“Scientific racism” is actually valid science (part 2)

Highlights: in section 2, read why race is genetic. In section 13, read why intelligence tests are accurate and not culturally biased. In section 16, read why race denialism is politics, not science, in the words of a professional forensic anthropologist.

Tonight we take a break from the futility of arguing logically with feminists, and return to the equally thankless task of explaining to race denialists why they are so very, very wrong. Our subject, again, is hateful, ignorant, prejudiced blogger Zek J Evets. Last time I debunked every claim in his post, “21st Century Scientific Racism.” Today I will do the same with his even stupider follow-up, “Deconstructing Scientific Racism in the 21st Century.”

1. Introduction: Pots and kettles

So why did he need to follow up on the subject of “scientific racism,” anyway?

ZEK: [S]ome people have asked me — or challenged me — to discuss this issue from a more “scientific” perspective, as opposed to my more emotional responses.

Naturally, I called BS on those who pretend they’re objective to my subjective, because that’s an ad hominem dismissal being shoveled through a strawman argument, ignoring the fact that nobody is completely objective, and the so-called “race-realists” are just as influenced by their emotions as I am — only they refuse to admit it.

First of all, that’s not what “straw man argument” means. Second, it’s not an ad hominem fallacy, either. Zek’s opponents are right to point out that he did nothing but shriek insults, offering no rebuttal to the claims of race realists, some of which I outlined in my post. Here is the proof, in Zek’s own words: a summary of his first post.

ZEK: The debate is basically Us & Them. Race realist HBDers versus regular folks. … THEY ARE ALL FULL OF SHIT… fuckwits… racist douchebags… ignorance… idiocy… incapable of thinking outside the dogmatic little box they’ve dug their ostrich-like heads into… ignorant pseudo-science… fucking Regular Joe Shmoe… some bullshit diploma-factory degree in Armchair Academics… NONE OF THESE GUYS HAS ANY EXPERTISE IN THE FIELD! … all a bunch of bullshitters… neo-scientific racism… [citing sources] like Westboro Baptists recite homophobic slurs at military funerals… special brand of racist… dogmatic indoctrination… Steve Sailer needs to sit his racist ass down, and let the Grown-Ups talk. … Please, go find someone to sell a computer, since that’s what you actually do for a living. [Note: Zek is a college student.] … racists in-denial… listen here Stevie [Stephen Hsu]… YOU’RE NOT WHITE. Stop trying to be. And stop being a racist douchebag… hypocrisy is staggeringly blinding… smacks of the self-same arguments used by Creationists to foist “intelligent design” into classrooms… yelling, raving, that the establishment is trying to cover it up! They talk of conspiracy theories like a crazy person… some ancient McCarthyite resurrected from the depths of the 50’s Red Scare… Like a zombie, moaning for… BRAAAAAAAAAAIIIINNNSSSS!… they’re so full of racist shit, it’s hard to separate the hater from the hatred… pig-fuckers.

Third, Zek himself constantly commits straw man fallacies (that’s lying about what your opponent said — see my previous post and below) and ad hominem fallacies (that’s calling your opponent names — see above).

ZEK: … I am ready to go into the exact, bio-anthropological problems with HBD, “race-realism” and refute them at the scientific level.

Be warned, all ye who enter here: this is going to be a science lesson, so pay attention!

Be warned: everything Zek is about to say is politicized pseudoscience.

2. Race exists, and it is genetic

ZEK: First, let’s begin with the definition of Race.

There isn’t one. Genetically speaking, race cannot be traced. There is no “gene” (or group of genes) that codes for Blackness, or Whiteness, or any other ethnicity, at least, none that we know of.

Wrong. Just because no single gene codes for race, doesn’t mean race isn’t genetic. No single gene codes for height, yet height is 60 to 80 percent heritable. Zek’s argument is so flawed, you can use it to “prove” that Chinese people are just as tall as Norwegians. (They’re not.) And just because we haven’t identified all the genes that play a role in determining race, doesn’t mean race isn’t genetic. That’s true of practically every hereditary trait. (Turns out genetics is hard.) It doesn’t make those traits less hereditary.

ZEK: The International Human Genome Project confirmed this when their work showed that humans are 99.99% the same. Even people so unrelated as to be from completely opposite continents!

It’s really too bad Zek couldn’t be bothered to do any research. (That’s why he doesn’t cite any sources.) Let’s get a more accurate picture of human genetic variation from Nature Genetics:

The average proportion of nucleotide differences between a randomly chosen pair of humans… is consistently estimated to lie between 1 in 1,000 and 1 in 1,500 [about seven to ten times higher than Zek claims]. … The [1 in 1,000] value for Homo sapiens can be put into perspective by considering that humans differ from chimpanzees at only 1 in 100 nucleotides, on average. Because there are approximately three billion nucleotide base pairs in the haploid human genome, each pair of humans differs, on average, by two to three million base pairs.

