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A few days ago I received an email from Mike Berman, a good friend and Dissident Right supporter. I reproduce it here with Mike’s permission.
Last night I attended a talk given by Charles Murray. During the Q&A a threatening looking young man asked Mr. Murray if he was the author of The Bell Curve, which he said was about “blacks possessing inferior intellectual ability to whites.”
Charles Murray bravely stood his ground and stated that he had co-written the book. He further said that only a part of one chapter was devoted to the subject of race, that at the time much less was known regarding genetic influence, and that he and Richard Herrnstein were then agnostic on the subject.
The precise statement of that is in Chapter 13 of The Bell Curve: “It seems highly likely to us that both genes and the environment have something to do with racial difference. What might the mix be? We are resolutely agnostic on that issue; as far as we can determine, the evidence does not yet justify an estimate.”
That was written in 1994. Back (that is, forward) to Mike’s email of last week.
Mr. Murray said that since the book was written we have learned that evolution has not stopped since man left Africa and may have even speeded up.
Then Charles Murray made a startling statement. He said that an unstoppable train was coming down the track which would be arriving within three years. He was emphatic that this train would not take a decade or even five years.
Mr. Murray says that within these three years incontrovertible evidence of the overwhelming genetic influence on cognitive abilities and many other human traits of the different races will become available. He said that he doesn’t know what the reaction will be when this occurs but that he cannot imagine professors who have made a career out of proclaiming the contrary view will just say, “Never mind.”
It happened that Mike’s email arrived while I was catching up on some back reading of the human-science blogs. One of the best of those blogs is Razib Khan’s over at The Unz Review.
Here was Razib on January 26th, in the comment thread to one of his own posts. The comment thread is chewing over that same issue, the genetic architecture of human intelligence.
honestly i would just sit on my hands for now. in the next <5 years the genomic components of traits like intelligence will finally be characterized. this is not speculation, but anticipation based on research going on now. [R.A. Fisher on Race and Human Genetic Variation by Razib Khan; The Unz Review, January 24th 2016.]
It’s interesting that two people who have studied this topic and thought deeply about it but from different perspectives—Murray as a sociologist, Khan as a population geneticist—should be in such close agreement on the timescale here. Murray says “within three years”; Khan, “in the next <5 years.”
Murray has actually shortened his estimate since 2010. That was the year he told Norwegian inquirer Harald Eia that:
We don’t know the extent to which these [i.e. race difference sin intelligence] are environmental and the extent to which these are genetic. It’s still being explored. We will know the proportions very … Oh, maybe ten, fifteen, twenty years from now, because work in genetics is proceeding so fast that we’re bound to find out what proportion is genetic and what proportion is environmental. [At 29m35s here, in the sixth instalment of Harald Eia’s 2010 Brainwash series, which I wrote up for VDARE.com last year.]
“Ten, fifteen, twenty years” from 2010 means 2020, 2025, or 2030. Murray seems to now be settling on some date earlier than 2020, as does Khan.
Assuming these gents are correct, there are at least two big social consequences to look out for.
First of course is the “designer baby” issue. Once key gene variants for high intelligence are known—and it needn’t even be all of them, just ones with the biggest effect—widespread embryo selection and/or selective abortion could eliminate births of low-IQ humans, or at least make such births a deliberate choice.
Second, and much more fun to observe, will be the one Murray identified: the writhing and shrieking of “professors who have made a career out of proclaiming the contrary view.”
(My own very modest contribution to the topic is here.)
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Once they figure out which genes lead to higher IQ, they will prolly bio-engineer all newborns to be smart folks.
I’m sure blank slatists will go on denying for decades or even centuries, just like creationists still do, and their believers will follow them.
“One of the best of those blogs is Razib Khan’s over at The Unz Review.”
That thin-skinned dotkin?
I can assure you that just as soon as the genetic components of intelligence are identified, the detractors will attack the researchers and once again assert that that “race” is not a genetic reality but rather a “social construct.”
Seeing as though H. sapiens is soon to be the new P. troglodytes on the evolutionary tree, it would be wiser to rid mankind of the genes involved in psychopathy first.
Turning low-function psychopaths into high-function psychopaths would not be a good thing.
If you’ve ever lived in a college town, that prospect will frighten you as surely as did Idiocracy.
Thank you. I was thinking the same thing but would not have said it as well.
True to a degree. However, a part of the identity of most liberals is their belief that they are smarter than conservatives and that they are the party of “science.” It will cause them a lot more cognitive dissonance to deny genetic research than creationists feel about their beliefs.
