[lbo-talk] Genetics, race, and IQ, again and again and again

(Chuck Grimes) cgrimes at rawbw.COM
Thu Nov 22 13:12:38 PST 2007


God this IQ busness gets annoying. Let's start over.

Max Sawicky posted this link on the last round of this bullshit, but here it is again:

http://cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/weblog/523.html

Read the whole article. The bottom line is that data from IQ tests establish a correlation to a factor called the g-factor. However, there is no causal relationship between g-factor and a putative phenomenon called general intelligence, period.

But let's look at a couple of other unexamined assumptions in this IQ argument. Let's start with the words African descent. I don't know how many different kinds of people live in Africa, hundreds maybe thousands all with different languages, cultures, histories, along with great variations in their hereditary make up. Whatever. There are enough differences to make it impossible to call anybody African, let alone African descent. For the purposes of any bio-science discussion the term is too vague to have any meaning.

Africa is a geographical outline on world maps that encompasses this huge variation. So what does African descent mean? If you go back far enough we are all of African descent.

I suppose African descent is supposed to stand in for negroid features. Okay. What are negroid features? I mean we need flash cards here like the 19th Century racial diagrams or something? In anthro, most of the peoples who appear to look negro, are classified by their language base as Bantu and live (I think) mostly in central Africa. Their long lost relatives probably comprised most of the slave population brought to the US.

So then let's take White People. Who the fuck are they? How is it possible for some genetic mystery complex called Intelligence to ever get so wide spread in this population and not in any other so-called population? I mean white people come from anywhere from the British isles to Northern Mongolia and Siberia and have been non-interbreeding for millennia before they all showed up here sometime in the last two hundred years. How did this mystery gene complex suddenly become so uniformly distributed only to the people who could claim to be White, and who can be genetically traced back to a tremendous variation of populations spread from Europe to Asia? How is it that this mystery gene complex was the only uniformly distributed characteristic, and not many, many others?

I mean, did the mystery gene complex spread wings and fly around from Europe to Siberia and seed itself? About the only thing that white people have in common is being white, which is again an empty signifier outside a racialized social context, which in turn has nothing to do with shared genetic characteristics.

Whatever.

Let's try unpacking the word Intelligence. Everybody seems to have an idea of what intelligence means, but nobody can agree on exactly what that is. There is not even a consensus standard on this concept. It is literally an empty signifier, that requires some kind of mythological interpretation to explain what it is supposed to mean in any particular context. This is like reading tea leaves to predict the future. Today it means one thing, yesterday another, tomorrow yet another. Most empirical concepts usually have enough specificity to last longer than one e-mail thread cycle.

Instead of providing a clear definition in advance, what IQ discussions do, is presume the concept is known with sufficient clarity, that it doesn't have to be defined. The default is to use the word in the tautological sense that it is what IQ tests measure. This obvious circularity is just ignored. But lets go back to what IQ is supposed to measure, which is a g-factor that has no casual connection to anything. (See above link.) In other words g, whatever it is, is not an empirical concept. Its a statistical construct that has, in principle, no casual connection to any empirical observation, period.

How much more broken and irrational can any of this IQ discussion get?

Oh, yeah and another thing, I forgot. Remember that we have no idea if this mystery gene complex that we signify with the word Intelligence even exists.

What we call genetic is, at very best a phenotypic set of characteristics that we have identified that putatively has a genetic basis.

Just because we have a name for something we see as a characteristic, doesn't mean it is a phenotypic characteristic.

It may or may not be a phenotype. And worse. Many of our known phenotypic characteristics are spread across multiple gene complexes in such a way as to make it very difficult to isolate even a complex or network of interacting genes, that we see in a resultant phenotype.

I can't sort out the vagaries of dominant and recessive, and all the other hereditary stuff that goes on under all of the above to figure out why for example our mystery Intelligence gene works one way with people of African descent and differently, with apparently greater frequency of expression in White people.

What is any of this stuff about? It's pure bunk.

Finally, I go with Charles Brown. IQ tests measure the effects of growing up in a racist society benefiting white people on average while depreciating those of African descent, demonstrated by the magnitude of the shift from one curve to another. That explanation accounts for the mysterious `difference' more directly than any other explanation, and does so with fewer mystery causal chains, empty signifiers and other mythological artifacts. Therefore by Occam's razor, that is the default conclusion.

I wasn't going to sent this because it probably contains too many mistakes of argument and I am fed up with topic----but what the hell..

See, then I just read this:

``It's a sign of racism though that the thesis of black genetic superiority is not considered with the same seriousness as the reverse thesis. Both are scientifically laughable of course...and repellant.'' Abu Hartal

Ahmen. Exactly. It is the marker of a bad scientific theory and argument that leads to two opposite and opposing conclusions by the same apparently logical path.

CG



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