What’s Wrong with the World

Hmmmmm, I'm curious about this line:

Q. How can Hispanics raise their IQs?
A. The most likely way is by raising their children better. And the most likely way for them to raise their children better is by having fewer children so they can concentrate more parental energy and resources per child. The one group that is raising test scores is the Asians, and we have Amy Chua’s testimony on how they do it: Tiger Mothering. Asians have low fertility and they concentrate enormous effort on their small number of kids. Maybe if Latinos try having fewer children, in a generation a Yale Law professor named Amy Chavez will write Battle Hymn of the Jaguar Mother.

I'm not sure what I think of all of this. I mean, does Richwine has an answer? What does he think should be done? If I were a teacher, which I very well might end up being, and I had latinos in my class I certainly wouldn't use "latinos have historically lower IQs" as an excuse for bad grades.

I suppose I'd do what I would do if any of my students weren't doing well - tell them to work harder. I do think work ethic does wonders to make up for lower IQs. And as Richwine pointed out, IQs can improve, and a lot of it is as much nurture as it is nature.

Very interesting.

...Also, this talk about best and worst genetics reminds me suspiciously of eugenics.

Sorry if I appear to be spamming. I'm trying to work my way through it. I found Richwine's own comments far more enlightening than the FAQ, which I found muddled. Specifically this quote:

My proposal is based on the same principle they use (pick skilled immigrants), but it offers a much better chance for disadvantaged people to be selected.

I'm getting that his idea is that, since latinos statistically tend to have lower IQs, IQ testing should be a bigger factor in immigration to make sure we have intelligent immigrants entering the country. The problem I see is that the way this is stated makes it very easy for an unfair, blanket stigma to be applied to latinos. On the other hand, what he says make sense. I'm honestly not sure what to think.

I know Americans who home school who have tons of children, large families, and whose children are doing well academically and obviously have high IQs. They are "raised better." I'm deeply suspicious of a connection between "raise your children better" and "have fewer children." That seems to me quite shallow. Certainly there are ways to have large numbers of children and be neglectful of them, but there are also ways to have small numbers of children, or even just one child, and be neglectful. The idea that prima facie large families equal poor parenting is questionable, not to mention distasteful.

What Lydia said.

A well-disciplined and lively household of many children is the very perfection, in my mind, of "raise your children better." Ceteris paribus, every child blessed with another older sibling to model hard work and moral rectitude, as well another younger sibling to whom he or she must model hard work and moral rectitude, will perforce accrue the benefits precisely of being raised better.

That aside, this horror of the possibility that intelligence tracks to some discernible degree along extended lines of familial genetics, is characteristic of the neglected fact that liberal society wants nothing to do with science it finds distasteful.

Ow, touchy field. It seems to me that there are a lot of issues tangled together. Here are my thoughts:

1) People are different. Sometimes entire populations or ethnic groups differ from the average in a certain direction. (With their own outliers, obviously.) Pygmies, for instance, are unusually short. It's reasonable to believe that some groups could be unusually stupid, but this is a heresy to the modern liberal, who retains some idea of "all men are created equal" sans Creator, resulting in the nonsensical assertion "all men are equal" and a need to find scapegoats for inequality, because, to said liberal, inequality cannot be a thing that happens of its own.

2) Virtue. There is no particular virtue to being intelligent any more than there is virtue to being tall, having limbs, or lacking limbs, being rich, or being poor.

3) Causes. Some people are born without limbs. Some people lose limbs in accidents. Some are born without one limb and lose another in an accident. Some people are fortunate enough to experience neither. The same goes for intelligence, and for that matter, wealth.

4) Behavior. I am obliged to treat a person with respect regardless of whether they are short, stupid, limbless, impoverished, or none of the above, as they are made in the image of God. Similarly, a government is obliged to grant a person the full protection of the law.

5) Policy. I am not obliged, however, to allow any person entrance to my home regardless of their personal qualities. Nor is a country obliged to admit every would-be immigrant regardless of that immigrant's qualities. (Should a country attempt to make this into law, I expect it would collapse in short order.)

6) Eugenics and dysgenics. Much like "racist", I think these words inflame more than they illuminate, particularly "eugenics" being a small step above crying "Hitler", whereupon the discussion tends to take a turn for the worse. I assert that one can condemn an invasion of Poland on its own demerits, and a similar principle could hold in this matter. Discarding the broad category labels, I could for instance say that being selective about one's spouse is a good thing, while having many children and murdering the weakest is a bad thing.

Lydia (and Paul),

Aside from the fact that I think Steve Sailer was being a bit cheeky in his answer regarding raising Hispanic IQ, I must admit that there is a slightly distasteful (to use Lydia's word) strain of eugenics that runs through a lot of his writing. At least in the U.S., a large problem related to the underclass is not the number of children a particular Black or Hispanic woman might have, but whether or not she has those children in the context of a stable marriage with the father at home helping her raise those children.

MarcAnthony,

I think that for any teacher, all you can do is to do your best for the children in your class. Those children may or may not be gifted academically, but you and society shouldn't fool yourself with respect to "hard work". There is only so much hard work can do before it hits the real cognitive limits that do exist for any particular child -- that's why I'm a big believer in academic tracking. In other words, 'Lake Wobegon' is a myth and some kids are actually below average when it comes to their academic abilities. Dealing with this reality and what to do with these kids is something we need to confront realistically as a society -- both political parties would rather bury their head in the sand than confront the notion that certain groups of kids have low IQs or just aren't going to do well in college or with advanced academics. For further reading on this subject, I'd recommend the excellent blogger "education realist": http://educationrealist.wordpress.com/ As a teacher who deals with diverse IQ populations himself, but one who believes the science behind IQ, he has some very interesting things to say about these topics and he obviously has a passion for teaching.

There is only so much hard work can do before it hits the real cognitive limits that do exist for any particular child

Of course, I agree with this. There are students from my High School who are going to Princeton right now, a school I had no delusions of ever making it into. Pretty much all of my friends are smarter than I am, and believe me when I say that I'm being realistic right now, not humble. They had 3.6 to 3.7 GPAs to my 3.2.

I also know more about current events than the majority of them, can make a better case against abortion than virtually all of them, and knew more about theology than one of my theology teachers - and he was not a stupid man. I just have a lot of interest in the subject. I can probably teach a HS Theology class right now, and I don't say this lightly.

When you have an intellectually gifted but lazy student and a less intelligent but diligent, hard working student it can get you a long way. It's the classic nature/nurture debate. Now obviously if two students worked equally as hard but one had a higher IQ than yes, he'd probably end up getting better grades.

Would he be more successful in life? That depends on a lot of things. I think hard work is underrated. Many times students will rise to the expectations set for them - I have a book written by a teacher who taught a virtually all black class. They were in 6th grade, and he taught them eighth grade algebra. By the end of the semester every single one of them had passed the class, and their standardized tests reflected their level of knowledge.

Now, were they all equal? Of course not. The less intelligent students had lower grades. But they all passed because the teacher kept tabs on the students and made sure extra help was given to the students that were struggling.

IQ is a good measure of intelligence, but it isn't perfect. If a student says he wants to be a lawyer but has lower IQ scores, I'm not going to tell him he can't be a lawyer. I'm going to tell him that at the level he's performing at now he's going to have to work extremely hard to be a lawyer.

The movie "Rudy" is one of my favorites. It's a true story about an Irish Catholic boy who dreams of playing football for Notre Dame, despite being barely over 5 feet tall and having a learning disorder. A Priest tells him he's probably not meant for college, and Rudy goes off to work in his family's factory, hoping to raise enough money to pay for school anyway. When his best friend dies it becomes a catalyst for him to go to community college and work to get good enough grades to transfer into Notre Dame. After extensive tutoring he finally makes it into ND, where he practices like crazy and due to sheer determination makes it onto the team's practice squad. The movie ends with him being allowed to get in one play in a real game, where he sacks the QB.

Something in me just find it hard to tell people that they're probably not going to be as successful due to their IQs. Obviously this is true to an extent, but determination and hard work really can overcome a lot.

With all of this said, I DO actually think that some students aren't well-suited to college and I think the decline in labor jobs is a tragedy. An excellent look at a lot of these phenomena is the documentary "Waiting for Superman". Also, I find the blog you linked to very interesting, by the way. I'll be bookmarking it.

That aside, this horror of the possibility that intelligence tracks to some discernible degree along extended lines of familial genetics, is characteristic of the neglected fact that liberal society wants nothing to do with science it finds distasteful.

We haven't covered this subject ad nauseum? In other contexts you all scoff at complex statistical studies as being pseudo-science (i.e. global warming), yet when it comes to racial IQ they can do no wrong. So let's examine the science again. Of course there is the Flynn effect which shows that population IQ is not static and involves multiple factors like nutrition, disease exposure, and intellectual stimuli and feedback in the environment. Those first two factors can easily produce epigenetic effects in a population, meaning it is temporarily heritable and can take a couple of generations for the effect to be sorted out. There is also the purely nurture effect of "Tiger Mothering" which is another way of saying high family expectations, monitoring, and discipline. Strangely enough, Sailer appears to endorse this primarily nurture/environment view according to MarcAnthony's first comment, which makes his nature/genetic quote in the original post nonsense.

