africans also achieve much less schooling than modern whites, however the Black Africans who are typically tested in Raven IQ studies are school children, so the years of schooling variable is already controlled. Thus their IQ of 66 can not be increased by correcting for years of schooling.

Correcting the IQs of Victorian whites for nutrition

What about the biological environment? Whites born in 1877 were 1.5 standard deviations shorter than whites today. If we make Richard Lynn’s assumption that nutrition (including disease which limits the body’s ability to use nutrients) affects IQ to the same degree it affects height, then correcting for nutrition further raises the IQs of white Victorians from 78 to 101 (an increase of 1.5 SD). So correcting for just the two most obvious environmental variables (years of schooling and nutrition) brings white Victorians up to the level of modern whites.

Correcting the IQs of modern black Africa for nutrition

Black Africans today are also malnourished as evidenced by modern West Africans being 0.8 SD shorter than modern African Americans. Correcting their IQ for this 0.8 SD deficit raises them from 66 to 78. This is somewhat lower than the average IQ of 85 for African Americans, but keep in mind that the average African American has as much as 25% white ancestry and whites average around IQ 100. Based on these stats, Richard Lynn calculates that African Americans with no white ancestry have IQs around 80.

So after correcting for very simple and obvious environmental deficits, blacks reared in the third World have the same IQs as their genetic counterparts reared in the First World for centuries.

Conclusion

This demonstrates that a simple Phenotype = Genotype + Environment model can work well for group differences, with environment defined simply as years of schooling + nutrition. This simple model seems to explain both the Flynn effect, and IQ differences between blacks in the Third World and blacks who have lived in the First World for centuries.

Norms of reaction: The ultimate test for HBD

26 Thursday Mar 2015

Posted by in heritability

≈ 36 Comments

Earlier today commenter “Mugabe” suggested the following thought experiment (I corrected a minor typo):

imagine you had 100 clones and each had been carried by a different gestational surrogate in a different country. and suppose there were 49 other such people like you in this regard.

i don’t find it hard to imagine that there would be norm crossing, that is, that the rank order would not be maintained across countries and that the smallest h^2 (calculated for a pair of countries) would be much smaller than .5.

I agree with Mugabe that in this scenario, the smallest heritability would be much less than 0.5, but I don’t think it matters because if HBD icon Arthur Jensen were alive, I have no doubt he would agree that on a global level, heritability is much lower than the 0.8 figure he liked to cite for countries like America.

The 0.8 correlation between middle aged identical twins raised apart (within countries like America) is controversial, not least because it implies an astonishing 80% of the variation in IQ is “explained” by genes. Taking the square root of the correlation implies that middle aged American IQ would correlate nearly 0.9 with genes! In other words, middle aged American IQ is nearly perfectly genetic.

But as Mugabe would argue, even if older American IQ correlates highly with genes, it doesn’t mean older American IQ is highly independently caused by genes. It could be that Tom has genes that code for an IQ of 120 in America but an IQ of 113 in Africa, and Bill’s genes code for an IQ of 120 in Africa and an IQ of 113 in America. So who is genetically smarter? Tom or Bill.

I have previously suggested that Mugabe’s thought experiment about a sample of people having many clones in many countries could be improved if the IQs of each person’s 100 clones (born from 100 different random wombs in a 100 different diverse countries) could be averaged, and this average would represent a person’s genetic intelligence. Since averaging each person’s 100 clones would cancel out the different reactions each genotype has to different environments, the higher the average IQ of your 100 international clones, the more independent causal high IQ genes or alleles you could claim to have (or the fewer low IQ causing genes/alleles).

So the real debunking of Jensenism would come not from showing that heritability for the entire world (or even just the developed world, or a particular range of countries) is less than 0.5 (no one disputes that), but rather from showing that less than 50% of the variation in older American IQ is independently caused by genes.

That is if a sample of 50+ random Americans each had 100 clones born in 100 random wombs in 100 random countries where they were raised in 100 random homes, and the IQ of each of these 50 Americans and each of their 100 random clones was tested at age 40; if the squared correlation between each American and the average IQ of his 100 clones was less than 0.5, only then could one say HBD and Jensenism have been debunked.

Drunk thugs attacked Synagogue in England last night?

22 Sunday Mar 2015

Posted by in Uncategorized

≈ 105 Comments

I wonder if the anti-semitic thugs were white or non-white Caucasoids? Racial tension and ethnic violence is strong evidence that humans are tribal creatures who genetically evolved to side with their group, since their group shares copies of their genes.

High IQ peoples tend to defeat lower IQ peoples in military conflicts, but I wonder how well the same correlation holds when this kind of stone age violence occurs.

