Peterson, Harris, etc....

Trequarista10

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I really think the intro to this video misses the point. I've never heard the phrase cultural Marxism used and thought that the person using it was literally implying that it is a Marxist plot or somehow cultivated by Marxists. I've always interpreted it as referring to the well meaning but flawed application of egalitarian solutions to cultural problems, the idea that all inequality is entirely the product of discrimination, racism, sexism.

I do think Peterson's arguments on Marxism are real poor though, so I'm referring solely to the first three minutes of the video. Also the last minute or so I think is an unfair analysis of Peterson. I get that some people may disagree with his world view or solutions (which can be summarised as take self responsibility). But it's a complete mischaracterisation to suggest he's defending the status quo or saying people should accept unfairness or inequality. Perhaps it's because I work in a similiar field to Peterson that I am more inclined to see the origins of his viewpoint and in turn give credit for good intentions, but I've always considered Peterson to be clear and consistent with regards to saying life and society is harsh, brutal and unfair, and your best and only real option is to maximise your own abilities. I haven't listened to his debate with Zizek so I may be overlooking something daft Peterson said (he does say some daft things on occasion), but I know his belief is not that all inequality is natural or fair, just that it's more complicated than being the result of discrimination and exploitation by those in power.

To be honest I dislike all debates about Capitalism vs Marxism because they all end the same way whether it's two esteemed professors or two mates down by the pub putting the world to rights. Both sides end up claiming the other has evil intentions. I used to be a full blown Communist and it was the most difficult thing for me to accept - that some people believe in the free market and Conservative principles because they genuinely believe that is the best model. Its not all born out of self interest and greed. I'm sure it plays a part for many (eg little Englanders, privileged brats born into wealth, or those who have climbed the corporate ladder), but characterising your opponents as all fear mongers or Nazis just misses the point.
 
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Gehrman

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Wouldn't it just have been more correct for Jordan Peterson just to say that the teachers in US academia are overwhelmingly "liberal" by the US definition of liberal and that teachers in european academia are overwhelmingly left wing? Personally I think that would make more sense.

Anyway I enjoyed reading James Lindsay commentary on "Cultural Marxism".

https://newdiscourses.com/tftw-cultural-marxism/
 
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e.cantona

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I really think the intro to this video misses the point. I've never heard the phrase cultural Marxism used and thought that the person using it was literally implying that it is a Marxist plot or somehow cultivated by Marxists. I've always interpreted it as referring to the well meaning but flawed application of egalitarian solutions to cultural problems, the idea that all inequality is entirely the product of discrimination, racism, sexism.

I do think Peterson's arguments on Marxism are real poor though, so I'm referring solely to the first three minutes of the video. Also the last minute or so I think is an unfair analysis of Peterson. I get that some people may disagree with his world view or solutions (which can be summarised as take self responsibility). But it's a complete mischaracterisation to suggest he's defending the status quo or saying people should accept unfairness or inequality. Perhaps it's because I work in a similiar field to Peterson that I am more inclined to see the origins of his viewpoint and in turn give credit for good intentions, but I've always considered Peterson to be clear and consistent with regards to saying life and society is harsh, brutal and unfair, and your best and only real option is to maximise your own abilities. I haven't listened to his debate with Zizek so I may be overlooking something daft Peterson said (he does say some daft things on occasion), but I know his belief is not that all inequality is natural or fair, just that it's more complicated than being the result of discrimination and exploitation by those in power.

To be honest I dislike all debates about Capitalism vs Marxism because they all end the same way whether it's two esteemed professors or two mates down by the pub putting the world to rights. Both sides end up claiming the other has evil intentions. I used to be a full blown Communist and it was the most difficult thing for me to accept - that some people believe in the free market and Conservative principles because they genuinely believe that is the best model. Its not all born out of self interest and greed. I'm sure it plays a part for many (eg little Englanders, privileged brats born into wealth, or those who have climbed the corporate ladder), but characterising your opponents as all fear mongers or Nazis just misses the point.
Well said, all that
 

nimic

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I really think the intro to this video misses the point. I've never heard the phrase ultural Marxism used and thought that the person using it was literally implying that it is a Marxist plot or somehow cultivated by Marxists. I've always interpreted it as referring to the well meaning but flawed application of egalitarian solutions to cultural problems, the idea that all inequality is entirely the product of discrimination, racism, sexism.
Essentially, you've been had. The original meaning of Cultural Marxism is very much a literal Marxist plot to destroy Western civilization, not the much more benign "well meaning but flawed application of egilitarian solutions to cultural problems". It is more or less the successor of Cultural Bolshevism, a term invented by the Nazis.

It is just another dogwhistle, allowing people to raise their hands in mock surprise and exclaim "but I'm just saying...", and to fool people into thinking they are being genuine.
 

Trequarista10

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Essentially, you've been had. The original meaning of Cultural Marxism is very much a literal Marxist plot to destroy Western civilization, not the much more benign "well meaning but flawed application of egilitarian solutions to cultural problems". It is more or less the successor of Cultural Bolshevism, a term invented by the Nazis.

It is just another dogwhistle, allowing people to raise their hands in mock surprise and exclaim "but I'm just saying...", and to fool people into thinking they are being genuine.
I don't really see what relevance the origin of the term has with regards to its current use. The vast vast majority of people (I'd almost argue all people, but I assume their are a couple of extreme exceptions out there) are not attempting to play 5D chess, secretly using coded Nazi language in order to indoctrinate the unsuspecting audience and slowly lead them towards a gradual acceptance of goose stepping Brownshirts patrolling the streets hunting down anyone who questions the natural supremacy of the middle aged white man.

The Nazi comparison is tedious anyway, both sides can argue it. Those being accused of being Nazis in this thread are almost all against increased state power, so they don't seem like very good fascists to me. Contrastly those opposing "the Nazis" tend to be broadly in favour of increased state power these days. It's cringeworthy really, and a misplaced belief that totalitarianism can be altruistic and benevolent. The boring and disappointing reality is freedom from and freedom to are both necessary, both potentially beneficial and both potentially dangerous. The current narrative of having to pick one or the other, and calling anyone who picks the alternative to you a Nazi, or even anyone who disagrees partially with where the line between freedom from and freedom to should be drawn on specific issues a Nazi, its just so nauseating. Not only are they Nazis, they're secret Nazis, campaigning for the Fourth Reich through subtle dogwhistles. I can't fathom how obviously intelligent people can not grasp this.

It's like everyone has some desire to be a superhero or Harry Potter fighting the dark, evil force trying to destroy all that is good in the world. Jordan Peterson can not be a professor who hasn't a different world view, he must be the reincarnation of Lord Voldemort, disgusting himself as a clinical psychologist in order to grow his army of evil soldiers. Its like genuine criticisms aren't sufficient. He's an eccentric professor who had a moment of fame and capitalised through churning out a number of books and pursuing a public speaking career, in which he often comes unstuck when he takes on subjects outside of his area of expertise. He can't just be wrong about stuff. He has to be a closet Hitler fan.

I don't know whether to feel enraged or sorry for people sometimes. I mean, do people really believe there are a secret alliance of powerful white men who are meeting up and plotting how to subvert the course of social discourse and progression in order to maintain the power of the white man and bring about a regime of tyranny? That public figures they disagree with have a secret language used to mask their true, malevolent intentions. Like, if people actually think that then the world must be truly terrifying to them. And yet this mindset seems to be a dominant theory, not merely confined to the realms of paranoid conspiracy theorists.

I suppose its only a matter of time before the woke brigade realise the "literal Nazi" argument doesn't work, and it'll come full circle and we'll start getting terms like "cultural fascist". And then a few years later conservatives will be saying "it's a dog whistle used by Communists who seek to overthrow the free market and turn us into North Korea!!". I'm genuinely in despair at the futility of it all.
 

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Okay then.

