I'm not a psychometrician but nothing he wrote sounds crazy in the light of the evidence we have today.
One could make an argument about basic intellectual and emotional equivalence among all human races but I've actually never seen anyone make such an argument. They just claim that it SHOULD be true, therefore it is, therefore stop talking about it.
I think that the taboos about this topic (or sex characteristics, or gender identity/psychological health, or Jews and their historical roles in various societies) have been subsumed, eroded.
Thought leaders erected barriers of politeness and ideology, but then they used those barriers to try to support short-term political goals, and they tied their program to absurdities and obvious falsehoods, so the barriers broke.
Now they're broken. I don't think they're coming back. If frank discussions of racial trends in IQ are disconcerting for you then this will probably be a bad thing. If your interest is in truth and rational public policy then this could very well be a positive change.
If Hitler hadn't happened, we would be living today in a very different world. There would have been some kind of global conflict, but it wouldn't have left the same scars on our collective conscience.
A lot of other things would have played out differently:
- Decolonization would have happened more slowly, and with much more resistance from the settler communities.
- Western countries would have experimented with global immigration, but the experiment would have been greatly scaled back by the 1980s.
- The Minnesota Transracial Adoption Study would have had a greater impact, becoming in fact a major turning point in academia.
Something I've noticed as an outside observer or the race and IQ debate is how many academics talk about the "invention of race" as a historical contingency, but never consider that their own view of race is historically contingent on the second world war.
If the Thirteen Colonies had banned slavery at an early date — like Canada — the American population would have followed the same trajectory as the Canadian population. Instead of being 80 to 85% of European descent, the United States would have been 96%.
Then, from the 1960s onward, the American government would have thrown all of that away. Just like Canada.
In "Still No Evidence for a Jewish Group Evolutionary Strategy" I cite the 1911 edition of The Mind of Primitive Man: "it would be erroneous to assume that there are no differences in the mental make-up of the negro race and of other races, and that their activities should run in the same line. On the contrary, if there is any meaning in correlation of anatomical structure and physiological function, we must expect that differences exist" (pp. 271-272). A similar statement exists in the 1938 version, published after the rise of the Nazis (p. 270).
Another interesting character was Theodor Waitz, who published On the Unity of the Human Species and the Natural Condition of Man in 1859. Waitz took an extreme environmentalist view of human differences. Boas often cited him as an important authority (as discussed by Degler).
Boas was interested in finding the truth. He thus reflected not only his own intellectual maturity but also that of the majority of educated Americans in the early 20th century. This was a time when traditional religion was in decline while the "new religions" were still relatively weak. As a result, there was a large space for free discussion and enquiry.
Boas seemed to have drawn the correct conclusion about racial differences being genetic but was too timid to come down four square, much like many today.
Can you point to a public intellectual who, in recent times, has made similar statements in public and under his own name? The only one who comes to mind is Charles Murray — and he has been no less "timid" in his statements.
Charles Murray has hardly been timid given the constant hostility his ideas have been subjected to. He's one of the most principled intellectuals whose ever lived. We wouldn't be having this conversation now if he hadn't held the fort down for hereditarianism for so many lonely decades.
I agree. That's why I put the word "timid" in quotation marks. In other words, I was putting Charles Murray and Franz Boas on the same level of academic civility, courtesy, and decency.
Given what we know today about both verbal and quantitative skills, spatial thinking, future and present orientations, and criminality anyone writing about these things must take on the responsibility of discussing the impact even if only marginal of losing the deep well of intellect because of racial demographics but also because of extended life spans and the childbearing success of all intelligence levels. I would be interested in seeing Carl and Winegard discuss this Frost article in that light. Boas would be deficient if he were alive today and wrote as he did early or late in his career in a way that basically ignored the social effects of these differences.
Franz Boas was a great scientist who pushed back against the excessive emphasis on nature over nurture before the stock market crash of 1929 led to the rise of the left on campus as rich businessmen couldn't pony up the money anymore to support academics. It's not Boas' fault that his followers and their followers went overboard in the opposite direction in the decades after his death.
In the Social Science Building on the U. of Chicago campus, finished in 1929 before the money vanished, there's one entrance where statues of Galton and Boas face each other across the doorway. That seems fair to me.
