Right... The anti-police/don't snitch thing is not racial and not necessarily even a poor thing.

My sister lives out in the sticks of Indiana but works as a lawyer in Chicago (lolcommute). Her old boss was federally indicted and the feds came knocking on her door during the day, on a weekday. Obv no answer so they knocked on her white, middle class, redneck-ish neighbor's door and the neighbor told them to **** off. Like, literally, **** off and don't bother my sister or any neighbors. Afterwards the neighbor said it was a perfect example of why she doesn't trust and help the police, because they're shady, her words. This is ****ing rural Indiana.

Lol wil?

Lets start with evolution. People evolved in different environments. Skin, hair, height, noses, penises, and even susceptibility and immunity to disease have been a part of evolution in groups. To pretend that somehow all of that has evolved with group variations yet the brain evolved the same is ridiculous. I think people are being willfully dense in order to fit their pc narrative. Its like a backwards equation where they start with everyone is the same and then pat themselves on the back for being such a great and progressive person

Also "intellegence" is complex. Juggling is a demonstration of intellegence that isn't going to show up on an iq test. Groups evolved differently in all ways. This will manifest itself in different behavior patterns in our current environment

Of course "black culture" is an oversimplification or a broad generalization at best. But what is toxic and useless in discovering some truths about human behavior and genetics is shouting people down as racist for pointing out factual differences and using the default ******ed line of "it's not all....."

It think a lot of cultural norms are based on genetics. Genetics are based on evolution

The funny thing i see in all these discussions is the lack of understanding of what we are and where we came from. Watch the planet earth series or just youtube the portion about chimps. When resources get low they plan and execute an invasion of a rival tribes terrritory. We share 98.8% dna. This behavior explains everything to what we see when we look at countries on a map, politics, how we behave around sports and the fan bases, to clustering of groups in neighborhoods. Until we recognize our tribal tendancies and rationalize with our monkey tendencies, we will be doing circles around our bull**** theories and feel-good stories

Race and crime come down to this. Family structure and family values. Stats show that family structure is the biggest predictor of success and failure. Stats show that there is a big difference racially here. Thats a behavior individuals choose, not some fault of society

No one has to pretend anything. We're allowed to evaluate the existing evidence. This goes back to the discussion with Chris about what is really meant by the phrase "race is a social construction", and the fact that it isn't intended to mean that literally no biological differences between human sub-populations exist. Yet, there is no compelling evidence that social and cultural differences reduce meaningful to biological differences. That isn't an assumption, it isn't something we pretend, it's what the evidence actually demonstrates.

There is no evidence to support this hypothesis and a great deal of evidence to the contrary. I recommend you do some basic reading in Anthropology.

Family structure and family values are primarily socially constructed, not biological primitives. Again a basic course in cultural anthropology would be of use to you. Beyond that, many posts in this thread provide arguments against your hypothesis, presenting evidence and analysis to support alternative conclusions. You have provided no evidence and no argument to support your assertions. I suggest you read the thread.

I should probably be clearer. Obviously genetics and biology play some role in all human behavior. If all that were meant by "cultural norms are based in genetics" was that humans are hominids, it wouldn't be particularly contentious. But, the question we're discussing, and the assertion being made, is about the diversity of human cultural norms, and whether or not cultural differences reduce in some neat way to biological differences.

The evidence suggests very strongly that they do not. That is not to say that biology plays no role in human culture, but biology doesn't explain very much about racialized crime rates in the US. It doesn't explain differences between the Yanomamo and other Amazonian tribes. It doesn't explain why Pueblo culture is distinct from the Apache, or French from German, and so on and so forth.

The future of an illusion

They don't happen to listen to the raps in rural Indiana, do they?

