Human biodiversity is actually pretty low - Homo sapiens has been
through a number of bottlenecks and when compared to other species, such
as our closest relatives like chimpanzees, we’d look like inbreeds.
Human migrations over the last thousand years have been such that
literally everyone on Earth is a descendant of literally everyone that
lived 7000 years ago whose offspring didn’t die out. This is known as
the Identical Ancestors Point (google it) and it’s pretty
uncontroversial if unintuitive. You can easily derive it by reasoning
the other way around: simply put, the probability that anyone lived 7000
years ago and wasn’t one of your ancestors given the amount of
potential ancestors you’d be supposed to have (which is
2^(7000/generation time)) is low enough to be considered negligible. And
7000 years ago is a pretty conservative estimate.
Africans have more genetic diversity than literally every other
ethnicity on earth taken together, so any classification that separates
“Africans” from other groups is going to be suspect.
Race isn’t a valid construct, genetically speaking. It’s not well
defined; even HBD proponents disagree on how to classify people beyond
Blacks/Whites/Asians. Most of the definitions are based on self reports
or continents of origin, when we know what is considered “black” in the
US may not be so in, say, Brazil, or that many people from Africa can
very well be considered “white”. Of course most HBD proponents are from
the US and are hardly aware of other countries’ existence apart from
their national IQ so they just handwave it away.
Intelligence is not well-defined and not construct valid. There’s no
single definition of intelligence on which people from different fields
can agree. (Among other things, this is why AI specialists have been
struggling with “general AI” for the better part of a century)
IQ has a number of flaws that would make anyone outside the field of
psychology not touch it with a ten foot pole. For starters, it is by
definition Gaussian for no apparent reason. The g construct itself has
no neurological basis and is purely an artifact of factor analysis.
Twin studies are flawed in methodology - not even going into details
like assuming shared environment, twins simply do not share the same
DNA. Yes, even identical twins.
Evolution isn’t just mutations + natural selection. To assume that
diversity just arose from different populations adapting to different
environments is already a pretty huge assumption that none of the HBD
proponents cares to back up. Not every trait is an adaptation.
There’s no single genetic explanation that was ever put forward to
account for traits purported to be “genetic” in origin by HBD
proponents. This is because HBD proponents do not care about genes, and
because they do not know about anything related to genetic mechanisms.
Epistasis alone fucks up many behavioral genetics models and this is
just scratching the surface of the complexity involved.
Heritability does not imply genetic determinism. Many things are
heritable and do not involve genes. These include epigenetic mechanisms,
microbiota, or even environmental stress on germinal cells (this can
carry over two generations if someone is pregnant - the stress then
applies to the cells that would become the germinal cells of the
foetus). That’s not even addressing the environmental confounding
factors. When confronted with their lack of an actual genetic
explanation, HBD will fall back to utterly bizarre retorts like “uuuh
you don’t need to find genes for something to be grounded in
genetics”.
Literally every public HBD proponent operates outside academia and is
virtually unknown in the genomics community. They are known to make up
their own journals (from Mankind Quarterly to OpenPsych) so they can
publish in them instead of trying to get accepted in mainstream ones.
“Everyone is in a conspiracy against me” only goes so far as an
argument. On the other hand, literally every public figure in the
genomics community has spoken against HBD. Generally speaking, HBD
proponents are unqualified. Their understanding of genetics and
evolution does not go beyond high school, none of them hold a degree in
a discipline relevant to genetics and none of them has ever published in
a high profile journal. (I’m going to be charitable and assume that high
profile means IF > 4). HBD proponents are more interested in
shitposting on the internet than publishing genetics papers and going to
conferences.
Literally anyone who’s been working on HBD stuff has been receiving
funding from shady organizations like the Pioneer Fund whose express
purpose is to prove a hierarchy of races and justify eugenics since the
1930s so their neutrality can be questioned.
Many public HBD figures have been found guilty of fraud. Cyril Burt
would literally forge results, while Lynn would take the average of two
neighbouring countries’ IQ in order to derive “data” from a country’s
unknown national IQ. HBD proponents actually doubled down on this
practice. People like Rushton would attempt to transpose pleiotropy
mechanisms from some species to humans, despite the explicit
insistence that such mechanisms were not adaptable because the genetics
behind skin colors in humans are completely different from that of
species governed by pleiotropy. Other people like Kanazawa would write a
paper literally assuming the Earth was flat, and it was accepted in a
“high profile” journal like Intelligence in three weeks.
