Back at the peak of New Atheism I was often boggled by atheists proudly declaring their belief in evolution, only to then parrot notions of biological race and sex equity - mostly the lay followers, but even Hitchens was guilty of this. Revealing, I think, a secularized Christianity still setting the foundation of their worldview.
Of course, leftists now still often claim to be the believers of evolution, as if to contrast rightoids, even as evolution denialism has become an obvious sanctified tenet of leftism.
They're not very honest about it though. Harris avoids talking about it and Dawkins has spread very misleading anti-HBD claims. Dawkins also likes to say "We are all Africans."
The problem they, and a lot of today's "rationalists", have is not realizing most of their followers aren't like them and aren't following them due to a belief in reason.
Most new atheists followers weren't interested in truth or reason, they just wanted to be free from moral constraints on their own actions.
Yes, at the core of woke is a more puritan and literalist denomination of Christianity, which is why it only cropped out of post-Christian nations, but because they're so animated by the percieved failings of their source philosophy they seem incapable of recognizing how indebted they are to it.
Most atheists are leftists and follow the dogmatic narrative of the left. While I am an atheist, I am neither left nor right. I prefer the reality approach.
"“Young Earth Creationism isn’t just wrong, it is fundamentally wrong. And the experts are acting in bad faith.”
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"If it is ever documented conclusively, the genetic inferiority of a race on a trait as important as intelligence will rank with the atomic bomb as the most destructive scientific discovery in human history. The correct conclusion is to withhold judgment."
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The Problem is that even here, you are not saying what needs to be said. In a sense even Turkheimer is being more honest than you are. It is a matter of ethical principle(s) that the genetic inferiority of a race... in circumstances where it's denial has led to 60yrs of atrocities, if admitted must lead to reprisals.
a) Against the liars.
b) Against the inferior race.
c) Against both, just in case.
Personally I'm on team A.
In any case there must be an atom bomb. It must be destructive. The only question is who genuinely deserves to be in the blast radius.
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Here's the funny part.
People don't sign up for moral crusades in which they don't get to crush their enemies at the end. You can't go - 1) This was a terrible atrocity. 2) It's ok now no one must be punished.
If you say 1 and 2, no one trusts you on 1. There has never been a societal change in which the winning side was not fueled by some desire for retribution.
We should stop being cowardly and just say it. Eric Turkheimer will be deported to Haiti if we win.
1) there is value in telling people that if they give up their power and positions they will face no further reprisals. That’s literally how communism fell in europe without a shot being fired. It’s how ww1 ended with the Kaiser hanging out at a mansion in the netherlands.
2) the inferior race is obviously going to take a hit if the truth comes out.
Affirmative action, state welfare, some “civil rights”, and right to immigrate are obvious ones.
Beyond government policy, it would be a huge hit to social standing and mating prospects.
While I suppose it’s possible that there could be offsetting good aspects, it takes very little imagination to see the negatives
3) hence I think the most “honest” way to approach this is to just admit a lack of concern for the welfare of niggers. Like yeah they might be worse off if we publicly admitted they are dumb and violent. I don’t care! I care about me and mine. They are hurting me and mine. I want to stop them.
> "1) there is value in telling people that if they give up their power and positions they will face no further reprisals. That’s literally how communism fell in europe without a shot being fired."
If Turkheimer wants to give up his tenure and move to Alaska to chop wood, sure, but he ought to have the self awareness to realise what time it is.
> "3) hence I think the most “honest” way to approach this is to just admit a lack of concern for the welfare of niggers. Like yeah they might be worse off if we publicly admitted they are dumb and violent. I don’t care! I care about me and mine. They are hurting me and mine. I want to stop them"
I think the "me and mine" argument is valid, but it's worth remembering "the niggers" will not be better off in the event of a global venezuela/zimbabwe scenario, which is where the left's (and to a large extent their own) preferred policies would eventually lead.
The minority of the world's black population that live in rich western countries will be somewhat worse off if HBD goes mainstream and the DEI programs end, but the ~95% of blacks living in Africa or Latin America get to continue having access to all the vaccines and synthetic fertilisers needed to keep them alive. That doesn't happen if civilisation collapses.
I'm totally on board with you that it's not in niggers long run interest to niggerfy the whole world. Kill the goose that lays the golden eggs and all. It fails a net present value utilitarian test even if you don't give a shit about non-niggers.
But actual niggers in the actual first world today who have actual voting rights would take a hit on any kind of timeline they are actually capable of caring about. Remember that the entire reason why niggers are so bad at everything is that they aren't capable of long term rational planning! They are poor because they are the kind that kill the goose for a good meal, it's why they can't build infrastructure! That's why every city they take over politically can't provide clean drinking water and functioning electricity within a generation.
Being more reconciliatory. I think its human nature to care a lot about relative status. Some people would rather live in a world where the lights don't work but they (and their race) are "big men".
It should also be mentioned that blacks living under segregation in the US during the 1950s were actually better off than today by various metrics, such as marital stability, drug use, business ownership as so on, and the *relative* B/W difference in income was broadly similar. Black criminals being punished/incarcerated/shot with the regularity their behaviour indicates leaves the vast majority of blacks better off.
> "Being more reconciliatory. I think its human nature to care a lot about relative status. Some people would rather live in a world where the lights don't work but they (and their race) are "big men"."
I agree that there are people who would rather tear down civilisation than accept a subordinate position within it, but "better to reign in hell" is not a position I have much sympathy for.
> "Remember that the entire reason why niggers are so bad at everything is that they aren't capable of long term rational planning!"
Perhaps (obviously with the usual caveats about NAXALT), but you could still make this argument to any intelligent non-black who cares (or pretends to care) about black welfare.
"claims" is doing a lot of work here. I don't think many people really give a fuck.
They care that they need to placate blacks to hang onto coalition partners that give them a double digit vote swing in every election plus cultural and social power.
They also care that nigger equality is part of a larger "equality" ideology that buttresses like an entire worldview. Why does NYC spend 36k per kid per year on K-12 education when it doesn't accomplish shit and they literally phoned it in for two years during COVID. Because "no child left behind" and "everyone can learn to code". Admitting that niggers are too dumb to amount to much also means admitting the lower half of the bell curve of every race can't amount to much either. That's a lot of voters and a lot of professional managerial jobs focused on uplifting the left half of the bell curve.
> "claims" is doing a lot of work here. I don't think many people really give a fuck.
Maybe, but anyone making the claim can still be told "your policies will ultimately make life worse for everyone, including the people you claim to care about, so is this what you actually care about?"
2 and 3 are simplistic. Their needless offence blinds one to rational discussion as much as any adherence to racial creationism or racial denial. If one is to take your line seriously, categorising all of a race by the mean of the race in the light of the criteria you imply, white Europeans must accept being the inferior race compared with Chinese or Indian. Whites might hope that these groups look on them with more charity.
The obsession with focusing on intergroup differences detracts from the intragroup differences. The latter are much greater and the source of most of societies' problems.
"Whites might hope that these groups look on them with more charity."
Whether they will look on us with charity will depend on whether they want to. You seem to think being charitable automatically makes someone charitable back. It doesn't. Sometimes people see it as weakness or don't care at all. And charity to blacks doesn't earn you kudos from East Asians (it might even make them angry if the blacks are victimizing them and stealing their jobs through AA).
The Indians have IQ of 76, I'm not really concerned with their superiority. And we already know what they think of us.
