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Satoshi Kanazawa

In addition to the Pioneer Fund grantees, another name that gets bandied about these parts in order to try and support the hereditatian position is the work of Satoshi Kanazawa. Hence it is of some interest that he currently has gotten himself into trouble by making some sketchy statements, to the extent that sixty something evolutionary psychologists have published a letter distancing themselves from his work, criticizing it and have called his contributions "poor quality work" (among other things). See here [1] (blog, though academic probably not a RS) and more importantly here.Volunteer Marek (talk) 01:41, 4 June 2011 (UTC)

There seems to be a bit of an edit war about this. Kanazawa's status as a reliable source (or rather as a significant reliable source) is something that we should address. I fear there is a danger of his undoubted ability to get into the media giving a false impression of his status among EP researchers. He is - inadvertently - the EP poster child for EP critics. (Some of his writings are so awful I struggle to believe he has any credibility at all).VsevolodKrolikov (talk) 15:03, 16 June 2011 (UTC)
While Kanazawa's research is not an important source for this article and while it's true that he has published some shoddy studies (I'm surprised some of them got published), completely shutting him out of this article would not be justified. Many scientists publish bad research; most results reported in academic journals are probably false. We should decide whether his work should be cited on a case-by-case basis, just like we would do with other scientists. BTW, a statement signed by some twenty academics defending Kanazawa has been published in The Times Higher Education: [2]--Victor Chmara (talk) 15:52, 16 June 2011 (UTC)
First of all, the letter doesn't say that Kanazawa is a great researcher or representative of the field. It's protesting against the manner of his vilification. Secondly, it's really not the prettiest list of signatories one could find. There are quite a few academics (of those in the list that are notable) who've been disowned/reprimanded at various points by their institutions for poorly done research (and for the same reason - ideological motivation). While this is interesting in a gossipy sense, we're here to represent academic consensus as best we can. These same signatories may be on one side of the debate this page seeks to represent, but by themselves, they're not the best witnesses to respectability in wikipedia terms. I'm not arguing for Kanazawa's omission, but he doesn't appear to deserve a paragraph to himself and his critics.VsevolodKrolikov (talk) 16:37, 16 June 2011 (UTC)
Of course the list of signatories includes people who have had their run-ins with the academic establishment. They are the ones who understand the importance of academic freedom. If all researchers supported the status quo, there'd be no need for academic freedom.--Victor Chmara (talk) 17:40, 16 June 2011 (UTC)
That's not quite how academic freedom works; it's still bound by a code of ethics, which many of them have broken. Aside from that, you raise the same point I do - Kanazawa stands out, similar to most of those signatories, precisely because he is a contrarian, not because his work is considered to have great scientific merit. Wikipedia should give due weight according to standing, not according to the number of times people have been hauled up before ethics committees or been fired for resisting academic oversight.VsevolodKrolikov (talk) 15:55, 17 June 2011 (UTC)
Well, one man's contrarian is another's trailblazer. None of those people would probably have gotten into hot water were they not doing research on politically explosive topics. Only time will tell whose work will be important, but I would suggest that many of these "controversial" scientists are much less so among their peers. For example, Lynn's research on global IQ variation has already given birth to a large literature on the topic.--Victor Chmara (talk) 22:03, 18 June 2011 (UTC)
I see this whole area as just stuffed with people on both sides convinced of their rightness and doing the 'science' to try and prove themselves right so I'd view any of the researchers with a huge truckful of scepticism. I think in this case a single sentence might be appropriate as they have been specifically criticized for their work in general. The article Satoshi Kanazawa can be linked for anything more. Dmcq (talk) 18:16, 16 June 2011 (UTC)

I've been lurking around this discussion here for awhile and view it with a bit of bemusement and frustration. While it is not my personal constitution to focus on the racial aspects of hereditary science (i think it does the school-of-thought a great disservice).........that said, when one see's headlines like this "Schools report finds ‘jaw-dropping’ gap for black boys.........one has to ask, why'????'...........and one has to ask "Jaw dropping" to who?????? .......It certainly isn't "jaw dropping" to an advocate of the hereditary theory......in fact, it falls right in line with their scientific ideology. It is only "jaw dropping" to the radical nuture/environmental crowd...............My dear Mr. Marek, can we start seeing some research to back up your claims??? I need and want to be convinced that race (even if a social construct) is not a factor in the intelligence debate. Sempre30 (talk) 00:22, 18 June 2011 (UTC)

I have to add, that being of latin background, I'm not anxious to jump to a racial conclusions, especially when Lynn just published a study, "Southern Italians less intelligent than northerners" says British Professor.........considering I derive from the southern stock that Lynn is refering to, but I can take my lumps like a man (and a weak man at that) Sempre30 (talk) 00:29, 18 June 2011 (UTC)

Wikipedia is not the place for putting forward your own theories and arguments on a topic; it is a place for fairly representing the range of expert views on a subject.VsevolodKrolikov (talk) 15:42, 18 June 2011 (UTC)

It's fine for the documentary to be included as an external link, but it doesn't seem encyclopedic for the article to single out this documentary without including any of the other equally notable external links. It's also non-neutral for this to be the only external link: the documentary is in favor of the viewpoint that the IQ gap is due to test bias, which isn't a majority viewpoint (the APA disagrees with that for example).

Here are some other external links that are at least as notable as this documentary:

There are also miscellaneous editorials we could link to by people like Flynn, Nisbett, Rushton, or Murray. I think all of these sources are at least as notable as the tv documentary, so the documentary shouldn't be the only external link. I would be okay with either removing the documentary link or adding some of the others in addition.Boothello (talk) 06:20, 7 July 2011 (UTC)

External links are not "notable" things, in wikipedia terms. External links are meant to be useful, and fall within various guidelines about spamming etc. Rageh Omah and Channel Four (which is, in case you're not familiar with British TV, a national network with a public service remit) doing a serious documentary that explains in straightforward terms some of the issues seems perfectly fine, if we're worried about reliability. I don't see why we have to do deals over what goes in, which appears to be your approach. We should only be concerned if there are too many links. And one is not too many. Instead of taking out good material, you could add some ;-) VsevolodKrolikov (talk) 07:13, 7 July 2011 (UTC)
Policy or no, it seems like common sense that neutrality should matter for the external links in an article on a controversial topic. Imagine if all of the external links were to articles by Jensen, Rushton and Lynn, even though their perspective is only one of many about this topic. I think everyone would agree that was a POV issue. For that reason I also think it isn't NPOV for the only external link to be a documentary that says the IQ gap is due to test bias. But I will follow your suggestion and add some more links instead of removing the one. I just noticed that the Rose article isn't accessible without a subscription, and it would also be non neutral to only include the Ceci & Williams article without the other half of the debate between them and Rose. I'll add the other four.Boothello (talk) 18:44, 7 July 2011 (UTC)
The position the documentary holds - that Rushton et al are getting it wrong - is the mainstream view. I don't think we need get too jumpy about that. Be careful, by the way, of adding material already included in the text. Policy is important.VsevolodKrolikov (talk) 20:14, 7 July 2011 (UTC)
I think the mainstream perspective is agnosticism - the viewpoint that nobody knows the cause of the IQ gaps. The APA report and Earl Hunt's Human Intelligence take this view, for example. If you read papers about this topic in Intelligence or other journals that commonly discuss R&I, they're almost always written under the assumption that the cause is unknown. Because of that, saying the gap is caused by any specific factor is always non-mainstream. That is true for genetics, nutrition, test bias, or anything else. For test bias it's even more the case, because the APA report specifically rejects that idea (and it's even more critical of test bias as a possible cause than it is of genetics).Boothello (talk) 21:14, 7 July 2011 (UTC)

Evolutionary theories

Mustihussain twice removed the content cited to Lynn and Kanazawa from the "evolutionary theories" section [3] [4] arguing that it gives undue weight to their perspective. With Lynn and Kanazawa removed, all of the sources discussing evolutionary pressures as an explanation for racial IQ gaps are critical. The first paragraph cites Brace and Nisbett: they disagree on whether evolutionary explanations are theoretically possible, but they both think these explanations are wrong. The rest of the discussion about this idea is cited to Brace and Graves, and they are both criticizing it as well. The only source that is not against evolutionary explanation is the Woodley paper, but this paper doesn't discuss it at all - it discusses inbreeding depression (and should likely be moved to a different section because of that).

In terms of undue weight, I think it's fine to devote less space to evolutionary theories than to other ideas. But that doesn't mean the section should contain nothing but criticism. When we present criticism on a topic, the encyclopedic thing to do is to first explain what the idea is and why people believe it. We do this for other non-mainstream ideas, like communism or global warming skepticism, and we should do it here too. If the issue is that Lynn and Kanazawa aren't respected enough to include, then we can replace the material cited to them something from a researcher like Jensen who is better regarded.Boothello (talk) 20:43, 7 July 2011 (UTC)

One way could be to write a shorter section. You could combine the overall viewpoints of Lynn and Kanazawa rather than detailing the studies. As an aside: I've said previously that Kanazawa is more notorious than notable as a researcher; he gets into the press about as often as his work gets picked apart by experts in the field and beyond. I don't think it does the hereditarian side many favours to make him out as a leading light. He's also a sociologist, not a geneticist.VsevolodKrolikov (talk) 22:12, 7 July 2011 (UTC)
the second paragraph clearly states the so-called evolutionary mechanisms that rushton and lynn envisage. what more do you want?-- mustihussain (talk) 05:56, 8 July 2011 (UTC)
That's not the issue and I'm sure you know that. The second paragraph is sourced entirely to Brace, a critic of evolutionary theories on race and IQ. Since you removed Lynn and Kanazawa, the section now contains no content from any proponents of these theories, and is sourced entirely to their critics. I want the section to give proponents of these theories an opportunity to explain what the theories are, before it brings up the criticisms.
I will try rewriting a new version of this section. I will have it explain the evolutionary theories and source it to someone more well-regarded such as Jensen. The section also has other issues like unsourced statements and poor organization so I'll improve those things too.Boothello (talk) 14:18, 9 July 2011 (UTC)
It's a mess. There's a random reference to Ashkenazi jews, and another to "inbreeding" leading to diminished IQs - but inbreeding is not an evolutionary response to selective pressures. Good luck with a re-write.VsevolodKrolikov (talk) 14:25, 9 July 2011 (UTC)
Ok, changed it. I made it a lot shorter, and also got rid of the content that was unsourced or irrelevant. Hopefully the new version is an improvement. I also removed the undue weight tag because the tag was for the previous version which has now been replaced. If someone thinks the new version is still undue, they can tag it again, but in that case they need to offer suggestions on how to improve it.Boothello (talk) 15:01, 9 July 2011 (UTC)

Roma study

About this latest addition to the article: There appears to have been some back-and-forth about this in the article's edit history, though I couldn't find anything about it on this talk page. Anyway, it appears to have been first removed five days ago with this edit summary: "the source cited appears to say nothing about intermarriage, and cites only a single study."

From what I've read in the paper, neither claim seems to be true. There was clearly two instances in the study where the authors said that Romani people did not intermarry significantly with local populations (though they appeared to have cited another study). Considering that this is a peer-reviewed paper in a top journal, I think this is reasonably well-cited.

As for "cites only a single study", I'm not sure what the user meant. The paper itself is, of course, only one study; I don't see how this would be a problem, as the deleted content made it clear that the result was shown in one particular study. Or if the user meant the number of studies cited by that particular study, that would be false; the study cited, by my count, at least two dozen other papers.

Anyway, I'm not the user who first added this statement and I'm not convinced of its relevance in the article. But the reasons for removing it seem unjustified. Batjik Syutfu (talk) 10:30, 8 July 2011 (UTC)

