Could this have to so with smart people increasing pursuing hedonism over reproduction? Maybe Idiocracy was right all along.
From a strict evolutionary perspective I have doubts that a high IQ is useful anymore.
replies(6):
From a strict evolutionary perspective I have doubts that a high IQ is useful anymore.
The only things being selected for in modern humans, if anything, are going to be things like disease resistance, maybe tolerance to some chemical contaminants in food & water, air pollution. And even then only in some parts of the world.
A big part of "The Bell Curve" was arguing that no interventions could change IQ except genetics and so any money spent on low IQ people (African-Americans in the book, but the author followed up by attacking poor people more generally) was a pointless waste.
It turns out he wasn't just an asshole, he was also wrong.
I have yet to read “the bell curve” said, but did they really use an argument that flew in the face of the abundant evidence of IQ increases unlinked to genetics as a result of better nutrition and education? Hell America gained a few IQ points nationwide from banning leaded gasoline alone so we also knew of environmental means to affect IQ levels. This was all known about and very well established at the time of authorship. Is there an excerpt?
I am not rejecting this point but I have a hard time accepting it Carte Blanche. If anything if IQ is lowering for generic reasons I would suspect birth control as a cause especially since it’s a more recent phenomenon than means tested welfare.
Yes they did, and they did a lot worse than that. And that is the reason why the scientific community was very fast to discredit this book. The science in it were bad, to say the least. It wasn’t even peer reviewed. I think the decline in IQ research is in large part thanks to the pushback this book rightfully got.
It is actually nice that this books is raised here, because the journal this study was published in Intelligence has its ties to true believers of The Bell Curve. Richard J. Haier is the editor in chief signed an editorial defending this book back in 1994. And the board included disgraced eugenicist Richard Lynn (whos discredited pseudo-scientific work cited throughout the book) was on the editorial board until 2018.
He worked at the American Enterprise Institute, so if you just imagine their attitude to the scientific facts of climate change, transposed onto genetics, you'll have a good idea of what they were saying. So it's not so much as not being aware of the science, but of not liking the obvious policy conclusions it leads to and so having to work really hard to counter it.
"The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life is a 1994 book by psychologist Richard J. Herrnstein and political scientist Charles Murray, in which the authors argue that human intelligence is substantially influenced by both inherited and environmental factors."
That statement completely contradicts what your claim about the book, and now I am disinclined to trust you.. Later on another statement also completely contradicts what you are saying:
"According to Herrnstein and Murray, the high heritability of IQ within races does not necessarily mean that the cause of differences between races is genetic. On the other hand, they discuss lines of evidence that have been used to support the thesis that the black-white gap is at least partly genetic, such as Spearman's hypothesis. They also discuss possible environmental explanations of the gap, such as the observed generational increases in IQ, for which they coin the term Flynn effect"
See above reply. Wikepedia completely contradicts what you are saying. I also know what you're saying about AEI is mostly garbage, too.
> According to Herrnstein and Murray, the high heritability of IQ within races does not necessarily mean that the cause of differences between races is genetic. On the other hand, they discuss lines of evidence that have been used to support the thesis that the black-white gap is at least partly genetic, such as Spearman's hypothesis. They also discuss possible environmental explanations of the gap, such as the observed generational increases in IQ, for which they coin the term Flynn effect. At the close of this discussion, they write:
> > If the reader is now convinced that either the genetic or environmental explanation has won out to the exclusion of the other, we have not done a sufficiently good job of presenting one side or the other. It seems highly likely to us that both genes and environment have something to do with racial differences. What might the mix be? We are resolutely agnostic on that issue; as far as we can determine, the evidence does not yet justify an estimate.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bell_Curve#Part_III._The_N...
The part I find especially amusing is how often the Flynn effect is used to refute The Bell Curve, even though the term "Flynn effect" comes from The Bell Curve.
It should be self-evident that you can lower IQ through environment (injury, developmental issues, malnourishment, etc.). So even if you believe there's a genetic ceiling to IQ, Flynn effect (and reverse) don't contradict that.
("The rich outbred the poor" also seems very dubious, labor was still very manual, so you gotta have someone to do it.)
This YouTube video[1] does a fair job of summarizing the bulk of what is wrong with this book. But IMO very fact that the book is an apologia for eugenicists should be enough of a critique, you shouldn’t need any more.
1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UBc7qBS1Ujo
PS. Regarding the naming of the Flynn effect:
> Flynn stated that, if asked, he would have named the effect after Read D. Tuddenham who "was the first to present convincing evidence of massive gains on mental tests using a nationwide sample" in a 1948 article
When the collective hive mind of a society is organized around anti-intellectualism (the core ethos of America), then it will subsidize a combination of stupid (less talent) and mental laziness (lack of productive application of talent). This is how a society enters the dustbin of history and emerges as a brutal and backwards people.
You're denying settled science. Trying to tie it to the Bell Curve to assassinate the basic character of the science isn't tricking anyone. Pronouns in your profile only make this bad faith move easier to identify.
On the individual level stupider people reproduce more so evolutionary speaking it's more efficient to be stupid. However if a small portion of the population has high IQ they can move society forward via say the discovery of electricity, mathematics, etc, etc. This propels every individual forward as a whole at the detriment of a few individuals who are to nerdy or geeky to get laid that often.
