The definitive guide to race and intelligence
Recent research findings indicate that the European population's phenotypic characteristics, commonly associated with whiteness, can be attributed to interbreeding between a limited number of Neanderthals residing in northern Europe and the indigenous African population prior to the last ice age. European individuals of Caucasian descent has a distinct genetic heritage, with approximately 2-5% of their DNA being attributed to Neanderthal ancestry. It has been suggested that the traits of red hair, green eyes, and negative blood type can be traced back to their origins in the Neanderthal population. Neanderthals constituted a discrete taxonomic category characterized by restricted biological compatibility with Homo sapiens originating from Africa. Based on an examination of extant Neanderthal DNA inside the human genome, it has been postulated that interbreeding between humans and Neanderthals occurred, albeit resulting in male hybrids with infertility and female hybrids with significantly diminished fertility. The phenomenon described bears resemblance to the observed outcomes in interbreeding between lions and tigers, as well as horses and donkeys. This observation could potentially elucidate the notably diminished prevalence of Neanderthal genetic material inside the human genome, as well as its uneven dispersion. However, does this suggest that those of Caucasian descent are considered to be of lower human status?
No, contemporary individuals exhibit varying combinations of distinct SPECIES of archaic humans. In alternative terms, it might be argued that people are universally characterized by mixed ancestry. Various qualities exhibit varying degrees of independence rather than clumping together. There exists a prevailing consensus within scholarly discourse that the racial categories commonly employed in ordinary language are products of social construction, and that the delineation of racial groups lacks a biological foundation. Until around one hundred years ago, individuals in the United States and Britain who engaged in discourse concerning "race" commonly held the assumption that the Irish constituted a distinct and inferior "race," clearly differentiated from the evidently superior English population. In contemporary discourse, it is commonly assumed that individuals of Irish and English descent belong to the same racial category. The utilization of the term "race" has become increasingly controversial due to its connotations with the ideologies and beliefs derived from the research conducted by anthropologists and physiologists in the 19th century, which have persisted and evolved during the latter part of the 20th century. It is a prevalent misconception among individuals to erroneously equate the concept of "race" with the broader notion of human variation or diversity, despite the absence of any substantive correlation between the two. The categorization of human populations into Caucasoid, Negroid, and Mongoloid groups is based on typological principles. The typological framework utilized for categorizing human races lacks scientific and anthropological validity, as it relies on folk taxonomies that are mostly derived on perceived physical characteristics. Two organisms are classified as distinct species when they are unable to create viable and fruitful offspring through interbreeding.
All humans are in fact members of the same species and subspecies, i.e., the same race. White people belong to the same race as African humans because there is insufficient genetic differentiation between human populations to properly classify them into racial categories. The classification of humans into groups based on incidence and prevalence of phenotypical characteristics (the statistical probability of your ancestors' geographical origins) as evidence of "race" is scientifically absurd and should be phased out. Science illiterates are unaware that all phenotypes and alleles for them exist in all "races." Almost all humans share the same set of genes. varying populations, however, have varying proportions of active (expressed) genes as a result of long-term, geographically distributed selective pressures.(s).. For instance, the genes associated with dark hair are present in Asian populations, which include native Americans, but are also present in European populations, albeit at a reduced rate of activation. When genes are excessively or insufficiently expressed, distinct configurations emerge.
Another major problem with the typological model is that the number of "races" you end up with depends on the number and kinds of traits employed in the classification. The more traits used, the fewer people in the world there are who share them. For example, light skin color is considered to be a defining characteristic of Europeans. However, when you add the criteria of narrow noses, straight hair, and tall stature, many Europeans would be excluded altogether or the European racial category would have to be further subdivided into several smaller "races." Since the number of "races" can be so easily changed by the way they are defined, it is clear that they do not really exist as distinct biological groupings of people. Instead, they are arbitrary creations that reflect our ethnocentric views of ourselves and other people. They are mainly cultural rather than biological groupings.
A bit of history
The term race was first used to refer to speakers of a common language and then to denote national affiliations, by the 17th century race began to refer to physical (i.e. phenotypical) traits. The term was often used in a general biological taxonomic sense, starting from the 19th century, to denote what was believed to be genetically differentiated human populations defined by observable characteristics. However, scientists now consider biological essentialism obsolete, and generally discourage racial explanations for collective differentiation in both physical and behavioral traits. People who believe that we should treat "race" as subspecies fail to recognize, that if that were the case, there would be very large blocks of empty spaces in PCA and MDS Plots signifying the variation. We do not observe this, instead every single population on the planet, clusters closely in an uninterrupted fashion. Today (outside of a few small circles) race is used in a social/political manner by the masses and not biological. The question of what race you belong to is a spurious one, since in Genetics, Taxonomy and Zoology, a race is the lowest taxon ranking any organism can achieve.
