If we know there are 30 point differences between pre and post industrialization within the same societies shouldn't it be pretty self evident we see 30 point gaps between countries?
Are you referring to the pre- and post-agriculture confusion Scott talks about here?
"Reich had said that pre-agriculture Europeans were '2-3 standard deviations' below moderns. I had interpreted that as IQ deviations of 15 points, making them genetic IQ 55-70, which would have been pretty crazy. [Lyman] Stone tells me he actually meant PGS deviations, each of which was about 3-4 IQ points, so he’s claiming that pre-agriculture Europeans had genetic IQ of 90"
I'm skeptical of that summary of the finding. Any selection pressures that impacted the genes used to compose a PGS score probably impacted the frequency of a bunch of other genes for intelligence we haven't identified yet.
(This is why PGS tracks with observed group-level phenotypic IQ across racial/ethnic/religious lines so well, even though it only directly accounts for ~10% of the variance.)
Fair enough, but the "30-point differences" is still based on a misunderstanding of the point that was made (even if that point was wrong). Or does it come from somewhere else?
OK. I wasn't aware that worked out to a flat 30 points.
In fact, I doubt that it does represent a flat 30-point industrialization bonus for all societies, because societies are presumably starting from different baselines on all the factors that may contribute to the Flynn effect (poverty, mal-/nutrition, education, environmental toxins, etc.) So it really gets to the heart of the topic: Yes, pretty much everyone agrees that there's a very significant environmental contribution, but we don't know how big it is, or how it is distributed, among or within societies. It's a bit facile to say it is self-evidently 30 points.
(And as for MA_browsing's skepticism, it is interesting, but still not particularly relevant to my reply when I misunderstood your comment, and even less relevant to your original comment.)
I was generalizing a bit too much, sorry for that. The initial Flynn effect was the re-meaning of IQ scores because they increased by roughly 3 points per decade in the United States. The strength of gains vary according to country, intelligence domains, and the investigated time span. Some areas like sub-Saharan Africa have shown low or no gains while, countries like South Korea and Japan have had periods of 7.7 point per decade gains with 35+ point gains overall.
If my reading of the Flynn effect is correct, this suggests pre-agricultural Europeans had an IQ about in line with Americans in the 1980s? Seems to undermine basically any suggestion in my mind that this means anything whatsoever.
This speaks specifically to genetic IQ, whereas my understanding of the Flynn effect is that it is best understood as a raising of the mean largely due to environmental changes that raise the lower part of the distribution in the US (through better education, nutrition, less poverty, etc.) up into the 80s. Also the 3-point pr decade probably can’t easily be generalized to all other periods and places. It would be astounding if genetic IQ increased by something like 3 points (or even 3%) every decade – especially ever since the agricultural revolution.
Does genetic IQ make sense as a concept? Is this not just a renaming of g? I would guess the explanation would be what they'd score if they were brought up in the existing American system, but why is the educational system of the US privileged as the "normal" education system? It seems impossible to determine what the objective measure would be because everything is a mixture between genetic and educational components. Maybe the US has terrible education and very strong genetic advantage? Maybe the opposite.
In principle even pure g-factor can be lowered by environmental factors, like malnutrition or cyanide poisoning or viral infections of the nervous system and so on.
The Flynn effect doesn't represent a true intelligence gain because it isn't measure invariant. AFAIK there's no reliable way to norm test results over time so it's not really meaningful to say that modern Americans are 30 points smarter than 19th century Americans. Informally it seems pretty obvious that that can't be true because if the average IQ a century ago was 70 then we never could have modernized.
That only holds if IQ is actually normally distributed; if in the past there were more prevalent environmental limitations to most people's IQ but the distribution were more heavy-tailed, we'd still have enough smart people to modernize society.
(Yes, I know IQ is normally distributed by definition; just pretend I said some sort of "effective IQ").
This doesn't mean that your overall statement is incorrect, though.
I am inclined to believe the IQ test results are primarily a product of human adaptability at early ages. That is, if you grow up in a literate culture with lots of emphasis on the kinds of thought present in solving pen-and-paper puzzles, you will be much more capable of understanding them, and much less capable of understanding the things that you would understand were you brought up as an illiterate hunter-gatherer. Not explaining myself very well, but a friend told me about a study suggesting that literacy restructures our brain by overwriting a portion of it that would otherwise be used for recognizing faces. Assuming something like this is right, I would imagine it extends to the sorts of concepts involved in any puzzles, and so I probably wouldn't expect an illiterate hunter-gatherer of average intelligence to be capable of understanding anything he was shown on pen and paper, regardless of whether it involved words or not, to the same level as a literate person with a high school diploma.
While I agree the original statement is too strong, IQ test could measure something closer to intelligence in literate cultures and fail to measure that in illiterate cultures, through the process he said above. Especially considering IQ test already require normalization to work correctly, even within literate societies.
By the same token even intelligent people from literate societies often appear to hunter gatherers to be childlike in their inability to acquire basic observational and tracking skills so the „overwriting“ theory makes sense to me.
Some of the best hunters in the world are westerners who have just spent more time hunting than the rest of us. It's probably not anything to do about "overwriting." You can learn hunting skills even as a fully developed and literate adult.
I would strongly expect that all of those individuals were also taken hunting at a young age, or at the very least participated in types of play that used adjacent skills.
"Overwriting" might not be quite the right word, since it implies replacing skills that already existed, but it's certainly true that early development devotes more or less "space" for skills based on their usage, sometimes in in areas (evolutionarily) "intended" for other skills. (Of course, neuroplasticity doesn't entirely go away with age either, it just gets less effective)
Why wouldn't you just expect that hunting is a skill like any other?
I expect that hunting is like anything else -- if you devote a lot of effort to learning about it and practicing it, even starting as an adult, then you can become very good at it -- if not among the best in the world, then at least as good as the average tribesman.
Right, but *like any other skill*, the people who are the best in the world usually started practicing when they were young. Like I said, neuroplasticity is just less for adults, and at the top of the bell curve you usually have people with every advantage. And starting will usually give you a greater effect for less effort. (Plus in this specific case, 'dads taking their son hunting' is practically a stock story, so it's not like it's uncommon.)
Best hunters in the world with what tool package and education? Would these hunters really be comparable to the skillset developed by societies with a hunter-gatherer cultural package?
Yes, Henrich mentions that early on in the book. He claimed that literacy re-purposed the ability to process faces.
Unfortunately the claim is based on studies by Dehaene with very small Ns (~10) and interpretations of fMRI images (which are controversial).
There is a paper by Huettig, F., & Mishra, 2014, that concludes:
"Dehaene and colleagues (2010) have suggested that face perception abilities will suffer as individuals become literate because orthographic representations ‘invade’ the ventral visual system and interfere with the enlargement of faces and houses into the surrounding cortex.
There is no solid experimental evidence from behavioral studies to support such claims. Huettig et al. (in preparation) compared complete illiterates and literates from the same village and the same community of Indian society on the recognition of the emotions of the standardized Ekman (Ekman & Friesen, 1975) faces. There was no hint of a difference between the two groups. The Ekman faces are sometimes criticized for being culture-specific (i.e., Western), and thus, perhaps these results have to be interpreted with some caution. Orihuela, Carreiras, and Dunabeita (2013) have also investigated whether illiterates and literates differ in face perception.
These authors found in fact the opposite effect, illiterates made more errors than literates in a face recognition task of varying degrees of difficulty. Thus, as in the case of memory research, literacy may improve face perception rather than being detrimental."
I offer my own n=1 observation: I am pretty bad with faces (not terrible, but noticeably worse than most other people) and I learned to read very young.
An ordinary 21st century Westerner with a TV can easily recognise thousands of faces, more faces than an average hunter-gatherer will ever encounter in their whole lives. If literacy has invaded the facial-recognition part of our brain then what are we supposed to have lost?
The hunter gatherer will have learnt thousands of plants and animals, more than an ordinary 21st century Westerner will ever encounter in their whole lives.
Evolution gave us that capability and it wasn't so we could recognize Z-list celebs!
I was echoing Melvin's comment - the numbers aren't important. But hunter-gathering is memory/information intensive: you need to remember which trees produce edible fruit or nuts, where they grow, what time of year they produce, how to collect and how to prepare them to remove toxins - multiply this by all the other things you need to eat over the different seasons.
According to Aporia, the claim that Lynn described himself as a “scientific racist” is taken out of context. He said, “If we are talking about people who believe there are genetic differences between the races, then I am definitely a scientific racist.” I can’t speak for the other claims about his beliefs or who he was affiliated with, however.
I’m assuming he meant genetic differences *in intelligence* between the races, but I guess it’s unfair to attribute that broader context to this one quote
Even if it was it's still not racist. You're making a category error in conflating empirical claims with normative ones. If races differ in IQ for genetic reasons then they do. That's a scientific question that has an objective answer. It doesn't make anyone racist to have a good-faith opinion about objective reality.
In fact it's very dangerous to tie anti-racist views to arguments like this. What would you do if it became the indisputable scientific consensus that IQ is 90% genetic and definitely differs between races? Would you then be compelled to describe yourself (and everyone else) as a scientific racist?
I’m just describing how the concept is used; not commenting on its normative valence. For 95% of people, if you tell them you think Whites are genetically smarter than Blacks, they will call you racist.
“Okay, but you shouldn’t use that definition. Like I would refuse to use the word “Quran” to mean “the true word of Allah” even if societal developments lead it to be commonly defined that way because it’s unhelpful for many reasons. It’s better to use a different word without the assumption of “true” within the definition.”
