Sullivan needs to let go of Trigg race and IQ before it starts to embarrass him.
Yes, “race” is a social construct when we define it as “white”, “black,” “Asian” or, even more ludicrously, “Hispanic.” But why then does the overwhelming data show IQ as varying in statistically significant amounts between these completely arbitrary racially constructed populations? Is the testing rigged? If the categories are arbitrary, then the IQs should be randomly distributed. But they aren’t, even controlling for education, income, etc.
These concepts of ‘race’ are indeed social constructs. Sub-Saharan Africa has more genetic diversity than the rest of the world combined. ‘Hispanics’ can come from a lot of different places. If IQ tracks very well with a social construct and poorly with genetics, the default hypothesis ought to be that the collective IQ disparity is also a social construct. Sticking with a more complicated hypothesis makes you look less like the rational person in the room and more like a retrograde Tory clinging to the racialist baggage of the British Empire.
cyntax
What part of socio-economic class does Silly not get? Oh, that’s right–the part that implies we need to do something about it.
pseudonymous in nc
Which is ironic, given that he’s the descendent of Irish immigrants, and we all know how thick and uncivilised the Hibernian race is.
Emma
He can’t let go of it. His whole worldview is that of the pukka sahib. White people bringing enlightenment to the grateful masses of pigmented races. Combine that with his inability to produce a flat-out mea culpa and you can expect him to double-down every time.
bleh
And while “‘race’ is a social construct,” IQ is a precise scientific measurement, right?
And then it’s only a small step from this to “the poor deserve their poverty because of their laziness and/or God’s will.”
QED. Let’s all go have martinis.
srv
I would like to see a Tarantino movie where white writers are the antagonists.
Patricia Kayden
As an ex-Canadian, I’d like to ask any Canadian Balloon Juicers if they ever took an IQ test. I just don’t recall taking one when I went to school (all the way from kindergarden to University) there. Don’t recall any fuss about IQs when growing up or getting into University in Canada. But perhaps my mind is slipping.
My understanding of IQ tests is that they are a series of questions that are culturally biased. Don’t understand their importance. I understand a test to get into law school (L-SAT) or medical school but not a general, trivial information IQ test.
SatanicPanic
Sully is racist. He is a racist man. Why he isn’t banished to a far corner of the internet along with the other racists is beyond me.
Just Some Fuckhead
I feel like you all are requiring me to pick sides when you set up four frontpage posts in a row. Please don’t do this to me.
/it’s you Tim
Tim F.
@Just Some Fuckhead: ?
Hunter Gathers
He’ll never drop it because it drives traffic. He gets a spike whenever he brings it up. And now that his site’s traffic directly fattens his pocketbook (as opposed to having Tina Brown cut him a check after taking her percentage), he’ll fuck any chicken that increases his page clicks. And he can’t help fucking this particular chicken.
kindness
I do not understand Sully not seeing that what he is saying is abhorrent and that he would be wise to stop.
I scroll on. I don’t even read those posts. They are a waste of my time, just like NPR’s morning show.
NonyNony
So, what, like he should find a time machine and convince himself from 15 years ago to drop it?
Well yes – if you aren’t a racist flailing about trying to justify your racism, that WOULD be the logical outcome to turn to. Perhaps if we delved a bit into the social conditions that the folks who belong to each of these categories belonged to on average in the US we might glean the common factor. And since it by Sullivan’s own prattling here he admits that the link CANNOT be genetic, it must be something else…
Violet
Maybe Trigg isn’t Sarah Palin’s son.
Just Some Fuckhead
@Tim F.: Shh. Don’t speak of this again, my liege.
Higgs Boson's Mate
Hmmm. My first thought is that IQ, other than a very low one, is no predictor of success in life. My second though is that both Binet and Wechsler were caucasians. My third thought is that Sullivan is a shitheel.
Mike in NC
Wonder where Sully and Niall Ferguson go to shop for their pith helmets and safari jackets?
Violet
@Hunter Gathers: You are absolutely right. Sullivan needs those clicks onto his site.
aimai
@Patricia Kayden:
IQ tests are constantly evolving and the kinds that are created and administered have more to do with theories of how to apporition people properly into the right class for them in a meritocracy than they do with reality. What I mean by that is that you don’t need to “measure” the IQ of a child at all if you think they are simply going to get a great education and have a great life–you need to give people IQ tests when you want to separate populations and give some favorable treatment and some unfavorable treatment–maybe you want to give the low scorers extra help or maybe you want to favor the high scorers and put them in the college prep classes.
I had to read all this stuff a long time ago but certainly the IQ and testing business generally is always attempting to prove that there is something ineffable about their tests which make it possible to eliminate the social and class biases which they have to know are present–for instance how do you administer an english language based IQ test to someone from a pre-industrial society? The very visual conventions on which a non language based teset would take place are, of course, culturally conventional nad not universally shared.
I don’t know what Sullivan is talking about when he says that he believes that class and culture and economic background (to the extent that we are distinguishing soical class from economic class) can be “controlled for.” As far as I know all IQ tests in the past, if not in the present, were highly biased and have always tracked the taker’s social class. In fact I thought it was rather a well known fact that you could largely do away with test taking and simply scale children according to the economic background of their parents and pretty much get the same distribution as with any standard IQ test.
Roger Moore
Hey! No fair bringing logic into the argument. I’m sure that the point Sullivan is insinuating but is afraid to make outright is the exact opposite. He wants to stand up and say that race is real and genetic, and that racial disparities in IQ are proof that Those People are genetically subhuman, but he’s afraid of the social ostracism that would result, so he can only suggest and insinuate rather than shout it from the rooftops.
Violet
I think Sullivan should take an IQ test written in Urdu. Let’s see how “smart” he is then.
Redshirt
What’s Trigg’s IQ?
Shakezula
Before it starts to embarrass him? First he would need the capacity to feel embarrassment, which would require the capacity to know when he is being a mendacious toolbox.
And should that level of awareness ever penetrate his skull, it would explode.
Not. Gonna. Happen.
Just Some Fuckhead
I took one of those online “20 questions” IQ tests but I got a script error. Turns out I was an idiot for using the Opera browser.
NonyNony
@aimai:
Ah but aimai this is Sullivan’s point in all of this – IQ tests show that the people at the top deserve to be at the top because they’re the smartest. White people deserve to be in power over black people because white people are smarter. Rich people deserve to be in power over less rich people because rich people are smarter. And so on.
That the test tracks exactly with the social class of the people taking it isn’t a mark that the test is biased – it’s an indication that it must be right because it buttresses Sullivan’s preconceived notions of how the world should operate!
schrodinger's cat
@Violet: I wonder what his score was for the quantitative section of the GRE , since the man cannot even calculate a percentage. I wonder what this grave lack of mathematical abilities says about him.
patroclus
Gee – Sully is back to his “blacks are stupid” shtick. But this time, he’s amplified it to a “Hispanics are stupid” shtick. Luckily, I still have my Oakeshott in the Widener for succor.
Scamp Dog
I’ve said this before, but the key thing about Sullivan is that he’s a polemicist, trained in formal debate. Pick a topic, and he can come up with an argument for either side. If it’s something like torture (which he’s against), he’ll come up with relevant history and cogent arguments. If it’s the Bell Curve, he’ll find plenty of smoke to blow to confuse the issue. I’m starting to think that all that training and practice wrecked his ability to tell good arguments from bad ones.
I’m not entirely sure how he picks what side he jumps in on, but white he fancies himself a “small-c” conservative, he’s mostly playing for Team Republican and the 1%-ers that fund them.
russell
Yes.
Why does anyone read Sullivan? What has he ever written that was worth anyone’s time?
beltane
@SatanicPanic: Sully is the beneficiary of ethnic profiling. If he were a white guy from Mississippi writing this crap, he would have been banished to the wingnut corner of the internet. Because he is British, however, he gets a pass on his views in the minds of naive American liberals who believe that English accent= respectable. I blame PBS.
DH
If I ever see the name of this racist here again, it will be much too soon.
Why do all the front page people here pay such attention to this guy? Forget the bigotry: when he was Marty Peretz’s “boy toy” at the New Republic, he helped defeat the Clinton Health Care Plan with a totally dishonest screed. Thousands of persons-I do not exaggerate-are dead because of that, and he has some real responsibility for their deaths. And until recently, he was very proud of this.
He lives for page hits. Don’t give him any.
MomSense
“retrograde Tory clinging to the racialist baggage of the British Empire.”
Can this please be a tag?
Chet
Oof, got it in one. Epic theory-burn.
Sully’s right about the Trig thing, though.
mike with a mic
You guys are falling for this one again.
