When is the last time you saw a proponent of Scientific Racism debate an Egalitarian scientist? The last time I saw it happen was Rushton vs. Joseph Graves in 1997 at John Jay College of Criminal Justice. That was 22 years ago..... View my post debunking Scientific Racism Summary points of the Evolutionary Arguments of Joseph Graves vs. Rushton: 1. Rushton's arguments rely on r- and K- life history theory. These designations are general descriptions of investment in reproduction and somatic tissue on opposite ends of a spectrum (r- = more reproduction/less soma and K- = less reproduction/more soma). The problem with this notion is that it has been shown to be incorrect in a series of experiments with a wide variety of organisms. No one took this theory seriously after about 1990. 2. Even if r- and K- theory were correct, I showed that Rushton applied it backwards. By the theory, Africans should be K- selected (K selection occurs in stable environments, such as the tropics) while r-selection was to be favored in fluctuating environments, such as the temperate zones. So by Rushton's reasoning, Africans should be more genetically capable of intelligence, and Europeans/Asians less. 3. Throughout his work, Rushton selectively uses examples to support his ideas. I have caught him manipulating data in unclear ways, for the purposes of making his points. 4. Rushton requires the existence of biological races, which humans do not have. The existence of geographically based genetic variation is not the same as proving races exist, or that in life history features all Africans are different from all Europeans. After debating this subject for years I have become convinced that proponents of Scientific Racism will not debate Egalitarian Scientists in an academic setting because they don't have new arguments. There is no excuse for this intellectual cowardice. For example Charles Murray ducked a debate with Joseph Graves. While there may have been some miscommunication in the set up of the debate the fact remains that no debate happened despite Graves being ready and willing to take Murray on. According to Graves Murray wants to wait 5 years in order to allow advanced in genetic research to help him better present his case for there being a genetic component to racial differences in IQ. 3 years have passed since that correspondence. To my knowledge Charles Murray has not debated ANYONE on the topic in an academic setting in the last 3 years. I only see these academic racists discuss their views on their own websites, in their own publications or in video interviews with people open to their views. They are propagandists preaching to the choir rather than debating in the academic arena. Rushton and Jensen both died. In his debate with Graves Rushton was not able to respond to any of the evolutionary arguments. During the Q&A session he made arguments for why he felt his genetic hypothesis was correct and Graves schooled him on evolutionary genetics explaining why he was wrong. Rushton's research was revealed to be selective when he was asked why he omitted Native Americans from his studies. He could not decide whether Native Americans should be classified as Mongoloids or their own race and never presented a plausible explanation for why their IQ scores contradict his Cold Winters Theory that is used to explain East Asian mental superiority (a point mentioned by David Suzuki in their debate as the ancestors of Native Americans traveled over the Bering Strait in to North America and their ancestors should have experienced the same evolutionary pressure that supposedly gave Northeast Asians their superior intelligence). This debate was actually settled a long time ago when that article in Scientific American was published in 1970 in response to Arthur Jensen. The article Intelligence and Race was approved by the Genetics Society of America featuring the research of world class geneticists Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza and Sir Walter Bodmer who concluded that the genetic hypothesis for the cause of racial differences in IQ was not testable without first controlling for the environment and since you can not control for racism attempts to discover a genetic component are a meaningless exercise. (43:38-45-15) Suzuki: Now remember, neither Rushton nor Jensen is a geneticist. After Jensen published his work in 1969 The Genetics Society of America, the leading Genetics organization in the world, overwhelmingly approved a GSA statement that such work as Jensen's cannot prove a genetic basis for IQ difference in races. World class population geneticists, two of the leading population geneticists in the world, Luca Cavalli-Sforza of Standford and Sir Walter Bodmer of Oxford and Richard Lewontin of Harvard have written books on this subject! In October 1970 of Scientific American, Bodmer and Cavalli-Sforza published the definitive popular work entitled Intelligence and Race in direct response to Jensen's work. Their opening sentence is, "To what extent might behavioral differences between social classes and between races be genetically determined?" 