Jeff, I haven't been following the Richwine story, but from the quick investigation I have been able to do just today, it looks like a truly shameful treatment of a young scholar who does not sound even particularly extreme in his views.

What is interesting about Americans' approach to immigration is that many Americans, including too many Christians, don't want to apply _any_ standards. They just seem to want open borders! Speaking for myself, I'd rather have another migrant crop worker who will be peaceable, law-abiding, and hard working than another Dzohkar Tsarnaev, even if the latter has a higher IQ than the former. But it doesn't seem to me to be entirely out-to-lunch to apply more than one filter. At this point, however, we will be lucky if _any_ remotely reasonable filters can be applied, including reasonable attempts to keep out criminals and people who want to kill large numbers of Americans, or who are going to be "radicalized" so that they _come_ to want to kill large numbers of Americans. Americans simply are not willing to start talking seriously about restricting immigration. Heck, for that matter, Americans aren't even willing to start talking seriously about controlling our border and preventing *still more* illegal immigration.

So in a sense Richwine's suggestion seems to concern only a non-existent hypothetical future state of the country where such matters can even be considered much less intelligently applied. But the same could be said for many proposals and scenarios I take seriously, so that isn't in itself a damning criticism.

I would be more interested in the question as to whether Richwine is involved with any groups actually pushing population control and-or eugenics. There was a rather striking debate that you may have heard about recently concerning Human Life Review. They published an article showing some really disturbing connections between anti-immigration groups and population control groups. I gather it caused quite a stir.

As someone who _both_ would be regarded as hawkish on immigration and also as passionate, even merciless, against population control, this came as something of an unpleasant surprise. What you say about Sailor fits into it as well.

However, Richwine comes across in his article for National Review as enough of a moderate that I tend to doubt that this is the case.

In any event, he is beyond all doubt right about the anti-intellectual and utterly political and debased nature of the attacks on him. And it sounds as though he's being charitable to Heritage.

Step 2,

You ask, "We haven't covered this subject ad nauseum?" Apparently not, because you then proceed to write a bunch of nonsense about the subject. I won't tolerate it.

Of course there are both nature/nurture components to intelligence -- no one on my side who argues that there is a genetic component to intelligence would argue otherwise. It is the heretic-hunters on the left who insist on ruling out any genetic component or any notion of group differences, whatever their source.

As for large-scale statistical studies -- it depends on what you are trying to measure understand. I think most IQ researchers would agree with anyone who said IQ tests DO NOT perfectly measure intelligence. But they do correlate with all sorts of measures of success in modern, industrial society -- so they must be measuring something of significance.

Finally, a lot of thought and work has gone into understanding what exactly the Flynn Effect (FE) really means. You should familarize yourself with some of the literature first before invoking the FE as some sort of talisman to scare me off:

http://menghusblog.wordpress.com/2013/05/03/using-item-response-theory-to-assess-the-flynn-effect-in-the-national-longitudinal-study-of-youth-79-children-and-young-adults-data/

Lydia,

I'm glad you mentioned that story in Human Life Review. Mario Lopez should be ashamed of himself. Yes, it is true that many of the founders of anti-immigration groups had bad ideas about population control, abortion, etc. Who cares? The question is what do they stand for today. Mark Krikorian and the Center for Immigration Studies no longer shares those views and if anything Krikorian himself is a bit of a squish when it comes to the question of Hispanic immigration (Richwine was infamously on a panel criticizing a book by Krikorian because the book refused to acknowledge that today's Hispanic immigrants are not like yesterday's European waves of immigrants).

At times Sailer and some anti-immigrant types will talk about our "population problem". But really get the sense that what bothers Steve more than a dysgenic population is OUR unwillingness to deal with social disfunction. He sees the welfare state supporting out-of-wedlock births, he sees public parks being trashed by Hispanic immigrants, he sees rising crime and disfunctional school (not to mention a relatively bankrupt State that can't afford all those Central American laborers) and he is frustrated. I share his frustration but I'm also very, very careful to always acknowledge the basic humanity and Christian brotherhood between me and my Mexican, Honduran, etc. neighbors. I won't stop loving them despite my frustration and despite the fact that I don't think they should get to jump the citizenship line by virtue of the fact that they live close to our border.

So far as I can recall, Step2, you and I have never covered this topic at any length. Nor can I recall any writing of mine that undifferentiatedly "scoffed at complex statistical studies" or labeled them all "pseudo-science." My general attack on science has been its practitioners' temptation toward a particular smuggling or counterfeiting operation which presents dubious philosophy as empirical science, or, what is the reverse of the same scam, presents hard empirical fact as dubious philosophy.

Is there a lot of mendacious scientistic reductionism peddled by enthusiasts of IQ? Hell yes there is. This charlatanry they share with countless secularists and evolutionists of every political persuasion, and I consider myself an implacable foe of it.

Nevertheless, we still live in a republic; I hardly resent coalition and consensus as a political form of self-rule. Thus when a bill like this Gang of Eight usurpation comes forward, I'll take any vote against it I can get, materialist, evolutionist, liberal or what have you.

On overpopulation, in my judgment it an almost comical antiquity. It's a relic from the energumens of another age. It's as dusty and dingy as yesteryear's fashion. In truth the whole world of mankind has chosen against reproduction. Except for a few isolated holdouts, every successive generation from this one forward, for the foreseeable future, will be more and more oppressed every moment, by the burdens of declining population. We are all become as Gondor under the late Stewards:

Childless lords sat in aged halls musing on heraldry or in high, cold towers asking questions of the stars. And so the people of Gondor fell into ruin.

What do the evolutionists make of peoples made so sterile by their own artifices that they leave off reproducing themselves? For Poland (to use but one example from Jon Last's excellent What to Expect When No One's Expecting) to avoid losing half her population in short order, every living Polish girl must average four children over her reproductive otherwise. Right now they average less than one and a half. That is how precipitous is the decline. History does not frequently record societies that flourish as their people vanish from the earth. This dreary puzzle of rejection or negation -- the burden of procreation rests too heavily on our weary souls -- is of course concentrated among populations of the most affluence and highest IQ.

So I have little patience with anyone (mostly liberals, but on occasion a conservative) so backward as to think our "population problem" is too-fast growth.

I will present myself as counterexample that hard work is "overrated" in the academic sphere, but to reach the pinnacle of academic accomplishment, one needs both intellect and hard work, and possibly some social and political skills to secure resources and attain favorable positions. Many people with autism find college challenging because they are disorganized and cannot effectively manage available time to complete assignments and study, but I was afflicted with those problems too and managed to graduate without special accommodations and assistance (except the financial support of my parents).

I don't know the value of hard work, but I got a 3.2 GPA in college with a degree in Cell and Molecular Biology; I tend to trivialize the degree and do not expect nor want people to be impressed about that credential, but it is braggadocio when I stated that I attained it without much studying. I do not consider myself successful or exceptional, but many people could not "accomplish" that without hard work, and my fellow molecular biology students were a self-selected sample who managed to be admitted (although the admission criteria is rather "low" compared to more selective universities), perceived themselves to have to possess the aptitude to succeed in a science-based curriculum (many of the weaker students are probably communications and psychology majors), had enough interest in biology to work hard, and managed to make it through remediation if they required it (it was not a top-tier university). As for myself, I was driven to learn the information and principles of molecular biology by a compulsive, fervid curiosity and became fairly knowledgeable partly through independent reading as opposed to formal instruction, but sometimes my curiosity in molecular biology waned when I became interested in more "liberal arts" topics and I could not focus on my academic responsibilities. I frequently failed to complete homework and other assignments, study inadequately (most students spend nights during finals studying at the university library while I studied at most for about 2 hours per class), occupied my time in the library reading about history, economics, finance, politics, and philosophy, and scientific journals on topics, as opposed to researching anything pertinent to my coursework. Also, I watched a lot of Pokémon episodes, primarily the original series and the Johto episodes; I actually was more invested in Pokémon at college as a young adult than in the late 90s as a preteen when Pokémon was at its zenith as I didn't watch many episodes because I tend to be disinterested in popular fads. I still haven't grown out of it, and I am not slightly embarrassed about my affinity towards Pokémon media.

I was probably in the 5th to 10th percentile of work ethic at my college in the pool of students who managed to make it past remediation, which I did not need, and other sources of attrition. I really don't regret anything I did not do (as a sin of omission), and I did not confess this sloth during my first Confession or any other subsequent Confessions since I would not be truly be contrite nor do I think it was entirely a conscious "choice" since my actions (or lack of them) are partially driven by my personality. I actually look fondly and wistfully about watching the Pokémon episodes and do not regard it as a "waste of time" or a pointless activity with high opportunity costs (not studying to attain higher academic marks). I don't think what I did, getting a 3.2 with minimal effort in a scientific field, would be possible if I only had an intellectual caliber of 1000 (Math + Verbal) or 1200, since I had to rely on intellect to make up the deficit in assignments on exams.