East Asians are a different story because they are genuinely high IQ, but they don't seem to perform as well as their IQ implies. Without some long discussion as to why, the bottom line even the rich democratic ones have got like 60% of our labor productivity, extinction tier TFR, and a per capita innovation rate way below what's implied by their IQ. If China didn't have 1.4B people we wouldn't even be talking about them.
Anyway, ignoring intergroup differences does nothing to enhance discussion of intragroup differences. If anything it makes it harder, because "why are the low performers disproportionately from group X" is like the first thing people look at when they start doing things by class instead of race. In fact it's taken as a refutation of intragroup differences! If all races are equal then not performing equally must invalidate IQ as a concept, and thus it can't be applied intragroup either.
That's you know the entire reason Charles Murray gave about why he wrote about race in The Bell Curve.
"IQ is real and important but only accurate for white people" is a non-sensicle scientific statement. Its even more non-sensible then environmentalism.
Unfortunately, people are rarely persuaded by logical argument. From Hume to Haidt, it has been shown that what actually moves people are emotional dispositions and symbolic attachments: these make certain arguments 'feel' persuasive in the first place. Reason justifies, but emotion is what really matters.
Yes, what Westerly Sun is really saying is that HE is not persuaded by logical argument. He prefers his own emotions over logical argument. That argument is typically made by those who lack a logical argument to support their claim, but also lack the integrity to care.
You and Realist are in denial of reality and Human Nature. What The Westerning Sun is saying is that absolutely NO ONE is actually moved by Logic and Reason, and this has been proven by Neuroscience numerous times. You are delusional if you think your beliefs and/or values come from anything other than your subconscious genetically formed emotional temperament. Rationalism itself is an irrational delusion.
Logic and Reason exist to post-hoc rationalize one's subconscious emotions & instincts (which are the real drivers of all Human and other Animal behavior) as well as to make sense of external reality.
I said nothing about “rationalism,” a philosophical viewpoint which I do not subscribe to.
I actually wrote an article about how ideologies and other world views are based on underlying psychological temperament (i.e. they use the non-rational part of their brain). That temperament is largely determined by genetics.
It is, however, ridiculous to go to the opposite extreme of saying “no one is actually moved by logic and reason.”
My “ subconscious genetically formed emotional temperament” was created at birth, and I have learned much since then. Mainly by reading books that present evidence and rational arguments.
If you do not think that logic and reason do not move people, then why are you wasting your time replying in the comments?
Smart and honest people are moved by arguments, and those are the people who we need on our side. 90% of the population plays absolutely no role in political change.
"Race Creationism is like Young Earth Creationism. They are both doctrines that people believe for essentially religious reasons. And they were never supported by sound evidence."
Sometime it seems like modern social science "evolved" into a way to maintain a Christian moral worldview in a post-religious world. Educated people couldn't believe in God, but they wanted to keep the morals. Social scientists came along and justified all those moral beliefs. You no longer need to believe that all humans are equal before God if the experts tell you that all really are exactly biologically equal! One type of creationism was replaced by another - this one allegedly scientific.
This distinction is what made me shift from calling myself an atheist to calling myself a nihilist in the Nietzschean sense. They claim a lack of belief or even an opposition to Christianity, yet scarcely posses any thoughts that aren't derived from Christianity's presuppositons.
The mantra in the’70s was that “people are all the same“. It wasn’t true then, and it isn’t true now. There is a sizable group who would prefer to treat people as interchangeable. That is one step away from treating people as if they are disposable.
If we could get people to accept that intelligence is largely hereditary, we might be able to get them to stop looking for the witch every time outcomes differ. Then policy makers might come to grips with the fact that people are not the same.
We have been closing out economic niches for the left end of the Bell curve, for decades. This is manifestly unjust. Even if you do not believe that human beings have any intrinsic worth, you should remember that they all have trigger fingers.
"Scientists" who promote Race-denialism are acting in bad faith. On the other hand, millions of laypeople, who have neither the time nor the inclination to delve into it, just assume that the "experts" are right. They are not necessarily acting in bad faith.
'They are both doctrines that people believe for essentially religious reasons.'
This is true of all doctrines — scientific, political, moral, aesthetic. Every system ultimately rests on presuppositions that cannot be proven within its own frame, but are sustained by myth, authority, and trust. In other words: essentially religious reasons.
The significant question is not whether a doctrine is 'religious' or 'evidence-based', but what symbolic order it belongs to, and what social residues it animates.
By that reckoning, it hardly matters whether people believe in Creationism or Evolution. The West flourished for almost a thousand years before Darwin. Its vitality came not from assent to reason, but from the Christian symbolic order which its people lived, embodied, and breathed.
I have heard them say that race doesn't exist , because some immigrant groups from Europe to America were considered non-white. (Italians, Greeks, Poles etc)
So people who were allowed to use whites-only restaurants and drinking fountains were non-white?
So people who married white people were considered non-white at a time when there were anti-miscegenation laws?
So people who legally had to tick 'white' on census forms were considered non-white?
We live in a ideological times. We've always lived in ideological times. The Young Earth Creationists were just one in a long procession of ideologies, and there are many other ideologies, not just the Young Earthers.
The trouble in debates over sensitive topics is it requires intellectual honesty, and we lost that at some point over the millennia. Or maybe we never really had it, or maybe it was there all along, just, it's not convenient to Power for Truth and Honesty to play the prominent role, so they're always on the margins.
Years ago I encountered the topic while researching merit (which in the simple formulation is defined as intelligence x effort). IQ is the closest convenient quantitive metric, but it's not intelligence, and Bell's curve created an inconvenient rendition. We live in a topsy-turvy world and ideologies have us.
I think the orthodoxies are starting to collapse. The dogmatists expanded the list of things that one couldn’t consider too greatly. We all have eyes. And some of us are naturally curious. Reality simply doesn’t align with progressive sacraments.
I am reminded of a creationist who thought the evolution of whales implausible. There are many gaps in the fossil record, but on the other hand creationism is asserted without any such scrutiny. Isolated demands for rigor indeed.
When you're in dissident spaces for long enough, the comparison between current egalitarians and religious nutters can sometimes get a bit tired, but it never gets any less true.
I firmly agree with the rhetorical approach suggested, you *must* make it clear that your position is the position one comes to because of the evidence, while theirs is reached by presupposition and wishful thinking.
So, if I get this right, there are 3 lots groups that we need to argue against: Young Earth Creationists, Race Creationists and Race Deniers, the first two because they say that ethnic differences are created and the second because they say there are no differences.
'We' say that there are differences and these are because of evolution. (I take it that we are allowed to admit a common (female) ancestor?)
So if we turn to sex, we disagree with Sex Creationists and Sex Deniers, for parallel reasons, and have parallel views on the role of evolution in the sex differences we observe (not that one dares declare them in today's society).
We have, therefore, a bivariant situation: created/evolved and significant differences/not.
UK society is much more controlled by those who deny, usually passionately, sex and ethnic differences. Strangely they have equally strong reactions against those who deny evolution.
My own feeling is that we don't think nearly enough about intragroup differences, which are much bigger than sex or ethnic differences.
I feel like this discussion treats a number of different views as if they were the same. Is there likely to be literally any difference in averages between different groups of humans based on ancestry, is that difference likely to be socially meaningful and does it track our the way we classify people by race. The former claim is obviously correct. Indeed, you can show it is essentially mathematically necessary once you admit there is any widespread variation in genetics that bear on a trait -- the probability that such variation is distributed so as to exactly render the population averages exactly equal is so tiny as to be 0 for all meaningful purpose.
