Do be aware that Lorenzo is in Australia and asleep at the moment. He'll be around in about six hours.
[Addendum Monday 22nd at 5 pm GMT: Rather than getting into the weeds with people, I'll just note that some of the comments here are getting a bit spicy. Please don't tell people to read books or that their claims are incoherent. With very few exceptions, most of the people on this Substack leave sensible comments, and this is still true even when I disagree with them.]
Ugh. The amount of variation by DNA is minimal compared to variation by acculturation. Sowell's Wealth, Poverty and Politics is directly on point. There are cultural subgroups all but genetically identical to neighbors that do not display the same socio-economic success.
The heredity argument clearly falls apart as soon as you examine any aristocracy.
“Race” is a shitty term with bad history,but people intuitively understand it as shorthand for complex population genetics.
Recent black African immigrants to the USA are more affluent and from well educated, professional families, which presumably have better genes AND cultural tendencies than ADOS (many of which have something like 25% DNA from slave masters, who are not the best part of the “white” gene pool, see Colin Woodard’s 11 Nations).
DNA differences between modern-western gene pools are drastically different the parts of the world where honor systems, clans and dynasties rule and practice cousin marriage and polygamy.
Inbred gene pools are pre-modern in their thinking and values. Thus they struggle with high-social-trust, democracy, market economics, Constitutional order, scientific and technological innovation, etc.
The same differences show up comparing the Frankish Manorial gene pool vs Celts, Slavs and Romans. It isn’t about skin pigment, it is about degree of historical cousin marriage, clans, and inbreeding.
The dominant paradigm in sociobiology and evolutionary psychology is gene-culture [CO]evolution , which follows Darwin’s observations on the evolution of culture and morals.
The “race deniers” the postmodern “left” explicitly set out to muddle the science because they are corrupt ideological tribalists. Ironically
We need terminology that differentiates between group and individual context. Race is a poor term because it is used for describing groups as well as individuals.
This is not a simple problem - we assign a group name not to a specific group of individuals but to an abstract concept meaning "all that have X characteristic".
So while the qualities discovered in the group (via research and statistics) are "true" they are not necessarily applicable to an individual that one happens to think belongs to that group. And often those qualities are further differentiate within the group by other social factors.
No surprise that our enlightened rulers have decided to double down on identity politics, where the individual is encouraged to have a strong connection to their group. Of course this connection is natural for an individual. But often what is natural is not productive or is even destructive.
Ironic that those that celebrate diversity (therefore difference) are such advocates for equality.
Great article, Lorenzo, that argues against use of the term race realist. So what do you suggest as a better term to distinguish people who are trying to be realistic about these matters from those pursuing ideological motivated falsehoods?
Very interesting...particularly the African-American rural/urban crime-rate persective which I wasn't aware of. I posted my own quibble on another aspect of the Cofnas essay (completely tangential to yours) in response to Cofnas saying: "wokism is simply what follows from taking the equality thesis of race and sex differences seriously".
I re-post my quibble here: "Wokeism is not, at bottom, driven by a serious thesis of ANY kind. It is more in the way of a mind-game.....one in which you the woke person get a nice FEELING about yourself as one of a caring (and sophisticated) elect. At the same time you get to indulge some delicious hate towards your notional peers."
Reference for heritability of executive function vs intelligence?
In Britain I note that there is criticism from some quarters over unrealistic expectations of black kids at school. This is called 'adulting'.
On the other hand, schools like Michaela, with mostly black pupils and higher expectations, score very highly in objective tests - ie public examinations - and also highly, anecdotally, in behaviour outside school. Learning executive function - management of emotions - is mentioned as a feature of the school.
It is interesting that equalitarians do agree that certain groups have poor executive function - hence the need to train everyone else in the existence of microaggressions.
Another thought provoking essay. Thanks. When I hear the word 'hereditarianism' I immediately think of both culture and biology. After all we inherit both. Why can't the word incorporate both aspects of our inheritance?
I'm not going to quibble over conflating races and subspecies or any other definitional disputes, since I don't think it's worth anyone's time. I've never seen any serious challenges to Fuerst's The Nature of Race, so I'll just link it here for those interested in the evidence on the concept: https://philarchive.org/rec/FUETNO.
I don't know if my piece on Nigerians (which is about to receive a follow-up piece on ethnic attrition in many other groups) shows the importance of culture. From the available data, it cannot differentiate culture from, say, genes. There's no clearly-articulated theory of cultural regression to the mean, but there is a genetic one, and it is consistent with the results. A cultural theory doesn't seem consistent with the observation of ethnic attrition without making a number of other assumptions that there's not currently evidence for.
There isn't actually good support for the claim that executive function is more heritable, or even distinct from, intelligence. There's a niche misconception that they are distinguishable (not justified by latent variable modeling in sufficiently broad batteries) and that EF is more heritable than g (this is based on seeing EF modeled alone in an underpowered AE model of its common pathway), but the idea is just based on a confusion and it doesn't hold up.