In college, I was an errant, restless sheep without a shepherd due to my secular and materialist worldview and lack of fellowship. Was it God's will that I floundered in college so that I may find Him later?

I hadn't matured while I was in college, and my personality reflects that of Misty's: excitable and passionate, and can be easily angered and anxious, but we usually quickly revert to our normal mood when the stressor is removed; compassionate, sympathetic, nurturing, and motherly, usually concerned about the welfare of others; insecure about my own abilities, just like Misty was concerned about being in the shadow of her sisters; possessing a relative high degree of masculinity, as Misty is a tomboy while I have masculine intellectual interests; and fairly being fairly intelligent and perceptive. But like her, I do not exhibit much adult maturity, generally having less "adult" responsibility than other adult women in my cohort and we lack the interest and ability to use Machiavellian deceit and blandishment to advance in adult economic, social, and political hierarchies; to me, one dimension of "freedom" is to be relatively free from influence of those hierarchies. While Misty lives in a relatively simple world, I lack the ability to succeed in our real, complex world since my autism hampers me from meeting the various social demands of secular hierarchical institutions nor do I want to conform. Still I am functional and friendly around other people and respect their interests, and can engage in dialogues on "mature" topics such as politics, theology and science, although the quality of such discourse is not heavily dependent on maturity of the participants but the level of abstraction and depth of the discussion, and sound "mature", as maturity is often correlated to intellectual development.

Is there a lot of mendacious scientistic reductionism peddled by enthusiasts of IQ? Hell yes there is. This charlatanry they share with countless secularists and evolutionists of every political persuasion, and I consider myself an implacable foe of it.

I don't know if this discussion would awaken the HBDer within me.

Jeff,

Concerning the Human Life Review controversy. I'm going to admit up front that I've done only _some_ investigation into it. There may well be aspects I've overlooked, and I say that quite sincerely. At a minimum, Mario Lopez in his original article was sloppy in not making any attempt to distinguish the current from the previous administrators of those anti-immigration organizations and the present people (like Krikorian) from the founders.

However, several things remain that do trouble me a bit:

First, and perhaps easiest to deal with, is just this: We pro-lifers generally consider it fair game to point out the odious views of Margaret Sanger and to question where Planned Parenthood stands in relation to those views. Why is it not similarly legitimate to point out the odious views of John Tanton, who founded all of these organizations, including apparently CIS? And look, I know that the 1970's seem like the Dark Ages, but we're not talking 500 years ago! We're talking within many of our lifetimes. Is it really asking too much to say, "Hey, your organization was founded within the last fifty years by a person with really odious population control views, and apparently those views were part of the _motive_ for his founding your organization. Can you give us definite evidence that your organization no longer represents those views?"

Second of all, NumbersUSA and FAIR have articles on their web sites from *recent* years touting the population control and environmentalist nonsense as part of their anti-immigration argument, and in one of the other articles I read on the controversy I noticed a *current* representative of one of those two organizations (I think NumbersUSA) blandly saying that, hey, some of their arguments will appeal to the left and some to the right. Okay, so what this amounts to is that that organization really doesn't care if it's appealing to members of the left by using population control arguments! Whatever works, man. And there's really nothing there that shows any concern that, you know, population control arguments are not only empirically discredited but also morally odious. No intent to distance themselves.

Now, let's treat Krikorian at CIS somewhat differently, since everyone has come to his defense saying what a dedicated pro-lifer he is and so forth. Fine, but he still should be at least a little bothered by the fact that his org was founded within living memory by John Tanton. It wouldn't hurt to say something to distance himself from Tanton and to admit the badness of his views. Moreover, look at this 1993 article, which is _still up_ on the CIS web site.

http://www.cis.org/CensusBureauProjections-400MillionAmericans

Sure, it's from 1993. (Was Krikorian with CIS then? In what capacity? How did this article come to be published?) But it's really bad. It literally touts RU486 as "Hope for the Future" as part of keeping down America's population. Ummmmm. And there's no disclaimer anywhere. Not even any fine print that says, "This article does not reflect the current views and aims of CIS" or anything like that.

Do you think just _maybe_ if CIS had published as recently as 1993 an article that asserted that deliberate racial genocide (for example) was part of our "hope for the future," CIS might manage to put up a disclaimer on the page even if they still thought they needed to keep it online to keep their archives complete? I kind of think so.

What all of this amounts to is what appears to me a troubling dismissal of the true badness of population control rhetoric, approaches, and argument. It just seems to me that the National Review crowd isn't treating these as disreputable _enough_.

For the record (and I have little else to say on the subject):

The belief that intelligence is effectively the only non-heritable human characteristic--such belief usually being asserted as though it has been proved in much the same way as the heliocentric solar system--is simply unbelievable on its face, and the burden of proof lies strongly on the proponents of this bizarre idea, which is driven entirely by the ideology of political liberalism and has nothing whatever to do with science. And no, high-volume indignation doesn't meet the burden of proof, nor do calls for banning research into this area for expressly-stated political reasons. The whole left-wing position on the matter is contrary to common experience, and to the weight of evidence commonly referred to as "the entire damned history of the human race."

Faced with the rare person willing to acknowledge the obvious, advocates of this counterfactual orthodoxy usually retreat to some middle-ground such as, "But environment is a factor too!" as though anyone denies that it is a factor in the extent to which an individual meets his ultimate potential, and as though this really has anything much to do with the essential question, which is whether extended kinship groups have common cognitive characteristics.

Why we should expect this one thing to be completely walled off from the variations that attend to every other characteristic of the human person, I just don't know, unless the truth is simply intolerable to contemporary liberal man. And since contemporary liberal man is so given to hysterical shrieking over so many other obvious facts of life, for entirely political reasons (e.g., men and women are different in ways that have irrevocable social significance), I find this explanation entirely sufficient to satisfy my curiosity as to motive, especially when someone resorts to the child-like argument from exception.

The bottom line is that mother nature is not a liberal and couldn't care less whether the unequal distribution of eye color, height, physical reflexes, or intelligence violates a liberal's sense of cosmic justice (though it is maybe worth remarking that the liberal is more than comfortable with the idea that "white men can't jump," and that they probably shouldn't try). Political equality as established in the West never depended (and certainly was not based upon) this simple-minded notion of substantive equality in observable traits, because our forebears had a more sophisticated and realistic view of human nature. There is a sense in which their view was more profoundly spiritual, precisely because they did not believe that something as base as the genome formed the foundation of human dignity and value.

Indeed, there is a subtle connection here to other areas of public policy in which we can see the differences in our assumptions being played out--an easy, low-hanging case being this idea that "consciousness" or cognitive complexity is the basis of a person's status as a member of the human race. Notice which side of the general right-left divide comes down where on that question, and you'll see what I mean. As a conservative, it doesn't bother me one whit that different groups of people might have different cognitive capacities, because that does not have any interesting effect on their basic humanity and their basic worth. The contemporary liberal enjoys a much more, ahem, tenuous relationship with this abstract, non-materialist idea of human value. Materialism is essential for dethroning God, but it has some rather inconvenient consequences for political equality.

The liberal's war against reality in this, as in other areas, is doomed to utter failure, though of course the liberal's political triumph may enable him to institute his Bergeron-esque policies into perpetuity.

Okay, I need to strengthen my statement in the last comment. There are _numerous_ environmentalist articles and arguments on CIS's web site, accepting all the usual environmentalist anti-human-population rhetoric, coming up to 2009! Click through Lopez's endnotes 167-173, here:

http://www.humanlifereview.com/index.php/component/content/article/68-2012-fall/205-hijacking-immigration

Most of the links still work. Some of the articles have to be found by a site search.

So far the 1993 article is the only one I've seen (but I haven't read through all the others, either) that explicitly touts anti-fertility measures. However, the articles as a whole are pretty much standard-issue environmentalism--more humans equals more "ecological footprint" equals carbon emissions equals bad. These common environmentalist positions are then applied to the immigration issue directly: If we're good little environmentalists and realize that human population growth is a bad thing, we should be anti-immigration because immigration increases the population of the U.S. It's not even a very subtle argument, and it comes up again and again and again on CIS's site.

Not only does the 1993 article _expressly_ connect this with lowering human fertility, the whole environmentalist argument accepted and pushed in all the other articles is, of course, precisely the sort of argument that environmentalists do indeed use to push the population control agenda both here and abroad. And understandably so, given their premises. I just don't see anything in what Krikorian and his defenders have said that addresses this issue head-on. In fact, Ponnuru just dismissed it.

Did Lopez exaggerate or distort the nature of CIS's current agenda? Yes, I think he did. Did he exaggerate the environmentalist commitment and the conclusion from that commitment that "human population growth = bad" on on-going display at CIS? No, I don't think he did.