But that claim isn't particularly controversial amoung experts. Sure many people will insist it is true but lots of people think Christ rose from the dead on the third day too. David Reich makes a big point in his book of the fact that we are likely to eventually detect such population level differences and that didn't generate any serious scientific pushback.
The second point is where a bunch of the action is going to be. And of course what is large and small here is somewhat vague but notice that most of the major phenotypical differences we can trace to genetics have an obvious survival advantage in one environment but not others which is not the case with something like intelligence.
The existence of relatively recent genetic bottlenecks means there hasn't been that much time for truly large evolutionary changes. We see variation in populations mostly as a result of SNPs and other small local changes (eg think the genetic differences in lactase production as adults or even in ratios of slow and fast twitch muscle).
But we can look and see if there are any SNPs or other very localized differences that have a large impact on traits like intelligence and we just don't find them. Yes, overall GWAS can be used to predict at most something like 10% of variation in intelligence (within homogeneous groups) but what it hasn't found is a couple SNPs (outside of some unfortunate disorders) that have large effect and certainly not ones that seem to be under high selective pressure as one would expect for such an important trait.
This makes any theory of particularly substantial genetic differences in intelligence by ancestry pretty hard to explain. I mean it doesn't seem like any race has access to some mutation that makes a big difference that others don't so why would you expect any widespread substantial differences given it's a trait under substantial evolutionary pressure? It's not like intelligence wouldn't matter in some ancesteral condition but would in others.
And yes, we can look at population studies and see differences but science is much less clean than one might hope and there isn't a study in existence that can compare people of different racial makeups without confounders. Indeed, I'd argue that often it is the desire not to say potentially controversial things that make these studies look like the are more reliable than they actually are.
I mean take adoption studies. At first blush the fact that adopted infants of African descent in the Norwegian countries don't score as high on various tests might seem clear cut but if you think about it for a moment the mere fact that those children are up for adoption strongly suggests their parents didn't have the best outcomes not to mention any confounders of pre-natal health (and maybe even some social effects later). And societal wide demographic studies are even more confounded. Ultimately, when you look at these studies my overall impression is that we just don't have that much resolution and it's just damn hard to tell.
Which brings us to our final question. Do those ancestral differences track our racial categories. I mean if I had to bet, I'd say while our current studies aren't able to clearly resolve any differences in traits like IQ it is pretty plausible some do exist but -- as the majority of human biodiversity is in Africa -- we should expect that the groups who are the most extreme on any phenotype not under uniquely different evolutionary pressures by region (skin color) to occur in Africa.
And I don't think saying that would actually be that controversial. Yah probably there are generic mental differences which -- though small relative to the amount of individual differences -- will show up in population level averages but its not going to be that asians are smart and black people are dumb. If anyone has some non-trivial advantage on IQ tests (and here differences are more likely to be a different mix of skills given evolutionary pressure but will effect single measure scores like IQ) it's likely going to turn out to be some African ethnic group.
I don't think that claim would be treated like some kind of heresy. What gets that reaction is the insistence (which is imputed unless you take pains to deny it) that you are adopting a simple model which seems to track racial stereotypes. I mean we know there are going to be serious cultural and environmental confounders so it is suspicious if, despite this, you seem to conclude that genetic differences in traits closely track these stereotypes.
"The second point is where a bunch of the action is going to be. And of course what is large and small here is somewhat vague but notice that most of the major phenotypical differences we can trace to genetics have an obvious survival advantage in one environment but not others which is not the case with something like intelligence."
Normally I would be more polite, but in spirit with this article, I'll be frank: This is flat-out wrong.
Humans have lived in very diverse environments, and more importantly, have adapted in ways that require vastly different mental capabilities. If you compare sophisticated european, middle eastern or asian farming practices, including the necessary preservation techniques just to simply survive the winter, with subsaharan tribal living, it becomes instantly obvious that while the latter still needs guile and shrewdness, it's the former that requires the methodological long-term planning that is most associated with intelligence. This coincided with the emergence of writing, which was initially developed mostly for bookkeeping. Subsaharan africa never developed, nor adapted to, writing before being colonized. On the other extreme end, you had for example jewish groups who have been forced into a niche that made them entirely dependent on complicated bookkeeping and hence have had very high literacy rates for literal centuries. And lo and behold, modern IQ estimates almost perfectly match up with the degree to which the respective groups depended on bookkeeping and long-term planning.
"I mean take adoption studies. At first blush the fact that adopted infants of African descent in the Norwegian countries don't score as high on various tests might seem clear cut but if you think about it for a moment the mere fact that those children are up for adoption strongly suggests their parents didn't have the best outcomes not to mention any confounders of pre-natal health (and maybe even some social effects later). And societal wide demographic studies are even more confounded. Ultimately, when you look at these studies my overall impression is that we just don't have that much resolution and it's just damn hard to tell."
But we find exactly the opposite for east asian adoptees, despite them presumably having exactly the same confounders. Nobody claims the studies are perfect and give 100% true results, but your point just makes no sense in light of the findings. You can't have it both ways.
"Which brings us to our final question. Do those ancestral differences track our racial categories. I mean if I had to bet, I'd say while our current studies aren't able to clearly resolve any differences in traits like IQ it is pretty plausible some do exist but -- as the majority of human biodiversity is in Africa -- we should expect that the groups who are the most extreme on any phenotype not under uniquely different evolutionary pressures by region (skin color) to occur in Africa."
This is a popular point, and I wouldn't be terribly surprised if there are some small local african groups with surprisingly high intelligence. Nevertheless, you should make yourself more familiar with the ancient genomics / archeaogenomics / general ancient history literature.
The evidence nowadays is quite overwhelming that a group of anatomically modern humans moved to somewhere around the arabic peninsula, underwent multiple sweeps of genomic adaption including metabolically & neurologically relevant loci and then one part moved further to the black sea and later mixed with neanderthals further west, while another part went along the east coast and mixed with denisovans. The former roughly correspond to caucasians, the latter to asians. Notably, it excludes sub-saharan blacks, and we can show this; The native populations from sub-saharan africa lack all these adaptions.
And not only we can see these clear differences already in ancient genomes, and how they propagated themselves, we can see them in modern populations as well; For example, one loci that changed already on the initial arabic peninsulan ancient genomes is related to autism, and non-blacks do in fact have it, as well as significantly increased risk of autism. And again, we can track this further through time and find that ancient genome variants related to autism turn up in the places we would expect, i.e. northern europe and northern asia. This is just one small part, but the autism spectrum is known to be positively associated with exactly the kind of methodological thinking that you would expect from civilizations dependent on bookkeeping and long-term planning.
The critical part here is not that every single finding here is unassailable; It's that every time people look further in detail, it points in the same directions despite the best efforts of the scientists involved (believe it or not, but most scientist don't like the idea of significant neurological differences between grous of people, see the Turkheimer quote).
There are several issues with your argument about selection for intelligence re: agriculture.
1) Intensive agriculture didn't start till about 10,000 years ago. That is barely long enough to push the incidence of adult lactase production -- seemingly a single nucleotide change -- to almost all Europeans.
2) It presumes that the selective pressure for intelligence is primarily the ability to perform tasks like manage a farm. But we know that group selection is an incredibly weak effect and at an individual level, especially in more collective cultures, you mostly just follow your societies traditions and rules.