Sully is all about page hits and being contrarian and edgy along the lines of the pampered levels of society along the cocktail circuit. Right down to his “conservative gay catholic that supports gay marriage”, or his branding of Obama as a true conservative. Sully gives the well off pampered conservatives something to feel good about and feel edgy by participating in, all while validating their own silly sense of self superiority.
Which is why every now and then he’ll say something edgy like chasing this race unicorn again, or how Democrats are the real enemies because Clinton was worse for gays than Reagan, and people will freak out about it, comment on it, and link to it. And then he’ll be the edgy guy again, instead of someone who posts silly cat vids, vapid self congratulatory wank vids, steals poetry and bitches about NYC.
Because if the dude wasn’t edgy he’d have no career and no real clout. And instead of being invited to state dinners he’d just be another laughing stock.
Don’t fall for it.
Anton Sirius
What’s a Sullivan?
Amir Khalid
Incidentally, is Andrew Sullivan’s own IQ test score a number he could brag about? Has he ever shared it with his readership?
rikyrah
He refuses to apologize for backing that fucking racist Murray, and fails to comprehend that still pimping that mofo, and not saying – I WAS WRONG
makes folks look sideeye at him.
Tonybrown74
@Hunter Gathers:
Sully is a bottom. The chicken fucks him!
Just Some Fuckhead
@DH: Thank you. The obsession with the devil’s own Beagle creatures should be reason enough to deport his candyass back to Hull in Yorkshire.
Higgs Boson's Mate
Sullivan’s real message is that the mud people are too stupid to appreciate the wonderfulness of modern conservatism.
Mnemosyne
It’s almost as though IQ tests themselves are a social construct designed to test how well you fit into a white, middle-class paradigm. But that can’t be true, because they have numbers, and numbers always equal science. And I say this as someone who scores quite well on standard IQ tests (usually around 135, though apparently I’ve grown dumber with age since I used to test higher than that in grade school and high school).
I would suggest that Sully read Stephen Jay Gould’s The Mismeasure of Man, but I suspect he would continue to miss the point. Badly.
Just Some Fuckhead
@Tonybrown74: lolz
Calouste
@MomSense:
Sully may look like a retrograde Tory clinging to the racialist baggage of the British Empire, and he may write like a retrograde Tory clinging to the racialist baggage of the British Empire, but don’t let that fool you, he really is a retrograde Tory clinging to the racialist baggage of the British Empire.
Roger Moore
@aimai:
The idea is that you’re supposed to compare like to like. Rather than measuring an aggregate IQ for all whites, blacks, etc., you also break them down by class, socioeconomic status, etc. That way, at least in theory, you can compare poor, lower class white kids to poor lower class black kids, rich Hispanics to equally rich Asians, etc. If you find there are still racial differences, then those represent a true racial disparity.
The problem is one of interpretation. If you find there are persistent racial differences even after controlling for everything else you can think of, that still doesn’t prove that the residual difference is genetic. It could just as well be a result of cultural bias in the tests, systematic discrepancies in education that aren’t controlled for by socioeconomic status, etc.
jayackroyd
Exactly. Incredibly clear and succinct.
Mnemosyne
Also, too: when professor and author Henry Louis Gates Jr. started looking into his ancestry, he discovered that he actually has more “white” (European, specifically Irish) genes than “black” genes. So whose team gets to claim him when it comes to IQ? And does Sully believe that they do genetic testing on people who take IQ tests to determine what race they “really” are rather than going by how the person self-identifies or is visually identified by others?
Redshirt
As a Teapartier, I only take Tea Party approved IQ tests.
I just took one – guess what? I’m a super genius! Just like all Tea Partiers!
mike with a mic
@rikyrah:
Why would he? His page hits go up when he talks about this crap and people link to it and yack about it. You really think people are going to give him $20 for cat videos and to read plagarized poetry? If he had to rely on those he’d never get asked to a state dinner again.
jrg
@Tonybrown74:
We have a winner! “There is no racial disparity in IQ because Andrew Sullivan is a f*g”. Could this thread possibly be a bigger clown show? I’ll bet I could go read comments on a Fox News article and not see this much ad hominem.
I wonder how much of this “race doesn’t really exist” stuff I can expect to hear when SCOTUS rules on affirmative action, BTW.
Just Some Fuckhead
@mike with a mic:
That’s the view from your window, asshole.
Frankensteinbeck
@DH:
It’s linked to why people gamble. Most liberals are really uncomfortable writing off huge swathes of humanity as irrecoverably evil, right? So to some, finding a conservative who’s just wrong rather than insane or a sadistic bastard is a huge kick. Sully flashes signs of this reasonableness every once in awhile, and even though overall he’s an asshole they keep coming back for that occasional jolt of ‘See? Someone said something I disagree with that’s not completely fucking lunatic!’
Chris
@Mnemosyne:
What I love is how much they despise scientists, fancy-pants intellectual elitists, people who think they’re so smart, etc etc etc (global warming, evolution, etc) yet are totally willing to believe these kinds of “scientific” theories the moment they say something they want to hear.
the Conster
TNC does have an elegant way of identifying Sully’s real issue:
Shorter TNC: Sully is a useful idiot or a racist, and I’m leaning toward racist.
Fwiffo
One of the consequences of the social construct of race is the historical concentration of minority groups in urban ghettos. Living in urban ghettos is strongly correlated with increased lead exposure. So, the whole race/IQ thing could actually just be a lead thing (h/t Kevin Drum).
CDW
There are many explanations when poor people of whatever race test lower than others in IQ tests. One I never hear mentioned is nutrition, or the lack thereof better said. When you don’t have the money to provide a healthy diet, they may be stunted not only in intelligence, but also in stature. I’m not an expert in either field, but I’ve always wondered, why this variable is never mentioned.
priscianus jr
@russell: “Why does anyone read Sullivan? What has he ever written that was worth anyone’s time?”
Ah, NOW you’re talking. I do not read Sullivan and never have, for precisely that reason.
SatanicPanic
@beltane: This plus he’s all broder-y. He certainly doesn’t show any exceptional smarts.
MomSense
Just wondering but why does anyone care about IQ in the first place? It seems like the only people who bring it up are just looking for reasons to justify their racism or discriminatory policies. And just for the record I think the whole race and IQ business is just BS.
aimai
@Roger Moore: Right, but he doesn’t mean “controlled for” in that sense–he means eliminated as significant. When someone like Sullivan says that something is “controlled for” he means that you don’t have to worry about it.
Frankensteinbeck
@the Conster:
Oh no, not an idiot. Sully is a big ‘tough love’ advocate. He thinks screwing the poor is totally the way to help them. He’s twisting any piece of evidence around to avoid the unbearable thought that social welfare programs might be morally correct.
Mnemosyne
@mike with a mic:
This is what I still don’t get about conservatives, though — why do they think it’s “contrarian” and “edgy” to say the same things about race and gender that people were saying 50 or 60 years ago? I would use words more like “retrograde” to describe it.
It’s the same thing with certain male comedians who think that jokes Henny Youngman would have found old-fashioned are somehow “hip” and “edgy.”
aimai
@jrg: I think its not particularly a homophobic joke at all–its a variation on the old soviet era joke “Under capitalism man oppresses man. Under communism its just the opposite!”
piratedan
so, someone now has to go and buy Sully a new Blue Ray version of Gunga Din and maybe he’ll finally shut his pie hole and the rest of his safely constructed worldview can collapse and implode around him thanks to his golbergian logical constructs and his thoughts never be able to escape to event horizon to trouble the internet forever more…..
Haydnseek
@Just Some Fuckhead: Are you absolutely sure that the reason was the browser? Think really hard before you respond………..
Mnemosyne
@Roger Moore:
Since they’re not testing actual genes at all but just looking at racial identification, it still wouldn’t prove anything about genetics (but I know you already know that since you’re a science dude).
If they did a cheek swab after every IQ test to determine the person’s exact genetic makeup, then some interesting data might turn up, particularly when you think about how mixed most African-Americans and Latinos are. If anyone knows of a study that did that, I’d be interested to see it.
Maus
Come on now, Sullivan is a conservative. He’s never going to let go of the things that define him. Set your expectations properly.
@aimai:
It’s not a sincere response, it’s a handwave away so he can continue believing his evo-psych just so stories.
Redshift
@Mnemosyne:
I know! There was an entire book written in response to The Bell Curve that answers the exact question he’s asking, and in all these years, he apparently can’t be bothered to read it.
Comrade Mary
@Patricia Kayden: I took one IQ test in grade 6 in Montreal ca. 1971. Better yet, my teacher entrusted me with the summary sheet of EVERY SCORE IN MY CLASS and asked me not to look at them when I delivered them to the principal in the next building.