.........Yet

Remember that our dna is 98.8% chimp. Again i started with mentioning evolution for a reason. Any dope who understands evolution gets the fact that our environment shapes how we evolve. You can't just invent ships and jets and have that all disappear in 100 years of us being neighbors. The differences in humans and chimps is enourmous. The difference in different human races is miniscule. But its clearly exists. Its obviously going to be challenging to disect scientifically. This type of work gets no funding because at the end of the day the work is "racist" and so will the results be. Its a road thats not worth going down for science at this point. At the end of the day we should be treated as equals so discovering our differences in a scientific way is going to be limited to medical purposes for the time being

Again looking at all the physical differences in race and then assuming we have the same cognitive skill set (our brains evoveld the same) is just comically stupid. It contradicts the theory of evolution which is what produced "races" in the first place. I don't care if there is no proof. Theres a lot of things you can't prove that are logically ridiculous. Someone acting certain that earth has the only carbon based life in the universe is silly but we can't prove that wrong either

Cognitive differnces, slightly different skill sets will certainly manifest itself in to behavior/ culture. This is going to change as the world gets smaller through exposure

Imagine on the south pole that the average man is 5'10 170lbs and the average woman is 5'6 110lbs. On the north pole the reverse is true. Do you really think the "culture" will just be something irrelevant to biology? What about an environment that rewards the man for taking care of themselves and reproducing with as many partners as possible vs an environment that rewards a tight family structure? Does that just disappear when you invent ships and jets but somehow the melanin inour skin stays the same? Our differnces are minuscule and its going to be extremely challenging and controversial to prove them scientifically, but starting from the position that you have to prove they exist is just dense. We can physically see evolutionary difference, theyre obvious. Pretending we have the same thought patterns and cognitive strenghts is absurd. That manifests itself in to behavior

The topic is race and crime in the usa. The answer is we know statistically that poor family structure is the biggest factor in crime. We know that racially family structure falls apart in the same areas crime rates go up. Nobody is interfering with peoples breeding habits and decision to raise there kids as a family, those are individual choices that are amount to huge statistical differences in race

Another tidbit to ponder. Doping experts in sports say africans on average have higher testosterone ratios, asians less than whites. If this is true then can you pretend hormone levels don't impact behavior? Last time i checked women aren't committing much crime. This isnt my theory but at this point the doping experts comments explain crime rates in the usa. Testosterone ratios could be the a great predictor of crime (but not the reason). My point is that our biology impacts behavior/ "culture". Most of it is far too complex and subtle to accurately measure

There's a tremendous amount of research on race in biological anthropology. Some of it has been discussed in this thread. I haven't seen any evidence that genetics research is suppressed due to "political correctness" or objections about racist interpretations. You correctly note that large differences between chimps and humans rest on relatively small genetic differences, but that doesn't really get you anywhere. The argument, and here again this has been hashed out already in the thread, is not that it's theoretically impossible for biological differences to be important, but that there is very little evidence to support the conclusion that they are. You want to cast the discussion as one in which one side assumes the conclusion that biological differences are mostly uninformative, but that is not correct.

We don't have to assume anything. You're also again demonstrating that you haven't read the thread, because some of this was covered in the discussion with ChrisV. I even briefly discussed The Bell Curve, which quite infamously discussed genetics as an explanation for differences in intelligence. Except that even in that book the authors found a limited role for biological explanations, as was pointed out by the authors of Inequality by Design:


It's not clear to me what you mean by this. If you only mean that Darwin's theory led to early anthropologists and others constructing racial theories of human difference based in evolution, then fair enough, but that's not evidence that those theories were correct.

If you mean that evolution has created meaningful genetic sub-populations correlated to race, where "meaningful" means that differences in culture are supposed to be explained by the genetic differences, then the evidence suggests that conclusion is false.

We reject biological reductionism not just because of a lack of evidence, but because the positive evidence strongly points to the conclusion that socio-cultural diversity doesn't reduce easily to biology. The conclusion is not that your views are wrong because there is no proof, but that your views are wrong because they are contradicted by the available evidence.

I don't understand the purpose of using a hypothetical here rather than citing some actual physical differences between some real populations, but in any case the conclusion that "culture" and "biology" are interdependent is granted. In fact, cultural differences can create biological adaptations over time. Lactase persistence, which allows Europeans (and some others) to consume dairy products as adults is a well-known example, where cultural changes involving the domestication of animals led over time to a genetic adaptation. Again, no one is assuming that biology is totally irrelevant. The argument is that the evidence suggests that biology doesn't explain racialized crime rates in the US. That is the argument the OP tries to make, and which is supported very strongly by research in anthropology, sociology, and criminology. One of the reasons for this is that human social behavior is orders of magnitude more complex than the genetic basis for lactase persistence.