I’m not saying that liberals will quickly breakdown, but it’s a much harder fight for them. Also, there’s always the next generation of liberals who won’t have as much invested in denying racial differences. Liberals love to say that while you may disagree with them, your children will be on their side. Well, the shoe may be on the other foot.
At some point, facts matter. Granted, we already have a mountain of evidence on our side but it’s mainly circumstantial. A liberal (really liberals and conservatives because they all believe in racial equality) can still deny it because there’s no smoking gun and confession. Once those show up, you begin to look really stupid denying the truth. And liberal hate to look stupid, maybe even more than looking racist.
That looking stupid will get them in the end.
A timely piece by The Derb as I am currently engrossed in Nicholas Wade’s “A Troublesome Inheritance” which is about the very subject of race and genes, not to mention the fecklessness of those very same professors referred to by Charles Murray.
Blah blah blah whites rule coloreds drool
If white men are so superior then why are they disappearing and why are their daughters bearing Children of Color?
“Once they figure out which genes lead to higher IQ, they will prolly bio-engineer all newborns to be smart folks.”
Including lower IQ whites, blacks, Hispanics, and Asians? ALL, huh?
“First of course is the “designer baby” issue. Once key gene variants for high intelligence are known—and it needn’t even be all of them, just ones with the biggest effect—widespread embryo selection and/or selective abortion could eliminate births of low-IQ humans, or at least make such births a deliberate choice.”
The question is SHOULD?
“Second, and much more fun to observe, will be the one Murray identified: the writhing and shrieking of “professors who have made a career out of proclaiming the contrary view.”
Not necessarily. Depends on how that data is interpreted.
“Seeing as though H. sapiens is soon to be the new P. troglodytes on the evolutionary tree, it would be wiser to rid mankind of the genes involved in psychopathy first.”
Even better, why not now get rid of any and all low IQ people. The cut-off being 120 IQ. Will you meet that mark? I mean, a super-race of people is much more desirable?
“Turning low-function psychopaths into high-function psychopaths would not be a good thing.”
Yes, let’s value life even more, still.
You are conflating some things.
Identifying gene sequences is one thing; directly manipulating them is another. I’ve not seen anything that suggests such a complex, polygenic trait is anywhere near being manipulable.
OTOH, it would be trivially easy to run a blood test on the mother to determine the estimated intelligence of the fetus she carries. Selectively aborting any babies that are not “smart enough” (or the right sex) would be quite simple.
I personally find this morally reprehensible, but perhaps I’m just atavistic. I’m not averse to aborting a fetus that has three 21st chromosomes, has Tay Sachs, or other massive genetic error (which is a currently offered service.)
Don’t you know, intelligence itself is a social construct.
If you can’t take it from Peter and give it to Paul (while charging a commission on the transfer) then it’s a social construct.
That’s Left-Collectivism in a nutshell.
The only white chicks bearing babies for black guys are:
1. UGLY
2. Black guy is a celebrity.
3. chicks who’ve imbibed the multi-culti KoolAid so much that increasing the odds their children will be morons is worth the Virtue Signal.
The cat is nearly out of the bag. White girls hooking up with black males is SOOOO last year’s fashion.
High IQ whites are, if anything, becoming even MORE assortive in their mating habits. Why do you think blacks (esp. black women) do so poorly on dating sites?
As time passes, the truth about heritability will turn dating sites into a virtual IQ-based assorting system.
Given that my kids all have IQ’s well north of 135 and their wives are both Caucasian and very bright/well-educated, I figure my clan is well-positioned for the future.
Your obituary for Caucasians better not come true; without men of predominantly Northern European ancestry, the cell phones, jet planes, and plentiful food you now enjoy will go the way of the Do-Do bird. Wake me when you find a population of PoC who have done any of that…even the East Asians just reverse engineer Western accomplishments.
I still don’t understand all this.
1. If my test results are correct, there are probably 500,000-1m people in North America who are smarter than me; that doesn’t hurt me, and I don’t know why I’m supposed to resent them. Lots of those people produce things I truly appreciate, and I thank them for that with my business.
2. There are plenty of people who are not as smart as me who are more successful. Again, that doesn’t bother me, it doesn’t hurt me, and I don’t know why I’m supposed to resent them. I appreciate what they produce.
3. High IQ doesn’t guarantee success (at anything.) It’s just a factor–yes, an important one–but not the only thing that matters. The latest data on IQ vs wealth shows a positive correlation but not nearly as strongly as most people seem to think.
http://humanvarieties.org/2016/01/31/iq-and-permanent-income-sizing-up-the-iq-paradox/
4. High IQ is also a handicap. There are lots of jobs where being “too smart” is a major impediment to success. Police departments actually try to avoid hiring people above a certain IQ, and lots of corporate managers don’t like having subordinates who are smarter. High IQ makes “fitting in” difficult for lots of people.