I assumed you were being fooled, but you seem to be a willing victim. I am sure that incoherent rant made you feel really good, though. I mean, we're living in a world where there have been multiple terrorist attacks by people using "cultural Marxism" language, but go off.
 
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Halftrack

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I don't really see what relevance the origin of the term has with regards to its current use. The vast vast majority of people (I'd almost argue all people, but I assume their are a couple of extreme exceptions out there) are not attempting to play 5D chess, secretly using coded Nazi language in order to indoctrinate the unsuspecting audience and slowly lead them towards a gradual acceptance of goose stepping Brownshirts patrolling the streets hunting down anyone who questions the natural supremacy of the middle aged white man.

The Nazi comparison is tedious anyway, both sides can argue it. Those being accused of being Nazis in this thread are almost all against increased state power, so they don't seem like very good fascists to me. Contrastly those opposing "the Nazis" tend to be broadly in favour of increased state power these days. It's cringeworthy really, and a misplaced belief that totalitarianism can be altruistic and benevolent. The boring and disappointing reality is freedom from and freedom to are both necessary, both potentially beneficial and both potentially dangerous. The current narrative of having to pick one or the other, and calling anyone who picks the alternative to you a Nazi, or even anyone who disagrees partially with where the line between freedom from and freedom to should be drawn on specific issues a Nazi, its just so nauseating. Not only are they Nazis, they're secret Nazis, campaigning for the Fourth Reich through subtle dogwhistles. I can't fathom how obviously intelligent people can not grasp this.

It's like everyone has some desire to be a superhero or Harry Potter fighting the dark, evil force trying to destroy all that is good in the world. Jordan Peterson can not be a professor who hasn't a different world view, he must be the reincarnation of Lord Voldemort, disgusting himself as a clinical psychologist in order to grow his army of evil soldiers. Its like genuine criticisms aren't sufficient. He's an eccentric professor who had a moment of fame and capitalised through churning out a number of books and pursuing a public speaking career, in which he often comes unstuck when he takes on subjects outside of his area of expertise. He can't just be wrong about stuff. He has to be a closet Hitler fan.

I don't know whether to feel enraged or sorry for people sometimes. I mean, do people really believe there are a secret alliance of powerful white men who are meeting up and plotting how to subvert the course of social discourse and progression in order to maintain the power of the white man and bring about a regime of tyranny? That public figures they disagree with have a secret language used to mask their true, malevolent intentions. Like, if people actually think that then the world must be truly terrifying to them. And yet this mindset seems to be a dominant theory, not merely confined to the realms of paranoid conspiracy theorists.

I suppose its only a matter of time before the woke brigade realise the "literal Nazi" argument doesn't work, and it'll come full circle and we'll start getting terms like "cultural fascist". And then a few years later conservatives will be saying "it's a dog whistle used by Communists who seek to overthrow the free market and turn us into North Korea!!". I'm genuinely in despair at the futility of it all.
You seem to have a bee in your bonnet about nazis. All @nimic did was correctly point out that cultural Marxism is just cultural Bolshevism under new management. I'm assuming, or at least hoping, that the vast majority of people who think cultural Marxism is a thing aren't nazis who want fascism back, despite them clearly lacking the ability to think critically. They've been suckered into the belief the malevolent Marxists have infiltrated Western governments and academia, and are intent on destroying Western society by people that are, though. Whether they've bought it hook, line and sinker, or if they're more like you, naively thinking it's just an opinion about how maybe leftist are sometimes misguided doesn't really matter, it's lending credence to a dangerous ideology all the same.

The bolded is pretty funny, seeing as that's pretty much what Jordan Peterson thinks the cultural Marxists are doing.
 
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When somebody uses the term 'cultural Marxism', it's a safe assumption that they're just parroting what they believe to be an insult with very little idea why. I've literally seen people describe CNN and Biden as Marxist. Sort of like libs calling everyone they disagree with a fascist.

More generously, I've always interpreted it as the religiously 'woke' appropriating conflict theory from Marx and applying it to identity rather than class. So people highest on the lib victim scale are the proles and white men are the bourgeoisie.

It's silly, obviously...but unfortunately does a good job of poisoning the Marxism well by painting it as elitist and idpol driven - ignoring the fact that hyperfocus on modern identity politics is antithetical to class consciousness and unity.
 

Gehrman

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When somebody uses the term 'cultural Marxism', it's a safe assumption that they're just parroting what they believe to be an insult with very little idea why. I've literally seen people describe CNN and Biden as Marxist. Sort of like libs calling everyone they disagree with a fascist.

More generously, I've always interpreted it as the religiously 'woke' appropriating conflict theory from Marx and applying it to identity rather than class. So people highest on the lib victim scale are the proles and white men are the bourgeoisie.

It's silly, obviously...but unfortunately does a good job of poisoning the Marxism well by painting it as elitist and idpol driven - ignoring the fact that hyperfocus on modern identity politics is antithetical to class consciousness and unity.
Yeah that's kind of what got from this.

https://newdiscourses.com/tftw-cultural-marxism/
 

berbatrick

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I agree with you, and I believe Sam Harris would agree with you too. He’s not at all pro Murray, he’s just opposed to the pile-on that’s taken place recently. He critiques a lot of Murray’s work quite pointedly. Here’s a snippet of the general theme of his critique:

“... I’m sure we can find hate supremacist organizations who love the fact that The Bell Curve was published ... Why look at this? How does this help society get more information about racial difference?”

The ‘why’ is important. Harris recognises the danger in Murray’s research, as it could be misappropriated by certain hate groups. If certain ‘hate groups’ would approve of the work of a certain scholar, then that scholar has a responsibility to appropriately frame their position, or so Harris says. Harris isn’t particularly enamoured with Murray’s work in this respect.

Harris does not wade deeply into the science behind Murray’s general hypothesis, but does say the following:

“... there seems to be very little we can do environmentally to increase a person's intelligence even in childhood. It's not that the environment doesn't matter, but genes appear to be 50 to 80 percent of the story. People don't want to hear this. And they certainly don't want to hear that average IQ differs across races and ethnic groups”.

So, genes are important to intelligence - Undeniably true. IQ appears to differ across races - also true, as statistics show. That’s about as deep as Harris goes. The reality is that a complex mix of sociocultural phenomena contribute to this ‘iq disparity’. What Harris never does, much as it might pain certain people in here, is suggest that white people (or Asian people, really, as they fare best in Murray’s research) have some sort of biological or intellectual superiority over any other race. That is a deplorable suggestion.
These (bolded) are strong claims made by Murray and defended by Harris. I am not sure they are uncontroversial as he portrays them.

For the first one, quoting from this meta-analysis
The French Adoption Study by Schiff et al. (1978) and Colombo et al.‘s (1992) study from Chile both found a higher mean IQ for the adopted siblings. In the Schiff et al. (1978) study, school failure rates and the percentage of IQ scores below 95 were collected for a sample of 32 adopted children placed at approximately 4 months of age. Both percentages were significantly smaller than those expected from the social class of birth (13% vs. 55% and 17% vs. 51%, respectively) and the percentages observed in a control group of nonadopted birth siblings (56% and 49%, respectively). However, the percentages were close to those expected from the social class of the adoptive families (both 15%; Schiff, Duyme, Dumaret, & Tomkiewicz, 1982). Colombo et al. (1992) studied 35 school-age children (5–21 years) with a history of early malnutrition. They compared three groups. The first group consisted of children who were raised after recovery by adoptive families (n 16; placed for adoption before 12 months), the second group of children remained in institutional care (n 8), and the third group consisted of children raised in their birth family (n 11). Adopted children had IQs in the normal range, and they outperformed the other groups, in particular on the verbal subscale. The authors concluded that early undernourishment may not cause irreversible damage for children but instead can be negated by early, drastic, and stable environmental improvement. Similar findings have been reported by Tizard and Hodges (1978), Lien et al. (1977), Winick et al. (1975), and Dennis (1973). The influence of the adoption experience may become larger when the change of environment becomes more drastic. Scarr and Weinberg (1976) studied the IQ and school achievement of 130 Black children adopted before the age of 12 months by advantaged White families. The adoptees from educationally average families scored above the average level of IQ and school achievement of the White population. The high IQ scores of the Black adoptees suggests that IQ is malleable under rearing conditions that are relevant to the tests and the schools and that deviate drastically from the preadoption social background. Because the preadoption cognitive status of these adoptees was not assessed, the study findings, although impressive, remain inconclusive.