I didn’t look. That made me easily cowed and maybe even honest, but whether that made me smart or stupid, I’ll never know.
jrg
@aimai: Really? The full quote was “Sully is a bottom. The chicken fucks him!”
Whatever. Doesn’t change the fact that pretty much everyone on this thread would rather bash Andrew Sullivan than consider the possibility of a genetic component to IQ. ’cause, you know, it’s not like anyone has ever conducted any identical twin studies or anything.
Tonybrown74
@jrg:
I am a f@g, too … but I guess that doesn’t matter.
He published the Bell Curve, and as a black man, I was all set with him then.
Later on, he pointed his priggish Tory finger at Gay men and our supposed sex culture, because he was infected with HIV “innocently”, while those “other” gay men are degenerate whores … until it it was discovered he was proposition men for bareback sex online.
And then to add insult to injury, we get that 5 column bullshit during Bush II’s Presidency.
Not to mention is constant sexism …
Saying that Sulliven get’s fucked by a chicken is probably the KINDEST thing I can say.
You, sir/madame/whatever, can go lovingly fuck yourself with a rusty chainsaw.
Shakezula
@Mnemosyne: I suspect if you pressed the Race/IQ fapstains on this point they would dust off the speeches about the dangers of miscegenation.
mike with a mic
@Mnemosyne:
Because anytime you’re saying something that’s not allowed in polite company it’s being edgy to some extent or another. It’s the troll mentality, and trolling is a great way to gin up webpage hits, which is how Sully earns his living.
Sully knows what he’s doing. Each one of these idiotic posts on race will be linked to by dozens on conservatives because now a known public thinker with his educational background has endorsed this theory thus proving how liberals actually hate science. And on the other side dozens of liberals will freak out and link to it thus proving how even the good conservatives are racist assholes. He gets to sit back and rake in the cash from it.
It’s not just conservatives who do this sort of crap, trolls of all stripes do it. Pick something you know is off limits and be edgy by screaming it and then watch the fallout. As long as something is forbidden from being talked about in polite company, going there with be edgy, if a bit tasteless.
Tonal (visible) Crow
@Just Some Fuckhead:
FTW!
pseudonymous in nc
@beltane:
And Sullivan’s accent is far from being English these days.
Redshift
@Mnemosyne:
I think that’s precisely the reason they came up with “contrarian.” It allows them to spout bog-standard long-discredited conservative crap while denying that’s what they’re doing. There’s an inherent appeal of “everything you thought you knew is wrong” that “what’s up with these kids today and their rap music and gay marriage and all” will never have.
Tonal (visible) Crow
@Shakezula:
And they might even couch it in terms of the “dangers” of an Obama presidency.
Higgs Boson's Mate
Did they control for generational poverty, paucity of learning resources, persistence of single parent homes, the effects of generations of poor nutrition, parental involvement in the development of learning and language skills, etc. ?
I recall reading a study from, IIRC, Columbia university that IQ tested five year olds. When all of the poverty-related factors were exhaustively accounted for the difference in scores between children of different races was a statistically insignificant 3%.
pseudonymous in nc
@jrg:
Obvious Troll is obvious. But it’s interesting how Obvious Troll conflates the IQ bogosity with the fact that certain Americans were, in living memory, restricted by law from housing, education, jobs and marrying the people they love on account of their hue, when access to at least three of those four things was the foundation of economic advancement.
Nazgul35
Every time he posts on this subject, he verifies the null hypothesis.
aimai
@jrg: Wait, what? Of course people have conducted identical twin studies–and even gone to the effort to find twins separated at birth who were raised in different families. I think those studies have shown that genetics as in genotype only accounts for some of the expressed similiarities and that environment accounts for a significant proportion of variation.
In any event, speaking as a woman, it is absolutely possible to both fuck and get fucked from all positions. “The chicken fucks him” does not mean he is gay.
NonyNony
@jrg:
Would you care to explain exactly how making arguments about IQ being tied to “race” means that Sullivan is making an argument about genetics?
This is the entire point – “race” is a social construct. Black people in the USA have plenty of “white” genes in them because “race” is not a biological construct. At all. So this is not a genetic argument. At all.
If you’d care to explain how biologists have it all wrong and “race” is really a genetic question, by all means go for it. Include in your explanation exactly how the fact that black folks in the USA generally have plenty of “white” European DNA in their makeup (because of a little thing known as “slaveholders raping their slaves with abandon”) as part of your explanation.
patroclus
@jrg: Identical twin studies have been conducted regarding astrology and phrenology too – I’m not interested in whether they have a genetic or racial component either.
And I don’t hate Sully – he’s good on torture and gay stuff. But his “blacks are stupid” shtick is tiresome and worthless.
Roger Moore
@aimai:
I think that’s the exact sense he’s using. He’s saying that yes, of course there are differences because of education and the like, but that you can account for those differences by appropriate controls. The idea that those differences are controlled for makes the whole thing seem more sciencey. And there are still racial differences, which ZOMG proves Those People are inferior.
Of course this leaves out a ton of stuff. Sullivan himself has no idea how to go about doing good controls, so he has no way of knowing if the studies he’s reading have completely controlled for those factors, so there’s a good chance that the effect they’re finding is a result of inadequate controls. More importantly, the need for controls should be seen as a major blow against the value of IQ as a measure. The original idea behind IQ was that it was measuring some kind of innate intelligence. If you need to control for outside factors like education and socioeconomic status, that’s a sign that IQ is measuring something beyond inborn intelligence and isn’t doing what it’s designed to do.
dr. bloor
@Higgs Boson’s Mate:
Neither Binet nor (particularly) Wechlser would touch current conceptions of “IQ” with a twenty-foot pole, nor would they be stupid enough to conflate “IQ” with “intelligence.”
Higgs Boson's Mate
@jrg:
You mean that they studied identical twins who were of different races? Paging Ripley’s Believe It or Not.
jacy
@jrg:
Sully, and the people who are trying to hitch IQ to a genetic component are scientifically illiterate. Somebody on TNC’s blog mentioned that if you’re of Jewish descent you should be concerned about Tay-Sachs disease — thus proving that there might be something to “inherited” intelligence because some diseases have a genetic component. Trouble is there is a “Tay-Sachs gene,” but there is no “intelligence gene.” Any organsim’s level of “intelligence” has myriad components, lots of them environmental (society, nutrition, healthcare, parenting). I’m simplifying here because I’m not going to write a 14-page blog post with footnotes showing why Sully, et al are idiots. Suffice it to say, the genetic intelligence argument is not just comparing apples to oranges, it’s like comparing apples to an Amazonian rainforest.
Temporarily Max McGee (soon enough to be Andy K again)
@Fwiffo:
Sure, it might be lead. It might be sub-standard diets. It might be that parents are working too many hours at shit jobs to dedicate time to their children’s educations. It might be that a parent is dead or in prison. It might be a lack of access to well-funded schools and libraries. It’s probably a mix of all of these factors, and more that I’m not coming up with so quickly .
And it might also be that IQ tests are culturally biased.
NonyNony
@jrg:
I didn’t notice this before.
“Race” does in fact exist as a social construct. Anyone who claims otherwise is an idiot, a racist or Stephen Colbert pretending to be a a “color blind” Republican.
RACE AS A GENETIC CONSTRUCT DOES NOT EXIST. There is only minor genetic variation between blacks in the USA and white people in the USA.
VARIATIONS IN PERFORMANCE ON IQ TESTS BETWEEN DIFFERENT RACIAL GROUPS DO EXIST. They need an explanation. The explanation cannot be genetic because RACE IS A FUCKING SOCIAL CONSTRUCT. One explanation is that IQ tests are written in such a way that they do not, in fact, measure intelligence but rather measure what the folks who are writing the test THINK is a measure of intelligence (cultural bias). There are a number of studies that purport that this is exactly what is going on. This means that the disparity between groups in IQ test performance would ALSO BE A SOCIAL CONSTRUCT.
BTW – Affirmative Action seeks to fix one of the problems that we have in this country with race by acknowledging the fact that it is, in fact, a social construct and trying to find a way to work around it. I know of no Affirmative Action plans that rely on genetic testing to measure their outcomes.
J.W. Hamner
I don’t know that the “race is a social construct” retort that liberals tend to gravitate towards is particularly convincing response to this IQ nonsense. A lot of federally funded medical research looks at physiologic differences between Caucasians and African Americans (or whomever). Is this all misguided racist nonsense? To me this seems unlikely since I don’t really know how white supremacy is advanced by noting racial differences people’s cardiac baroreflex. Granted, what you put on the Census probably is a relatively poor marker of your genetic makeup, but that doesn’t make it completely useless.