We don't actually know this. We know that there are correlations between crime and family stability just as their are correlations between crime, poverty, income inequality, and other socio-economic factors. It is not easy to disentangle causation here, and there's no reason to assume the causation is simple.

We also know that these same areas endure a much higher and more severe concentration of poverty. The evidence suggests this concentration of poverty is overwhelmingly a consequence of historical systemic racism and lingering discrimination, not biological difference. Again, teasing out causation in the relationship between poverty and crime is not simple, but the OP (and others elsewhere) argue persuasively that this is the best interpretation of the available evidence. Strain theories, for example, provide a fairly good way of conceptualizing the relationship between poverty and crime as well as between poverty and the breakdown of family structure. Beyond that, we can also connect social issues involving family structure to racism and mass incarceration, and those explanations are far better than a vague appeal to biological differences.

Mostly, your arguments rest on a non-sequitur. You begin with the true premise that biological differences between human sub-populations exist (and presume that opponents of your conclusion don't accept this premise), and then make the logical leap that therefore racial crime rates rest on genetic differences, even though the available evidence contradicts that conclusion.

Ha! No... When I was out there for a couple of weeks this past 4th of July they blasted Led Zeppelin on a continuous loop. Maybe it was to not offend me, and after I left they went back to NWA's **** The Police.

You give the right answer before exploring the wrong answer. This minuscule (and that word is generous, I'd go with "infinitesimal") difference is why the the topic has no bearing in a sociological discussion, not because it's "racist"

I have to go so i cant really adress all of this but my point is that you cant seperate "culture" from biology. If the thread topic was womens rights in the south pole vs womens rights in the north pole with the example i gave i think the "culture" would be lol different. Same with a culture evolving on a beach with bountiful fruit vs a culture evolving with harsh winters and teamwork hunting. If somehow you think you could stick them together and the only thing evolving is their melanin and they have the same cognitive strenghts, you have a ridiculous understanding of evolution. The reality is far more subtle though

When i talk about the lack of racial research in cognitive strenghts i'm parroting neuro scientist sam harris

If you think that we have different physical characteristics, different hormone levels, different athletic abilities, and the same cognitive strenghts, i think youre being delusional and looking at things backwards. Most people defending that we are all the same like to pat themselves on the back for being superior and progressive while citing that theres no science to disprove them in a field that is intentionally avoiding the topic

Somehow sprinters winning the 100m dash mostly come from 1 area regardless of their nationality. These athletes have superior fast twitch muscle yet they cant compete in swimming. Everything functions slightly different except our thoughts.....sound theory lol.....well at least nobody is bothering to show you are wrong

fast-twitch posting itt

5ive, do you understand the difference between isolated incidents between rivals and danger to public safety?

If so, explain from law enforcement perspective.

Zeppelin were heavily influenced by the earlier blues movement. It's probably why they didn't shoot on sight, but still kept a distance.

I suspect if they'd been listening to nothing but waltz and polka this wouldn't have happened.

To your last sentence, that is probably because I have made none of the claims you are suggesting. For one thing, you are talking about intelligence and cognitive ability, but all of my posts have been about race and crime, with a brief diversion to clarify the concept of race as a social construct and criticism of a few genetics studies using clustering algorithms.

You haven't really offered a coherent thesis about racial disparities in socio-economic status or crime rates, but it appears that you are implying that those disparities owe in some large part to differences in intelligence, and expecting that differences in intelligence reduce to genetic differences. Rather than offer any evidence for that hypothesis, you offer the excuse that evidence isn't available because there isn't sufficient research, or that research is suppressed. You have also ignored evidence that suggests a limited role for intelligence itself in social outcomes (the point of Inequality by Design's criticism of The Bell Curve, or for the limited and complex role of genetic factors in intelligence.