So the average difference from a human to a chimpanzee is only ten to fifteen times bigger than the average difference between two humans. That alone should tell you how little we learn about human genetic variation from throwing around numbers like “1 in 1,000.” Tiny genetic differences make a huge difference to us. (Unless that’s racist against chimpanzees?)

Of the 0.1% of DNA that varies among individuals, what proportion varies among main populations? Consider an apportionment of Old World populations into three continents (Africa, Asia and Europe), a grouping that corresponds to a common view of three of the ‘major races’. Approximately 85–90% of genetic variation is found within these continental groups, and only an additional 10–15% of variation is found between them…

It is tempting to conclude that race isn’t genetic, because the genetic variation within races is greater than the variation between races. However, this is a fallacy. Lewontin’s Fallacy, to be precise, identified by the statistician, geneticist, and evolutionary biologist A.W.F. Edwards. From that article:

it is nonetheless possible to classify individuals into different racial groups with an accuracy that approaches 100% when one takes into account the frequency of the alleles at several loci at the same time. This happens because differences in the frequency of alleles at different loci are correlated across populations — the alleles that are more frequent in a population at two or more loci are correlated when we consider the two populations simultaneously. Or in other words, the frequency of the alleles tends to cluster differently for different populations.

If you look at genetic clusters, instead of blindly comparing average genetic differences between people (recall that we are 99 percent similar to chimpanzees, according to that thinking), you find races. Edwards explains:

[t]here is nothing wrong with Lewontin’s statistical analysis of variation, only with the belief that it is relevant to classification. It is not true that “racial classification is… of virtually no genetic or taxonomic significance”. It is not true, as Nature claimed, that “two random individuals from any one group are almost as different as any two random individuals from the entire world” and it is not true, as the New Scientist claimed, that “two individuals are different because they are individuals, not because they belong to different races” and that “you can’t predict someone’s race by their genes”.

Don’t take my word for it. You can actually look at the genetic clusters yourself. From Gene Expression at Discover Magazine, check out “Genetic variation within Africa (and the world)”. There’s a great graph from a 2009 paper by Tishkoff et al. in Science, entitled “The Genetic Structure and History of Africans and African Americans” (Figure 1 — click for larger version). It’s

a three dimensional PCA [principal components analysis] plot. It has the first, second and third principal components of variation. In other words, the three largest independent dimensions in terms of explanatory power of genetic variation. Panel A includes all world populations, and panel B just Africans.

Figure 1: Genetic variation between races. Source: Tishkoff et al. (2009).

I know, I know: it hardly stands up to Zek’s Microsoft Paint picture. I’m doing my best here.

Geneticists, medical doctors, and statisticians agree,

an epidemiologic perspective [studying health and disease on the population level] on the issue of human categorization in biomedical and genetic research… strongly supports the continued use of self-identified race and ethnicity. … [The authors] demonstrate here that from both an objective and scientific (genetic and epidemiologic) perspective there is great validity in racial/ethnic self-categorizations, both from the research and public policy points of view.

That’s why acknowledging the existence of biological race can help doctors treat patients.

The American Society of Human Genetics reports that

[g]enetic cluster analysis of the microsatellite markers [in a study of the genetics of hypertension] produced four major clusters, which showed near-perfect correspondence with the four self-reported race/ethnicity categories. Of 3,636 subjects of varying race/ethnicity, only 5 (0.14%) showed genetic cluster membership different from their self-identified race/ethnicity. On the other hand, we detected only modest genetic differentiation between different current geographic locales within each race/ethnicity group. Thus, ancient geographic ancestry, which is highly correlated with self-identified race/ethnicity—as opposed to current residence—is the major determinant of genetic structure in the U.S. population.

Again, that’s a 99.86 percent success rate, comparing gene clusters to self-reported race. Are you starting to feel a little cheated by the shallowness of Zek’s 99.99 percent “analysis”?

Why do I even need to prove this? Zek’s ideas contradict common sense. See Figure 2.

Figure 2: I wonder if race is a hereditary trait?

3. Racial stereotypes: it’s okay when he uses them

Well, that takes care of the first six sentences. Let’s move on.

ZEK: … even more importantly, the reason there is no biological or genetic definition for race in humans is because race in humans is not used in a biological or genetic sense.