In contrast there is a strong reason to believe that a major driver of intelligence selection is managing social interactions and alliances.
3) Seems like agriculture, if anything, probably reduces the selection for intelligence given that we see a steady decrease in brain volumes since the invention of agriculture. Indeed, this makes sense given the fact that agriculture probably reduces the variation in individual outcomes as a result of intelligence.
Regarding adoption studies there just aren't that many for white adoption of Asians and once you account for the time the iq tests were taken and Flynn effect corrections: (see this meta-analysis https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6526420/ ) it's just not that clear a piece of evidence.
I agree it is a fair point that need to explain why you don't see the same impact in these studies of asian adoption. However I think world events provide some explanation -- For instance China's one child policy (and earlier Maoist purges) had huge effects on the composition of who ended up in orphanages meaning it was no longer children of people who couldn't afford to keep them and they were less likely to have been starving during pregnancy. Also it will be affected by how shameful the society sees unwed motherhood as.
But I think the most important difference is probably that the parents who adopt east Asian children probably have very different motives than those who adopt black children. Lots of people do (and more did), at some level, think that east Asian children are more likely to be smart. If you were motivated to adopt a cross-racial child to save the poor starving orphans and get social credit going African was the obvious choice while if you wanted a smart kid you might think east Asian was a better choice.
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To be clear, I'm not saying these aren't some evidence. But the fact that the numbers are all over the place (one black-black study gets 89 another 118) tells me that other things are going on so they aren't a clear signal, certainly not large enough to get a clear sense.
Look, I understand why it feels like there is always another excuse. You have no reason to believe me but I generally think that it is very hard to infer much from statistical studies on their own without a lot of theoretical backing. I certainly wouldn't use them to argue we know such differences aren't there. But here the fact that the differences only seem to track our racial categories rather than, e.g., revealing a strong difference between Finnish and southern Italian ancestry tells me we don't have clear theoretical and empirical agreement and that almost certainly something else is going on. Is that other thing 50% 10% or 120% of the observed signal ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.
What we need to settle the question is pretty clear. Good studies that compare adoptees who look the same and have similar situations but who differ in heritage (eg people who have substantial genetic heritage from other groups). Failing that at least a detailed and robust association with actual ancestry groups (eg if we could predict average IQ well based on the percentage heritage from different haplotypes or a clear association between average IQ and time the ancestral group started farming).
Results showing a 10 point difference between races are like the results finding that power pose gives you this massive boost on test performance. A small effect is plausible but such a large effect , especially on such small samples, without seeing big effects tracking the boundaries of known ancestry that isn't so salient to us (Finnish racial heritage is very different) isn't almost surely partially confounded. But sure it isn't unreasonable to think that some of that gap reflects some genetic differences just not all of it.
Say it ends up being a population level difference of 3 points between racial groups taken broadly (which seems possible though far from proven). I'd say that is pretty small. And if it further turns out that it's not monolithic (different ancestry groups that look the same have different averages) ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ I don't think it would be that big a deal ... people just wouldn't want to talk about it just like they don't like talking about the much stronger evidence of male/female differences in interest towards engineering or social subjects. The experts would quietly admit it was real but it wouldn't really be relevant to daily life since there are a billion pieces of info we can condition on to screen off this effect (most obviously an IQ test). Especially since, in the US, there aren't many real Africans as most African-Americans have substantial European ancestry and even if they didn't they'd hardly be representative.
1. The average decline in brain size began a few thousand years before the invention of agriculture then reversing in the Late Neolithic, and most current Hunter Gatherers have smaller brains and lower IQ than everyone else with the Inuit being the exception. See Peter Frost for more information
2. Interracial adoption is primarily the activity of Upper Middle and higher class Whites. There's little to no different between those who adopt an Asian kid and those who adopt an African one.
You are arguing that there is a strong evolutionary pressure for increased intelligence as a result of certain farming practices. I don't need to establish that brains shrank since the development of agriculture only point out the lack of a clear signal of increased selective pressure for intelligence as a result of agriculture.
It's not that your story is impossible but there just isn't the evidence needed to clearly raise it above the many other theories for the same evidence that could be offered.
2) I'm not suggesting the adoptive parents differ in race or income. But those are obviously not the only characteristics that matter. It's not a coincidence that Tiger Woods and the Williams sisters had parents who really cared about how their kids did in those sports.
Are you claiming that if you hear -- or especially heard back in the 80s -- that someone was adopting kids from Africa you wouldn't make a bunch of assumptions about them are different than whites at the same time who adopted an Asian child. I certainly am more inclined to think the later is more likely to see academic performance/smarts as particularly important.
1. "Yet Villmoare and Grabowski (2022) recently argued that the dataset from which we based our findings was inadequate for the question being asked. Furthermore, they reassessed our study using portions of our dataset and were unable to detect any reduction in brain volume. Based on their analysis, they conclude that “human brain size has been remarkably stable over the last 300 ka. Thus, hypotheses of recent change are not supported by the evidence.” If these authors are correct, human brain reduction—an established fact for almost a century (Figure 1)—did not occur. In this paper, responding to Villmoare and Grabowski’s critique, we demonstrate that our revised dataset is sufficient for testing trends in brain volume through time and reaffirm recent human brain size reduction."
2. Every environmental/culture based argument for race differences in IQ have been debunked numerous times.
I have encountered African-Americans in discussion groups who argue that white people are basically a criminal race, responsible for everyone else's problems, genetically morally inferior to others, and all the relative affluence of primarily white societies are ill-gotten gains stolen from others.
Ta-Nehisi Coats (sp?) says he wouldn't want his children playing with white children, because his children would not be fully aware of the evil that white children are capable of.
Woke ideology holds that "punching down" is forbidden while "punching up" is just great. Non-whites are relatively "down", therefore they are allowed to perpetrate all this outrageous slander and it's wonderful, while any effort whites make to defend themselves is "punching down" and not allowed.
Woke liberals make the claim that pretty much ALL the problems of non-white people are due to "injustice", mostly of the form of "bigotry", perpetrated by whites. This is not only an excuse, it's also an accusation, and the accused have a right to speak in self-defense.
This is a good point. 'Race denialism' occurs somewhat in academia but isn't quite the right term when race is rarely denied outright in real world rhetoric. Rather a statistically inverted vision of race realism is canonized. Camouflaging reality in a nice-sounding lie has its consequences, but a wholly false alternate vision with its own demiurge is far more destructive.
Back at the peak of New Atheism I was often boggled by atheists proudly declaring their belief in evolution, only to then parrot notions of biological race and sex equity - mostly the lay followers, but even Hitchens was guilty of this. Revealing, I think, a secularized Christianity still setting the foundation of their worldview.
Of course, leftists now still often claim to be the believers of evolution, as if to contrast rightoids, even as evolution denialism has become an obvious sanctified tenet of leftism.
Both Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris are confirmed Race Realists though. That's partly why the Left eventually disowned them.
They're not very honest about it though. Harris avoids talking about it and Dawkins has spread very misleading anti-HBD claims. Dawkins also likes to say "We are all Africans."
The problem they, and a lot of today's "rationalists", have is not realizing most of their followers aren't like them and aren't following them due to a belief in reason.
Most new atheists followers weren't interested in truth or reason, they just wanted to be free from moral constraints on their own actions.
The progressive atheist critique of Christianity is that it is essentially not Christian enough.
