2500 words

To set myself apart from other HBD bloggers, I decided to start a few series, one on Afrocentrism, HBD and Sports and refutations on how race isn’t a social construct. Agabond has a lot of untrue things to say, and I am here to refute them. Agabond, you can expect a lot of pingbacks from me on a lot of your posts, so get used to this.

Agabond wrote an article on the cons of Scientific Racism. The whole article is wrong.

According to race realism and the field of human biodiversity (HBD), the scientific racism of our day, the following are true:

1. Race is genetic.
2. Race affects intelligence.
3. The races in order of intelligence are: Asians, Whites, Hispanics/Mixed, Blacks.

All of these are true.

Why this is wrong:

1. Race is a social construct, created by the rules of society not by genetics.

My favorite saying from race-denialists. Yes, everything is a social construct. The Universe is a social construct, but that doesn’t mean that it doesn’t actually physically exist. We have social constructions for EVERYTHING, does that mean that NOTHING exists because they are social constructs?

The above picture is a PCA graph showing how the different races cluster on the graph. This is actually scientific evidence that what we call ‘race’ and ‘ethnicity’ has an actual biological basis. You say that “it’s created by the rules of society not genetics”, but you can clearly see here that GENETICS shows that humanity CLUSTERS into distinct groups.

2.  The differences between people from different parts of the world are too new and too slight to account for differences in IQ.

Not true at all. They are not “too new”, Agabond. Due to genetic isolation between populations for thousands of years, i.e., no population migrations between people with different genomes, this caused evolution to happen faster.

Faster evolution means more ethnic differences. This is due to, as I alluded to before, no migration of others with differing genes. Due to us moving genetically AWAY from each other and not genetically CLOSER from each other, shows that evolution is speeding up in the OPPOSITE WAY.

How are they too new and too slight to account for differences in IQ? Selection pressures varied depending on where those populations evolved. The more cognitively demanding Northern part of Europe, as well as the cognitively demanding parts of Asia that East Asians evolved in led to cooperation, which in turn led to evolutionary selection pressures, ala altruism. They also had to be smart with their food in regards to rationing. Along with more variables, over tens of thousands of years of genetic isolation, populations evolved to have distinct physical, as well as biological differences due to those certain selection pressures in those environments.

The less cognitively demanding parts of the world, along the equator, doesn’t foster high intellectual capabilities due to the lifestyle of the peoples there. They lived a mostly hunter-gatherer lifestyle (which was extremely difficult in Eurasia during the Ice Age). Evolution dictated the traits that it would enhance with Africans, e.g., longer limbs for better throwing and to cover more ground while running to get food, darker skin due to the climate, as well as their hair.

There are evolutionary reasons for everything. You should have done a bit more research here before writing this.

Your intelligence is determined not by your race but by where you were born, when you were born, a bit from your parents’s genes and the rest from what you make of it.

Yes, it is determined by your race, but I’ll get back to that later. Depending on where you’re born? Sure. If you’re born in a place with high rates of disease, parasitic load and bad nutrition, this will retard IQ. But for those born in first world countries, their IQ is at their genetic limit due to better nutrition. You said “where you were born”, do you even realize that “where you were born” means that you’re giving credence to the hereditarian hypothesis?

When you were born? Is this an epigenetic argument?

A bit from your parents genes, well more than a bit. Funny you say that. We know that the mother’s IQ is the best predictor of the child’s IQ. That being said, in studies of racially mixed black and white children, those with white mothers have higher IQs than those with black mothers. So yes, it is your parents genes. I assume you were going for the “individual variation in IQ is greater than between the races” is what you were going for. Not going to work.

The rest is what you make of it. I agree here. Even those with high IQs won’t be automatically successful, personality variables have a lot to do with it, which I will cover in a future post.

1. Correlation does not equal causation

Just because blacks in America have a higher crime rate or a lower average IQ does not necessarily mean the cause is mainly genetic. To come to such a conclusion you would have to assume that racism is pretty much dead, that American society is just so gosh-darn fair to everyone that genetics is pretty much all that remains to account for the differences.