Furthermore, the environmental influences of the adoptive family may fade as the adopted children grow older. In general, genetic and environmental factors may not operate on the same level across the life span. In longitudinal studies, the IQ of adopted children has been found to become more similar to the IQ of their birth parents with increasing age (Fulker, DeFries, & Plomin, 1988; Plomin et al., 1997), and in adulthood the correlation between the IQ of adopted children and that of their adoptive parents appears to be much lower than the correlation with the IQ of the biological parents (McGue, Bouchard, Iacono, & Lykken, 1993; Plomin et al., 1997).

Not only age at assessment but also age at adoption and previous adverse experiences or deprivation may make a substantial difference for the influence of the adoption experience. O’Connor et al. (2000) studied Romanian adopted children in the United Kingdom who had experienced early malnourishment and circumstances of severe deprivation, particularly in institutional care. They found that children adopted at older ages and institutionalized children had lower IQ scores than younger and noninstitutionalized adopted children. Extending previous research using data from the same children, Rutter et al. (1998) assessed the cognitive development of 6-year-old children adopted from Romania before they were 24 months old or when they were between 24 and 42 months old and nondeprived, domestic adoptees from the United Kingdom adopted before they were 6 months old. They found that later placed Romanian children caught up considerably from entry into the United Kingdom to age 6, but, as a group, the children exhibited lower cognitive scores and general developmental impairment compared with earlier adopted Romanian children. This may indicate that the positive outcomes of adoption may be hampered or reduced by severe negative experiences before adoption placement.
To summarise: 7 studies showing substantial increase in IQ/reduction in school failure when children of poor or Black parents are raised in a rich or White household, and that this disparity between biological parental IQ and child IQ rises as the socioeconomic disparity between the biological and adopting parents rises. It then quotes 4 studies saying this gain is less in adulthood. Finally, it quotes 2 studies concluding that the earlier the adoption into a higher SES family, the better the outcomes. Thus, it appears that childhood environment has an effect on what we measure as intelligence.
Using the same data, this study concludes that there is a 12-18 point IQ increase (equal to 1 standard deviation, slightly bigger than the average white-black IQ gap in the US) when children of poor parents are adopted by middle class families.

Besides this, we have the Flynn effect, a massive, secular, increase in worldwide IQs over many postwar decades, which would be hard to envisage if we understand IQ as something which cannot be significantly altered by external interventions.


About the second claim, undoubtedly, genes have an effect on intelligence.
I find it interesting that after decades of microarrays and about a decade of high-throughput sequencing, and with mass-scale sequencing of human genomes, the candidate genes for intelligence and many other complex traits (especially behavioral traits) all have very small effect sizes. This is the biggest GWAS I could find, with 80 named scientists, 23&me genetic data, and data from other big collaborations, involving a look at 1.1 million individual genetic sequences. It identifies 1,300 genes (we only have about 20k total genes!) with variants contributing to intelligence, and putting the effect of all 1.3k together, concludes that they explain 7-10% of individual differences in IQ. A very far cry from the 50-80% cited by Murray and Harris. Note that any further variants discovered in future GWAS with expanded samples will have even smaller effect sizes than those found in this one.

Yes, heritability estimates of IQ (and most other behavioral traits) from twin studies are high, and are cited by Murray and others. But heritability is not a direct measure of the genes involved. At some point, it is reasonable to expect the GWAS gene lists to have better predictive power, but even with 1.1 million individuals sequenced and 80 co-authors analysing the data, polygenic scores do not come close to heritability estimates. (Height GWAS does better, for comparison Like with IQ, height has shown a worldwide increase in the past 2 centuries, showing strong environmental modulation of more heritable and genetic traits than intelligence).

I wonder how much the quoted heritability estimates have been clouded by gene-environment and gene-gene interactions - i.e. genes that affect intelligence only in certain external conditions (for example, polluted environments) or of people with a particular genetic backgrounds (a gene variant that has no effect on intelligence unless paired with a particular variant of a different gene). It is known, for example, that IQ heritability itself varies with SES - genes predict a rich person's IQ better than a poor person's, presumably because poor people's childhood environments are more varied.

As an aside, GWAS itself has its issues - even after applying controls, researchers could find associations between exposure to certain atmospheric pollutants and certain gene variants! Obviously, this is not a heritable or even biological trait, and is determined by industries and traffic at the place you live. But the standard controls could not eliminate whatever underlying factors were causing these correlations, and, taken at face value, this suggests that exposure to pollutants can be predicted by your genes. Same point is made here, with a direct reference to Murray's claims about PGS from GWAS - a scientist was able to predict national GDP based on the genetics of mustard plants grown there.

Nevertheless, the correlation between genetics and individual differences in IQ is among the less controversial claims Murray makes, so I am not going to waste any more time on it. I have not had much coursework or done real research in this, besides TAing an Intro Genetics course, so my knowledge of all these things is a bit haphazard and not systematic.


Racial and national gaps in IQ are vast. If the earlier two propositions hold, they are likely fixed in amount and direction.
These are race-based results for performance in an Army test in the US during and after WW1, published in 1922. Clearly, people originally from Italy, Poland, Russia, Ireland, and Austria were significantly less smart than those from England, Germany, and native-born US Whites (whose scores will statistically dominate the "Total White Draft"). Indeed, the author finds that Italians, Poles, and Russians are significantly worse than Blacks in the northern US, whose scores are most similar to Irish immigrants. The author considers the objection that the difference in immigrant scores might simply reflect a language handicap, and shows that this is unlikely - the gap increases after 5 years of schooling (Table IV). Hence, it seems quite unlikely that Italian/Polish/Irish scores can be remedied by better education.
These intra-European differences are seen as late as the 70s. Looking at data directly from Europe rather than from European immigrants to the US, Irish IQ lagged far behind UK IQ and was again comparable to that of "American negroes" (from Race, Intelligence, and Education by Hans Eysenck, 1971; the author was a signatory to the "Mainstream Science on Intelligence" Declaration of 1994 published in the wake of Charles Murray's Bell Curve).

However, intra-European IQ and schooling differences are much reduced or reversed now (2019 PISA scores for Ireland and Poland are among the highest in Europe for example), and differences between groups originating from different European countries in the US are not significant anymore. If the original effect was genetic, this is quite unlikely.

What does this have to do with Murray, whose work on race focuses on American Blacks? Well, Italian and Irish inferiority had been demonstrated repeatedly by science, and was used to help settle things like US immigration policy. There are not many people who still believe it. It should be a cautionary tale before arguing for a genetic explanation of IQ gaps between races or nations; this re-ordering of races over time are unlikely if racial differences in IQ have a genetic origin.
[Note: I have tried to look for further IQ scores of different races over time, but have been stymied by the fact that almost all blogs and papers are by Rushton, Lynn, Jensen, and other Pioneer Fund people, or by Ron Unz. Most of these people have been cited by Murray, I briefly discuss Lynn's data (the most mainstream of these) below.]

The hard genetic evidence for differences in IQ between American Blacks and Whites (a major claim of Murray, and a natural progression of his other claims) is significantly worse than the evidence for individual differences that I discussed above. This is a very recent peer-reviewed paper, based on statistical analysis of GWAS results: "Tests for selection using Fst values did not find evidence of natural selection. Expected mean difference in IQ was substantially smaller than postulated by hereditarians, even under unrealistic assumptions that overestimate genetic contribution". This is a blog post by an evolutionary biologist responding to several other papers.