Yes, at the core of woke is a more puritan and literalist denomination of Christianity, which is why it only cropped out of post-Christian nations, but because they're so animated by the percieved failings of their source philosophy they seem incapable of recognizing how indebted they are to it.
Exactly. It's just Christian morality except they replaced "God" with "The State" and "Christ" with "The Self"
Most atheists are leftists and follow the dogmatic narrative of the left. While I am an atheist, I am neither left nor right. I prefer the reality approach.
I think it’s because mainstream Christianity had such poor quality arguments that New Atheists snuck in stupid moral premises.
"“Young Earth Creationism isn’t just wrong, it is fundamentally wrong. And the experts are acting in bad faith.”
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"If it is ever documented conclusively, the genetic inferiority of a race on a trait as important as intelligence will rank with the atomic bomb as the most destructive scientific discovery in human history. The correct conclusion is to withhold judgment."
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The Problem is that even here, you are not saying what needs to be said. In a sense even Turkheimer is being more honest than you are. It is a matter of ethical principle(s) that the genetic inferiority of a race... in circumstances where it's denial has led to 60yrs of atrocities, if admitted must lead to reprisals.
a) Against the liars.
b) Against the inferior race.
c) Against both, just in case.
Personally I'm on team A.
In any case there must be an atom bomb. It must be destructive. The only question is who genuinely deserves to be in the blast radius.
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Here's the funny part.
People don't sign up for moral crusades in which they don't get to crush their enemies at the end. You can't go - 1) This was a terrible atrocity. 2) It's ok now no one must be punished.
If you say 1 and 2, no one trusts you on 1. There has never been a societal change in which the winning side was not fueled by some desire for retribution.
We should stop being cowardly and just say it. Eric Turkheimer will be deported to Haiti if we win.
I addressed Turkheimer's objection to race realism in my FAQs (https://zerocontradictions.net/faqs/race#racial-differences-and-racism). It's basically a Pascal's Mugging Argument and an excuse to ignore reality.
1) there is value in telling people that if they give up their power and positions they will face no further reprisals. That’s literally how communism fell in europe without a shot being fired. It’s how ww1 ended with the Kaiser hanging out at a mansion in the netherlands.
2) the inferior race is obviously going to take a hit if the truth comes out.
Affirmative action, state welfare, some “civil rights”, and right to immigrate are obvious ones.
Beyond government policy, it would be a huge hit to social standing and mating prospects.
While I suppose it’s possible that there could be offsetting good aspects, it takes very little imagination to see the negatives
3) hence I think the most “honest” way to approach this is to just admit a lack of concern for the welfare of niggers. Like yeah they might be worse off if we publicly admitted they are dumb and violent. I don’t care! I care about me and mine. They are hurting me and mine. I want to stop them.
> "1) there is value in telling people that if they give up their power and positions they will face no further reprisals. That’s literally how communism fell in europe without a shot being fired."
If Turkheimer wants to give up his tenure and move to Alaska to chop wood, sure, but he ought to have the self awareness to realise what time it is.
> "3) hence I think the most “honest” way to approach this is to just admit a lack of concern for the welfare of niggers. Like yeah they might be worse off if we publicly admitted they are dumb and violent. I don’t care! I care about me and mine. They are hurting me and mine. I want to stop them"
I think the "me and mine" argument is valid, but it's worth remembering "the niggers" will not be better off in the event of a global venezuela/zimbabwe scenario, which is where the left's (and to a large extent their own) preferred policies would eventually lead.
The minority of the world's black population that live in rich western countries will be somewhat worse off if HBD goes mainstream and the DEI programs end, but the ~95% of blacks living in Africa or Latin America get to continue having access to all the vaccines and synthetic fertilisers needed to keep them alive. That doesn't happen if civilisation collapses.
I'm totally on board with you that it's not in niggers long run interest to niggerfy the whole world. Kill the goose that lays the golden eggs and all. It fails a net present value utilitarian test even if you don't give a shit about non-niggers.
But actual niggers in the actual first world today who have actual voting rights would take a hit on any kind of timeline they are actually capable of caring about. Remember that the entire reason why niggers are so bad at everything is that they aren't capable of long term rational planning! They are poor because they are the kind that kill the goose for a good meal, it's why they can't build infrastructure! That's why every city they take over politically can't provide clean drinking water and functioning electricity within a generation.
Being more reconciliatory. I think its human nature to care a lot about relative status. Some people would rather live in a world where the lights don't work but they (and their race) are "big men".
It should also be mentioned that blacks living under segregation in the US during the 1950s were actually better off than today by various metrics, such as marital stability, drug use, business ownership as so on, and the *relative* B/W difference in income was broadly similar. Black criminals being punished/incarcerated/shot with the regularity their behaviour indicates leaves the vast majority of blacks better off.
> "Being more reconciliatory. I think its human nature to care a lot about relative status. Some people would rather live in a world where the lights don't work but they (and their race) are "big men"."
I agree that there are people who would rather tear down civilisation than accept a subordinate position within it, but "better to reign in hell" is not a position I have much sympathy for.
> "Remember that the entire reason why niggers are so bad at everything is that they aren't capable of long term rational planning!"
Perhaps (obviously with the usual caveats about NAXALT), but you could still make this argument to any intelligent non-black who cares (or pretends to care) about black welfare.
"claims" is doing a lot of work here. I don't think many people really give a fuck.
They care that they need to placate blacks to hang onto coalition partners that give them a double digit vote swing in every election plus cultural and social power.
They also care that nigger equality is part of a larger "equality" ideology that buttresses like an entire worldview. Why does NYC spend 36k per kid per year on K-12 education when it doesn't accomplish shit and they literally phoned it in for two years during COVID. Because "no child left behind" and "everyone can learn to code". Admitting that niggers are too dumb to amount to much also means admitting the lower half of the bell curve of every race can't amount to much either. That's a lot of voters and a lot of professional managerial jobs focused on uplifting the left half of the bell curve.
> "claims" is doing a lot of work here. I don't think many people really give a fuck.
Maybe, but anyone making the claim can still be told "your policies will ultimately make life worse for everyone, including the people you claim to care about, so is this what you actually care about?"
2 and 3 are simplistic. Their needless offence blinds one to rational discussion as much as any adherence to racial creationism or racial denial. If one is to take your line seriously, categorising all of a race by the mean of the race in the light of the criteria you imply, white Europeans must accept being the inferior race compared with Chinese or Indian. Whites might hope that these groups look on them with more charity.
The obsession with focusing on intergroup differences detracts from the intragroup differences. The latter are much greater and the source of most of societies' problems.
"Whites might hope that these groups look on them with more charity."
Whether they will look on us with charity will depend on whether they want to. You seem to think being charitable automatically makes someone charitable back. It doesn't. Sometimes people see it as weakness or don't care at all. And charity to blacks doesn't earn you kudos from East Asians (it might even make them angry if the blacks are victimizing them and stealing their jobs through AA).
The Indians have IQ of 76, I'm not really concerned with their superiority. And we already know what they think of us.
https://x.com/VivekGRamaswamy/status/1872312139945234507?lang=en
East Asians are a different story because they are genuinely high IQ, but they don't seem to perform as well as their IQ implies. Without some long discussion as to why, the bottom line even the rich democratic ones have got like 60% of our labor productivity, extinction tier TFR, and a per capita innovation rate way below what's implied by their IQ. If China didn't have 1.4B people we wouldn't even be talking about them.