I don't know if it's 95%, but you're pretty much right. But probably because they are assuming (incorrectly) that there is no good evidence, and (possibly with some justification depending on their social context) that people who say it don't like other races, otherwise they would respect the taboo and not investigate the topic, and/or just keep their mouths shut.
A non-trivial percent will also say stupid incoherent things like "racism = prejudice + power" and only whites (all whites, everywhere, even poor homeless ones, because they "participate in and benefit from whiteness" or something), so if a Korean, for example, says, "god I hate f***ing n***ers, and I intend to discriminate against them", that's not racist. People have all sorts of stupid and incoherent beliefs.
As Scott argues, people switch between different definitions without realizing it, but the only one that really makes sense, and also the one that people ultimately fall back on in practice is the definition from motives (being motivated by ill-will toward a particular race(s)).
+1 - you can acknowledge differences and still treat people without prejudice and not make categorical judgements about them. The term racism includes discrimination based on race.
I don’t have a perfect definition of racism. I just know that it can’t be that because scientific differences between races doesn’t justify cruelty, disrespect, lack of rights, etc. towards other races.
The word's meaning has swollen quite a bit beyond that limited definition, though. Almost all the people who fought to abolish slavery in the 19th century would be considered 'scientific racists' by modern standards.
Okay, but you shouldn’t use that definition. Like I would refuse to use the word “Quran” to mean “the true word of Allah” even if societal developments lead it to be commonly defined that way because it’s unhelpful for many reasons. It’s better to use a different word without the assumption of “true” within the definition.
The way I learned it at least is that racism was trying to allocate resources based on racial differences. Just positing a difference between/among races isn't enough.
So if I say "Koreans and Nigerians are different", that's not racist according to the definition I learned in college. Even if I say "Koreans and Nigerians are physiologically and biologically distinguishable", that's not racist. But if I say "Koreans and Nigerians are different, and therefore I won't let one group into my store", that's racism.
Once you tie some kind of resource allocation to being a member of a particular race, that's where you run into trouble.
From what I can see on the Wikipedia article, it mirrors what I learned in college. Wikipedia defines scientific racism as "is the pseudoscientific belief that the human species is divided into biologically distinct taxa called "races", AND that empirical evidence exists to support or justify racial discrimination, racial inferiority, or racial superiority" (emphasis mine). Without that second part, I don't think you have racism.
I think that many people (especially today) drop the second clause when attributing racism, and think that any highlighting of (especially biological) differences counts as racism.
Why? In general I think that there *had* been a decoupling of these beliefs, at least in terms of people willing to discus so publicly. If you imagine the quadrant, nearly all public discussion got sorted into the groups of (Differences + Discrimination) or (No Differences + No discrimination). This state of affairs lasted for roughly the long second half of the 20th Century. Highlighting major genetic or biological differences between groups of people that may gesture towards "race" being real was increasingly the domain of people who happened to also be racist or at least vaguely gestured in that direction.
It wasn't purely coincidental that this original sorting from 4 groups to 2 happened. The descriptive claim isn't purely independent of the normative claim. Consider racial justice or feminist campaigns of recent years. The ~roughly mainstream scientific (and Scott's?) view "racial differences are real but we can treat people equally" view is now more popular and acceptable, mostly due to the sheer amount of genetic evidence coming out every day. But it also saw the decoupling on the other side, people who thought (innate) racial differences weren't real BUT you should treat people differently.
You might correctly identify differences between groups, deny the biological explanation, and then attribute said differences to solely environmental factors. If you then think "and that means we should act differently to if all these groups had similar outcomes" (e.g. DEI) then it means your descriptive claim has influenced your normative claim. But if you instead think that "wait, no, a lot of these differences are actually due to *biology* or *genetics* (and those cluster in groups etc. etc.)" then you can see how the maintenance of "differences in people should entail differential treatment" (the same macro view as before!) becomes racist.
If the four views then are "90s liberal race blind", "technocentrist enlightened genetics liberal", "DEI advocate" and "dictionary definition racist", which of those today could get you labelled as a racist?
For the last 25 or 30 years, I've been publicly articulating the moderate, reasonable, empirically-backed position that the racial differences due to nature and nurture that we see when watching sports on TV are also seen in other aspects of society. (I realize that most of Scott's readers don't watch sportsball, but a whole lot of people really care about it.)
I've pointed out that the obviousness of racial differences in sports performance (e.g., a Kenyan is about a zillion times more likely to win the 3000m Steeplechase gold medal at the 2028 Los Angeles Olympics than a Bangladeshi) has not led to the genocide of the (literally) weaker or stronger races.
Instead, people really like sports, which leads them to having heroes of different races. White football fans really admire Lamar Jackson (a black QB) and black football fans really admire Josh Allen (a white QB). They might be modestly prejudiced in favor of the football hero of their own race, but ... that's okay.
When people ask me when I became aware of racial differences, I point to an October 13, 1968 college football game I attended at the Los Angeles Coliseum featuring two All-American running backs. #13 Oregon State's star was the huge Steve Enyart, who used his upper body strength to devastate #1 USC's defensive line in the first half. But in the second half, USC's superstar tailback used his lower body speed to overwhelm Oregon State. His name was O.J. Simpson.
But these obvious racial differences in sports didn't cause American elites to conclude that, well, sure, nature and/or nurture lead to racial differences. Instead, they concluded that anybody daring to mention the obvious was an evil enemy of society.
I've oversimplified, obviously there are "acceptable" ways of treating people differently due to their differences that don't get you labelled as a racist, high performance sports being one of them. Nozick chose Wilt Chamberlain for his famous thought experiment after all. If you interrogate this too deeply or take it toward logical conclusions (reward elite talent, but don't discriminate at the bottom end..?) it falls apart of course. So you could self deceive that you sit in one quadrant and not in the other.
Anyway this is more for public consumption, I don't need to explain this to you Steve. I do note that your own views (and self!) have become more mainstream as of late and this is largely due to that 2 quadrant equilibrium breaking down and the millions of sequenced human genomes we now have.
If you truly think that widespread acceptance of the idea that black people are less intelligent than whites would not lead to a massively more negative perception against black people from other races, you're deceiving yourself. Most people assume that white people are not that good at basketball, which doesn't do white basketball players any favors, but doesn't move the needle that much because basketball is a tiny part of life. If people assumed that black people had the skill level for jobs requiring intelligence as white people have at basketball, it would lead to a significant increase in bias against black people.
Professional athletes are outliers. Already I am seeing (unprompted by anything I choose to engage with) pretty racist memes on Instagram Reels and (especially) twitter based on the idea that black people are less intelligent. Maybe that theory is correct, but if it becomes widely accepted things will be much, much worse for a lot of people, and I don't believe you are being honest when you suggest otherwise.
That suggests a useful academic study: how much are white athletes hurt by stereotype threat and the like? Over a 20 year stretch that recently ended, no white players were regular starters at cornerback. How come? Well, blacks tend to be better cornerbacks? But 100% black with no whites or Samoans? Really? Probably something else like the old corporate saying: no executive ever got fired for buying IMB. Similarly, no coach ever got fired for starting a black cornerback, but many could imagine getting fired for starting a white cornerback and he gives up a touchdown.
So, here's the question that could be studied: how much different would be a world where nobody perceived race at all? How many more whites would have started at cornerback?
My guess is: a few. Not really all that many. Blacks really are much better at cornerback on average than nonblacks. But I could be wrong. Perhaps racial stereotyping kept dozens of whites and Samoans from playing cornerback.
Doesn't anybody want to know this?
Especially because it seems obviously useful to estimating the size of the harm you dread as people like Scott make it more socially respectable to be unignorant about race and IQ.
An interesting aspect of the widespread ignorance of how huge is the intelligence gap between Asians and blacks is that college admission affirmative action is highly unpopular with the public, even though affirmative action is the only way to have more than negligible black representation at our most elite academic institutions. I've often joked that when you become president of Harvard, they give you the key to unlock the Harvard President's Book of Secrets, which turns out to be a dog-eared copy of "The Bell Curve."
The point isn’t that what you’re saying isn’t true, that point is that for most people who have heard of Steve Sailer, Steve Sailer is the textbook example of a scientific racist. So I think we have a good working definition of scientific racism, which is just, whatever Steve Sailer says. I say this unironically with no disrespect; I also consider myself a scientific racist.
Kenyans, Ethiopians and Ugandans who do well in middle and long distance running grow up and train at altitude where the air is thin. The body adjusts to the conditions and becomes more efficient at handling oxygen. Uganda recently build a training centre at altitude open to athletes from all over the world. The distance running genes haven't been discovered (yet).
Kenyans and Ethiopians also do pretty well in distance running when they move to the US and compete at low altitude, or when their parents do.
For example, in the all-time great 1500 meter men's final in 2024 Olympics, the bronze metal was won by Yared Nuguse, an Ethiopian-American who was born in Arlington, Virginia and went to high school in Louisville.
Setting aside the obvious problems (that AA programs are textbook-racist under the above definition), I think it's going to be very difficult, in practice, to acknowledge the 'biologically distinct taxa' element without leading to the 'discrimination/hierarchy' element.
"We should always judge individuals on their individual merits" all sounds very fine and noble, but you can't evaluate individual merit unless you have perfect information about individuals, which is never *perfectly* true and often largely missing, especially from people who arrive on rubber dinghys or chuck out their passports on arrival. And in any case even carefully-screened individuals are bound to their background groups through loyalty to kinship networks and regression-to-the-mean effects, which we can't reliably predict at an individual level. It's not irrational or unjustified to fill in the blanks here with probabilistic information derived from an individual's background group, which is definitionally 'racist'.