Most people don't know anything about genes
Some people misunderstand what genes are for and what they do in the body. People don’t understand that genes direct the production of proteins. Genes, on their own, are not the masters but the servants. And, as entirely passive strings of chemicals, it is logically impossible for them to initiate and steer development in any sense. Long before scientists even knew what the structure of DNA was, the idea of genetic or biological determinism was prevalent. Genetic determinism is the theory that an individual organism’s behavior is predominantly controlled by that individual’s genes, playing down or eliminating the role of environment entirely. In fact, this theory remained popular throughout the twentieth century, and it is only in recent decades that continuous scientific study has been capable of diminishing the role of genetic determinism in the behavior of living things.
DNA, and the genes it encodes, used to be compared to the pages of a book. The DNA was written down carefully, page after page, in a specific manner, and if this “book” was read in a specific way, the resultant interpretation would lead to genes and, by extension, a biological being. However, if any part of the DNA sequence was written down incorrectly, this would lead to errors i.e. gene mutations. This analogy corresponds very well with genetic determinism – nothing matters but the genes that are encoded.
However, nowadays DNA is akin to the hard-drive of a computer; the base sequence from which everything else is built upon. DNA on its own does absolutely nothing until activated by the rest of the system through transcription factors, markers of one kind or another, interactions with the proteins. Modifications that directly affect DNA, such as mutations, are actual errors or damage to the hardware. Any additional modifications to the DNA are comparable to software installed on the computer i.e. do not directly change the DNA sequence but, rather, sit “on top of” the base data in order to change the final outcome of any given sequence.
Epigenetics is the branch of genetics which deals with changes to DNA that alter levels of gene expression, without altering the DNA sequence itself. Many epigenetic signals are known as post-translational modifications; by and large, these modifications occur at the site of gene transcription and ultimately determine whether a gene is over-expressed, under-expressed, or expressed at all. These epigenetic modifications can permanently turn genes off when they are deemed entirely unnecessary. Modifications such as these can be activated and deactivated based on particular environmental stimuli, be that stimuli from within the cell itself or externally e.g. too much sunlight, not enough food etc. Perhaps most importantly, whilst epigenetic modifications are heritable – they can be passed on to offspring - they can also be very readily reversed.
Viruses/bacteria/fungi/parasites are also the gene manipulators... as humans go, our own genetic mutation is copy/replication “mistake” error driven but when living in an environment with all the pathogens, we are constantly getting edited by these manipulators which give us cancers, diabetes, autism, etc. We have so many viruses embedded in our genome that we can’t even begin life (initial cell differentiation) without utilizing the initial control functions passed from a virus, unlike all other mammals which don’t have these virus type cell differentiators. We are symbiotic with our gut bacteria for energy and digestion and to defend against other bacteria and viruses.
There are always going to be genetic components to some aspects of why an organism is the way it is. However, human physical traits such as height, which used to be considered entirely genetic, are now considered to be epigenetics.
Why do blacks and whites have different testosterone levels? Most significant difference is probably going to be the vitamin d levels, drop those and the body has to compensate by boosting the reservoirs for the immune system... those happen to also allow the higher testosterone levels unless the immune system needs to tone down the use of them, so it turns down testosterone when it is weak and needs access to the muscles resources...
Human intelligence
Effectively, human/“intelligence” is just a survival strategy. That is, a method of acquiring energy for structuring the growth of an organization of cells... the greater/higher the level of intelligence, as defined by both breathe of knowledge about the external reality and the temporal domain of reality (history for perspective and future for planning to be where the energy will be, or even better planting the future so energy will be there when and where we want it) is just the extension of that strategy of acquiring energy, nutrients, etc.
The human brain is not intelligence, it’s a survival mechanism optimized for selecting immune and other compatibilities. Generally speaking, intelligence is pattern matching but still requires an active context to know if you need to calculate within two seconds whether the mountain lion is going to eat you or run away from you? The high level processes of the brain are coordinating the retrieval of context mode and maintaining it, while activating different coherency regions that might be used by that context mode. Similar to the OS maintaining the partition of the programs and scheduling the access to resources like the memory or storage systems. For the most part, this means that the “lazy intelligence” only executes when it is necessary for survival. Since our world is getting a lot easier and safer, your brain has no need to emphasize memorizing frequently observed sequences (Cognitive modules) of patterns and developing invariant representations. We grow into a context of demands that then causes the growth of the required level of complexity to manage the knowledge and acquisition of details to fill in the domains.