I find it all very depressing. You would think by the year 2015, humans would have overcome their primitive ethnic impulses.

Ron Unz on Richard Feynman’s IQ

22 Sunday Mar 2015

Posted by in Uncategorized

≈ 30 Comments

In the comment section of Steve Sailer’s blog, the widely admired Ron Unz said the following about physicist Richard Feynman’s reported IQ of about 125:

…Like I said, Feynman was a notorious prankster and jokester. I’m somewhat more inclined to believe he was just pulling that journalist’s leg, and the silly fellow didn’t realize it.

But my main point is there’s simply *no* possibility Feynman had an honest-to-goodness true IQ of 125. 251 or maybe even 512 would be likelier. Back in JHS or HS he developed a new type of generalized Calculus after someone gave him a book. In college, he won the Putnam as a last-minute substitute entrant.

IQ-fetishists have come up with the silliest theories to justify the 125. Maybe he had a bad day. Maybe he did badly on the Verbal questions. The bottom line is if Feynman really scored 125 on a legitimate IQ test (a test that allowed scores higher than 125) then “IQ Is Bunk.”

I personally subscribe to the theory that Feynman’s verbal IQ was much lower than his spatial/mathematical IQ, and since prominent IQ tests of that era emphasized verbal ability almost exclusively, the test dramatically underestimated Feynman’s overall IQ.

However even if 125 were a true reflection of Feynman’s overall IQ, I’m not convinced the score invalidates the concept of IQ, because Feynman is only one data point. Unz seems to believe that if you’re a mathematical Genius, then by definition, you’re spectacularly brilliant. Maybe. But in my humble opinion, that’s analogous to arguing that if you’re a spectacular basketball player, then by definition, you’re super tall.

So just as height is perhaps the single best predictor of basketball achievement, intelligence is the single best predictor of mathematical achievement, but that doesn’t mean other variables can’t compensate for less than stratospheric height and intelligence respectively.

An example is Muggsy Bogues who became one of the best basketball players in Americas despite being only 5’3″ tall. 5’3″ is roughly 2.71 standard deviations below average in height for an American man; equivalent to an HQ (Height Quotient) of only 59!

By contrast, Feynman’s reported IQ score was 125 (1.67 standard deviations above the average American). So even if his true IQ were “only” 125, Feynman was more than FOUR STANDARD DEVIATIONS more gifted in intelligence than Bogues is in height. And yet no one cites Bogues to argue that tape measures must be bogus, even though he’s much much much more anomalous for basketball than Feynman was for physics.

Statistically we should expect some of the greatest intellectual achievers in history to have IQs below the gifted level. This is because achievement is an imperfect measure of talent, and talent in a specific domain, even one as g loaded as physics, is an imperfect measure of general or overall intelligence.

While the average Nobel prize winning academic probably has an IQ around 150, the scores are probably normally distributed, with some being above 180 and others being below 120. Analogously, we should expect the average height on the NBA to be about 6’7″, with some being above seven feet, and others being below 6’1″.

But again, I do not in any way believe that Feynman’s reported IQ score was valid, however I do believe some non-brilliant people achieve at the highest level in even the most intellectual of fields. That’s just the nature of an imperfect correlation between ability and achievement.

Do white liberals hate East Asians & South Asians?

21 Saturday Mar 2015

Posted by in ethnicity

≈ 43 Comments

Commenter JS wrote:

Liberals would never respect an East Indian guy, the same with the male members of the East Asian category or a White guy from the right, conservative camp, who are all seen as enemies to the liberal establishment and their legions of black minions. It all really boils down to competition of the higher IQ groups. A lot of these individuals of these groups also dislike blacks, because they are being “propped up” without innate substance.

Liberal whites probably dislike East Asians and also South Asians because their success seemingly confirms the conservative narrative that America is not a racist country and that minorities can succeed if they pull themselves up by their boot straps.

Also, Asians and South Asians are very hard working. Liberals hate hard workers.

Also as JS is perhaps implying, Asians and South Asians compete with white liberals for elite jobs. White liberals prefer their minorities poor and dependent so white liberals can get the ego boost of being their savior. Asians and South Asians don’t need white liberals to save them and white liberals resent it.

Also white liberals probably resent the fact that Asians and South Asians are not liberal enough. Their attitude is probably “us white liberals made it possible for non-whites to even have basic rights. How dare you not vote Democrat with virtual unanimity?”

Making matters worse, as JS implies, a sizable number of Asians and South Asians don’t like blacks. In the case of South Asians, this may be because of the caste system in India which values light skin. But while South Asian racism against blacks is largely cultural, I believe East Asian racism against blacks is genetic. I believe humans evolved to hate people who are genetically distant from themselves because these have fewest of their genes. North East Asians and sub-Saharan Africans are the two most biologically distant peoples on the planet so the two are genetically predisposed to not get along.