Several smaller points - national IQ data from Lynn cited by Murray shows that the average human being of several African countries is "borderline mentally retarded". I find that unlikely, and an indication that perhaps the data quality isn't the best; indeed, it has been criticised. The theory that cold climate selects for higher IQ hasn't been backed up by genetic evidence, or by IQ scores from people indigenous to Canada, US, NZ, etc (colder than many low-IQ countries and races). In the absence of directional selection, the rather homogenously low scores for Sub-Saharan national IQs are at odds with the great genetic diversity of the region (comparable to the genetic diversity of the rest of the species). Within the US, I am fascinated by data on lead exposure in childhood. Lead disproportionately affects poor and Black households, and childhood exposure is correlated with aggression and low intelligence, with strong evidence of causation. Finally, there is the transracial adoption data from the meta-analysis which I mentioned at the top of this post, which contradicts Murray's conclusions. (Here is another meta-analysis, focusing on race alone and not class, with a similar conclusion).


About the "deplorable suggestion" and Harris' and Murray's personal beliefs:

If Harris believes the 3 things you quoted (intelligence largely fixed at birth, largely genetic, races far apart), as well as the largest point of Murray's book (g correlates with all life outcomes) they clearly imply racial superiority, and he must believe it, whether or not he has the guts to say it to himself and the world. Murray too (like many whom I cite above) takes great pains to argue that his work in the Bell Curve is not racist. These screenshots contain instructive comments from fellow travelers, correcting him on this point. Indeed, The Bell Curve shows a causative correlation between low individual IQ, criminal behavior and many other negative things - there is no better proof of racial inferiority than a race being born genetically criminal. Either Murray truly believes what he has published, or he believes there is no biological racial superiority, both are not possible.

The open racism of the random guy on reddit who told me that, since I'm from a 80-IQ country, my opinion should not count, is much preferable to the coy, wink-wink, socially accepted, policy-driving racism of Murray.
 
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Beachryan

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@berbatrick - Thanks that's a really well put, well-researched post and makes a lot of sense, and clearly provides excellent material to blow Murray's claims out of the water.

Again, self-proclaimed fan of some of Harris' work here - having listened to all of the episodes and subsequent discussions, I don't get the feeling that Harris is taking Murray's position as his own - rather that he's open to studies showing it as a possiblity. And if that is the case, then his whole point is that society must have some capacity to have discussions about it. That's the actual hypothesis of that episode, and Harris' take on cancel culture in general.

I.e. IF there was a properly conducted study showing that Bermudian-born males were significantly less attractive than the general populace, there cannot be a blanket ban on analysing that report to determine its potential faults and merits. Indeed, more 'outside normal' studies need that scientific review more - we shouldn't bury them or fail to discuss them simply because they don't say something we like.

Final reminder: Harris had Murray on NOT beacuse of anything said in the Bell Curve (which is like 30 years old) but because he and the organiser of a talk at a very liberal university had been literally assaulted by students. THAT was the trigger that Harris found interesting.

For me it's an incredibly clear distinction, and those that are trying to push Murray's viewpoint onto Harris simply because Harris 'platformed' Murray are just hearing what they want to hear without listening to what is actually said.
 

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These (bolded) are strong claims made by Murray and defended by Harris. I am not sure they are uncontroversial as he portrays them.

For the first one, quoting from this meta-analysis
The French Adoption Study by Schiff et al. (1978) and Colombo et al.‘s (1992) study from Chile both found a higher mean IQ for the adopted siblings. In the Schiff et al. (1978) study, school failure rates and the percentage of IQ scores below 95 were collected for a sample of 32 adopted children placed at approximately 4 months of age. Both percentages were significantly smaller than those expected from the social class of birth (13% vs. 55% and 17% vs. 51%, respectively) and the percentages observed in a control group of nonadopted birth siblings (56% and 49%, respectively). However, the percentages were close to those expected from the social class of the adoptive families (both 15%; Schiff, Duyme, Dumaret, & Tomkiewicz, 1982). Colombo et al. (1992) studied 35 school-age children (5–21 years) with a history of early malnutrition. They compared three groups. The first group consisted of children who were raised after recovery by adoptive families (n 16; placed for adoption before 12 months), the second group of children remained in institutional care (n 8), and the third group consisted of children raised in their birth family (n 11). Adopted children had IQs in the normal range, and they outperformed the other groups, in particular on the verbal subscale. The authors concluded that early undernourishment may not cause irreversible damage for children but instead can be negated by early, drastic, and stable environmental improvement. Similar findings have been reported by Tizard and Hodges (1978), Lien et al. (1977), Winick et al. (1975), and Dennis (1973). The influence of the adoption experience may become larger when the change of environment becomes more drastic. Scarr and Weinberg (1976) studied the IQ and school achievement of 130 Black children adopted before the age of 12 months by advantaged White families. The adoptees from educationally average families scored above the average level of IQ and school achievement of the White population. The high IQ scores of the Black adoptees suggests that IQ is malleable under rearing conditions that are relevant to the tests and the schools and that deviate drastically from the preadoption social background. Because the preadoption cognitive status of these adoptees was not assessed, the study findings, although impressive, remain inconclusive.

Furthermore, the environmental influences of the adoptive family may fade as the adopted children grow older. In general, genetic and environmental factors may not operate on the same level across the life span. In longitudinal studies, the IQ of adopted children has been found to become more similar to the IQ of their birth parents with increasing age (Fulker, DeFries, & Plomin, 1988; Plomin et al., 1997), and in adulthood the correlation between the IQ of adopted children and that of their adoptive parents appears to be much lower than the correlation with the IQ of the biological parents (McGue, Bouchard, Iacono, & Lykken, 1993; Plomin et al., 1997).

Not only age at assessment but also age at adoption and previous adverse experiences or deprivation may make a substantial difference for the influence of the adoption experience. O’Connor et al. (2000) studied Romanian adopted children in the United Kingdom who had experienced early malnourishment and circumstances of severe deprivation, particularly in institutional care. They found that children adopted at older ages and institutionalized children had lower IQ scores than younger and noninstitutionalized adopted children. Extending previous research using data from the same children, Rutter et al. (1998) assessed the cognitive development of 6-year-old children adopted from Romania before they were 24 months old or when they were between 24 and 42 months old and nondeprived, domestic adoptees from the United Kingdom adopted before they were 6 months old. They found that later placed Romanian children caught up considerably from entry into the United Kingdom to age 6, but, as a group, the children exhibited lower cognitive scores and general developmental impairment compared with earlier adopted Romanian children. This may indicate that the positive outcomes of adoption may be hampered or reduced by severe negative experiences before adoption placement.
To summarise: 7 studies showing substantial increase in IQ/reduction in school failure when children of poor or Black parents are raised in a rich or White household, and that this disparity between biological parental IQ and child IQ rises as the socioeconomic disparity between the biological and adopting parents rises. It then quotes 4 studies saying this gain is less in adulthood. Finally, it quotes 2 studies concluding that the earlier the adoption into a higher SES family, the better the outcomes. Thus, it appears that childhood environment has an effect on what we measure as intelligence.
Using the same data, this study concludes that there is a 12-18 point IQ increase (equal to 1 standard deviation, slightly bigger than the average white-black IQ gap in the US) when children of poor parents are adopted by middle class families.

Besides this, we have the Flynn effect, a massive, secular, increase in worldwide IQs over many postwar decades, which would be hard to envisage if we understand IQ as something which cannot be significantly altered by external interventions.


