Source: Telegraph
One of the most popular posts on my blog has been about the race and IQ. Since as early as I can remember there have been some very interesting debates around this issue and it still raises as much passion as ever.
Channel 4 are going to starting a series discussing issues around race. The leading programme is Race: Science’s Last Taboo and is being chaired by Omar Rageh where he challenges the concept of race and intelligence.
Is this Debate Worth Having?
There are a number of people who will wonder why Channel 4, famous for it’s controversial programmes, will air such a show, especially in Black History Month. I feel a bit more comforted in that Oona King, has sanctioned this to go through, so it’s more about challenging notions than massaging some twisted right wing thinking.
I personally think the more we talk about the notions around race and especially from a scientific perspective the better. It is a lack of discussion that led to many of the eugenics driven horrors of the holocaust in Germany and the less spoken of differences in the Rwanda genocide. Whilst I do not share the views held by Prof Watson and Rushton I think a concrete argument around this is neccesary.
The Bell Curve
In 1994 the Bell Curve was published. This book written by Harvard psychologist Richard J. Herrnstein and American Enterprise Institute political scientist Charles Murray focused on intelligence and success. Their most controversial section focused on race and intelligence and has sparked debate ever since and much of the rest of the book about differing success based on intelligence between the classes.
The thing is this. In many arguments people get incredibly emotive. That’s a given. However if we are ever going to get to the bottom of an argument on this we need to look at all the facts. For example, many people will not lose any hair over the supposed advantage athletes of afro descent have in major games while hardly being represented in swimming (Did I go there?). However when it comes down to IQ well that hits a real sore spot.
Just Watch First
Like many controversial programmes the hype around the programme is always going to create debate. Let’s not make a judgement before the show has been aired. Watch the show. Dissect the information. Stand away from the emotive side of it and then let’s have a sensible debate around this.
Channel 4’s Race: Science’s Last Taboo season of documentaries begins on October 26 2009.
Getting people to be objective about this is very hard. Steven Pinker & Alan Dershowitz have a paper at Harvard on discussing taboo subjects such as this.
Princeton Bio-ethicist Peter Singer wrote about the James Watson controversy:
“Yet to say that we should not carry out research in this area is equivalent to saying that we should reject open-minded investigation of the causes of inequalities in income, education, and health between people of different racial or ethnic groups. When faced with such major social problems, a preference for ignorance over knowledge is difficult to defend.”
http://www.utilitarian.net/singer/by/200711–.htm
In the recent edition of Nature, Bruce Lahn & Lanny Ebenstein have written a piece “Let’s Celebrate Human Genetic Diversity”.
“A growing body of data is revealing the nature of human genetic diversity at increasingly finer resolution1, 2. It is now recognized that despite the high degree of genetic similarities that bind humanity together as a species, considerable diversity exists at both individual and group levels (see box, page 728). The biological significance of these variations remains to be explored fully. But enough evidence has come to the fore to warrant the question: what if scientific data ultimately demonstrate that genetically based biological variation exists at non-trivial levels not only among individuals but also among groups? In our view, the scientific community and society at large are ill-prepared for such a possibility. We need a moral response to this question that is robust irrespective of what research uncovers about human diversity. Here, we argue for the moral position that genetic diversity, from within or among groups, should be embraced and celebrated as one of humanity’s chief assets.”
http://www.gnxp.com/blog/Lahn.pdf
Jonathan Haidt at University of Virginia has written on this subject also in terms of progress on the Human Genome Project:
“FASTER EVOLUTION MEANS MORE ETHNIC DIFFERENCES
The most offensive idea in all of science for the last 40 years is the possibility that behavioral differences between racial and ethnic groups have some genetic basis. Knowing nothing but the long-term offensiveness of this idea, a betting person would have to predict that as we decode the genomes of people around the world, we’re going to find deeper differences than most scientists now expect. Expectations, after all, are not based purely on current evidence; they are biased, even if only slightly, by the gut feelings of the researchers, and those gut feelings include disgust toward racism..
A wall has long protected respectable evolutionary inquiry from accusations of aiding and abetting racism. That wall is the belief that genetic change happens at such a glacial pace that there simply was not time, in the 50,000 years since humans spread out from Africa, for selection pressures to have altered the genome in anything but the most trivial way (e.g., changes in skin color and nose shape were adaptive responses to cold climates). Evolutionary psychology has therefore focused on the Pleistocene era – the period from about 1.8 million years ago to the dawn of agriculture — during which our common humanity was forged for the hunter-gatherer lifestyle.
But the writing is on the wall. Russian scientists showed in the 1990s that a strong selection pressure (picking out and breeding only the tamest fox pups in each generation) created what was — in behavior as well as body — essentially a new species in just 30 generations. That would correspond to about 750 years for humans. Humans may never have experienced such a strong selection pressure for such a long period, but they surely experienced many weaker selection pressures that lasted far longer, and for which some heritable personality traits were more adaptive than others. It stands to reason that local populations (not continent-wide “races”) adapted to local circumstances by a process known as “co-evolution” in which genes and cultural elements change over time and mutually influence each other. The best documented example of this process is the co-evolution of genetic mutations that maintain the ability to fully digest lactose in adulthood with the cultural innovation of keeping cattle and drinking their milk. This process has happened several times in the last 10,000 years, not to whole “races” but to tribes or larger groups that domesticated cattle.