I agree that it does mention intermarriage, although it doesn't give any source for that assertion, repeatedly made. A bigger problem is why mention this study at all. Judging by google scholar, it has not been cited much by anyone except Rushton himself. I think there is an argument for undue weight, certainly in the detail. Intelligence (journal) only started in 2000; I don't know how major it is.VsevolodKrolikov (talk) 10:43, 8 July 2011 (UTC)
It was me that removed the section: apologies if the source cited actually does say something about intermarriage - I think I may have been referring to another study(?). In any case, unless the source gives grounds for the assertion, and likewise, the suggestion that the Romani are "a people of South Asian origin" (a highly questionable and rather vague statement), it looks like undue weight (and possibly synthesis). There is also the issue that without a base figure for the non-Romani population, the data is meaningless. Frankly, without much stronger grounds for inclusion, this looks like just another example of eastern-European anti-Roma prejudice. In any case, who (other than the most disreputable suspects) has ever argued that the Roma are 'a race'? AndyTheGrump (talk) 11:01, 8 July 2011 (UTC)
Well, the article on Romani people clearly state that the Roma are an ethnic group (or subgroup) with origins in the Indian subcontinent. This seems like a pretty well-established fact; I'm not sure why you dispute it, but that seems pretty irrelevant to our current discussion.
The source is a peer-reviewed paper in a well-established journal (it started in 1977, not 2000). If you have a problem with the accuracy of the study, publish a comment to the editors of the journal. It is not our place as Wikipedia editors to decide which papers are dubious and which aren't. The paper deals directly with the relationship between race and intelligence, so it certainly is suitable for inclusion in this article, although I think it was misplaced.
I agree that the issue is sensitive, but I wouldn't really throw around accusations about racism at random strangers for citing a psychological study. Batjik Syutfu (talk) 11:39, 8 July 2011 (UTC)
Batjik, ethnicity (socially defined) and race (for hereditarians, genetically defined) are not the same thing, at least not for most researchers. This was actually rather elegantly demonstrated in the documentary you wanted to delete from the page - you should have watched what there is of it on YouTube before criticising its inclusion. Scottish, for example, is an ethnicity, but genetically there's pretty much no difference between Scots and English - who both largely carry the genes of pre-anglo saxon, pre-celtic populations of the British isles (language is not an efficient marker of genetic origin in this case). The converse goes for "African American", where, as the programme noted, in a population of "gifted" black children, there was great diversity in the level of European lineage in the children, with no relationship between the extent of that lineage and giftedness. Researchers such as Rushton and Lynn are generally criticised for not making the distinction, for presuming that socially defined ethnicities reflect genetic demarcation lines. Rushton provides no source for a lack of intermarriage over previous generations, which speaks volumes, as it's a pretty important assumption, given his belief in the dominating influence of genes in adult IQ test scores. He also provides no evidence for when the genetic distinctiveness of romany peoples supposedly developed, which creates issues regarding evolutionary sources of differential intelligence between groups. These are pretty basic problems; it makes me wonder about the prestige of the journal Intelligence. Anyway, that's my view, which doesn't count here - what does count is the lack of other people citing the work.
All this may sound like they're making an elementary mistake. The thing is, enough people think they're making a mistake along these lines that they are not taken seriously by mainstream geneticists, who generally don't see race as a useful category at all. And some people think that the problem is so obvious that they'd have to be racists not to accept it. They, of course, dispute the extent to which socially-defined ethnicity and genes diverge.VsevolodKrolikov (talk) 13:39, 8 July 2011 (UTC)
VK, firstly, who has "generally criticized" Rushton and Lynn for not taking into account admixture? The reality is of course that both of them have frequently used the results of admixture studies in support of the hereditarian view. Lynn has published studies on the correlation between (the lightness of) skin color and IQ in African Americans, arguing that the positive correlation indicates that European ancestry causes higher intelligence. They and other researchers have proposed that modern genomic ancestry estimation methods be used to study the association between white ancestry and IQ in Africans Americans. That sort of study could give conclusive answers, but unfortunately the people who want to conduct such a study do not have the means, whereas those who have the means do not want to do it (fearing what they might find).
Secondly, AFAIK the only study to attempt to measure the level of European ancestry in gifted African Americans is the one by Witty and Jenkins, from 1936. I assume you're talking about that one. Witty and Jenkins identified a sample of gifted black children, and asked their parents how racially admixed the kids were. Then they compared the admixture information to that reported in Herskovitz's large 1930 study of African American adults, concluding that the distributions of white ancestry were similar in both samples. The Witty and Jenkins study has been used to argue that in America gifted blacks do not have more white ancestry than non-gifted blacks. However, the study does not prove such a thing because it was deeply flawed. Firstly, parental report is not a reliable way to measure ancestry, perhaps especially in the case of African Americans. Secondly, the Herskovitz sample was an elite one, with 32 percent Howard University students, and another 16 percent professionals from New York. In other words, what Witty and Jenkins actually showed, using an unreliable measure of ancestry, was that gifted black children were about as "white" as black elites. The study has no relevance in the race and intelligence debate, but that, of course, has never prevented people from misrepresenting it as a key study.--Victor Chmara (talk) 14:56, 8 July 2011 (UTC)
Victor - you're right, insofar Lynn himself is usually more criticized for cherry-picking data and misusing proxies - such as his study of African IQs and his attempts to show that the difference between northern and southern Italian economic success was down to the Southern Italians miscegenating with people from North Africa and the Middle east thus apparently making them stupider. That said, he has been criticised not only for massaging stats but also for misrepresenting the nature of genetic differences between groups such as here in the journal Heredity, and for the way he often fails to establish distinct genetic membership of a group. It's not that he ignores admixture - it's the way that he takes it into account that maintains - in the eyes of critics who choose to pick up on that rather than something else - the error. The general point remains, that while ethnicity as a social reality is recognised by academics, race as a effective genetic construct (such as Lynn's "mongoloid race") is not, except by a small minority.VsevolodKrolikov (talk) 16:52, 8 July 2011 (UTC)
As for the study of skin tone (as a proxy for caucasian genetic heritage), the stats on that have been criticised here in the same journal for forgetting to control for environmental factors - a criticism cited favourably cited in American Economic Review here (pdf) in a study that shows that skin tone affects discrimination - ie the perceived social membership of a group impacts on economic outcomes. That study refers to previous ones that show a weak relation between skin tone and caucasian heritage, and no particular relationships between degree of caucasian heritage of "black" Americans and IQ. Again, it's membership of the socially-defined group rather than the genes that most scholars seem to think matters.VsevolodKrolikov (talk) 17:34, 8 July 2011 (UTC)
The studies you cite are prime examples of what Jensen called the sociologist's fallacy (Lynn points this out in his reply to Hill). If the hereditarian view is true, then the expectation is that there will be differences in things like childhood environment and adult outcomes between light- and dark-skinned blacks, in favor of the former. The sociologist's fallacy is about confusing correlation with causation -- just because a low-IQ individual's parents are poor, it does not necessarily mean that it is the poverty that causes his or her low IQ, because parents give their children not only a childhood environment but also their genes. The skin tone studies cannot discriminate between environmental and genetic causes, so what we need are the sort of genetic admixture studies I briefly discussed above.--Victor Chmara (talk) 19:05, 8 July 2011 (UTC)
The last incorrect. It is mainly US anthropologists who reject race. Very much less so among non-US anthropologists and in other branches of science: {http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_(classification_of_humans)#Current_views_across_disciplines] Miradre (talk) 17:21, 8 July 2011 (UTC)
If you are going to cite Wikipedia on the views of non-US anthropologists, at least try to get it right - it says nothing of the sort: "The survey shows that the views of [European] anthropologists on race are sociopolitically (ideologically) influenced and highly dependent on education" (a quote from an article in American Anthropologist). And from personal experience, I doubt that 'very much so' could be applied in the UK. Or do you have a source that says anything to the contrary? AndyTheGrump (talk) 18:40, 8 July 2011 (UTC)
"Liberman et al. in a 2004 study claimed to "present the currently available information on the status of the concept in the United States, the Spanish language areas, Poland, Europe, Russia, and China. Rejection of race ranges from high to low with the highest rejection occurring among anthropologists in the United States (and Canada). Rejection of race is moderate in Europe, sizeable in Poland and Cuba, and lowest in Russia and China." Methods used in the studies reported included questionnaires and content analysis"
"Kaszycka et al. (2009) in 2002–2003 surveyed European anthropologists' opinions toward the biological race concept. Three factors, country of academic education, discipline, and age, were found to be significant in differentiating the replies. Those educated in Western Europe, physical anthropologists, and middle-aged persons rejected race more frequently than those educated in Eastern Europe, people in other branches of science, and those from both younger and older generations."The survey shows that the views of anthropologists on race are sociopolitically (ideologically) influenced and highly dependent on education."Miradre (talk) 18:44, 8 July 2011 (UTC)
Not that anthropologists have the final words on race. See the views of other experts given in my link above.Miradre (talk) 18:44, 8 July 2011 (UTC)
Exactly, our article doesn't state that 'It is mainly US anthropologists who reject race'. And no, I'm not interested in reading another article you've used to push your POV in. How about finding some proper sources? AndyTheGrump (talk) 19:03, 8 July 2011 (UTC)
The articles are proper studies. The point being that not even anthropologists agree whether race exists or not. Race is not a disproven concept.Miradre (talk) 19:06, 8 July 2011 (UTC)
No, the point is that our article doesn't say what you claimed it did. AndyTheGrump (talk) 19:10, 8 July 2011 (UTC)
Ok, I agree that is not only some branches of US anthropology that support race. Satisfied? Still does not change that there is no consensus among anthropologists regarding whether race exists or not. It is not a disproven concept.Miradre (talk) 19:12, 8 July 2011 (UTC)
Possibly the reason that 'race' isn't 'a disproven concept' is that it is unfalsifiable as science - because it isn't a scientific concept in the first place. What is there to 'prove' or 'disprove'? If 'the Roma' are a race when it suits the 'science', without actually defining what a race is, or whether they constitute one, there isn't much to falsify. AndyTheGrump (talk) 19:23, 8 July 2011 (UTC)
OR. Publish something and then we can cite it. I note that today scientists can determine original ancestral background with an accuracy approaching 100% when using genetic markers. So ancestry is real. If race did not exist this should not be possible.Miradre (talk) 19:27, 8 July 2011 (UTC)
OR. Publish something and then we can cite it. AndyTheGrump (talk) 10:51, 9 July 2011 (UTC)
Already done. Like here [5]. Ancestry can be determined extremely accurately.Miradre (talk) 11:38, 9 July 2011 (UTC)
Nope, It is your assertion that "if race did not exist this should not be possible" that is the OR. Does the article refer to 'race'? The abstract doesn't. AndyTheGrump (talk) 12:37, 9 July 2011 (UTC)
See Lewontin's Fallacy.Miradre (talk) 12:49, 9 July 2011 (UTC)
Also, even in the US forensic anthropologists accept race, see link above.Miradre (talk) 17:24, 8 July 2011 (UTC)
I'll give you Soviet-educated anthropology, as it didn't really move beyond the 1930s. Geneticists - which is what Lynn et al are concerned with - reject a model of distinct races. There are regional variations, but not the demarcation implicit and explicit in someone like Lynn's writings. The forensic anthropologist you quote is one person, with opponents, and it's not clear he's talking about race in the same way as Lynn.VsevolodKrolikov (talk) 17:50, 8 July 2011 (UTC)
Your description of the modern view of race is incorrect. No one argues for completely distinct groups these days. However, note that also "regional variations" in geographic ancestry can create large group differences when groups from different ancestral environments are quickly by migration moved close to one another. See also Lewontin's Fallacy.Miradre (talk) 17:56, 8 July 2011 (UTC)
Now there's a nice piece of circular logic. How do we know that (a) the Roma are actually from from a different ancestral environment to the non-Roma, and (b) that they were 'quickly by migration moved close to one another'? We don't. They may possibly be descended in part from a south-Asian migrant group, but any migration was anything but 'quick' from what little evidence we have and there is no evidence at all that they haven't significantly intermarried with other populations (who incidentally may also have migrated significantly during the same period). The only reasons for describing them as 'a race' are (a) because that is how the local non-Roma see them, and (b) because it suits the purposes of those trying to correlate 'race' and 'intelligence'. AndyTheGrump (talk) 18:56, 8 July 2011 (UTC)
Actually the study describes them as a group in the South Asian race. Whether the Roma is a separate "sub-race" is not discussed.Miradre (talk) 19:02, 8 July 2011 (UTC)
And how did the study determine that they were 'a group in the South Asian race'? AndyTheGrump (talk) 19:05, 8 July 2011 (UTC)
That is what the study states. If you object I suggest that you publish.Miradre (talk) 19:07, 8 July 2011 (UTC)
FYI the study cites both linguistic studies and genetic studies by other authors.Miradre (talk) 19:09, 8 July 2011 (UTC)
The study cites linguistics as a basis for a claim that the Roma are 'South Asian'? Yeah, very scientific... AndyTheGrump (talk) 19:13, 8 July 2011 (UTC)
To quote myself "the study cites both linguistic studies and genetic studies by other authors." Linguistics is often as part of ancestral research so I fail to see what you see as funny.Miradre (talk) 19:15, 8 July 2011 (UTC)
On the Indian origins of the Roma: link --Victor Chmara (talk) 19:22, 8 July 2011 (UTC)
the following is said about the use of sources in wiki: "wikipedia articles should be based on reliable, published secondary sources and, to a lesser extent, on tertiary sources. secondary or tertiary sources are needed to establish the topic's notability and to avoid novel interpretations of primary sources, though primary sources are permitted if used carefully."[6] tell med miadre, is the current version of r&i based on reliable secondary sources or is it littered with hundreds of primary sources? -- mustihussain (talk) 19:48, 8 July 2011 (UTC)
Much is based on review studies which are secondary. Not that primary studies are disallowed. They are prominent in all Wikipedia science articles.Miradre (talk)
the core wiki policy is to *base* the articles on reliable secondary sources. *reliable* primary sources are allowed *if* used carefully. are rushton or kanazawa considered to be reliable by secondary sources? the current version not only has copious amount of primary sources, it also, due to these primary sources, gives undue weight to a minority view... another core wiki policy is thus breached.-- mustihussain (talk) 20:12, 8 July 2011 (UTC)
That there are racial differences in IQ was the most common view in the only survey of IQ researchers ever done.Miradre (talk) 20:15, 8 July 2011 (UTC)
are rushton or kanazawa considered to be reliable by secondary sources? yes or no? does the current version give undue weight to minority views, yes or no?-- mustihussain (talk) 20:21, 8 July 2011 (UTC)
Peer-reviewed sources are reliable sources. Again, that there are racial differences in IQ was the most common view in the only survey of IQ researchers ever done.Miradre (talk) 20:24, 8 July 2011 (UTC)
reliable primary sources are allowed if used carefully... that does not change the core wiki policy of basing articles on reliable secondary sources. since you don't answer my questions let me rephrase: how are rushton's views in sections like "brain size" or "regression toward the mean" regarded by secondary sources?-- mustihussain (talk) 20:33, 8 July 2011 (UTC)
Peer-reviewed literature reviews are reliable secondary sources. These sections contains such sources. They have differing views. Some reviews argue for a genetic explanations, others do not.Miradre (talk) 20:49, 8 July 2011 (UTC)
so you claim that rushton does not hold a minority view about e.g. brain size and iq? if so then this article needs an administrative measure... just like your race&crime-article.-- mustihussain (talk) 21:14, 8 July 2011 (UTC)

<-- That there are racial differences in IQ was the most common view in the only survey of IQ researchers ever done.Miradre (talk) 21:19, 8 July 2011 (UTC)

I'm inclined to agree with mustihussain. Meanwhile, Miradre can you clarify where these 'peer-reviewed literature reviews' are published? As Wikipedia:Rs#Academic_consensus points out "Care should be taken with journals that exist mainly to promote a particular point of view. A claim of peer review is not an indication that the journal is respected,.." AndyTheGrump (talk) 21:21, 8 July 2011 (UTC)
One of Rushton and Jensen's literature reviews in "Psychology, Public Policy and Law". by the American Psychological Association. Another by Nisbett in book published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book has likely not undergone peer-review unlike Rushton and Jensen's but if we exclude it then the all-environmentalists loose their major source... Miradre (talk) 21:27, 8 July 2011 (UTC)
miadre, is rushton's view on e.g. iq and brain size the most common view? yes or no? -- mustihussain (talk) 21:33, 8 July 2011 (UTC)
On brain size? No survey of researchers have been done on that so it is unknown.Miradre (talk) 21:36, 8 July 2011 (UTC)
wiki does not rely on surveys...! -- mustihussain (talk) 21:44, 8 July 2011 (UTC)
If you want to know prevalence of views among researchers then surveys is the way to go.Miradre (talk) 21:46, 8 July 2011 (UTC)
i rest my case.-- mustihussain (talk) 21:47, 8 July 2011 (UTC)

Looking over the proposed addition as well as this conversation I just don't see enough relevance to include the text. This article isn't a place to carry out score keeping about which "race" (and yes, this isn't even a "race" but an ethnic group) is superior or whatever. Hell, Wikipedia as a whole is not a place for that kind of thing.Volunteer Marek (talk) 07:47, 9 July 2011 (UTC)