A nation of high IQ people is likely to be a wealthy, peaceful place to live, but the rewards of being, say, >120 are in my opinion largely overrated at the level of the individual.
Turn a Babu into a “Patriotic Muslim Bangladeshi” or a “Patriotic American Atheist” – he always and everywhere remains only a Babu.
In this dystopia, the world would be a better place as the Supra A-Males and Supra B-Females bred for intelligence duke it out with each other to see who runs the universe. Superior intelligence without a moral sense is a “nuke” waiting to go off — Joseph Stalin, Adolf Hitler, Allen Dulles, and an impossibly along list of emperors and kings.
Let’s hope that all of our progeny will become supra-intelligent predators … rather than their less-intelligent prey. Then, may the “last man (or woman) standing win!”
I suspect many leftists already know the Bell curve is accurate.
once they identify the hundreds of genes which determine IQ, will be interesting to see if the government encourages aborting fetus’s if their genome indicate an IQ below 95…would our medical community actually advocate the abortion of 75% of African Americans ?
I suspect Asians will be the first the embrace aborting their babies with IQs under 100, as they already choose to abort their females.
actual genetic engineering of embryos will be decades away and will be costly, as it will involve In vitro fertilization which currently costs over $10,000 and often results in multiple births and pre-mature infants which causes lowered IQs and other health problems.
On 2nd thought, given the PLA’s well-known, systematic hacking and theft of Western firms’ technology on an ongoing basis, perhaps their colleges should just exhibit some honesty and issue degrees in REVERSE ENGINEERING instead of engineering.
For a nation with three times the population and a higher mean IQ (vs the USA), China is surprisingly more interested in stealing the innovations of others than it is producing innovations of its own.
The real problem may remain the race between man and machine. Even a genetically engineered human takes 20 years to mature. If AI becomes a reality such machines can ‘evolve’ far faster and then who wins?
Rather than Razib, I would recommend following Steve Hsu over at his Information Processing blog. He seems to me much more direct about it, perhaps due to the more secure place he has in the edustocuracy.
I hope there are some function ones in there as well as all the development ones so that we old breed are not completely left out. I will sign up for the CRISPR IQ tune up. God knows I can use every little bit I can get. Even if it could just help keep me in place as I age.
http://infoproc.blogspot.com/2015/09/snp-hits-on-cognitive-ability-from-300k.html
very true
I suspect AI robots may reach an effective IQ near 130 well before we can genetically engineer humans to have IQs above 125. Thus human genetic engineering may focus on making offspring more attractive, athletic, charismatic and healthier instead of using it to create 130 IQ humans.
once AI machines and robots have reached IQs over 130 , humans will mostly be used in service jobs , thus attractiveness and personality will be more important than IQ. The Wealthy will choose to use high IQ robots instead of humans and reduce the need for high IQ workers.
What are the current rates by race?
http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2014/09/abortions-racial-gap/380251/
Refresher course:
http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/Gattaca/
I can think of many more social consequences:
1. It is almost inevitable that in the near future the medical utility (for all sorts of purposes spread over the course of a lifetime) of having a full genome on file and the low cost of doing so (ca. $100) will mean that children will routinely have full genome tests done as children. Even without compression it takes only about 3 megabytes to record a full transcription of someone’s genome in a text file, and if you leverage the fact that every locus has a more common variant (which can be used as a reference sequence) and less common variant, allowing the file to only include the less common variants in an individual, a person’s full genome can easily fit into an RFID chip put into a piece of cheap jewelry.
2. Once you have a full genome and you have the research papers that determine which genes are relevant to intelligence and the magnitude and nature of the effect of each one, it is trivially easy with software no more sophisticated than an cell-phone app to translate that genome into an expected adult IQ for the individual right down to a margin of error and maybe even some sub-scores.
3. If everyone has a scientifically validated expected IQ at birth, this validates a restructuring of the educational system by at least some jurisdictions or private educational institutions to institute massive tracking based upon it, even if the benefits of tracking itself, as opposed to knowing which track someone belongs in if you do track, are not validated.
4. Expected IQ will naturally call attention to people who are overachievers and underachievers relative to IQ than current systems in which there is less trust do. Non-genome based research suggests that this has two main other dimensions for which genomic work may also provide a basis: one dimension involves factors such as the Big Five personality trait conscientiousness, grit, deferral of gratification, self-discipline, procrastination and ADD; the other dimension involves interpersonal and social skills roughly corresponding to the Big Five personality trait of extraversion. The instinct to push underachievers to perform will be socially validated, even if there may be unknown genetic or non-genetic reasons for it.
