evolution discussion: can ancestry effect ability to learn/retain information.

[Dezerte]

I'd say no. While we're discovering that nuture is much more influential than we thought before, DNA still isn't irrelevant. But I also think it's very simplified to equate IQ to intelligence.

[Gheld]

I'd say no. While we're discovering that nuture is much more influential than we thought before, DNA still isn't irrelevant.

When you look at data on the topic from a perspective though it's found that regional variation plays a greater role than ethnic variation.

[Spectral]

Actually the concept of "race" is very highly disputed in it's scientific merit and that while REGIONAL variations do exist in people's DNA the whole "Race" thing is largely an abstract construct based on superficial observation.

This is kind of a weird idea that popped up a couple decades ago when genetic evidence was quite a lot weaker and has stuck because it's a rather happy idea. This Wiki on human genetic clustering summarizes more recent developments in the scientific literature and surrounding debate; while it's quite complicated and not a settled matter, there's no real argument that race is not a scientifically valid construct.

There's also socially constructed concepts of race that have varying degrees of material validity, but this does not suggest that there aren't really human populations that evolved mostly separately for thousands of years.

[Deleted]

Yes evolution can affect IQ, this happens mostly through the relative size of the brain to total body mass. Humans for example have very large brains compared to their mass, and the increase in our cranial volume is well documented through our evolutionary history.
In humans today there is no significant difference though. All human dna is like 99.99% the same so people aren't going to have a markedly different brain then others.

However there are tons of non-evolutionary factors that can increase your capacity for learning, like nutrition of mother during pregnancy, stimuli during early years, quality of education, etc, that are in large parts determined by how well off your direct parents/family tree is.

[Spectral]

Maybe because a lot of universities aim sports related scholarship programs towards economically disadvantaged youths and that in many parts of the world blacks are more likely to be economically disadvantaged and thus being good at a sport is the difference between receiving a post secondary education or working 3 jobs for 7 dollars an hour for the rest of their life.

This is a pretty unsatisfying explanation for African-American dominance in football and basketball. Many white children also grow up playing these sports, becoming good at them brings prestige (and access to sex) even for people that won't go onto make any money playing sports. Lots and lots of people work hard to become good at sports, yet African-Americans thoroughly dominate at the highest levels.

It doesn't taking looking far to notice that this is specifically people of West African ancestry, who also dominate sprinting and other explosive track events - this is likely to have more to do with innate differences in muscle fiber content (note that distance running events are dominated by people of East African ancestry) than culture, as differences in fiber types account for a significant portion of the variance in endurance and sprint speed across populations.

I wouldn't be surprised to find that cultural factors matter too - Kenyans, for example, grow up running to an extent that other peoples just don't. Chalking it all up to culture seems like an odd impulse though.

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I'd say no. While we're discovering that nuture is much more influential than we thought before, DNA still isn't irrelevant.

This is not consistent with the best modern science on the matter. Check out this Molecular Psychiatry article (this is a Nature pub, quite reputable). Of note:

Intelligence is a core construct in differential psychology and behavioural genetics, and should be so in cognitive neuroscience. It is one of the best predictors of important life outcomes such as education, occupation, mental and physical health and illness, and mortality. Intelligence is one of the most heritable behavioural traits. Here, we highlight five genetic findings that are special to intelligence differences and that have important implications for its genetic architecture and for gene-hunting expeditions. (i) The heritability of intelligence increases from about 20% in infancy to perhaps 80% in later adulthood. (ii) Intelligence captures genetic effects on diverse cognitive and learning abilities, which correlate phenotypically about 0.30 on average but correlate genetically about 0.60 or higher.

Intelligence seems to be highly heritable.

But I also think it's very simplified to equate IQ to intelligence.

Why do you think so? The best IQ tests are heavily g-loaded and correlate tightly with the ability to perform the most mentally demanding tasks. There are literally zero physicists without high measurable IQs.

[Jingoism]

Nature > Nurture and intelligence is definitely heritable, but shh don't tell the egalitarians that. They're already throwing a fit in the thread.

[Exception]

Assuming this isn't just pulling data from the days when IQ tests asked loaded questions that were academically biased against proportions of the population who couldn't afford to attend school...

"Frequency distributions for populations of equal size" sounds like "Not a random sample."

For a statistical study to be scientifically valid it has to use a random sample. So they would have to test the IQ of 100-1000 randomly selected people across the globe.

EDIT: LAwl, I followed that image to it's linking source, and it comes right off some lolworthy white supremacist site.

No, random sampling is not the only scientifically valid option. There are numerous ways to collect data, different ones being more useful depending on the study at hand and the nature of the populations. In this particular study, since the data is easily grouped to two sections due to clear distinctive characteristics, it’s better to use more specific sampling methods.

Obviously that website wasn’t the one performing this study. In essence, just because a certain website has a link to a certain study, doesn’t mean they were the people conducting it. I know, the internet can be quite confusing at times.

That particular picture is from this book: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bell_Curve
This has been proven several times in different studies too, but this one might be the most famous.

[Gheld]

Nature > Nurture and intelligence is definitely heritable, but shh don't tell the egalitarians that. They're already throwing a fit in the thread.

Well so far all I've seen is some chart off some white supremacist site, which one of you guys denies being a white supremacist site despite the editor of the second most recent front page article suggesting that all black people be killed.