Anyway, ignoring intergroup differences does nothing to enhance discussion of intragroup differences. If anything it makes it harder, because "why are the low performers disproportionately from group X" is like the first thing people look at when they start doing things by class instead of race. In fact it's taken as a refutation of intragroup differences! If all races are equal then not performing equally must invalidate IQ as a concept, and thus it can't be applied intragroup either.
That's you know the entire reason Charles Murray gave about why he wrote about race in The Bell Curve.
"IQ is real and important but only accurate for white people" is a non-sensicle scientific statement. Its even more non-sensible then environmentalism.
Excellent article, thank you.
Logic is the way to win an argument.
Unfortunately, people are rarely persuaded by logical argument. From Hume to Haidt, it has been shown that what actually moves people are emotional dispositions and symbolic attachments: these make certain arguments 'feel' persuasive in the first place. Reason justifies, but emotion is what really matters.
And the world is less for that.
Yes, what Westerly Sun is really saying is that HE is not persuaded by logical argument. He prefers his own emotions over logical argument. That argument is typically made by those who lack a logical argument to support their claim, but also lack the integrity to care.
You and Realist are in denial of reality and Human Nature. What The Westerning Sun is saying is that absolutely NO ONE is actually moved by Logic and Reason, and this has been proven by Neuroscience numerous times. You are delusional if you think your beliefs and/or values come from anything other than your subconscious genetically formed emotional temperament. Rationalism itself is an irrational delusion.
Why did a capacity for reasoning evolve, then, if we're all acting purely on genetic impulse? What is the need for a brain?
Logic and Reason exist to post-hoc rationalize one's subconscious emotions & instincts (which are the real drivers of all Human and other Animal behavior) as well as to make sense of external reality.
I said nothing about “rationalism,” a philosophical viewpoint which I do not subscribe to.
I actually wrote an article about how ideologies and other world views are based on underlying psychological temperament (i.e. they use the non-rational part of their brain). That temperament is largely determined by genetics.
https://frompovertytoprogress.substack.com/p/where-does-ideology-come-from
It is, however, ridiculous to go to the opposite extreme of saying “no one is actually moved by logic and reason.”
My “ subconscious genetically formed emotional temperament” was created at birth, and I have learned much since then. Mainly by reading books that present evidence and rational arguments.
If you do not think that logic and reason do not move people, then why are you wasting your time replying in the comments?
Exactly.
Westernly Sun is proven right by Neuroscience and Genetics, you're delusional if you think otherwise
Oh, are you making an argument based on logic and reason?!?
I thought that you said that humans do not do that!
Smart and honest people are moved by arguments, and those are the people who we need on our side. 90% of the population plays absolutely no role in political change.
"Race Creationism is like Young Earth Creationism. They are both doctrines that people believe for essentially religious reasons. And they were never supported by sound evidence."
Sometime it seems like modern social science "evolved" into a way to maintain a Christian moral worldview in a post-religious world. Educated people couldn't believe in God, but they wanted to keep the morals. Social scientists came along and justified all those moral beliefs. You no longer need to believe that all humans are equal before God if the experts tell you that all really are exactly biologically equal! One type of creationism was replaced by another - this one allegedly scientific.
This distinction is what made me shift from calling myself an atheist to calling myself a nihilist in the Nietzschean sense. They claim a lack of belief or even an opposition to Christianity, yet scarcely posses any thoughts that aren't derived from Christianity's presuppositons.
The mantra in the’70s was that “people are all the same“. It wasn’t true then, and it isn’t true now. There is a sizable group who would prefer to treat people as interchangeable. That is one step away from treating people as if they are disposable.
If we could get people to accept that intelligence is largely hereditary, we might be able to get them to stop looking for the witch every time outcomes differ. Then policy makers might come to grips with the fact that people are not the same.
We have been closing out economic niches for the left end of the Bell curve, for decades. This is manifestly unjust. Even if you do not believe that human beings have any intrinsic worth, you should remember that they all have trigger fingers.
"Scientists" who promote Race-denialism are acting in bad faith. On the other hand, millions of laypeople, who have neither the time nor the inclination to delve into it, just assume that the "experts" are right. They are not necessarily acting in bad faith.
The same can be said for Sex/Gender Creationism
'They are both doctrines that people believe for essentially religious reasons.'
This is true of all doctrines — scientific, political, moral, aesthetic. Every system ultimately rests on presuppositions that cannot be proven within its own frame, but are sustained by myth, authority, and trust. In other words: essentially religious reasons.
The significant question is not whether a doctrine is 'religious' or 'evidence-based', but what symbolic order it belongs to, and what social residues it animates.
By that reckoning, it hardly matters whether people believe in Creationism or Evolution. The West flourished for almost a thousand years before Darwin. Its vitality came not from assent to reason, but from the Christian symbolic order which its people lived, embodied, and breathed.
Are race deniers arguing in good faith?
I have heard them say that race doesn't exist , because some immigrant groups from Europe to America were considered non-white. (Italians, Greeks, Poles etc)
So people who were allowed to use whites-only restaurants and drinking fountains were non-white?
So people who married white people were considered non-white at a time when there were anti-miscegenation laws?
So people who legally had to tick 'white' on census forms were considered non-white?
And race deniers want to be taken seriously?
We live in a ideological times. We've always lived in ideological times. The Young Earth Creationists were just one in a long procession of ideologies, and there are many other ideologies, not just the Young Earthers.
The trouble in debates over sensitive topics is it requires intellectual honesty, and we lost that at some point over the millennia. Or maybe we never really had it, or maybe it was there all along, just, it's not convenient to Power for Truth and Honesty to play the prominent role, so they're always on the margins.
Years ago I encountered the topic while researching merit (which in the simple formulation is defined as intelligence x effort). IQ is the closest convenient quantitive metric, but it's not intelligence, and Bell's curve created an inconvenient rendition. We live in a topsy-turvy world and ideologies have us.
I think the orthodoxies are starting to collapse. The dogmatists expanded the list of things that one couldn’t consider too greatly. We all have eyes. And some of us are naturally curious. Reality simply doesn’t align with progressive sacraments.
https://jmpolemic.substack.com/p/white-supremacy
I am reminded of a creationist who thought the evolution of whales implausible. There are many gaps in the fossil record, but on the other hand creationism is asserted without any such scrutiny. Isolated demands for rigor indeed.
When you're in dissident spaces for long enough, the comparison between current egalitarians and religious nutters can sometimes get a bit tired, but it never gets any less true.
I firmly agree with the rhetorical approach suggested, you *must* make it clear that your position is the position one comes to because of the evidence, while theirs is reached by presupposition and wishful thinking.
So, if I get this right, there are 3 lots groups that we need to argue against: Young Earth Creationists, Race Creationists and Race Deniers, the first two because they say that ethnic differences are created and the second because they say there are no differences.
'We' say that there are differences and these are because of evolution. (I take it that we are allowed to admit a common (female) ancestor?)
So if we turn to sex, we disagree with Sex Creationists and Sex Deniers, for parallel reasons, and have parallel views on the role of evolution in the sex differences we observe (not that one dares declare them in today's society).
We have, therefore, a bivariant situation: created/evolved and significant differences/not.
...................SIGNIFICANT DIFFERENCES..........NO SIGNIFICANT DIFFERENCES
CREATED..........Race & YE Creationists
EVOLVED..............Aporia people....................................Race Deniers
UK society is much more controlled by those who deny, usually passionately, sex and ethnic differences. Strangely they have equally strong reactions against those who deny evolution.
