Monday, July 23, 2012

Race, IQ, and Wealth by Ron Unz

Race, IQ, and Wealth by Ron Unz
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2 comments:

  1. MJuly 24, 2012 at 12:53 AM

    Comments by 'Chuck' on the East Asian exception:

    "ne problem with Ron Unz’s new theory of Mongoloid fitness (i.e., that East Asians developed a novel genetic resistance to cognitively depressing environments), invoked to explain the “Asian Socio-Economic exception,” is that East Asians aren’t particularly exceptional when it comes to the relation between National IQs and socio-economics. Generally, the “socio-economic” explanation suffers from the following problems: National IQs predict growth rate not just wealth, national wealth is unable to explain the covariance between IQ and educational scores (so one has to problematically propose that wealth increases National IQ by acting through the g-nexus), the IQs of oil rich Middle Eastern nations are no greater than those of the poorer Greater Middle Eastern nations (the “Middle Eastern Socio-Economic exception”), and longitudinal studies show that National IQs are antecedent to national wealth. And there is, of course, the whole issue of the biological, ecological, and historic cognitive correlates of national IQ. (These correlates preclude a simple contemporaneous Wealth –> contemporaneous National IQ hypothesis for the obvious reasons that neither differences in contemporaneous wealth nor contemporaneous National IQ can induce differences in these evolutionary markers and that the correlation between these markers and National IQs is greater than that between National IQs and wealth or between these markers and Wealth. Right? — try creating a plausible path model yourself.)

    The other problem, of course, is parsimony. It’s possible that Mongoloids evolved a unique genetic system which buffers their cognitive ability against environmental depressors. But a much simpler explanation is that they simply evolved higher IQs. With the former, you have to invoke between race gene x environment interactions — in the classic biometric sense, not the pseudo Turkheimer sense — which don’t exist within populations or, at least, have yet to be detected. In effect, you have to propose a dissimilarity in racial developmental processes, one which has not been found. With the latter, you can just call upon the garden variety within population factors to explain between population variance. Of course, proposing the latter, that there was increased selection of beneficial IQ alleles in the Northern Asian populations, might lead some to wonder if there was selection in other northern populations. And it’s appreciated that the point is to introduce the larger topic in a politically acceptable way."

    East Asian Exception?

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  2. MJuly 24, 2012 at 12:54 AM

    See also, Peter Frost's comments. Frost liaised with Unz on the draft, and now comments on the published version.

    http://evoandproud.blogspot.co.nz/2012/07/ron-unz-on-race-iq-and-wealth.html

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