About the second claim, undoubtedly, genes have an effect on intelligence.
I find it interesting that after decades of microarrays and about a decade of high-throughput sequencing, and with mass-scale sequencing of human genomes, the candidate genes for intelligence and many other complex traits (especially behavioral traits) all have very small effect sizes. This is the biggest GWAS I could find, with 80 named scientists, 23&me genetic data, and data from other big collaborations, involving a look at 1.1 million individual genetic sequences. It identifies 1,300 genes (we only have about 20k total genes!) with variants contributing to intelligence, and putting the effect of all 1.3k together, concludes that they explain 7-10% of individual differences in IQ. A very far cry from the 50-80% cited by Murray and Harris. Note that any further variants discovered in future GWAS with expanded samples will have even smaller effect sizes than those found in this one.

Yes, heritability estimates of IQ (and most other behavioral traits) from twin studies are high, and are cited by Murray and others. But heritability is not a direct measure of the genes involved. At some point, it is reasonable to expect the GWAS gene lists to have better predictive power, but even with 1.1 million individuals sequenced and 80 co-authors analysing the data, polygenic scores do not come close to heritability estimates. (Height GWAS does better, for comparison Like with IQ, height has shown a worldwide increase in the past 2 centuries, showing strong environmental modulation of more heritable and genetic traits than intelligence).

I wonder how much the quoted heritability estimates have been clouded by gene-environment and gene-gene interactions - i.e. genes that affect intelligence only in certain external conditions (for example, polluted environments) or of people with a particular genetic backgrounds (a gene variant that has no effect on intelligence unless paired with a particular variant of a different gene). It is known, for example, that IQ heritability itself varies with SES - genes predict a rich person's IQ better than a poor person's, presumably because poor people's childhood environments are more varied.

As an aside, GWAS itself has its issues - even after applying controls, researchers could find associations between exposure to certain atmospheric pollutants and certain gene variants! Obviously, this is not a heritable or even biological trait, and is determined by industries and traffic at the place you live. But the standard controls could not eliminate whatever underlying factors were causing these correlations, and, taken at face value, this suggests that exposure to pollutants can be predicted by your genes. Same point is made here, with a direct reference to Murray's claims about PGS from GWAS - a scientist was able to predict national GDP based on the genetics of mustard plants grown there.

Nevertheless, the correlation between genetics and individual differences in IQ is among the less controversial claims Murray makes, so I am not going to waste any more time on it. I have not had much coursework or done real research in this, besides TAing an Intro Genetics course, so my knowledge of all these things is a bit haphazard and not systematic.


Racial and national gaps in IQ are vast. If the earlier two propositions hold, they are likely fixed in amount and direction.
These are race-based results for performance in an Army test in the US during and after WW1, published in 1922. Clearly, people originally from Italy, Poland, Russia, Ireland, and Austria were significantly less smart than those from England, Germany, and native-born US Whites (whose scores will statistically dominate the "Total White Draft"). Indeed, the author finds that Italians, Poles, and Russians are significantly worse than Blacks in the northern US, whose scores are most similar to Irish immigrants. The author considers the objection that the difference in immigrant scores might simply reflect a language handicap, and shows that this is unlikely - the gap increases after 5 years of schooling (Table IV). Hence, it seems quite unlikely that Italian/Polish/Irish scores can be remedied by better education.
These intra-European differences are seen as late as the 70s. Looking at data directly from Europe rather than from European immigrants to the US, Irish IQ lagged far behind UK IQ and was again comparable to that of "American negroes" (from Race, Intelligence, and Education by Hans Eysenck, 1971; the author was a signatory to the "Mainstream Science on Intelligence" Declaration of 1994 published in the wake of Charles Murray's Bell Curve).

However, intra-European IQ and schooling differences are much reduced or reversed now (2019 PISA scores for Ireland and Poland are among the highest in Europe for example), and differences between groups originating from different European countries in the US are not significant anymore. If the original effect was genetic, this is quite unlikely.

What does this have to do with Murray, whose work on race focuses on American Blacks? Well, Italian and Irish inferiority had been demonstrated repeatedly by science, and was used to help settle things like US immigration policy. There are not many people who still believe it. It should be a cautionary tale before arguing for a genetic explanation of IQ gaps between races or nations; this re-ordering of races over time are unlikely if racial differences in IQ have a genetic origin.
[Note: I have tried to look for further IQ scores of different races over time, but have been stymied by the fact that almost all blogs and papers are by Rushton, Lynn, Jensen, and other Pioneer Fund people, or by Ron Unz. Most of these people have been cited by Murray, I briefly discuss Lynn's data (the most mainstream of these) below.]

The hard genetic evidence for differences in IQ between American Blacks and Whites (a major claim of Murray, and a natural progression of his other claims) is significantly worse than the evidence for individual differences that I discussed above. This is a very recent peer-reviewed paper, based on statistical analysis of GWAS results: "Tests for selection using Fst values did not find evidence of natural selection. Expected mean difference in IQ was substantially smaller than postulated by hereditarians, even under unrealistic assumptions that overestimate genetic contribution". This is a blog post by an evolutionary biologist responding to several other papers.

Several smaller points - national IQ data from Lynn cited by Murray shows that the average human being of several African countries is "borderline mentally retarded". I find that unlikely, and an indication that perhaps the data quality isn't the best; indeed, it has been criticised. The theory that cold climate selects for higher IQ hasn't been backed up by genetic evidence, or by IQ scores from people indigenous to Canada, US, NZ, etc (colder than many low-IQ countries and races). In the absence of directional selection, the rather homogenously low scores for Sub-Saharan national IQs are at odds with the great genetic diversity of the region (comparable to the genetic diversity of the rest of the species). Within the US, I am fascinated by data on lead exposure in childhood. Lead disproportionately affects poor and Black households, and childhood exposure is correlated with aggression and low intelligence, with strong evidence of causation. Finally, there is the transracial adoption data from the meta-analysis which I mentioned at the top of this post, which contradicts Murray's conclusions. (Here is another meta-analysis, focusing on race alone and not class, with a similar conclusion).


About the "deplorable suggestion" and Harris' and Murray's personal beliefs:

If Harris believes the 3 things you quoted (intelligence largely fixed at birth, largely genetic, races far apart), as well as the largest point of Murray's book (g correlates with all life outcomes) they clearly imply racial superiority, and he must believe it, whether or not he has the guts to say it to himself and the world. Murray too (like many whom I cite above) takes great pains to argue that his work in the Bell Curve is not racist. These screenshots contain instructive comments from fellow travelers, correcting him on this point. Indeed, The Bell Curve shows a causative correlation between low individual IQ, criminal behavior and many other negative things - there is no better proof of racial inferiority than a race being born genetically criminal. Either Murray truly believes what he has published, or he believes there is no biological racial superiority, both are not possible.

The open racism of the random guy on reddit who told me that, since I'm from a 80-IQ country, my opinion should not count, is much preferable to the coy, wink-wink, socially accepted, policy-driving racism of Murray.
That’s a great post.

I’m also fascinated by lead poisoning. Such a crazy way to cause profound societal consequences.
 

Conor

Full Member
Joined
Feb 19, 2011
Messages
5,451
These (bolded) are strong claims made by Murray and defended by Harris. I am not sure they are uncontroversial as he portrays them.