So I'm not exactly seeing a lot of imperative to make a well backed argument since this thread is going to get closed anyway after the mods finish watching saturday morning cartoons. Any hard research would be completely wasted.

[Stonecloak]

It's whatever cap you give yourself, or idea that limits yourself. It's baked into peoples psyche's so much they don't even realize it.

[Gheld]

Since white supremacists like to hang onto the whole backyard militia movement in the states...who worship Atlas Shrugged as their bible.. I'll leave you with this.

[Spectral]

Well so far all I've seen is some chart off some white supremacist site, which one of you guys denies being a white supremacist site despite the editor of the second most recent front page article suggesting that all black people be killed.

So I'm not exactly seeing a lot of imperative to make a well backed argument since this thread is going to get closed anyway after the mods finish watching saturday morning cartoons. Any hard research would be completely wasted.

Can you be specific about the evidence you're looking for? This really isn't hard to find at all - going to scholar.google.com and searching for "race IQ" pulls up tons of results. The Wikis on the matter are highly cited. While there's tons of argument about why there's a persistent IQ gap across traditional race groups and across countries, there's no real doubt that the gap shows up however you test for it, over and over again. Whether we can or should do anything about that is an open question, but I'm not sure why you'd think there aren't differences that show up between regions.

Tons of citations here for a good start.

[Zenny]

Yes

This graph is so blatantly dumb that believing it most likely puts your IQ somewhere at the start of it.

[Spectral]

This graph is so blatantly dumb that believing it most likely puts your IQ somewhere at the start of it.

What makes you say so?

[Gheld]

Basically Ayn Rand says your chart is bad and that you should feel bad. Even if it's 100% accurate, you're not posting it because you're over to the right of it.

[Spectral]

Basically Ayn Rand says your chart is bad and that you should feel bad. Even if it's 100% accurate, you're not posting it because you're over to the right of it.

It's not "my chart" as I didn't graph it or post it. I don't care what Ayn Rand thinks about much of anything. Finally, "yeah, well, you're stupid" isn't so much an argument as a way to whine about someone saying something you don't like.

In any case, I'm not at all worried about where I personally stand on the ol' IQ Leaderboard. I've done just fine for myself.

[Deleted]

Obvious answer is obvious.

Evolution decides every advantage and disadvantage you have compared with all other forms of life.

How well do blades of grass survive against cows?

Cows and grass share the same common ancestor, as do you.

Major advantages, like those i just pointed out are obvious.

Minor advantages are harder to identify, but they are all still there.

Nope, evolution doesn't apply to humans anymore.
The rich don't have the most children and the ones wh can barely afford them got too many.

OP seems like race bashing, like the kind they used to do in the 1950's.

DNA gets around. DNA wise there's practically no difference between whites and blacks.

Of course you would say that, you got the skullshape of a stagecoach horse changer.

[wregelmann]

You (fairly objectively) have a greater ability to learn than a goldfish.
There is no empirical delineation between species.
Therefore, if one is to argue that all humans have equal "potential", one must concede that all animals have the same "potential" as humans (extend this to all life if you want).
So goldfish have the same ability to learn as humans - directly contradicting the first statement.

So yeah: Intelligence is absolutely related to the condition of your birth (i.e. genetics).

[Spectral]

If you want to see something interesting find a bell curve of White vs Asian IQ.

If you've got one, I'd be interested in seeing it. As near as I can tell, it's firmly established that East Asians (particularly Chinese, Japanese, and Koreans) have higher average IQs than European ancestry whites, but that the distribution isn't well known. There's a lot of speculation about differing standard deviations, but I'm not aware of any high quality studies on the matter.

[Gheld]

What that graph fails to show is that the average IQ "Black distribution" is increasing at greater rate than the average IQ in the "White distribution". Exposure to education has the effect of increasing IQ

The chart is inherently flawed. Because if there was any merit to it, the terminating points would also differ. But if you strain your eyes on that shit, the terminating point for both blacks and whites is roughly about 145 on the high end and around 50 on the low end.

So if it was an inherent 20 point IQ loss to be a black person, the terminating points should be 30 and 125. But they aren't. Which means that the bulk of the data was collected via flawed methodology, while extreme cases (such as people with severe mental handicaps, and people with high levels of genius who undoubtedly get scooped up into private academic circles before you can say "Race") are really hard to fudge. Not to mention people in the super genius range have an exponentially easier time passing a test that is biased against them. While somebody who is severely mentally handicapped couldn't pass it if they had an answer sheet right beside them. Hence the harmonized terminating points.

So that alone can pretty much definitively tell you that the data that chart is based on is biased.

[Spectral]

The chart is inherently flawed. Because if there was any merit to it, the terminating points would also differ. But if you strain your eyes on that shit, the terminating point for both blacks and whites is roughly about 145 on the high end and around 50 on the low end.

Those are pretty much the measurable limits for standard IQ tests, so this isn't surprising.

So if it was an inherent 20 point IQ loss to be a black person, the terminating points should be 30 and 125.

This suggests that you don't really understand how distributions work. I don't think you're really in a position to comment on anything that involves statistical analysis. There's not an "inherent 20 point loss", this isn't how averages work. There is, on average, something like an ~13-15 point persistent measurable gap in the United States. This doesn't, at all, imply a hard cap on how smart a black person can be - there are certainly plenty of African-American geniuses.