I can’t count how many times I’ve heard this since I jumped into the black-white IQ debate. Yes, we know that correlation does not equal causation, but with retesting what you tested before with the same variables and lab conditions, if you come to the same conclusions, it is not a correlation does not equal causation argument.

Higher crime rates and lower average IQs are inversely related. There is a negative correlation there. We can see here that the low IQ being correlated with crime argument holds up in studies.

Deborah Denno analyzed data from 987 African American school children in Philadelphia. Her data contained multiple measures of intelligence collected at ages four, seven, and thirteen as well as officially recorded criminal offenses. Chronic, violent offenders consistently had low IQ scores. For example, female chronic offenders were almost four times less likely to be in the top third of verbal-IQ test scores than female nonoffenders. Similarly, male violent offenders scored 10 to 17 percentile points lower on measures of vocabulary, reading, and language than nonoffenders.

In addition to finding a robust IQ-crime correlation, studies have turned up two other empirical regularities worth noting. The first regards two different types of IQ measures: performance IQ (PIQ) versus verbal IQ (VIQ). Performance IQ is measured with nonverbal tests of attention to detail, manual design construction, and visual puzzle solving. Verbal IQ is measured with tests of general factual knowledge, abstract reasoning, mental arithmetic, and vocabulary. Studies have consistently found that criminals have PIQ scores close to the general population but VIQ scores substantially lower. This PIQ > VIQ finding holds even when controlling for race, class, and reading ability (Moffitt), suggesting that verbal intelligence is a more important correlate of criminal behavior than other types of intelligence.

I also touched on black crime and correlates for crime here. No matter what you can say about this, low IQ is correlated with crime. There are countless studies on this. Juvenile criminals average 92, whereas adult offenders are at IQ 85, right at the black average in America.

Genetics does account for the difference though you seem dishonest enough to believe any other reasons for it.

2. Confirmation bias

Scientific racists notice the cases that prove their ideas while overlooking those that disprove them. But in science it is the exceptions that disprove the rule. That is why the law of gravity is still a part of science: no known exceptions!

Care to tell me what they overlooked that disproved them? Why did you not use any examples?

3. Lack of expertise

Look at the race realists and HBDers you hear about most:

• Steve Sailer, journalist/computer salesman.

His occupation says something about his knowledge on these subjects?

• J. Philippe Rushton, psychologist.

OK? What about him? He’s a Ph.D. in psychology. He cites what he says, obviously. Rushton is one of the most important psychologists of this generation. Have you ever read any of his books, or have you only read attack articles on him? He first began researching the study of altruism. This gives him credibility, in your eyes, to talk about racial differences, as well as HBD. Hell, altruism is how our complex societies formed. That is a part of HBD as well, but you seem to talk about things you don’t know.

• Francis Fukuyama, political economist.

First I’ve heard of him. Seems to get heat for his book arguing that we have almost reached the end of history. He says people have misunderstood his thesis, that “the French and American revolutions, and their underlying principles of liberty and equality, were the final resting point for human ideological evolution. So we need to consider whether Hegel, when he declared the end of history in 1806, was not right. My argument is concerned less with the world of real events and more with the world of ideas. Essentially the question I was trying to pose is whether there are any systematical ideological competitors left to modern liberalism.”

• Steve Hsu, astrophysicist.

I love Steve Hsu. It seems that, according to Agabond, you can’t have other interests outside of your field, and if you do have interests outside of your field and speak on them, that no one should listen to you. Things don’t work like that. Steve Hsu is actively looking for intelligence genes. He also shows the reality of human genetic variation.

Just because someone is interested in things outside of their field, does that mean they can’t become an authority on it?

• Richard Herrnstein, psychologist.

Same with Rushton. Are you telling me that psychologists can’t study IQ differences and behavioral differences between races? Hernnstein knows damn well what he’s talking about in terms of IQ. Are you trying to use Hernnstein and Murray as examples of people who talk about actual human genetics? Well, they don’t. They talk about IQ, and yea they talk about genetic causes for it, but they’re mostly concerned with the policy of the country that we are no noticing because we are ‘IQ blind’ so to speak.

• Charles Murray, political scientist.

Same as above. Murray has defended himself multiple times with attacks him and Hernnstein got on The Bell Curve. 22 years later, and the book is still not refuted.