Indeed, there is a subtle connection here to other areas of public policy in which we can see the differences in our assumptions being played out--an easy, low-hanging case being this idea that "consciousness" or cognitive complexity is the basis of a person's status as a member of the human race. Notice which side of the general right-left divide comes down where on that question, and you'll see what I mean. As a conservative, it doesn't bother me one whit that different groups of people might have different cognitive capacities, because that does not have any interesting effect on their basic humanity and their basic worth. The contemporary liberal enjoys a much more, ahem, tenuous relationship with this abstract, non-materialist idea of human value. Materialism is essential for dethroning God, but it has some rather inconvenient consequences for political equality.

Well said, Sage. This is the point where the astute conservative emphasizes that, on the matter of human equality as a transcendent construct, he is clearly the inheritor of the Lincolnian tradition and his liberal opponents just as clearly the inheritors of the positivist school of Calhoun and Douglas.

I endorse everything Lydia has said in her recent excellent comments. My only demurral or concurrence is that we do keep in mind that when it comes to bad legislation, a vote is a vote. I won't inquire into whether a congressman is sympathetic to "population bomb" charlatanry when he casts a vote for or against open borders laws or officials, anymore than I will inquire into whether a congressman is sympathetic to open borders when he votes for or against pro-abortion laws or officials.

I agree with you as far as votes, Paul. I gather the controversy here concerns think tanks and organizations, which is a somewhat different issue. Apparently there are some pretty tight friendships, for example, and conservative connections and co-belligerence, with some heavily, even ardently, environmentalist anti-immigration think-tanks. Especially in the case of CIS, there has been a lot of dismissal of its published and even recent environmentalism and anti-population rhetoric on the grounds that its current executive director (I believe that's his title), Krikorian, is a Catholic, a committed pro-lifer, a father, and an all-around great guy who is good friends with everybody at National Review. Or something like that. Hence, goes the argument, who in the world cares about anti-human-population papers published by his organization? That seems to me somewhat thin as an argument. After all, given that Krikorian is all that is said of him, _he_ should care!

Lydia,

While this subject is off topic, I think it is worthy of further discussion. What annoys me still about Lopez is that he is a committed open borders guy who wants Congress to pass amnesty and so was using the histoy of these think tanks as a weapon against them to further his agenda now.

That said, you are right -- CIS should not get a pass on its silly environmentalism and/or anti-population rhetoric; nor should those other organizations get a pass if they embrace bad arguments. I will do a better job in the future of calling out CIS (or Numbers USA, or FAIR) for their bad arguments when and where it is appropriate.

Sage, can you name one scientist, liberal or otherwise, who recently claimed that "intelligence is effectively the only non-heritable human characteristic" - i.e., that intelligence is not heritable? Or, more precisely, that IQ is not heritable?

Even reading the major media, we're always being told that IQ is heritable. Anyone who gets their views from the New York Times believes that IQ is heritable. Steven Jay Gould acknowledged that IQ was heritable, back in the 1990s. Same (I think) with Lewontin and Rose; at least neither has denied that any time recently (correct me if I'm wrong about that), unless you count a general critique of the concepts of genes and heritability. This "liberal man" sounds more like a straw man.

As far as your "essential question...whether extended kinship groups have common cognitive characteristics": I thought the whole issue was Hispanic immigration. Your question isn't just non-essential, it's irrelevant. Hispanics are not an extended kinship group. Neither are races, for that matter. (That idea is close to one of Steve Sailer's Big Theories of Race, that race is an extended family; he's wrong.)

The truth is bad enough; there's no need to embellish it. "Liberal man" denies any genetically-influenced difference in intelligence between Hispanic immigrants and native-born whites. Maybe "liberal man" happens to be correct, I don't know, but the point is that nobody knows.

Aaron,

Apparently you are having some trouble reading today. Sage didn't say anything about "liberal scientists" -- he indicted "political liberalism" as well as the "whole left-wing position" on this subject (the subject of IQ differences between the races -- which in case you aren't paying attention, implies the heritability of intelligence). If you really want me to pull a bunch of quotes proving this rather banal contention, I can do so, but Google is your friend.

Meanwhile, I'd be happy to get into an extended argument about the meaning of race and how Hispanics fit into the definition, but I suspect it won't be fruitful, given your rejection of Sailer's rather common-sense idea (which is, of course, backed up by genetic data).

This is one of Sage's best lines:

Materialism is essential for dethroning God, but it has some rather inconvenient consequences for political equality.

I would say anecdotally that I find liberals rather schizophrenic when it comes to whether intelligence is heritable. When they are wearing their eugenics hat and want to lecture people about not giving birth to inferior children, eugenic abortion, pre-natal testing, etc., then they definitely believe intelligence is heritable. When anyone starts making noises about _groups_, especially where that impinges upon mascot groups (including women), then the idea that either intelligence or even specific mental aptitudes might be heritable or have a strong biological component becomes anathema. In the gender area, it isn't even enough to convey something like this: "Males and females have the same mean IQ, but males tend to show more variance from the mean, which results in our having both more males at the low end of the spectrum and more male physicists." No, sirree, that's not good enough. We must all beat our breasts and engage in massive social engineering until there are just as many women as men in STEM fields. (Though no one, funnily enough, ever tries to socially engineer more women in prison to match the numbers of men.)

I see this in chess. The chess establishment, fortunately, retains its standards, but there's a huge amount of time-wasting gnashing of teeth over how we can get more women into the high levels. That there might be biological reasons for the disparity is ruled out of court.

It goes without saying that something similar applies to divisions by racial or genetic groupings. What's interesting is that it is the liberals who obsess about these groupings. After all, we wouldn't even know how Caucasians as opposed to Asians or blacks do on the SAT if they didn't insist obsessively on gathering that data so they can worry about it! And so that they can make up affirmative action programs to "correct for" it. If we could just stick (in college admissions and job hiring, for example) to a kind of idealistic American individualistic meritocracy and let the chips fall where they may, these issues wouldn't arise. So in a sense, the liberals force on the rest of us the issue of race and this heavy question of differential outcomes, but then they punish anyone who gives an answer they don't like. They should just give it a rest, already.

Jeffrey, the liberal media are with the scientists here: There's a consensus that IQ is heritable. This is not controversial. There's lots of controversy on the degree to which IQ is heritable and on the implications of its heritability, but its heritability per se is not controversial. (Of course there are some uneducated people who are wrong about it.) I did a Google search for "IQ not heritable" and clicked on the first few links, but that didn't reveal anything to change my mind.

I'd be happy to be corrected about this if I'm wrong. Anybody want to find, say, a recent news article (not opinion piece) from the New York Times or a comparable source that claims that IQ might not be heritable? I'd be surprised to see even one isolated occurrence, much less a pattern.

Even if between-population heritability did imply within-population heritability as you say (and it does not), I was just responding to what Sage wrote. Your logical implication, even if it were true, goes in the wrong direction. Sage wrote about a supposed belief that "intelligence is effectively the only non-heritable human characteristic." That is something that the liberal media, and those who get their views from the liberal media, do not say or believe.

As I said, the truth about "liberal man" is bad enough, there's no need to embellish it.

I just want to emphasize something that Lydia said:

So in a sense, the liberals force on the rest of us the issue of race and this heavy question of differential outcomes, but then they punish anyone who gives an answer they don't like.

Don't let liberals get away with claiming the categories are arbitrary when they themselves chose the categories.

Okay, how about "The liberal media says that IQ is inherited but in reality talks out of both sides of their mouth and gets offended when somebody points out that since its heritable there may in fact be racial differences involved, just like skin color".

Most liberals believe in racial and individual differences in IQ --- they just don't want to admit it.

Ah, I missed it. Lydia already made my point.

I would say anecdotally that I find liberals rather schizophrenic when it comes to whether intelligence is heritable. When they are wearing their eugenics hat and want to lecture people about not giving birth to inferior children, eugenic abortion, pre-natal testing, etc., then they definitely believe intelligence is heritable. When anyone starts making noises about _groups_, especially where that impinges upon mascot groups (including women), then the idea that either intelligence or even specific mental aptitudes might be heritable or have a strong biological component becomes anathema.

Aaron, nothing that is heritable is distributed equally between different populations--that much is obvious. I'll rest on what Jeffery S. has said in my defense (I suppose Google really isn't your friend), and the observation that you're being pedantic.

[EDIT: So maybe I won't rest on that...]

I'm reminded of the time I was told, in response to my claim that "liberals" believed that there were no serious differences between men and women that really matter, that "Liberals don't believe that! Everybody knows that's crazy!"

Well, the problem is that the two sentences don't contradict each other. Yes, even liberals know that the idea is crazy, and in their everyday lives cannot possibly live in consistent harmony with it. There are levels of belief at work here. The great mass of the people believe what the ruling ideology requires them to believe, at least whenever the question becomes relevant as a matter of practical public policy or even just public speech. For the occupants of public institutions, this is no longer optional even in principle.

