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.
Evolution determines the mean and SD of the IQ distribution for each race
Heredity, eugenics can influence the concentration of IQs among races, but there will always be outliers since IQ is not purely hereditary
Over time heredity becomes evolution . For whites not to believe IQ is heredity would imply the existence of two divergent lines of human lineage. – A white people that evolved parallel to Africans for hundreds of thousands of years, with the whites always begin smarter.
Pumpkin I don’t usually agree with you but I must say you’re probably the most creative science blogger I have ever seen. In a field littered with repetitive pap, it’s refreshing to see an original thinker with so many fresh ideas and one who actually understands the science on a really technical level.
I think that’s the key to your popularity.
I’d be interested in knowing what other good science blogs you can recommend Scott. The problem is most of them aren’t written by scientists, just people parroting the scientific literature. It’s always frustrating when a well meaning but incompetent amateur finds one of my publicstions in google scholar and mischaracterizes it on a blog.
If h^2 is low, then it’s easy to say that blacks have the same genetic IQ as whites but the average black environment is X SD to the left of the average white environment. The amount to the left that, if corrected, could nearly close the gap, would be plausible. If h^2 is high, then the amount to the left would be implausible.
3) would just be expanded to include everyone. Most IQ differences for any reason would be mostly environmental.
Also…..if gene therapy for IQ existed (if ever the ‘genes’ for IQ are found), it most certainly would help “erase” group differences if h^2 were low.
“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!””
If that were true, and assuming environment is completley uncontrolled/random (as we debated on the Indian-American blog post), then it would mean Blacks would have the chance to produce significantly lower-IQ offspring.
To sub-Saharans with Harvard IQ of 122,
White HS dropout with 90 IQ.
Heritability, say 0.35
Black mean 85, White mean 100
122-((122-85)(1-0.35))= 122-24.05= 97.95
90-((90-100)(1-0.35))= 90+6.5= 96.5
Point is, they’d under all the given conditions, produce offspring of nearly the same intellect, in just the first generation.
If all those conditions are present.