There are no genes for intelligence
They are basically allele counting and making unsubstantiated claims. The truth is that if you get a particularly nasty virus when you are young, then you are a prime suspect for developing the overactive brain that is edging towards the schizophrenia brain patterns depending on which proteins are over or under produced once the virus starts operating it’s control functions. After digging through the research on various "geniuses" throughout history, I learned a higher percentage of them had childhoods that more than likely resulted in a similar over expressed memory encoding activity in their brain due to viruses and the resulting anxiety of the heightened immune system pushed them to solve problems they had in front of them, any and all problems they could think about because that is how the brain works when it is stressed - it tries to solve problems. However, the amount of energy required to maintain that excessive brain activity and immune system will likely kill you.
The default state of a human is basically like a cow. Humans were NOT meant to ponder the whole universe their entire lives, aka philosophize and grandiosize their own take on what it means to be alive… they are meant to learn new things and how to survive but the brain isn’t supposed to be on all the time. Studies on the heritability of intelligence started over a century ago can be dismissed with new research in Molecular Biology, Cell Biology and Neuroscience connecting the brain to the immune system. Immune molecules are actually defining how the brain is functioning.
Polygenic scores may be all the rage with halfwits, but they are a fudge. A decade’s efforts to identify individual bricks that build the house have failed: let’s just throw a few thousand suspicious bits of material together to see if they at least make a start. In a host of assumptions like additivity and linearity of effects, it entails a highly naïve – indeed outmoded – view of the gene and biological systems.
Polygenic scores can be slightly interesting from the point of view of animal/plant breeding, where they might actually be usable/measurable. but human GWAS is too much of a hot mess for these things to be even slightly interpretable. What conceivable use does a measure have when it maybe sometimes can explain 1% of the variance? Recall that polygenic scores are, basically, linear combinations of dozens of features–when there is no plausible reason to believe that these effects are statistically independent–so you’ve basically overfit the crap out of what little signal there is, and gee whiz, turns out the prediction is crap also. The method entails a formidable battery of assumptions, data corrections, and statistical maneuvers. But the most fatal assumption is that human societies can be treated as random breeding populations in randomly distributed environments with equally random distributions of genes.
On the contrary, human populations reflect continuous emigration and immigration. Immigrants with related genetic backgrounds tend not to disperse randomly in the target society. In their flow to jobs they concentrate in different social strata. This creates (entirely coincidental, non-causal) correlation between social class and genetic background persisting across many generations. For example, the Wellcome Trust’s “genetic map of Britain” shows strikingly different genetic admixtures among residents of different geographic regions of the United Kingdom.
This is what is called “population structure.” As Evan Charney notes, it is “omnipresent in all populations and it wreaks havoc with assumptions about ‘relatedness’ and ‘unrelatedness’ that cannot be ‘corrected for’ by the statistical methods [devised]”. History shows that anyone committed to a “genes as destiny” narrative, and a mythological meritocracy, based on nothing but mountains of correlations, needs to tread very cautiously.
We see this with r/K selection theory as an application for human behavior and even *racial* differences in behavior. Rushton didn’t properly understand ecological theory, nor did he understand evolution, nor did he understand anything involving r/K selection theory which means one can safely disregard what Rushton—or anyone like Molyneaux who doesn’t know about the theory—says about it.
Honestly, this is a classic case of someone over-extrapolating something in a high-school textbook and then proceed to misapply it haphazardly to something that they think sounds related. "Higher birth rates? Yep, that's r selection" *proceeds to ignore every other characteristic of r/K selection theory because they've got far enough to confirm their biases*. Definitely ignore that it's an equation that throws out more variables than you can count to focus only on the "dominant" ones under extreme conditions. Pretty much every *race* had similar birth rates until industrialization and birth control. Having few children is a modern luxury that has zero to do with race, and everything to do with circumstance, and a trivial inspection of history will tell you that near a dozen children were normal in pretty much every European country up until the 1800s. Hell it was a common convention in the roman empire to name your children numbers, like quintius, sextus, or decimus, because so many would die young. In fact, by the 1900s Europe had more than half the world's population.
Ethnicity cannot be detected by DNA
DNA tests indicate possible Biogeographical ancestry, not race. DNA testing companies ascertain DNA ethnicity by analyzing DNA samples from living individuals who comprise a reference panel. Generally, samples are collected from individuals with significant roots in a particular region. For certain DNA ethnicity initiatives, the individual must have four grandparents from the same country, region, or county. Why? Even if you are a descendant of Shakespeare, there is only a negligible chance of your having any of his DNA. This is because autosomal DNA gets passed on randomly. Shakespeare's kid probably had 50 percent of his DNA; his kid in turn, on average, a quarter, and so on. Within 10 generations, Shakespeare's DNA has spread out and recombined so many times that it doesn't even really make sense to speak of a match.