For the first one, quoting from this meta-analysis
The French Adoption Study by Schiff et al. (1978) and Colombo et al.‘s (1992) study from Chile both found a higher mean IQ for the adopted siblings. In the Schiff et al. (1978) study, school failure rates and the percentage of IQ scores below 95 were collected for a sample of 32 adopted children placed at approximately 4 months of age. Both percentages were significantly smaller than those expected from the social class of birth (13% vs. 55% and 17% vs. 51%, respectively) and the percentages observed in a control group of nonadopted birth siblings (56% and 49%, respectively). However, the percentages were close to those expected from the social class of the adoptive families (both 15%; Schiff, Duyme, Dumaret, & Tomkiewicz, 1982). Colombo et al. (1992) studied 35 school-age children (5–21 years) with a history of early malnutrition. They compared three groups. The first group consisted of children who were raised after recovery by adoptive families (n 16; placed for adoption before 12 months), the second group of children remained in institutional care (n 8), and the third group consisted of children raised in their birth family (n 11). Adopted children had IQs in the normal range, and they outperformed the other groups, in particular on the verbal subscale. The authors concluded that early undernourishment may not cause irreversible damage for children but instead can be negated by early, drastic, and stable environmental improvement. Similar findings have been reported by Tizard and Hodges (1978), Lien et al. (1977), Winick et al. (1975), and Dennis (1973). The influence of the adoption experience may become larger when the change of environment becomes more drastic. Scarr and Weinberg (1976) studied the IQ and school achievement of 130 Black children adopted before the age of 12 months by advantaged White families. The adoptees from educationally average families scored above the average level of IQ and school achievement of the White population. The high IQ scores of the Black adoptees suggests that IQ is malleable under rearing conditions that are relevant to the tests and the schools and that deviate drastically from the preadoption social background. Because the preadoption cognitive status of these adoptees was not assessed, the study findings, although impressive, remain inconclusive.

Furthermore, the environmental influences of the adoptive family may fade as the adopted children grow older. In general, genetic and environmental factors may not operate on the same level across the life span. In longitudinal studies, the IQ of adopted children has been found to become more similar to the IQ of their birth parents with increasing age (Fulker, DeFries, & Plomin, 1988; Plomin et al., 1997), and in adulthood the correlation between the IQ of adopted children and that of their adoptive parents appears to be much lower than the correlation with the IQ of the biological parents (McGue, Bouchard, Iacono, & Lykken, 1993; Plomin et al., 1997).

Not only age at assessment but also age at adoption and previous adverse experiences or deprivation may make a substantial difference for the influence of the adoption experience. O’Connor et al. (2000) studied Romanian adopted children in the United Kingdom who had experienced early malnourishment and circumstances of severe deprivation, particularly in institutional care. They found that children adopted at older ages and institutionalized children had lower IQ scores than younger and noninstitutionalized adopted children. Extending previous research using data from the same children, Rutter et al. (1998) assessed the cognitive development of 6-year-old children adopted from Romania before they were 24 months old or when they were between 24 and 42 months old and nondeprived, domestic adoptees from the United Kingdom adopted before they were 6 months old. They found that later placed Romanian children caught up considerably from entry into the United Kingdom to age 6, but, as a group, the children exhibited lower cognitive scores and general developmental impairment compared with earlier adopted Romanian children. This may indicate that the positive outcomes of adoption may be hampered or reduced by severe negative experiences before adoption placement.
To summarise: 7 studies showing substantial increase in IQ/reduction in school failure when children of poor or Black parents are raised in a rich or White household, and that this disparity between biological parental IQ and child IQ rises as the socioeconomic disparity between the biological and adopting parents rises. It then quotes 4 studies saying this gain is less in adulthood. Finally, it quotes 2 studies concluding that the earlier the adoption into a higher SES family, the better the outcomes. Thus, it appears that childhood environment has an effect on what we measure as intelligence.
Using the same data, this study concludes that there is a 12-18 point IQ increase (equal to 1 standard deviation, slightly bigger than the average white-black IQ gap in the US) when children of poor parents are adopted by middle class families.

Besides this, we have the Flynn effect, a massive, secular, increase in worldwide IQs over many postwar decades, which would be hard to envisage if we understand IQ as something which cannot be significantly altered by external interventions.


About the second claim, undoubtedly, genes have an effect on intelligence.
I find it interesting that after decades of microarrays and about a decade of high-throughput sequencing, and with mass-scale sequencing of human genomes, the candidate genes for intelligence and many other complex traits (especially behavioral traits) all have very small effect sizes. This is the biggest GWAS I could find, with 80 named scientists, 23&me genetic data, and data from other big collaborations, involving a look at 1.1 million individual genetic sequences. It identifies 1,300 genes (we only have about 20k total genes!) with variants contributing to intelligence, and putting the effect of all 1.3k together, concludes that they explain 7-10% of individual differences in IQ. A very far cry from the 50-80% cited by Murray and Harris. Note that any further variants discovered in future GWAS with expanded samples will have even smaller effect sizes than those found in this one.

Yes, heritability estimates of IQ (and most other behavioral traits) from twin studies are high, and are cited by Murray and others. But heritability is not a direct measure of the genes involved. At some point, it is reasonable to expect the GWAS gene lists to have better predictive power, but even with 1.1 million individuals sequenced and 80 co-authors analysing the data, polygenic scores do not come close to heritability estimates. (Height GWAS does better, for comparison Like with IQ, height has shown a worldwide increase in the past 2 centuries, showing strong environmental modulation of more heritable and genetic traits than intelligence).

I wonder how much the quoted heritability estimates have been clouded by gene-environment and gene-gene interactions - i.e. genes that affect intelligence only in certain external conditions (for example, polluted environments) or of people with a particular genetic backgrounds (a gene variant that has no effect on intelligence unless paired with a particular variant of a different gene). It is known, for example, that IQ heritability itself varies with SES - genes predict a rich person's IQ better than a poor person's, presumably because poor people's childhood environments are more varied.

As an aside, GWAS itself has its issues - even after applying controls, researchers could find associations between exposure to certain atmospheric pollutants and certain gene variants! Obviously, this is not a heritable or even biological trait, and is determined by industries and traffic at the place you live. But the standard controls could not eliminate whatever underlying factors were causing these correlations, and, taken at face value, this suggests that exposure to pollutants can be predicted by your genes. Same point is made here, with a direct reference to Murray's claims about PGS from GWAS - a scientist was able to predict national GDP based on the genetics of mustard plants grown there.

Nevertheless, the correlation between genetics and individual differences in IQ is among the less controversial claims Murray makes, so I am not going to waste any more time on it. I have not had much coursework or done real research in this, besides TAing an Intro Genetics course, so my knowledge of all these things is a bit haphazard and not systematic.


Racial and national gaps in IQ are vast. If the earlier two propositions hold, they are likely fixed in amount and direction.
These are race-based results for performance in an Army test in the US during and after WW1, published in 1922. Clearly, people originally from Italy, Poland, Russia, Ireland, and Austria were significantly less smart than those from England, Germany, and native-born US Whites (whose scores will statistically dominate the "Total White Draft"). Indeed, the author finds that Italians, Poles, and Russians are significantly worse than Blacks in the northern US, whose scores are most similar to Irish immigrants. The author considers the objection that the difference in immigrant scores might simply reflect a language handicap, and shows that this is unlikely - the gap increases after 5 years of schooling (Table IV). Hence, it seems quite unlikely that Italian/Polish/Irish scores can be remedied by better education.
These intra-European differences are seen as late as the 70s. Looking at data directly from Europe rather than from European immigrants to the US, Irish IQ lagged far behind UK IQ and was again comparable to that of "American negroes" (from Race, Intelligence, and Education by Hans Eysenck, 1971; the author was a signatory to the "Mainstream Science on Intelligence" Declaration of 1994 published in the wake of Charles Murray's Bell Curve).

However, intra-European IQ and schooling differences are much reduced or reversed now (2019 PISA scores for Ireland and Poland are among the highest in Europe for example), and differences between groups originating from different European countries in the US are not significant anymore. If the original effect was genetic, this is quite unlikely.

What does this have to do with Murray, whose work on race focuses on American Blacks? Well, Italian and Irish inferiority had been demonstrated repeatedly by science, and was used to help settle things like US immigration policy. There are not many people who still believe it. It should be a cautionary tale before arguing for a genetic explanation of IQ gaps between races or nations; this re-ordering of races over time are unlikely if racial differences in IQ have a genetic origin.
[Note: I have tried to look for further IQ scores of different races over time, but have been stymied by the fact that almost all blogs and papers are by Rushton, Lynn, Jensen, and other Pioneer Fund people, or by Ron Unz. Most of these people have been cited by Murray, I briefly discuss Lynn's data (the most mainstream of these) below.]

