(September 6, 2018 at 12:25 pm)Khemikal Wrote: I have explained to you that complaints of white victimization and some imaginary cryptomarxist end of the western world are batshit crazy rightwing talking points.  This is not an argument, it is a statement of fact.  It it's modern incarnation, both tunes go back as far as 1970...and yet here we still are, rights and all.  Whites still haven't been rounded up by their black oppressors.  What..about that, should I have to argue in, for you?

(September 7, 2018 at 6:01 am)Khemikal Wrote: I'd tell you that I was surprised, but I'd be lying.

(September 1, 2018 at 9:06 am)Khemikal Post #643 Wrote: I'll give you an example, from the thread.  The heritability of IQ.  The claim that genetics (race, in a racists eyes) account for 70-80% of differences on IQ scores, the remainder being environmental (15%ish) and unquantified.  That's true..but it's selectively mined.  Its true -within- a control group called High-SES.  High socioeconomic status.  The same study, in the Low-SES control group, found a direct inversion of the relationship.  Estimated heritability was only 10%.  

Scientific racism points to the first half of their finding, omits the other, and uses that as a justification for an argument known as "the inevitability of black poverty".  The notion that a "difference" between the races, in this case iq, leads to a pronounced demographic trend in poverty.  It does this..because it's not science, it's just racism.  

Khemikal 1st source, Post #724 Wrote:

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How Can IQ Be Heritable for Rich Kids and Not for Poor Kids?
Society and Culture

A new article has been published with more evidence that there is an interaction effect between genes and socioeconomic status (SES) on IQ, but only for children from low-SES homes (one of the coauthors, Eric Turkheimer, has been making this case since about 2003). From the abstract: “At age 2 years, genes accounted for nearly 50% of the variation in mental ability of children raised in high-SES homes, but genes continued to account for negligible variation in mental ability of children raised in low-SES homes.”

What can that mean? That somehow IQ is not heritable for poor children but is heritable for rich children? That’s impossible, surely. Kids are kids; if IQ is (let’s say) 50 percent heritable for human beings, doesn’t that have to mean that it is 50 percent heritable for rich and poor alike?

The confusion arises partly from the difference between the underlying heritability of IQ and its measurement over the life span. The correlation between the midpoint of parental IQ and the child’s IQ starts fairly small in early childhood and continues to increase. In the best review of twin studies, genes accounted for only about 22 percent of the variance at age 5, 40 percent at age 7, and a whopping 82 percent at age 18. So there’s lots of room to push and pull mental ability in infants and toddlers. It doesn’t mean that the reshaped mental ability will stay that way, but it will certainly produce changes in the measurement of it while the children are young.

The confusion also arises partly from the asymmetrical way in which good and bad environments affect IQ. Super-enriched environments don’t have much effect. That wonderful mobile you bought to put over your baby’s crib won’t make much difference, nor will playing Mozart while the child is in the womb, nor will any of the other ingenious ways in which ambitious upper-middle-class parents try to whip every neuron in their child’s cerebral cortex into tip-top shape. The things that such parents normally do will provide a “good enough” environment.

But never talking to an infant at all, except to scold it? Leaving an infant in an environment that is devoid of stimulation? Or in cases of blatant abuse, locking a toddler in a closet for long periods of time? You certainly can have a major negative effect on mental ability if you do those kinds of things. That’s the parsimonious explanation for Turkheimer’s findings. We know from other studies that low-SES mothers (in low-SES circles, fewer and fewer fathers are part of the picture these days) often don’t talk much to their children, often leave them in low-stimulation environments—often, not to mince words, have terrible parenting practices. That indeed will produce a big environmental effect on low-SES infants that has no counterpart among high-SES children.

The obvious next question: Can outside interventions do much to help children facing that kind of incompetent parenting? But that’s a big topic, completely separate, that I’ll leave for another time.

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(September 1, 2018 at 6:04 am)bennyboy Post #639 Wrote: With regard to (2), it's shown that while childhood boosts can be gotten by environment, heritability after puberty is at about 75% - 80%.  It's a monster.  So even though we create special programs and so on (and we should, if just for the enrichment of those children's lives), the effect on IQ in adulthood is going to be fairly negligible.  What are we left with?  Eugenics?  I'm quite depressed about it actually-- I literally don't see a practical way out of this situation.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3270016/ Wrote:The notion that heritability may be lower in lower-SES families is appealing, in part because of its environmental implications: If heritability is lower in lower-SES families, it suggests that environmental interventions might be more effective in boosting cognitive development for children in lower-SES families. The present study, which is based on a large UK-representative sample of children followed longitudinally, leads to a similar implication. Although the genetic influence on IQ is the same in lower-SES families, shared environmental influence appears to be greater in lower-SES families, suggesting that family-based environmental interventions might be more effective in these families. However, two further aspects of the results temper the policy implications of this finding. First, shared environmental influence is found in both lower- and higher-SES families and the difference in shared environmental influence between them is modest.  Second, shared environmental influences on IQ decline from childhood to adulthood so that these influences might not have an impact in the long run.