The case for this can be made with or without reference to genetic factors, of course, but the case certainly gets stronger when genetics enters the picture.
This doesn't make, e.g, assimilation of some non-zero number of foreign migrants necessarily *impossible*, but to make it work you're talking about a multi-generational process with necessarily higher standards of scrutiny than would be required of native-born citizens to compensate for any background risk-factors, which... again, is definitionally 'racist'.
What changed during the Great Awokening versus the previous several decades is that expressions of racial animus against whites in the mainstream media became not just acceptable but fashionable.
I favor doing as much as is practical to get better information about individuals: e.g., colleges should go back to requiring the SAT or ACT.
But I am against adjusting scores for reasons of racial regression toward the mean. For example, sure, a black applicant who gets a perfect 1600 on the SAT the one time he takes it would be likely to average a little lower than an Asian applicant who got a 1600 the one time he takes it if they both took it nine more times. But let's not penalize him for that statistical pattern. He got a 1600. Good for him.
On the other hand, say your mother's car breaks down in the middle of a dark block and her phone isn't charged, so she has to decide in which direction to walk. Hanging out on one corner are a half dozen Asian-American teens and hanging out on the other corner are a half dozen African-American teens. I think she can be forgiven in this case for doing some racial profiling and walking toward the Asian-Americans.
I was referring to regression-to-the-mean (maybe a misnomer, I think Galton used the term 'regression-towards-mediocrity') as a phenomenon seen among the children of exceptional parents- e.g, the children of very short people tend to be taller, on average, and the same can be seen at both ends of the bell curve for any complex human trait, due to a combination of non-additive genetic and non-systematic environmental factors.
Notably, as you probably know, different racial groups regress toward different means for IQ (up until the advent of GWAS, this was one of the more powerful pieces of evidence for hereditarianism.) This is relevant to long-term migration policy, but also in the broader sense to any attempt at integrating exceptional individuals into meritocratic societies or institutions.
For example, the children of wealthy black parents do about as well on the SAT as white kids who grow up in trailer parks. And... I have to imagine this could strongly motivate parents of colour to push for the... shall we say, relaxation of meritocratic standards, when it comes to their child? Potentially true for any parent, of course, but more likely to be true the larger the regression effect. And this has to be a factor when considering whether to include such parents in the social milieu that decide standards of merit to begin with.
Looking back, I think that the definition I was using was from Omi and Winant. They added an "essentialism" component.
So that rescues most AA programs.
By way of example, let's say that the Nazis put all the Jews in camps and stole their property. You could, without being racist, say that the Jews should be compensated - not because of some essentialist characteristic of being Jewish, but because of their historical experience suffering in Nazi concentration camps.
As for the rest of it, you don't have perfect information to treat individuals the same. I don't run a background check on the people I meet, though I'm sure it would reveal lots of information about whom to trust and whom to shun. Instead, I just treat people like they're all normal, unless and until I get individualized data saying that someone is, say, a convicted felon, or something.
People make decisions based on imperfect information every day. Unfortunately, race is something that's really hard to not see!
I'm not sure I buy that AA programs can be justified on any non-essentialist / contingent grounds: the bar to clear for receiving benefits is "be black", right, not any feature equivalent to "experienced XYZ event or type of event"—or, in other words, if it were that being black was any sort of proxy, there'd be a better way to get at the thing we /really/ care about without need for a proxy.
(e.g., a middle-class black woman from a recent-immigrant family applies for some benefit under AA: well, she & her ancestors experienced no slavery, or none the U.S. was complicit in; she isn't poorer than other applicants; she isn't disadvantaged in any way relative to other applicants; etc... she's just black, and that's the sole criterion.)
Unless I'm wrong and AA in practice requires that one prove U.S. slave ancestry or other white American oppression against you & yours in particular, or something...? I think most proponents are against anything like this, though, even something like "just give help to poor people as a whole"—some have come up with various ways to try to justify making it race-based, but (if I may do some armchair psychologizing) I'd bet you $5 that nah, they see it in essentialist terms in their hearts of hearts. So to speak.
I understand your point, but the problem with allocating AA on the basis of, e.g, poverty is that poverty just doesn't predict social mobility across racial backgrounds, so it wouldn't have the required 'compensatory' effect.
So a couple points. First, I don't think your characterization of the facts is accurate. In California, where I live, the reparations task force said that reparations should be "based on lineage, determined by an individual being a Black descendant of a chattel enslaved person or a descendant of a free Black person living in the United States prior to the end of the 19th Century".
Second, with that fact in mind, I don't think the facts matter all that much for this discussion. I know literally zero people who would support (or oppose) a lineage-based reparation program but who would change their mind for just a race-based reparation program.
So I'll agree that most people who support AA/reparations are racist, albeit in a direction that runs contrary to the bulk of American history. I think that's why the people in charge of, say, California's reparations task force took pains to separate race from lineage, to avoid charges of racism.
Of course, that got them zero converts, because normal people aren't living based on what Omi and Winant were writing about. They're not trying to conform their lives to some ideology - they have vibes and make decisions based on those vibes.
But people who care about the ideology do, in fact, have answers to these questions. I just don't think they represent too many real people.
I agree that people injured through either malice or incompetence deserve compensation, but I also don't think you can just measure per-capita GDP disparities and use this to infer injury, so I want to know what level of compensation is meant to be sufficient. And I've written elsewhere why I don't think affirmative-action programs are an appropriate form of compensation under any circumstances.
If you mean 'treat the same' in the sense of 'receive the same nominal courtesies during casual conversation', I mean... sure, politeness doesn't cost much. But the risk/reward evaluation can become quite different if you're deciding who to rent an apartment to, or approve for a bank loan, or hire for a job. Once upon a time, you could, perhaps, rely on credentialling institutions or background checks or just asking face-to-face questions to fill in the blanks, but the left has increasingly made it *illegal* to seek out such individuating information, and has actively corrupted every credentialing institution to reduce the exposure of embarrassing facts.
Racism is like democracy or love--it has dozens of different meanings used in different contexts, and often even the speaker isn't aware when they switch from one meaning to another.
To be useful, we really need to distinguish the moral / social stuff from the factual claims. You can't learn anything about the truth or falsehood of a factual claim by its moral or political or social implications. It would be bad if blacks' lower average IQ in the US were due to genetic factors that couldn't be changed, just as it would be bad if burning the cheapest available fuels messed up the climate. But if you let "it would be bad if this were true" influence your evaluation of "is this claim true," you are sabotaging your brain.
I agree with that, although in some circumstances, it makes sense to circle back and check with your moral / social stuff before publishing the information. Privacy is an obvious example - if my social security number gets released, I'm mad about people obtaining truthful information about me.
Regardless, the bar to clear for "This is true, but for moral / social reasons it must be suppressed" is really, really, really high. I can understand people who want to suppress the study of racial intelligence, but I'm pretty skeptical of the whole endeavor (leaving aside the question of whether it does more harm than good, or whatever).
In that case it still would be bad to publish a false social security number, because that can impact a random person with that number.
A problem is that once you start lying about the truth, you have to expand that lie to deal with hard questions. And suddenly all kinds of useful science becomes off limits.
And you need other explanations for certain things, and in practice this often seems to boil down to racist conspiracy theories that are remarkable similar to those wielded against Jews with rather nasty consequences. So is it really preferable to have people believe those conspiracy theories?
Well said. Funny how no one ever makes this kind of argument to, say, deny the Holocaust or something. "But if you believe than that, then you must think humans are terrible and there's no hope for the future!" Well...maybe? Not necessarily, but regardless... "Therefore it didn't happen" Non sequitur! "and anyone who says it did is an evil person who needs to be shunned and banished from polite company."
Oh, so you claim there's "evidence" that the Holocaust was real? Why are you interested in that? Do you LIKE the idea of millions of Jews being gassed? Gross! What a vile and disgusting person you are!
What about something like "people of X race are stupid, but we shouldn't give people more or less resources just because they're stupid"?
And a somewhat related question: if you think people of X race are stupid, and that they should get disability benefits as a result, are you racist against X or for X?
You kinda have to pick your battles. By way of example, I'm a Dodgers fan. I think that Giants fans are awful and stupid. All right-thinking people agree. But the kind of discrimination that Giants fans have historically endured is pretty small potatoes compared to racial, religious, or gender-based discrimination. If we could stop allocating resources based on racial, religious or gender lines, we'd be doing really, really well. I'd be extremely happy to live in a country where race was just as likely to predict your future financial success as what baseball team you root for.
To your second question, I was remembering the definition of racism used by Omi and Winant and I think they snuck in some requirement of essentialism. So if you believe that people of X race are essentially stupid, and therefore they should get more resources, yeah, that's racist.
Of course, I don't see many historical examples where that ever happened, so I don't think there's any cause for alarm. If in the future racist people start being far too kind and friendly and caring to other races, I'm sure we can figure out a solution.
The question is, of course, /why/ race predicts future financial status. If, hypothetically, the answer were to be "because some races are better at deferring gratification and have more smarts, on average", ought we still engage in redistribution along purely racial lines?
I think we pretty much always end up better not using race as a proxy, regardless—you have to engage in various unintuitive contortions to rescue such a policy over "just help whoever appears to need it most" without worrying about the racial balance of the recipients—but, considering how many people are only too glad to engage in such contortions, and how academia looks upon those who find for the wrong side on questions like "is it mostly differential intellectual ability, or mostly evil whitie being all oppressive and shit?", I'm not hopeful for the future here.
I don't know that we do engage in redistribution along purely racial lines. But if we did - and we just let the chips fall where they may - I'm pretty sure we'd stop caring about the people in Ohio and let unlimited numbers of Chinese people immigrate here.