Everyone in the Soviet Union knew that the official figures were insane lies, and nobody in the interwar Narkomindel had any serious confidence that the capitalist powers were literally destined to war on one another as a matter of material necessity; but the ideology required them to believe it, and so they did, and so their public policy was shaped into conformity with it, and so any opposition to it was assiduously persecuted. It is precisely the cognitive dissonance at work here, the insecurity borne of some remaining kernel of common sense, that causes such emotional and unreasoning outbursts in response to any suggestion that the liberal faith in absolute equality (understood as sameness) between groups may not actually hold true.

One particularly famous fainting spell at Harvard comes to mind, as does the insanity that exploded in the media over one commentator's remark to the effect that black skin was specially helpful in coping with heat in summer sports. That basically everybody knows this is true is almost a secondary consideration. The same fans who joke about the inability of any white man to become a respectable cornerback in the NFL will explode with racially correct indignation at the suggestion that what they know to be true really is true.

Listening to Aaron, it's as though the whole phenomenon of political correctness--which is nothing other than the institutionalized requirement to profess belief in things that everyone knows are false--did not exist. Would that it were so, but it's not.

black skin was specially helpful in coping with heat in summer sports.

Dusty Baker said that once.

http://www.nyu.edu/gsas/dept/philo/faculty/block/papers/Heritability.html

Aaron,

I just can't resist:

1) "The idea that Latinos won't assimilate because they're doomed to low IQs for generations is offensive. But so what? More important, it's wrong." - Elspeth Reeve, The Atlantic Wire, May 8, 2013;

2) "The Richwine affair is just the latest flap in a long-running dispute over the significance of IQ tests and group differences in IQ scores. It's easy enough to shut down that debate with cries of racism, but stigmatizing a point of view as morally tainted isn't the same thing as demonstrating that it's untrue. Here I want to explain why Richwine's position is intellectually as well as morally unsound." - Brink Lindsey, The Atlantic, May 15, 2013 (my, how a once great magazine has fallen!)

3) "Others defended the premise of Richwine’s thesis—that genes account for at least some of the differences in IQ scores between different ethnic groups—and deplored attacks on him as threats to freedom of speech and scientific inquiry. Journalist Andrew Sullivan says that the “effective firing” of Richwine “should immediately send up red flags about intellectual freedom.”
These are the same sorts of things said in 1994 when Harvard researchers Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray argued in The Bell Curve that programs to boost black academic performance might be futile because blacks are innately less intelligent than whites; and in 2007 when geneticist and Nobel laureate James Watson ascribed Africa’s social problems to Africans’ genetic inferiority. (Watson is also a former Harvard professor. What is it with Harvard? Could there be something in the drinking water?)
I’m torn over how to respond to research on race and intelligence. Part of me wants to scientifically rebut the IQ-related claims of Herrnstein, Murray, Watson and Richwine. For example, to my mind the single most important finding related to the debate over IQ and heredity is the dramatic rise in IQ scores over the past century. This so-called Flynn effect, which was discovered by psychologist James Flynn, undercuts claims that intelligence stems primarily from nature and not nurture.
But another part of me wonders whether research on race and intelligence—given the persistence of racism in the U.S. and elsewhere–should simply be banned. I don’t say this lightly. For the most part, I am a hard-core defender of freedom of speech and science. But research on race and intelligence—no matter what its conclusions are—seems to me to have no redeeming value.
Far from it. The claims of researchers like Murray, Herrnstein and Richwine could easily become self-fulfilling, by bolstering the confirmation bias of racists and by convincing minority children, their parents and teachers that the children are innately, immutably inferior.
Why, given all the world’s problems and needs, would someone choose to investigate this thesis? What good could come of it? Are we really going to base policies on immigration, education and other social programs on allegedly innate racial differences? Not even the Heritage Foundation advocates a return to such eugenicist policies. ...
Scientists and pundits who insist on recycling racial theories of intelligence portray themselves as courageous defenders of scientific truth. I see them not as heroes but as bullies, picking on those who are already getting a raw deal in our society." - John Horgan, scientificamerican.com, May 16, 2013

4) " If Mr Richwine's view "turns out to be correct", what we are to do is to acknowledge that the racists were right all along—that racism has, to some extent, a valid scientific basis. People are understandably a bit touchy about this possibility. However, the subject is not fraught because "the left" has loaded it with toxic racial politics. It's fraught because the scientific validation of hereditary racial inequality would imply that there's something to be said for the racist convictions that made America's brutal history of slavery, apartheid, and colonial genocide possible. That conservatives have a tendency to minimise the savage enormities of America's racist history, to dismiss even a little interest in it as "political correctness" run amok, helps explain their related tendency to see hostility to work like Mr Richwine's as unduly politicised bullying aimed at shutting down necessary rational inquiry." - Will Wilkinson, The Economist, May 14, 2013 [Will also argues, with no evidence whatsoever, that Jason's thesis is "shoddy", implying that he has some special insight into the question of racial heritability of IQ although what that insight might be the reader is left to guess at -- I really hate Will's writing].

5) “Whether you agree or disagree with the Heritage study, what their co-author believes is downright insulting and shameful,” said Ali Noorani, executive director of the National Immigration Forum, a group that has mobilized support for the bill. “Heritage has really become an outlier. The rest of the country is having a 21st-century conversation about immigration reform, and Heritage is caught in 1800. I really think their entire credibility is in question.” - NYT, May 9, 2013

6) "Jennifer Korn, executive director of the pro-immigration-reform conservative Hispanic Leadership Network, responds: “If you start with the off-base premise that Hispanic immigrants have a lower IQ, it’s no surprise how they came up with such a flawed study.” She continued: “Richwine’s comments are bigoted and ignorant. America is a nation of immigrants; to impugn the intelligence of immigrants is to offend each and every American and the foundation of our country. The American Hispanic community is entrepreneurial, and we strive to better our lives through hard work and determination. This is not a community hampered by low intelligence but a community consistently moving forward to better themselves and our country.” - Jennifer Rubin's column in the Washington Post, May 8, 2013 [and Jennifer is under the delusion she is a conservative!]

Step 2,

I skimmed that paper and I could feel my IQ dropping by at least one standard deviation ;-)

Seriously though, if anyone is going to cite Lewontin as someone to take seriously about IQ and race, I'm just going to tune them out. Not impressed. You need to spend more time on this blog:

http://humanvarieties.org/

You'll learn a lot.

http://humanvarieties.org/

You'll learn a lot.

Just recommend readers to read Half Sigma's blog (his old blog). I learned so much about HBD, NAMs, and proles there.

Jeffrey S., I just can't resist: You have no idea what you're talking about, much less what others here are talking about. You didn't post a single example that suggests "intelligence is effectively the only non-heritable human characteristic," i.e., that IQ is not heritable.

All of your examples are about between-group differences. Of course that's controversial, and I'm sure most liberals would deny any genetic influence on between-group differences. But I challenge you to find one single recent article (other than an opinion piece) from any of those sources that denies or even doubts the heritability of IQ. That's what Sage was accusing liberals of, remember. Just one article.

Two answers to Sage's point: Of course different populations are not going to have identical genetic profiles. The question is whether there's any effective difference relating to some given trait. If the between-population "heritability" (if that even means anything) of IQ were, say, one percent, then yes, it's nonzero, but it's effectively zero. That scenario is of course consistent with the almost universally accepted belief that IQ is substantially heritable within populations.

But more to the point: Sage was talking about what liberals believe, or say they believe. Even if people here were right that within-group heritability implies between-group "heritability" - and I'll qualify that with non-negligible, if you're being pedantic about it - even if people here were right about that, most liberals do not "know" that supposed fact about heritability. In other words, liberals are being consistent when they affirm the within-group heritability of IQ and deny between-population "heritability" of IQ given their understanding of the two (which happens to be basically correct in this case).

Just saw another comment by Sage that I'd missed before. I won't comment on all the stuff about doublethink, etc., because that's getting away from the point.

I'm accused of not understanding liberals or of speaking as if political correctness didn't exist. Whatever. I'll just remind everyone that what I said about liberal beliefs about heritability of IQ is true, while what Sage and Jeffrey said about liberal beliefs is demonstrably false. That's the only point I'm arguing.

Again: the truth about liberals, and about political correctness, is bad enough. There's no need for Sage and Jeffrey to embellish it.

Aaron, let's reason this way:

1. If IQ is non-negligibly biologically heritable (I put "biologically" in there to get away from doublespeak about heritability that I noticed in one of the articles Step2 linked to, according to which wearing earrings is a heritable trait!), then it is not enormously implausible that groups that share a great many other obvious biological traits and that appear to be significantly biologically related also share an IQ profile as a non-negligible result of biology.

2. If it is not enormously implausible that groups that share a great many other obvious biological traits and that appear to be significantly biologically related also share an IQ profile as a non-negligible result of biology, then that thesis is one which could plausibly be worthy of scientific study.