The real issue is not scientists looking at race in my view, but putting any stock in IQ testing.
Roger Moore
@aimai:
I think it’s more of a variant on Yakov Smirnoff’s Russian Reversal jokes, e.g. “In America, you can always find party. In Soviet Union, Party can always find you!” Usually, we say to keep fucking that chicken, but in Andrew Sullivan’s America, that chicken keeps fucking you.
Bill E Pilgrim
Balloon-Juice needs to let go of Andrew Sullivan.
I read any number of non-right wing blogs and I almost never see him mentioned except here. And here he’s mentioned a lot.
Forum Transmitted Disease
Don’t give two shits about Sullivan: he has no influence and no audience. He is of no importance save for one place – and that’s Balloon Juice.
Let him die in peace.
dr. bloor
@jacy: You’re right about the multifactorial bit, but there most decidedly is a genetic component to whatever construct IQ tests measure, and I could write a post much longer than fourteen pages with research to that effect. Whether the construct being measured by IQ tests is actually “intelligence” is another, and legitimate question.
Roger Moore
@Mnemosyne:
Ideally, you’d want to do IQ tests on identical twins separated at birth, since then the genetics are well controlled for. That would give you some kind of baseline measure of how much IQ is affected by environment. Of course both identical twins will usually be considered to be of the same race, so it won’t do anything to measure the social effect of perceive race.
patroclus
@NonyNony: IQ TESTS ARE WORTHLESS. There need be no explanation for their results BECAUSE THEY ARE WORTHLESS. Just like PHRENOLOGY AND ASTROLOGY.
dr. bloor
@patroclus: No, they’re not worthless. They’re just not very good at measuring the construct that everybody thinks they measure (i.e., “intelligence”), because the construct itself is poorly defined.
Bill E Pilgrim
@Roger Moore: Humanility. It’s next on the slippery slope right after people wanting to marry their tractors.
kbsuttle
Further to aimai, not just “collective IQ disparity”, Tim, but IQ itself. Of course it might vary by race because it’s not a real thing. Meaning in a strict, scientific, how-nature-is-organized-and-human-populations-evolved kind of way. It has to reflect our test, because it only exists in reference to our test. That’s not as circular as it sounds. If IQ as a concept and IQ as a test were developed by Australian aborigine’s, who do you think would place highest on the scale? It’s not cultural chauvinism, its relevance to ecological life history. It could vary by race – so what? That doesn’t actually have any bearing on questions of intelligence among the races.
gelfling545
I would like to see Mr. Sullivan go to a culture not his own and take whatever tests are on offer there. It would be most interesting to see whether he would be as “smart” as he thinks he is in another culture.
jrg
@NonyNony:
To unprecedented success. Clearly.
@jacy:
Tay-Sachs is a social construct!
Redshift
@jrg:
Since you’ve only replied to the comments you find most offensive rather than the ones about the substance of IQ tests and the lack of connection between “racial groups” and “genetic components”, I have my doubts about your interest in the views of “pretty much everyone on this thread.”
Unless you begin with the assumption that IQ Test Score = Intelligence, I have a hard time seeing what the significance of twin studies of IQ tests would be. Since you can’t be bothered to provide a link or make an actual argument, I’m not going to do your research for you or guess what wrong conclusion I’m supposed to be arguing against.
patroclus
@dr. bloor: No, they are worthless precisely because they don’t actually measure what they purport to measure. It is not a “legitimate question” as to whether they measure intelligence – they don’t. Pretending that it is an open question merely grants them legitimacy. They are just like phrenology and astrology and I could write more than 14 pages about if I wanted to too.
kbsuttle
Yes – what dr. bloor said.
Anton Sirius
@jrg:
I’ll take that bet. The loser has to reveal their real name, address and phone number.
Redshift
@jrg:
Racist troll is racist.
Can we get some better-quality trolls here? I prefer the ones who at least pretend to make an argument, even if it’s a stupid argument.
Ben Cisco
Racist irrelevant conservative is racist.
And has been.
And will continue to be.
Let him fling his poo behind his paywall, write him off and be done with it.
dr. bloor
@patroclus: Your understanding of the use of psychometric testing in the assessment and treatment of neurocognitive disorders leaves something to be desired. But go ahead and hammer out your fourteen pages demonstrating the point that a little knowledge is indeed a dangerous thing.
kbsuttle
@NonyNony: This seems only partly right. Of course there are genetic differences among the races – somewhere, multiple places actually, in human DNA are gene regions that code for skin color; there is greater variation in these regions among groups than there is within groups. There is at least one meaningful genetic difference separating each race from each other, or at least their historically has been. The last hundred and fifty years are on an accelerating path to erasing these, but for now, they’re certainly here.
patroclus
@dr. bloor: Your understanding of Andrew Sullivan’s attempt to mainstream genetic and/or racial components to intelligence leaves something to be desired. But go ahead and bloviate for 14+ pages about something not related to the thread topic if you want to and further demonstrate that a little knowledge is not necessarily a good thing.
Shakezula
@Tonal (visible) Crow: MIGHT?
dr. bloor
@patroclus:
No, I’m well aware of what Sullivan is trying to do, thanks. If you want to take down Sullivan, have at it–he’s an atrocious asshole who gets way too much attention around here.
But if you want to do it right, you need to understand your argument and make it properly. And if you can’t tell the difference between the construct at issue and the measures which purport to measure that construct, you’re going to make an argument full of holes.
muddy
@kbsuttle: That would be a good point if Sullivan was talking about skin color and not intelligence.
I’m another one that only encounters him here, will skip further posts about him.
dm
By far, this is my favorite response to the whole “race and IQ” thing (for jrg):
From: http://delong.typepad.com/egregious_moderation/2007/07/cosma-shalizi-a.html
Cosma Shalizi, whose understanding of the subtlety of statistics, not to say wit and style, is something I can only aspire to, is great on this topic: http://vserver1.cscs.lsa.umich.edu/~crshalizi/weblog/cat_iq.html
And on many other topics, as well: http://vserver1.cscs.lsa.umich.edu/~crshalizi/weblog/
A short time spent browsing among Shalizi’s essays on the topic will mean you start skipping Sullivan’s post whenever he starts embarassing himself with them again.
patroclus
@dr. bloor: If you want to defend Andrew Sullivan, by all means have at it. Be sure to explain how IQ tests really measure “intelligence” and how it’s an open question as to how legitimate they are.
But if you want to do it right, you need to understand your argument and make it properly. And if you can’t tell the difference between the construct at issue (Andrew Sullivan’s use of racial disparities in IQ tests) and psychometric testing to treat neurocognitive disorders, you’re going to make an argument that is irrelevant to the topic of this thread.
Shakezula
@kbsuttle: Except this requires a little bit of juggling doesn’t it? First you have to pretend there’s a standardized definition of race. There ain’t. Then you have to pretend that definitions of race are linked to genetic markers which are in turn visible. Uh-oh! Let’s take skin color. You can have people from two parts of the globe who are the same color but according to local custom they might (or might not) be different races. How then do you explain the difference? It isn’t the genetic marker of skin color.
ET
I suspect that despite the number of years in the US, Sully really doesn’t understand that the very nature of the discussion – at least in US is toxic . Many of the more academic may be just as clueless as him but in the case of the Heritage guy are interested in pushing an agenda and they are trying to look “serious” as a cover so that people like Sully will be more likely to sympathize with them and take their research seriously.
weaselone
@Roger Moore:
Only environment after birth. Things like maternal nutrition, maternal health, and exposure to various substances while in the womb certainly also play a significant role.
Villago Delenda Est
Starts to embarrass him? Starts?
This vile racist shitstain can’t see straight about anything having to do with skin color. Every last bit of it is social construct, to include the idiocy of “IQ”. All IQ tells you is how socially attuned you are to the authors of the IQ tests, for the most part.
Hoodie
@kbsuttle: Yeah, I imagine Sully would do poorly on an aborginal IQ test, particular parts relating to the ability to identify poisonous animals. Maybe we could IQ test embryos to deal with the control issue but, somehow, I don’t think it would work, some issues with data gathering. Anyway, IQ tests are good at measuring a performance index generated by an industrialized society with poor communal bonds, high levels of psychic pain and severe resource consumption problems. What was Sully’s point?
Redshift
@kbsuttle: There are genes that control skin color and other physical features, but the boundaries that divide those into broad racial groups are social constructs, not genetically specified ones.