Selection via slavery doesn't seem like a reasonable hypothesis. When observed, slaves virtually always have low fertility relative to their captors and their conditions align more with luck-based fertility. There are also no records of multi-generational slave breeding programs to make them, e.g., stronger, more environment-resistant, etc. I also don't know of good reasons to believe that Sub-Saharan Africans in general have been selected for physical robustness.
The point about African American and White American homicide rates being statistically attributable to urbanicity is wrong. With the latest CDC WONDER data, I am unable to replicate this result for the period 1999-2020 or using the Compress Mortality 1979-1998 data. I've charted the 1999-2020 results, here: https://twitter.com/cremieuxrecueil/status/1749158245229326586. The data suggest practically no effect of urbanicity for Blacks aside from the most urban category, and this could just be due to geographic sorting. The point about female-headed households doesn't seem meaningful either, since female-headed households are not populated randomly. Sibling control results are at least not consistent with a strong or moderate causal effect of father absence: https://www.cremieux.xyz/i/118965416/poverty-and-violent-crime.
Otherwise, nice! I look forward to the other pieces.
Excellent essay, thank you. My first encounter with a version of Lorenzo's well titled and defined "hereditarian thesis" was from Matt Ridley's book 'Nature via Nurture' which I recommend to interested readers... "Heritability is a measure of what is varying, not what is determining... Social policy must adapt to a world in which everybody is different... 'environment' is not some inflexible and real thing: it is a unique set of influences actively chosen by the actor himself. Having a certain set of genes predisposes a person to experience a certain environment... The genes are likely to be affecting appetite more than aptitude. They do not make you intelligent; they make you more likely to enjoy learning. Because you enjoy it, you spend more time doing it and you grow more clever. Nature can only act via nurture. The environment acts as a multiplier of small genetic differences, pushing sporty children towards the sports that reward them, and pushing bright children towards the books that reward them." https://www.amazon.com/Nature-via-Nurture-Genes-experience-ebook/dp/B0054J9CLK
Do be aware that Lorenzo is in Australia and asleep at the moment. He'll be around in about six hours.
[Addendum Monday 22nd at 5 pm GMT: Rather than getting into the weeds with people, I'll just note that some of the comments here are getting a bit spicy. Please don't tell people to read books or that their claims are incoherent. With very few exceptions, most of the people on this Substack leave sensible comments, and this is still true even when I disagree with them.]
Ugh. The amount of variation by DNA is minimal compared to variation by acculturation. Sowell's Wealth, Poverty and Politics is directly on point. There are cultural subgroups all but genetically identical to neighbors that do not display the same socio-economic success.
The heredity argument clearly falls apart as soon as you examine any aristocracy.
“Race” is a shitty term with bad history,but people intuitively understand it as shorthand for complex population genetics.
Recent black African immigrants to the USA are more affluent and from well educated, professional families, which presumably have better genes AND cultural tendencies than ADOS (many of which have something like 25% DNA from slave masters, who are not the best part of the “white” gene pool, see Colin Woodard’s 11 Nations).
DNA differences between modern-western gene pools are drastically different the parts of the world where honor systems, clans and dynasties rule and practice cousin marriage and polygamy.
Inbred gene pools are pre-modern in their thinking and values. Thus they struggle with high-social-trust, democracy, market economics, Constitutional order, scientific and technological innovation, etc.
The same differences show up comparing the Frankish Manorial gene pool vs Celts, Slavs and Romans. It isn’t about skin pigment, it is about degree of historical cousin marriage, clans, and inbreeding.
Modern black American crime rates are not a genetic selection effect. They are a policy outcome.
https://www.blackpast.org/african-american-history/moynihan-report-1965/
The dominant paradigm in sociobiology and evolutionary psychology is gene-culture [CO]evolution , which follows Darwin’s observations on the evolution of culture and morals.
The “race deniers” the postmodern “left” explicitly set out to muddle the science because they are corrupt ideological tribalists. Ironically
This reads like you've reached the bargaining stage with reality WRT race-realism.
We need terminology that differentiates between group and individual context. Race is a poor term because it is used for describing groups as well as individuals.
This is not a simple problem - we assign a group name not to a specific group of individuals but to an abstract concept meaning "all that have X characteristic".
So while the qualities discovered in the group (via research and statistics) are "true" they are not necessarily applicable to an individual that one happens to think belongs to that group. And often those qualities are further differentiate within the group by other social factors.
No surprise that our enlightened rulers have decided to double down on identity politics, where the individual is encouraged to have a strong connection to their group. Of course this connection is natural for an individual. But often what is natural is not productive or is even destructive.
Ironic that those that celebrate diversity (therefore difference) are such advocates for equality.