In fact, there is in fact plenty of research on intelligence, environmental and genetic factors, and correlations between intelligence and race. It is not as if we have to begin from pure assumptions. If you want a thorough overview, I recommend you start here: Intelligence: New Findings and Theoretical Developments (Nisbett et al, 2012)

One thing is true, geneticists are not (yet?) able to identify the genes responsible for various traits when those traits are polygenic, even if we know that those traits are highly heritable, like height (cf. page 135 above). So it's reasonable to believe that future improvements in genetics research will shed more light on certain questions about intelligence. But, while you deride people who supposedly assume a lack of biological difference in explanations of racial disparities (an accusation which isn't even true), you yourself seem to want to assume that biological explanations will predominate, even though the overwhelming majority of experts in every relevant field disagree. Nisbett et. al. provide a great many reasons for that disagreement. I will quote some relevant snippets:

On the heritability of IQ:

On the impact of Socio-Economic-Status (SES) to the heritability of IQ:

I snipped out some of the complicating or limiting factors related to this research, and so you should read the full text, but it should be obvious why it these conclusions are relevant to the kind of arguments I've made in this thread. It's not just a question of "nature" vs. "nurture", but even where genes exist there expression is conditioned by environmental factors. As with crime, the data suggests that the racialization of poverty is probably more fundamental than genetics. There is additional evidence to support that conclusion, which I'll quote below...

On research regarding environmental influences on intelligence:

Here the racial difference is closely tied to differences in SES.

On Black-White differences in IQ:

Here again, the racialization of poverty is strongly indicated as the most important factor. Other research shows that Black-White differences in IQ have been shrinking over a time-frame in which genetic factors obviously play no role:

The mechanism by which this has occurred is unknown and perhaps even unknowable, but it's obviously not genetic. It may plausibly speak to environmental improvements in the lives of Black people during this time period.

Finally, Nisbett et. al. cite research that relates very neatly to claims I've made about Strain Theory as an explanation for racial disparities in crime rates:

The poorest far-below-the-poverty-line Asians dominate the wealthiest upper middle class blacks in the math SAT:



More recent research shows this trend getting stronger. Race - not income or parental education - is the best predictor of SAT scores:

Just something to factor into your considerations when you post subtly but strongly biased research. Race is a greater factor than poverty in SAT scores.

I'm sure you'll shoehorn this data into showing "stereotype bias" - Asians are thought to be good at math which is why they do well on the math tests!

Let me ask you a question since you're reading and posting a lot of research. Just how large is stereotype bias claimed to be when you look over all the studies? I say claimed because there's a strong publication bias toward confirmatory results; the same thing happens in drug trials, although they have much stronger controls.

I was really wondering where you get the exact verbal scores "Mexican" test takers that make between 10-20k? Because I am certain that you simply forgot the citation and didn't just grab this from some racist blog that you have no affiliation with.

I was wondering about the source of the image as well. TinEye suggests it came from this page, which cites this page, which provides some other links I haven't explored.

I'll respond to that post after a while :P

The company that administers the SAT records this data and has since the 1990s. It's a large, rich and reliable dataset for researchers. If you've read research in this field (you clearly haven't), you'd be aware of that.
I googled "SAT scores by race graph" and copied the url of the first suitable image into imgur.

For later data, I linked/quoted "Inside Higher Ed", which has all kinds of education related data. Really, you're scraping the bottom of the barrel with your insinuations.

The left wingers on this board seems to have a strategy of: "Smear anyone who posts any inconvenient truth by claiming it comes from a racist site". I had the same in regular politics when I posted a graph from Pew Polling on Muslim attitudes (from the mouths of Muslims themselves!) - three separate posters questioned the source with hints that it came from a racist site (it didn't) - unless the mouths of Muslims themselves as measured by one of the world's largest polling organizations are a "racist site".

Such is the modus operandi of the dishonest left wing bigots on this site. Fact don't matter; they'll smear however they can when they see something they don't like. All your post has demonstrated is your own narrow minded bigotry.

TS makes an uncomfortable argument. The left will always argue against any example of people who may overcome the odds against them. It's always racism or economics, and it just gets old.

