NOTE: I now write for Aporia Magazine. Please sign up there! The centrist intellectual Coleman Hughes recently had Charles Murray on his podcast to talk about Murray’s new book Facing Reality: Two Truths about Race in America. (For those who aren’t aware, the “two truths” in question are that violent crime rates and average cognitive ability vary across self-identified racial groups, with Asians having the lowest violent crime rates and the highest average cognitive ability, and blacks having the highest violent crime rates and the lowest average cognitive ability.)
I think Huges objections need to be fleshed out a little, given the low-informational tribalism that centres around skin colour. Further, even people with superior statistical skills often put too much weight in point estimates, which themselves are meaningless without variance, and there's issues with the statistical models themselves: genetics drives culture, and culture drives genetic drift. (For example, religiosity is heritable, and religious people have higher fertility: culture drives genetics.)
The fact that Africans are by far the most genetically diverse "group" of humans, it really doesn't make that much sense to think of "black IQ". There is little likelihood that we can measure a "purely genetic" statistical difference larger than a third of a standard deviation (keeping in mind the long tails). And the caveats of such measures are going to be well beyond the midwit pundit class.
It's far more likely that we'll find a specific lineage of humans -- who may be from the most diverse set of humans -- that really do have a significant "purely genetic" difference in IQ. (If this weren't possible, then intelligence would never have been selected for.) In which case, the points you make in this article are important.
Nonetheless, I think the consensus message from the scientific community should be: there's huge question marks all over this, including the near impossibility between making a neat culture/genetics split.
Could you record an audio version of your articles as well
I think Huges objections need to be fleshed out a little, given the low-informational tribalism that centres around skin colour. Further, even people with superior statistical skills often put too much weight in point estimates, which themselves are meaningless without variance, and there's issues with the statistical models themselves: genetics drives culture, and culture drives genetic drift. (For example, religiosity is heritable, and religious people have higher fertility: culture drives genetics.)
The fact that Africans are by far the most genetically diverse "group" of humans, it really doesn't make that much sense to think of "black IQ". There is little likelihood that we can measure a "purely genetic" statistical difference larger than a third of a standard deviation (keeping in mind the long tails). And the caveats of such measures are going to be well beyond the midwit pundit class.
It's far more likely that we'll find a specific lineage of humans -- who may be from the most diverse set of humans -- that really do have a significant "purely genetic" difference in IQ. (If this weren't possible, then intelligence would never have been selected for.) In which case, the points you make in this article are important.
Nonetheless, I think the consensus message from the scientific community should be: there's huge question marks all over this, including the near impossibility between making a neat culture/genetics split.