This is the article for race and intelligence and this peer-reviewed article is part of this area of reserach.Miradre (talk) 07:58, 9 July 2011 (UTC)
Not interested on wasting another perfectly good night on this little game of yours. There's sufficient disagreement on this talk page with the inclusion of the study.Volunteer Marek (talk) 08:49, 9 July 2011 (UTC)
Wikipedia content is not decided by voting but by discussion in order to resolve differences. There is no particular preference for one version, such as exclusion of disputed material, in case of a dispute.Miradre (talk) 09:04, 9 July 2011 (UTC)
Wikipedia content is decided by policy, as well as by discussion. Your relentless attempts to push a minority POV in an area where the overwhelming scientific consensus rejects it is a clear breach of that policy. I suggest you read this [7], and then decide whether your "single purpose account" would be better used to "contribute neutrally". And I'm not interested in any more of your weasel-wording prevarication - you know full well that you are pushing a minority POV, and you have been warned that sanctions may be applied to those who refuse to conform to the agreed requirements regarding edits in this area. AndyTheGrump (talk) 10:48, 9 July 2011 (UTC)
There have been 2 or even 3 attempts to ban me by those who have opposing views to mine. These attempts have all failed. According to the only survey ever done of IQ researchers the view that there are racial IQ differences is the most common view. It is not a minority view. The POV that you yourself is pushing is more likely to be the minority view.Miradre (talk) 11:33, 9 July 2011 (UTC)
I am glad to see you concede that you are pushing a particular POV in the article, in breach of policy agreed at Wikipedia:Arbitration. (And BTW, I'm not the slightest bit interested in what you think 'is most likely', given your propensity for cherry-picking any source which suits you). AndyTheGrump (talk) 11:53, 9 July 2011 (UTC)
I am not pushing a POV anymore than you are. I include views from all sides when I encounter them in the sources. At the moment the hereditarian views are underrepresented in Wikipedia which is why I emphasize them. If they were overrepresented I would do the opposite.Miradre (talk) 11:57, 9 July 2011 (UTC)

due to miadre's extreme pov pushing this article has become another augean stable. the only solution is to knock the rotten edifice down and start from scratch. this was precisely done with another darling of miadre, namely the race and crime-article. that article was extremely at odds with wiki-policies, and the lead is the only thing remaining after an administrative intervention.-- mustihussain (talk) 11:39, 9 July 2011 (UTC)

Incorrect description. No one could show any faults with my editing so the attempt to ban me for my edits failed. As was the attempt to delete the article. After extensive editing by those disliking the earlier content the article was stubbed without any claims of any specific material being incorrect or not allowed in the future.Miradre (talk) 11:55, 9 July 2011 (UTC)
That is a complete misrepresentation of what happened - see the AfD debate: [8]. AndyTheGrump (talk) 11:59, 9 July 2011 (UTC)
Yes, nothing there by the closing administrator stated that any specific material was incorrect or not allowed in the future. The article was certainly deeply flawed at this time due to the extensive editing by those disliking the earlier content.Miradre (talk) 12:02, 9 July 2011 (UTC)
I think your gross misrepresentation of the consensus at that AfD can be taken as further evidence of your refusal to accept Wikipedia policy. AndyTheGrump (talk)
Nothing in my earlier statement is incorrect.Miradre (talk) 12:52, 9 July 2011 (UTC)
Woah. I hadn't read that AfD before. Miradre, you seriously need to realise what wikipedia is for. You're trying to use it to publish your own theories (see WP:OR). Wikipedia is not a publishers of people's syntheses. You're trying to make a case by putting various sources together, which is classic OR. I also have to be blunt and say if you want to get published elsewhere in a forum wikipedia will take seriously, you're in serious need of a couple of social science methods courses first. Presuming causation from correlation is one of the most basic errors. Your defence of the use of white supremacist organisation material really doesn't make your participation in editing in this topic area particularly encouraging.VsevolodKrolikov (talk) 13:07, 9 July 2011 (UTC)
Please give examples of the claimed OR. As well as the SYNTH. I cite peer-reviewed academic studies.Miradre (talk) 13:14, 9 July 2011 (UTC)
Err...the article in general and your defence at the AfD in particular. I don't see the need to rehash the AfD. I have no reason to believe I have any better powers of education than the people at that AfD. I recommend other editors interested in Miradre's modus operandi read it and the article as was before it was challenged and subsequently stubbed to a single paragraph. VsevolodKrolikov (talk) 13:43, 9 July 2011 (UTC)
So you cannot find any specific examples of any OR or SYNTH.Miradre (talk) 13:45, 9 July 2011 (UTC)
"Different crime rates for different racial groups is not correlations. It is like saying that different incomes for different occupations if just correlations and does not prove anything for certain regarding the relationship between occupation and income." There you go - making an original argument based on a collection of various pieces of data. You'll say it isn't, but that's just a way of wasting other people's time. I note that in making that argument you also studiously misrepresented sources that provided you with the data you then used to synthesise an argument. It's all in the AfD. Anyway, this is getting off track. What's important is that this article should not be used as a means of creating the impression that a minority viewpoint enjoys general academic support.VsevolodKrolikov (talk) 14:01, 9 July 2011 (UTC)
Describing what crimes rates are in the sources I used is not OR but just a description of material from the sources. I repeat again, in the only survey done of IQ experts ever done the view that there are racial differences in IQ is the most common view. It is not a minority view but, from what evidence we have, the most common view among the academic experts on the subject.Miradre (talk) 14:12, 9 July 2011 (UTC)
the current version already gives the impression that minority viewpoints (see e.g. the "brain size"-, "regression towards the mean"- or "evolutionary theories" - sections) enjoy general academic support. i suggest to remove everything except for the lead. or should i nominate the article for deletion and then propose the "keep but severely chop"-solution? -- mustihussain (talk) 14:24, 9 July 2011 (UTC)
I think aggressive re-writes are in order. Boothello is doing one on the evolutionary theories section. From a user point of view, I think there is value in presenting the arguments made by people like Lynn, along with why their views are not widely accepted. Academically they're not particularly notable, but in terms of the wider media reach of such ideas, they are more notable. VsevolodKrolikov (talk) 14:30, 9 July 2011 (UTC)
i see your point but aggressive rewrites could lead to edit warring. i think a wider wiki community response is needed.-- mustihussain (talk) 14:40, 9 July 2011 (UTC)
No one has presented any evidence for that the partially genetic explanation is a minority view. I repeat that what evidence we have finds it to be the main one among IQ reserachers.Miradre (talk) 14:54, 9 July 2011 (UTC)
If no one is citing it but a small group of individuals clustered around a small foundation that we know to be outside the mainstream doesnt that mean something? The Resident Anthropologist (talk)•(contribs) 19:00, 9 July 2011 (UTC)
The survey was not done by the PF.Miradre (talk) 19:10, 9 July 2011 (UTC)

I also agree that the "Aegean stables" approach is about the only thing that can work with this article.Volunteer Marek (talk) 18:50, 9 July 2011 (UTC)

how do we proceed?-- mustihussain (talk) 20:26, 9 July 2011 (UTC)
Reminder. This article is under discretionary sanctions by the ArbCom. Any attempt at mass deletions in order to push a POV is of course always inappropriate but especially here.Miradre (talk) 20:38, 9 July 2011 (UTC)
So in other words we revert your insertion of WP:FRINGE viewpoints and we are thus at risk of Sanctions. Now tell me how familiar are you with the the scientific literature in this topic area? The Resident Anthropologist (talk)•(contribs) 20:45, 9 July 2011 (UTC)
The view that there are racial differences in IQ is the most common view among IQ expert in the only survey done. It was not a fringe view but the most common one.Miradre (talk) 20:48, 9 July 2011 (UTC)
don't worry, i will not delete anything. a wider wiki community response will put this article back on track just like the race and crime-article. i asked you several posts ago if rushton's view on e.g. iq and brain size is the most common view, and you answered that a survey was needed..! wiki core policy is to use reliable secondary sources not surveys. the hereditarian views put forward in many of the sections, trying to explain the current differences in iq, are indeed fringe. what is the mainstream view? the lead says: "the american psychological association has said that while there are differences in average iq between racial groups, there is no conclusive evidence for environmental explanations, there is even less empirical support for a genetic interpretation, and no adequate explanation for the racial iq gap is presently available". this is the mainstream view...that there is even less empirical support for a genetic interpretation than an environmental interpretation. this is not reflected in the current version where hereditarian views are given undue weight. the heavy use of controversial primary sources at the expense of reliable secondary sources, the undue weight given to minority and even fringe views, and thus the lack of neutral point of view all constitute a brazen violation of core wiki policies. -- mustihussain (talk) 21:57, 9 July 2011 (UTC)
The view of IQ researchers was that the partially genetic explanation was the most common choice in a survey. Regarding the APA report the correct quotation is "The differential between the mean intelligence test scores of Blacks and Whites (about one standard deviation, although it may be diminishing) does not result from any obvious biases in test construction and administration, nor does it simply reflect differences in socio-economic status. Explanations based on factors of caste and culture may be appropriate, but so far have little direct empirical support. There is certainly no such support for a genetic interpretation. At present, no one knows what causes this differential." Anyway, both the survey and the APA report are quite old and does not represent current research. But there is certainly no support for calling either view fringe. Both should be mentioned.Miradre (talk) 22:15, 9 July 2011 (UTC)
And yet again you come up with the same cherry-picked source for your response. If the 'genetic' explanation is not fringe, presumably you can cite sources other than the ones originating from the Pioneer Fund to support this? AndyTheGrump (talk)
The survey of IQ experts was not done by the PF or persons connected with it.Miradre (talk) 22:23, 9 July 2011 (UTC)
ah, thanks for the apa quote above. if apa claims that "there is certainly no such support for a genetic interpretation" then the undue weight given to hereditarian views is even *more* undue. sorry you lost.-- mustihussain (talk) 22:25, 9 July 2011 (UTC)
The APA report is not more important the survey where the partially-genetic theory was the most important. APA also has various political aspects to consider which may influence what they can state in an report. Both the partially-genetic and non-genetic explanations are important. None is a fringe theory.Miradre (talk) 22:28, 9 July 2011 (UTC)
even if you assume that the "partially-genetic explanation" is not fringe, the hereditarian theories represented in many sections are.. and you need reliable secondary sources to prove to the contrary.-- mustihussain (talk) 22:37, 9 July 2011 (UTC)
The article has several peer-reviewed literature reviews which are secondary sources in support for those views. I should note that the pro-non-genetics literature review is much weaker since it is from a not peer-reviewed book.Miradre (talk) 22:39, 9 July 2011 (UTC)

Introduction is not as accurate as it could be

"with the average score of the African American population being lower—and that of the Asian American population being higher"

it should read:

"with the average score of the African American population being significantly lower—and that of the Asian American population being higher"

based on established IQ averages of ~86, 100 and 104.8. The difference of 4.8 and 14 points is statistically significant.

108.32.12.207 (talk) 22:50, 24 June 2011 (UTC)

I've reverted your changes as the first one edited a quote from a source, and the second edit - the one you mention here - appears to be your own research. You need to use reliable sources.VsevolodKrolikov (talk) 14:50, 25 June 2011 (UTC)
(facepalm) actually, someone else had already reverted; I missed it in my watchlist....VsevolodKrolikov (talk) 14:54, 25 June 2011 (UTC)

The United States Department of Labor maintains an elaborate census based on statistical sampling called the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979 (NLSY'79). Over 155,000 youths were surveyed by phone and 12,686 were finally selected as representative samples to be given an IQ test and then interviewed annually or bi-annually for the rest of their lives to track their progress.


There was also a more recent study conducted by the government in 2007 that involved Blacks adopted by white parents exhibiting a lower average intelligence than that of Chinese adopted by white parents.

If the wiki community feels that a "too accurate" introduction could be considered "racist" by uneducated individuals that is a shame because people will miss out on objective facts that scientist worked on for years to produce.

108.17.98.152 (talk) 07:17, 16 July 2011 (UTC)

I would rather see a lot less of all that material. There's far too much already in this global article, especially in the lead, from the USA, a country riddled with racial bigotry. Far too much research done to prove theories of racial differences, rather than objective investigation. HiLo48 (talk) 07:59, 16 July 2011 (UTC)
I very much agree with this sentiment, though I would probably point out that US does is not necessarily anymore bigoted than many other countries in the world (and a lot of these PF folks are in fact... Canadians).Volunteer Marek (talk) 08:41, 16 July 2011 (UTC)

Geographic ancestry section

Looks like there's been some edit warring going on. From what I understand:

  1. Mustihussain removed two paragraphs that had been in the article for a few months [9]
  2. Mustihussain was reverted by an IP [10]
  3. Hrafn restored Mustihussain’s removal [11]
  4. The IP edit warred against Mustihussain and a bunch of others to try and undo Mustihussain's removal of this material, then finally got blocked as a sockpuppet.

I see no one discussed these edits on the talk page, not Mustihussain, or the IP, or anyone reverting the IP. Usually if someone removes sourced content that's been in the article for months, they should explain the reason for it on the talk page. The IP's six reverts without discussion is even worse. Why even have a talk page if everybody just resolves their disagreements by edit warring.