Strangely, the people who care the most about race and intelligence never seem content to let the people of West Virginia sink into deserved oblivion as the more intelligent Japanese and Chinese people move in next door and buy up everything.
Quite the contrary, they want to ban Chinese investment, like TikTok, rather than just acquiescing in the face of the Asians' superior brain power.
Would you be okay with getting rid of all race/nationality/citizenship distinctions and letting individual merit be the only factor considered for, say, housing, employment, voting rights, etc.?
If you think IQ differences are leading to differences in outcome that should be compensated for by welfare or something, how does race even come into that? You would want to do that by individuals, not by races--a black doctor or engineer doesn't need any compensation for having a low IQ, whereas a white or Asian janitor may need that compensation.
You can have *some* level of social safety net, but, but how do you propose to allocate equal resources to all people regardless of their own productivity? This was tried a couple times and didn't work out well.
Even the 'safety net' approach still requires a reasonable number of net tax payers, by the way, which in turn depends on the typical genetic endowments of your country's citizens.
Most redistribution works out great - human beings depend on redistribution to survive to their teenage years.
Literally no newborn human can support themselves. Not a single one. They depend on net contributions from someone - usually their parents. This strategy differs from almost every other animal or plant ever encountered. Yet human beings are the ones who've taken over the world.
I think it's totally fine to take care of our fellow human beings - after all, every single one of us was taken care of at some point in our lives.
There are many examples of social species that exhibit reciprocal aid and essentially all mammals and birds provide parental care, so this is hardly a unique human innovation.
Do you think that social animals are immune to Darwinism?
Nobody sensible is saying people of race X are stupid. If you can't distinguish "the mean IQ of people of race X is lower than the mean IQ of people of race Y" from "people of race X are stupid," you're basically doomed to talk nonsense in this whole conversation. Seriously, a vast amount of nonsense on this topic comes from people who can't keep the difference between the mean and the distribution straight in their heads.
The counter claim is usually that "race" is an arbitrary way of grouping people that doesn't map well onto real populations. You see the conceptual confusion Scott has in these articles in his treating of "black" as a natural kind.
I think you may be reading too much into it. That study looked at four broad racial categories and discovered that they could tell which of the participants was in what category by their genes— the participants being people who were pre-selected to be among those four categories with none of the participants "mixed-race".
African-Americans are a mixed race population, as are mestizo Hispanics. Discrete notions of race do break down if you don't have concepts like "mestizo" or "mulatto" (much less "quadroon"), which are more popular in Spanish than English-speaking settler colonies, but it's still a fact that there are genetic differences that multiple services can now use to portion out your ancestry.
I don't think that obviates the point, which is that the population breaks down into separate races as well genetically as it does socially; hence, it isn't arbitrary: these are real genetic categories, and the expectation would have been (and, previously, a common claim was that) "conventional" race /wouldn't/ map to genetics in this way. Compare the prediction for how well an actually arbitrary grouping would be sliced along genetic joints (e.g., "people who like lettuce" vs. "people who like spinach", or something, barring some SNP that turns out to mediate this by itself or whatever—you could probably eventually get okay at slotting participants into the correct category, but 99% would be surprising).
Cluster analysis supports this as well—the only arbitrary portion being how many clusters you choose, which many commonly misunderstand as somehow a relevant consideration—and it's also just what you'd expect when eyeballing the geographical population barriers (& hence structures) of the world (if something , like a mountain range or ocean, is in between two populations in different environments that thus don't do much mixing for X millennia, one would expect to end up with two genetically-distinct groups).
Is black, not the race Black, but the color black, a natural kind? If yes, why not the race? If not, how is Scott confused is he treats Black and black as scientific concepts and not natural kinds?
Black the color is the absence of reflected light, and basically every culture has words to distinguish black from white. As you go up in the number of colors, the percentage of cultures with distinct words for them goes down.
In terms of ancestral race, African vs non-African is one of the biggest divides, since all non-Africans are descended from a relatively small group of (presumably) east Africans who then appeared to have mixed with Neandertals in the Middle East before splitting again into west & east branches (with the east branch mixing with Denisovans). But supposedly even within Africa there are splits that go back even further between the majority of Africans vs Khoi-San or pygmies.
A complication is that certain Oceanians (such as the aptly named "Melanesians" as well as Australian Aborigenes) have been called "black", because they have dark skin. They aren't any more closely related to Africans than any other non-African, in fact their Denisovan ancestry makes them LESS related to Africans than Europeans are.
The point is that red, as distinguished from orange, will have many edge cases, and the dividing line between them will appear arbitrary. From this, it appears that either there is no Platonic ideal/natural kind that is “redness”, or there are infinitely many; either way as humans we rely on our concept of redness, somewhat arbitrarily defined. Yet there is a fact of the matter that apples are red, and bananas are not.
Similarly, the division of humans into races will be somewhat arbitrarily defined, but there is a fact of the matter that LeBron is Black and Messi is not, even if Black is not a natural kind.
You hear that all the time, but what are the implications?
For example, on the 2010 Census, Barack Obama counted as black and only black because that's what he chose to self-identify as (according to a White House press release). Of course, he had a white mother.
If you don't count as Barack Obama as black, would that make the white-black IQ gap smaller?
No.
We've got the DNA technology now to measure racial admixture to 3 decimal places. That's now been done with two databases of around ten thousand young people each for which we also have their IQ scores: the national ABCD database and the Philadelphia Neurodevelopment database. It turns out that the more white ancestry a self-identified African American has, the higher his IQ on average. The effect is not huge but it's definitely there.
In the US, the rule for being black for affirmative action purposes seems to be that you must have at least one parent who self-identified as a member of the black community and was socially recognized as a member of the black community.
So, you can't claim to deserve affirmative action just because one of your ancestors 1024 ancestors ten generations ago was black.
That actually works surprisingly well. We have strikingly few disputes over who is black for affirmative action purposes.
One issue would be if your parent was part black but decided to pass as white. Can you reclaim blackness? But, ever since the introduction of affirmative action in 1969, not that many people who could justify a claim to being black have chosen to self-identify as white. State and society now provide benefits to identifying as black, so most people who can reasonably claim to belong to the legally privileged race.
The rules for claiming American Indian ancestry are more specific for individual tribes and more vague for the whole race.
For being Hispanic, having one Hispanic grandparent seems to work, but several judges have felt that being 1/8th Hispanic was ridiculous.
I don't think there are genetic differences between races in any *meaningful* or *persistent* sense, only in a technical and temporary sense. Gene alleles aren't locked to races, but to individuals, and through combinations of intermarriage and geographical isolation over time, alleles that are common in individuals in one group can transfer into and become prevalent in another group, and over long periods of time racial groupings at one time can dissolve and resort into completely different racial groupings at another time (and in fact, by investigating ancient human DNA we have proof that this has in fact happened).
I think those alleles have persisted for a LONG time. You're right that intermarriage will result in recombination, but we're still far from panmixia (Brazil is probably the place where socially constructed race has diverged most form genetic ancestry, but most of the world isn't Brazil).
I'm not just talking about what will happen, but what has already happened. I highly recommend the book *Who We Are and How We Got Here* by David Reich. To quote the summary from wikipedia, "almost all human populations are mixtures resulting from multiple population migrations and gene flow. "
Yes, modern day populations are the results of even more ancient populations mixing. If you go back far enough it wouldn't make sense to talk of people in terms we use for modern populations. This doesn't change the fact that modern populations are distinct from each other.
Yeah, but you're talking about a process that takes centuries at minimum, if not thousands of years, and many of these large-scale migration+admixture events were heavily co-extensive with genocide (the Bantu expansion and Indo-European invasions, for example.)
I don't see how that really resolves the anxiety of anyone concerned with present-day race relations.
Why do people of African descent have dark skin? I always assumed it was a genetic thing, but if there aren't meaningful genetic differences between races, it must be something else.
Now I feel stupid for having spent all that time reading the comments.
Why?
Presumably because he could've saved time by just reading the best comments in this highlight post.
I, on the other hand, am going to add 3 points to my personal IQ estimate for wisely having chosen to skip them.
If we know there are 30 point differences between pre and post industrialization within the same societies shouldn't it be pretty self evident we see 30 point gaps between countries?
Are you referring to the pre- and post-agriculture confusion Scott talks about here?
"Reich had said that pre-agriculture Europeans were '2-3 standard deviations' below moderns. I had interpreted that as IQ deviations of 15 points, making them genetic IQ 55-70, which would have been pretty crazy. [Lyman] Stone tells me he actually meant PGS deviations, each of which was about 3-4 IQ points, so he’s claiming that pre-agriculture Europeans had genetic IQ of 90"
I'm skeptical of that summary of the finding. Any selection pressures that impacted the genes used to compose a PGS score probably impacted the frequency of a bunch of other genes for intelligence we haven't identified yet.
(This is why PGS tracks with observed group-level phenotypic IQ across racial/ethnic/religious lines so well, even though it only directly accounts for ~10% of the variance.)
Fair enough, but the "30-point differences" is still based on a misunderstanding of the point that was made (even if that point was wrong). Or does it come from somewhere else?
No I'm referring to the 30 point flynn effect over the past 100 years for European and east Asian countires.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0191886911001437
OK. I wasn't aware that worked out to a flat 30 points.
In fact, I doubt that it does represent a flat 30-point industrialization bonus for all societies, because societies are presumably starting from different baselines on all the factors that may contribute to the Flynn effect (poverty, mal-/nutrition, education, environmental toxins, etc.) So it really gets to the heart of the topic: Yes, pretty much everyone agrees that there's a very significant environmental contribution, but we don't know how big it is, or how it is distributed, among or within societies. It's a bit facile to say it is self-evidently 30 points.
