I just want to say that I respect your opinions and value your input on this forum. I think everyone does. But I think the aggression can be grating. I apologize if I came off as rude.
Who is marginalizing her on here?
Okay, while the little “replying” icon isn’t lit up, I’m going to close the thread until tomorrow. We’re pretty much all friends in here, and I think it would behoove everyone to step back, take a breath, and then decide later whether and how the discussion should continue.
-Tom
A bigger factor on your intelligence is that you mom didn’t feed you enough growing you.
All Hope Abandon, ye who enter this thread.
Might I suggest a different question:
What is a possible good that would come from this discussion?
If there was a genetic difference in intelligence (on some arbitrary decision on what intelligence is) what possible good comes from bringing that knowledge into the world?
Perhaps one set of people have natural selected to have, on aggregate 5% better spacial reason. But maybe in doing so they are 5% worse at playing attention while driving.
The whole general thing is that as the environment and society change we want a diverse population that can adapt to those changes.
The idea that we should try and measure tiny slices of the attributes of groups of people is generally unhealthy for society unless it’s about identifying and mitigating risks like genetic disease issues that can save people and strengthen our diversity.
What, lets have a frank discussion of how nutrition impacts brain development, especially in poorer nations, or places that have poor diets.
I thought you wanted a frank discussion.
Anyway, it’s been stated multiple times, that variations within a group are far greater than the variations between the groups. Seriously, do you just ignore all the discussions we’ve had already?
Oh man, I’d love to see the data you have to back that up.
Cause I’m sure the KKK, the Nazis, and other white supremacists groups would subscribe to your news letter if you did!
I would say that this is extremely unlikely, except in the cases of mutations which result in major changes in brain function.
Most of what you consider “intellectual characteristics” are a factor of what you have learned, encoded in the neural connections that have formed in your brain as a result of experience.
If there were some inherited cognitive faculty, it wouldn’t be something like the types of physical characteristics you inherit like height. It would be something more akin to some minor variation in the ain’t of fast twitch muscle fiber.
That means that while it’s possible that you could inherit some very minor modification of neural functionality (although i have never seen science to support such an idea), any effect would be trivial in terms of manifested cognition.
Your intellectual characteristics are going to be almost entirely a result of your experiences, and the conditions (such as nutrition) when you are developing as a child.
Sure, that why we had a Eugenics movement. That was a great idea /s.
That is exactly not what anyone thinks.
It is “everyone is different in different ways so if you want to know something about someone you will have to get to know them and see who they are instead of assuming based on one or a few superficial traits”
This is why racists/sexists/etc all talk differently about people they know versus groups that those people might belong in.
But i don’t think there’s really much mechanism by which this could occur, on a genetic level, that works impact higher level cognitive function.
The mechanism by which you might achieve what you are talking about, would exist on a societal level. That is, groups of humans would potentially favor certain types of thought, and this teach it to children, but this wouldn’t be based on genes.
We already have extreme examples of it, where totally normal children have been raised outside of human society, and as a result have entirely different cognitive abilities as a result.
What characteristics are these?
How do you quantify them?
How do you have specific measures?
Are these measures subjective in any way? How can you tell?
Are these measures affected by other factors (environmental, cultural, learning methods, teaching methods, learning environment, exposure to information relative to maturity rate)? Yes, including nutrition! Cognition is complicated. Learning more so.
How do you establish control populations to eliminate these other factors - all of them - statistically?
Assuming you find some small facet of intelligence where all of the above is possible, and then yes, it would be some small facet … how do you then correlate it with anything useful and control for those variables? Proving something is causal rather than correlated is usually harder than explaining the difference. Like with any other gene, that mutation or similar ones may already exist or spontaneously occur in other populations. This was one of my warnings on the prior physical thing. Even should you isolate a specific testable genetic component, how big a factor in the overall spread of scores? I doubt it would be huge.
In the meantime … let me measure height … easy.
Oh, have we sorted out what of the differences across populations are due to environmental things? Nope, not yet. Height is easy to measure, but growth a little more complicated.
Yes, what use is this information? How would it help someone? Except to be misunderstood by a racist?
I think it would be a fairly big waste of research money to study “intelligence”, but useful if looking for a cause of a specific, quantified disorder to consider potential genetic contributors. That may only be useful if it leads to better treatment options. But there is a lot of frivolous money spent like to research chocolate.
I know! We can use it to sell chocolate!
In one example, a Columbia University researcher, [Adam Brickman] Taub Institute for Research on Alzheimer's Disease and the Aging Brain), led a Mars-funded study, looking at how cocoa flavanols might affect the dentate gyrus, a region of the brain whose deterioration with age is associated with memory decline. His paper concluded that flavanols may improve dentate gyrus function, according to specific cognitive ability tests.
And that article shows the pitfalls should much of the research be funded by large sums of money invested in the outcomes. Don’t get me started on the state of research funding either.
There are two big issues which make the entire “scientific debate over racial differences” something to avoid. First is the simple scientific fact, proven over and over and over and over and over and over and motherfucking over again, that individual variation is far larger (orders of magnitude of standard deviation larger) than group variation. Period. So we should treat people as individuals. Again, Period.
Second, there is a real, objectively measurable, well documented, and again motherfucking obvious history of discrimination, bias, racism, oppression, etc, that despite some gains, is still with us today. This creates two huge problems for “scientific analysis of racial differences”. One, every goddamn single tiny factoid in this topic has to be carefully scrutinized to separate real facts from the legacy of discrimination, assumptions based on bias, etc. Getting real data would require superhuman levels of objectivity and may not even be possible given the complexities of human experience and pyschology. Second, unless you do a 100% job on #1 above, AND unless you also have evidence so goddamn strong that it shits upon preponderance of evidence, looks downs upon clearing and evidence and farts in the general direction of beyond a reasonable doubt, then you are opening a can of worms of potential justification for oppression without even remotely adequate evidence to justify the potential harms.
Just stop.
The racial divisions we use have almost nothing to do with real biology. All of the evidence we look at it is tainted by testing bias, cultural influence, the history of discrimination, etc. AND, any group variation detected is going to be a pimple on the ass of individual variation. So any “scientific analysis” is going to be extremely weak tea at best. Compared to that, you risk justifying and rationalizing both the long and terrible history of human racism and the very real ongoing racism still sadly all around.
Lastly, yes I have consumed a couple of triple strength Belgian abbey ales tonight and my normal vehemence is +5 Holy Weapon-ized. Deal with it.
Isn’t this basically like asking if we can have an objective discussion about whether Hitler did nothing wrong?
The answer is no.
No, it is more like asking specifically about all the things he did and analyzing them, if only to come up with actual reasons as to why they were wrong instead of just kneejerk “Nazis bad!” reactions (which while true, simply aren’t very educational).
Knowledge isn’t good or bad. It just is.