Therefore,

3. The thesis that groups that share a great many other obvious biological traits and that appear to be significantly biologically related also share an IQ profile as a non-negligible result of biology is one which could plausibly be worthy of scientific study.

4. Racial groups as understood in the U.S. share a great many other obvious biological traits and appear to be significantly biologically related.

Therefore,

5. The thesis that racial groups as understood in the U.S. also share an IQ profile as a non-negligible result of biology is one which could plausibly be worthy of scientific study.

Okay, now, you can disagree with various premises there, but they don't seem terribly wild to me. Now, what we have in liberals are people who, according to you, acknowledge some significant quantity of biological heritability of IQ but want to deny everything from there on, and, moreover, want to treat any inference such as the one presented here as in some way immoral.

Doesn't that seem more than a bit rigid as a kind of a priori limitation on the possible implications of what, according to you, all the liberals around us fully and freely acknowledge? Doesn't that seem to be an attempt to block a rather natural line of inference and inquiry from the premise, which supposedly everyone on both sides of the aisle acknowledges, that IQ is non-negligibly biologically heritable?

And isn't it understandable that, viewing that extremely rigid resistance, people who don't share that intense insistence on blocking that line of inquiry are inclined to think that somewhere along the line there is a denial of the significant heritability of IQ?

Oh, I do have one name for you: Peter Medawar. Here is a quotation in a section on ad hocness from, of all things, a book on Bayesian probability theory:

A number of so-called environmentalists put a low [IQ] score down primarily to poor social and educational conditions. However, this explanation ran into trouble when it was discovered that a large group of Eskimos, leading a feckless, poor, and drunken existence, scored very highly on IQ tests. The distinguished biologist Peter Medawar..., in an effort to deflect the difficulty away from the environmentalist thesis, explained the observation by saying that an “upbringing in an igloo gives just the right degree of cosiness, security and mutual contact to conduce to a good performance in intelligence tests.” (Howson and Urbach, Scientific Reasoning: The Bayesian Approach, 1989, p. 108)

Aaron,

This will be my last comment directed to you, because I think you are generally on the side of the "good guys" here, but insist on being obtuse in this comment thread. If you can't read the quotes I provide (and I can provide others like them) and get the idea that an actual living, breathing liberal denies or even doubts the heritability of IQ then I don't know what else I can say. It is obvious to me that those folks I cited are uncomfortable with the very notion of IQ in the first place and fall down hard on the nurture side of the nature vs. nurture debate. I mean what do you think Horgan was going on about with the Flynn effect??? ("This so-called Flynn effect, which was discovered by psychologist James Flynn, undercuts claims that intelligence stems primarily from nature and not nurture.") Yes, I acknowledge that there are liberals who accept the science of IQ testing and the idea that IQ is partially heritable. But many, many other liberals reject the idea altogether and get crazed when you suggest that all the social programs and government spending in the world won't raise the IQ scores of poor black and Hispanic kids in America.

I don't think Eskimos score highly on IQ tests. If I remember correctly, Richard Lynn stated in Race Differences in Intelligence (I read the book in college when I was lurking around HBD blogs) that their average IQ is only 91. Not considered high, but higher than indigenous Africans, Aborigines, and other American Indians.

This will be my last comment directed to you, because I think you are generally on the side of the "good guys" here, but insist on being obtuse in this comment thread. If you can't read the quotes I provide (and I can provide others like them) and get the idea that an actual living, breathing liberal denies or even doubts the heritability of IQ then I don't know what else I can say.

I guess that reminds me of my behavior on other threads here where I insist on arguing against the pro-life position.

Getting down to brass tacks, a question for the group: Should American immigration policy be heavily restricted with respect to Hispanics for the reason that, as a group, their mean IQ is significantly lower than the native white population which greatly limits their ability to assimilate (regardless of intention)? The pseudonymous author Joseph Kay made that argument at VFR a number of years ago:

http://www.amnation.com/vfr/archives/010122.html

"Getting down to brass tacks, a question for the group: Should American immigration policy be heavily restricted with respect to Hispanics for the reason that, as a group, their mean IQ is significantly lower than the native white population which greatly limits their ability to assimilate (regardless of intention)?"

No.

BTW, I don't object to the question, nor do I object to the questioner for asking the question.

I think there are factors that are significantly more important than IQ, so my answer to Andrew's question would be "no." However, if we had the money and will (both of which we lack) for applying multiple factors to individual applications, I think we should return to the idea that prospective immigrants should have a sponsor who has to agree not to let them become a drain on the community and should show prima facie ability to support themselves and their families with a job--preferably, a job already offered. Other filters should be applied, ideally including giving preference to those who already speak English, screening for terrorist background or sympathies with such concepts as jihad, sharia, or reconquista, and preference given to pro-American attitudes rather than seething America-hatred. There are plenty of other ideas that could be quite reasonable. I'm inclined to think that if all of these screens were consistently applied, IQ would tend to be raised among incoming immigrants as a byproduct.

Andrew E.,

I actually prefer the policy conclusions outlined in Richwine's original PhD thesis -- I think our immigration system should favor individuals from any country that have high IQs and/or can invest in the country in a meaningful way from the get go -- the perfect example is that Russian guy who started Google. In other words, I want the U.S. to have a policy with respect to immigration that is closer to Canada. However, in that link you provided, I think Larry made an excellent point about non-Westerners and big numbers:

I also prefer to emphasize the cultural identity argument over the intelligence argument because the former avoids the question of superiority/inferiority. It is not my main position that non-Westerners should not be allowed to immigrate into the West because they are less intelligent than whites—that, after all, is an argument that would lead us to letting ourselves be taken over by the billion-strong Chinese. Rather non-Westerners should not immigrate into the West simply because they are different from us, with different cultures, different histories, different collective identities and agendas as peoples, different mental outlook, different physical and racial type producing different aesthetic ideals, and on and on.

We need to slow down and stop letting in lots of immigrants, period. This will hopefully enable us to begin the hard work of assimilating those large number of immigrants we have today and working to deport those illegals who do not belong in this country.

We need to slow down and stop letting in lots of immigrants, period.

Bingo. This is really important.

By the way, I'll just be more radical than I was earlier: We need to stop Muslim immigration. It's not actually _required_ that we not apply quotas to countries, etc., in immigration.

In passing, and in some ways OT: Report today from London--grisly meat-cleaver murder by Muslims who stood up in front of cameras, literally red-handed, and avowed, "We swear by almighty Allah we will never stop fighting you." And of course we had the "radicalized" Tsarnaevs here in the U.S. just last month. But anybody who says, "Okay, that's it. We need to stop Muslim immigration" is considered a nut.

Okay, sorry, Jeff. It was just that that news story came in at the very moment that we are talking about assimilation problems.

Lydia,

No apology necessary -- I was almost going to say something about the unique problem of Muslim immigration myself. Why am I in Wal-Mart (!) near my house and the women around me are not just veiled, but they are in full burqas (or is it full chadors -- I can't tell -- all I know is everything is covered except the eyes)?

Meanwhile, I know I said I wouldn't write anymore comments to Aaron, but I really want him check this blog post out:

http://lhote.blogspot.com/2013/05/all-races-being-equal-but-all-people.html

Freddie is a radical liberal (who admits he's a socialist and often critizes other liberals for being to squishy) who links to another liberal writer who tries to make the case that IQ is about environment (nurture), not nature. Admirably for Freddie, he points out that the evidence does not support this position ("Beauchamp goes hard on the notion that environment trumps everything when it comes to IQ. Indeed, he goes so hard on that attitude that most readers will likely think that there is nothing to the notion of a genetic basis for IQ. That's simply not in keeping with the large majority of the data.") so we should definitely acknowledge the fact that there are liberals who are willing to honestly look at the evidence around IQ. But there are other liberals who are doing their best to obscure the link between our genes and IQ and good for Freddie for calling this particular liberal out on it ("Most egregiously, Beauchamp speaks about all of this by referring to a "new consensus," as if the notion that IQ is dominantly environmental rather than genetic is broadly shared in developmental psychology. This simply is not true.")

Yes, statistically, African Americans and Hispanics perform slightly worse in IQ tests than other racial groups.
And people prone to right wing ideology and extreme conservatism perform worse than liberals, see e.g.
http://pss.sagepub.com/content/early/2012/01/04/0956797611421206.abstract
Given that, for decades and centuries, white right-wing Christians almost always were the offspring of other white right-wing Christians and procreated with white right-wing Christians, the hypothesis that white right wing ideologues "also share an IQ profile as a non-negligible result of biology is one which could plausibly be worthy of scientific study" (Lydia).
Sounds weird? Perhaps, but you cannot have it both ways. The same, of course, holds for liberals who applaud studies that found that, statistically, conservatives have rather low cognitive abilities, but despise studies that show that the same may hold for members of certain ethnic groups.
Measuring intelligence is a thorny and controversial issue, with many methodological problems. I do not think that there is much value in comparative studies - no matter whether they are driven by a conservative or liberal agenda or by no agenda at all. Note that the differences found, though statistically significant, are, in fact, quite small.
This said, I think there is nothing wrong with "INDIVIDUAL IQ testing as a way to identify bright people who do not have access to a university education in their home countries" (Jason Richwine) Unlike small group differences in IQ scores, big INDIVIDUAL differences cannot easily be explained away by the methodological problems and possible biases of IQ tests.