(And as for MA_browsing's skepticism, it is interesting, but still not particularly relevant to my reply when I misunderstood your comment, and even less relevant to your original comment.)
I was generalizing a bit too much, sorry for that. The initial Flynn effect was the re-meaning of IQ scores because they increased by roughly 3 points per decade in the United States. The strength of gains vary according to country, intelligence domains, and the investigated time span. Some areas like sub-Saharan Africa have shown low or no gains while, countries like South Korea and Japan have had periods of 7.7 point per decade gains with 35+ point gains overall.
http://www.iapsych.com/iqmr/fe/LinkedDocuments/nijenhuis2011ip_FE_Korea.pdf
If my reading of the Flynn effect is correct, this suggests pre-agricultural Europeans had an IQ about in line with Americans in the 1980s? Seems to undermine basically any suggestion in my mind that this means anything whatsoever.
This speaks specifically to genetic IQ, whereas my understanding of the Flynn effect is that it is best understood as a raising of the mean largely due to environmental changes that raise the lower part of the distribution in the US (through better education, nutrition, less poverty, etc.) up into the 80s. Also the 3-point pr decade probably can’t easily be generalized to all other periods and places. It would be astounding if genetic IQ increased by something like 3 points (or even 3%) every decade – especially ever since the agricultural revolution.
Does genetic IQ make sense as a concept? Is this not just a renaming of g? I would guess the explanation would be what they'd score if they were brought up in the existing American system, but why is the educational system of the US privileged as the "normal" education system? It seems impossible to determine what the objective measure would be because everything is a mixture between genetic and educational components. Maybe the US has terrible education and very strong genetic advantage? Maybe the opposite.
In principle even pure g-factor can be lowered by environmental factors, like malnutrition or cyanide poisoning or viral infections of the nervous system and so on.
Flynn Effect gains vary a great deal depending on the test-type you look at, and have probably co-occurred with genotypic decline.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0160289622000241
The Flynn effect doesn't represent a true intelligence gain because it isn't measure invariant. AFAIK there's no reliable way to norm test results over time so it's not really meaningful to say that modern Americans are 30 points smarter than 19th century Americans. Informally it seems pretty obvious that that can't be true because if the average IQ a century ago was 70 then we never could have modernized.
That only holds if IQ is actually normally distributed; if in the past there were more prevalent environmental limitations to most people's IQ but the distribution were more heavy-tailed, we'd still have enough smart people to modernize society.
(Yes, I know IQ is normally distributed by definition; just pretend I said some sort of "effective IQ").
This doesn't mean that your overall statement is incorrect, though.
I am inclined to believe the IQ test results are primarily a product of human adaptability at early ages. That is, if you grow up in a literate culture with lots of emphasis on the kinds of thought present in solving pen-and-paper puzzles, you will be much more capable of understanding them, and much less capable of understanding the things that you would understand were you brought up as an illiterate hunter-gatherer. Not explaining myself very well, but a friend told me about a study suggesting that literacy restructures our brain by overwriting a portion of it that would otherwise be used for recognizing faces. Assuming something like this is right, I would imagine it extends to the sorts of concepts involved in any puzzles, and so I probably wouldn't expect an illiterate hunter-gatherer of average intelligence to be capable of understanding anything he was shown on pen and paper, regardless of whether it involved words or not, to the same level as a literate person with a high school diploma.
What explains the variance among literate people with a high school diploma?
While I agree the original statement is too strong, IQ test could measure something closer to intelligence in literate cultures and fail to measure that in illiterate cultures, through the process he said above. Especially considering IQ test already require normalization to work correctly, even within literate societies.
It doesn't seem to work that way, though: even on e.g. purely visual or mechanical tasks, the rank over doesn't reverse.
By the same token even intelligent people from literate societies often appear to hunter gatherers to be childlike in their inability to acquire basic observational and tracking skills so the „overwriting“ theory makes sense to me.
Do you have links that go into more detail on this?
I bet no—or, at least, I would be surprised if there were any substance to this claim; sounds like Did You Know? & Just World pontificating, t'me.
Most stories I've read involving contact between Bushmen and Westerners involves a very different dynamic.
There are.anecdotes.along those ones in Diaonds Guns, Germs.And Steel, and Evertetts book on the Pirahã.
Some of the best hunters in the world are westerners who have just spent more time hunting than the rest of us. It's probably not anything to do about "overwriting." You can learn hunting skills even as a fully developed and literate adult.
I would strongly expect that all of those individuals were also taken hunting at a young age, or at the very least participated in types of play that used adjacent skills.
"Overwriting" might not be quite the right word, since it implies replacing skills that already existed, but it's certainly true that early development devotes more or less "space" for skills based on their usage, sometimes in in areas (evolutionarily) "intended" for other skills. (Of course, neuroplasticity doesn't entirely go away with age either, it just gets less effective)
Why wouldn't you just expect that hunting is a skill like any other?
I expect that hunting is like anything else -- if you devote a lot of effort to learning about it and practicing it, even starting as an adult, then you can become very good at it -- if not among the best in the world, then at least as good as the average tribesman.
Right, but *like any other skill*, the people who are the best in the world usually started practicing when they were young. Like I said, neuroplasticity is just less for adults, and at the top of the bell curve you usually have people with every advantage. And starting will usually give you a greater effect for less effort. (Plus in this specific case, 'dads taking their son hunting' is practically a stock story, so it's not like it's uncommon.)
OK, but now we're less in "overwriting neurons" territory and into "normal skill acquisition" territory.
Best hunters in the world with what tool package and education? Would these hunters really be comparable to the skillset developed by societies with a hunter-gatherer cultural package?
You may be referring to The Weirdest People in the World By Joseph Henrich.
Yes, Henrich mentions that early on in the book. He claimed that literacy re-purposed the ability to process faces.
Unfortunately the claim is based on studies by Dehaene with very small Ns (~10) and interpretations of fMRI images (which are controversial).
There is a paper by Huettig, F., & Mishra, 2014, that concludes:
"Dehaene and colleagues (2010) have suggested that face perception abilities will suffer as individuals become literate because orthographic representations ‘invade’ the ventral visual system and interfere with the enlargement of faces and houses into the surrounding cortex.
There is no solid experimental evidence from behavioral studies to support such claims. Huettig et al. (in preparation) compared complete illiterates and literates from the same village and the same community of Indian society on the recognition of the emotions of the standardized Ekman (Ekman & Friesen, 1975) faces. There was no hint of a difference between the two groups. The Ekman faces are sometimes criticized for being culture-specific (i.e., Western), and thus, perhaps these results have to be interpreted with some caution. Orihuela, Carreiras, and Dunabeita (2013) have also investigated whether illiterates and literates differ in face perception.
These authors found in fact the opposite effect, illiterates made more errors than literates in a face recognition task of varying degrees of difficulty. Thus, as in the case of memory research, literacy may improve face perception rather than being detrimental."
Thanks for that. I bought the book cos I was interested in the repurposing but then was disappointed to find that he just skipped over it.
I offer my own n=1 observation: I am pretty bad with faces (not terrible, but noticeably worse than most other people) and I learned to read very young.
An ordinary 21st century Westerner with a TV can easily recognise thousands of faces, more faces than an average hunter-gatherer will ever encounter in their whole lives. If literacy has invaded the facial-recognition part of our brain then what are we supposed to have lost?
The hunter gatherer will have learnt thousands of plants and animals, more than an ordinary 21st century Westerner will ever encounter in their whole lives.
Evolution gave us that capability and it wasn't so we could recognize Z-list celebs!
> The hunter gatherer will have learnt thousands of plants and animals
This sounds unlikely. Can you back it up?
I was echoing Melvin's comment - the numbers aren't important. But hunter-gathering is memory/information intensive: you need to remember which trees produce edible fruit or nuts, where they grow, what time of year they produce, how to collect and how to prepare them to remove toxins - multiply this by all the other things you need to eat over the different seasons.
What explains the variance between groups on IQ test proxies that don't involve "pen-&-paper reasoning"?
According to Aporia, the claim that Lynn described himself as a “scientific racist” is taken out of context. He said, “If we are talking about people who believe there are genetic differences between the races, then I am definitely a scientific racist.” I can’t speak for the other claims about his beliefs or who he was affiliated with, however.
https://www.aporiamagazine.com/p/the-dissident-psychologist?utm_source=publication-search
I don’t think there’s any other definition of scientific racist.
Disagree. I don’t think the science about race differences can justify racism, which that term implies.
I’m assuming he meant genetic differences *in intelligence* between the races, but I guess it’s unfair to attribute that broader context to this one quote
Even if it was it's still not racist. You're making a category error in conflating empirical claims with normative ones. If races differ in IQ for genetic reasons then they do. That's a scientific question that has an objective answer. It doesn't make anyone racist to have a good-faith opinion about objective reality.
In fact it's very dangerous to tie anti-racist views to arguments like this. What would you do if it became the indisputable scientific consensus that IQ is 90% genetic and definitely differs between races? Would you then be compelled to describe yourself (and everyone else) as a scientific racist?
I’m just describing how the concept is used; not commenting on its normative valence. For 95% of people, if you tell them you think Whites are genetically smarter than Blacks, they will call you racist.
Fair enough, but this idea needs to change.
Another critique I put down below:
“Okay, but you shouldn’t use that definition. Like I would refuse to use the word “Quran” to mean “the true word of Allah” even if societal developments lead it to be commonly defined that way because it’s unhelpful for many reasons. It’s better to use a different word without the assumption of “true” within the definition.”