So you're not really using the population statistics in your decision and that illustrates my point about the usefulness of racial statistics as descriptive of individuals or in social policy. Of course this is valid even when setting aside the problems confounding measurement in the first place when we are focusing on more complex attributes than batting average.

And it is easy to see how those population level statistics could be misused. In practice, decisions are not made on objective criteria such as 100 at bats (never mind the validity of that sample). I would imagine that in this society a high IQ black man with a southern drawl would face never ending challenges in trying to develop his potential- unless he could bat 400.

Even sports can be highly subjective, but outside of sports just bout everything is highly subjective. The last thing needed is already biased simpletons going around making decisions based on their ill-informed views on behavioral genetics and race.

First of all, you've failed to actually state a conclusion here in relation to my post. I think you've implied one, but it would be helpful if you attempted to make your conclusions concrete. Especially here, because as a response to the section of my post which you quoted, and even as a response to my general argument, this appears to be a non-sequitur.

Your implicit argument is that my conclusions about the role of socio-economic factors in IQ testing differences is contradicted by data about SAT scores. But clearly conclusions from research about IQ testing are not contradicted by conclusions from research about SAT test scores. The SAT is not a test of general intelligence. It's a test of knowledge and education. The two are not directly comparable, and research that shows a lack of direct correlation between family income and SAT scores does not invalidate research related to IQ testing.

The other implicit argument appears to be that these SAT results indicate a stronger role for genetic differences between racial groups than environmental/SES differences. When you say "race is a greater factor than poverty", I believe that is what you mean, even though "race" does not actually substitute for genetics. I am presuming that this is your argument because otherwise you wouldn't really be contesting anything that I've actually claimed. I didn't claim that racial differences don't exist. I didn't claim that simple measures of family income accounted for them, in crime rates, IQ testing, or anything else. Even in the OP, I clarified that the relation between poverty and crime was complex and that there were many factors, before focusing in on neighborhood concentration of poverty, a more complex measure than family income. In the post you are responding to, measures of SES used in the studies cited are also more complex than family income. Nor did I claim differences in SES were the only relevant factor. For all of these reasons, I presume the argument you are really trying to make is about the role of genetic differences over against environmental differences.

The problem is that your own sources do not support the conclusion that genetic differences are more important, even for the SAT data you provided. I posted previously the results of a TinEye search on the image, and the blog from which it originated. Some of the citations listed appear to lack any basic credibility, but there is one worth discussing, although it is a study of 2003 SAT data rather than 1995 data. That study is here. The Inside Higher Ed article cites this study. Neither study supports a conclusion that racial differences in SAT scores are the result of genetic differences between races. One of the most basic reasons why not is simply that the trend-line changes in the correlations between race, family income, and SAT performance are too rapid to have any explanation in genetics. Beyond that, your implicit argument relies on a false dichotomy, that either family income explains racial differences or else genetics must. But there are quite obviously other environmental factors that could be in play.

Here is what Geiser (2015), linked from Inside Higher Ed, argues, with some emphasis added:

Really the entire section is worth reading in full, but here you find research relating to SES factors that go well beyond family income, as well as segregation (both within schools and between neighborhoods), alongside the conclusion that genetic factors are contraindicated due to the trend-lines associated with the gaps.

The authors of the 2013 study make less of an attempt to examine racial differences not accounted for by socio-economic differences, but through their literature review and analysis also highlight these factors. Both studies are worth reading and neither contradicts anything that I've claimed.

I considered the "stereotype threat" argument to be of lesser importance to the question about genetics and the environment than the arguments from adoption studies, the Flynn effect, and studies taking into account other environmental factors. That's why I placed it last. I'm not well-read enough to have strong opinion about its importance in the general discourse on intelligence. Like research that shows racial biases in policing, the court system, evaluation of resumes, or responses to the "ban the box" initiative, I certainly believe it is meaningful and well worth taking into account.

I would like to comment more on this. You accuse me of posting "subtly but strongly biased research", yet you posted a link and an image you found after 2 minutes of googling which isn't even related to the previous discussion.. You didn't bother to provide a citation for the image. You also clearly didn't bother to read the study cited by the article you linked. You made no attempt to actually state your argument plainly. Given that the research you cited also supports my arguments, it appears you must think it equally biased? You also, of course, offered no actual argument that the research I've cited is biased.