• Arthur Jensen, psychology professor.

My personal favorite. He is THE AUTHORITY ON IQ as well as RACE DIFFERENCES IN IQ. Sure Rushton and Jensen bring up genetics sometimes, but they always cite where they got their information from.

Really bad arguments here.

You notice anything strange? No biologists or anthropologists, much less geneticists.

>some of the biggest names in HBD aren’t biologists, anthropologists (LOL), and geneticists

>means there are no HBD biologists, anthropologists (LOL) and geneticists

Nice fallacy.

Why in the world should we trust these people over biologists and anthropologists, the very people who study these things for a living? To leave no stone unturned, some biologists and anthropologists have even written books about race for the general public:

This is going to be good. Let’s see what “has been written for the general public by biologists and anthropologists”.

• “Guns, Germs, and Steel”, Jared Diamond, biologist

!!!! People still cite this?!?!??!?!?

I’ll say something on G,G&S then let Rushton take over:

So different levels of civilizations can be traced to environmental differences and not innate differences in races? Because physical environment can explain civilization differences does that mean all human brains are the same on average? Horrible strawman. No one says environment doesn’t matter.

We can look at 2 countries within Sub-Saharan Africa. Look at South Africa. Still one of the wealthiest countries in Africa. Economic freedom isn’t the only source of wealth, human capital and natural resources are important. The lack of proper resources for civilizations in the past isn’t why Africa is poor today since we can see actual African countries that are better of by simply having more economic freedom.

The poverty today in Congo isn’t dated back to the dawn of time. Diamond says New Guineans are probably smarter than white Europeans. So does he accept that all races are the same in the brain except New Guineans? So does he then accept that human brains can differ in environments? Jared Diamond’s work is irrelevant and does nothing to explain why the various races perform differently in Europe. You can say racism or lingering effects of oppression, but the reasons for Africa’s poverty is not relevant to the racial gaps in Europe and America.

If you think it’s caused by environmental poverty in the past, you still have to argue the facts on racial differences today, the evidence still exists.

Jared Diamond is a man who spent a lot of time in Papua New Guinea. I guess he grew to like the natives there and befriended some of them so he makes ridiculous leaps in logic to actually say they may be more intelligent than Europeans. Hilarious. Any intelligent person can see the ridiculousness of what he claims. I can’t even begin to think how, when faced with all of this evidence of differences, that you can possibly believe in some warped view of equality or egalitarianism.

Here is Rushton’s dismantling of G,G&S.

• “The Mismeasure of Man”, Stephen Jay Gould, biologist

Arthur Jensen refutation here.

JP Rushton refutes it here.

• “Genes, Peoples, and Languages”, Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza, geneticist

What about it?

• “Man’s Most Dangerous Myth: The Fallacy of Human Race”, Ashley Montagu, anthropologist

Never heard of this book but from the Amazon review:

It presented a revolutionary theory for its time; breaking the link between genetics and culture, it argued that race is largely a social construction and not constitutive of significant biological differences between people.

Discarded.

These books are good to help you overcome the racist brainwashing of American society.

Let’s see. G,G,&S is trash. It has some cool tidbits of information, but it’s largely not true and is an egalitarians way of attempting to say that Europeans “got lucky” in regards to geography.

Mismeasure of Man is full of sidestepping and not addressing points, as well as wishful thinking mixed with lying about the truth and not telling his audience certain things. Sure, if anything, this book will make you MORE BRAINWASHED.

No idea why you cited Cavalli-Sforza.

A book that says race doesn’t exist. Wow, that’s a new one.

4. Conspiracy theories

The reason scientific racists give for trusting, say, Steve Sailer, a computer salesman, over Cavalli-Sforza, a professor of human genetics who has, like, studied race, is, wait for it, that people like Cavalli-Sforza secretly agree with them but are too afraid to say so in public! Have they gone mad?

What are you talking about? Are you talking about how Cvalli-Sforza uses terms like “population clusters”? That doesn’t matter. You can call the things what you’d like, but that doesn’t change the underlying biological reality of genetics, race and ethnicity.

If you’d have understood Cvalli-Sforza, you’d get that.

I know you got this pingback, Agabond. I’d love a response from you though I doubt it.