Has no one shared the link yet? Ok then, I will. Required reading by Scott on the topic. https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/06/21/against-murderism/
I don't know if it's 95%, but you're pretty much right. But probably because they are assuming (incorrectly) that there is no good evidence, and (possibly with some justification depending on their social context) that people who say it don't like other races, otherwise they would respect the taboo and not investigate the topic, and/or just keep their mouths shut.
A non-trivial percent will also say stupid incoherent things like "racism = prejudice + power" and only whites (all whites, everywhere, even poor homeless ones, because they "participate in and benefit from whiteness" or something), so if a Korean, for example, says, "god I hate f***ing n***ers, and I intend to discriminate against them", that's not racist. People have all sorts of stupid and incoherent beliefs.
As Scott argues, people switch between different definitions without realizing it, but the only one that really makes sense, and also the one that people ultimately fall back on in practice is the definition from motives (being motivated by ill-will toward a particular race(s)).
+1 - you can acknowledge differences and still treat people without prejudice and not make categorical judgements about them. The term racism includes discrimination based on race.
How are you defining 'racism', then?
I don’t have a perfect definition of racism. I just know that it can’t be that because scientific differences between races doesn’t justify cruelty, disrespect, lack of rights, etc. towards other races.
The word's meaning has swollen quite a bit beyond that limited definition, though. Almost all the people who fought to abolish slavery in the 19th century would be considered 'scientific racists' by modern standards.
Okay, but you shouldn’t use that definition. Like I would refuse to use the word “Quran” to mean “the true word of Allah” even if societal developments lead it to be commonly defined that way because it’s unhelpful for many reasons. It’s better to use a different word without the assumption of “true” within the definition.
The way I learned it at least is that racism was trying to allocate resources based on racial differences. Just positing a difference between/among races isn't enough.
So if I say "Koreans and Nigerians are different", that's not racist according to the definition I learned in college. Even if I say "Koreans and Nigerians are physiologically and biologically distinguishable", that's not racist. But if I say "Koreans and Nigerians are different, and therefore I won't let one group into my store", that's racism.
Once you tie some kind of resource allocation to being a member of a particular race, that's where you run into trouble.
From what I can see on the Wikipedia article, it mirrors what I learned in college. Wikipedia defines scientific racism as "is the pseudoscientific belief that the human species is divided into biologically distinct taxa called "races", AND that empirical evidence exists to support or justify racial discrimination, racial inferiority, or racial superiority" (emphasis mine). Without that second part, I don't think you have racism.
I think that many people (especially today) drop the second clause when attributing racism, and think that any highlighting of (especially biological) differences counts as racism.
Why? In general I think that there *had* been a decoupling of these beliefs, at least in terms of people willing to discus so publicly. If you imagine the quadrant, nearly all public discussion got sorted into the groups of (Differences + Discrimination) or (No Differences + No discrimination). This state of affairs lasted for roughly the long second half of the 20th Century. Highlighting major genetic or biological differences between groups of people that may gesture towards "race" being real was increasingly the domain of people who happened to also be racist or at least vaguely gestured in that direction.
It wasn't purely coincidental that this original sorting from 4 groups to 2 happened. The descriptive claim isn't purely independent of the normative claim. Consider racial justice or feminist campaigns of recent years. The ~roughly mainstream scientific (and Scott's?) view "racial differences are real but we can treat people equally" view is now more popular and acceptable, mostly due to the sheer amount of genetic evidence coming out every day. But it also saw the decoupling on the other side, people who thought (innate) racial differences weren't real BUT you should treat people differently.
You might correctly identify differences between groups, deny the biological explanation, and then attribute said differences to solely environmental factors. If you then think "and that means we should act differently to if all these groups had similar outcomes" (e.g. DEI) then it means your descriptive claim has influenced your normative claim. But if you instead think that "wait, no, a lot of these differences are actually due to *biology* or *genetics* (and those cluster in groups etc. etc.)" then you can see how the maintenance of "differences in people should entail differential treatment" (the same macro view as before!) becomes racist.
If the four views then are "90s liberal race blind", "technocentrist enlightened genetics liberal", "DEI advocate" and "dictionary definition racist", which of those today could get you labelled as a racist?
For the last 25 or 30 years, I've been publicly articulating the moderate, reasonable, empirically-backed position that the racial differences due to nature and nurture that we see when watching sports on TV are also seen in other aspects of society. (I realize that most of Scott's readers don't watch sportsball, but a whole lot of people really care about it.)
I've pointed out that the obviousness of racial differences in sports performance (e.g., a Kenyan is about a zillion times more likely to win the 3000m Steeplechase gold medal at the 2028 Los Angeles Olympics than a Bangladeshi) has not led to the genocide of the (literally) weaker or stronger races.
Instead, people really like sports, which leads them to having heroes of different races. White football fans really admire Lamar Jackson (a black QB) and black football fans really admire Josh Allen (a white QB). They might be modestly prejudiced in favor of the football hero of their own race, but ... that's okay.
When people ask me when I became aware of racial differences, I point to an October 13, 1968 college football game I attended at the Los Angeles Coliseum featuring two All-American running backs. #13 Oregon State's star was the huge Steve Enyart, who used his upper body strength to devastate #1 USC's defensive line in the first half. But in the second half, USC's superstar tailback used his lower body speed to overwhelm Oregon State. His name was O.J. Simpson.
But these obvious racial differences in sports didn't cause American elites to conclude that, well, sure, nature and/or nurture lead to racial differences. Instead, they concluded that anybody daring to mention the obvious was an evil enemy of society.
I've oversimplified, obviously there are "acceptable" ways of treating people differently due to their differences that don't get you labelled as a racist, high performance sports being one of them. Nozick chose Wilt Chamberlain for his famous thought experiment after all. If you interrogate this too deeply or take it toward logical conclusions (reward elite talent, but don't discriminate at the bottom end..?) it falls apart of course. So you could self deceive that you sit in one quadrant and not in the other.
Anyway this is more for public consumption, I don't need to explain this to you Steve. I do note that your own views (and self!) have become more mainstream as of late and this is largely due to that 2 quadrant equilibrium breaking down and the millions of sequenced human genomes we now have.
If you truly think that widespread acceptance of the idea that black people are less intelligent than whites would not lead to a massively more negative perception against black people from other races, you're deceiving yourself. Most people assume that white people are not that good at basketball, which doesn't do white basketball players any favors, but doesn't move the needle that much because basketball is a tiny part of life. If people assumed that black people had the skill level for jobs requiring intelligence as white people have at basketball, it would lead to a significant increase in bias against black people.
Professional athletes are outliers. Already I am seeing (unprompted by anything I choose to engage with) pretty racist memes on Instagram Reels and (especially) twitter based on the idea that black people are less intelligent. Maybe that theory is correct, but if it becomes widely accepted things will be much, much worse for a lot of people, and I don't believe you are being honest when you suggest otherwise.
That suggests a useful academic study: how much are white athletes hurt by stereotype threat and the like? Over a 20 year stretch that recently ended, no white players were regular starters at cornerback. How come? Well, blacks tend to be better cornerbacks? But 100% black with no whites or Samoans? Really? Probably something else like the old corporate saying: no executive ever got fired for buying IMB. Similarly, no coach ever got fired for starting a black cornerback, but many could imagine getting fired for starting a white cornerback and he gives up a touchdown.
So, here's the question that could be studied: how much different would be a world where nobody perceived race at all? How many more whites would have started at cornerback?
My guess is: a few. Not really all that many. Blacks really are much better at cornerback on average than nonblacks. But I could be wrong. Perhaps racial stereotyping kept dozens of whites and Samoans from playing cornerback.
Doesn't anybody want to know this?
Especially because it seems obviously useful to estimating the size of the harm you dread as people like Scott make it more socially respectable to be unignorant about race and IQ.
An interesting aspect of the widespread ignorance of how huge is the intelligence gap between Asians and blacks is that college admission affirmative action is highly unpopular with the public, even though affirmative action is the only way to have more than negligible black representation at our most elite academic institutions. I've often joked that when you become president of Harvard, they give you the key to unlock the Harvard President's Book of Secrets, which turns out to be a dog-eared copy of "The Bell Curve."
The point isn’t that what you’re saying isn’t true, that point is that for most people who have heard of Steve Sailer, Steve Sailer is the textbook example of a scientific racist. So I think we have a good working definition of scientific racism, which is just, whatever Steve Sailer says. I say this unironically with no disrespect; I also consider myself a scientific racist.
Some people consider me a textbook example of a public-spirited realist.
Kenyans, Ethiopians and Ugandans who do well in middle and long distance running grow up and train at altitude where the air is thin. The body adjusts to the conditions and becomes more efficient at handling oxygen. Uganda recently build a training centre at altitude open to athletes from all over the world. The distance running genes haven't been discovered (yet).
Kenyans and Ethiopians also do pretty well in distance running when they move to the US and compete at low altitude, or when their parents do.
For example, in the all-time great 1500 meter men's final in 2024 Olympics, the bronze metal was won by Yared Nuguse, an Ethiopian-American who was born in Arlington, Virginia and went to high school in Louisville.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yared_Nuguse
I looked up the top 160 high school cross country runners in America about 15 or 20 years ago, and 9% of them were of East African ancestry.
Setting aside the obvious problems (that AA programs are textbook-racist under the above definition), I think it's going to be very difficult, in practice, to acknowledge the 'biologically distinct taxa' element without leading to the 'discrimination/hierarchy' element.