5. Expected IQ will not doubt be offered as evidence in hearings on competency to be executed and/or convicted of crimes.
6. The political momentum to finance merit based scholarships at all educational levels for low to medium income individuals with high expected IQ will be increased, as will support for gifted and talented programs with high expected IQ score qualification from pre-K through high school.
7. Once we know the biological basis of IQ, the race will be on to identify drug treatments or more aggressively CRISPR gene therapy to enhance the effective IQ of people beyond their expected IQ. This will probably produce some successes and even more popular fad treatments that should work in theory but don’t actually work (much like fad diets today). In the recent book “Echopraxia” by Peter Watts, set in the waning days of the 21st century, almost everyone employs some combination of intelligence enhancing drugs, genetic modification or surgical modifications (sometimes involving cybernetic parts and sometimes not) to enhance their cognitive potential.
Some of these mods will have unexpected and negative consequences, for example, influencing personality in a negative way.
8. Discrimination against people will low expected IQ can also be expected as this way of making hierarchical distinctions becomes validated socially as a valid distinction. There will be moves to deny them access to higher education and maybe even high school education. There will be moves to categorically bar people with low expected IQ from a wide variety of professions. But, there will also be a greater sense of social obligation and support of welfare programs for people with low expected IQ because it will be harder to say that they are simply lazy.
9. Expected IQ will have a complex impact on the social aspects of race.
On one hand, it is inevitable that there will be some differences in mean expected IQ between samples taken from different racial groups which in the U.S. simply because it is wildly improbably that the mean would be the same even due to random chance. No matter how large or small the difference are, some people will say that they are big enough to be meaningful, and others will disagree – statistics give you a standard deviation, it doesn’t tell you how many standard deviations of difference are meaningful. The largest differences in IQ between racial groups in the U.S. will be heavily biased by the recent immigration history of people in that group, particularly when the group is small and there was one dominant pattern of recent immigration (e.g. for part of U.S. history that is the source of a lot of the current Korean American population of the U.S., the main source of migration of Koreans to the U.S. was limited to medical doctors who no doubt have higher than average IQ which will pass to some extent to there).
On the other hand, a statistic that will probably become a benchmark for measuring improper discrimination in society at both the group and the individual level will be the differences between measured IQ and expected IQ which subject to the margins of error in each measurement are fair ways to measure the environmental impact on measured IQ that could be due to discrimination. There is strong circumstantial evidence from non-genetic data that this will be significant and it could be a factor that could shift public opinion dramatically about whether racial discrimination exists in much the same way that the growing understanding that sexual orientation is biological pervasively changed public opinion about gay rights.
If, as is likely, there is a significant difference based upon race in expected IQ, but also a much bigger difference in measured IQ, public opinion will have to embrace this complicated reality which will take time and it is hard to predict how it will shake out in the end.
The current technology for producing high IQ humans is well understood and very reliable. No test tubes needed.
Selective abortion and negative eugenics via screening (e.g., preimplantation genetic diagnosis and the like) was, last time I checked, the only currently available method. This is a far cry from “bio-engineering.” And it’s far from egalitarian. All it does is allow prospective parents to rule out children who don’t measure up. If this sort of thing becomes widespread, it’s much more likely to crash black birth rates than it is to bring blacks up to cognitive parity.
Maybe advances in eugenics will allow non-whites (especially the south Asian and SWANA types, who are in particular need) to breed out their inherent tendency toward despotism. Then Razib Khan III and Jayman III might allow free discussion on their blogs.
You won’t. Sub-120 IQ isn’t “low.” Mean global IQ isn’t even 100.
Good point. Liberalism and lack of ethnocentrism are whites’ Achilles heel. I see you want to bash white men because you have a thing for white women, though. You seem conflicted.
(emphasis added)
Choice is obviously bad.
It’s ipso facto manipulable. The question is, whether and when the tech is created.
He’s probably more open to dissenting views, too. HBD being what it is.
Or the synthesis, dropping robotic brains into cloned human bodies.
I have been waiting for this moment for years, and I did not expect it to come so early.
I can´t wait. Of course it will be silenced and ignored (look, a squirrel!). We also have to realize that the keepers of the megaphone will dictate how the new findings are to be interpreted… But it will be nice to see the liars humiliated.
“If white men are so superior then why are they disappearing…?”
