Thread by @PaoloShirasi

[THREAD]

A VERY BASIC INTRODUCTION TO THE HEREDITARIAN POSITION ON RACE AND IQ.

PART 18: Rebutting the Environmentalist Claim That 'Race Is Purely a Social Construct'

In the last several threads, I've described the hereditarian explanation for racial differences in IQ.

Let's turn now to the rebuttal points made by those favoring an environmental hypothesis for the race IQ gaps.

I'll then rebut those rebuttals.

The main argument made by opponents of a hereditarian (genes-based) explanation for race IQ differences is a foundational one: They assert that because race is “purely a social construct” with “no biological basis,” these gaps are “meaningless.”

This is partially correct –- race is a social construct, but it also has a biological basis.

Both of these can simultaneously be true.

Calling race *purely* a social construct, though, is scientifically indefensible.

David Reich, a leading scientist in population genetics (an area of science well positioned to investigate the biological basis of race), says: “Differences in genetic ancestry that happen to correlate to many of today’s racial constructs are real.”

I suspect Reich would probably agree more or less with the renowned evolutionary psychologist Steven Pinker that “every geneticist knows that the 'race doesn't exist' dogma is a convenient PC 1/4-truth.”

Although it's true that “genetic ancestry tests from companies like 23andMe function only because race exists and can be identified at a genetic level,” it's also true that “racial categories have vague, poorly defined boundaries and can overlap.”

There is no fixed or firmly-set number of racial groups, and “sometimes it will make sense to classify people into... continental races,” while “at other times it will be beneficial to classify [them] into smaller, more local groups at the regional level.”

Yes, there may perhaps be more precise and biologically meaningful genetic ancestry classifications that can be made for humans than continental race — for example, “Korean” is more precise than “Asian” — but the concept of “race” retains scientific value.

When IQ testing is conducted on smaller genetic clusters like “Korean,” do gaps in average group IQ disappear? Of course not — testing performed on these and other such groups shows the same type of gaps that testing of “races” does.

Editorial in journal Genome Biology: “[A] decade or more of population genetics research has documented genetic... differentiation among the races... Indeed, it is difficult to conceive of a definition of 'biological' that does not lead to racial differentiation.”

It adds that the continental definition of race “need[s] some modification, because it is clear that migrations have blurred the strict continental boundaries... [ethnic groups] retain a great deal of genetic variation...”

Jerry Coyne. professor eneritus at the University of Chicago, has written that the question “How many races exist?” is “pretty much unanswerable... one could delimit 'Caucasians' as a race, but within that group there are genetically different [subgroups],...”

“Even if most human variation occurs within rather than between races, there are statistical differences between human groups that can, when combined, be used to delimit them... One could call Eurasians a race, or one could call Bedouins a race...”

“... It all depends on how finely you want to divide things up,... and this is precisely what is expected if populations have evolutionary ancestry, which produces clusters of groups nested within each other.”

Finally, Coyne writes: “The 'sociological constructs' thing is simply political correctness imposed on biological reality. In view of the morphological and genetic differences among human populations, how can such differences be 'constructs'?”

The 1000 Genomes Project identified five genetically-distinct races (“super populations”) containing between all of them 26 smaller “populations.” The races were African, European, East Asian, South Asian, and Admixed American.

Another study concluded: “It is inaccurate to state that race is biologically meaningless... Recent research in genetics demonstrates that certain racial, and also ethnic categories have a biological basis in statistically discernible clusters of alleles.”

Many recent and semi-recent population genetics and molecular biology studies support a biological basis for the traditional racial categories. You'll see links to many of these studies at the end of this thread.

Even when politically-motivated scientific declarations, such as this one by American Society of Human Genetics, are constructed and omit information to achieve a particular spin, look very carefully at the language because there's only so far you can go with the spin.

Of course “racial” divisions aren't clear bright lines (no one is saying that), but even this political statement (look at its motivation) has to concede there are “clear observable correlations between variation in the human genome and how individuals identify by race.”

The ASHG statement acknowledges that racial categories have a relationship to genetic differences. But it contends that there are no absolute boundaries between groups and that modern genetics allow for more finely-grained categories — hereditarians do not dispute this.

Genetic ancestry and race can be fairly easily scientifically-identified by a variety of different methods –- DNA testing being the most accurate and well-known, already used on a consumer-basis by millions of people around the world.