Bill E Pilgrim
To take Sullivan seriously, which he doesn’t deserve:
So he can admit that people can be put into categories, but can’t grasp how this would affect their responses on (equally arbitrarily constructed) “IQ” tests?
Categorization can be arbitrary and still have an effect. The fact that he needs this explained to him just underlines the mystery of why anyone reads him.
jl
Sullivan doesn’t know what he is talking about, so he swings from one wild extreme and arbitrary stipulation (for the sake of today’s polemic?) to another.
Awhile back he was saying, that there are superficial differences in appearance between populations that are highly correlated with conventional racial classifications. Now he says race is totally arbitrary construct.
I get skeptical when people trot out extreme and wrong assumptions for the sake of argument.
As for the Sullivan’s previous polemic to the effect that, well those people have dark skin so there must be other stuff different about them, that is weak. People been looking for genetic markers for broadly defined inherent aptitudes for decades. From what I’ve read, we don’t know much about it, except that they are not like the relatively few genes that make eyes blue, hair blond etc.
So, now race is a totally artificial construct, I think that is wrong too, there is some generalizations you can make about the genetic make up of different populations who are classified as different races using conventional criteria, or self-identification. But unless there is just one or a few “IQ-gene’ genes, the genetic differences between populations are so small, it is difficult to come up with a plausible genetic story.
And yes, Sullivan, you CAN control for social and economic class. The problem is that in most U.S. populations large enough to make a good study, the two are so highly correlated that you cannot really detect the independent contribution of each. One contribution Kinsley did make, IIRC, was that he did suss out the fact that Charles Murray does not understand how regressions and similar techniques work, which explains how Murray can be so sure of results using inadequate statistical analysis on bad data.
Sullivan should look at the research on stereotype bias. What is one of the hallmarks of IDing a correct causal theory? That you an manipulate the study population and predict the results. Research on stereotype bias has shown that you can manipulate the stereotype bias in Asian women to change their scores on IQ and aptitude tests. Put them in a setting where stereotypical Asian ‘strengths’ are emphasized they do significantly better than control, emphasize stereotypical female ‘weaknesses’ they do worse.
Sullivan even fails in comprehending the range of non-genetic explanations. A tragic one that is to avoided at all costs, and recently has been shown to be more important than previously understood, is development effect of exposures to toxins, and even stress, pre- and post-natal. (edit: tragic, because once adverse developmental effects may be very difficult to reverse during the lifetime of the individual, but not a fixed genetic effect at all)
I do not understand how these genetics fanatics can parade their ignorance for decades, and still get an audience.
Roger Moore
Of course, all this discussion of race and IQ misses another important point: so what? What are the actual policy implications? There’s plenty of evidence that lots of people in every racial and ethic group benefit tremendously from a good education, so there’s no reason to use racial differences as a justification for racist policy. And variation within groups are so much larger than the differences between groups that there’s no reason to use race when looking at any individual. Even if the racists are right on the science, they’re still wrong on policy.
Mnemosyne
@Higgs Boson’s Mate:
You beat me to it — I’m still trying to puzzle out what the significance of identical twin studies is in determining the role of race in IQ. Did they give one of them a really dark tan or something?
@J.W. Hamner:
No, because you can objectively measure how well a drug works on a test group of white men vs. a test group of black men by testing things like blood serum levels, reported effectiveness, reported side effects, observed side effects, etc. And even then, those results will tell you in a general way how a given population might react to a drug, not give you a definitive result that drug X won’t work if the person has skin color Y.
kbsuttle
@muddy: Accepted. I think there are a couple different conversations happening in this thread without clear distinction, and it’s generating conflict where there actually isn’t much. Or maybe comment threads just inevitably spark tensions as a fundamental attribute. dr. bloor’s comments struck me as trying to re-moor certain elements of developing arguments to scientific accuracy, which I guess was my response as well. My concern is that this shit matters – so we can be as “left” in our response to things like this we can find ground for, or we can develop ultimately the strongest arguments, but the two aren’t always perfectly overlapping.
Higgs Boson's Mate
@Mnemosyne:
Using identical twin studies to determine the effects of poverty on IQ scores is like using today’s weather to measure the effects of global warming.
ruemara
@jrg: Wow, you’re not a bigot at all. Nope, not you.
@Tonybrown74: And pretty much all of this.
Xenos
I was watching an interview with the generally problematic Orson Scott Card the other day. He was asked what in “Ender’s Game” was just too far out there to ever take place. He said that after the first book was published he went out and finally did research on intelligence and intelligence testing, and concluded that we would never have good enough testing to determine who is truly gifted or not, as children, to allow for the social scenario his story is based on.
Right there you have an outright bigot in some matters who respects science enough to admit the truth about something. Given the racial hangups that Sullivan is just unwilling to accept science about, Card is a better man than he.
Schlemizel
Its really sad reading TNC as he tries his damnedest to ignore/forgive/explain away Sullys obvious racism. I guess the times they were talking Sully never called him “boy” or “nigger” so TNC thinks Sully can’t be a flaming racist. It is hard to admit bad things about people you know sometimes; he gives ol’ argle-bargle the same, totally undeserved, benefit of the doubt.
Schlemizel
Its really sad reading TNC as he tries his damnedest to ignore/forgive/explain away Sullys obvious racism. I guess the times they were talking Sully never called him “boy” or “nigger” so TNC thinks Sully can’t be a flaming racist. It is hard to admit bad things about people you know sometimes; he gives ol’ argle-bargle the same, totally undeserved, benefit of the doubt on econ matters.
kbsuttle
@Hoodie: Shakezula and Redshift too – Good points all around.
Roger Moore
@Bill E Pilgrim:
Note also that he discusses statistical significance, not practical significance. If you test enough people, you can get statistical significance from a quite small absolute difference. In tests on thousands of people, you should be able to get statistical significance for differences of a few points of IQ, but you’ll have a very hard time showing that those differences are practically significant.
Mnemosyne
@dm:
I think DeLong is not helping his argument by conflating (confusing?) “heritable” and “genetic” in that piece. An accent is not “heritable” the way eye color is “heritable.”
I get his point, but the whole “heritable” thing really annoyed me.
mike with a mic
@Xenos:
I don’t doubt that in the future we’ll be able to test children to see just what they will be like, we’ve already come remarkably far in that aspect. I also wouldn’t past us to be able to have customized children as well.
We’re already able to do a frightening amount of stuff now, and we do it to other species. Creating custom super children and being able to see if it worked isn’t really out of the question anymore. Nor is testing to make sure the kid is what you want or even that it’s going to have favorable traits. It’s just a road we haven’t gone down for various ethical reasons but I’m sure that will be fixed soon enough.
However this isn’t really related to race in the slightest.
gelfling545
@jrg: Unfortunately for any argument about genetic components, nobody does a DNA analysis to see if you are actually the “race” that you are grouped with. You (or the test administrator) check off a box based pretty much on how you look and your social situation. Nobody asks for your family tree. There is no way to tell if there is a genetic component because there is no genetic study attached to the testing. I’ve read any number of IQ testing reports for students & never seen anything in them that would indicate the student’s actual genetic heritage. With something like Tay-Sachs, a DNA analysis IS done. Someone above mentioned that some people who are considered black for social purposes actually have substantial Caucasian genetic make up. Now that DNA testing is more or less commonly available to those willing to pay, I have heard about some folks who were surprised to find that their own genetic make up was rather different than they thought it to be regarding all sorts of various genetic groups and because it is so diverse (read about James Fallows discovery that he possesses a greater than usual amount of Neanderthal DNA, for example) it would be hard to base any determination on self-reported or observed race other than what can be accounted for by social constructions.
Temporarily Max McGee (soon enough to be Andy K again)
@Schlemizel:
To his credit, it does seem to me that Mr. Coates dons a velvet glove to strangle Mr. Sullivan.
Mnemosyne
@dr. bloor:
I guess the question at hand, given the subject of the thread, is whether that genetic component can be tied to a specific race or racial identity, or whether it seems to be distributed throughout the human spectrum.
If it’s something that primarily shows up for white, upper-class people, then I think do you have to question exactly what it is that’s being measured since that’s exactly the trap that the scientists Stephen Jay Gould wrote about were falling into.
prufrock
@Redshift:
What’s funny is that The Mismeasure of Man was written nearly a decade before The Bell Curve. The Bell Curve came pre-refuted.
GregB
In the words of Al Ducharme, when Andrew Sullivan takes a shit his head caves in.
jl
@jrg: Twin studies are useful, but you need a lot of assumptions on mating patterns and modes of genetic action to generalize the results from individuals to populations. So, twin studies are no magic bullet.