Whatever their reasons for doing such, on even its own terms, it's clear that trying to solve racism by pretending race doesn't exist has been a failure. Eighty years of failure is more than enough to call any project hopeless, and the present day figures — Yglesias, FdB, etc. — who continue to pretend that racial fantasism is a viable antiracist solution, whatever their other merits, will only make the present problem worse.
Nor did it ever make much sense to blame recognizing race as a real thing as being the cause of Nazi'ism, given that we'd recognized race as a real thing for thousands of years before the Nazis even existed. But even if it was, we can't rewrite reality just because we fear others will interpret it in bad ways. Said people still interpret things in bad ways. They're just more likely to do it based off false premises, which compounds their bad interpretations of things to make them even more disastrous than they would've been otherwise.
Truth is the first casualty of war. And the war on racism is just that — a ruthless conflict where most of the victims don't even get the pretense of a trial.
Race is a myth and an increasingly antiquated subject. There is no 'white', 'black' or 'asian' peoples. These are essentially sociological categories, often based on appearance alone.
Race precedes our modern understanding of genetics, and what we often see now is a retro-active fitting of modern science onto these ancient categories.
A "race" is a population that exists long enough to be shaped by natural selection. That can be a short time. A population can diverge significantly from another population in as little as eight generations.
Race is a "myth" in the sense that everything is mythical. To make sense of reality, we have to simplify it in various ways. We create categories, and we rank these categories in terms of their importance. We may thus lose sight of their "fuzziness."
All of that is unfortunate, but it's a problem that comes up in any intellectual analysis. When some people denounce race as a myth, they are using arguments that can be used to denounce any categorization.
Why delineate population categories by colour though? 'Race' was used long before any concept of natural selection was accepted, and has constantly transmogrified as the facts and our collective knowledge has changed, as well as when cultural self-definitions have changed.
Why not delineate population categories by ethnicity? (itself a sociological categorisation of human differences, though one which is endlessly malleable due to its inclusion of socio-cultural factors).
No matter which way you cut it, race is an arbitrary categorisation of human diversity.
I don't define human populations in terms of skin colour, and neither does anyone else at Aporia Magazine.
There is always some arbitrariness in any categorization. That's inevitable. In the case of human populations, we also have to reconcile two very different sets of criteria:
1. genetic distance between populations;
2. differences in natural selection between populations.
For instance, Sub-Saharan Africans and New Guineans are very distant from each other in terms of genetic distance. This isn't surprising because their common ancestors go back a long way in time. Yet they are quite similar, not only in their physical appearance but also in many of their mental and behavioral adaptations. This is because both groups have remained in the Tropics and share similar forms of social organization and material culture. So both groups have adapted to similar natural and cultural environments.
Now, let's repeat this mental exercise with Eurasians. That group has diversified considerably over a much shorter time into a much wider range of natural and cultural environments. So, in terms of adaptive traits, they are much more diverse.
That is all fine - my contention is with the alleged definition of race.
Do you refer to Sub-Saharan Africans and Eurasians as a race? Do you believe that one is 'black' and the other is 'white'?
If you don't, then you believe, along with me, that the vast majority of people who refer to these 'racial' categories are essentially talking about something totally different from you - a myth.
First, that “vast majority“ is composed of people who, like you, see human differences as being skin-deep. Such people literally believe that races are defined by skin colour.
Like you, I was one of those people. You’re probably familiar with the reasons:
• Mental and behavioral traits are too complex to have diversified during the time of Homo sapiens.
• Cultural evolution has replaced genetic evolution. Humans have adapted to local conditions primarily through their culture, and not through their genes.
• Substantial genetic differences have not arisen between human populations, since there has been too much gene flow between them. Indeed, Richard Lewontin showed that genetic variation within populations greatly exceeds genetic variation between populations.
Over time, I found those reasons less and less compelling. The process was gradual, and there was a long time when I superficially believed in antiracism while not really believing.
I would sum up my current beliefs as follows:
• Human populations differ not only in physical traits but also in mental and behavioral traits. The latter are no less heritable and no less susceptible to natural selection.