11 pages later, and that's a long article in Scientific American, they conclude, "The question of a possible genetic basis for the Race/IQ difference will be almost impossible to answer satisfactorily before the environmental differences between U.S. Blacks and Whites have been substantially reduced. There is no good case for encouraging the support of studies of this kind on either theoretical or practical grounds." (48:42-49-47) Rushton: I'm very disappointed in Dr. Suzuki's presentation. Dr. Suzuki says my ideas on race are too esoteric and he shows however little more than moral outrage. He says that people like me should be rooted out and if I heard correctly he actually called for me to be fired. Well...that is not a Scientific Argument. I don't know that there is very much of substance in what I he said that I can respond to. He went on about Arthur Jensen and IQ and Genetics and completely ignored all the work on two-egg twinning and the 60 other variables that I mentioned including the ranking of the three races. (56:30-56:55) Suzuki: My position was very clear. I did not choose to discuss the points he raised because I tried to point out very clearly that Bodmer and Cavalli-Sforza indicate that the genetic relationship or the correlation of the genetic basis that allows comparison between races is simply not possible. And I did not hear you rebut that in any way. And that is the definitive work! Rushton had no cogent response to Suzuki in 1989 and the same happened in 1997. Rushton's book Race, Evolution and Behavior was called the Bible of Race-Realism. His research was promoted in The Bell Curve and Rushton, a President of the Pioneer Fund before he died was championed as the foremost expect on racial differences in intelligence having a genetic component (see for example Linda Gottfredson's article Resolute ignorance on race and Rushton). If Rushton was the champion of Scientific Racism he was dealt a knockout blow in their debate at John Jay College of Criminal Justice. Since then Joseph Graves has supported his evolutionary arguments with actual genetic data showing that genes related to intelligence do not show a racial association in their distribution. More recently, Gail Davies and colleagues (2011), in a genome-wide scan of 549,692 single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) from 3,511 unrelated adults, concluded that 40 percent of the crystallized-intelligence variation and 51 percent of the fluid-intelligence variation was accounted for by linkage disequilibrium between known SNP markers and unknown causal variants. Using SNP data alone, similar to the studies above, they could only account for 1% of the variation in IQ scores. These studies indicate that individual difference in human intelligence is determined by many genes of small effect. Thus the evidence summarized above suggests that we can state that cognitive performance is definitely influenced by genetic variation, that cognitive performance is heritable (and therefore varies by families), we cannot reasonably state that differentials measured in socially-defined racial groups results from differences in underlying genetic potential for cognitive performance. Source: Race, Genomics, and IQ: Slight Return for Intelligence Quotient: Testing, Role of Genetics and the Environment and Social Outcomes, Ed. Joseph Kush, Nova Scientific Publishers, pp. 69 –86 (2013) POPULATION SUBDIVISION Population subdivision is a means to test the amount of genetic variation amongst subpopulations within a species. This concept was developed by American evolutionary geneticist Sewall Wright (1978 ). Populations, which have undergone significant adaptation to local conditions, differ in population dynamic history, and limited gene flow between them should differ in allele frequencies at a number of loci. The population subdivision statistic (FST) compares the allelic diversity of each of the subpopulations against a pooled total population. Since Wright's invention of F coefficients, which examine the proportioning of genetic variation between different levels within a species, population geneticists have utilized a minimum value of differentiation between subpopulations and the total species as the threshold for identifying the existence of biological races (FST> 0.250). Wright chose this value to maximize the probability that the subgroups were actually fixed for alternative different alleles at various loci. Four nucleotides can be found in DNA, adenosine (A), Thymine (T), Guanine (G), and Cytosine (C). In coding regions of the genetic code three nucleotides in succession determine which amino acid should be placed in the resultant protein. The code is redundant, but a change in a position can result in a different amino acid being specified. When we examine the coding and non-coding regions of DNA in a population, most people will have the same nucleotide at the vast majority of the positions within the code. However, at some positions, a variant will be found in some individuals. Such a variant is called a SNP. One study examined 4,833 single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) in 538 clusters