And, from what I know, the most popular theory regarding IQ from twin studies is the ‘generalist’ gene hypothesis. Broad aptitudes, including intelligence, are the product not of genes for specific observable talents, but a small group of genes that can coordinate many lower level tasks. One thing it implies is that there should be a high correlation between skill in different areas of mental functioning. Applied to racial groups, then one groups would have uniformly lower skills across a broad range of cognitive function. So, say, blacks would be worse at IQ type tricks, music, writing, speaking… on an on.. Is there any evidence for that?
So I do not dismiss the idea that what we call IQ might have a large genetic component in individuals, but finding a plausible story to extrapolate that idea to average differences between populations just has not panned out, as far as I can see.
JoyfulA
@J.W. Hamner: A major reason I stopped doing medical copyediting was that so many studies had “black” and “white” comparisons but never defined “black” and “white.” Was it appearance, self-definition, genetic, or what? So I’d query the author for definitions and never got any. I concluded that medical science is not very scientific.
Roger Moore
@Mnemosyne:
I think that’s a major part of his point. We inherit things socially as well as genetically. As long as most people are raised by their close genetic relatives, large-scale studies that look at heritability are more or less useless at separating the two effects. You’re stuck with things like identical twins separated at birth, which are pretty useless for looking at the kinds of racial effects at question in IQ studies.
muddy
I’d like to see Sullivan “control” for this: http://www.upworthy.com/this-is-the-worst-thing-i-have-ever-heard-a-child-say-3?c=upw1
jrg
@ruemara:
Some of my posts were regrettable. But this thread is toxic WRT the Sullivan bashing, so I don’t regret pointing out the fact that a lot of people would rather bash him than discuss the content of his post.
I do not believe that race (such as it is) is a significant contributor to IQ.
Heliopause
South of Oklahoma City really getting hammered right now. Yikes.
jl
Someone needs to ask Sullivan whether he has figures out that the Hispanic ethnicity is not a racial concept. It is highly correlated with White and Native American genetic markers. Because most Hispanics are sons and daughters of Whites and Native Americans, who wudda thunk.
Sullivan’s recent plunge into self embarrassment is also changing the subject from his statements about the Heritage Foundation immigration study. He just should have admitted he didn’t know what he was talking about, and apologized.
dm
@Mnemosyne: It’s actually Shalizi making the point, and I think the point he is making is very much the one you are making.
Namely, accent is not heritable in the way eye-color is. Why would you think IQ is?
Perhaps I should have edited my excerpt more carefully.
Shalizi’s essay goes on from there to point out that, taking accent as your metaphor lets you see the IQ debate more clearly: for example, the accent metaphor makes the “puzzle” of the Flynn effect (the fact that IQ test results have been improving across the board) not as puzzling as it would be if you mistook IQ for eye-color-style inheritability.
And Shalizi’s post (written five years ago, probably during another eruption of Sullivan Bell-Curvism), speaks directly to Sullivan’s current self-conundrum. If you could develop an Accent-Q test, you’d find it varied in statistically significant ways across those populations and classes. So what?
Hoodie
@gelfling545: A friend of mine from my childhood in N. Georgia used to joke that, if the number of white men actually having Cherokee blood were as great as the number claiming it, the Trail of Tears would have never happened.
jl
@JoyfulA: From what I have heard at seminars, racial characterization from standard issue clinical and administrative records can be anything: self-ID, what some one looks like across the room, somebodiy’s memory of who the patient was. Self-ID data from well designed surveys is better, but that wraps up a lot of stuff that is not genetics, including social class and conventional racial categories in local area.
jl
@dm: Thanks for links to Shaliz, on IQ, Copied and saved!
Heliopause
I know TV news people tend to get excited but if their descriptions are right this is an awful tornado, in terms of size and population affected.
Temporarily Max McGee (soon enough to be Andy K again)
@jrg:
The problem I have with this is that the debate has occurred over and over again, some traditional American troglodyte getting busted for it, and Sullivan pipes up again, hauling out the same arguments he did the last time – only to be shot down again. Rinse and repeat.
There’s something wrong with the man, and there’s something wrong with not dismissing him in the same way Charles Murray has been dismissed.
Trollhattan
@jrg:
Sullivan has had plenty–which is to say far more than he deserves–opportunities to reevaluate and walk back his thumpingly innacurate and ill-intentioned positions on this subject. That he refuses to and instead doubles [quintuples?] down shows that he is 1. distressfully stupid or 2. operating in bad faith by parroting things he doesn’t believe.
Bashing=hard-earned.
lojasmo
I’ve heard this before, but have never seen a citation, and can’t find it anywhere. What I do find is that Sub saharan Africa has more genetic diversity than any other continent.
jrg
@jl: Thank you for the post. Far more interesting and insightful than the ones that preceded it, which ranged from “screw you, bigot” to “tell me where you live”.
muddy
@Heliopause: They have film from the air on msnbc right now, it is just massive.
Catsy
@jrg:
That’s because they are in possession of functioning brain cells. Yes, anyone who is paying attention and knows anything whatsoever about this subject would rather bash Andrew Sullivan for being a racist fuckwit than to consider that his “argument” about there being a “racial” component to IQ scores has any merit worth debating. Just as anyone with two brain cells to rub together would rather point and laugh at anyone who suggests that space aliens were behind the 9/11 attacks rather than consider the so-called “merits” of the argument.
Also, your attempt to rephrase the argument that Sully is making in order to make it sound less racist than it is has been noted. He’s not talking about a “genetic” component to IQ. He’s talking about a “racial” component. He cloaks this in the usual subterfuge of “groups with genetic similarities”, but let’s be honest here: this really boils down to nothing more than “blahs are stupid because SCIENCE”.
patroclus
@Mnemosyne: But why would you ask that question? I take dr. bloor’s point as that one (i.e., me) should not criticize IQ tests as being useless in assessing intelligence because they are useful for doctors and scientists in treating patients and subjects because one can compare the patients to themselves in earlier tests to determine whether they are still as alert and aware as they were in prior testing (and can thus devise therapy for them if they aren’t). It might be helpful to know how the patients’ parents or relatives tested similarly – especially if they had similar cognitive disorders. But how would their racial identity be useful? Do black people – as a whole – respond differently to different therapies? I don’t think so, and it would take a lot more than 14+ pages to convince me.
Maybe I’m as dense as dr. bloor implies, but I just don’t see why someone would even go there (for therapeutic purposes). And I certainly don’t understand why a political polemicist like Sullivan would go there except to mainstream racial disparities in IQ testing into political discourse so as to demean those that score least well on these tests. Honestly, I think the question is irrelevant – especially as to what Sullivan is trying to do (again).
jacy
@dr. bloor:
I’m not saying there’s not a genetic compononet to intelligence. Far from it. I’m saying there are lots of environmental factors, and a good portion of those environmental factors influence HOW any genetic component will be expressed. Also, you can search for a gene related to a heritable disease. You can’t search for a gene for intelligence, due in large part to the fact that you can’t really say “what” intelligence is. Trying to tie the amorphous concept of “intelligence” to the amorphous concept of “race” is a fools errand.
Mnemosyne
@patroclus:
Actually, I can think of one instance where knowing the patient’s racial identity could be useful, although it was incorrectly used in the past. African-Americans (particularly AA men) are more likely than other ethnic groups to be diagnosed with schizophrenia. It used to be thought that African-Americans had a higher predisposition to that specific disease (which does have a genetic component), but it now turns out that their ethnic group was more likely to have untreated depression for so long that they would develop major depression with psychosis, which is distinct from schizophrenia.
So, these days, knowing the race of a patient with psychosis should make a responsible clinician take a long look at whether the person is truly schizophrenic or if they may have a different illness that has psychotic features. And the only reason we know about those misdiagnoses is because the race of the patients was being tracked.
It doesn’t really answer the “race and IQ” question, but that’s one example I can think of.
JoyfulA
@jl: I figured as much, which means we should pay minimal attention to “race” effects in medical research.
But I have a worse story of classification from the 1970s. My supervisor claimed a new hire was “black” because her brother was married to another employee who was “black” (golden complexion, long straight black hair). The new hire was very pink, but apparently not “white” because of in-laws.
(I’m really tired of “race.” We’re all the human race. Eventually, we’ll all be golden-beige, but I wish that time were now.)
aimai
@Roger Moore: Yes, there was a very interesting long New Yorker article about this issue with the rise of IQ tests and Aptitude tests in the 50s? 60s? The article basically described the push for such tests, from the University side, as a way of guaranteeing to upper class whites a test which didn’t test them for actual knowledge or for ability to study hard but for an innate virtue they were supposed to possess which Jews and non whites were not going to possess. Of course the tests immiediatly gave rise to the entire test prep industry which proved, in short order, that you could indeed improve your supposedly “natural” score by studying hard. The link here is to a similar (or the same) articl ein the New Yorker on the occasion of Stanley Kaplan’s self promoting book coming out.