• Humans have adapted genetically not only to natural environments but also to the growing number of cultural environments. Beginning 10,000 years ago, genetic evolution sped up more than a hundred-fold, as hunting and gathering gave way to farming and then to other cultural changes. Thus, cultural evolution did not slow down or replace genetic evolution. In fact, it caused genetic evolution to accelerate.
• There has been a coevolution between humans and culture. We create culture, and culture recreates us, through natural selection. Culture favours those of us who better fit in and exploit its opportunities. Different human populations have therefore pursued different trajectories of gene-culture coevolution.
• Within a single population, a gene may have several variants — what we call alleles — which differ from each other in their anatomical, physiological, or behavioral consequences. The less consequential the difference between alleles, the less it will align with population boundaries, which tend to separate different regimes of natural selection — i.e., different natural or cultural environments. This is why we typically see considerable genetic overlap not only between populations of the same species but also between sibling species that nonetheless show clear differences in anatomy, physiology, and behaviour. The overwhelming majority of genetic variation is of little consequence and is weakly influenced by natural selection.
That is what I believe, but my beliefs can change. Abandonment of one set of dogmas doesn’t necessarily mean adoption of a new set. We should not assume that a post-antiracist is a racist, any more than we should assume that an atheist worships Satan or the old pagan gods.
It's not delineated by color. Plenty of people of different races have the same color skin, nor do mutations that drastically change skin color, such as albinism, magically change race.
Skin color just has different average presence in different races, so skin color terms are used as a proxy for race.
I'm not a psychometrician but nothing he wrote sounds crazy in the light of the evidence we have today.
One could make an argument about basic intellectual and emotional equivalence among all human races but I've actually never seen anyone make such an argument. They just claim that it SHOULD be true, therefore it is, therefore stop talking about it.
I think that the taboos about this topic (or sex characteristics, or gender identity/psychological health, or Jews and their historical roles in various societies) have been subsumed, eroded.
Thought leaders erected barriers of politeness and ideology, but then they used those barriers to try to support short-term political goals, and they tied their program to absurdities and obvious falsehoods, so the barriers broke.
Now they're broken. I don't think they're coming back. If frank discussions of racial trends in IQ are disconcerting for you then this will probably be a bad thing. If your interest is in truth and rational public policy then this could very well be a positive change.
https://jmpolemic.substack.com/p/horizontal-information-flow
If Hitler hadn't happened, we would be living today in a very different world. There would have been some kind of global conflict, but it wouldn't have left the same scars on our collective conscience.
A lot of other things would have played out differently:
- Decolonization would have happened more slowly, and with much more resistance from the settler communities.
- Western countries would have experimented with global immigration, but the experiment would have been greatly scaled back by the 1980s.
- The Minnesota Transracial Adoption Study would have had a greater impact, becoming in fact a major turning point in academia.
Something I've noticed as an outside observer or the race and IQ debate is how many academics talk about the "invention of race" as a historical contingency, but never consider that their own view of race is historically contingent on the second world war.
"If Hitler hadn't happened, we would be living today in a very different world."
True, but the same could be said about slavery in North America.
If the Thirteen Colonies had banned slavery at an early date — like Canada — the American population would have followed the same trajectory as the Canadian population. Instead of being 80 to 85% of European descent, the United States would have been 96%.
Then, from the 1960s onward, the American government would have thrown all of that away. Just like Canada.
Ideology matters.
"Then, from the 1960s onward, the American government would have thrown all of that away. Just like Canada."
That is conjecture.
The word "conjecture" doesn't mean "things that actually happened and are happening."
"The word "conjecture" doesn't mean "things that actually happened and are happening."
I know what the word conjecture means. But when someone says so and so would not have or would have happened IF such and such...then it is conjecture.
In "Still No Evidence for a Jewish Group Evolutionary Strategy" I cite the 1911 edition of The Mind of Primitive Man: "it would be erroneous to assume that there are no differences in the mental make-up of the negro race and of other races, and that their activities should run in the same line. On the contrary, if there is any meaning in correlation of anatomical structure and physiological function, we must expect that differences exist" (pp. 271-272). A similar statement exists in the 1938 version, published after the rise of the Nazis (p. 270).