Race is used as a sociocultural construct, to define and categorize people from different geographic areas based on morphological features (skin-color, nose shape, hair texture) and social stereotypes.

If you’re having trouble deciphering the logic here, that’s perfectly normal. You can’t actually conclude that race doesn’t have a genetic basis, just because ordinary people don’t use genetic analysis to tell what race someone is. Of course, if they did, they would get the same results exactly. (Remember that “near-perfect [99.86%] correspondence with the four self-reported race/ethnicity categories.”)

ZEK: When we think of “Black people” the stereotypes go: dark skin, kinky hair, but we also think of good dancers, musicians, aggressive, not smart, very poor, awesome at sports, and lots of other descriptions which have nothing to do with a person’s genes. Even features like dark skin and kinky hair are not unique to Black people; these characteristics could exist in various ethnic and racial groups. For instance, Sephardic Jews have dark skin and kinky hair, and so do Aboriginals. Good dancers could also mean Hispanic people, or Greeks, or Whirling Dervishes. These categories are not delineated enough for scientific experimentation — indeed, you cannot separate ANY of them from their cultural context — that is the environment that we find them in — to see which ones unique to certain populations. And equally important is that they can apply to any number of groups.

Notice how he simply declares that genes have nothing to do with athletic ability or aggression or intelligence. He is wrong, of course. He is obviously wrong about athletic ability. He is also wrong about aggression: genes are known to play a significant role, especially in adolescent delinquency and violence (remind you of any race in particular?). See Guo, Roettger, and Cai (2008), “The Integration of Genetic Propensities into Social-Control Models of Delinquency and Violence among Male Youths,” American Sociological Review, 73: 543–568. (See how easy that was, Zek? At least, it’s easy to cite sources when you have sources…)

We will look at intelligence in detail in sections 10–13. For now it is enough to note that he asserts there is absolutely no genetic component to six things (and unspecified “lots of other descriptions”) without presenting any evidence whatsoever. That is because there is no evidence for any of those claims, nor will there ever be. The first law of behavior genetics is that all human behavioral traits are heritable. (The first rule of Fight Club is… not relevant.)

He also seems to think that if Jews have the same hair as blacks (they don’t) and Hispanics are just as good at dancing as blacks (?), that means black people don’t exist. And yet he’s tacitly admitted that only black people have the specific combination of traits we use to identify them, such as skin color, hair texture, and bone structure (see section 9), all of which are genetic.

Of course, real scientists don’t consider dancing ability or poverty when they classify races. They consider genes, and the traits determined by those genes. Genes do not have a “cultural context,” and they do not “apply to any number of groups” (section 2), so Zek’s supposed cultural traits are all perfectly irrelevant.

4. Zek admits that race is genetic

ZEK: Yet we can, with a high degree of certainty, identity people of different races. How is this so? This reveals another important component of race: the link to geographic location. We tie race to human groups that exist in certain areas of the planet. Black people come from Africa. White people come from Europe. Hispanic people from the Americas, etc and so on.

This is why we can identify people of different races, because we can link their features to ancestral populations in certain geographic areas.

Wait, we can “link their features to ancestral populations”? So their features, which he says we use to identify their race, come from ancestral populations, which makes them hereditary. In other words: racial features are genetic.

5. Evolution I: Slow and steady creates the race

ZEK: But as the world changes, so do races. Today’s races are not the same as races a thousand years ago. Evolution is always occurring, according to Darwin, and as such, human variation is as much a factor in how we differ from each other today as we do from people who lived hundreds of years ago.

Yes, evolution is indeed always occurring. And Africans were reproductively isolated from Europeans for many thousands of years (because, essentially, cavemen didn’t drive cars). When sub-populations of a species (not to be confused with sub-species) are reproductively isolated, they begin to diverge, due to (1) founder effects, (2) genetic drift, (3) random mutations (note that gene flow is prevented by geographic separation), and (4) adaptation (sometimes called “survival of the fittest”). That Europeans and Africans remain genetically indistinguishable after that many generations apart is absurdly unlikely.

Go ahead, ask Zek to explain exactly how he got from (a) “[t]oday’s races are not the same as races a thousand years ago,” and (b) “human variation is as much a factor in how we differ from each other today,” all the way to (c) “[g]enetically speaking, race cannot be traced.” Because I’m pretty sure he’s missing a few steps in there…

ZEK: Hold on, wait a second! I said above that we’re all 99.99% the same… How can there be variation then? Well, that’s the rub of it: we’re obviously the same species, because we can reproduce with one another, and we’re obviously not sub-species, because because all groups of humans interbreed naturally without needing to live in a crowded city. But we do exhibit variation: genetic variation and physical variation. We don’t all look the same, and the small percentage of our genes that don’t match also differ in some interesting ways.