Ruckus
@aimai:
It’s a dog eat dog world and the dogs are winning.
jl
And I remembered something regarding the general line of thought that ‘well they look different in ways that have to do with genes, so they must be different in other ways that have to do with genes too’
I think we do know a little about that line of argument from pharmacogenetics, and it does not support that line of thinking.
A few genes do determine superficial appearance, But look at other traits that are just determined through a few genes, and for which there is no reason to believe that they are highly correlated with hair eye or skin color. Does the fact that U.S. African Americans have a higher prevalence of a gene that controls metabolism for certain drug mean much about black populations in Africa, or other black African populations around the world? Or that it does not have a high prevalence uniformly in White populations around the world?
No, from what studies that have been done, you see a crazy patchwork of the prevalence of the gene that cuts across racial groups. That is one of the reasons that genetically tailored drugs have not appeared, there aren’t superficial and cheap and easy to measure markers for who might have what gene that makes one version of the drug work better.
So that fact that there is a relatively small constellation of genes that control features that are what whitey types think are good markers for racial classification says very little about correlations with other traits controlled by just a few genes.
So, just be clear, initial evidence from pharmacogenetics (admittedly from small studies) does not support that line of reasoning. Sullivans argument that you can generalize from genetic factors that correlate with surface appearance to random other genetically determined traits fails.
ns
Sully’s faith in the IQ tests defies logic. But what sets him off is people’s absolute knowledge that there cannot be group variations of intellectual or emotional genetic inheritances even though there are physical traits and diseases that strongly correlate with ancestral groups. I don’t understand why it is so important to him, but I do not concede that it is racist to believe that the chances of a marathon champion from Tonga or Somoa is vanishingly small.
If IQ was real and differences could be observed, then what? Very few people have written/spoken out against database correlations being used against people when it comes to umpteen other things. I don’t trust humanity with this knowledge so I wish Sully would stop asking about it. But his question isn’t stupid, and the political correctness about it all is lame.
Tim F.
@patroclus: There are some cases of genetically-targeted therapeutics percolating up through drug trials. Aside from sickle cell anemia, which you no doubt already know, there are some heart drugs and a few other treatments that show remarkable disparities in their effectiveness in certain black ancestries.
Part of that could well have to do with the incredible disparity in the amount of daily stress that black and non-black people have to deal with. Constant suspicion and fear and reminders of one’s inferiority (blatant or otherwise) has tangible effects on a person.
jl
@jl: And to amplify, there is no evidence for there being one or a few ‘IQ genes’ to begin with. But I wanted to emphasize that there is no evidence for that whole line of argument, based on what we know about genetics and drug metabolism.
Eric U.
I think the fact that Sullivan is gay should make him a little more understanding of why racism is a bad thing, but he’s a conservative so I am not waiting for enlightenment to strike..
I apparently took an IQ test in elementary school without realizing it, because my mother told me about it later. A little scary that they were probably using it to put kids in tracks. It’s just a standardized test, I can’t imagine controlling for social factors is particularly easy.
Mandalay
@Tim F.:
Do you have a link for the original source of that claim? I see it cited repeatedly in blogs as though it’s a well known fact.
I’m not doubting it, but it is neither obvious nor intuitive to me, and it would be nice to know who originally determined this.
Darkrose
@Tim F.: Yup. One of the reasons I’m one two different blood pressure meds is because apparently, the combination of the ACE inhibitor (?) and the diuretic has been shown to be more effective for African-Americans than either alone. I’ve also seen theories that there’s a genetic, race-linked component to the way people process carbohydrates that could account for the high rates of diabetes in African-Americans–not that it’s the only factor, but that in combination with other factors, it makes it more likely that I’d be diabetic and my wife isn’t.
aimai
@J.W. Hamner: Haven’t we already had this conversation? No one is saying that there aren’t clusters of inherited, genetic, traits that might be found more in one isolated or intermarrying ethnic community–Tay Sachs would be one example, Sickle Cell Anemia would be another. But the overarching category “black” or “white” just gives you a kind of global historical short hand that indicates you might want to watch out for the presence of those specific traits by, you know, testing. Because a person can be classed visually as “white” or “black” according to local sterotypes doesn’t mean that their genetic heritage actually tracks that assignment at all. Tay Sachs, for example, is found primarily among Ashkenazic jews and not sephardic jews. Some things are found among small populations within a larger category–like white or black–but we have forgotten the history that made those groups separable originally. Like take the Amish, for example, they’ve been intermarrying for quite a while–is their propensity for certain diseases or body types “white” or “Amish” at this point? The fact that some genetic diseases appear to track some ethnic boundaries doesn’t prove that “race” in the global black/white “I know it when I see it and dammit, it was good enough for my grandfather to spot when he saw a colored fellow” exists. It doesn’t. Not all people with Curly hair come from Africa, not all people with white skin and blue eyes are from Scandinavia.
BTW speaking of all of this I, personally, know a couple who had a child with Tay sachs–they had no history of being Jewish, either of them. Not only that the husband was an identical twin and the two men married unrelated, non Jewish, women and both children were unaware carriers of Tay Sachs and both had children who died of it. Even bizarre and apparently ethnically isolated genetic diseases can appear in the human population for reasons having to do with forgotten genetic and social histories, rape, sexual contact outside of marriage and its record keeping, and just plain mutation.
Chris
@Eric U.:
Herman Cain, Allen West and Clarence Thomas are black, Sarah Palin and Michelle Bachmann are women, Michelle Malkin is an immigrant and an anchor baby and a woman and nonwhite, and stories about union members, government employees and people on Social Security and Medicare who vote conservative because IGMFY are so common they’ve long since turned from “irony” to “worn out cliche.”
IOW, I’m not waiting for enlightenment to strike either.
tavella
@lojasmo:
Here’s a starter:
http://sciblogs.co.nz/the-atavism/2010/02/26/nucleotide-diversity-what-two-new-african-genomes-mean/
The main illustration shows it pretty well — nearly the entire genetic diversity of the rest of world descend from a single sub-lineage of one of the great African lineages. There are groups living just a few miles apart in Africa that are more genetically different than a Swede from an Australian Aborigine. The only significant exception as far as I know is that Subsaharan African didn’t have the minor contributions from the Neanderthal and Denisovan genes that some groups picked up.
aimai
@ns: Well, but to keep asking the same question, in the same way, over and over and over again without actually reviewing, understanding, or challenging the data and the process kind of is definitionally stupid. Show me the IQ gene–go ahead, don’t just intuit that it must be there show it to me. We’ve mapped the whole human genome–show me where there’s a gene for “driving tractors” which women don’t have (as I can assure you people in other countries will tell you) or for “being smart” which some non white people don’t have.
Jonathan
@ns: I’m pretty much in agreement. Huff and puff all you want about what race is and whether IQ matters, but that doesn’t change the fact that some populations of people answer a certain set of questions differently (edit: “on average”) than other populations…. is that not interesting? Apparently, it can only be racist to consider a genetic component, but what are our lives other than a set of genes responding to our environment?
Roger Moore
@Darkrose:
It sure looks as if there’s something going on there. Rates of diabetes are quite different by race, and the relative levels of Type I and Type II are even more different. But that ties into areas (immune response and metabolism) where we have solid evidence that we’ve been evolving the fastest. Lots of other well known genetic differences (e.g. sickle cell, alcohol tolerance) are known to be involved in those areas, too.
Phoenician in a time of Romans
But why then does the overwhelming data show IQ as varying in statistically significant amounts between these completely arbitrary racially constructed populations?
Do you think, just possibly, that these “completely arbitrary” classifications might just have real world effects? Including some that might affect IQ tests?
I recall some commentator bringing that home to me by comparing two classes – one an aspirational middle class bunch of mostly white suburbanite children who saw college as their destination and the other a bunch of bored poor urban (mainly) blacks turned off by subpar schooling. Stick each of them in a classroom for a three hour test, and which do you think will do better? Even if you do try to paint the result as objective by reducing it to a number…
jl
@tavella: Thanks for that link
lojasmo can get an overview of the recent African origins hypothesis and implication in the Wiki article, which from a quick look, seems pretty good.