My own feeling is that we don't think nearly enough about intragroup differences, which are much bigger than sex or ethnic differences.
I feel like this discussion treats a number of different views as if they were the same. Is there likely to be literally any difference in averages between different groups of humans based on ancestry, is that difference likely to be socially meaningful and does it track our the way we classify people by race. The former claim is obviously correct. Indeed, you can show it is essentially mathematically necessary once you admit there is any widespread variation in genetics that bear on a trait -- the probability that such variation is distributed so as to exactly render the population averages exactly equal is so tiny as to be 0 for all meaningful purpose.
But that claim isn't particularly controversial amoung experts. Sure many people will insist it is true but lots of people think Christ rose from the dead on the third day too. David Reich makes a big point in his book of the fact that we are likely to eventually detect such population level differences and that didn't generate any serious scientific pushback.
The second point is where a bunch of the action is going to be. And of course what is large and small here is somewhat vague but notice that most of the major phenotypical differences we can trace to genetics have an obvious survival advantage in one environment but not others which is not the case with something like intelligence.
The existence of relatively recent genetic bottlenecks means there hasn't been that much time for truly large evolutionary changes. We see variation in populations mostly as a result of SNPs and other small local changes (eg think the genetic differences in lactase production as adults or even in ratios of slow and fast twitch muscle).
But we can look and see if there are any SNPs or other very localized differences that have a large impact on traits like intelligence and we just don't find them. Yes, overall GWAS can be used to predict at most something like 10% of variation in intelligence (within homogeneous groups) but what it hasn't found is a couple SNPs (outside of some unfortunate disorders) that have large effect and certainly not ones that seem to be under high selective pressure as one would expect for such an important trait.
This makes any theory of particularly substantial genetic differences in intelligence by ancestry pretty hard to explain. I mean it doesn't seem like any race has access to some mutation that makes a big difference that others don't so why would you expect any widespread substantial differences given it's a trait under substantial evolutionary pressure? It's not like intelligence wouldn't matter in some ancesteral condition but would in others.
And yes, we can look at population studies and see differences but science is much less clean than one might hope and there isn't a study in existence that can compare people of different racial makeups without confounders. Indeed, I'd argue that often it is the desire not to say potentially controversial things that make these studies look like the are more reliable than they actually are.
I mean take adoption studies. At first blush the fact that adopted infants of African descent in the Norwegian countries don't score as high on various tests might seem clear cut but if you think about it for a moment the mere fact that those children are up for adoption strongly suggests their parents didn't have the best outcomes not to mention any confounders of pre-natal health (and maybe even some social effects later). And societal wide demographic studies are even more confounded. Ultimately, when you look at these studies my overall impression is that we just don't have that much resolution and it's just damn hard to tell.
Which brings us to our final question. Do those ancestral differences track our racial categories. I mean if I had to bet, I'd say while our current studies aren't able to clearly resolve any differences in traits like IQ it is pretty plausible some do exist but -- as the majority of human biodiversity is in Africa -- we should expect that the groups who are the most extreme on any phenotype not under uniquely different evolutionary pressures by region (skin color) to occur in Africa.
And I don't think saying that would actually be that controversial. Yah probably there are generic mental differences which -- though small relative to the amount of individual differences -- will show up in population level averages but its not going to be that asians are smart and black people are dumb. If anyone has some non-trivial advantage on IQ tests (and here differences are more likely to be a different mix of skills given evolutionary pressure but will effect single measure scores like IQ) it's likely going to turn out to be some African ethnic group.
I don't think that claim would be treated like some kind of heresy. What gets that reaction is the insistence (which is imputed unless you take pains to deny it) that you are adopting a simple model which seems to track racial stereotypes. I mean we know there are going to be serious cultural and environmental confounders so it is suspicious if, despite this, you seem to conclude that genetic differences in traits closely track these stereotypes.
"The second point is where a bunch of the action is going to be. And of course what is large and small here is somewhat vague but notice that most of the major phenotypical differences we can trace to genetics have an obvious survival advantage in one environment but not others which is not the case with something like intelligence."
Normally I would be more polite, but in spirit with this article, I'll be frank: This is flat-out wrong.
Humans have lived in very diverse environments, and more importantly, have adapted in ways that require vastly different mental capabilities. If you compare sophisticated european, middle eastern or asian farming practices, including the necessary preservation techniques just to simply survive the winter, with subsaharan tribal living, it becomes instantly obvious that while the latter still needs guile and shrewdness, it's the former that requires the methodological long-term planning that is most associated with intelligence. This coincided with the emergence of writing, which was initially developed mostly for bookkeeping. Subsaharan africa never developed, nor adapted to, writing before being colonized. On the other extreme end, you had for example jewish groups who have been forced into a niche that made them entirely dependent on complicated bookkeeping and hence have had very high literacy rates for literal centuries. And lo and behold, modern IQ estimates almost perfectly match up with the degree to which the respective groups depended on bookkeeping and long-term planning.
"I mean take adoption studies. At first blush the fact that adopted infants of African descent in the Norwegian countries don't score as high on various tests might seem clear cut but if you think about it for a moment the mere fact that those children are up for adoption strongly suggests their parents didn't have the best outcomes not to mention any confounders of pre-natal health (and maybe even some social effects later). And societal wide demographic studies are even more confounded. Ultimately, when you look at these studies my overall impression is that we just don't have that much resolution and it's just damn hard to tell."
But we find exactly the opposite for east asian adoptees, despite them presumably having exactly the same confounders. Nobody claims the studies are perfect and give 100% true results, but your point just makes no sense in light of the findings. You can't have it both ways.
"Which brings us to our final question. Do those ancestral differences track our racial categories. I mean if I had to bet, I'd say while our current studies aren't able to clearly resolve any differences in traits like IQ it is pretty plausible some do exist but -- as the majority of human biodiversity is in Africa -- we should expect that the groups who are the most extreme on any phenotype not under uniquely different evolutionary pressures by region (skin color) to occur in Africa."
This is a popular point, and I wouldn't be terribly surprised if there are some small local african groups with surprisingly high intelligence. Nevertheless, you should make yourself more familiar with the ancient genomics / archeaogenomics / general ancient history literature.
For a good start, you can check out this paper: https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.2213061120. But it's far from the only one.
The evidence nowadays is quite overwhelming that a group of anatomically modern humans moved to somewhere around the arabic peninsula, underwent multiple sweeps of genomic adaption including metabolically & neurologically relevant loci and then one part moved further to the black sea and later mixed with neanderthals further west, while another part went along the east coast and mixed with denisovans. The former roughly correspond to caucasians, the latter to asians. Notably, it excludes sub-saharan blacks, and we can show this; The native populations from sub-saharan africa lack all these adaptions.
And not only we can see these clear differences already in ancient genomes, and how they propagated themselves, we can see them in modern populations as well; For example, one loci that changed already on the initial arabic peninsulan ancient genomes is related to autism, and non-blacks do in fact have it, as well as significantly increased risk of autism. And again, we can track this further through time and find that ancient genome variants related to autism turn up in the places we would expect, i.e. northern europe and northern asia. This is just one small part, but the autism spectrum is known to be positively associated with exactly the kind of methodological thinking that you would expect from civilizations dependent on bookkeeping and long-term planning.
