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Originally Posted by raveneye
Well in order for intelligence to be “defined” by anything, it has to be defined. Since cognitive psychologists haven’t been able to come up with a definition that doesn't give at least a third of them a conniption (and not for lack of trying), I rather doubt that genes could do the job.
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Your doubts don't concern me really. Spatial intelligence is definable and testable, verbal, deductive reasoning, its only the package together that gives people fits. Cleaving rabbits on this doesn't diminish anything.
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Perhaps you could give us a definition of “intelligence” in which variation in intelligence in any population is “almost completely” explained by genetics?
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Men are better at spatial tasks than women, very well documented. Are you saying thats due to upbringing?
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Not even performance on an IQ test is completely explained by genetics: heritability of this particular trait is anywhere from 30 to 80% depending on what study you want to believe, as sapiens pointed out.
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And he also generally agreed with me. It actually doesn't matter if its 99% or 9%, genetics would play a role either way. Even at the lowest end, 30% of what you are intelligence wise was due to genetics. I think its far higher.
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And in any case, the heritability of test performance is irrelevant to the question of group differences, because the causes of within-group differences tell us absolutely nothing about the causes of between-group differences, in any trait. This is one of the most fundamental statistical truths about heritability, as pointed out by the originator of the concept, RA Fisher himself.
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And?
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Intelligence is not even possible to measure. There is no yardstick. The concept itself is a cultural construct that varies from place to place and from time to time. We currently have an IQ test; a hundred years from now we might be attempting to test musical improvisational ability, or skill in real-time oral argument, or deftness at manipulating a person’s emotions, or talent in moving up a social hierarchy, or real-time situational problem solving, like the ability to survive a month in the Kalihari. None of these is even vaguely quantified by anything remotely resembling any IQ test. These tests are inherently circular anyway because they simultaneously define the construct in terms of the operation and the operation in terms of the construct.
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So what I'm not arguing the validity of IQ tests. But I ask you, would you rather have your doctor have an IQ of 160 or 60? After all you can't measure it, according to you, so it shouldn't matter right?
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Whatever test you claim shows that Group A has a higher intelligence than Group B, I guarantee I can construct a dozen different tests that show the exact opposite.
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If you want to measure various variables in intelligence do so, and maybe some will be different. They have looked for some intelligence genes and found some, but its obviously going to be a multi-loci aggregation. Did you know that even symmetry can be linked to intelligence? The reason should be obvious, but the genes we are looking for may have nothing directly to do with the brain but parasite resistance or the immune system.
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Or look at it from this angle: if a dentist can confidently pronounce the field of human evolutionary genetics “asinine” because it points out that there are no genetic races, then I think it’s time to throw up our hands and admit that the concept is irreducibly subjective.
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No I said dismissing the concept of race was assine. You seem to be trying to belittle me because I'm a dentist and therefore unqualified to speak on this. I also graduated with a degree in Ethology, Ecology, and Evolution from the University of Illinois, I worked in a lab while there looking for DNA homologs of a brain expressed protein that seemed to cause neuron growth in adults and to look for the homologs in the animal kingdom as a whole. I spent a year doing prep work for a masters in ecology before deciding I had enough and went to dental school. No idea what your background is, but if I didn't bother to get a doctorate and another masters after I'd be officially a evolutionary biologist. So please, quit trying to belittle me on this, its a straw man, and you have no idea who you are dealing with.
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Foolhardy? Since it’s impossible to even know why any particular person is more “intelligent” than any other particular person, going through life with an assumption of genetic equality can’t possibly hurt you in any way whatsoever.
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Again, don't care. What you do with the data doesn't really matter.
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I’d be more worried about drunk drivers, myself.
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Not the question, doesn't matter.
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“Mongoloid” might narrow it down by a few percent, whereas knowing where a person’s parents were born narrows it down by about 80%. Numbers like that, by the way, are one of the values of scientific inquiry. They lead to conclusions like “the use of ethnicity alone will often be inadequate as a basis for medical treatment” (Manica, 2005).
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Which is why I say there are more races not none. Scandinavians are different than Greeks even if they are both 'white'.
ok enough
We are not arguing genetics anymore but the value of the inquiry, which this topic no longer is about. When I started this I didn't expect people to take the absurdest stance that race doesn't exist, or that genetics doesn't determine your intelligence. It does and it does.
Personally I think you are just arguing with me to argue, this shit is pretty basic.