This is very reminiscent of the "Evolutionary theories" situation a month ago. Mustihussain removed several paragraphs from that section without discussing it first, but the section was already such a mess it was hard to tell if his change was helpful. I ended up rewriting the whole section from scratch. The "Geographic ancestry" section is also terrible. Would anybody mind if I tried to rewrite this section to make it clearer, as I did before?Boothello (talk) 06:26, 1 August 2011 (UTC)

there are many problems with the current version of this article. firstly, the so-called "genetic" arguments are given undue weight. the lead clearly states: "the american psychological association has said that while there are differences in average iq between racial groups, there is no conclusive evidence for environmental explanations, there is even less empirical support for a genetic interpretation, and no adequate explanation for the racial iq gap is presently available". this is the mainstream view.. that there is even less empirical support for a genetic interpretation than an environmental interpretation. this is not reflected in the current version. in fact, the current version gives the impression that the so-called "genetic" arguments are as strong as the environmental. secondly, figures like the editor-in-chief of "mankind quarterly", richard lynn, and the head of "pioneer fund", philippe rushton, are extremely controversial and do not provide neutral point of view at all. yet, their views are over-represented in the current version. thirdly, this article was hijacked by pov-pushing single purpose accounts that inserted enormous amount of controversial content without any discussion. due to all these reasons a wider wiki community response is needed, and the article should be totally re-written. this time by brutally sticking to core wiki policies.-- mustihussain (talk) 18:00, 1 August 2011 (UTC)
This comment is not helpful. I don't care what happened on the article before I showed up. I want to discuss how to improve the article by rewriting one section at a time, like I did for the evolutionary theories section and the mental chronometry section before that. Meanwhile you and Ramdrake are busy blanking sourced content without discussing it first. When you discuss your edits at all, the only thing you have to say is these general statements about how the hereditarian perspective is overrepresented. Other than your basic desire to remove content cited to hereditarians, you're never willing to explain why these sections are better off without the specific content you remove. And you also never are willing to offer any advice about rewriting these sections when I offer to do that. You say you want the article to be rewritten, but that can only be done one section at a time, and you and Ramdrake are actively interfering with that.
The only others I've seen here who seem to actually care about rewriting the article to improve it, rather than just indiscriminately blanking chunks of content, are Maunus, Victor Chmara and Vsevelodkrolikov. If you think a wider response from the community is needed, I should try to get them to participate in this discussion too.Boothello (talk) 04:43, 2 August 2011 (UTC)
I'll just make the constructive comment that you should go ahead and read sources, review the article, and make whatever improvements you find appropriate through bold editing, and if you're reverted either discuss the edits, or move on to other content edits and leave the disputed issues aside. As the article currently stands, there is lots of room for improvements. aprock (talk) 05:29, 2 August 2011 (UTC)
Thanks for the suggestion. I just asked Maunus, Victor Chmara and Vsevelodkrolikov to contribute to this discussion, so I'll see if they have anything else to add before I try rewriting another section.Boothello (talk) 05:51, 2 August 2011 (UTC)
(ec) Boothello left me a message asking me to comment. A section re-write is, of course, a good idea. This is one of those pages where a single editor needs a chance to re-work a slab of material rather doing it by committee. That said (and this may be seen as unhelpful, but anyway) - I think there are larger structural/purposive issues with the article.
In defence of those removing material, the material they are removing is basically the problem with the article - that a minority opinion (the same three or so authors) in psychology is being given undue weight. Given the problems there are and have been with SPAs and socks, I can understand why some are engaging in brusque editing, and I wouldn't be so quick as to say such people are not interested in improving the article. However, now that there seem to be fewer such problems than before (to my eyes anyway) perhaps it's better that we all take a deep breath and try to re-build confidence by using the talkpage a bit, rather than communicating with edit summaries. Wikipedia isn't fun when it's a battleground, not deep down.
What makes things difficult is that the title, like those of a couple of other similar articles, essentially pushes the content towards UNDUE representation of a minority viewpoint. (To see the community's struggle with this, compare the nice big bold title with the lede that follows it, more or less apologising for it, and then the he-said she-said format of minority viewpoint versus majority rebuttal.) One of the problems with the AfD discussion just gone is that although many editors supported keeping the article, it was also generally agreed that the article was a mess and needed to be re-written. However, there was little suggestion on how to resolve the problem.
What I'm not clear on is what this article should be doing that History of the race and intelligence controversy does not do, or the pages of the individual authors or the Pioneer Fund does not do, that would make the article encyclopedic and not POV or UNDUE. We can re-write each section (and any improvement is good), but I'm concerned that the overall purpose of the article needs to be reformulated. VsevolodKrolikov (talk) 06:32, 2 August 2011 (UTC)
I think the focus of the article should be on the scientific debate over the cause of racial IQ gaps as described in books like Hunt's Human Intelligence and Mackintosh's IQ and Human Intelligence. Both were published this year from major academic publishers, and they have chapters devoted to the debate over the cause of group IQ differences. So this is clearly a notable debate and there's no other article at Wikipedia that covers it in depth. The other articles you mentioned focus on issues like the political side of the debate, and questions over motives and sources of funding. Those topics are also notable, but there should be at least one article that focuses on the actual scientific debate (which is what Hunt and Mackintosh write about).
Even if the article is unbalanced in a hereditarian direction, I don't think the best solution is to indiscriminately remove content cited to hereditarian authors. Some parts of the article don't benefit from such a heavy-handed approach. There have been situations where Mustihussain removed content that really was excessive detail, and that's fine. But there are other sections of the article that can't be encyclopedic without including some information cited to hereditarians. The evolutionary theories section was the most recent example: Mustihussain's removing all of the hereditarian content left nothing but criticism, and an encyclopedic presentation of any idea needs to explain what the idea is before criticizing it. We need to discuss on the talk page first to make sure the removed content really is extraneous.
As to what Maunus said below, I can only fix one thing at a time. Because of the recent edit war over the degree of geographic ancestry section, I was intending to try rewriting that section next. It's pretty badly written as well as far longer than it needs to be. A lot of these sections could be rewritten to make them shorter, which would help to fix the undue weight problem. But this shouldn't be done haphazardly. If everyone else is okay with this, I want to try rewriting the degree of geographic ancestry section over the next few days as suggested by Aprock and VsevelodKrolikov. After that I can try improving the international comparisons section too, but please let's not blank large parts of that section while we're working rewriting a different section.Boothello (talk) 17:44, 2 August 2011 (UTC)
  • Mustihussain is riht in so far as his claim that the article represents it as if the hereditarian and environmentalist hypotheses are on equal footing. It does and it shouldn't, because they aren't. There are large amounts of evidence that shows environmental influence on IQ differences between groups (this literature is mostly ignored in the article) - there is as yet no direct evidence for the hereditarian hypothesis and what circumstantial evidence there is is disputed. I also do think the article here needs to be drastically pruned before it can achieve the quality a wp article should have. I generally agree with the sentiment of VsevolodKrolikov above.·ʍaunus·snunɐw· 15:35, 2 August 2011 (UTC)
i agree with maunus and vsevolodkrolikov. the article needs to be pruned as the problem is structural. re-writing the "hereditarian sections", as boothello suggests, will not change the fact that the hereditarian hypothesis is given undue weight.-- mustihussain (talk) 16:04, 2 August 2011 (UTC)
With regard to the particular edit by mustihussain, I can see nothing whatsoever wrong with it. The removed text consisted of nothing more than isolated cites selected from minority hereditarian position sources, with no attempt to put it in context. On the more general point, I agree that the article gives undue weight to the hereditary argument - in my opinion, it also gives undue weight to assumptions that IQ testing is of any real relevance when comparing different populations. AndyTheGrump (talk) 16:16, 2 August 2011 (UTC)
  • I would have to agree that given that there is "even less empirical support for a genetic interpretation", it is odd the the write-up of this interpretation is nearly three times that of the environmental. I'm not sure that mere rewriting can correct such a stark disparity -- some reasonably solid pruning would appear to be called for. HrafnTalkStalk(P) 16:22, 2 August 2011 (UTC)
@Andy, the problem we have is that the AfD was quite clear that this article should exist. Keep votes were expressed even by editors who generally seem quite antipathetic to the hereditarian viewpoint. The challenge is to frame the article in a way that admits the title as a valid one but sidesteps an undue presumption of importance of a minority viewpoint. At the same time, it shouldn't turn into a kicking of Jensen, Rushton and Lynn.
@Hrafn, I don't think it's simply a matter of pruning. The article structure and focus are problematic. As I said above, I'm not sure how this article is sensibly differentiated from History of the race and intelligence controversy, and I'm genuinely interested in a good answer to this question. The "race-realist" view is more a popular/media-driven phenomenon than an academic one; its notability stems more from its notoriety than its academic standing, which is what the "controversy" article looks at. A similar topic area (but to be fair to the hereditarians, a more extreme case of mainstream versus fringe) is climate change. The article Global warming controversy is a nasty mess, and I think it's because it tries to do what this article currently does, which is present lots and lots of argument vs counter-argument. As a result, the user gets a confused impression about what the academic state of play is. One of wikipedia's weaknesses is dealing with minority academic viewpoints that have political significance.VsevolodKrolikov (talk) 16:45, 2 August 2011 (UTC)
  • The obvious differentiating factor is the thematic versus chronological treatment. And I'm not sure that the structure of the latter is much of an improvement -- bare-2-decade-titles ("1960-1980", "1980-2000"), followed by giant slabs of text -- very little ease of reading. On the subject of this article, where specific arguments lack any substantive empirical support, this fact is probably all that really needs to be noted about them, and the details of the arguments in favour of them can be (largely) omitted. This would likely help towards bringing things back into balance. HrafnTalkStalk(P) 17:45, 2 August 2011 (UTC)
i don't have all the answers but everybody agree on one point: the hereditarian hypothesis is given undue weight.-- mustihussain (talk) 17:17, 2 August 2011 (UTC)

One way to approach it would be to emulate the way that literature reviews/introductions are actually written in journal articles. There, you hit the major relevant studies, discuss the most recent ones and then say something like "for a different view see work by X, Y and Z" or "other studies in the literature include X, Y and Z". Sometimes, if it's really a minor point, in a footnote. So working off of that we could take all the Rushton/Lynn/PF studies, specifically discuss the one or two most important ones and then just say "Lynn has also written on the subjects of a, b and c, while Rushton has published on c and d". Basically deal with the Undueness by collapsing the many paragraphs devoted to this minority view point into a single paragraph or so. Volunteer Marek (talk) 18:50, 2 August 2011 (UTC)

Excellent suggestion.·ʍaunus·snunɐw· 21:29, 2 August 2011 (UTC)

I am really glad to see some progress being made here. I note a oomment by one editor saying that she has no interest in prior discussion. While we need to be friendly to newbies, I think any newcomer needs to understand that this is an article that has going through mediation and a lot of hard work went into reaching consensus on specific points. This is common for controversial articles, and all editors ought to care about past discussions as they can help explain the reasons - very good reasons, carefully thought through after much argument and discussion by many informed editors - for certain elements of the article. By the way, other articles often comments within the text that are visible only when in edit-mode, that point to passages that were carefully worked out by editors with strongly divergent views and should only be changed after discussion on the talk page. Slrubenstein | Talk 19:41, 2 August 2011 (UTC)

  • The mediation can be found at Wikipedia:Mediation Cabal/Cases/2009-11-12/Race and Intelligence (with most of the action occurring on the talk page). Skimming it, most of the discussion appears to be on "The history section" (which I assume means the 'History of the debate'). I'm seeing little, if anything, on the balance between coverage of 'Potential environmental causes' versus 'Genetic arguments' -- so I'm finding it hard to understand how any changes in this overturns "a lot of hard work went into reaching consensus on specific points." I think Slrubenstein needs to specifically cite any "specific points" relevant to this discussion. HrafnTalkStalk(P) 03:19, 3 August 2011 (UTC)

:I like VsevolodKrolikov's suggestion of looking at literature reviews in journals. A great article that is perfect for this section is James J Lee of Havard's 2009 "Review of intelligence and how to get it: Why schools and cultures count, R.E. Nisbett".

Here is the section on Geographic Ancestry:
"‘‘Direct” evidence of association between African ancestry and IQ

African Americans trace their origin to a relatively recent admixture of two populations that had previously evolved in isolation. Thus, African Americans can expect to inherit about 20% of their genomes from European ancestors. Nisbett points out that the hypothesis of a lower genotypic mean IQ for Sub-Saharan Afri- cans naturally predicts that degree of European admixture should be positively associated with IQ.

Nisbett claims that the available ‘‘direct” evidence on this point supports total environmental causation of the black–white IQ difference. Despite the great weight that he attaches to them, Nisbett’s sources on this point are in fact quite indecisive. He cites a study failing to find elevated European ancestry in a sample of gifted black children (Witty & Jenkins, 1936). Although this study does pose rather strong evidence for an environmental hypothesis, Nisbett does not mention a critical limitation: the investigators ascertained degree of white ancestry by parental self-report. He goes on to cite two studies failing to find an association between ancestry-informative blood-group markers and IQ without mentioning that the handicaps of small sample size and unreliable ancestry estimation rendered these two studies virtually powerless to reject any hypothesis within the interval of contention (Loehlin, Vandenberg, & Osborne, 1973; Scarr, Paks- tis, Katz, & Barker, 1978).

Modern genetic methodology allows estimates of ancestry admixture to draw on thousands of DNA polymorphisms rather than a mere handful of markers constrained to be associated with readily measurable phenotypic variation (Price et al., 2008). As a result we can now make such estimates with extraordinary preci-sion. Fig. 3 displays what differential psychologists might call the‘‘loadings” of several genotyped individuals on the principal com-ponents (PCs) of the genotype-by-individual matrix. We can read-ily see that the first two PCs perfectly separate East Asians,Europeans, and West Africans. The admixed American blacks are arrayed along a nearly straight line between the African and Euro-pean clusters. The scattering toward the East Asian cluster most likely represents additional admixture with Native Americans.

If Nisbett is truly confident that degree of European ancestry shows no association whatsoever with IQ, he should call for studies employing superior ancestry estimates of the kind displayed inFig. 3. Note that the increased reliability of ancestry estimation does not obviate the need for a large sample. Even under an ex-treme hereditarian hypothesis assigning mean genotypic IQs of 80 and 100 respectively to the African and European ancestors ofAfrican Americans, we can only expect an increase of .2 IQ pointsfor every percentage increase in European ancestry. The consider-able IQ variation among African Americans makes an effect of thissize difficult to detect in small samples.