Another interesting character was Theodor Waitz, who published On the Unity of the Human Species and the Natural Condition of Man in 1859. Waitz took an extreme environmentalist view of human differences. Boas often cited him as an important authority (as discussed by Degler).
Boas was interested in finding the truth. He thus reflected not only his own intellectual maturity but also that of the majority of educated Americans in the early 20th century. This was a time when traditional religion was in decline while the "new religions" were still relatively weak. As a result, there was a large space for free discussion and enquiry.
Boas seemed to have drawn the correct conclusion about racial differences being genetic but was too timid to come down four square, much like many today.
Can you point to a public intellectual who, in recent times, has made similar statements in public and under his own name? The only one who comes to mind is Charles Murray — and he has been no less "timid" in his statements.
Who did you have in mind?
"Can you point to a public intellectual who, in recent times, has made similar statements in public and under his own name? "
No, but that is my point. Everyone lives in fear of being called racist.
Not everyone.
"Not everyone."
True, but almost everyone. Bless the exceptions.
Charles Murray has hardly been timid given the constant hostility his ideas have been subjected to. He's one of the most principled intellectuals whose ever lived. We wouldn't be having this conversation now if he hadn't held the fort down for hereditarianism for so many lonely decades.
I agree. That's why I put the word "timid" in quotation marks. In other words, I was putting Charles Murray and Franz Boas on the same level of academic civility, courtesy, and decency.
Given what we know today about both verbal and quantitative skills, spatial thinking, future and present orientations, and criminality anyone writing about these things must take on the responsibility of discussing the impact even if only marginal of losing the deep well of intellect because of racial demographics but also because of extended life spans and the childbearing success of all intelligence levels. I would be interested in seeing Carl and Winegard discuss this Frost article in that light. Boas would be deficient if he were alive today and wrote as he did early or late in his career in a way that basically ignored the social effects of these differences.
Actually, he did write about social effects. His terminology was a bit different, but when he talked about "tradition" he meant "culture."
Well, then that needs to be covered to be precise about what he believed over his career especially early on.
I believe I did.
Franz Boas was a great scientist who pushed back against the excessive emphasis on nature over nurture before the stock market crash of 1929 led to the rise of the left on campus as rich businessmen couldn't pony up the money anymore to support academics. It's not Boas' fault that his followers and their followers went overboard in the opposite direction in the decades after his death.
In the Social Science Building on the U. of Chicago campus, finished in 1929 before the money vanished, there's one entrance where statues of Galton and Boas face each other across the doorway. That seems fair to me.
Whatever their reasons for doing such, on even its own terms, it's clear that trying to solve racism by pretending race doesn't exist has been a failure. Eighty years of failure is more than enough to call any project hopeless, and the present day figures — Yglesias, FdB, etc. — who continue to pretend that racial fantasism is a viable antiracist solution, whatever their other merits, will only make the present problem worse.
Nor did it ever make much sense to blame recognizing race as a real thing as being the cause of Nazi'ism, given that we'd recognized race as a real thing for thousands of years before the Nazis even existed. But even if it was, we can't rewrite reality just because we fear others will interpret it in bad ways. Said people still interpret things in bad ways. They're just more likely to do it based off false premises, which compounds their bad interpretations of things to make them even more disastrous than they would've been otherwise.
Truth is the first casualty of war. And the war on racism is just that — a ruthless conflict where most of the victims don't even get the pretense of a trial.
Race is a myth and an increasingly antiquated subject. There is no 'white', 'black' or 'asian' peoples. These are essentially sociological categories, often based on appearance alone.
Race precedes our modern understanding of genetics, and what we often see now is a retro-active fitting of modern science onto these ancient categories.
Race is not a myth: https://www.aporiamagazine.com/p/the-case-for-race-realism
—NC
Race is not a myth. https://zerocontradictions.net/faqs/race
Try navigating the TOC to answer all of your objections before responding, if ever.
A "race" is a population that exists long enough to be shaped by natural selection. That can be a short time. A population can diverge significantly from another population in as little as eight generations.
Race is a "myth" in the sense that everything is mythical. To make sense of reality, we have to simplify it in various ways. We create categories, and we rank these categories in terms of their importance. We may thus lose sight of their "fuzziness."