The hard genetic evidence for differences in IQ between American Blacks and Whites (a major claim of Murray, and a natural progression of his other claims) is significantly worse than the evidence for individual differences that I discussed above. This is a very recent peer-reviewed paper, based on statistical analysis of GWAS results: "Tests for selection using Fst values did not find evidence of natural selection. Expected mean difference in IQ was substantially smaller than postulated by hereditarians, even under unrealistic assumptions that overestimate genetic contribution". This is a blog post by an evolutionary biologist responding to several other papers.

Several smaller points - national IQ data from Lynn cited by Murray shows that the average human being of several African countries is "borderline mentally retarded". I find that unlikely, and an indication that perhaps the data quality isn't the best; indeed, it has been criticised. The theory that cold climate selects for higher IQ hasn't been backed up by genetic evidence, or by IQ scores from people indigenous to Canada, US, NZ, etc (colder than many low-IQ countries and races). In the absence of directional selection, the rather homogenously low scores for Sub-Saharan national IQs are at odds with the great genetic diversity of the region (comparable to the genetic diversity of the rest of the species). Within the US, I am fascinated by data on lead exposure in childhood. Lead disproportionately affects poor and Black households, and childhood exposure is correlated with aggression and low intelligence, with strong evidence of causation. Finally, there is the transracial adoption data from the meta-analysis which I mentioned at the top of this post, which contradicts Murray's conclusions. (Here is another meta-analysis, focusing on race alone and not class, with a similar conclusion).


About the "deplorable suggestion" and Harris' and Murray's personal beliefs:

If Harris believes the 3 things you quoted (intelligence largely fixed at birth, largely genetic, races far apart), as well as the largest point of Murray's book (g correlates with all life outcomes) they clearly imply racial superiority, and he must believe it, whether or not he has the guts to say it to himself and the world. Murray too (like many whom I cite above) takes great pains to argue that his work in the Bell Curve is not racist. These screenshots contain instructive comments from fellow travelers, correcting him on this point. Indeed, The Bell Curve shows a causative correlation between low individual IQ, criminal behavior and many other negative things - there is no better proof of racial inferiority than a race being born genetically criminal. Either Murray truly believes what he has published, or he believes there is no biological racial superiority, both are not possible.

The open racism of the random guy on reddit who told me that, since I'm from a 80-IQ country, my opinion should not count, is much preferable to the coy, wink-wink, socially accepted, policy-driving racism of Murray.
Excellent post. This forum needs a thumbs up feature on posts(for all to use).
 

e.cantona

Mummy, mummy, diamonds, I want them too
Joined
Nov 10, 2006
Messages
2,564
These (bolded) are strong claims made by Murray and defended by Harris. I am not sure they are uncontroversial as he portrays them.

For the first one, quoting from this meta-analysis
The French Adoption Study by Schiff et al. (1978) and Colombo et al.‘s (1992) study from Chile both found a higher mean IQ for the adopted siblings. In the Schiff et al. (1978) study, school failure rates and the percentage of IQ scores below 95 were collected for a sample of 32 adopted children placed at approximately 4 months of age. Both percentages were significantly smaller than those expected from the social class of birth (13% vs. 55% and 17% vs. 51%, respectively) and the percentages observed in a control group of nonadopted birth siblings (56% and 49%, respectively). However, the percentages were close to those expected from the social class of the adoptive families (both 15%; Schiff, Duyme, Dumaret, & Tomkiewicz, 1982). Colombo et al. (1992) studied 35 school-age children (5–21 years) with a history of early malnutrition. They compared three groups. The first group consisted of children who were raised after recovery by adoptive families (n 16; placed for adoption before 12 months), the second group of children remained in institutional care (n 8), and the third group consisted of children raised in their birth family (n 11). Adopted children had IQs in the normal range, and they outperformed the other groups, in particular on the verbal subscale. The authors concluded that early undernourishment may not cause irreversible damage for children but instead can be negated by early, drastic, and stable environmental improvement. Similar findings have been reported by Tizard and Hodges (1978), Lien et al. (1977), Winick et al. (1975), and Dennis (1973). The influence of the adoption experience may become larger when the change of environment becomes more drastic. Scarr and Weinberg (1976) studied the IQ and school achievement of 130 Black children adopted before the age of 12 months by advantaged White families. The adoptees from educationally average families scored above the average level of IQ and school achievement of the White population. The high IQ scores of the Black adoptees suggests that IQ is malleable under rearing conditions that are relevant to the tests and the schools and that deviate drastically from the preadoption social background. Because the preadoption cognitive status of these adoptees was not assessed, the study findings, although impressive, remain inconclusive.

Furthermore, the environmental influences of the adoptive family may fade as the adopted children grow older. In general, genetic and environmental factors may not operate on the same level across the life span. In longitudinal studies, the IQ of adopted children has been found to become more similar to the IQ of their birth parents with increasing age (Fulker, DeFries, & Plomin, 1988; Plomin et al., 1997), and in adulthood the correlation between the IQ of adopted children and that of their adoptive parents appears to be much lower than the correlation with the IQ of the biological parents (McGue, Bouchard, Iacono, & Lykken, 1993; Plomin et al., 1997).

Not only age at assessment but also age at adoption and previous adverse experiences or deprivation may make a substantial difference for the influence of the adoption experience. O’Connor et al. (2000) studied Romanian adopted children in the United Kingdom who had experienced early malnourishment and circumstances of severe deprivation, particularly in institutional care. They found that children adopted at older ages and institutionalized children had lower IQ scores than younger and noninstitutionalized adopted children. Extending previous research using data from the same children, Rutter et al. (1998) assessed the cognitive development of 6-year-old children adopted from Romania before they were 24 months old or when they were between 24 and 42 months old and nondeprived, domestic adoptees from the United Kingdom adopted before they were 6 months old. They found that later placed Romanian children caught up considerably from entry into the United Kingdom to age 6, but, as a group, the children exhibited lower cognitive scores and general developmental impairment compared with earlier adopted Romanian children. This may indicate that the positive outcomes of adoption may be hampered or reduced by severe negative experiences before adoption placement.
To summarise: 7 studies showing substantial increase in IQ/reduction in school failure when children of poor or Black parents are raised in a rich or White household, and that this disparity between biological parental IQ and child IQ rises as the socioeconomic disparity between the biological and adopting parents rises. It then quotes 4 studies saying this gain is less in adulthood. Finally, it quotes 2 studies concluding that the earlier the adoption into a higher SES family, the better the outcomes. Thus, it appears that childhood environment has an effect on what we measure as intelligence.
Using the same data, this study concludes that there is a 12-18 point IQ increase (equal to 1 standard deviation, slightly bigger than the average white-black IQ gap in the US) when children of poor parents are adopted by middle class families.

Besides this, we have the Flynn effect, a massive, secular, increase in worldwide IQs over many postwar decades, which would be hard to envisage if we understand IQ as something which cannot be significantly altered by external interventions.


About the second claim, undoubtedly, genes have an effect on intelligence.
I find it interesting that after decades of microarrays and about a decade of high-throughput sequencing, and with mass-scale sequencing of human genomes, the candidate genes for intelligence and many other complex traits (especially behavioral traits) all have very small effect sizes. This is the biggest GWAS I could find, with 80 named scientists, 23&me genetic data, and data from other big collaborations, involving a look at 1.1 million individual genetic sequences. It identifies 1,300 genes (we only have about 20k total genes!) with variants contributing to intelligence, and putting the effect of all 1.3k together, concludes that they explain 7-10% of individual differences in IQ. A very far cry from the 50-80% cited by Murray and Harris. Note that any further variants discovered in future GWAS with expanded samples will have even smaller effect sizes than those found in this one.