The ultimate test of the hereditarian hypothesis is of course theidentification of the genetic variants affecting IQ and a tally of theirfrequencies in the two populations. Because of their likely small ef-fects,wemay have to identify dozens of such variants beforewe areable to make any confident inferences regarding the overall geno-typicmeans of different populations. Although this task is currentlywithin our technological means, it seems practically out of reach inthe very short term. Ancestry estimation is much less costly thangene-trait association research and thus offers the advantage ofan immediate increment toward the resolution of this issue." Phillip Descendant (talk) 10:41, 3 August 2011 (UTC) sock of banned user Professor marginalia (talk) 13:28, 3 August 2011 (UTC)

WP:CANVAS

I'm a he, not a she, last time I checked. Anyway, I think I should mention that Mustihussain has been canvassing in this discussion. Today he has contacted Hrafn, [12] AndyTheGrump, [13] Professor Marginalia, [14] Volunteer Marek, [15] Ramdrake, [16] and Slrubenstein. [17] At first I thought he was just trying to alert all of the editors involved here recently, so I contacted one editor (Dmcq) who Mustihussain apparently forgot. But now Mustihussain is also contacting people like Slrubenstein, who hadn't posted here in months, while not contacting people like Vecrumba, SightWatcher and HiLo48 who have been involved just as recently. I don't think we can trust any consensus that appears to develop here based on sheer numbers when most of the people contacted seem to have been contacted because they tend to have the same opinion on content.Boothello (talk) 20:19, 2 August 2011 (UTC)

I was canvassed by you. In anycase this is not a vote but a collaborative discussion - everyone who is not topic banned is welcome.·ʍaunus·snunɐw· 21:29, 2 August 2011 (UTC)
I figured it's only canvassing when it's deliberately contacting people with similar viewpoints. I knew you and VsevelodKrolikov tend to disagree with the hereditarian hypothesis while Victor tends to support it. I contacted who I did based only on who's been involved recently (and who tends to like using the talk page). Anyway, I guess this doesn't matter now that I can see what direction the discussion is taking. But based on the selection of people that Mustihussain contacted, I was initially worried we'd end up with an artificial "consensus" that all of the hereditarian content should be removed.Boothello (talk) 01:16, 3 August 2011 (UTC)
excuse me but you wrote: "i see no one discussed these edits on the talk page, not mustihussain, or the ip, or anyone reverting the ip." you even mentioned hrafn and ramdrake by name. i notified all the editors who reverted the ip. yes, slrubenstein wasn't one of the editors who reverted the ip but victor, who you notified, didn't do it either. this does not constitute canvassing at all. -- mustihussain (talk) 20:31, 2 August 2011 (UTC)
@Boothello, I'll reiterate my advice, with a slight twist. By all means, please be bold and start editing the article to improve it. Such activity is likely to be more productive than discussing the finer niceties of WP:CANVASS on the talk page. aprock (talk) 20:34, 2 August 2011 (UTC)
I contacted Victor, Maunus and VsevelodKrolikov because they have all been actively involved in the talk page within the past month. I'm not sure why you contacted Slrubenstein, (who hadn't posted here in months) but didn't contact anyone I mentioned who's posted here just as recently.
@Aprock: I will as soon as I'm sure the editors Mustihussain contacted will allow me to do so.Boothello (talk) 20:42, 2 August 2011 (UTC)
You don't need "permission" to be bold, and if someone does give you "permission" they can still revert your edits. The key to moving forward is making constructive edits. No amount of talk page drama is going to improve the article. aprock (talk) 20:48, 2 August 2011 (UTC)
Like I said above, please give me a few days - I'll attempt a rewrite of this section. This will likely take a little longer than the evolutionary theories section because there's more material that needs to be summarized.Boothello (talk) 01:23, 3 August 2011 (UTC)
again, it was you who pointed out that these editors were not discussing...and when they do you get cold feet.-- mustihussain (talk) 20:55, 2 August 2011 (UTC)

Did Mustihussein "canvass me?" All I can say is (1) M and I have often disagreed and (2) I really, honestly was part of a mediation in which I and several others confronted a serious of highly contentious issues and worked towards painstaking compromises. These reflected th POVs of opposing parties. I do not care about "MY POV" being preserved, I care about the careful results of the mediation being preserved, and all I asked was that newcomers take some time to see how the article reached this state. Does this really sound like canvassing? Slrubenstein | Talk 20:39, 2 August 2011 (UTC)

Slr, would you mind giving me a link to this mediation you're talking about? If it's important to know about it in detail I'd like to take a look at it, thanks.Boothello (talk) 20:47, 2 August 2011 (UTC)
I would have to search the archive, which you can do just as easily. In addition to myself MathSci was a prominent participant, and Aprock, and for some time TechnoFaye. it is all in the archives. If you are a newcomer to Wikipedia everything is perfectly transparent: you can see all past versions of this article through the article's history, and you can see all prior talk through the talk page archives. Nothing is hidden from you and you have the same access all of us have. Slrubenstein | Talk 02:34, 3 August 2011 (UTC)
Well I'm another one asked to give my opinion. I think that surveys of professionals in a field give he best approximation to scientific consensus, better than official bodies or governments or newspapers. I this field The IQ Controversy, the Media and Public Policy (book) needs to be taken very seriously. That survey does not support the removal of what keeps on being called hereditarian. The names here imply a political agenda rather like one bunch of psychologists I came across who declared their aim was to prove that blacks had the same intelligence as whites. The controversy needs to be reported because here is a controversy. The general consensus what there is of it needs also to be reported and it can be done separately by saying what the major bodies and surveys say. That way there doesn't have to be any sillly pruning of things to try and achieve some measure of weight in text. It should just be said out straight in a section about what the best opinion is and the controversy and studies reported elsewhere in the article. Dmcq (talk) 21:25, 2 August 2011 (UTC)
In this case it happens that experts in the field do not think that that survey is worth much - and its results in any case doesn't reflect the scholarly consensus in published academic literature but rather a "colk consensus" among scholars. And it is also quite clearly established that Rothman and Snyderman had a political agenda. We have discussed this study a lot already with other editors.·ʍaunus·snunɐw· 21:35, 2 August 2011 (UTC)
If you have something to add to that article about its reception please do so. All I see along those lines is the Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science being very against it and that certainly sounds a fairly political organization to me! Have you got good evidence using another survey perhaps that that survey is flawed or have you some paper talking about a flaw in the design of the survey? If so add them to the article and improve Wikipedia. Dmcq (talk) 21:48, 2 August 2011 (UTC)
Of course as I said major bodies like the lead bit "the american psychological association has said that while there are differences in average iq between racial groups, there is no conclusive evidence for environmental explanations, there is even less empirical support for a genetic interpretation, and no adequate explanation for the racial iq gap is presently available" should be mentioned as well as surveys in a discussion about what the mainstream view is. Are there any other surveys as well? Picking a single researcher and saying they give the mainstream view would simply be POV. Dmcq (talk) 21:55, 2 August 2011 (UTC)

Mustihussain left a note on my talk which said please note the recent constructive debate on the subject.. Obviously I've been involved in this article before so this was a perfectly legitimate and neutrally worded notification. To be perfectly honest I had already noticed this discussion and was planning on making a comment but was bus with some other stuff just then. There's nothing wrong with this kind of notification. You're misunderstanding WP:CANVASS.Volunteer Marek (talk) 21:52, 2 August 2011 (UTC)

Yes, I don't see any evidence of 'canvassing' - we are discussing how the article can be improved, not !voting. In my case, I have this article on my watchlist anyway, and was already aware of the discussion. AndyTheGrump (talk) 22:04, 2 August 2011 (UTC)
I have it on my watchlist too but didn't feel like responding before but got a request on my talk page. There just seem to be so many people with an axe to grind in the area ans I have a finite life. Dmcq (talk) 22:13, 2 August 2011 (UTC)
yes, you got a request where boothello asked you to participate...compare that to my neutral notifications to editors who boothello himself called for. i thought that the discussion was going well since boothello admitted that the hereditarian arguments were undue i.e. he agreed with all the discussing editors. you on the other hand are repeating the arguments of miadre who is banned for 3 months.-- mustihussain (talk) 05:18, 3 August 2011 (UTC)
  • To put it bluntly, all other things being equal, my probability of responding to a thread tends to be inversely related to the thread length (see Dmcq's comments for two reasons why, a third would be the high probability of anything you say getting lost in the mass of text). And I would suspect that I'm not the only one. If Boothello wants unprompted comments, then more needs to be done to keep the threads short & to the point -- which means avoiding tangents like this one. This sort of article-topic is an absolute magnet for interminable circular discussions -- and really I'm not in the mood for such at the moment. HrafnTalkStalk(P) 01:33, 3 August 2011 (UTC)

There is no evidence for the claim that "environmentalism" is mainstream and "hereditarianism" is not. People have made this claim numerous times on the talk page, and I have asked for evidence for it a dozen times, but none was ever been forthcoming. It is undoubtedly true that political activists and non-experts favor the environmental explanation, but when you poll experts, the results are altogether different, as shown by Rothman and Snyderman. Maunus claims that "experts in the field do not think that that survey is worth much - and its results in any case doesn't reflect the scholarly consensus in published academic literature", but this is untrue, too. Sternberg whom Maunus is apparently referring to said that the experts favor the hereditarian view only because they share popular prejudices, which is a stupid argument directly contradicted by the survey (which shows that non-experts lean towards environmentalism, whereas experts lean towards hereditarianism).

I do not appreciate the fact that some editors blank entire paragraphs of the article without first discussing the issues on the talk page. Many of these paragraphs are the result of much debate on the talk page, and they should be removed only if there's consensus on doing so. To present, say, Nisbett's views as the final word on some issue is wrong because he has been heavily criticized in the literature.--Victor Chmara (talk) 11:18, 3 August 2011 (UTC)

Your own opinion on whether an RS is making a stupid argument is neither here nor there. Might I suggest you refrain from such comments? It would make your requests for "evidence" sound a little more genuine if you did.VsevolodKrolikov (talk) 12:07, 3 August 2011 (UTC)
The only representative survey of expert opinion shows that the hereditarian position is very common among experts, and not so common among non-experts. This directly refutes your and Sternberg's claims. Unless you have evidence to the contrary, stop making baseless claims about what the mainstream view is.--Victor Chmara (talk) 12:40, 3 August 2011 (UTC)
(moved to section below) aprock (talk) 17:35, 3 August 2011 (UTC)
interesting. could you please post this in the "undue weight"-thread below ? this "canvas"-thread is just too messy.-- mustihussain (talk) 17:33, 3 August 2011 (UTC)

pruning duplicate content

I've reduced the sections Race and intelligence#International comparisons and Race and intelligence#Spearman's hypothesis as both topics have their own articles. The first section contained nearly identical content as the main article. The second section contained significant content not in the main article so I moved the content to the main article. Feedback invited. aprock (talk) 21:43, 10 August 2011 (UTC)

I think it would be better if those sections were rewritten instead of turned into stubs with links. They definitely were a mess before though, so I don't think there's any point in adding that back. Maybe sometime later someone like Victor Chmara or Vsevelodkrolikov could try rewriting these sections in a better organized manner.Boothello (talk) 03:41, 11 August 2011 (UTC)
If you, or anyone else, would like to put more work into better summarizing the articles, I would fully support that effort. Other sections which need better summary work are the history section, and the Flynn effect section. aprock (talk) 03:44, 11 August 2011 (UTC)

undue weight

it seems that everyone, including boothello, agree that the hereditarian hypothesis is given undue weight. that should be the starting point of the discussion. i also recommend marek's and hrafn's excellent recommendations in the "geographic ancestry" thread-- mustihussain (talk) 05:33, 3 August 2011 (UTC)

That's completely false. Please present evidence that the environmental hypothesis is the mainstream view.--Victor Chmara (talk) 11:20, 3 August 2011 (UTC)
There is ample evidence you are arguing in a familiar vein here ignoring the APA report, the AAA and AAPA statements, the Unesco statements, and virtually every publication not written by a pioneer grantee.·ʍaunus·snunɐw· 01:45, 4 August 2011 (UTC)
Second that. Evidence would be as for example in Scientific consensus on climate change. Anything by recognized bodies and surveys complete with citations. Not any of this tarring of names and saying of course they have this position or that and saying one's favourite writer is the mainstream. The subject is contentious, proper citations are needed rather than making private agreements on talk pages to present just one side or the other and vote out the other. Dmcq (talk) 11:48, 3 August 2011 (UTC)
Any division between mainstream and non-mainstream here is not comparable to the climate change debate. There, the "minority" view has more or less no place in a discussion of the science at all given that it is more or less absent from the scientific literature. No one here is suggesting that the work of Jensen et al is comparable to someone like Anthony Watts or Lord Monckton, who operate outside academia entirely. No one is saying it should be cut out and ignored completely. There's also not going to be the same kind of statements issued on the mainstream view by peak science associations, not least because this debate does not have the same political urgency.
As evidence, we have the statements that are in the lede from the APA, AAA and AAPA. There is also the chapter in the general collection The Cambridge Handbook of Intelligence on race and intelligence that treats Rushton, Jensen etc. more or less as wrong and against current thinking on race and intelligence measurement; that there seem to be the same few names appearing again and again (Jensen, Rushton, Lynn) the non-acceptance of their work by many acacdemics is frequently mentioned even by those defending some of what they say (such as in this book and so on (if you search google books for university imprints that mention race, intelligence and then one of the authors above, you'll see what I mean - these guys are not flavour of the month most of the time). As far as I can see, what the minority view is (as represented by the authors above) as far as it touches on this page, is not simply that intelligence is in no small part heritable (something which is not disputed much), but that there are clear and important differences in intelligence that can be attributed to genes generally shared within racial groups as commonly understood (the "folk" perception that Sternberg refers to). At least, that appears to be the basis of the critique of the majority of scholars I find when doing searches. This is why it seems to me that the Pioneer Fund people's research is considered not mainstream.
What is important to remember (and it's something I think Victor Chmara overlooks with his comments about stupid arguments and how he himself is refuting RS) is that wikipedia isn't here to find the truth. If Jensen, Rushton and Lynn are being unfairly caricatured by mainstream scholars, that's a great shame, but we don't correct the matter on this page. Where reliable, respectable defences of them are mounted in the literature we should include that. VsevolodKrolikov (talk) 14:57, 3 August 2011 (UTC)
To be clear, there was a single question in the 1984 survey which highlighted the views of IQ experts alone. Reviewing the article, it appears that 46% thought that genetics played a role, while 60% thought that environment played a role. Among those who thought environment or genetics dominated, environmental outnumbered the genetic views 15:1. So yes, among self selected IQ experts, a significant minority think that genetics plays a role of some kind. Notably absent in these 27 year old views are the views of geneticists, anthropologists, and other experts that study the interplay of genes, the environment, and social outcomes. aprock (talk) 17:20, 3 August 2011 (UTC)
Amongst the 661 returned questionnaires, 14% declined to answer the question, 24% voted that there was insufficient evidence to give an answer, 1% voted that the gap was "due entirely to genetic variation", 15% voted that it "due entirely to environmental variation" and 45% voted that it was a "product of genetic and environmental variation". Another bigoted way of representing these figures is that 14% declined to answer, 24% sat on the fence, 46% thought genes played a part and 15% thought they didn't. Dmcq (talk) 17:42, 3 August 2011 (UTC)
A "bigoted" (whatever that means) way of representing the survey would be to say that only 30% of experts surveyed responded that genetics plays a factor. Of course, that represents all the surveys sent out, including those not returned. Such is the difficulty with interpreting self selected responses. That's why we let secondary sources do the synthesis when it comes to writing articles. aprock (talk) 19:18, 3 August 2011 (UTC)
is this survey reliable? is it noncontroversial?-- mustihussain (talk) 17:57, 3 August 2011 (UTC)
I was quoting from The IQ Controversy, the Media and Public Policy (book), I'm sure people can put on their own bias! That article has a see also for a couple of other. I'd have a problem with Mainstream Science on Intelligence for instance because the people signing it were to some extent self selected whereas I'm much happier with surveys and national organizations. Dmcq (talk) 18:15, 3 August 2011 (UTC)
it's a primary source?-- mustihussain (talk) 18:20, 3 August 2011 (UTC)
It's a fine source for what it says: that ~25 years ago, a significant minority of self selected IQ experts thought genetics played some role in the black-white IQ gap. aprock (talk) 18:22, 3 August 2011 (UTC)
ok, but the question of primary vs reliable secondary sources is important.-- mustihussain (talk) 18:33, 3 August 2011 (UTC)
The IQ Controversy book has very limited relevance to the dispute here. The only direct question surveyed on the subject alluded specifically to black/white differences. Besides this, the multiple choices offered are simplistic. Of survey repondents, 1% said the gap is "entirely genetic", 15% that it's "entirely environmental". 45% say it's some combination of both which-obviously-lumps "almost all but not entirely genetic", "almost all but not entirely environmental" and all points in between. The authors of the book furnish this interpretation that a "majority of respondents" consider genetics an "important" determinant, which a) is not how the question posed in the survey and b) potentially misleading since a "minority" of respondents affirmed genetics was involved at all, period.
And what this does or doesn't say about the consensus of any particular researcher on this topic is completely speculative. Elsewhere the survey includes questions about the opinion of some experts by name, but again these aren't much use here. Even the authors of the book are dismissive of the findings there with the rationale "the abundance of very low ratings for those who publicly postulate genetic influences on group differences thus seems to reflect the views of both those who disagree with these positions and those who may agree but believe certain things are best left unsaid."
Long and short is survey or no survey, the IQ Controversy book is simply a secondary source expressing its own opinion of mixed responses received. The authors themselves make this perfectly clear. "We have at present no concise description of the nature and variety of expert opinion on such issues as the origin and stability of intelligence, test use and misuse, bias in testing, and racial and economic group differences in IQ." Professor marginalia (talk) 20:08, 3 August 2011 (UTC)
the book is clearly unreliable and speculative. in addition, it's also a primary source since the survey was conducted by the authors themselves. i agree that it's not relevant to this discussion.-- mustihussain (talk) 20:32, 3 August 2011 (UTC)
Primary in terms of the findings and significance of the survey itself. The book's also chock full of claims, opinions, and speculations coming elsewhere, besides the survey. Professor marginalia (talk) 20:49, 3 August 2011 (UTC)