Each one of those should be a debunking, but of course HBD proponents
don’t really care about any of those; as I said, none of them has ever
been really involved in the actual scientific community. The whole point
is to give an appearance of scholarship under the guise of clever
sounding citations and lengthy papers, nevermind that those are in bogus
journals from fields that are virtually unknown of the broader genomics
community.
> Other people like Kanazawa would write papers literally assuming the Earth was flat
I have to know what the story behind this is, that sounds amazing
Holy shit, what a fucking hack.
Also worth noting that Kanazawa's thesis is not actually novel, but has been one of the cornerstones of scientific racism for like a hundred fucking years. The fact that the reviewers in a journal dedicated to *intelligence* apparently weren't aware of that is... troubling.
That journal and a few others have had their editorial board captured by a handful of scientific racists allowing this shit through for decades. It's troubling to say the least.
The Frontiers family of journals will publish any garbage as long as they get paid. Not saying that there aren’t any worthwile papers there, but they have an abysmally low rejection rate and have published AIDS denialism, chemtrails tinhattery, anti-vaxx stuff and some batshit insane papers like 'bread makes people mentally ill' or 'neural correlates of communicating with the deceased (taking the communication w the deceased as fact, not as subjective experience)'
i think it's pretty telling that for all their semi-predatory practices Frontiers in Genetics's IF is like 3.5 which is still higher than Intelligence's lol. imagine having the most prominent journal of your field trail a journal geneticists use for their third-hand rejects
I've found with Frontiers it can really matter which particular journal and at what time. Frontiers in Plant Science is generally regarded pretty well and has an IF of like 4.3 and Frontiers in Genetics is also regarded fairly well, but others are less reliable and trusted by people. I think the editorial board at the time really matters in terms of quality.
Impact factor- it's the average number of times an article is cited from a journal over two years. So impact factor of 4 means articles in that journal have on average 4 citations after 2 years. It's a very rough, and somewhat game-able metric of journal quality
If IQ is genetic though couldn't we compare it to a complex trait like height? There are pretty large differences in height between countries and different ethnic groups.
RE: Genetic diversity, isnt there the complicating issue of genetic diversity not neccessarily leading to phenotypical diversity? Eg. Dogs are fairly different phenotypically because of their inbreeding (that we have done, mostly) and the same thing being true with most domesticated species?
Firstly, IQ and intelligence are not the same thing, as the existence
of high-IQ dumbasses aptly demonstrates. Researchers use IQ because
that’s something that can be measured, intelligence tests that don’t correlate
well with IQ are thrown out.
Secondly, the Flynn effect shows
that the average IQ in developed countries went up by around 15 points
in 3 generations (too soon for major genetic change). This proves that
IQ differences between groups can be greatly affected by environmental
factors. The difference in “IQ” between races today is generally found
to be in the same ballpark, and one of those races is still oppressed
and lags in wealth and education. It doesn’t take a genius to figure out
the most likely explanation here.
Concise version: If you assume from the beginning that there’s no
such thing as institutionalized bias, or that it ended in 1965 or 2008
or whenever and all lingering effects of the past were immediately wiped
clean, then of course when you see minorities on the low side of an
achievement gap, you’ll run out of other explanations besides
genetics.
But do read the article, because race-scientists have a tendency to
reveal other dubious facets of their character besides making one big
assumption.
Also, if you like YouTube rants, Saun on YT has a long (2hr!) video essay taking on "The Bell Curve" & the way it plays fast and loose with population statistics to draw incredibly tendentious conclusions, couched in a kind of deniable "well, what if things were like this?" just asking questions prose which serves mainly as a shield for the authors to hide behind.