Recent “sweeps” of the genome across human populations show that hundreds of genes have been changing during the last 5-10 millennia in response to local selection pressures. (See papers by Benjamin Voight, Scott Williamson, and Bruce Lahn). No new mental modules can be created from scratch in a few millennia, but slight tweaks to existing mechanisms can happen quickly, and small genetic changes can have big behavioral effects, as with those Russian foxes. We must therefore begin looking beyond the Pleistocene and turn our attention to the Holocene era as well – the last 10,000 years. This was the period after the spread of agriculture during which the pace of genetic change sped up in response to the enormous increase in the variety of ways that humans earned their living, formed larger coalitions, fought wars, and competed for resources and mates.
The protective “wall” is about to come crashing down, and all sorts of uncomfortable claims are going to pour in. Skin color has no moral significance, but traits that led to Darwinian success in one of the many new niches and occupations of Holocene life — traits such as collectivism, clannishness, aggressiveness, docility, or the ability to delay gratification — are often seen as virtues or vices. Virtues are acquired slowly, by practice within a cultural context, but the discovery that there might be ethnically-linked genetic variations in the ease with which people can acquire specific virtues is — and this is my prediction — going to be a “game changing” scientific event. (By “ethnic” I mean any group of people who believe they share common descent, actually do share common descent, and that descent involved at least 500 years of a sustained selection pressure, such as sheep herding, rice farming, exposure to malaria, or a caste-based social order, which favored some heritable behavioral predispositions and not others.)
I believe that the “Bell Curve” wars of the 1990s, over race differences in intelligence, will seem genteel and short-lived compared to the coming arguments over ethnic differences in moralized traits. I predict that this “war” will break out between 2012 and 2017.
There are reasons to hope that we’ll ultimately reach a consensus that does not aid and abet racism. I expect that dozens or hundreds of ethnic differences will be found, so that any group — like any person — can be said to have many strengths and a few weaknesses, all of which are context-dependent. Furthermore, these cross-group differences are likely to be small when compared to the enormous variation within ethnic groups and the enormous and obvious effects of cultural learning. But whatever consensus we ultimately reach, the ways in which we now think about genes, groups, evolution and ethnicity will be radically changed by the unstoppable progress of the human genome project.”
http://www.edge.org/q2009/q09_4.html#haidt
Apparently the show relied on the Lewontin Fallacy (more within group gene variation than between group variation). This was debunked in 2003 by Cambridge geneticist AWF Edwards. The problem is that it overlooks the correlations and that genes vary in frequency across groups.
It also made efforts to tar iq tests with bad things in history but overlooked the fact that Stalin and Hitler banned IQ testing. In Hitler’s case he banned them because Jews did well on them.
IQ tests actually have a progressive background in allowing working class kids with academic ability to get into Colleges previously only for the rich.
hartford-hwp.com/archives/45/129.html
Tests aren’t perfect but they predict academic performance very well. More recently neuroscientists have identified that people have quite distinct brain characteristics which correlate with iq test performance. These include cortical thickness, myelination quality and efficiency in processing info.
UCLA neuroscientist Paul Thompson & Yale Psychologist Jeremy Gray summarize these findings here.
loni.ucla.edu/~thompson/PDF/nrn0604-GrayThompson.pdf
5. These traits are significantly heritable.
“The UCLA researchers took the study a step further by comparing the white matter architecture of identical twins, who share almost all their DNA, and fraternal twins, who share only half. Results showed that the quality of the white matter is highly genetically determined, although the influence of genetics varies by brain area. According to the findings, about 85 percent of the variation in white matter in the parietal lobe, which is involved in mathematics, logic, and visual-spatial skills, can be attributed to genetics. But only about 45 percent of the variation in the temporal lobe, which plays a central role in learning and memory, appears to be inherited.
Thompson and his collaborators also analyzed the twins’ DNA, and they are now looking for specific genetic variations that are linked to the quality of the brain’s white matter. The researchers have already found a candidate–the gene for a protein called BDNF, which promotes cell growth. “People with one variation have more intact fibers,” says Thompson.”
technologyreview.com/biomedicine/22333/
6. Many genes have undergone significant change over the past 10,000 years so the possibility that groups would differ to some extent on average is not implausible.
“Dec. 10, 2007 – Researchers discovered genetic evidence that human evolution is speeding up – and has not halted or proceeded at a constant rate, as had been thought – indicating that humans on different continents are becoming increasingly different.
“We used a new genomic technology to show that humans are evolving rapidly, and that the pace of change has accelerated a lot in the last 40,000 years, especially since the end of the Ice Age roughly 10,000 years ago,” says research team leader Henry Harpending, a distinguished professor of anthropology at the University of Utah.
Harpending says there are provocative implications from the study, published online Monday, Dec. 10 in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences:
“We aren’t the same as people even 1,000 or 2,000 years ago,” he says, which may explain, for example, part of the difference between Viking invaders and their peaceful Swedish descendants. “The dogma has been these are cultural fluctuations, but almost any Temperament trait you look at is under strong genetic influence.”
“Human races are evolving away from each other,” Harpending says. “Genes are evolving fast in Europe, Asia and Africa, but almost all of these are unique to their continent of origin. We are getting less alike, not merging into a single, mixed humanity.” He says that is happening because humans dispersed from Africa to other regions 40,000 years ago, “and there has not been much flow of genes between the regions since then.”
unews.utah.edu/p/?r=120607-1