None of this is disputed by race realists. All of it contradicts his earlier claims about human genetic variation.

ZEK: So while we haven’t evolved to the point of being too different, we do still change over time. This is based on Stephen Jay Gould’s theory of punctuated equilibrium, which means that species tend to change only a little over time, and then in brief moments experience rapid evolutionary changes.

Gould was biased by his radical politics, but it’s not particularly important in light of the following: Zek simply declares, without supporting evidence, that although the races have been evolving in isolation, they were evolving too slowly to create any real differences between races… even though races show “genetic variation and physical variation”… even though “we can identify people of different races” by their ancestral features. Hm.

And how does he know they didn’t experience these “rapid evolutionary changes”? (The words “citation needed” spring constantly to mind.) And how does he reconcile this with genetic clusters? (Trick question: he doesn’t know what they are.)

6. Evolution II: Under selection pressure, or: I adapt to the rains down in Africa

ZEK: Variation is one of the keys to our species’ survival. It helped us survive disease, disaster, and even other animals. Natural selection constantly puts pressures on us that shape our physiology, and the mechanism in us that allows this is our genetics.

Race-realists and HBDers like to think that this means humans have evolved into biologically grounded, genetically distinct races, and that this affects traits like aggressiveness, and especially IQ.

Sadly, for them, this is not the case.

Indeed, for thousands of years, Africans have been subjected to the selection pressures of Africa, Europeans to the selection pressures of Europe, Asians to the selection pressures of Asia, and so on. Is it possible that’s why Africans have a genetic resistance to one kind of malaria — a tropical parasite — but Europeans don’t?

Not to worry, Zek has a funny picture of a narwhal to distract you from exactly this kind of inconvenient question.

7. Evolution III: Geographical separation anxiety

ZEK: Sure, we’ve evolved over time, and thus we are always changing. But race is not a “fixed” category. A Black person today has very little in common with a Black person a thousand years ago other than that they both belong to the same species. Why is this? Because of the same theory that HBDers and race-realists use to justify their claims: evolution.

How is comparing black people today to black people thousands of years ago, relevant to comparing black people today to white people today? Answer: it’s not. The race realist position, which happens to also be the consensus of mainstream evolutionary biologists, is that when the Europeans went to Europe, and the Africans went to (or stayed in) Africa, they were genetically very similar, but over the next few thousand years, they diverged. Of course people today are different from people in the past; that’s necessary for the race realist position, not contradictory to it.

ZEK: Remember! Race as we define it is not based on your genes, but on phenotypic and sociocultural factors.

Remember! He has failed to show that race is not based on genes, and he has never even tried to show that it’s sociocultural. (If that were true, you could literally turn black people into white people by treating them differently. Does this sound like a plausible description of the universe we live in?)

ZEK: [Race] is based on morphological/physiological/phenotypic characteristics, and geographic ancestry. (Which is still problematic, since all humans originated from Africa in the first place.)

And those morphological/physiological/phenotypic characteristics are known to have hereditary components. And if you inherit traits from your ancestors, then those traits are genetic.

ZEK: Ancestry is basically where you can trace certain markers in your DNA to. There are some genes which have a higher frequency in certain groups than in others, and are used to link you to various groups in human history.

Very good! Just replace “groups” by “races,” and you’ve got it!

ZEK: One of the most common methods of doing that is with Mitochondrial DNA.

Now, the problem with this is that by tracing ancestry, we can only point to where your ancestors came from — not what they looked like. We don’t really know. A good example of this is how humans are taller now than in previous generations ([Scientific American] has a great article) and this has a lot to do with access to better healthcare, nutrition, and other environmental factors.

Basically, tracing ancestry only gives you a location for a distant ancestor, and doesn’t inextricably link race to a gene, or genes. Nor does it help us at all in determining how races looked back then.

Again, race realists — and evolutionary biologists — believe that Europeans and Africans (to use the most relevant example) looked about the same when they separated geographically. Apparently, they diverged evolutionarily, because… wait for it… white people don’t look like black people, and their kids don’t look like black people’s kids. Nothing Zek wrote here contradicts anything I’ve written above.

ZEK: They could have looked just like different races do now, but that is unlikely, as we know for a fact that human physiology has been changing rapidly, even though genetically we’ve been rather slow to exhibit a wide spectrum of variation in our DNA.