Uh, because they read books that document the world’s diminishing resources such as oceanic fish and fresh water and they understand the laws of exponential growth. Capable of forward thinking and empathy they can envision the future and place themselves in the shoes of those less fortunate than themselves, those ill equipped to deal with the challenges that lie ahead of them and of which they are, due to their shortsightedness, blithely ignorant. And, being conscientious, principled people they act on their knowledge.
Edited my edit. Added (It’s 100 by definition, but you know what I mean) but pasted over it.
“He said that an unstoppable train was coming down the track which would be arriving within three years. He was emphatic that this train would not take a decade or even five years.”
Hehe.
Murray has no clue what he’s talking about, neither do Razib or Steve Hsu.
I can’t wait for this train though.
With an IQ of that magnitude, you should be aware of the “regression towards the mean” phenomenon. There is a one in four chance that a grandchild of yours will be significantly below that 135 IQ, possibly even below average.
Your comments on black-white mating and white accomplishments are generally correct.
If mean US IQ is normed to 100 then the world average is about 90.
If it is proved (to the satisfaction of the general public) that IQ is genetic I would expect that large segments of the population, especially the black population, will still disagree. This is not a recipe for social tranquility.
The larger and much more explosive issue is on the subject of behavior, i.e. time preference (which does correlate with g) and impulse control, both of which correlate with criminality.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20152292
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24326626
I wonder if government funded “future research” is being done.
Not a recipe for tranquility at all.
One might state, quite crudely, that the scientific facts are running a train on blank slatists.
“Mr. Murray says that within these three years incontrovertible evidence of the overwhelming genetic influence on cognitive abilities and many other human traits of the different races will become available.”
Yeah, right.
Back in the nineteenth century, an anthropologist didn’t pack enough seeds into an African skull, so we can know in advance that this upcoming “evidence” must be pseudoscience.
“Identifying gene sequences is one thing; directly manipulating them is another”
Heard of CRISPR?
That’s what I meant; if you assay global IQ, it’ll be normed to 100, but that would push up a lot of countries’ means.
Wouldn’t matter if that is proved. It’d still be “differences between races is still down to environment.”
who talks about superior? it is about being different, having different strengths and weaknesses, being adapted to different social institutions.
high IQ does´t guarantee success but makes it more likely. Thus for any individual ceteris paribus it is better to have a higher IQ.
low IQ countries are not poor because they are oppressed and thus the people of those countries do not have an eternal right to migrate to richer countries based on the oppression they have allegedly suffered. Thats what it all is about, isn´t it?
I think a result like this will imply very interesting scientific debates. Let´s say there is really a connection between a distinctive genetic pattern and IQ, then how does it work? Does the group of people having (or not having) this genetic pattern have even more intelligent guys at the right tail of the IQ distribution? Or does it work at the left tail, or does it rather work homogenous in the whole distribution? Does it work given certain environmental conditions (rather not likely, if anything probably nutrition)?
Anyway as far as I understand such a result would be something categorically new compared to the old evidence from adoption studies. That is I think because while finding those relevant genetic patterns is a complex puzzle which will be solved by using up to date datamining techniques, once it is found it can be replicated using simple t-test.
When a result like this comes the implications and societal changes it brings can barely not be overstated I think. It could be as important as the discovery of the New World by the Europeans, like the industrial revolution or something like that. The ideological framework of the modern world which has worked for at least some decades could fall into pieces like a card house. Finding something like that is like opening the box of Pandora, and it´s overdue.
If you are referring to Morton he wasn’t an anthropologist but a physician. Morton’s skull measurements were recently rechecked and determined to have been completely accurate.
The 2R allele of the MAOA gene has about a 5% frequency in African-American males versus about .1% frequency in white American males.
There is absolutely nothing in the least bit surprising about any of this. If human intelligence had no relation to polynucleotides then it would be absolutely unique among biological traits.
There is nothing at all unique about human beings. We are simply a particaular kind of biological organism. Everything about us is related to polynucleotides. This true of all living things.
As for how it works there are probably thousands of single nucleotide polymorphisms which are related to inteligence as measured by IQ tests. Their effects operate in a myriad of ways to effect neurological functioning.
The ideological framework which will fall to pieces is the idea that the world has a moral strructure or that there is something divine or transcendental about humans.
“The ideological framework which will fall to pieces is the idea that the world has a moral strructure or that there is something divine or transcendental about humans” which means that around 99% of what has been written about humans since the neolithic revolution was wrong.
Yes.
If I live long enough to benefit from highly capable future technologies I would want enhanced intelligence but also a way to vary it.
Or at least a way to return to my default settings.
The first order of business when designing Black babies must be to turn off the Rap gene.