← Autodidact Archive · Original Dissent · Conservative
Thread ID: 8502 | Posts: 1 | Started: 2003-07-27
2003-07-27 06:09 | User Profile
Forwarded from [url=http://groups.yahoo.com/group/wta-talk/]http://groups.yahoo.com/group/wta-talk/[/url]
I got an e-message asking me, "How do you think intelligence and personality are distributed across the races, and what led you to this view?"
The most thorough treatment of IQ across the nations is Richard Lynn and Tatu Vanhanen, IQ and the Wealth of Nations (Praeger, 2002). I don't have the book, which costs $68, but have seen discussions. Basically, world IQ is about 90. Average IQs of 100 are to be found only in Western Europe, East Asia (somewhat above 100), and the Anglo-Saxon offshoots, like the United States, Canada, and Australia. The authors find a simple correlation of IQ and per capita income of about 0.7, I recall, with certain countries like the U.S. above the regression line and others, like the communist and ex-communist countries below it.
How much of it is innate? The proper question is, within a given population at a given point of time, how much of the variance is due to heredity and how much to the environment? Studies vary from 50 to 90% of the variance as due to heredity. There are a variety of ways of estimating this figure, and they converge to these estimates.
Change the population and you may get different results. If environments were equalized, presumably 100% of the variance would be due to heredity.
What of the environment? Can different environmental factors be partialled out? Yes, and the general results is that intrauterine environment is a major factor (at last in America today), more important than what takes place later. Parental environment, which is hard to partial out from hereditary factors, is of lesser importance, and schooling is less important still.
But these studies are for a given population at a given point in time. We know from the Flynn Effect that tested IQs have risen over time in Europe and America, and the most popular exlpanation is that improved nutrition is responsible for raising the IQs of those in the lower classes, along with their height and weight. The gap in height was several inches in England during even the nineteenth century. (See Robert Fogel, The Fourth Great Awakening, an astonishingly fact-filled book by a liberal economist, which I urge all to read.) Once nutrition is adequate, no further IQ gains can be had from improving diet.
Malnutrition no longer being a problem in Europe and America, the Flynn Effect has pretty much stopped, as I recall. It is becoming less and less of a problem in the developed world. Obesity, not being underweight, is a worldwide problem. Being fat does not harm your IQ; not getting enough calories and protein does. (Fogel has data for both.)
My general opinion is that most of the observed differences in IQ among groups (all well-nourished) in the United States is due to heredity. The racial egalitarians have not produced any data-driven positive evidence FOR equality, just critiques of the inegalitarians, mostly ad hominen critiques and impossible burdens of proof. They have the incentive and the means to present positive arguments and have since even before Arthur Jensen's famous article in 1969. This failure is a very large part of the reason why I subscribe to inequality.
My general opinion is that most, but not quite as much, of the differences across countries in average IQ is due to heredity. I remind you of what I said before that differences, on the order of a standard deviation or so, should not be surprising in any primate, most esp. not in man.
FOR TRANSHUMANISTS, all these differences in intelligence is not very germane to the future (so I won't go into detail about what IQ and intelligence are or what races are), since new technologies from embryo selection to Designer Children mean that more genetic change is going to happen in the next fifty years than during the last fifty centuries.
PSYCHOLOGICAL DIFFERENCES are much more interesting to me but much less studied. Edward C. Stewart and Milton J. Bennett, American Cultural Patterns: A Cross-Cultural Perspective. Revised edition. Yarmouth, ME: Intercultural Press, 1991, 192 pp., is one book that compares these differences on a deep level, and the new book by Robert Nisbet, The Geography of Thought, looks very promising. I have not looked into the World Values Survey, but values are only one aspect of psychology. There's also a book by Harry Triandis, The Analysis of Subjective Culture (1972), approx. date and title., and his Individualism and Collectivism (Boulder: Westview Press, 1995).
Nisbet says that much of the psychological differences between Whites and East Asians (the foci of his study) are wiped out by migration. I'd like to know how much. What persists, I should think, is racial. What I'd really like to know is how race shapes culture, the co-evolutionary question I brought up in the first place, even though culture shapes the individual. This is tremendously important to us transhumanists, since transhumanism is barely off the ground in American and European cultures, and there can be no transhumanism without a culture psychologically receptive to transhumanists.
Above all, we should inquire what racial characteristics it took for the emergence of objectivity, individualism, and liberty and try to encourage the proliferation of the relevant genes. (My own guess, a singularly (pun intended) weak one, is that the three co-evolved in Europe and that sexual selection--Darwin's other mode of selection, besides natural selection--was crucial.) If there are no such racial characteristics and if in fact objectivity, individualism, and liberty just happened, we should know that. And if some of these three are now longer needed to push toward posthumanism, we should know that, too. The Japanese are famous for their love of gadgets, but are not particularly individualistic, or at least Japanese culture is not.
We may already be at the point where transhumanistic values and technological developments may lead lives of their own. Even so, most of us here are strongly individualistic and will likely hope that so will be the robots.