Krolikov, the Cambridge Handbook also contains a chapter, the last one by Hunt, where the hereditarian and environmentalist hypotheses of racial differences are treated as more or less equally plausible explanations, so it's a total misrepresentation to claim that the book treats the arguments of Jensen, Rushton, etc. as false. Hunt also underlines the fallaciousness of the claim by Sternberg et al. that the greater within- than between-population variation would invalidate the genetic relevance of the race concept.

You keep bringing up the Pioneer issue, but this is not something that the relevant academic journals and researchers pay any attention to. Research sponsored by the Pioneer Fund, such as Thomas Bouchard's extremely influential twin studies, has been and continues to be published in mainstream journals, and it keeps getting cited by other researchers. As I have demonstrated before, the main anti-hereditarian treatments of the race and intelligence question (e.g. Nisbett and The Black-White Test Score Gap) do not even mention the Pioneer Fund.

Snyderman and Rothman first published their survey results in The American Psychologist, the flagship journal of the APA, so it's as mainstream as it gets. The IQ Controversy book is a secondary source that explicates the findings of the survey. While it's not a very recent source, it is the most informative source ever published on the prevalence of hereditarian views among experts, and its results thoroughly refute the claim that the anti-hereditarian view is prevalent among experts. I am still waiting for sources showing that Snyderman and Rothman are wrong.

My suggestion is that we treat the environmental and hereditarian views as equally plausible and mainstream and present the relevant findings and arguments that support each of these views.--Victor Chmara (talk) 21:23, 3 August 2011 (UTC)

The oft touted Snyderman and Rothman study points to broader acceptance of environmental explanations over a generation ago. The APA report indicates that environmental factors are better established than genetic factors. When referring to the Cambridge Handbook, it is probably better to stick with Daley's chapter on the actual topic of Race and intelligence instead of referring to Hunts historical retrospective. Even Dawkin's incidental discussion in the Ancestor's Tale indicates that the mainstream view is that of Lewontin's and that racial differences are largely superficial. You're promoting the hereditarian viewpoint to "equal plausibility" against reliable secondary sourcing. aprock (talk) 21:42, 3 August 2011 (UTC)
It makes no sense to pick one chapter from a large book containing mutually contradictory chapters by different authors, and claim that that one chapter represents the consensus. The Cambridge Handbook contains lots of stuff, some of it widely accepted, some not.
Dawkins says in his book that Edwards is right and Lewontin wrong. This is what Dawkins wrote:
"It is genuinely true that, if you measure the total variation in the human species and then partition it into a between-race component and a within-race component, the between-race component is a very small fraction of the total. Most of the variation among humans can be found within races as well as between them. Only a small admixture of extra variation distinguishes races from each other. That is all correct. What is not correct is the inference that race is therefore a meaningless concept. This point has been clearly made by the distinguished Cambridge geneticist A. W. F. Edwards in the recent paper called ‘Human genetic diversity: Lewontin’s fallacy’."
Edwards's argument is regarded as true, because empirical evidence says it's true. In fact, this was known as far back as the early 1960s when the first PCAs of multilocus genetic variation were published, as Edwards points out in his article. The logic behind Edwards's argument is approvingly discussed also in Muehlenbein's Human Evolutionary Biology, Vogel and Motulsky's Human Genetics, and other standard textbooks. Above all, Lewontin's fallacy has been exposed in numerous empirical studies showing that human genetic variation is geographically structured. From a 2010 Nature article[18]:
"Although the average level of population differentiation is low (at sites genotyped in all populations the mean value of Wright’s Fst is 0.071 between CEU [=white] and YRI [=black], 0.083 between YRI and CHB+JPT [=East Asian], and 0.052 between CHB+JPT and CEU), we find several hundred thousand SNPs with large allele frequency differences in each population comparison (Fig. 5c). As seen in previous studies, the most highly differentiated sites were enriched for non-synonymous variants, indicative of the action of local adaptation." [emphasis added]
Those numbers are compatible with Lewontin's argument about there being more variation within than between populations, but as suggested by Edwards, cumulative allele frequency differences is where the real population differences reside. Hundreds of thousands of SNPs exhibiting large frequency differences between continental races means that almost unimaginably large phenotypic differences between races are, in principle, possible. (This picture of human genetic variation may, however, be somewhat obsolete already. A recent paper[19] looking at rare variants missed by earlier studies claims that "the majority of human genomic variable sites are rare and exhibit little sharing among diverged populations". This would suggest that most genetic variation is between populations.)--Victor Chmara (talk) 12:32, 4 August 2011 (UTC)
You keep on saying it was a self selected sample. It was not. The 1020 experts were chosen randomly from various professional bodies in psychology, there's a list of the bodies selected from and it seems pretty reputable to me. I think it is better to just state the figures than give your interpretation. The APA report establishes nothing. It says it doesn't know, that the evidence is not conclusive for either. This article summarizes the difference as 'there is even less empirical support for a genetic interpretation, and no adequate explanation for the racial IQ gap is presently available'. That seems a reasonable position to me. Practically no-one thinks the difference is purely genetic and many think it is wholly environmental but a large portion think a non trivial part may be due to genetic factors. As far as actual real world policies is concerned nothing has been established and we're better off assuming the difference is purely environmental as that's all we can really affect. However as far as studies ae concerned saying one side is mainstream and the other is marginal is simply wrong - it is not like climate change that way. Dmcq (talk) 22:26, 3 August 2011 (UTC)
As some one who works with "APA Reports" on occasion they are not opinion pieces written by the one member or board resolution from people who do not have expertise. They are panels selected from leader in the field and are submitted to external reviewers. When in finished form APA reports are the official positions of the organization in a particular controversy The Resident Anthropologist (talk)•(contribs) 22:45, 3 August 2011 (UTC)
I agree that giving them equal weight is unjustified. And remember, we have to stick to the "race and intelligence" issue. The twin studies and Ancestor's Tale don't help. Snyderman doesn't either. All it offers is a single simplistically worded multiple choice question in a 25 year old survey (and incorrectly worded, as its own authors describe it).
It seems the discussions wandered into another rabbit hole anyway. How much weight to give a particular source or claim isn't determined by this broader question about whether or not most in the field think the race gap is significantly genetic in origin. Professor marginalia (talk) 22:18, 3 August 2011 (UTC)
The point is that we should use quantifiable yardsticks. Using cited sources for verifiability is a pillar of Wikipedia. What basis would you use if you don't depend on the opinion of the experts in the field? We're not qualified to make such decisions ourselves. Dmcq (talk) 22:26, 3 August 2011 (UTC)
What would you use to quantify this? Snyderman and Rothman indicate more support for environmental explanations. I don't think covering the issues in a 60:45 ratio of environmental:genetic explanations is unreasonable, but I'm pretty sure that's not the correct way going about determining these things. aprock (talk) 22:47, 3 August 2011 (UTC)
A Twenty-seven year old survey is useless for contemporary views on the issue anyway. The Resident Anthropologist (talk)•(contribs) 22:49, 3 August 2011 (UTC)vidence that the APA said something
WP:UNDUE is the relevant bit about it. It can be quite a bit out from that factor if there's more stuff on one than the other, its just a broad indicator and there may be a lot more to say for one side or the other but something like a factor of three difference from it should ring alarm bells. In the absence of statements from bodies and surveys we'd have to count the books and scholarly papers and come to some conclusion that way which is basically doing our own survey of the literature. Often it has to be done that way but it would be difficult to gain acceptance here where people dismiss books as worthless for weight when they disagree with them. Dmcq (talk) 23:13, 3 August 2011 (UTC)
(ec) I'll go out on a limb and say wikipedia does not tend to rely on "quantifiable yardsticks" to judge the weight to give claims in articles--especially weighting all claims against the yardstick of a single, overly-broad, erroneously worded question in a 30 year old survey of a scientific topic. We assess the weight to give claims by looking at how much weight they receive in the best, most representative and authoritative published references. That's why I don't understand why any of us are focused on this one survey. Professor marginalia (talk) 23:27, 3 August 2011 (UTC)
The official views of various national bodies should also be counted hightly of course in judging due weight. Weight should also be given to the statistics of how the views are represented in books and scholarly articles. The problem we have is that people are disputing what "most representative and authoritative published references" for due weight is and start running them down and promoting their own pet ideas or misinterpreting them as saying something they simply don't say. How about just not rewording what sources say, just weight them up whether you agree with them or not? Is someone here a better source? Dmcq (talk) 00:45, 4 August 2011 (UTC)
I confess I'm lost. I don't know what you're referring to about "just not rewording what sources say". Doesn't that go without saying? Professor marginalia (talk) 01:03, 4 August 2011 (UTC)
This survey is 27 years old, and I think it's very much an over-interpretation to think that the 45% answering a single survey question all meant to agree with the positions of Jensen, Lynn et al. It's certainly worth mentioning, but given the more recent criticism of it, I don't think by itself it should be taken as a guide for balance for the article overall. It's not as if genetics has stood still for the past three decades, and the absence of specialists in concepts such as "race" also counts against it. We need to remember that this is more than just about heritability of intelligence.VsevolodKrolikov (talk) 02:19, 4 August 2011 (UTC)
@p.marginalia&vsevolodkrolikov, i think it was dmcq or victor who brought the issue of the survey to one of the recent threads. before that it was miadre who kept writing about the survey before she was banned. as you and others have noted, the book is unreliable. in addition, it is a primary source in terms of the survey/findings. now, back to the topic: it's clear that the hereditarian arguments are overrepresented in the article (if victor disagrees i suggest another arbitration/mediation). we need now to discuss how to address the issue of undue weight. as a start we need to stick to the apa-statement which is supported by reliable secondary sources. the statement is clear (quote:"explanations based on factors of caste and culture may be appropriate, but so far have little direct empirical support. there is certainly no such support for a genetic interpretation. at present, no one knows what causes this differential.").-- mustihussain (talk) 06:03, 4 August 2011 (UTC)
If you have evidence of its unreliability and bias or whatever about the survey then please go and update the article about it citing your sources. We need as you say reliable secondary sources. Dmcq (talk) 09:31, 4 August 2011 (UTC)
mustihussain, on what evidence do you base your claim that "hereditarian arguments are overrepresented in the article"? Please cite your evidence, your personal opinion has no weight here. The survey was originally published in The American Psychologist, and I can cite many secondary sources that report its findings on the prevalence of hereditarian views among experts. The book itself is a secondary source, and the article cites many sources discussing the survey findings. The APA report, published ten years after the survey, says that no one knows what causes the IQ gap, which certainly does not support the claim by Krolikov, Maunus, and others that the environmental explanation is the mainstream view.--Victor Chmara (talk) 11:19, 4 August 2011 (UTC)
The APA statement says that the hereditarian explanation has "even less empirical support".·ʍaunus·snunɐw· 02:11, 6 August 2011 (UTC)
Victor - I'll clarify if I've been unclear or clumsy in expressing myself. My position is not that the environmental explanation is the mainstream view, it's that the Pioneer Fund people's view (and they're all associated with the Pioneer Fund; it's a useful shorthand) appears to be in quite a minority. It's this particular view which seems to be over-represented.VsevolodKrolikov (talk) 14:24, 4 August 2011 (UTC)
I don't see that qualification for reliable sources in WP:RS. It also strikes me as a bit circular. Mainstream is defined by the publications in the field not including those by these guys because these guys are not mainstream. Personally I think the evidence for any genetic component in the difference is pretty weak compared to environmental effects, however as per [[WP:NOTCENSORED}] censorship is not the way of Wikipedia and you'll need good evidence that the scientific method is not being followed before rejecting everything any of their members write. Have you got evidence for instance that their peer reviews are fixed or paid for? Dmcq (talk) 16:22, 4 August 2011 (UTC)