Thus from a high level perspective, there is selection pressure that works on the population of people that makes it so that our genes have the mechanisms in place to produce an occasional genius via specific combinations of traits or via simple on/off switch mutations that easily occur.
For reference this is a short and informative video on the aforementioned topic: https://youtu.be/sP2tUW0HDHA
Calling these twin studies as settled science is the most bad faith move here, since the chief problem of this section of The Bell Curve is that it confuses heritability with genetic determination, a mistake that informed scientists wouldn’t make. Unsurprisingly, that is why there is widespread scientific backlash against it.
Believe it or not, twin black babies separated at birth and raised with white parents are still treated as black by society.
[0] if it did, this wouldn't mean anything, because it can't be used to make predictions, because you don't know if any random person X you are trying to predict trait Y of has these "genetics".
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/BARTERICMP25UPZSUSA
> lack of productive application of talent
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS12027662
?
Either IQs are going up (and racial gaps closing) on a non evolutionary timescale due to environmental changes that should be studied and encouraged by government policy or IQs are not a good measure of genetic intelligence.
Their policy preferences are for the government not to intervene to improve IQ scores or close racial gaps. But they also want to make radical policy based on IQ because it's such an important measure.
> A big part of "The Bell Curve" was arguing that no interventions could change IQ except genetics
So its like a "climate change denier" who says "oh I dont deny climate change, its just that I oppose every commonly accepted way to combat it and therefore am in complete policy alignment with actual climate change demiers (who all love my work despite a literal reading being that I’m saying they are wrong)."
"Can't be used to make predictions"... seriously? These factors can be used to make predictions. Now whether these things are just correlates with other more fundamental factors, or causal - I thought that was where the conflict was.
I think they're liars that at the very least want you to believe the gap is mostly genetic. But they've carefully avoided ever directly stating that, because of the Nazi eugenics vibe that would give off.
So to try to avoid being accused of misrepresenting these disingenuous liars, I stated not that they believe it's 100% genetic, but rather that they believe no interventions would help.
It's their logical inconsistency, not mine.
https://edition.cnn.com/2016/07/26/health/human-height-chang...
For bonus points: why has the heritability of height changed over time and varied by country?
Or 3) they're going up at the same rate, so gaps aren't closing. That's what I've always understood to be happening.
Scrolling down to the graphs that have all sorts of breakdowns, it looks like in general it hasn't been converging. The third group, which breaks down by race/age, looks like a mixture of noisy sameness and diverging.
> For example, Hauser (1998) and Grissmer et al (1998) documented convergence of the race difference in data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress. Until the current study, this finding could be explained by a differential Flynn Effect in which minority scores increased at a steeper rate. However, we found no interaction in our data; the three different race categories each showed substantial FE’s, but they also tracked closely to the same consistent increase.
So again, they accept the gap is closing, but their result suggests this is not due to a differential Flynn effect, but to something else.
> The effect itself is strong and consistent, but we found no differential gender or race FE, nor was there much of a differential urbanization status identified. The positive finding of a differential FE in relation to maternal education (and at a smaller level, household income) at the older ages is suggestive of some of the dynamics of the process leading to the Flynn Effect. However, we do not consider our findings to be confirmatory in any sense.
America and western society is so taken with intellectualism that they spend their prime years for having children doing precocious amounts of studying while their brains are in a state of peak plasticity. Americans right now are like modern day Irish elk who need increasingly large antlers (degrees) to win the reproductive game but are so encumbered by this that it becomes difficult to reproduce at all. So fertility is sub-replacement and Americans have reacted by bringing in immigrants so they can spend more time working on their degrees.
What sort of immigrants do they bring in? University graduates!
Very, somewhere in the 80% range: "The estimated heritability was 0.79 (SE 0.09) for height and 0.40 (SE 0.09) for BMI, consistent with pedigree estimates." [0][1]
>For bonus points: why has the heritability of height changed over time
It hasn't.
>and varied by country?
It hasn't.
Love it when the bonus questions are easier than the main questions.
[0] https://www.science.org/content/article/landmark-study-resol...
Yes really.
>Using the fact that someone put pronouns in their profile is a bad faith move?
No, putting pronouns in your profile is a red flag for bad faith moves.
>Your account is literally a throwaway.
Which means you can expect unadulterated facts.
>Calling these twin studies as settled science is the most bad faith move here
No it's not, stop denying the science.
>since the chief problem of this section of The Bell Curve is that it confuses heritability with genetic determination
The Bell Curve makes no confusion between heritability and genetic determination.
>mistake that informed scientists wouldn’t make
Good thing the Bell Curve didn't make that mistake!
>Unsurprisingly, that is why there is widespread scientific backlash against it.
There wasn't much scientific backlash to it because it's fairly bulletproof. The backlash was because of contained heretical topics, and may have pointed to blasphemous conclusions.
>Believe it or not, twin black babies separated at birth and raised with white parents are still treated as black by society.
"Believe it or not, twin Asian babies separated at birth and raised with white parents are still treated as Asian by society."
You're almost there /r/selfawarewolves.