"We should always judge individuals on their individual merits" all sounds very fine and noble, but you can't evaluate individual merit unless you have perfect information about individuals, which is never *perfectly* true and often largely missing, especially from people who arrive on rubber dinghys or chuck out their passports on arrival. And in any case even carefully-screened individuals are bound to their background groups through loyalty to kinship networks and regression-to-the-mean effects, which we can't reliably predict at an individual level. It's not irrational or unjustified to fill in the blanks here with probabilistic information derived from an individual's background group, which is definitionally 'racist'.
The case for this can be made with or without reference to genetic factors, of course, but the case certainly gets stronger when genetics enters the picture.
This doesn't make, e.g, assimilation of some non-zero number of foreign migrants necessarily *impossible*, but to make it work you're talking about a multi-generational process with necessarily higher standards of scrutiny than would be required of native-born citizens to compensate for any background risk-factors, which... again, is definitionally 'racist'.
>obvious problems (that AA programs are textbook-racist under the above definition)
Why is that an obvious problem? Can it not be the case that they are textbook-racist and people still find them worthwhile?
Okay, but then there's such a thing as 'good racism'.
What changed during the Great Awokening versus the previous several decades is that expressions of racial animus against whites in the mainstream media became not just acceptable but fashionable.
I favor doing as much as is practical to get better information about individuals: e.g., colleges should go back to requiring the SAT or ACT.
But I am against adjusting scores for reasons of racial regression toward the mean. For example, sure, a black applicant who gets a perfect 1600 on the SAT the one time he takes it would be likely to average a little lower than an Asian applicant who got a 1600 the one time he takes it if they both took it nine more times. But let's not penalize him for that statistical pattern. He got a 1600. Good for him.
On the other hand, say your mother's car breaks down in the middle of a dark block and her phone isn't charged, so she has to decide in which direction to walk. Hanging out on one corner are a half dozen Asian-American teens and hanging out on the other corner are a half dozen African-American teens. I think she can be forgiven in this case for doing some racial profiling and walking toward the Asian-Americans.
I was referring to regression-to-the-mean (maybe a misnomer, I think Galton used the term 'regression-towards-mediocrity') as a phenomenon seen among the children of exceptional parents- e.g, the children of very short people tend to be taller, on average, and the same can be seen at both ends of the bell curve for any complex human trait, due to a combination of non-additive genetic and non-systematic environmental factors.
Notably, as you probably know, different racial groups regress toward different means for IQ (up until the advent of GWAS, this was one of the more powerful pieces of evidence for hereditarianism.) This is relevant to long-term migration policy, but also in the broader sense to any attempt at integrating exceptional individuals into meritocratic societies or institutions.
For example, the children of wealthy black parents do about as well on the SAT as white kids who grow up in trailer parks. And... I have to imagine this could strongly motivate parents of colour to push for the... shall we say, relaxation of meritocratic standards, when it comes to their child? Potentially true for any parent, of course, but more likely to be true the larger the regression effect. And this has to be a factor when considering whether to include such parents in the social milieu that decide standards of merit to begin with.
Looking back, I think that the definition I was using was from Omi and Winant. They added an "essentialism" component.
So that rescues most AA programs.
By way of example, let's say that the Nazis put all the Jews in camps and stole their property. You could, without being racist, say that the Jews should be compensated - not because of some essentialist characteristic of being Jewish, but because of their historical experience suffering in Nazi concentration camps.
As for the rest of it, you don't have perfect information to treat individuals the same. I don't run a background check on the people I meet, though I'm sure it would reveal lots of information about whom to trust and whom to shun. Instead, I just treat people like they're all normal, unless and until I get individualized data saying that someone is, say, a convicted felon, or something.
People make decisions based on imperfect information every day. Unfortunately, race is something that's really hard to not see!
I'm not sure I buy that AA programs can be justified on any non-essentialist / contingent grounds: the bar to clear for receiving benefits is "be black", right, not any feature equivalent to "experienced XYZ event or type of event"—or, in other words, if it were that being black was any sort of proxy, there'd be a better way to get at the thing we /really/ care about without need for a proxy.
(e.g., a middle-class black woman from a recent-immigrant family applies for some benefit under AA: well, she & her ancestors experienced no slavery, or none the U.S. was complicit in; she isn't poorer than other applicants; she isn't disadvantaged in any way relative to other applicants; etc... she's just black, and that's the sole criterion.)
Unless I'm wrong and AA in practice requires that one prove U.S. slave ancestry or other white American oppression against you & yours in particular, or something...? I think most proponents are against anything like this, though, even something like "just give help to poor people as a whole"—some have come up with various ways to try to justify making it race-based, but (if I may do some armchair psychologizing) I'd bet you $5 that nah, they see it in essentialist terms in their hearts of hearts. So to speak.
I understand your point, but the problem with allocating AA on the basis of, e.g, poverty is that poverty just doesn't predict social mobility across racial backgrounds, so it wouldn't have the required 'compensatory' effect.
So a couple points. First, I don't think your characterization of the facts is accurate. In California, where I live, the reparations task force said that reparations should be "based on lineage, determined by an individual being a Black descendant of a chattel enslaved person or a descendant of a free Black person living in the United States prior to the end of the 19th Century".
Second, with that fact in mind, I don't think the facts matter all that much for this discussion. I know literally zero people who would support (or oppose) a lineage-based reparation program but who would change their mind for just a race-based reparation program.
So I'll agree that most people who support AA/reparations are racist, albeit in a direction that runs contrary to the bulk of American history. I think that's why the people in charge of, say, California's reparations task force took pains to separate race from lineage, to avoid charges of racism.
Of course, that got them zero converts, because normal people aren't living based on what Omi and Winant were writing about. They're not trying to conform their lives to some ideology - they have vibes and make decisions based on those vibes.
But people who care about the ideology do, in fact, have answers to these questions. I just don't think they represent too many real people.
I agree that people injured through either malice or incompetence deserve compensation, but I also don't think you can just measure per-capita GDP disparities and use this to infer injury, so I want to know what level of compensation is meant to be sufficient. And I've written elsewhere why I don't think affirmative-action programs are an appropriate form of compensation under any circumstances.
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/how-to-stop-worrying-and-learn-to/comment/86414230
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/highlights-from-the-comments-on-lynn/comment/86697337
If you mean 'treat the same' in the sense of 'receive the same nominal courtesies during casual conversation', I mean... sure, politeness doesn't cost much. But the risk/reward evaluation can become quite different if you're deciding who to rent an apartment to, or approve for a bank loan, or hire for a job. Once upon a time, you could, perhaps, rely on credentialling institutions or background checks or just asking face-to-face questions to fill in the blanks, but the left has increasingly made it *illegal* to seek out such individuating information, and has actively corrupted every credentialing institution to reduce the exposure of embarrassing facts.
Racism is like democracy or love--it has dozens of different meanings used in different contexts, and often even the speaker isn't aware when they switch from one meaning to another.
To be useful, we really need to distinguish the moral / social stuff from the factual claims. You can't learn anything about the truth or falsehood of a factual claim by its moral or political or social implications. It would be bad if blacks' lower average IQ in the US were due to genetic factors that couldn't be changed, just as it would be bad if burning the cheapest available fuels messed up the climate. But if you let "it would be bad if this were true" influence your evaluation of "is this claim true," you are sabotaging your brain.
Why would it be "bad"? It's simply information that can be used to one's advantage. Information is power, it has no moral weight to it.
It would imply bad things about the future of the country, it would be unfortunate, we would prefer it to be otherwise.
I would suggest accepting reality as it is, not what you want it to be. Especially when you aren't capable of changing it.
Truth has moral weight.
...Yes, that is your opinion. I personally think it's very silly to ascribe moral character to arbitrary pieces of information, but you do you.
I can't seem to find the option to 'like' posts, but +1.
I agree with that, although in some circumstances, it makes sense to circle back and check with your moral / social stuff before publishing the information. Privacy is an obvious example - if my social security number gets released, I'm mad about people obtaining truthful information about me.
Regardless, the bar to clear for "This is true, but for moral / social reasons it must be suppressed" is really, really, really high. I can understand people who want to suppress the study of racial intelligence, but I'm pretty skeptical of the whole endeavor (leaving aside the question of whether it does more harm than good, or whatever).
In that case it still would be bad to publish a false social security number, because that can impact a random person with that number.
A problem is that once you start lying about the truth, you have to expand that lie to deal with hard questions. And suddenly all kinds of useful science becomes off limits.
And you need other explanations for certain things, and in practice this often seems to boil down to racist conspiracy theories that are remarkable similar to those wielded against Jews with rather nasty consequences. So is it really preferable to have people believe those conspiracy theories?
Well said. Funny how no one ever makes this kind of argument to, say, deny the Holocaust or something. "But if you believe than that, then you must think humans are terrible and there's no hope for the future!" Well...maybe? Not necessarily, but regardless... "Therefore it didn't happen" Non sequitur! "and anyone who says it did is an evil person who needs to be shunned and banished from polite company."
Oh, so you claim there's "evidence" that the Holocaust was real? Why are you interested in that? Do you LIKE the idea of millions of Jews being gassed? Gross! What a vile and disgusting person you are!
What about something like "people of X race are stupid, but we shouldn't give people more or less resources just because they're stupid"?
And a somewhat related question: if you think people of X race are stupid, and that they should get disability benefits as a result, are you racist against X or for X?
You kinda have to pick your battles. By way of example, I'm a Dodgers fan. I think that Giants fans are awful and stupid. All right-thinking people agree. But the kind of discrimination that Giants fans have historically endured is pretty small potatoes compared to racial, religious, or gender-based discrimination. If we could stop allocating resources based on racial, religious or gender lines, we'd be doing really, really well. I'd be extremely happy to live in a country where race was just as likely to predict your future financial success as what baseball team you root for.