It's a matter of WP:FRINGE, WP:DUE, WP:NPOV. The Resident Anthropologist (talk)•(contribs) 16:27, 4 August 2011 (UTC)

Dmcq - no one is arguing that everything written by Pioneer Fund people should be thrown out. The argument is that as it stands the impression is given that their views have greater credence in the academic community than is actually the case. Less, not zero.VsevolodKrolikov (talk) 16:35, 4 August 2011 (UTC)
I got a completely different impression from this discussion, e.g. the person just before who dismisses it all as fringe. Perhaps you could provide an estimate of how many of the signatories of Mainstream Science on Intelligence are members of the Pioneer Fund or were they just deluded or are they not reputable in some way? Dmcq (talk) 16:58, 4 August 2011 (UTC)
@dmcq&victor, in terms of the findings/survey "the iq controversy"-book is a primary source. even if it was not, a single secondary source doesn't establish verifiability for controversial claims. the claims have to be verified by additional reliable secondary sources. the mainstream view is clearly that the causes of the gap is unknown. however, it is also clear that the hereditarian hypothesis is weaker than the environmental, as stated by the apa, aaa, aapa and unesco. the flynn effect, the hampering of brain development by malnutrition and infectious diseases, the effects of being "caste-like minority" are all more mainstream arguments than the arguments in the "brain size"- or "evolutionary theories"- or "degree of geographic ancestry"-sections of the article. could you please provide reliable secondary sources that claim that the arguments in the "brain size"-, "evolutionary theories"-, "degree of geographic ancestry"-sections are more academically accepted or more mainstream than environmental arguments? these sections are also dominated by jensen and rushton. which reliable secondary sources claim that lynn, jensen and rushton are noncontroversial and more mainstream than e.g. flynn? they represent minority views, yet they get equal or more weight than mainstream arguments like the flynn effect.-- mustihussain (talk) 20:44, 4 August 2011 (UTC)
I would like to hear more about the hampering of brain development by malnutrition and infectious diseases. I didn't want to wear purple pants 20:50, 4 August 2011 (UTC)
Secondary sources are needed to show things are interesting and worth noting and for evaluative claims. Primary sources are perfectly okay if used straightforwardly avoiding original research or synthesis, they just shouldn't normally be dragged in if nobody has noted them. I have not claimed that genetic arguments are more mainstream, where did you get that idea from? If you have a look at the article the genetic studies get a bit more room but on the other side they also have more contrary arguments presented within that space so overall the pro genetic side gets less space. This is perfectly okay, If you cut space out of sections then the first thing that would have to go is discussion about results - that would mean that contrary arguments would be preferentially removed. Just develop the argument collaboratively and produce a good article and the arguments will speak for themselves if they are any good. Dmcq (talk) 21:58, 4 August 2011 (UTC)
ok, it seems that we all agree that the hereditarian arguments are weaker than the environmental. however, the question of undue weight remains. it's also highly problematic that the minority-arguments of controversial people like lynn and rushton are littered throughout the article.-- mustihussain (talk) 09:35, 6 August 2011 (UTC)

Some mainstream secondary sources

  • "Psychology" by Schacter, Gilbert and Wegner (2009) "Everyone agrees that some percentage of the between-group difference in intelligence is accounted for by experiential differences, and the only question is whether any of the between-group difference in intelligence is accounted for by genetic differences. Some scientists believe that the answer to this question is yes, and others believe the answer is no. Perhaps because the question is so technically difficult to answer or perhaps because the answer has such important social and political repercussions, there is as yet no consensus among those who have carefully studied the data. To draw firm conclusions about genetic causes of between-group differences will require (a) the identification of a gene or gene complex whose presence is strongly correlated with performance on intelligence tests and (b) the demonstration that this gene or gene complex is more prevalent in one group than another. Such findings are critical to establishing the role of genes in producing between-group differences." (my emphasis)
  • "Human biological varioation" Mielke, Konigsberg & Relethford (2006) "IQ is perhaps the most studied and controversial trait dealt with in behavioral research. There is still wide debate over the exact meaning of IQ scores. Are they good measurements of innate intelligence, measures reflecting one's ability to take an IQ test, or both? Twin and family studies have consistently demonstrated a heritable component; however, the magnitude varies considerably, and more recent work in behavioral genetics suggests previous estimates of the heritability of IQ may be biased upward. There is evidence for both genetic and environmental influences on IQ scores. Group differences in IQ test scores, such as found in American whites and blacks, appear to be due to environmental differences." (my emphasis)·ʍaunus·snunɐw· 03:28, 6 August 2011 (UTC)

This article has been the subject of endless wars between hereditarian and environmentalist editors, with the former trying to make this article 50/50 and the latter trying to show environmentalism as the mainstream. To put it bluntly, these 2 positions are baloney. The hereditarian position is that PART of the gap is genetic, and is thus accurately represented by the survey, in which hereditarians outnumbered environmentalists 3 to 1 and were an outright majority of those who responded. (I wonder what the position of those who didn't respond were, hint hint.) (That was just a side comment, so don't spend 5 pages addressing it.) Until we have another actual survey, (rather than one line unsupported comments) the results of this one should be taken at face value. The article should represent hereditarianism as the mainstream view and the intro drastically altered to show this fact. The survey, being the best thing on what exactly is the mainstream, should probably be made more obvious rather that buried halfway down the history section. P.S. Any survey is better than no survey at all, which is what the enviros have. 110.32.141.208 (talk) 08:49, 6 August 2011 (UTC)

I don't know where you got the 1:3 from. The article says: The question regarding this in the survey asked "Which of the following best characterizes your opinion of the heritability of black-white differences in IQ?" Amongst the 661 returned questionnaires, 14% declined to answer the question, 24% voted that there was insufficient evidence to give an answer, 1% voted that the gap was "due entirely to genetic variation", 15% voted that it "due entirely to environmental variation" and 45% voted that it was a "product of genetic and environmental variation". You're not confusing that 15% and 45% are you? It does show a majority thinking the environment is the major factor but it doesn't show a majority ruling out a genetic component. Dmcq (talk) 09:47, 6 August 2011 (UTC)

The hereditarian position is that it is a "product of genetic and environmental variation". The environmental one promoted by Flynn and such is that it is "due entirely to environmental variation". 110.32.141.208 (talk) 10:15, 6 August 2011 (UTC)

Maunus's sources are both good and can be used. The trouble with Snyderman and Rothman is that it is very out of date now. Opinion has shifted rapidly. Itsmejudith (talk) 10:17, 6 August 2011 (UTC)
yes. in addition, the snyderman and rothman-book is a primary source, in terms of the findings/survey. even if it was a secondary source, a single secondary source doesn't establish verifiability for controversial claims.-- mustihussain (talk) 10:27, 6 August 2011 (UTC)
Okay see where you're coming from. I would agree with others that the position has probably changed a bit since then but we can't say how much without another survey. Drastic change in that period is unlikely judging by what happens in other sciences, when there is no conclusive evidence one way or the other people tend to take up fixed positions and the overall consensus only changes as people retire or die so it can take far longer for any great change. Wikipedia is not a vanguard for new ideas so we really do have to stick by what the current state is. You just have to look at something like the history of plate tectonics to see this sort of thing. Dmcq (talk) 11:24, 6 August 2011 (UTC)
By the way where would I look for something showing Flynn believes the difference is entirely due to environmental variation please? Dmcq (talk) 11:36, 6 August 2011 (UTC)
My response to mustihussain is that I have 1 source, you have 0. My response to Itsmejudith is: what evidence do you have that opinion has shifted rapidly? Dmcq, see the Genetic arguments section: "Non-hereditarians argue that the genetic contribution to the gaps (not to individual IQ) is nil." 110.32.141.208 (talk) 13:06, 6 August 2011 (UTC)
So where is there evidence showing Flynn believes the difference is entirely due to environmental variation please? That statement does not mention Flynn. Dmcq (talk) 13:12, 6 August 2011 (UTC)
Flynn was just an example. (I chose him because I can spell his name.) 110.32.141.208 (talk) 01:28, 7 August 2011 (UTC)
Well I'm interested because the article says he is 'a non-hereditarian'. So I'd like to know on what basis that was stuck in. Is it using something he wrote and what exactly do people mean by a 'hereditarian'? Dmcq (talk) 09:53, 7 August 2011 (UTC)
You have a valid point, which I will try and find a reference for, but we are going way off topic. People normally mean by hereditarian anyone who thinks part or all of the gap is genetic. 110.32.141.208 (talk) 10:37, 7 August 2011 (UTC)
At http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UNU7Y2oZh7k&feature=related 4:26 he makes it sound like he thinks the gap is all environmental. 110.32.141.208 (talk) 11:26, 7 August 2011 (UTC)
Earlier you said the hereditarian position is that it is a "product of genetic and environmental variation". Now you say that people normally mean by hereditarian anyone who thinks part or all of the gap is genetic. Exactly how big 'part of' does make a big difference. Flynn hasn't said anything incompatible with 'a part of' but was classified as not a heriditarian in the article. He thinks it may all be caused by environmental factors. If you listen to the start of he talk though you'll hear him standing up for investigating things and debating them properly rather than suppressing discussion. So we have the situation that what hereditarian means is a bit unclear and we have people who think any genetic component if any is probably pretty trivial but who think the issue should still be investigated and debated openly. If he is 'mainstream' we have the added possible mainstream position that the various options should be properly discussed. Personally I would like to remove most of the tribal which has little to do with anything except establishing a personal identity for editors. Dmcq (talk) 16:25, 7 August 2011 (UTC)
These definitions are less than ideal. We can't defend how much attention to give to a researcher or position against this kind of crude yardstick derived from Hunt/Carlson.
Self-described hereditarians Jensen, Rushton, Gottfredson, and Lynn consider the gap more"heritable" than "environmental", more than half. ("Heritable" doesn't mean "genetic", but without any hard genetic data to go by, hereditarians tend to use the heritability #'s to estimate this). Hereditarians are commonly characterized as attaching a non-trivial portion of the gap to genetic race differences. Alan Ornstein labels as hereditarians those who come down hard on the side of heredity (that most of the gap is heredity). Hereditarians tend to see the gap as intractable, that heredity more than environment explains gaps in income and social progress, and that social programs will have little to no effect in raising IQ scores. Few environmentalists insist absolutely no genetics are involved (Kamin might be an acception.) But they say the gap is mostly, if not all environmental, and could be closed given an appropriate compensatory environment. Ornstein claimed that most social scientists fall in the environmentalist camp, and includes Flynn. He'd term Jencks a synthesist (some heredity involved) while Jencks said in an interview he's convinced most, if not all, the gap is environmental.
The "tribal" as you call isn't a purely wiki artifact-it's how it really is among the researchers themselves. The fighting wasn't triggered over disputes over exact percentages. It exploded due to the very different conclusions of the two tribes-one futilistic and status quo affirming (hereditarian) in outlook and the other idealistic and reformist (environmentalist). Professor marginalia (talk) 02:48, 8 August 2011 (UTC)
We can defer to Rushton and Jensen (2005) on this: "Because to date Dickens and Flynn have not given the high heritability of IQ any independent causal effect in explaining the mean Black–White group difference, their thesis is best placed in the culture-only camp." — Preceding unsigned comment added by Chuckiscool (talk • contribs) 06:00, 15 August 2011 (UTC)
No we cannot, they are less than reliable in summarising the opinions of those who disagree with them, as has been pointed out countless times in peer reviewed sources. ·ʍaunus·snunɐw· 01:50, 17 August 2011 (UTC)
You are right Professor. Just wanted to add that there are many environmentalists apart from Jencks who maintain that the gap can be explained by environmental causes alone with no necessary contribution from genetics necessary (since while they of course agree that genes contribute to individual IQ that does not mean that it necessarily contributes to the gap).·ʍaunus·snunɐw· 16:49, 8 August 2011 (UTC)
My take on it too. The stereo-typical environmentalists don't go there because they don't think the populations compared are in any plausible sense more distinct genetically than they are socio-environmentally. No causal genetic maps have been attached to IQ, so both sides are simply guessing about genetic links or lack of to intelligence. (To an environmentalist this kind of guesswork about genetic group differences is akin to attributing to genes to why some own Toyotas and others own Chryslers. Such a conclusion could be statistically quantified, given a suitably convenient data design, but that wouldn't make it any less ridiculous.) Professor marginalia (talk) 07:45, 9 August 2011 (UTC)

Some other mainstream secondary sources

From "Bias in Psychological Assessment: A empirical review and recommendation" by Reynolds and Ramsay (2003) in: Irving et al (ed) Handbook of psychology: assessment psychology: "Over time, exclusively genetic and environmental explanations have lost so much of their credibility that they can hardly be called current. Most researchers who posit that score differences are real now favor an interactionist perspective...However, this relatively recent consensus masks the subtle persistence of an earlier assumption that test score differences must have either a genetic or an environmental basis." From "Asking the Right Questions About g" by Reeve and Hakel (2002): "Although the evidence to date is far from complete, certain conclusions about the causes of observed racial differences are warranted. First, it is clear that group differences are not due solely to genetic, biological, or environmental factors. This is hardly surprising, however. Given the symbiotic relations among them, it would seem surprising if these factors were not all contributors to the manifestation of group differences."(Emphasis mine ----66.57.123.171 (talk) 01:34, 17 August 2011 (UTC)Chuck

Changing gears/ about undue weight

The "race and intelligence" topic is presented as a debate. The article confuses the heck out of what is generally agreed and not. (For example, the predictive power of IQ test scores in US education and income, the gap in IQ test scores measured in the US between blacks and whites-those are not Great Big Debates-they're generally agreed. ) The reader has no map to follow this "debate"--there's not enough narrative. It's a sea of balloons.

The talk page has lately been all caught up in this kind of hereditarian/environmentalist turf war. I did a rough side-by-side to compare the attention given hereditarian and environmentalist views. They're almost dead even in terms of page space and word count. Much of the page space going to the hereditarian view is consumed in the History of the debate section and Lynn's IQ and the Wealth of Nations. I think the History section (which has almost nothing about environmentalism except to paint it as a reaction against Nazi eugenics) could be summarized in a single paragraph. And Lynn's theory is better developed here than Flynn. ??? That makes absolutely no sense.