Yes, heritability estimates of IQ (and most other behavioral traits) from twin studies are high, and are cited by Murray and others. But heritability is not a direct measure of the genes involved. At some point, it is reasonable to expect the GWAS gene lists to have better predictive power, but even with 1.1 million individuals sequenced and 80 co-authors analysing the data, polygenic scores do not come close to heritability estimates. (Height GWAS does better, for comparison Like with IQ, height has shown a worldwide increase in the past 2 centuries, showing strong environmental modulation of more heritable and genetic traits than intelligence).

I wonder how much the quoted heritability estimates have been clouded by gene-environment and gene-gene interactions - i.e. genes that affect intelligence only in certain external conditions (for example, polluted environments) or of people with a particular genetic backgrounds (a gene variant that has no effect on intelligence unless paired with a particular variant of a different gene). It is known, for example, that IQ heritability itself varies with SES - genes predict a rich person's IQ better than a poor person's, presumably because poor people's childhood environments are more varied.

As an aside, GWAS itself has its issues - even after applying controls, researchers could find associations between exposure to certain atmospheric pollutants and certain gene variants! Obviously, this is not a heritable or even biological trait, and is determined by industries and traffic at the place you live. But the standard controls could not eliminate whatever underlying factors were causing these correlations, and, taken at face value, this suggests that exposure to pollutants can be predicted by your genes. Same point is made here, with a direct reference to Murray's claims about PGS from GWAS - a scientist was able to predict national GDP based on the genetics of mustard plants grown there.

Nevertheless, the correlation between genetics and individual differences in IQ is among the less controversial claims Murray makes, so I am not going to waste any more time on it. I have not had much coursework or done real research in this, besides TAing an Intro Genetics course, so my knowledge of all these things is a bit haphazard and not systematic.


Racial and national gaps in IQ are vast. If the earlier two propositions hold, they are likely fixed in amount and direction.
These are race-based results for performance in an Army test in the US during and after WW1, published in 1922. Clearly, people originally from Italy, Poland, Russia, Ireland, and Austria were significantly less smart than those from England, Germany, and native-born US Whites (whose scores will statistically dominate the "Total White Draft"). Indeed, the author finds that Italians, Poles, and Russians are significantly worse than Blacks in the northern US, whose scores are most similar to Irish immigrants. The author considers the objection that the difference in immigrant scores might simply reflect a language handicap, and shows that this is unlikely - the gap increases after 5 years of schooling (Table IV). Hence, it seems quite unlikely that Italian/Polish/Irish scores can be remedied by better education.
These intra-European differences are seen as late as the 70s. Looking at data directly from Europe rather than from European immigrants to the US, Irish IQ lagged far behind UK IQ and was again comparable to that of "American negroes" (from Race, Intelligence, and Education by Hans Eysenck, 1971; the author was a signatory to the "Mainstream Science on Intelligence" Declaration of 1994 published in the wake of Charles Murray's Bell Curve).

However, intra-European IQ and schooling differences are much reduced or reversed now (2019 PISA scores for Ireland and Poland are among the highest in Europe for example), and differences between groups originating from different European countries in the US are not significant anymore. If the original effect was genetic, this is quite unlikely.

What does this have to do with Murray, whose work on race focuses on American Blacks? Well, Italian and Irish inferiority had been demonstrated repeatedly by science, and was used to help settle things like US immigration policy. There are not many people who still believe it. It should be a cautionary tale before arguing for a genetic explanation of IQ gaps between races or nations; this re-ordering of races over time are unlikely if racial differences in IQ have a genetic origin.
[Note: I have tried to look for further IQ scores of different races over time, but have been stymied by the fact that almost all blogs and papers are by Rushton, Lynn, Jensen, and other Pioneer Fund people, or by Ron Unz. Most of these people have been cited by Murray, I briefly discuss Lynn's data (the most mainstream of these) below.]

The hard genetic evidence for differences in IQ between American Blacks and Whites (a major claim of Murray, and a natural progression of his other claims) is significantly worse than the evidence for individual differences that I discussed above. This is a very recent peer-reviewed paper, based on statistical analysis of GWAS results: "Tests for selection using Fst values did not find evidence of natural selection. Expected mean difference in IQ was substantially smaller than postulated by hereditarians, even under unrealistic assumptions that overestimate genetic contribution". This is a blog post by an evolutionary biologist responding to several other papers.

Several smaller points - national IQ data from Lynn cited by Murray shows that the average human being of several African countries is "borderline mentally retarded". I find that unlikely, and an indication that perhaps the data quality isn't the best; indeed, it has been criticised. The theory that cold climate selects for higher IQ hasn't been backed up by genetic evidence, or by IQ scores from people indigenous to Canada, US, NZ, etc (colder than many low-IQ countries and races). In the absence of directional selection, the rather homogenously low scores for Sub-Saharan national IQs are at odds with the great genetic diversity of the region (comparable to the genetic diversity of the rest of the species). Within the US, I am fascinated by data on lead exposure in childhood. Lead disproportionately affects poor and Black households, and childhood exposure is correlated with aggression and low intelligence, with strong evidence of causation. Finally, there is the transracial adoption data from the meta-analysis which I mentioned at the top of this post, which contradicts Murray's conclusions. (Here is another meta-analysis, focusing on race alone and not class, with a similar conclusion).


About the "deplorable suggestion" and Harris' and Murray's personal beliefs:

If Harris believes the 3 things you quoted (intelligence largely fixed at birth, largely genetic, races far apart), as well as the largest point of Murray's book (g correlates with all life outcomes) they clearly imply racial superiority, and he must believe it, whether or not he has the guts to say it to himself and the world. Murray too (like many whom I cite above) takes great pains to argue that his work in the Bell Curve is not racist. These screenshots contain instructive comments from fellow travelers, correcting him on this point. Indeed, The Bell Curve shows a causative correlation between low individual IQ, criminal behavior and many other negative things - there is no better proof of racial inferiority than a race being born genetically criminal. Either Murray truly believes what he has published, or he believes there is no biological racial superiority, both are not possible.

The open racism of the random guy on reddit who told me that, since I'm from a 80-IQ country, my opinion should not count, is much preferable to the coy, wink-wink, socially accepted, policy-driving racism of Murray.
Great post
 

Mike Smalling

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The assistants of course dressed in police gear and aviators, like it's some sort of comedy bit. Crowder is a weapons-grade douchebag.
 

WPMUFC

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Man who said he couldn't move to Texas because they wouldn't treat a gay man as fully human claims his "move to the right" and "support of Trump" was down to Trump being the last defender against "Liberal wokeness" destroying society.

Prager was right, Rubin is such a perfect patsy for the right-wing to inject their insidious ideology under the cloak of "liberalism"
 
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Kopral Jono

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Man who said he couldn't move to Texas because they wouldn't treat a gay man as fully human claims his "move to the right" and "support of Trump" was down to Trump being the last defender against "Liberal wokeness" destoying society.

Prager was right, Rubin is such a perfect patsy for the right-wing to inject their insidious ideology under the cloak of "liberalism"
With hacks like Rubin, Pool, et al is for all their claims of providing platform to heterodox speakers, they would only ever feature right-wing or at best right-leaning guests on their shows. If they are truly for giving platform to heterodoxy, they would ideally also have loony woke activists or actual communists on their shows for a proper 'battle of ideas' as they like to say.
 

psychdelicblues

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With hacks like Rubin, Pool, et al is for all their claims of providing platform to heterodox speakers, they would only ever feature right-wing or at best right-leaning guests on their shows. If they are truly for giving platform to heterodoxy, they would ideally also have loony woke activists or actual communists on their shows for a proper 'battle of ideas' as they like to say.
To be fair to Pool, he has has debated Seder, Destiny,Pakmen and Vaush, all in the past year or 18 months.

He was due to debate Seder again before or after the election but did not come to fruition due disagreement regarding format.(Poole wanted Seder to come to his studio, Seder insisted it done via zoom because of Covid.)

Rubin you're correct.I think the last lefty he debated was Marianne Williamson, and he got ripped apart.
 

Gehrman

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