To your second question, I was remembering the definition of racism used by Omi and Winant and I think they snuck in some requirement of essentialism. So if you believe that people of X race are essentially stupid, and therefore they should get more resources, yeah, that's racist.
Of course, I don't see many historical examples where that ever happened, so I don't think there's any cause for alarm. If in the future racist people start being far too kind and friendly and caring to other races, I'm sure we can figure out a solution.
The question is, of course, /why/ race predicts future financial status. If, hypothetically, the answer were to be "because some races are better at deferring gratification and have more smarts, on average", ought we still engage in redistribution along purely racial lines?
I think we pretty much always end up better not using race as a proxy, regardless—you have to engage in various unintuitive contortions to rescue such a policy over "just help whoever appears to need it most" without worrying about the racial balance of the recipients—but, considering how many people are only too glad to engage in such contortions, and how academia looks upon those who find for the wrong side on questions like "is it mostly differential intellectual ability, or mostly evil whitie being all oppressive and shit?", I'm not hopeful for the future here.
I don't know that we do engage in redistribution along purely racial lines. But if we did - and we just let the chips fall where they may - I'm pretty sure we'd stop caring about the people in Ohio and let unlimited numbers of Chinese people immigrate here.
Strangely, the people who care the most about race and intelligence never seem content to let the people of West Virginia sink into deserved oblivion as the more intelligent Japanese and Chinese people move in next door and buy up everything.
Quite the contrary, they want to ban Chinese investment, like TikTok, rather than just acquiescing in the face of the Asians' superior brain power.
Would you be okay with getting rid of all race/nationality/citizenship distinctions and letting individual merit be the only factor considered for, say, housing, employment, voting rights, etc.?
If you think IQ differences are leading to differences in outcome that should be compensated for by welfare or something, how does race even come into that? You would want to do that by individuals, not by races--a black doctor or engineer doesn't need any compensation for having a low IQ, whereas a white or Asian janitor may need that compensation.
You can have *some* level of social safety net, but, but how do you propose to allocate equal resources to all people regardless of their own productivity? This was tried a couple times and didn't work out well.
Even the 'safety net' approach still requires a reasonable number of net tax payers, by the way, which in turn depends on the typical genetic endowments of your country's citizens.
Most redistribution works out great - human beings depend on redistribution to survive to their teenage years.
Literally no newborn human can support themselves. Not a single one. They depend on net contributions from someone - usually their parents. This strategy differs from almost every other animal or plant ever encountered. Yet human beings are the ones who've taken over the world.
I think it's totally fine to take care of our fellow human beings - after all, every single one of us was taken care of at some point in our lives.
There are many examples of social species that exhibit reciprocal aid and essentially all mammals and birds provide parental care, so this is hardly a unique human innovation.
Do you think that social animals are immune to Darwinism?
Nobody sensible is saying people of race X are stupid. If you can't distinguish "the mean IQ of people of race X is lower than the mean IQ of people of race Y" from "people of race X are stupid," you're basically doomed to talk nonsense in this whole conversation. Seriously, a vast amount of nonsense on this topic comes from people who can't keep the difference between the mean and the distribution straight in their heads.
Who doesn't think there are genetic differences between the races?
The counter claim is usually that "race" is an arbitrary way of grouping people that doesn't map well onto real populations. You see the conceptual confusion Scott has in these articles in his treating of "black" as a natural kind.
It maps well enough to self-identified race in the US to have over 99% accuracy:
https://med.stanford.edu/news/all-news/2005/01/racial-groupings-match-genetic-profiles-stanford-study-finds.html
I think you may be reading too much into it. That study looked at four broad racial categories and discovered that they could tell which of the participants was in what category by their genes— the participants being people who were pre-selected to be among those four categories with none of the participants "mixed-race".
African-Americans are a mixed race population, as are mestizo Hispanics. Discrete notions of race do break down if you don't have concepts like "mestizo" or "mulatto" (much less "quadroon"), which are more popular in Spanish than English-speaking settler colonies, but it's still a fact that there are genetic differences that multiple services can now use to portion out your ancestry.
I don't think that obviates the point, which is that the population breaks down into separate races as well genetically as it does socially; hence, it isn't arbitrary: these are real genetic categories, and the expectation would have been (and, previously, a common claim was that) "conventional" race /wouldn't/ map to genetics in this way. Compare the prediction for how well an actually arbitrary grouping would be sliced along genetic joints (e.g., "people who like lettuce" vs. "people who like spinach", or something, barring some SNP that turns out to mediate this by itself or whatever—you could probably eventually get okay at slotting participants into the correct category, but 99% would be surprising).
Cluster analysis supports this as well—the only arbitrary portion being how many clusters you choose, which many commonly misunderstand as somehow a relevant consideration—and it's also just what you'd expect when eyeballing the geographical population barriers (& hence structures) of the world (if something , like a mountain range or ocean, is in between two populations in different environments that thus don't do much mixing for X millennia, one would expect to end up with two genetically-distinct groups).
Is black, not the race Black, but the color black, a natural kind? If yes, why not the race? If not, how is Scott confused is he treats Black and black as scientific concepts and not natural kinds?
Black the color is the absence of reflected light, and basically every culture has words to distinguish black from white. As you go up in the number of colors, the percentage of cultures with distinct words for them goes down.
In terms of ancestral race, African vs non-African is one of the biggest divides, since all non-Africans are descended from a relatively small group of (presumably) east Africans who then appeared to have mixed with Neandertals in the Middle East before splitting again into west & east branches (with the east branch mixing with Denisovans). But supposedly even within Africa there are splits that go back even further between the majority of Africans vs Khoi-San or pygmies.
A complication is that certain Oceanians (such as the aptly named "Melanesians" as well as Australian Aborigenes) have been called "black", because they have dark skin. They aren't any more closely related to Africans than any other non-African, in fact their Denisovan ancestry makes them LESS related to Africans than Europeans are.
The color black was a bad example lol.
The point is that red, as distinguished from orange, will have many edge cases, and the dividing line between them will appear arbitrary. From this, it appears that either there is no Platonic ideal/natural kind that is “redness”, or there are infinitely many; either way as humans we rely on our concept of redness, somewhat arbitrarily defined. Yet there is a fact of the matter that apples are red, and bananas are not.
Similarly, the division of humans into races will be somewhat arbitrarily defined, but there is a fact of the matter that LeBron is Black and Messi is not, even if Black is not a natural kind.
You hear that all the time, but what are the implications?
For example, on the 2010 Census, Barack Obama counted as black and only black because that's what he chose to self-identify as (according to a White House press release). Of course, he had a white mother.
If you don't count as Barack Obama as black, would that make the white-black IQ gap smaller?
No.
We've got the DNA technology now to measure racial admixture to 3 decimal places. That's now been done with two databases of around ten thousand young people each for which we also have their IQ scores: the national ABCD database and the Philadelphia Neurodevelopment database. It turns out that the more white ancestry a self-identified African American has, the higher his IQ on average. The effect is not huge but it's definitely there.
Is the 'One Drop Rule' no longer used? What's the percentage/threshold required to be black? (3 decimal places).
In the US, the rule for being black for affirmative action purposes seems to be that you must have at least one parent who self-identified as a member of the black community and was socially recognized as a member of the black community.
So, you can't claim to deserve affirmative action just because one of your ancestors 1024 ancestors ten generations ago was black.
That actually works surprisingly well. We have strikingly few disputes over who is black for affirmative action purposes.
One issue would be if your parent was part black but decided to pass as white. Can you reclaim blackness? But, ever since the introduction of affirmative action in 1969, not that many people who could justify a claim to being black have chosen to self-identify as white. State and society now provide benefits to identifying as black, so most people who can reasonably claim to belong to the legally privileged race.
The rules for claiming American Indian ancestry are more specific for individual tribes and more vague for the whole race.
For being Hispanic, having one Hispanic grandparent seems to work, but several judges have felt that being 1/8th Hispanic was ridiculous.
I don't think there are genetic differences between races in any *meaningful* or *persistent* sense, only in a technical and temporary sense. Gene alleles aren't locked to races, but to individuals, and through combinations of intermarriage and geographical isolation over time, alleles that are common in individuals in one group can transfer into and become prevalent in another group, and over long periods of time racial groupings at one time can dissolve and resort into completely different racial groupings at another time (and in fact, by investigating ancient human DNA we have proof that this has in fact happened).
I think those alleles have persisted for a LONG time. You're right that intermarriage will result in recombination, but we're still far from panmixia (Brazil is probably the place where socially constructed race has diverged most form genetic ancestry, but most of the world isn't Brazil).
I'm not just talking about what will happen, but what has already happened. I highly recommend the book *Who We Are and How We Got Here* by David Reich. To quote the summary from wikipedia, "almost all human populations are mixtures resulting from multiple population migrations and gene flow. "
Yes, modern day populations are the results of even more ancient populations mixing. If you go back far enough it wouldn't make sense to talk of people in terms we use for modern populations. This doesn't change the fact that modern populations are distinct from each other.
So, uh, how can 23andMe work?
People do, in fact, vary significantly.
Yeah, but you're talking about a process that takes centuries at minimum, if not thousands of years, and many of these large-scale migration+admixture events were heavily co-extensive with genocide (the Bantu expansion and Indo-European invasions, for example.)
I don't see how that really resolves the anxiety of anyone concerned with present-day race relations.
Why do people of African descent have dark skin? I always assumed it was a genetic thing, but if there aren't meaningful genetic differences between races, it must be something else.