across the human genome in Europeans (N = 30), African Americans (N = 30), and Asians (N = 40). In the study the mean frequency for FST at each locus was 0.083, with only 10 percent of the loci exceeding FST of 0.18 and about 6.5 percent exceeding FST of 0.250. This is consistent with the general finding that, averaged across the genome, FST in humans does not approach Wright's threshold (and is generally FST = 0.110). Utilizing eleven genes that have been reputedly associated with general intelligence (ASPM, OXTR, CCKAR, ADRB2, DTNBP1, ALDH5A1, IGF2R, CHRM2, MCPH1, DRD4, and CTSD; Deary, Johnson, & Houlihan, 2009) I calculated FST from the SNP's currently reported within these genes. The data on SNP's FST values was retrieved from the Allele Frequency Database (ALFRED, maintained by the Kidd Laboratory at Yale University). I calculated FST values for SNP's found within genes and for all SNP's found within these eleven genes. Table 1 reports the mean and standard deviation for FST within each gene. Of the eleven, nine have mean values well below Wright's threshold, OXTR barely exceeds it (0.251) and ASPM is well differentiated at 0.322. The FST values for each SNP were calculated from populations worldwide. The range of populations sampled varied between 4 and 87. However the vast majority of the SNP's frequencies in these genes were sampled from around 50 populations varying from regions identified as Africa (sub-Saharan Africa), Europe, Asia (Middle East and Eurasia), East Asia, Oceania, and the Americas. Generally, there were more populations sampled in Europe and East Asia, compared to Africa. This discrepancy in sampling makes all world-wide calculations of genetic variability suspect, simply because the data we have at present is not representative of the entire spectrum of human populations. The mean FST for all SNP's from these seven genes is 0.150, with a S. D. of 0.075. Only 12.5% exceeded Wright's threshold of 0.250, see Figure 1. This is to be expected in this sample, since nine of the eleven genes examined had mean FST values for all SNP's within them below Wright's threshold. Despite the limitations of sampling across world populations, the analysis presented above does not support the notion that there should be "racially"; differentiated genetic variation for genetic variants associated for intelligence. Source: Race, Genomics, and IQ: Slight Return for Intelligence Quotient: Testing, Role of Genetics and the Environment and Social Outcomes, Ed. Joseph Kush, Nova Scientific Publishers, pp. 69 –86 (2013) Furthermore, all genetic hypotheses for phenotypic variance require that genotypes are assayed in equivalent environments, not just at time of assay, but for at least two previous generations to equalize maternal effects. This never happens in racialized and socially stratified societies. Thus it can be argued that if one wishes to see the cognitive performance of the socially subordinated improve, then these people should be provided with equalized education, nutrition, health care, and freedom from differential exposure to toxic materials like lead. We know that psychosocial stress influences brain development (McEwen & Gianaros 2011) and that environmental factors influence a variety of complex phenotypes in quite complex ways (Zhang et al., 2012). Therefore it matters a great deal how one addresses the question of the existence and origin of intelligence disparity. The more complex the trait, the more likely it is to be disrupted by poor environment. This is crucial since racialized societies do not provide members of socially defined races equal environmental circumstances. Thus we will never really be able to launch a credible research program on the genetic differentials of intelligence associated with genomic variation associated with ancestry, until such social justice is achieved. Unfortunately, this has never really been the aim of those most invested in this research. Source: Race, Genomics, and IQ: Slight Return for Intelligence Quotient: Testing, Role of Genetics and the Environment and Social Outcomes, Ed. Joseph Kush, Nova Scientific Publishers, pp. 69 –86 (2013)
This research was published in 2013. That was 6 years ago. No academic debate between racial hereditarians and egalitarian scientists have happened in that time frame and I know of no plans to do this. The only proponent of Scientific Racism I know of who is even approach presenting genetic data in support of their position if Davide Piffer and he had trouble even getting his work published in a credible scientific journal. Piffer should debate Graves. Murray is too coward to do so and I don't believe Gottfredson or the other academic racists in the field of psychology will step up. They simply don't have the ability to debate support their position with research from biology and genetics. Any proponent of Scientific Racism who wants their position to be believed most present their research in an academic arena. Otherwise this theory will always be considered as the discredited racist garbage it is being promoted on the internet with all of the other pseudoscientific nonsense.