If the various human races have been changing slowly genetically, but rapidly in physiology (our bodies), then that means that very small genetic differences can mean big differences in our bodies. So why, again, did his false 99.99 percent statistic prove human beings are all one big race?

8. Taxonomy, or: Goddamn it, now I’ve got Toto stuck in my head

ZEK: And so we’re back to the problem of: how do we define race?

Here he indulges in some rambling about insects. It is not relevant.

I bless the rains down in — oh, he’s back.

ZEK: Race is a taxonomic classification, meaning it is a theoretical construct too. The word “race” represents a category in a taxonomy, and so it’s essentially a made-up word that stands for what we believe a race is.

I’m pretty sure a “made-up word” in a “taxonomic classification” can’t make you more susceptible to diseases. But I’m also totally sure Zek can find some way to blame white people for black people getting Alzheimer’s disease.

There follows more irrelevant information about taxonomy.

9. Forensic anthropology, or: CSI Serengeti

ZEK: Race doesn’t match-up well over time, and even forensic anthropologists can’t determine what race a person was with any accuracy past a certain point in history, and the people they can identify the race of need to have only a minimum level of decomposition. And even then their accuracy is only 80%, and significantly less for people of mixed-race.

Interesting that he doesn’t cite any sources. I checked it out myself, and discovered that forensic anthropologists “can determine race (e.g. Asian, African, or European ancestry) from skeletal remains with a high degree of accuracy by conducting bone analysis.” The source is George W. Gill, a professional forensic anthropologist — not that I don’t trust Zek, a college student who doesn’t understand genetics or evolution (see above) or know what a correlation is (see below). It just pays to be careful.

I recommend that you read the whole thing. Gill (sadly, not Grissom) writes:

I happen to be one of those very few forensic physical anthropologists who actually does research on the particular traits used today in forensic racial identification (i.e., “assessing ancestry,” as it is generally termed today). … I have found that forensic anthropologists attain a high degree of accuracy in determining geographic racial affinities (white, black, American Indian, etc.) by utilizing both new and traditional methods of bone analysis. … No forensic anthropologist would make a racial assessment based upon just one of these methods, but in combination they can make very reliable assessments, just as in determining sex or age. …

… I have been able to prove to myself over the years, in actual legal cases, that I am more accurate at assessing race from skeletal remains than from looking at living people standing before me. So those of us in forensic anthropology know that the skeleton reflects race, whether “real” or not, just as well if not better than superficial soft tissue does. The idea that race is “only skin deep” is simply not true, as any experienced forensic anthropologist will affirm.

10. I still do not think that word means what you think it means

ZEK: So now that we’ve got our working definition of race, let’s start with disproving the scientific racist claims.

Philippe Rushton is a popular, and oft quoted scientist in the realm of scientific racism. He says that IQ is heritable at 0.8, which is basically 80%. This means that the bulk of a person’s intelligence is determined by the genes they inherit from their parents and ancestors.

I feel a little embarrassed on Zek’s behalf. That’s not what heritability is. It’s also not what Rushton says. He says (and the intelligence research agrees) that the heritability of IQ is 0.7 to 0.8 in adults. It increases as you age, which is why Zek’s own link says “[d]ifferent studies have measured the heritability of IQ to be anywhere from 40% to 80%.”

By the way, 0.8 is exactly 80 percent, by the definition of the word “percent.” Speaking of percentages, what’s your confidence in Zek’s science?

Anyway, what Rushton’s findings mean is that 70 to 80% of the difference between one adult’s intelligence and another adult’s intelligence is caused by the differences between their genes. Talking about “the bulk,” or 80 percent, “of a person’s intelligence” makes no sense.

11. Gloss

ZEK: [Heritability is a proportion] that describes phenotypic variation between a population that is due to genetic differences. This also includes environmental factors.

It is simply not true that heritability “includes environmental factors,” which Zek would know if he had actually read his own link. It’s rather like saying “even numbers are numbers that are divisible by two, and include odd numbers.” And “between a population” is grammatically incorrect, but I’m starting to feel guilty for pointing out all these errors.

However, Rushton makes his first mistake in that IQ is a trait with low repeatability. That is, IQ can be measured over and over again, and different results will occur. … You can test someone over and over again, in a relatively short time-span, and you’ll receive different results. This requires you to “gloss” these results into an average, which is then correlated to the individual’s IQ.

The problem is that a “gloss” doesn’t reflect true IQ, only how well someone can take a test over and over again.

I no longer feel guilty. Those are all blatant lies. To disprove them, all I had to do was type “repeatability, psychology” into Google and look at the first hit: an introductory psychology textbook. (I hope Zek studies harder for his exams than he does for these debates!) Psychologists calculate the “test-retest reliability” exactly so that they can compensate for the different results people get by taking the test over and over. What do they find?