Almost all humans have the same set of genes. Nevertheless, different populations have varying frequency and prevalence of gene expressions. For example, genes related to dark hair are present in Asian populations-including native Americans-but also in European populations. Ancestry reports just counts the prevalence of gene expressions and put people into ancestry groups like Euro, African, etc. It doesn't go back more than 3000 years. A person who calls herself an Italian today might have called herself a Gaul a couple thousand years ago and gone to war against the Romans. In other words, to divide people into groups, researchers make decisions: For example, they'll say, the members of this group of people have all lived in Morocco for at least several generations, so we'll add their DNA to the reference libraries for Moroccans. And people who had one grandparent with that sort of DNA will hear that they're 25 percent Moroccan. But that boundary, is fundamentally imaginary. It's not really science so much as it's description. If they were to be completely honest, what they should tell you is not that you're 47 percent Italian but that you're 47 plus or minus some error range …
What IQ really means
IQ tests measure academic abilities i.e. Fluid Reasoning, Knowledge, Quantitative Reasoning, Visual-Spatial Processing, and Working Memory. Collectively, these skills are known as "symbolic logic" -- not any sort of fixed, innate intelligence. Some difference of 10 -15 points between individuals is pretty much indistinguishable and reveal little about an individual's potential for further growth.
IQ tests rely heavily upon language and upon a person's skill in defining words, in knowing facts about the world, in finding connections (and differences) among verbal concepts. The tasks featured in the IQ test are decidedly microscopic, are often unrelated to one another, and are remote, in many cases, from everyday life. This is why employers do not administer IQ tests and don't focus on academic scores such as GPA. IQ problems tend to be "clearly defined", come with all the information needed to solve them, have only a single right answer, which can be reached by only a single method. Practical problems, in contrast, tend to require problem recognition and formulation . . . require information seeking, have various acceptable solutions, be embedded in and require prior everyday experience, and require motivation and personal involvement.
In other words, an IQ test is based largely on accumulated knowledge. How much one learns and can reference, not necessarily useable level of knowledge though as so many college students seem to demonstrate. For example, you can start a university degree with an IQ of 100 and leave 4 years later with an IQ of 110 if you study a hard subject like computer science or philosophy. IQ tests are basically puzzles and only work for measuring people who have been exposed to the puzzles it tests for... turns out it’s a western culture test and slowly those cultural puzzles have been taught to more of the world to bring up the IQ scores. I am fairly certain that even a person with slight mental disabilities could reach a high “IQ” with enough time and a high enough training frequency. The problem there would certainly be with training motivation.
Consider for example the results from Germany obtained prior to its 1991 reunification. Lynn and Vanhanen present four separate IQ studies from the former West Germany, all quite sizable, which indicate mean IQs in the range 99–107, with the oldest 1970 sample providing the low end of that range. Meanwhile, a 1967 sample of East German children produced a score of just 90, while two later East German studies in 1978 and 1984 came in at 97–99, much closer to the West German numbers.
Moreover, intelligence, without a qualifier, is just a term applied to knowing enough to survive in an environment; any agent that doesn't make the cut isn't very intelligent. Human intelligence is demand driven, we grow into a context of demands that then causes the growth of the required level of complexity to manage the knowledge and acquisition of details to fill in the domains. For the most part, this means that the “lazy intelligence” only executes when it is necessary for survival.
The happy reality is that IQ scores:
A) measure developed skills, not native intelligence.
B) can change dramatically.
C) don't say anything about a person's intellectual limits.
"[Some] assert than an individual's intelligence is a fixed quantity which cannot be increased. We must protest and react against this brutal pessimism." - Alfred Binet, inventor of the original IQ test, 1909
What you might inherit from a parent is an overactive brain from some pathogens that are expressing their heritable genetic information through their hosts. The hosts are the environments of the pathogens. If the pathogens haven’t infected the hosts, the phenotypes aren’t expressed, despite the hosts having the same heritable genetic information. They’re really more like the heritable traits of the pathogens, expressed in the bodies of the hosts. Drowning in water could be said to be a heritable trait since humans unlike fish don’t have genes for breathing underwater, but that isn’t really the sense of the common usage of “heritable trait”.
In conclusion
We recommend is that if you insist on labeling people by groups then do by national/geographical means. "That Kenyan guy over there" makes a lot more sense then saying "that black guy over there". Not to mention the latter would be a subjective and inaccurate label. Especially considering being "black/white" etc is completely relative to the nation and culture one lives in. Being "white" 100 years ago meant something completely different then that it means today.