But when white liberals see South Asians and East Asians hating on blacks their attitude is “how dare you be racist against blacks! You’re not so white yourself!”

All of these factors create tension between white liberals and East/South Asians.

Here’s a clip of white liberal Michael Moore arguing with CNN’s Sanjay Gupta. You can feel the tension even in how Moore pronounces “Gupta”.

Another example of tension between white liberals and South Asians was when Roseanne Bar was talking to Deepak Choprah on an episode of one of Bill Maher’s talk shows. Roseanne wanted to talk about the economy and Choprah started lecturing about the importance of spirituality. Finally Roseanne barked “everything you just said plus $40 could be buy me a tank of gas!”

It was clear she had no respect for his ancient Indian spiritual wisdom, especially during tough economic times.

Razib Khan dropped from the New York Times?

20 Friday Mar 2015

Posted by in Uncategorized

≈ 30 Comments

So I’m reading the comment section at Steve Sailer’s blog and I come across a comment by Dave Pinsen stating “…Razib Khan just got Watsoned from his new NYT gig…”

According to Politico:

The New York Times has terminated its contract with one of its new online opinion writers after a Gawker article highlighted the writer’s previous association with racist publications, according to that writer’s Twitter account.

Razib Khan, a science blogger and a doctoral candidate in genomics and genetics at the University of California, Davis, was one of 20 writers who signed contracts with the Times to write for the paper’s online opinion section.

The Times announced its new stable of contributors on Wednesday. Hours later, Gawker’s J.K. Trotter reported that Khan had a “history with racist, far-right online publications.” Khan wrote 68 posts for Taki’s Magazine, a publication founded by a “flamboyantly racist Greek journalist,” Trotter wrote. Khan also wrote a letter to VDARE, “a white nationalist website named after the first white child born in America, in which he discussed [an essay] concerning the threat of the United States becoming “more genetically and culturally Mexican.”

So I guess the New York Times doesn’t believe in free speech (big surprise). Kind of hypocritical though, since the New York Times promoted, popularized, and legitimized the theory that Ashkenazi Jews are genetically more intelligent than Northern Europeans.

I guess the New York Times is okay with racialist ideas, just as long as they’re not favorable to Northern Europeans.

Steve Sailer has the best commenters

20 Friday Mar 2015

Posted by in Uncategorized

≈ 3 Comments

Not only is Steve Sailer a brilliant icon who pretty much invented HBD blogging, but he’s got the best commenters of any HBD blog. Don’t get me wrong, we have some excellent commenters here, but at Steve Sailer’s blog it’s just one excellent commenter after another. Unlike other blogs that are populated by naive credulous readers easily manipulated by bloggers with secret agendas, Steve’s readers are intelligent, shrewd, cynical, street-smart and experienced, and don’t fit into neat political categories.

I think the reason Steve Sailer has such quality commenters is that Steve himself is such a quality blogger and often writes lengthy posts that scare away mediocre minds, leaving behind largely smart educated people as his readers.

Also, because Sailer is so iconic, he attracts an enormous number of readers. When you have that many people trying to comment on your blog, you can be very selective about who gets to post.

As my fame continues to grow, I too have become more selective in who gets to post here. I’ve had to get rid of people who frankly didn’t have the intellectual heft to be here, and others who obviously have something wrong with them.

Why low heritability for IQ would be good news for white racists

19 Thursday Mar 2015

Posted by in Uncategorized

≈ 5 Comments

HBD deniers think that they are debunking racial differences by constantly claiming IQ has a low heritability or that genetic variation has little independent effect on IQ.  But if I were a racist, I would be literally dancing over the claims that IQ has low heritability because it implies that if there are racially genetic differences in IQ (and there are), these differences are very ancient & took an extraordinarily long time to evolve (tens of thousands of years), because the less heritable and independently genetically influenced a trait, the harder it is for natural selection to act on.

This would mean:

1) racial differences in genetic IQ are here to stay for the foreseeable future.  No amount of eugenics or gene therapy will bring blacks up to the same genetic IQ level as whites anytime soon

2) low IQ high school drop out white trash can lord over Harvard educated blacks by saying “you might have a much higher IQ than me, but I have a higher GENETIC IQ.  Since IQ has such a low independent correlation with genes, your genetic IQ will regress precipitously to the black mean of 85 while my genetic IQ will regress up to the white IQ of 100 and thus surpass you!”

3) IQ differences between social classes and between Jews and Gentiles would likely be almost entirely nongenetic.  This is also good news for white racists since many of these are of lower class non-Jewish background.