The WISC, Stanford-Binet, Progressive Matrices, and other commonly used intelligence tests all have reliabilities above .9 [“basically” 90 percent].

IQ scores are reasonably stable over time for most individuals. Many studies have found correlations near .9 [still “basically” 90 percent] for people taking the same test at times 10 to 20 years apart.

10 to 20 years apart, with a 90% correlation — frankly, it’s hard to imagine how Zek could be any wronger about IQ tests.

Rushton is a psychology professor, and “an honest and capable researcher” according to the great biologist (and, coincidentally, entomologist) E.O. Wilson. He knows what repeatability is. You may have noticed that Zek doesn’t actually point to where Rushton fails to take repeatability into consideration. That’s because there’s no such place to point at.

What he calls a “gloss,” real scientists call a mean and ordinary people call an average. It’s not a racist trick: they really are just testing lots of people; getting very stable, reliable results; and averaging out those results over all those people to get an accurate average IQ score for that population.

12. Statistics is not his strong suit

ZEK: Correlations don’t represent causation; they’re scientific guesstimates.

Oh my God. He just called correlations (“one of the most common and most useful statistics”) scientific guesstimates. This moment from Zoolander was the first thing that came to mind.

ZEK: This low repeatability of IQ means it has a lower heritability, when processed through the equations. So Rushton is wrong about his 0.8.

As we’ve discussed, IQ tests are very reliable; psychologists, who know exactly what repeatability is, have established a 70 to 80 percent heritability for IQ in adults; Zek simply does not know what the “equations” are; and Rushton has got the right answer, or close enough for our purposes.

It’s not necessary, but I would also like to point out that you cannot get from “low repeatability of IQ” to “lower heritability,” no matter how many “equations” you “process” it through. The very best you could get from low repeatability is uncertain heritability. After all, if a test doesn’t reliably measure intelligence, that doesn’t tell you anything about where intelligence comes from. Genes or environment? Who knows. It just tells you that you don’t know. Of course, he’s wrong about repeatability in the first place. I just want you to see how bad he is at science.

13. “Some cultures find different things important. Like basket weaving. Or crafts.”

ZEK: … IQ is a culturally constructed label. What we deem “smart” is based on our culture. Why? Because testing has historically reflected cultural knowledge, from reading certain books, to knowing certain facts, and even the names for shapes. Different cultures value different types/forms of knowledge. The Yanamamo [sic] don’t value technological expertise as much as we do, but they do value the ability to find food in the Amazonian jungles. The Nuer value the ability to understand how to properly raise cattle, not read Huckleberry Finn.

Wrong, wrong, wrong. IQ tests measure intelligence, not cultural knowledge. They are not biased by language or literature. From the linked article, signed by fifty experts in intelligence research:

Intelligence is a very general mental capability that, among other things, involves the ability to reason, plan, solve problems, think abstractly, comprehend complex ideas, learn quickly and learn from experience. It is not merely book learning, a narrow academic skill, or test-taking smarts. Rather, it reflects a broader and deeper capability for comprehending our surroundings — “catching on,” “making sense” of things, or “figuring out” what to do.

Intelligence, so defined, can be measured, and intelligence tests measure it well. They are among the most accurate (in technical terms, reliable and valid) of all psychological tests and assessments. They do not measure creativity, character personality, or other important differences among individuals, nor are they intended to.

While there are different types of intelligence tests, they all measure the same intelligence. Some use words or numbers and require specific cultural knowledge (like vocabulary). Others do not, and instead use shapes or designs and require knowledge of only simple, universal concepts (many/few, open/closed, up/down).

… Intelligence tests are not culturally biased against American blacks or other native-born, English-speaking peoples in the U.S. Rather, IQ scores predict equally accurately for all such Americans, regardless of race and social class. Individuals who do not understand English well can be given either a nonverbal test or one in their native language.

The Yanomamo (spelling words correctly is a sign of intelligence) are indeed good at surviving in the Amazon rain forest, but that is not intelligence. It is a skill — a survival skill, to be precise — learned from your experiences (i.e., practice) and your culture. Learned survival skills (which I suppose we call “wisdom” in old people and “street smarts” in black urban people) are useful things to have — and we, with our technological expertise, surely have learned survival skills for the environment we live in. (“Environment” doesn’t just mean rocks and trees.)