That's because they've all been driven to fringes, and none of them (or at least no white ones) will dare come out and do this research; they would lose their academic careers. Look up what's happened to academic researchers who published papers contradicting climate change. This is even worse than that.
Scientific Racism is considered to be pseudoscience so it is a fringe and discredited field of research. However that doesn't stop academic racists from promoting their views. Rushton did so in 1989 against David Suzuki and again in 1997 against Joseph Graves. Scholars such as Richard Lynn, Linda Gottfredson and Charles Murray are not worried about committing career suicide. They have maintained their position for years. Rushton and others received a lot of backlash for their racist views but they seem more interested in promoting propaganda through video interviews, websites, blogs and college presentations rather than actual debates. This would not be hard to set up. Simply find a college that will allow a debate like the Rushton debates and let a proponent of Scientific Racism debate a top Egalitarian scientist. I think a powerpoint presentation in addition to a Q&A session like in the Rushton-Suzuki debate would be really useful in illustrating the points of the scholars.
I didn't. Appeal to Authority argumentum ad verecundiam (also known as: argument from authority, ipse dixit) Description: Insisting that a claim is true simply because a valid authority or expert on the issue said it was true, without any other supporting evidence offered. Also see the appeal to false authority. Logical Form: According to person 1, who is an expert on the issue of Y, Y is true. Therefore, Y is true. Example #1: Richard Dawkins, an evolutionary biologist and perhaps the foremost expert in the field, says that evolution is true. Therefore, it's true. Explanation: Richard Dawkins certainly knows about evolution, and he can confidently tell us that it is true, but that doesn't make it true. What makes it true is the preponderance of evidence for the theory. Exception: Be very careful not to confuse "deferring to an authority on the issue" with the appeal to authority fallacy. Remember, a fallacy is an error in reasoning. Dismissing the council of legitimate experts and authorities turns good skepticism into denialism. The appeal to authority is a fallacy in argumentation, but deferring to an authority is a reliable heuristic that we all use virtually every day on issues of relatively little importance. There is always a chance that any authority can be wrong, that’s why the critical thinker accepts facts provisionally. It is not at all unreasonable (or an error in reasoning) to accept information as provisionally true by credible authorities. Of course, the reasonableness is moderated by the claim being made (i.e., how extraordinary, how important) and the authority (how credible, how relevant to the claim). My position is based on the preponderance of evidence I presented not the belief of anyone in position of authority. However it is noteworthy that the scientific consensus on this topic is that theories of racial hierarchy in intelligence have been dismissed as pseudoscience. Can you respond to the scientific research presented? There is no excuse for academic racists. They can either defend their position in academic debate or they can not. PSEUDOSCIENCE appeals to false authority, to emotion, to sentiment, or to distrust of established fact. A high school dropout is accepted as an expert on archaeology, though he has never made any study of it! A psychoanalyst is accepted as an expert on all of human history, not to mention physics, astronomy, and mythology— though his claims are inconsistent with everything known in all four fields! A show business celebrity swears it’s true, so it must be. A physicist says psychic Smoori Mellar couldn’t possibly have fooled him with simple magic tricks, although the physicist knows nothing about magic and sleight of hand. Emotional appeals are common: “If it makes you feel good, it must be true.” “In your heart, you know it’s right.” “Follow your bliss!” “Use your intuition!” Pseudoscientists are fond of imaginary conspiracies: “There’s plenty of evidence for flying saucers but the government keeps it secret.” They almost always argue from irrelevancies: “Scientists don’t know everything!”— but perhaps we weren’t talking about everything, maybe we were discussing the evidence for the tooth fairy and Santa Claus! - Rory Coker
Maybe you don't see how your argument is inherently circular. Your authority may be someone else's false authority, and vice versa. Well that's kind of irrelevant, isn't it, since I don't think this is even an academic field anymore.