The critical part here is not that every single finding here is unassailable; It's that every time people look further in detail, it points in the same directions despite the best efforts of the scientists involved (believe it or not, but most scientist don't like the idea of significant neurological differences between grous of people, see the Turkheimer quote).
There are several issues with your argument about selection for intelligence re: agriculture.
1) Intensive agriculture didn't start till about 10,000 years ago. That is barely long enough to push the incidence of adult lactase production -- seemingly a single nucleotide change -- to almost all Europeans.
2) It presumes that the selective pressure for intelligence is primarily the ability to perform tasks like manage a farm. But we know that group selection is an incredibly weak effect and at an individual level, especially in more collective cultures, you mostly just follow your societies traditions and rules.
In contrast there is a strong reason to believe that a major driver of intelligence selection is managing social interactions and alliances.
3) Seems like agriculture, if anything, probably reduces the selection for intelligence given that we see a steady decrease in brain volumes since the invention of agriculture. Indeed, this makes sense given the fact that agriculture probably reduces the variation in individual outcomes as a result of intelligence.
4) If your theory was right we should see the iq difference show up between southern Europeans and the Finish who didn't descend from people who have a long history farming: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/ca/World_Map_of_Y-DNA_Haplogroups.png
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Regarding adoption studies there just aren't that many for white adoption of Asians and once you account for the time the iq tests were taken and Flynn effect corrections: (see this meta-analysis https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6526420/ ) it's just not that clear a piece of evidence.
I agree it is a fair point that need to explain why you don't see the same impact in these studies of asian adoption. However I think world events provide some explanation -- For instance China's one child policy (and earlier Maoist purges) had huge effects on the composition of who ended up in orphanages meaning it was no longer children of people who couldn't afford to keep them and they were less likely to have been starving during pregnancy. Also it will be affected by how shameful the society sees unwed motherhood as.
But I think the most important difference is probably that the parents who adopt east Asian children probably have very different motives than those who adopt black children. Lots of people do (and more did), at some level, think that east Asian children are more likely to be smart. If you were motivated to adopt a cross-racial child to save the poor starving orphans and get social credit going African was the obvious choice while if you wanted a smart kid you might think east Asian was a better choice.
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To be clear, I'm not saying these aren't some evidence. But the fact that the numbers are all over the place (one black-black study gets 89 another 118) tells me that other things are going on so they aren't a clear signal, certainly not large enough to get a clear sense.
Look, I understand why it feels like there is always another excuse. You have no reason to believe me but I generally think that it is very hard to infer much from statistical studies on their own without a lot of theoretical backing. I certainly wouldn't use them to argue we know such differences aren't there. But here the fact that the differences only seem to track our racial categories rather than, e.g., revealing a strong difference between Finnish and southern Italian ancestry tells me we don't have clear theoretical and empirical agreement and that almost certainly something else is going on. Is that other thing 50% 10% or 120% of the observed signal ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.
What we need to settle the question is pretty clear. Good studies that compare adoptees who look the same and have similar situations but who differ in heritage (eg people who have substantial genetic heritage from other groups). Failing that at least a detailed and robust association with actual ancestry groups (eg if we could predict average IQ well based on the percentage heritage from different haplotypes or a clear association between average IQ and time the ancestral group started farming).
Results showing a 10 point difference between races are like the results finding that power pose gives you this massive boost on test performance. A small effect is plausible but such a large effect , especially on such small samples, without seeing big effects tracking the boundaries of known ancestry that isn't so salient to us (Finnish racial heritage is very different) isn't almost surely partially confounded. But sure it isn't unreasonable to think that some of that gap reflects some genetic differences just not all of it.
Say it ends up being a population level difference of 3 points between racial groups taken broadly (which seems possible though far from proven). I'd say that is pretty small. And if it further turns out that it's not monolithic (different ancestry groups that look the same have different averages) ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ I don't think it would be that big a deal ... people just wouldn't want to talk about it just like they don't like talking about the much stronger evidence of male/female differences in interest towards engineering or social subjects. The experts would quietly admit it was real but it wouldn't really be relevant to daily life since there are a billion pieces of info we can condition on to screen off this effect (most obviously an IQ test). Especially since, in the US, there aren't many real Africans as most African-Americans have substantial European ancestry and even if they didn't they'd hardly be representative.
1. The average decline in brain size began a few thousand years before the invention of agriculture then reversing in the Late Neolithic, and most current Hunter Gatherers have smaller brains and lower IQ than everyone else with the Inuit being the exception. See Peter Frost for more information
2. Interracial adoption is primarily the activity of Upper Middle and higher class Whites. There's little to no different between those who adopt an Asian kid and those who adopt an African one.
1. That doesn't seem to be the case. This analysis identifies it as happening during the last 3,000-5,000 years.
https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/ecology-and-evolution/articles/10.3389/fevo.2023.1191274/full
You are arguing that there is a strong evolutionary pressure for increased intelligence as a result of certain farming practices. I don't need to establish that brains shrank since the development of agriculture only point out the lack of a clear signal of increased selective pressure for intelligence as a result of agriculture.
It's not that your story is impossible but there just isn't the evidence needed to clearly raise it above the many other theories for the same evidence that could be offered.
2) I'm not suggesting the adoptive parents differ in race or income. But those are obviously not the only characteristics that matter. It's not a coincidence that Tiger Woods and the Williams sisters had parents who really cared about how their kids did in those sports.
Are you claiming that if you hear -- or especially heard back in the 80s -- that someone was adopting kids from Africa you wouldn't make a bunch of assumptions about them are different than whites at the same time who adopted an Asian child. I certainly am more inclined to think the later is more likely to see academic performance/smarts as particularly important.
1. "Yet Villmoare and Grabowski (2022) recently argued that the dataset from which we based our findings was inadequate for the question being asked. Furthermore, they reassessed our study using portions of our dataset and were unable to detect any reduction in brain volume. Based on their analysis, they conclude that “human brain size has been remarkably stable over the last 300 ka. Thus, hypotheses of recent change are not supported by the evidence.” If these authors are correct, human brain reduction—an established fact for almost a century (Figure 1)—did not occur. In this paper, responding to Villmoare and Grabowski’s critique, we demonstrate that our revised dataset is sufficient for testing trends in brain volume through time and reaffirm recent human brain size reduction."
2. Every environmental/culture based argument for race differences in IQ have been debunked numerous times.
I have encountered African-Americans in discussion groups who argue that white people are basically a criminal race, responsible for everyone else's problems, genetically morally inferior to others, and all the relative affluence of primarily white societies are ill-gotten gains stolen from others.
Ta-Nehisi Coats (sp?) says he wouldn't want his children playing with white children, because his children would not be fully aware of the evil that white children are capable of.
Woke ideology holds that "punching down" is forbidden while "punching up" is just great. Non-whites are relatively "down", therefore they are allowed to perpetrate all this outrageous slander and it's wonderful, while any effort whites make to defend themselves is "punching down" and not allowed.
Woke liberals make the claim that pretty much ALL the problems of non-white people are due to "injustice", mostly of the form of "bigotry", perpetrated by whites. This is not only an excuse, it's also an accusation, and the accused have a right to speak in self-defense.
This is a good point. 'Race denialism' occurs somewhat in academia but isn't quite the right term when race is rarely denied outright in real world rhetoric. Rather a statistically inverted vision of race realism is canonized. Camouflaging reality in a nice-sounding lie has its consequences, but a wholly false alternate vision with its own demiurge is far more destructive.