However, those skills are not themselves intelligence. Having a rifle (good old Western technological expertise) probably helps you survive in the Amazon rain forest too, but guns are not intelligence. Having a book called Yanomamo Survival Tactics For Dummies would definitely help me out, but books are not intelligence either. Intelligence is what you use to learn; to acquire new skills; to solve problems you’ve never solved before.

It’s (obviously) not that the Yanomamo don’t value technology that would enable them to shoot dangerous predators from a safe distance. They just never invented guns.

ZEK: There are different kinds of intelligence, from the Triarchic theory to Howard Gardner’s work on multiple intelligences. There’s emotional intelligence, kinetic intelligence, and others. Shoot, intelligence has more flavors than Baskin-Robbins!

Wrong. Emotional intelligence has nothing to do with intelligence. It’s just a deceptive name for social skills. “Kinetic intelligence,” intelligence of the body, is what normal people — people who aren’t committed to the hopelessly irrational notion that intelligence isn’t real — would call athleticism, flexibility, motor skills, hand-eye coordination, and so on.

You can’t proclaim that being good at X is now to be known as “X intelligence” and revolutionize intelligence research, any more than you can proclaim that cows are now a kind of plant and revolutionize botany (not to mention vegetarianism). Being good at whistling is not “whistling intelligence.” We already have a name for it: being good at whistling. We also already have a name for “the ability to reason, plan, solve problems, think abstractly, comprehend complex ideas, learn quickly and learn from experience”: intelligence.

This is essentially the reason why Gardner’s theory failed. On the other hand, the Triarchic theory simply doesn’t say much of anything about anything. Thus Zek is neither explaining intelligence research nor arguing for a competing theory. He is merely listing words with some connection to the subject and hoping you won’t bother to read what they mean.

ZEK: Another fundamental flaw in IQ testing is that these tests only prove how well someone knows how to take a test in the end. This is obvious when you attempt to test people who’ve created the test they’re taking. If it truly measured intelligence, they’d score at their actual IQ, but they don’t. They get near-perfect to perfect scores.

Wrong, and also… wow. He thinks that because IQ tests don’t accurately measure intelligence when you already know all the answers because you just created the test and you’re giving it to yourself, that means IQ tests don’t measure intelligence. Good grief — as if all white people were cheating to get a higher average score than black people. (The truth is rather different.)

Zek finally attempts to cite sources, by throwing three links our way without further discussion. I have already refuted his environmental explanations for the IQ gap; Stephen Jay Gould was hopelessly biased and his ideas about IQ have since been discredited; and I have also already dealt with “refutations” of The Bell Curve (which, being about 17 years old, is hardly representative of modern intelligence research).

14. Behavior genetics is also not his strong suit

ZEK: Another popular HBD and race-realist myth is that genes can determine your behavior! This is also known as sociobiology, and its phoenix-like reincarnation: evolutionary psychology.

I will again refer the interested reader to the Three Laws of Behavior Genetics, the first of which is that all human behavioral traits are heritable. The second law is that the effect of being raised in the same family (your shared environment) is smaller than the effect of genes (the heritability).

The third law… you must discover on your own. Good luck on your quest! Take this sword. You’ll probably need it for something.

ZEK: Advocates from this position tend to be more respectable, and tend to have a legitimate grounding in biology, genetics, or other related fields. Some of the famous personas are Richard Dawkins and Steven Pinker. They’re mainstream, legitimate scientists who are at the cutting edge of ground-breaking research.

No kidding. Why don’t you ask Steven Pinker — the “mainstream, legitimate scientist… at the cutting edge of ground-breaking research” — what he thinks about race differences in intelligence. Hint: if Zek did, he would start crying a word that starts with R.

ZEK: One major flaw in these fields is that they tend to be prescriptive instead of descriptive. That is, they don’t merely describe the way the world IS, but the way it OUGHT to be. And these prescriptions tend to revolve around dismantling welfare, affirmative action, as well as other policies to address the historical inequality of People of Color.

No, sociobiologists and evolutionary psychologists don’t do that. That’s why he can’t cite even a single source. Did he think we wouldn’t notice?

ZEK: … they treat abstract behaviors as real traits. Some examples include IQ, aggression, laziness, technological proficiency, etc. These characteristics are culturally defined, and not concrete — that is you can’t measure them with any reliability or repeatability as heritable traits — and are therefore not genetically-based.

We’ve already shown that IQ scores reliably measure intelligence, which is not culturally defined, and is up to 80 percent heritable in adults.

Zek believes that aggression, laziness, and the ability to use technology (e.g., being able to dig a well) are “abstract” and “culturally defined.” Hm. Does this agree with experience?