All of that is unfortunate, but it's a problem that comes up in any intellectual analysis. When some people denounce race as a myth, they are using arguments that can be used to denounce any categorization.
Why delineate population categories by colour though? 'Race' was used long before any concept of natural selection was accepted, and has constantly transmogrified as the facts and our collective knowledge has changed, as well as when cultural self-definitions have changed.
Why not delineate population categories by ethnicity? (itself a sociological categorisation of human differences, though one which is endlessly malleable due to its inclusion of socio-cultural factors).
No matter which way you cut it, race is an arbitrary categorisation of human diversity.
I don't define human populations in terms of skin colour, and neither does anyone else at Aporia Magazine.
There is always some arbitrariness in any categorization. That's inevitable. In the case of human populations, we also have to reconcile two very different sets of criteria:
1. genetic distance between populations;
2. differences in natural selection between populations.
For instance, Sub-Saharan Africans and New Guineans are very distant from each other in terms of genetic distance. This isn't surprising because their common ancestors go back a long way in time. Yet they are quite similar, not only in their physical appearance but also in many of their mental and behavioral adaptations. This is because both groups have remained in the Tropics and share similar forms of social organization and material culture. So both groups have adapted to similar natural and cultural environments.
Now, let's repeat this mental exercise with Eurasians. That group has diversified considerably over a much shorter time into a much wider range of natural and cultural environments. So, in terms of adaptive traits, they are much more diverse.
That is all fine - my contention is with the alleged definition of race.
Do you refer to Sub-Saharan Africans and Eurasians as a race? Do you believe that one is 'black' and the other is 'white'?
If you don't, then you believe, along with me, that the vast majority of people who refer to these 'racial' categories are essentially talking about something totally different from you - a myth.
First, that “vast majority“ is composed of people who, like you, see human differences as being skin-deep. Such people literally believe that races are defined by skin colour.
Like you, I was one of those people. You’re probably familiar with the reasons:
• Mental and behavioral traits are too complex to have diversified during the time of Homo sapiens.
• Cultural evolution has replaced genetic evolution. Humans have adapted to local conditions primarily through their culture, and not through their genes.
• Substantial genetic differences have not arisen between human populations, since there has been too much gene flow between them. Indeed, Richard Lewontin showed that genetic variation within populations greatly exceeds genetic variation between populations.
Over time, I found those reasons less and less compelling. The process was gradual, and there was a long time when I superficially believed in antiracism while not really believing.
I would sum up my current beliefs as follows:
• Human populations differ not only in physical traits but also in mental and behavioral traits. The latter are no less heritable and no less susceptible to natural selection.
• Humans have adapted genetically not only to natural environments but also to the growing number of cultural environments. Beginning 10,000 years ago, genetic evolution sped up more than a hundred-fold, as hunting and gathering gave way to farming and then to other cultural changes. Thus, cultural evolution did not slow down or replace genetic evolution. In fact, it caused genetic evolution to accelerate.
• There has been a coevolution between humans and culture. We create culture, and culture recreates us, through natural selection. Culture favours those of us who better fit in and exploit its opportunities. Different human populations have therefore pursued different trajectories of gene-culture coevolution.
• Within a single population, a gene may have several variants — what we call alleles — which differ from each other in their anatomical, physiological, or behavioral consequences. The less consequential the difference between alleles, the less it will align with population boundaries, which tend to separate different regimes of natural selection — i.e., different natural or cultural environments. This is why we typically see considerable genetic overlap not only between populations of the same species but also between sibling species that nonetheless show clear differences in anatomy, physiology, and behaviour. The overwhelming majority of genetic variation is of little consequence and is weakly influenced by natural selection.
That is what I believe, but my beliefs can change. Abandonment of one set of dogmas doesn’t necessarily mean adoption of a new set. We should not assume that a post-antiracist is a racist, any more than we should assume that an atheist worships Satan or the old pagan gods.
It's not delineated by color. Plenty of people of different races have the same color skin, nor do mutations that drastically change skin color, such as albinism, magically change race.
Skin color just has different average presence in different races, so skin color terms are used as a proxy for race.