r/K theory is still accepted fact in the field of ecology. Your contention here is highly questionable. That is an interesting point, and generally true, at least when it comes to other organisms besides humans. However, when you look at the oldest trees, they tend to be in colder climates. It may be because they grow slower due to the shorter seasons, or the lower incidence of disease due to the cooler temperatures. It might not make as much sense for an organism to be adapted to live a long age if it's very common for a fatal or debilitating disease (malaria, for example) to take hold. A species does not need to have clearly defined distinct biological races for his theories to be valid. If I can use the analogy, the colors on the rainbow. Look very closely and you'll see there's actually no clearly defined line between red and yellow.
That is obviously not true. An authority is an expert on a topic. Joseph Graves has a Phd in Evolutionary Biology. Rushton was a psychologist. Graves is an expert on Life History Biology and therefore more qualified to speak on it than Rushton. Academic credentials matter and remember my position is based on the scientific evidence not simply what someone in position of authority believes. Don't act like I didn't present evidence supporting my position which is right there at Quora for everyone to read. Archeology is an academic field but that is not the issue. That is just an example that Coker cited. You could replace archeology with evolutionary biology or genetics since that is relevant to the topic. Rushton is actually a false authority on this topic since he is not an expert on biology or genetics. This is not true. While you may be able to find a few ecologists who use it their position is fringe. As Graves noted r/K selection theories over the course of decades was falsified by a series of experiments on a wide variety of organisms and fell out of favor with the scientific literature so much so that Graves could only find one paper in a scientific database that supported it. These theoretical and experimental failures of the paradigm have led evolutionary biologists to dismiss r- and K-selection theory. This is evident from its current absence from the literature in evolutionary life history theory. Stearns (1992: 207) points out that from 1977 to 1982 there was an average of 42 references per year on r- and Kselection within the BIOSIS literature search service. From 1984 through 1989, however, this average had dropped to 16, and it continued to decline over time. In 2001, I ran a search on BIOSIS, using r- and K-selection as keywords for the period of 1995 to 2001, and found only one article. This appeared in the Journal of Environmental Biology, rather ironically concerning algal diversity in treated versus untreated sewage. Stearns (1992) and Roff (1992) presented r- and K-theory as a once useful heuristic that no longer serves any purpose in the discussion of life history theory. Source: What a tangled web he weaves: Race, reproductive strategies and Rushton's life history theory Anthropological Theory 2; 131 (2002) Here is the opinion of David Reznick another evolutionary biologist.... Email Response #1: Dear EgalitarianJay, Joe Graves' article is an accurate representation of the science side. Rushton's "theory" is really just a verbal argument that, as far as I can see, has no substantive support. Email Response #2: Dear EgalitarianJay, I have attached a copy of the 2004 paper with some comments. That 2005 paper is far too long for me to take on now but I may take on one or two of the ten arguments sometime to see how good the data are. As you say, the 2004 paper is not clear about what the underlying data are so it is hard to evaluate. I can at least say that Rushton does not know his biology and says numerous things that are untrue and silly. Some of the basics are his characterizations of vertebrate classes as ranging along an r-K continuum. Fish are not necessarily r, for example. Many of the longest lived vertebrates are fish. In fact, I wrote a well received paper about this for a senescence journal once and could send you a copy. r and K selection are no longer accepted as general explanations for life history evolution. I mentioned before that organisms often do array along a continuum that is similar to r and K selection at the extremes, but the factors that shape life histories are often a function of age or stage specific mortality risk. Very different mortality risks can generate the evolution of very similar life histories. Rushton's treatment of progress in evolution is wrong by many measures. It turns out that Darwin addressed this issue explicitly, along with addressing whether evolution caused increasing complexity, in the Origin of Species. He was quite emphatic, and quite correct, in arguing that there are no such trends evident in evolution. I have no doubt that E. O. Wilson criticized S. J. Gould's treatment of progress in evolution, but those arguments were based on finer distinctions than whether progress was present or absent. Rushton's