Great article, Lorenzo, that argues against use of the term race realist. So what do you suggest as a better term to distinguish people who are trying to be realistic about these matters from those pursuing ideological motivated falsehoods?
Very interesting...particularly the African-American rural/urban crime-rate persective which I wasn't aware of. I posted my own quibble on another aspect of the Cofnas essay (completely tangential to yours) in response to Cofnas saying: "wokism is simply what follows from taking the equality thesis of race and sex differences seriously".
I re-post my quibble here: "Wokeism is not, at bottom, driven by a serious thesis of ANY kind. It is more in the way of a mind-game.....one in which you the woke person get a nice FEELING about yourself as one of a caring (and sophisticated) elect. At the same time you get to indulge some delicious hate towards your notional peers."
Reference for heritability of executive function vs intelligence?
In Britain I note that there is criticism from some quarters over unrealistic expectations of black kids at school. This is called 'adulting'.
On the other hand, schools like Michaela, with mostly black pupils and higher expectations, score very highly in objective tests - ie public examinations - and also highly, anecdotally, in behaviour outside school. Learning executive function - management of emotions - is mentioned as a feature of the school.
It is interesting that equalitarians do agree that certain groups have poor executive function - hence the need to train everyone else in the existence of microaggressions.
Another thought provoking essay. Thanks. When I hear the word 'hereditarianism' I immediately think of both culture and biology. After all we inherit both. Why can't the word incorporate both aspects of our inheritance?
I'm not going to quibble over conflating races and subspecies or any other definitional disputes, since I don't think it's worth anyone's time. I've never seen any serious challenges to Fuerst's The Nature of Race, so I'll just link it here for those interested in the evidence on the concept: https://philarchive.org/rec/FUETNO.
I don't know if my piece on Nigerians (which is about to receive a follow-up piece on ethnic attrition in many other groups) shows the importance of culture. From the available data, it cannot differentiate culture from, say, genes. There's no clearly-articulated theory of cultural regression to the mean, but there is a genetic one, and it is consistent with the results. A cultural theory doesn't seem consistent with the observation of ethnic attrition without making a number of other assumptions that there's not currently evidence for.
There isn't actually good support for the claim that executive function is more heritable, or even distinct from, intelligence. There's a niche misconception that they are distinguishable (not justified by latent variable modeling in sufficiently broad batteries) and that EF is more heritable than g (this is based on seeing EF modeled alone in an underpowered AE model of its common pathway), but the idea is just based on a confusion and it doesn't hold up.
Selection via slavery doesn't seem like a reasonable hypothesis. When observed, slaves virtually always have low fertility relative to their captors and their conditions align more with luck-based fertility. There are also no records of multi-generational slave breeding programs to make them, e.g., stronger, more environment-resistant, etc. I also don't know of good reasons to believe that Sub-Saharan Africans in general have been selected for physical robustness.
The point about African American and White American homicide rates being statistically attributable to urbanicity is wrong. With the latest CDC WONDER data, I am unable to replicate this result for the period 1999-2020 or using the Compress Mortality 1979-1998 data. I've charted the 1999-2020 results, here: https://twitter.com/cremieuxrecueil/status/1749158245229326586. The data suggest practically no effect of urbanicity for Blacks aside from the most urban category, and this could just be due to geographic sorting. The point about female-headed households doesn't seem meaningful either, since female-headed households are not populated randomly. Sibling control results are at least not consistent with a strong or moderate causal effect of father absence: https://www.cremieux.xyz/i/118965416/poverty-and-violent-crime.
Otherwise, nice! I look forward to the other pieces.
Excellent essay, thank you. My first encounter with a version of Lorenzo's well titled and defined "hereditarian thesis" was from Matt Ridley's book 'Nature via Nurture' which I recommend to interested readers... "Heritability is a measure of what is varying, not what is determining... Social policy must adapt to a world in which everybody is different... 'environment' is not some inflexible and real thing: it is a unique set of influences actively chosen by the actor himself. Having a certain set of genes predisposes a person to experience a certain environment... The genes are likely to be affecting appetite more than aptitude. They do not make you intelligent; they make you more likely to enjoy learning. Because you enjoy it, you spend more time doing it and you grow more clever. Nature can only act via nurture. The environment acts as a multiplier of small genetic differences, pushing sporty children towards the sports that reward them, and pushing bright children towards the books that reward them." https://www.amazon.com/Nature-via-Nurture-Genes-experience-ebook/dp/B0054J9CLK
"But the notion of heritability is not only about genes"
well *technically* the term heritability is about the genes. the other stuff is non-heritable
colloquially of course heritable means everything
a lot of the issues here seem to be semantic. not sure where the huge disagreements are
Damn, this comments section is so good that you've all added at least 3 new books to my reading list (and introduced me to some new perspectives).
A salute to everyone here for taking a fraught and potentially ugly topic and analyzing it with so much calm intelligence.
Thanks also to Helen and Lorenzo...