Agustin Fuentes’ Race, Monogamy, and Other Lies They Told You. It’s
not as concise as a reddit post because you can’t fit it in one, but it
is probably as concise an overview of basic biological anthropology and
HBD myth debunking as you can get. There’s also his lecture on race
[here](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KqPdo7TTbWA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KqPdo7TTbWA).
u/wallofsneer has listed great reasons to be skeptical of the
arguments reasoning forward from genetics. There are some basic “smell
tests” that it also doesn’t pass when you reason backward from economic
outcomes. Without even mentioning IQ, I find it very suspicious that
- Most of us nine generations ago, pre-Industrial Revolution, were
either peasants, serfs, or otherwise part of an underclass, while today
there is much less dispersion of economic fortunes (the extent of which
varies a lot across societies);
- There have been dramatic reversals of fortune in countries’
economic circumstances within single human lifetimes (Argentina 1930s,
Singapore);
- Randomized controlled trials that change quite minor aspects of
schooling (like the Tennessee STAR experiment, which randomly allocated
class sizes) find statistically significant and practically large
effects.
These seem to me to be extremely difficult to reconcile with the
belief that only 15-25% of the variation in economic outcomes can be
affected by environmental interventions.
Just to add on to what other people have already said.
I’m studying pharmacology, and that involves a lot of wet lab work,
with various experimental models (yeast, bacteria, mice, etc…). And even
when working with literally cloned animals genetically engineered to be
perfect for a certain experiment, it can still sometimes be hard to get
consistent results. Sometimes a clone just doesn’t respond to a stimuli
in the expected way, despite the fact that we know it should, or how all
of its genetic duplicates did respond the ‘right’ way. And this is for
organisms with behaviour as relatively ‘simple’ as yeast, never-mind
humans.
Genetics is a really, really complex subject. It’s not rocket science
- it’s 5x messier and at least twice as hard.
So any IQ scientist that tells you that their human study actually
controlled for all possible environmental variables, and that their
results are truly and totally based on genetic factors (when we can’t
even guarantee that working with genetically engineered yeast, in a
perfectly sterile lab!) is full of shit.
A debunking of the flat earth doesn't exist. If it existed, it would be stickied to the top of this subreddit and you wouldn't need to have asked this question.
To be fair, you have to have a very high IQ to understand Sam Harris. His politics are extremely subtle, and without a solid grasp of theoretical physics most of the jokes will go over a typical viewer's head. There's also Sam's's nihilistic outlook, which is deftly woven into his characterisation- his personal philosophy draws heavily from Narodnaya Volya literature, for instance. The fans understand this stuff; they have the intellectual capacity to truly appreciate the depths of these jokes, to realise that they're not just funny- they say something deep about LIFE. As a consequence people who dislike Sam Harris truly ARE idiots- of course they wouldn't appreciate, for instance, the humour in Sam's existential catchphrase "When you want to argue over the treatment of woman and intellectuals in the muslim world, I would argue liberals have failed us" which itself is a cryptic reference to Turgenev's Russian epic Fathers and Sons. I'm smirking right now just imagining one of those addlepated simpletons scratching their heads in confusion as Dan Harmon's genius wit unfolds itself on their television screens. What fools.. how I pity them. 😂
And yes, by the way, i DO have a Sam Harris tattoo. And no, you cannot see it. It's for the ladies' eyes only- and even then they have to demonstrate that they're within 5 IQ points of my own (preferably lower) beforehand. Nothin personnel kid 😎
we don't care about shutting down IQ types. they are irrelevant in the scientific community and pretty much don't exist outside the internet. this sub exists to vent about rationalists and the turning point for many people here was doing actual science and realizing how full of shit rationalist and sam harris types were all along.
it also means that if you want a thoroughly good point by point rebuttal to literally everything hbd, you're going to have to pay us to write it, just like we get paid to write anything professional ever. /u/stairway-to-kevin wrote a nice one on his grant funds but he's way more thorough and patient than me, *and* he's getting a publication out of this. unlike internet shitposters we don't get off of doing that kind of stuff for free.
God if I wasn't independently funded by NSF and worked on this mostly during my qualifying exams it probably wouldn't have happened. Good science takes so much time
excuse me but I spent hours - hours! - working on this 10,000-word blog post, not even including my literature survey on youtube, and I believe you'll find it absolutely eviscerates your abstract
> How are these things comparable at all?
[ask your buddy Satoshi](https://www.reddit.com/r/SneerClub/comments/gmwst1/what_is_the_most_concise_debunking_of_hbd_if_it/fr73mrr/?context=1)
Human biodiversity is actually pretty low - Homo sapiens has been through a number of bottlenecks and when compared to other species, such as our closest relatives like chimpanzees, we’d look like inbreeds.