statistical analysis of the mammals is probably correct, in that there is a positive correlation between brain size, body size and some life history attributes. There has been long standing interest in the evolution of brain size. One strong association is that predators have larger brains than herbivores. This is accompanied by their having larger territories and, we think, facing the requirement for greater cognitive abilities. I suspect they will tend to be more "k-selected" than herbivores by the criteria Rushton has chosen, so his arguments to tangentially capture some aspects of biology that are real. But, it does not follow that we have seen the progressive evolution of predators at the expense of herbivores, since predators cannot survive without an abundance of potential prey. What this tells us instead is that brain size can evolve in concert with the evolution of other aspects of the biology of organisms. However, the entirety of Rushton's statistics are correlations, which mean they cannot define causation. I offer some more specific comments on the correlation-causation issue in comments I inserted on the attached PDF. What Rushton never does is apply this same statistical rigor to human races nor does he show the know how to apply them properly. Any attempt by him to apply the above results to humans is not matched with real data on brain size, for example, or real results that show an association between IQ and brain size. Other critical aspects of his argument are simply assertions that do not seem to have any concrete support. For example, he argues that environmental variation is declining which means that heritability must be increasing, yet we see the differences among races becoming larger not smaller. This is his key argument for genetic differences among races in intelligence. What is lacking is any support at all for the argument that environmental variation is declining, particularly environmental variation that might effect performance on IQ tests. Sincerely, David As Reznick noted some aspects of r/K theory are consisted with principles accepted in Life History Evolution. Rushton found a convenient concept to fit his racial theories and applied it a long with the Out-of-Africa origin of human migration to create his own Life History Theory (Differential K Theory) but he displayed such a profound ignorance of ecological principles that he got the theory backwards. This is what happens when a scholars speaks outside of their field about topics they haven't formally studied. As Sussman noted in his book Rushton's pseudoscientific theories were really just an attempt to justify his childhood prejudice. All he was really seeking was a genetic basis to racist stereotypes but he didn't understand genetics or evolution enough to discuss it with a real expert which he why he never responded to Graves in print. For his theory to be valid he would actually need to prove that there are biological races to begin with. That is why his book was titled Race, Evolution and Behavior: A Life History Perspective. As Graves noted though even without the existence of biological races you could still have populations that differed in Life History features. What proponents of Scientific Racism fixate on is the reality of human differences so I get the point that even if the boundaries are fuzzy we can still identify observable differences between people. And if there are some differences why not differences in mental characteristics? Right? Well that is where the genetic research becomes important. Whether we want to call human groups races or populations there is very little genetic variation between geographic populations and most of the variation is within groups. The variation that exists could account for differences in traits determined by the expression of a few genes but not for major biological systems like cognitive function where thousands of genes factor in to the equation. From an evolutionary perspective natural selection favors intelligence in all environments and the genes that determine high intelligence vary randomly within populations. Intelligence runs in families because family members have a lot of genes in common. So the success of your parents is a good predictor of how well you will do academically or professionally. Your skin color has nothing to do with your mental ability and stating this must be the cause or is probably the case because there are other differences is a bit like saying that there is a racial hierarchy in eyesight and citing myopia as evidence that some people can see better than others because of genetic differences. Severe mental illness and intellectual disability have a genetic component and for those conditions I hope we can find a cure but the existence of these genetic pathologies does not mean that any group of people is genetically defect because of their evolutionary lineages. That theory has been debunked and is nothing more than an insult to the intelligence of people who standard of living has been diminished on average because of institutional racism.