To demonstrate just how easy it is to identify races, there's this astonishing fact: It only takes 100 random SNPs (the most common type of genetic variation among people) to classify individuals by race with 97% accuracy.

A multivariate analysis of only 326 loci will increase accuracy, raising the correspondence between genetic clusters and race/ethnicity to 99.86%.

Once you look at 1000s of loci, individuals from different populations are NEVER more closely related than individuals from the same population. (This being the case, how can anyone possibly defend on scientific grounds a position arguing that race is purely a social construct?)

In one study involving analysis of 650,000 genetic variants there was perfect correspondence between self-reported ancestral origins and the global population groups established in the Human Genome Diversity Project.

Other ways to identify or accurately predict the race of an individual include brain imaging techniques, machine learning and AI tools, anthropological forensics, and numerous physical differences (including bone density and a 1 SD difference in white blood cell count).

In one recent study, researchers predicted individuals' race using MRI brain scanning, and found that “genetic ancestry is encoded in the functional connectivity pattern of the brain at rest."

Another study found that the 3-D geometry of cortical surface is “highly predictive of individuals’ genetic ancestry in West Africa, Europe, East Asia, and America, even though their genetic background has been shaped by multiple waves of migratory and admixture events.”

Unsurprisingly, what scientists feel obliged by PC to say about the genetics of “race” to the general public differs from what they publish in their research, and in no area is this more true than in medical genetics research using the same GWAS/PRS models used in IQ research.

An example is this article that bemoans the fact that GWAS/PRS medical research is being impeded because researchers are using mostly European-ancestry genetic data, which is “inaccurate” for other (especially African-ancestry) groups.

nature.com/articles/s4158…

If race were purely a social construct without a biological basis, then why would obtaining more genetic data from non-European groups be necessary in order to conduct “accurate” and “useful” medical research for non-European groups?

The NY Times tells us that race is just a social construct with no biological reality when reporting on IQ gaps, but then informs us in its medical reporting that race and ethnicity markers are important to medical research, like they do here...

nytimes.com/2019/05/14/wel…

... and here.

nytimes.com/2002/07/30/sci…

The importance of taking into account race and ethnicity in pharmacological research is a growing area of discussion and research. There is a sense that medical researchers are getting tired of having to tow the PC line about there being “only one race — the human race.”

“Pharmacogenetic research in the past few decades has uncovered significant differences among racial and ethnic groups in the metabolism, clinical effectiveness, and side-effect profiles of many clinically important drugs. These differences must be taken into account.”

And why are researchers at Cambridge University concerned that that bioweapons may be developed to attack specific racial and ethnic groups based on their DNA if race has no biological basis?

telegraph.co.uk/science/2019/0…

Activist scientists sometimes try to dismiss studies that involve racial classifications because they often rely upon the individuals being studied being able to accurately self-identify their race, which they criticize as scientifically inaccurate.

But they're wrong. Racial self-identification has been found to be extremely accurate in studies — up to 99.86% accurate.

Very few people don't know what race they are.

Since the race of an individual can be identified, for example, in blood testing, brain imaging and scanning, and in analysis of a skeleton through forensic anthropological methods, among other ways, it's preposterous to think race as lacking any biological basis.

Ask yourself this: If the concept of “race” were to disappear, would that change the fact that those genetic clusters even acknowledged by blank slatists — let's take the example again of “Pygmies” and “Korean” — have different average IQs? Answer: It wouldn't.

Ultimately the debate about group IQ gaps and genes doesn't hinge upon the concept of “race” because there may be other more biologically meaningful and precise taxonomic classifications — for example, Pygmy and Korean, or Maori and Finn — than race.

How did the idea that race has no biological meaning gain so much currency?

The answer couldn't be simpler: The dominance (and occasional bullying) of the “anti-racist” left in academia.

The idea that “race is purely a social construct” with no actual biological significance gained momentum, in particular, after a 1972 article ("The Apportionment of Human Diversity") was published by the Marxist evolutionary biologist Richard Lewontin.

The central argument of that article (now commonly referred to as “Lewontin's Fallacy”) has been discredited by geneticist AWF Edwards and others, but, as is often the case in academia, the imperative to maintain political virtue trumped the weight of scientific evidence.

But no political bullying or platitudinous virtue signaling can hide the plain and scientifically indisputable fact that taxonomic classifications of humans — whether by race or ethnicity or genetic/geographic (or some other genetic) cluster — vary in average IQ.

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