Human migrations over the last thousand years have been such that literally everyone on Earth is a descendant of literally everyone that lived 7000 years ago whose offspring didn’t die out. This is known as the Identical Ancestors Point (google it) and it’s pretty uncontroversial if unintuitive. You can easily derive it by reasoning the other way around: simply put, the probability that anyone lived 7000 years ago and wasn’t one of your ancestors given the amount of potential ancestors you’d be supposed to have (which is 2^(7000/generation time)) is low enough to be considered negligible. And 7000 years ago is a pretty conservative estimate.
Africans have more genetic diversity than literally every other ethnicity on earth taken together, so any classification that separates “Africans” from other groups is going to be suspect.
Race isn’t a valid construct, genetically speaking. It’s not well defined; even HBD proponents disagree on how to classify people beyond Blacks/Whites/Asians. Most of the definitions are based on self reports or continents of origin, when we know what is considered “black” in the US may not be so in, say, Brazil, or that many people from Africa can very well be considered “white”. Of course most HBD proponents are from the US and are hardly aware of other countries’ existence apart from their national IQ so they just handwave it away.
Intelligence is not well-defined and not construct valid. There’s no single definition of intelligence on which people from different fields can agree. (Among other things, this is why AI specialists have been struggling with “general AI” for the better part of a century)
IQ has a number of flaws that would make anyone outside the field of psychology not touch it with a ten foot pole. For starters, it is by definition Gaussian for no apparent reason. The g construct itself has no neurological basis and is purely an artifact of factor analysis.
Twin studies are flawed in methodology - not even going into details like assuming shared environment, twins simply do not share the same DNA. Yes, even identical twins.
Evolution isn’t just mutations + natural selection. To assume that diversity just arose from different populations adapting to different environments is already a pretty huge assumption that none of the HBD proponents cares to back up. Not every trait is an adaptation.
There’s no single genetic explanation that was ever put forward to account for traits purported to be “genetic” in origin by HBD proponents. This is because HBD proponents do not care about genes, and because they do not know about anything related to genetic mechanisms. Epistasis alone fucks up many behavioral genetics models and this is just scratching the surface of the complexity involved.
Heritability does not imply genetic determinism. Many things are heritable and do not involve genes. These include epigenetic mechanisms, microbiota, or even environmental stress on germinal cells (this can carry over two generations if someone is pregnant - the stress then applies to the cells that would become the germinal cells of the foetus). That’s not even addressing the environmental confounding factors. When confronted with their lack of an actual genetic explanation, HBD will fall back to utterly bizarre retorts like “uuuh you don’t need to find genes for something to be grounded in genetics”.
Literally every public HBD proponent operates outside academia and is virtually unknown in the genomics community. They are known to make up their own journals (from Mankind Quarterly to OpenPsych) so they can publish in them instead of trying to get accepted in mainstream ones. “Everyone is in a conspiracy against me” only goes so far as an argument. On the other hand, literally every public figure in the genomics community has spoken against HBD. Generally speaking, HBD proponents are unqualified. Their understanding of genetics and evolution does not go beyond high school, none of them hold a degree in a discipline relevant to genetics and none of them has ever published in a high profile journal. (I’m going to be charitable and assume that high profile means IF > 4). HBD proponents are more interested in shitposting on the internet than publishing genetics papers and going to conferences.
Literally anyone who’s been working on HBD stuff has been receiving funding from shady organizations like the Pioneer Fund whose express purpose is to prove a hierarchy of races and justify eugenics since the 1930s so their neutrality can be questioned.
Many public HBD figures have been found guilty of fraud. Cyril Burt would literally forge results, while Lynn would take the average of two neighbouring countries’ IQ in order to derive “data” from a country’s unknown national IQ. HBD proponents actually doubled down on this practice. People like Rushton would attempt to transpose pleiotropy mechanisms from some species to humans, despite the explicit insistence that such mechanisms were not adaptable because the genetics behind skin colors in humans are completely different from that of species governed by pleiotropy. Other people like Kanazawa would write a paper literally assuming the Earth was flat, and it was accepted in a “high profile” journal like Intelligence in three weeks.
Each one of those should be a debunking, but of course HBD proponents don’t really care about any of those; as I said, none of them has ever been really involved in the actual scientific community. The whole point is to give an appearance of scholarship under the guise of clever sounding citations and lengthy papers, nevermind that those are in bogus journals from fields that are virtually unknown of the broader genomics community.