I have been quite meticulous in my choice of research to cite. I've focused on articles with extensive literature reviews which comment on previous research from multiple perspectives. I've tried to find current research, and studies that are publicly available. I've tried to avoid arguments that weren't supported by multiple studies. When I discussed police shootings, I cited Fryer, who didn't find racial bias, as well as Ross who did. I provided references to genetic theories, and cited and discussed theories about culture even when I disagreed with them. I have been careful to clarify caveats and limitations of studies where necessary.

I have also taken a great deal of time to reply in detail to arguments you and others have offered. I have attempted to do so thoroughly and thoughtfully. On the other hand, you have failed on every occasion to engage with my counter-arguments. You claimed that there was no evidence of police bias in shootings, and I cited Ross. You simply ignored it. You claimed that racial differences in crime rates between Blacks and Asians disproved my arguments. Although you made no attempt to substantiate that claim, I provided a refutation. You weakly pledged to respond to it, but instead simply retreated from the thread, again. Here, rather than respond to the arguments made about IQ, you simply tried to change the subject. You spent no more than 5 minutes googling, dropped a link, made no attempt to explicate its meaning, and clearly failed to even read or appreciate the implications of the research you cited.

In my opinion, your posting has consistently demonstrated a lack of intellectual honesty, and a willful disinterest in engaging in the kind of nuance or consideration you claim to value. I think you should examine your own efforts in this thread before you accuse me of posting in bad faith.

Btw I can't find anything about asking about specific nationalities with regards to the SAT, only ethnicity which means someone probably changed Hispanic to Mexican to more appeal to a certain crowd, if they didn't outright falsify the data.

I am also suspicious of this, and I can't find a legitimate source for SAT score data that references "Mexican" as an ethnicity. On the blog post I found by searching for TS' image, they cite two articles from a "Journal of Blacks in Higher Education," one from 1998 and one from 2008. The two articles have identical titles, and re-use a chart that's supposed to demonstrate the correlation between poverty and SAT test results. Except in the 2008 version they change the date on the otherwise identical chart. The second article has some other modifications. What's odd is that the authors of those two articles aren't actually in favor of any genetics-based explanation of the data, and the 1998 version is actually cited by Dixon-Roman 2013, although not in a way that's particularly important to the article. One of the other sources cited by the blog is another anonymous blogger who seems to be popular in the alt-right blogosphere.

I decided not to focus on those dubious sources in the main part of my response mostly because the two reasonably credible articles have similar enough data, at least for Black-White disparities.

The posting of the graph has a pretty simple point. After reams of studies talking about the negative effects of poverty, I decided to post a graph in which math test results of the poorest of the poor - the most disadvantaged with the most poorly educated parents - do better than the richest of the rich in other races.

This is quite a shocking result. I post it not to push any particular position, merely to offset the reams of self indulgent academic nonsense speculating about the link between poverty and its environmental effects on intelligence and success.

In a mere generation, the poorest Asians rise above the wealthiest, most privileged blacks. So perhaps extreme poverty is NOT as big a factor as people would have you believe. The Jewish experience here is also instructive; as a people they rose out of ghettos, where they heavily stereotyped and discriminated against, often as poor immigrants with few resources and much prejudice against them, to run much of America and have amazingly outsized success in everything from science to business to creative pursuits.

That's not to preclude the stereotype threat (also self indulgent nonsense which is likely a publishing artifact and not even real), or other explanations like the confluence of various environmental factors unique to blacks. It's to show, rather simply, that we should take all of these "environmental factor X is causing poor outcomes for blacks" studies with a big grain of salt.

What research can show us is very little, and we run the risk of thinking we know more than we do. The best we can say from the data is that external environment has some effect of unknown size, but likely at least 1/3 of the gap from the situation of blacks in the 1970s; whether much of the gap remains environmental is an open question (I don't find your trendline argument satisfying, and indeed, the trend has stopped, indicating that the environmental effect may well have been mostly taken out).