Someone wake me if any of those smarter liberals show up here.

..."also share an IQ profile as a non-negligible result of biology is one which could plausibly be worthy of scientific study"...

The things is, I don't consider this comment prima facie offensive. If you want to do a study, be my guest, but it doesn't change the fact that many people with very high IQs indeed also happen to be right wrong. So I'm not sure what relevance this has to the right wing viewpoint even if it is true. I'll leave it to other people who have higher IQs than me to parse out if there are any problems with your comparison.

Given that, for decades and centuries, white right-wing Christians almost always were the offspring of other white right-wing Christians and procreated with white right-wing Christians,

Given that, in terms of "decades" and [especially] "centuries," a phrase like "right-wing" has no discernible useful meaning, this is not an antecedent that I think any smart person should grant. And even anecdotally it can be seen to be implausible. Viz. The youth group I went to in high school in Chicago was made up of a combination of white and hispanic "right-wing Christians," but a significant percentage of them were teenage converts.

MarcAnthony:

it doesn't change the fact that many people with very high IQs indeed also happen to be right wrong.

If I understand that correctly, I agree, and it's part of what I've been getting at in comments about immigrants with relatively lower IQs who are prepared to be law-abiding vs. immigrants who want to use their high IQs to do terrorist planning or become hackers or what-not. There are a lot of other variables here.

OTOH, in sheer terms of social sciences, I suppose I can see an argument to the effect that *on average* a significantly lower IQ, especially in males, is well-correlated with a propensity toward crime and anti-social behavior, and that therefore from the perspective of importing social problems into our country, we want to avoid importing a lot of immigrants who are low-IQ for this reason. One could also add the problem that our country has a real dearth of jobs for the law-abiding but not-very-bright, even among our own citizens, so we might want to "hoard" those jobs rather than raising the demand for them and making them even harder to obtain.

It's obviously a complex set of issues.

Seriously though, if anyone is going to cite Lewontin as someone to take seriously about IQ and race, I'm just going to tune them out.

I could say the same thing about Sailer, who as far as I'm aware has no formal education in genetics or statistics. Or I could read his particular arguments and point out mistakes instead of declaring his broader views on race to be disqualifying.

You need to spend more time on this blog:

No I don't, way too boring. I spend my non-political time at Mind Hacks and Arts and Letters Daily.

There are a lot of other variables here.

That reminds me of an early criminal mastermind, historically notable for having the second largest brain ever measured.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_H._Rulloff

If I understand that correctly, I agree

Typos are a horrible, horrible thing. Yes, you understand correctly. That sentence underwent several revisions before it was submitted, and what do I get for it? Typos breed like rabbits.

To clarify some more: Even if we grant that right-wing conservatives, as a group, tend to have lower IQs this says nothing about whether or not the right wing viewpoint is correct or not. There are very, very smart people who are right wing as well, so perhaps we should listen to their arguments since they're the smartest people who hold these views anyway.

Typos breed like rabbits.

Rabbit libel! Are you now or were you ever in favor of population control for rabbits?

HAhahahaha. It doesn't matter whether you try to control our breeding, we will always find a way to breed.

Brer Rabbit

Lydia, I agree with all five of your statements (except that your dismissal of the heritability of earring-wearing is too glib - that's very much to the point of some critiques). I agree with some of your conclusions, too. Everything up to "isn't it understandable that...." Lots of stupid mistakes and falsehoods are understandable, but not excusable.

Of course you know that within-population heritability doesn't imply between-population "heritability." It suggests it, but nothing more.

On your "understandable" point, consider James Flynn. Flynn of course believes that IQ is highly heritable, and he believes that the genetic influence on racial differences is negligible. That (pace Jeffrey and Sage) is the "official" position of the liberal media, though Flynn is quite willing to admit that the question isn't settled. Politically, Flynn isn't a liberal, but he's a democratic socialist, which is close enough.

Flynn has in fact appealed explicitly to Bellarmine's argument in the Galileo affair, quoting from a letter from Bellarmine to Catholic authorities explaining that while Galileo's theory might be true - in which case the Church will have to acknowledge that it had been misinterpreting scripture - the theory has not been demonstrated to be true. Given the high stakes involved, etc. etc.

Flynn explicitly endorsed Bellarmine's approach as applied to the study of genetic influence on racial differences in IQ. This is based entirely on the moral stakes involved and on the state of the art of the study of between-population variation, as he sees them. Flynn's appeal has nothing to do with his beliefs on within-population heritability, which are safely within the consensus that you, I, Sage, Jeffrey, Charles Murray, and the New York Times share. So while Sage's and Jeffrey's falsehoods are understandable, as are most falsehoods, I don't think they're at all excusable.

Finally, I don't see anything in the Medawar quote that doubts the heritability of IQ. He's clearly talking about between-group variation: Eskimos compared to others. The "environmental thesis" apparently refers to between-population theories, and there, obviously, the establishment media are environmentalist, denying any significant genetic role. So I don't think your example is all that different from those cited by Jeffrey.

@Black_rose, JP Rushton addressed the low IQ of Eskimos as well. I think this was in the "Challenges and Rejoinders" chapter of the "third" edition of Race, Evolution and Behavior, but I'm not sure it was there. (It's been years since I read the book.)

He had an explanation why Eskimos didn't fit his r-K theory. I don't remember what it was, but I remember thinking that it sounded kind of ad hoc. Anyway, I think it was in that book, I could look it up in my copy if you're interested.

Grobi writes: "Yes, statistically, African Americans and Hispanics perform slightly worse in IQ tests than other racial groups."

Slightly?! I still remember how I got interested in this subject. I'd been hearing, in the background noise of The Bell Curve debates, that blacks had lower IQs than whites. Never really interested me much; so what if they have slightly lower IQs?

Then I read the actual difference. One standard deviation. But it wasn't being disputed by anyone. (This was in the 1990s, before Flynn and others claimed that the gap had started closing.) I was shocked. That's a huge difference. And that's when I decided I'd read a little bit about this topic.

Okay, Aaron, so I think based on your hesitation regarding the earring example that when you say that you agree with my statements you _aren't_ actually accepting what I mean by "biologically heritable." I mean, I'm sorry, but no Flynn definition of "heritability" according to which earring wearing is heritable is included in what I meant by "biologically heritable." The _only_ reason I didn't use the phrase "genetically heritable" is because I suspect there are things that are heritable _directly_ and _biologically_ but may not be encoded in DNA alone. I've been warned against "DNA reductionism" by a friend I respect who thinks maybe you can inherit things physically that are encoded physically but in some way other than genetically, and I haven't gotten all the empirical info. totally worked out about that. Perhaps for purposes of these discussions, since there are people who are going to take "heritable" to be able to be applied to earring wearing, I should say "genetically heritable," but I was trying to be cautious about biological heritability. In any event, I meant _directly_ heritable by means of the biological structures you get from your parents, so that even if you were suddenly transported at birth to a radically different cultural context (where they don't wear earrings or have computers or whatever), _that trait_ would still be there.

Now, given that definition, do you still agree with the five statements, and do you still hold that there is a wide consensus that the abilities that go into IQ test results are significantly biologically heritable?

I can't believe you brushed off the Medawar example. I think Howson and Urbach's summary is quite clear, and I see no reason to doubt their summary. Their summary is, as far as I can tell, unequivocally stating that environmentalists hold that an _individual_ low-IQ score is due "to poor social and educational conditions." Of course this sort of environmentalism is quite general and would apply to within-racial-group variation as well as between-group. The example given would have been just as much a problem for the environmental thesis they are describing had the results been compared with a control group of well-off and well-educated Eskimos, and had the poor and ill-educated Eskimos done just as well as the well-off and well-educated Eskimos! Of course, in that case, Medawar would probably have come up with a different ad hoc hypothesis. But that's the nature of ad hoc hypotheses. One makes them up as needed.

I've been warned against "DNA reductionism" by a friend I respect who thinks maybe you can inherit things physically that are encoded physically but in some way other than genetically,

This is presumably Talbot or Wells, right?

Kind of depends on what we mean "inherit".

As we see in Lydia's thread on cloning, the cloned individual has the complete nuclear DNA of a person unrelated to the mother who donates the egg, but the clone STILL receives from the egg enough to modify and/or control how the DNA gets expressed, and that list of what happens because the DNA was dropped into THIS mother's egg cell instead of THAT mother's egg cell, very reasonably, can be considered inherited from the mother even though not from her DNA.

And there are mitochondria, which aren't nuclear DNA.