Firstly, IQ and intelligence are not the same thing, as the existence of high-IQ dumbasses aptly demonstrates. Researchers use IQ because that’s something that can be measured, intelligence tests that don’t correlate well with IQ are thrown out.
Secondly, the Flynn effect shows that the average IQ in developed countries went up by around 15 points in 3 generations (too soon for major genetic change). This proves that IQ differences between groups can be greatly affected by environmental factors. The difference in “IQ” between races today is generally found to be in the same ballpark, and one of those races is still oppressed and lags in wealth and education. It doesn’t take a genius to figure out the most likely explanation here.
Here’s a good takedown of Charles Murray featuring his lesser-known but much more revealing works, if that’s the kind of thing you’re looking for.
Concise version: If you assume from the beginning that there’s no such thing as institutionalized bias, or that it ended in 1965 or 2008 or whenever and all lingering effects of the past were immediately wiped clean, then of course when you see minorities on the low side of an achievement gap, you’ll run out of other explanations besides genetics.
But do read the article, because race-scientists have a tendency to reveal other dubious facets of their character besides making one big assumption.
Agustin Fuentes’ Race, Monogamy, and Other Lies They Told You. It’s not as concise as a reddit post because you can’t fit it in one, but it is probably as concise an overview of basic biological anthropology and HBD myth debunking as you can get. There’s also his lecture on race [here](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KqPdo7TTbWA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KqPdo7TTbWA).
Is it overly self-promoting to cite my own work here https://osf.io/preprints/socarxiv/2qfkt/ should be published soon btw
u/wallofsneer has listed great reasons to be skeptical of the arguments reasoning forward from genetics. There are some basic “smell tests” that it also doesn’t pass when you reason backward from economic outcomes. Without even mentioning IQ, I find it very suspicious that
- Most of us nine generations ago, pre-Industrial Revolution, were either peasants, serfs, or otherwise part of an underclass, while today there is much less dispersion of economic fortunes (the extent of which varies a lot across societies);
- There have been dramatic reversals of fortune in countries’ economic circumstances within single human lifetimes (Argentina 1930s, Singapore);
- Randomized controlled trials that change quite minor aspects of schooling (like the Tennessee STAR experiment, which randomly allocated class sizes) find statistically significant and practically large effects.
These seem to me to be extremely difficult to reconcile with the belief that only 15-25% of the variation in economic outcomes can be affected by environmental interventions.
You have to define it concisely before you can debunk it concisely. I humbly submit this subreddit’s previous endeavor into that area. I defy you to debunk any of those legitimate scientific observations.
Just to add on to what other people have already said.
I’m studying pharmacology, and that involves a lot of wet lab work, with various experimental models (yeast, bacteria, mice, etc…). And even when working with literally cloned animals genetically engineered to be perfect for a certain experiment, it can still sometimes be hard to get consistent results. Sometimes a clone just doesn’t respond to a stimuli in the expected way, despite the fact that we know it should, or how all of its genetic duplicates did respond the ‘right’ way. And this is for organisms with behaviour as relatively ‘simple’ as yeast, never-mind humans.
Genetics is a really, really complex subject. It’s not rocket science - it’s 5x messier and at least twice as hard.
So any IQ scientist that tells you that their human study actually controlled for all possible environmental variables, and that their results are truly and totally based on genetic factors (when we can’t even guarantee that working with genetically engineered yeast, in a perfectly sterile lab!) is full of shit.
[removed]
Here’s a random list of sources
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3737365/
http://gentlecynic.net/Articles/IQ%20and%20Global%20Inequality.pdf
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/01/100121155220.htm
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/unique-everybody-else/201210/the-pseudoscience-race-differences-in-penis-size
http://raceandiqmyths.blogspot.com/
http://raceandiqmyths.blogspot.com/2016/10/fake-chinese-iq-studies-richard-lynn.html
https://www.bmj.com/content/335/7633/1308
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/06/180625122437.htm
http://people.virginia.edu/~ent3c/papers2/nisbett2012int.pdf
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/338044465_Race_and_gender_in_methodologically_flawed_work_of_Richard_Lynn
https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/01/africans-carry-surprising-amount-neanderthal-dna
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/22233090/
Enjoy :)
[deleted]