15. I’m bored

At this point, he lists three issues he has with sociobiology. He cites no sources and provides no examples, because none exist. He’s just making stuff up. Frankly, I’ve lost patience for it.

ZEK: However race is also used incorrectly, by scientists, by the layperson, and most definitely by scientific racists like HBD and race-realists who attempt to ascribe negative cultural qualities to People of Color through a distorted interpretation of modern genetics. They mistake correlation for causation, and utilize methodologically flawed measurements to support these correlations.

I think someone who doesn’t know what correlation is, shouldn’t be lecturing professional psychologists, sociologists, anthropologists, sociobiologists, geneticists, evolutionary biologists, statisticians, and medical doctors about mistaking it for causation. Ditto “methodologically flawed measurements.”

ZEK: Human variation is not a Dues [sic] Ex Machina. You cannot cry racism and then point to the DNA saying, “He did it!” That is not science. That is Essentialism.

And that is a straw man argument.

ZEK: The reality is that genetic and cultural factors work “in tandem” to produce human variation. No race is predisposed to being smarter than another — whatever smarter means — and no behavior, from aggressiveness to laziness can be attributed only to genes.

Genes and environment work in tandem — except when it’s inconvenient for him; that’s why it must be a “myth” that “genes can determine your behavior.” (It’s not.)

He asserts, on the basis of no evidence whatsoever, that there are no race differences in intelligence. But there are. There really are. And you can’t escape it.

ZEK: Racism, both structural and personal, from micro-aggressions to entire socio-political movements are [sic] a powerful instrument in the disparity between the various races [so they do exist?] of human beings on this planet.

Citation needed.

ZEK: And I’m not the only one saying these things. My evidence comes from a long roster of social scientists, bio-anthropologists, academic disciplines, sub-disciplines, specialists, forensic anthropologists, geneticists, linguists, paleoanthropologists, psychologists, as well as academics of all colors, creeds, genders, and classes.

That’s rather interesting, considering that the last time he posted on the subject, he had the following to say about a journalist, a political economist, a political scientist, an astrophysicist, and three psychologists (emphasis, and foaming at the mouth, in original):

ZEK: NONE OF THESE GUYS HAS ANY EXPERTISE IN THE FIELD!

But now he’s happy to take the advice of Paula S. Rothenberg, a racism lecturer; “Jarred” Diamond, a professor of geography and physiology; Noam Chomsky, a linguist and radical activist; Richard Lewontin, who actually has a race-related fallacy named after him; Cornel West, who has no scientific credentials; Howard Gardner, a developmental psychologist; James Baldwin, a novelist; Tim Wise, a fanatical anti-white bigot who believes that family is a social construct; and dozens more. Hypocrisy or brain damage — who can say for sure? As a final insult to science, Zek cites Charles Darwin himself. I can only sigh.

At this point, I think it goes without saying that Zek never tells us what these people said or wrote or did that counts as evidence in his favor.

16. Fin

Well, that about wraps it up. I look forward to never reading any of Zek’s hateful, ignorant, prejudiced garbage ever again. Hurray!

"I hear you speaking French. When are you going to pay attention to me?"

I’ll leave you with the words of Charles Gill, forensic anthropologist extraordinaire:

Those who believe that the concept of race is valid do not discredit the [race denialist] notion of clines, however. Yet those with the clinal perspective who believe that races are not real do try to discredit the evidence of skeletal biology. Why this bias from the “race denial” faction? This bias seems to stem largely from socio-political motivation and not science at all. For the time being at least, the people in “race denial” are in “reality denial” as well. Their motivation (a positive one) is that they have come to believe that the race concept is socially dangerous. In other words, they have convinced themselves that race promotes racism. Therefore, they have pushed the politically correct agenda that human races are not biologically real, no matter what the evidence. …

In my experience, minority students almost invariably have been the strongest supporters of a “racial perspective” on human variation in the classroom. The first-ever black student in my human variation class several years ago came to me at the end of the course and said, “Dr. Gill, I really want to thank you for changing my life with this course.” He went on to explain that, “My whole life I have wondered about why I am black, and if that is good or bad. Now I know the reasons why I am the way I am and that these traits are useful and good.”

A human-variation course with another perspective would probably have accomplished the same for this student if he had ever noticed it. The truth is, innocuous contemporary human-variation classes with their politically correct titles and course descriptions do not attract the attention of minorities or those other students who could most benefit. Furthermore, the politically correct “race denial” perspective in society as a whole suppresses dialogue, allowing ignorance to replace knowledge and suspicion to replace familiarity. This encourages ethnocentrism and racism more than it discourages it.

Thank you and good night.