Recent African Origin
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recent_African_origin
And an interesting bottom line stat is from the following sections of Human Genetic Variation entry in Wiki
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/African_human_genetic_diversity#Population_genetics
If modern human races come relatively recently from Africa, then you should find all the genes there, and you do. I guess one crucial assumption is that ‘recent’ implies no huge event that put severe selective pressure across a broad range of genes in one race versus another. And I remember reading and article that found evidence that last time that happened was shortly after the outmigration from Africa occurred, and before the different populations we plunk into different racial categories had separated.
lojasmo
@Nazgul35:
NAZ! How you been, dude?
jl
@Jonathan: But how you pose the question depends on the culture of the person writing the test. Example; give people in a European culture and blacks in Africa a problem with the same logical content. Pose it geometrically and people from a European culture do better, pose it algebraically and Africans do better. So, who is ‘smarter’?
We just do not know enough about what is going on with these tests, how to parse out the components of intelligence. We know next to nothing about the genetic mechanisms that facilitate intelligence in an individual, or all the developmental and environmental factors that influence test results.
And, as I argued above, the idea that just because one set of characteristics correlated with current racial categories is genetically determined, doesn’t say much about other possibly unrelated characteristics. You have the whole pharmacogenetics literature on differences across populations to see that.
aimai
@Jonathan: I see you don’t really know what a population is if you think that “populations” or even people from populations give answers to questions in any signficantly different way. You are assuming that is true but as others have pointed out almost all the kinds of tests you imagine people are being given are not actually being given to people who are given an actual bloodtest to determine whether they belong to a specific “population” or race or ethnicity at all. People are self reporting, they are being classified according to the best guess of the interviewer, they are being classified according to what is known or guessed about larger historical population movements and settlement patterns and then their scores are being agregated.
I’d also like to point out that the most recent studies of people who actually take tests–the population that takes tests–shows that people are incredibly influenced in how they give those answers by all kinds of set and setting affects. Psychologists have demonstrated that your race and class background (in the sense that these are markers for the way society has already treated you before you come into the test situation and your assumptions about the way society will treat you after you leave) have profound effects on how well you do on tests of all kinds–not just IQ tests but SAT and tests of subjects you’ve studied.
In other words “getting it right” or “getting it wrong” has already been shown to be very much part of the social construction of the student and the testing situation UNLIKE A BLOOD TEST.
JoyfulA
@aimai: There are ongoing medical studies now on the Amish, who are about as inbred as we get in the US (although they push to intermarry across geographical Amish communities). Many live in the Hershey area, which is where Penn State located its medical school, and Amish are uninsured for religious reasons and generally cash-poor, so Hershey Med gets willing subjects and the Amish get welcome medical care.
Sad_Dem
@prufrock: “What’s funny is that The Mismeasure of Man was written nearly a decade before The Bell Curve. The Bell Curve came pre-refuted.”
True! The Bell Curve is just a rehash of the bad science that Gould demolishes in The Mismeasure of Man. That The Bell Curve got any attention at all from the “serious” pundits is yet another sign of how intellectually lazy they are.
Just Some Fuckhead
@Haydnseek:
OMG, zinger! And so original!
LAC
@jrg: Nice try, Jonathan Karl. Now you are just trying to rewrite what this queen wrote. You could find friendlier waters over at Stormfront.
lojasmo
@tavella:
Well that makes sense. Thanks. I had heard that said more than a couple of times, but have never seen a citation.
Jonathan
@aimai: Why are you an asshole?
I meant “population” simply as a generic statistical term.
You’re right… we should do that, and get to the bottom of it. I assume you’re with me?
fascinating. So people that self report as such and such race tend to have slightly different outcomes on a test than people that self report as such and such race? (Which is weird because race doesn’t exist). That’s interesting, we should figure out why that is.
Fascinating! If what you say is true, can you reply with why that is? If not, that’s interesting, we should find out why that happens.
So we have done the blood test comparisons, and already know that it’s all a “social construction”? I hadn’t heard that. But if we haven’t, see above.
…Look, I’d like to find out (and do believe) that the nurture side of things is the predominant factor, but I don’t think that means that we should wall off the “nature” side of things as taboo.
Jonathan
@jl: @jl: Yep, I understand and I agree with everything you say here. I’m just not sure why suggesting we find out is so taboo.
jl
@Jonathan:
I think we are finding out. The drug industry and academic medicine are very interested in finding out, that’s why so many clinical trials are done around the world now, rather than just on whites in the US and Europe. Population genetics is interested in finding out.
There have been lots of interesting research on how the details of IQ and aptitude tests work in different populations, how same logical content is presented in different ways effects the results, the effects of stereotype bias, and developmental factors from before and shortly after birth can affect performance.
What is missing is a strong connection between what is known about population genetics and the race/IQ connection, and the favorite race/IQ connection hypotheses. One reason for that is that there may in fact be no strong connection because the race/IQ theories are false.
IMHO, it is just a case where a probably false theory cannot gain support from independent lines of inquiry. We are gaining a lot of information about how genetics work in different populations. But no developments that I know of give much support to common race/IQ connection theories. That is not a matter of bias or fear on the part of researchers, it just how the chips are falling, factwise.
El Cid
I’d stop reading Andrew Sullivan except that every now and then his writing’s so good, he’s like a million Shakespeare’s times a billion Pope’s, he’s so awsum, it’s not like there are more people out there on the internet who deserve my attention more than he.
EthylEster
You guys are a little late to this discussion which has already been hashed out at TN-C’s place.
Tim, Sulllivan cannot be embarrassed.
El Cid wrote: he’s like a million Shakespeare’s times a billion Pope’s
Wow. Hyperbole much?
Protip: NOBODY is a million Shakespeares.
mclaren
The smoking gun is the studies showing that black infants adopted by white parents have IQs identical to whites.
James Flynn, the social scientist who discovered the “Flynn Effect” (intergenerational IQ scores on standardized tests have been rising for decades, and IQ rises the older you get if you keep taking the tests as you age — impossible if IQ is a measure of Spearman’s g, a fixed innate intelligence), found that
Source: “None of the Above: What IQ doesn’t tell you about race,” Malcolm Gladwell, The New Yorker, 17 December 2007.
themann1086
As others have pointed out, IQ is at best a mediocre approximation of a person’s knowledge and their ability to acquire knowledge of a particular sort and in a particular way. And that’s at best. Isn’t the best correlation for IQ a person’s access to food? Whatever Sully, keep fucking that chicken.
mclaren
@El Cid:
Except that presumably Sullivan knows when and when not to use apostrophes.
Mnemosyne
@Jonathan:
Stereotype threat. It’s an extremely well-known and easily demonstrated psychological phenomenon.
I have never seen a supposed “racial IQ difference” that could not be attributed to a combination of education, environment and stereotype threat, none of which can honestly be called “genetic.” And that’s leaving aside the fact that it’s well-known that you can increase “innate” IQ with the right kind of educational enrichment.
Personally, I would LOVE to see IQ researchers take a cheek swab from everyone they administer an IQ test to and check their genetic makeup, because I think it would be a huge shock to people like Sullivan who assume that people with dark skin and curly hair all have the same genes.
jl
@Mnemosyne:
” researchers take a cheek swab from everyone they administer an IQ test to and check their genetic makeup, because I think it would be a huge shock to people like Sullivan who assume that people with dark skin and curly hair all have the same genes. ”
Heh, I suggested something like that once in a seminar and got myself called a Nazi by some right thinking politically correct people.
Mnemosyne
@jl:
After watching Henry Louis Gates’s two genealogy series (“Faces of America” and “Finding Your Roots”), I frankly have no fear of the outcome, because a whole lot of African-Americans on the show were astounded to find out just how “white” they actually were, genetically speaking.
I can’t remember which series it was, but in one of them he did the genetic test on the guys who work at his local barbershop, which was pretty funny.
Patricia Kayden
@mclaren: Great comment. The links you cited discredit arguments that IQ scores are based on race. Sullivan should respond to them. What I don’t understand about Sullivan is that he seems to genuinely support President Obama who is at least 1/2 Black. Does he think President Obama is mentally lacking because of his half-Blackness?
Rebmarks
My mother told me she realized for the first time how biased IQ tests were when my family returned to the States from South America in about 1962 when my brother was about 10, and the IQ test he was given in school asked when Labor Day was and he got it wrong because Labor Day in the entire rest of the world is in May.
Rebmarks
My mother told me she realized for the first time how biased IQ tests were when my family returned to the States from South America in about 1962 when my brother was about 10, and the IQ test he was given in school asked when Labor Day was and he got it wrong because Labor Day in the entire rest of the world is in May.
brantl
Very few people have the self-awareness to be embarassed by their inner dick coming out. This is Sully’s inner dick.