Lydia, I agree your reading of the Medawar example as within-group may be right and my reading as between-group wrong. Even so, it's not an example of what I was asking for. I even said at the beginning, "There's lots of controversy on the degree to which IQ is heritable." This is part of it; the use of the word "primarily" rather than "exclusively" is important. Based on what you quoted here, there's no denial of the heritability of IQ.

Here's an old example of what I mean. Leon Kamin used to deny the heritability of IQ back in the early 1990s based on methodological problems with behavioral genetics studies: adoption studies, etc. Because of those methodological problems, he said the currently best estimate of heritability of IQ was zero. I don't think you'll find much if any of that today, even from non-scientist journalists in the New York Times.

My parenthesis on the earrings example was just that, a parenthesis. I completely agree with your statements (1)-(5). More strongly, I think between-race "heritability" of IQ is more likely than not. And as I said, I agree that liberals' desire to block research on this is wrong. I did find one crack in your argument that I'll mention just because I think you might use it: between-race heritability is not a "possible implication" of within-race heritability. The latter cannot possibly imply the latter in any circumstance. What the presence of the latter does is increase the probability of the former; maybe that's all you meant, but I wanted to clarify it. But this is all prior to the other evidence for and against between-group heritability.

That's one reason (not the only one) why it's inexcusable to assert that liberals don't really believe in heritability of IQ. James Flynn is not some special case. He's arguing a position on within- and between-group heritability that all scientists, including the most hereditarian, agree is valid prior to the between-group evidence. His beliefs on race and IQ are generally shared by the media and academic elites (with one important exception: Flynn himself is open, very open, to the possibility that he's wrong). So Flynn is a reductio ad absurdum to your point that these falsehoods are "understandable." If it's absurd to imply that it would be "understandable" if someone denied the honesty of Flynn's belief in heritability, then it's wrong to imply the same regarding the liberal establishment which basically shares his beliefs.

Wouldn't you say, Aaron, that if someone says that individual IQ is "primarily attributable to environment" and means by that something like "so much so that we can just ignore the rest," this puts him sufficiently squarely with those who dismiss the whole hereditarian thing that we can treat him functionally as just not believing IQ is biologically heritable? I wouldn't be surprised if there are more people _especially_ if you include the media who fall into that category than you seem to be saying. Heck, I bet there are lots of _conservatives_ in that category.

I didn't get any sense of "so much so that..." from the quote. He might want to ignore the genetic component, but not deny it.

I object to the whole "functionally as" also. First of all, Sage and Jeffrey were talking beliefs, not about functionality, so I was talking about beliefs as well. Bringing up functional equivalence of beliefs changes the subject.

But since you brought it up: Hernstein and Murray argued that between-race "heritability" is irrelevant to public policy, that it's not actionable. Heritability does not mean lack of malleability, and so on. (Michael Levin wrote a book, Why Race Matters, dedicated largely to refuting that "so what?" claim.) I think their argument could apply to within-race heritability just as well.

If the "so what?" theory were correct regarding within-race heritability, then all positions on heritability would be functionally equivalent. And many people, probably including most liberals, do believe that within-race heritability does not have social implications. So, as you say, "functionally" we can put lots of liberals, conservatives, and race realists (like Hernstein and Murray) in that category. That's because their reasoning about the social, political, and moral implications of heritability is incorrect. So I guess I agree. But I don't know what you're driving at.

By "can ignore" I didn't mean "should ignore" or something like that. I meant to indicate a position that the quantity of IQ that is attributable to biological inheritance is *very small* and that it is for that reason that the biological component will make no difference to expected outcomes in various areas of life. That is a far cry from saying that there is no way that we can or should try to tailor social policy to take this component into account. The latter is a much more high-level and complex claim. It's going to involve all manner of utilities as well as moral commitments. I was saying that a great many people believe something much more simple--namely, that any amount of heritable IQ is practically speaking negligible.

A few points:

1. The Richwine affair had little to do with anything about IQ and race and everything to do with discrediting the anti-amnesty study he was a part of. Conservatives, naturally, fell for it completely and are now running around defending Richwine's freaking dissertation (who cares?) while the study itself is ignored and amnesty proceeds on. The more sensible response, rarely heard, would have been that Richwine's dissertation is completely irrelevant to the study which had nothing to do with race or IQ.

2. Glad to see the real villain identified, which is of course Heritage and more broadly the conservative industrial complex that it forms a prominent part of. With friends like these... The man on the street, in the rare case that he knows about any of this, probably takes the view "well he was canned, so he must have been guilty." Thank God for the conservatives, without them the left might have trouble finding its footsoldiers.

The best part is that in Richwine, you have that rarest of creatures, a young, Harvard educated, apparently sincere person who wants to be a conservative Republican and do think-tank research for them. Naturally he had to go, cause no one under 50 allowed. Way to win the future there, "conservatives".

3. Much ink is spilled on this subject, but whether IQ is heritable or not is completely irrelevant. If we had no way to, say, administer some sort of "test" and determine someone's IQ directly, such that we instead had to make some sort of convoluted prediction based on the parents, then heritability might matter. If it is a bad idea to import stupid people, then their children and grandchildren possibly being smarter is hardly a counterargument. The HBDosphere wastes countless hours and internet bytes with this topic that has literally no policy implications.

If we had no way to, say, administer some sort of "test" and determine someone's IQ directly, such that we instead had to make some sort of convoluted prediction based on the parents, then heritability might matter.

Correct me if I'm wrong, which I might be, but isn't his point that, because Hispanics tend to have lower IQs, and since most of our immigration is coming from Hispanics, it might be wise to make IQ checks a part of our screening process?

The HBDosphere wastes countless hours and internet bytes with this topic that has literally no policy implications.

Okay, Aaron, so I think based on your hesitation regarding the earring example that when you say that you agree with my statements you _aren't_ actually accepting what I mean by "biologically heritable." I mean, I'm sorry, but no Flynn definition of "heritability" according to which earring wearing is heritable is included in what I meant by "biologically heritable." The _only_ reason I didn't use the phrase "genetically heritable" is because I suspect there are things that are heritable _directly_ and _biologically_ but may not be encoded in DNA alone. I've been warned against "DNA reductionism" by a friend I respect who thinks maybe you can inherit things physically that are encoded physically but in some way other than genetically, and I haven't gotten all the empirical info. totally worked out about that. Perhaps for purposes of these discussions, since there are people who are going to take "heritable" to be able to be applied to earring wearing, I should say "genetically heritable," but I was trying to be cautious about biological heritability. In any event, I meant _directly_ heritable by means of the biological structures you get from your parents, so that even if you were suddenly transported at birth to a radically different cultural context (where they don't wear earrings or have computers or whatever), _that trait_ would still be there.

I do not see why it is absurd to consider the "heritability" of earrings or any other behavioral trait that is not obviously "hard-coded" in the human genome. The technical definition of "heritability" is the proportion of the total variance of a trait in a given population at a given time that is attributable the genetic variance in the population. Since the precise "scientific" definition of "heritability" has the caveat of requiring that a measure of heritability only applies to a particular, designated population, the adjectives "direct" and biological" to modify "heritability" are superfluous. ("Genetically heritable" is a redundant pleonasm [and "redundant pleonasm" is also a pleonasm] because by definition a heritable trait is influenced by genetic factors.) This definition is statistical in nature as it quantifies the association between genotypic and phenotypic variation for a specific trait within a population; it is not meant to elucidate the underlying biological mechanisms that are responsible for the variation of phenotype or detect the genetic loci that generates the variation. Indeed, the mechanism of transmission of the genetic information to offspring need not involve variations in nucleotide sequences as differences in chromatin modification can influence phenotype and be transmitted to offspring, but it is assumed that variations in DNA sequences is the medium of most heritable traits. Certainly for psychological and behavioral traits, it is conceivable that a single genetic polymorphism can subtly affect brain architecture and synaptic transmission, and collectively these genetic polymorphisms of small effect can yield variance in major (propensity towards having mood disorder) and trivial (such as wearing earrings) personality traits within a population. It does not sound ridiculous that wearing earrings is somewhat heritable, but investigating the biological mechanism of this heritability would not generate valuable scientific knowledge and just waste scientific resources, since the information has little practical value or any theoretical significance.

As I stated before, I consumed much of my leisure time in college watching Pokémon episodes at the expense of my academic performance. Now consider my other college peers and MarcAnthony who is currently a college student. Do you think it is unreasonable that there are genetic factors that influenced my personality so I would gravitate towards being engrossed with the watching the adventures of Ash, Misty, and Brock (or doing any other time-consuming, seemingly "pointless" solitary activity) instead of school work or socializing with my peers at college? If the genetic components that gave me a propensity to watch Pokémon episodes tend to be present in myself but relatively absent in my fellow students and MarcAnthony, then my behavior in college is a heritable trait although the specific obsession (watching Pokémon episodes) is mostly influenced by environment and therefore not heritable, but the general behavior of introversion and immersion in a solitary interest with little academic value are heritable personality traits.