A *lot* of area is given to Jensen and Rushton numbers, apart from their arguments. And not just their arguments but Nisbett's (who is left a little too all alone sometimes in the text here) is presented too much he-said-he-said for an encyclopedia. The Uniform rearing section is so quick to get to the he-said-he-said the reader will have no idea what the study studied. And the tables there are an incomprehensible space waste imo. Professor marginalia (talk) 04:15, 8 August 2011 (UTC)

agree but how do we proceed?-- mustihussain (talk) 20:55, 8 August 2011 (UTC)
Much of the area is devoted to contrary studies so on turf war standards it isn't that bad. I'd prefer the sections go more into summarizing things rather than a said then b said stuff. Dmcq (talk) 22:39, 8 August 2011 (UTC)
I agree that review style summaries are better than "he shaid she said". However this requires agreeing that some views and rebuttalls to other views are not notable enough to being described as more as "but see x for a different view", or "x-type reseracher disagree". It also requires us settling on a few mainstream sources that we will use to model our weighting on. ·ʍaunus·snunɐw· 00:34, 9 August 2011 (UTC)
I agree that mainstream sources should be used as the framework. I'm too swamped irl to tackle any big projects here lately so I can't commit but that would be my advice. I don't know who would find any value in this article as it reads now, or come away with any insights from it, except those coming here with some intense desire to hunt down, reaffirm or denounce what they already thought they knew. Those ppl would just be coming to see if their pet idea showed up here. Professor marginalia (talk) 08:14, 9 August 2011 (UTC)
agree. basing the article on mainstream sources is precisely what has to be done.-- mustihussain (talk) 18:44, 9 August 2011 (UTC)

Degree of geographic ancestry

This section essentially discusses anything but what the title suggests. Most of the body discusses correlation between skin color and blood type. I've retitled the section accordingly. aprock (talk) 22:01, 10 August 2011 (UTC)

I was going to try rewriting that section per the suggestions from you and VsevelodKrolikov in the Geographic Ancestry Section thread above. Apologies for putting it off for so long. I've gone ahead and done so now. I also changed the section's title back to Degree of geographic ancestry because that seems more appropriate now that it's been rewritten. And as with the evolutionary theories section, I removed the undue weight tag: that was added for the previous version and hopefully the problems with it are fixed now.Boothello (talk) 04:08, 11 August 2011 (UTC)
Reviewing the section it appears to entirely rest on historic research 35-75 years old, using out dated techniques. The links between blood type and skin color to geographic ancestry appear to synthesis. Is this section even relevant outside of historic significance? aprock (talk) 04:24, 16 August 2011 (UTC)
This is discussed in plenty of current sources, including Hunt (2011), Mackintosh (2011), Nisbett (2009), Jensen and Rushton (2005), and Loehln/Sternberg (2000). If you read the Nisbett and Loehlin/Sternberg sources, you'll find that even the study from 1936 is still consistently discussed by modern authors. Our job is to include what is in the source material, regardless of whether we personally think the methods used are outdated. I cited a few older sources simply because some of them go into more details than the newer ones do. The relation between skin color/blood type and ancestry is also discussed in the same sources cited there (Jensen, Nisbett & Reed). It's not synthesis because it's being discussed in sources specifically about R&I.Boothello (talk) 05:43, 16 August 2011 (UTC)
I'm not saying this isn't discussed, or shouldn't be included. I'm questioning whether or not this is historic content, or representative of current research and views. The synthesis question isn't about whether it relates to the article, but whether the research relates to "geographic ancestry". aprock (talk) 06:10, 16 August 2011 (UTC)
I think if modern authors are commenting on the significance of studies conducted a long time ago, that belongs in the discussion about current views. A lot of the modern debate is over how old studies should be interpreted, as in the Eyferth study from the 1960s. The Nisbett, Jensen and Reed sources all talk about the correlation between ancestry and skin color or blood type and whether that can be used to examine the relationship between ancestry and IQ. In other words these sources are specifically discussing the relationship between skin color/blood type and geographic ancestry, in the context of a discussion about race and IQ. If you think this is synthesis, you'll need to be more specific about what ideas this section is combining that aren't combined in the source material.Boothello (talk) 06:30, 16 August 2011 (UTC)
Ancestry != geographic ancestry. Geographic ancestry is a concept that has largely grown out of DNA sampling and research, and is distinct from general ancestry because it makes claims about the branching of specific genes based geographic isolation. I don't believe that there is any sort of broad consensus that you can infer geographic ancestry from blood type or skin color. In fact, I'm pretty sure there is no significant research which addresses that issue with respect to blood type. Likewise skin color.aprock (talk) 14:44, 16 August 2011 (UTC)
I think this distinction between ancestry and geographic ancestry is kind of splitting hairs, but your section rename is a good compromise.Boothello (talk) 03:08, 17 August 2011 (UTC)

overepresentation

i like to appreciate the writer, of this article. But i have to point out some mistakes he has deliberately made. 1. The researches he has based most of his arguments on were all conducted in United states 2. It is wrong to make a conclusion based on studies not well distributed and essentially no carried out in Africa Itself to make arguments on "Blacks intelligence" 3. There is overemphasis on so called "leading Psychologists". 4. There is a deliberate attempt to use intelligence tests as an absolute predictor of intelligence - actually this is not right"

I beg the article should try to encompass all the information before making any conclusions especially on a topic such as " race and intelligence". — Preceding unsigned comment added by 197.179.152.138 (talk) 23:36, 17 August 2011 (UTC)

All very true but there's nothing better available. Wikipedia is about making an encyclopaedia using verifiable sources and not indulging in our own idea (which is called WP:original research here). Plus there's more than one editor as you can see by clicking on the 'history' tab at the top when looking at the article. The bit about leading psychologists is another basic strand in wikipedia, that articles should give weight the best sources available. In an article where there are peer reviewed studies you really need peer reviewed studies to have any sort of weight. See wp:five pillars for a basic summary of the principles underlying Wikipedia. Dmcq (talk) 07:59, 18 August 2011 (UTC)

No "achievement gap" discussion

After spending some time away from the article, following the modern debate in the broader media, it appears that one of the biggest problems here is a lack of any discussion or sources which related research and reporting on what is broadly called the achievement gap. I believe that this lack primary stems from the articles use of hereditarian sources to delineate the topics of the debate, with a huge over emphasis on psychometrics. At a general level, I would suggest one of two things. (A) rename the article "Race and IQ" and allow the article to only cover that narrow aspect of the debate. (B) integrate the wide body of research concerning the general achievement gap into the article. Feedback? aprock (talk) 23:19, 24 August 2011 (UTC)

I don't like idea A. I think renaming the article "race and IQ" has been mentioned before and most editors opposed it.
Idea B sounds good, but only in a limited way. Wikipedia already has an article called Achievement gap in the United States that discusses racial gaps in areas besides IQ. If we incorporate material from that article which uses sources that don't discuss intelligence test scores, it will duplicate material and also create a possible WP:Synthesis issue. But I do think it would be helpful to take more material from sources that discuss gaps in areas like educational achievement in the context of their relation to IQ gaps. The article has a section on this already ("significance of group differences") but it's short and could be expanded. The only sources it has about achievement gaps in the US (as opposed to worldwide) are The Bell Curve and Earl Hunt's Human Intelligence.Boothello (talk) 01:05, 25 August 2011 (UTC)
You've lost me here. You don't want to rename it to "Race and IQ", but you don't want to cover other areas of intelligence here except in a limited way? I'm certainly fine with using WP:SUMMARY style, but that applies to a lot of the content already in the article. I believe I've done some summaries already, and added tags to various sections which need to be better summarized. aprock (talk) 02:42, 25 August 2011 (UTC)
That's not what I meant, sorry if I wasn't clear. If we add a section on something like racial gaps in SAT scores, cited to sources that discuss only SAT scores but not IQ, then I think that would be original synthesis. In order to discuss racial SAT gaps and racial IQ gaps together, we need to cite sources that discuss them together. I think your suggestion B is good as long as we're careful to avoid synthesis of that sort.Boothello (talk) 03:35, 25 August 2011 (UTC)
I think B is a good idea - there should be section on that based on the best available sources. Whether it would repeat or contradict material in another article is less of a concern - we can always improve that other article later.·ʍaunus·snunɐw· 01:19, 25 August 2011 (UTC)

Minnesota Transracial Adoption Study misses data for Asian/Native Indian adoptees

The table on the data from the MTAS by Scarr et al (1976,1992) misses entries or Asian/Native Indian adoptive children that were taken as part of the study. Given that the article is restricted for editing I cannot make the relevant edits. The table with the line added looks like this:

Minnesota Transracial Adoption Study[1] Tested at age 7 and follow-up at age 17
Biological parents Age 7, number of children Age 17, number of children Age 7, average IQ Age 17, average IQ
Black-black 29 21 97 89
Black-white 68 55 109 99
White-white 25 16 112 106
Asian or Native-American India 21 12 101 96
Biological children 143 104 120 115

Furthermore the data reported in the table is somewhat misleading as presented because it compares different sub-populations. For example if the 16 white children whose IQ was taken are used for the 7 year old value the white IQ reads 117.6, and if the 21 black/black children are taken for the same age the black/black IQ reads 95.4. Hence the table gives the impression that white children had a lower IQ loss than black children, when in fact on the actual population in question, the opposite is true. The 1992 paper contains the correct data without this confusion in presentation. Furthermore there are miscopies from the original source. For example the natural children at age 17 IQ is reported in the study as 109.4 not 115.

A more sensible and corrected table would simply compare only the populations whose IQ was measured at 7 and 17. That table would look like this and does not suffer the problem of being misleading:

Minnesota Transracial Adoption Study[2] Tested at age 7 and follow-up at age 17
Biological parents number of children Age 7, average IQ Age 17, average IQ
Black-black 21 95 89
Black-white 55 110 99
White-white 16 118 106
Asian or Native-American India 12 101 96
Biological children 104 116 109

I would propose that this later table replace the current one, and reference to the 1992 replace reference to the 1976 one, because the latter does actually not contain this table information. 141.212.71.146 (talk) 05:26, 21 September 2011 (UTC)

Good points. I don't have a copy of the 1992 handy-unless someone beats me to it I'll edit the table and cite myself once I have it. And you might consider creating a user account-due to ongoing disruptions, the Race and Intelligence articles are frequently protected against IP editing. Professor marginalia (talk) 00:12, 22 September 2011 (UTC)
I've made the changes to the table. The description of the study currently in the article is inane, but I can't give it the time right now. Maybe tomorrow. Professor marginalia (talk) 00:14, 23 September 2011 (UTC)

Recent changes

I think some of Maunus's recent changes could be improved. Firstly with the Murray quote removed, it makes the remaining sentence unclear, because you can't really tell what argument Murray is making. I added an explanation of Murray's argument to fix this.

I'm also not too sure about the new paragraph that was just added. [20] It says "in this way both Lewontin and Edwards are right in their arguments" but says nothing about what Lewontin's or Edward's arguments are. I figure this is referring to Human genetic diversity: Lewontin's fallacy but the paragraph doesn't say.

More generally, I don't think it's a good idea for this article to attempt a summary of the debate between Lewontin and Edwards. In its current state the article refers to both of their arguments without actually describing either, which is poor form for an encyclopedia article. And then again, providing an adequate and neutral explanation of both of their arguments would make the "validity" section overly long. The validity of race is a separate debate, and I don't think we can expect this article to adequately summarize all the arguments on it that exist in sources outside the context of R&I. I would suggest replacing the Lewontin and Edwards paragraph with a secondary source that discusses the validity of race specifically as it applies to R&I, like Earl Hunt's Human Intelligence. I can do this if no one else has a better idea.Boothello (talk) 21:36, 27 September 2011 (UTC)

My edits were intended to counter a problem that I and others have noted before that sections seem to give disproportionate space to hereditarian rebuttals, generally giving them the last word. I agree that avoiding "he said - she said" is good - it would be a worthy goal to summarise both Lewontin and Edwards arguments together - that is why I think the article by Kaplan is a very good source, because he shows that they're not mutually exclusive. I also think that summarising arguments is better than quotes, so I think that your paraphrasing of Murray is better than having the quote, although perhaps it is still undue weight to spend an entire paragraph on it. ·ʍaunus·snunɐw· 23:26, 27 September 2011 (UTC)
As I said, the issue with the Kaplan material is that it assumes the reader is already familiar with Lewontin's and Edwards' arguments, despite this not being explained anywhere else in the article. As such, I suggested replacing this with a paragraph cited to Hunt's book, which has a concise explanation of how this is relevant to R&I that doesn't require prior understanding of Lewontin and Edwards. Would you be okay with that, or do you have a better suggestion how to fix the current problem?Boothello (talk) 00:13, 28 September 2011 (UTC)
What does Hunt write exactly?·ʍaunus·snunɐw· 00:18, 28 September 2011 (UTC)
Hunt writes that racial categories are socially constructed labels that vary based on time and place, but that they still tend to correlate with certain social and biological variables. Then he makes the point that since racial groups are just labels, race itself usually isn’t a causal variable for anything. When people measure racial disparities in test scores, what they're really measuring are disparities caused by the social and/or biological variables that correlate with race. I think this is an important thing that the article should mention. Since racial IQ gaps aren't truly "racial" in nature, the fact that race is socially defined doesn't mean racial IQ gaps can't exist, or that it isn't possible to research which of the variables correlated with race is causing them.
I see you removed the reference to Edwards' and Lewontin's arguments, which I think is helpful, but I do think Hunt's point should be mentioned as well.Boothello (talk) 01:31, 28 September 2011 (UTC)
I agree that including Hunt's point would be good. It doesn't contradict Kaplan's argument but supplements it, by showing how it relates to the R&I debate. ·ʍaunus·snunɐw· 02:38, 28 September 2011 (UTC)

Race and genetics

The section on race and genetics misses a number of hereditarian arguments (in bold). The arguments are:

1. Mean Black–White–East Asian IQ differences is found worldwide.

(Comments: The argument here is twofold: 1) that IQ differences are found between races within other nations apart from the US (Lynn, 2008) and 2) that National-IQ differences are found between nations, differences which, given ancillary evidence, suggest aggregate individual IQ differences. Point 1) is completely neglected. The section on "Nations and intelligence" does not address this, but simply deals with national-IQ differences, which are conceptually distinct from intra-national IQ differences outside the US. Worse, no connection is made between the genetic hypothesis and inter/intra national differences, even though this an important piece of evidence for that hypothesis (-- or against, depending on how you look at the evidence (e.g. Tizard, 1974). Either a section on intranational IQ differences in other countries needs to be added or a separate page needs to be made (or linked to).

2a Mean Black–White differences is greater on g loaded cognitive tests than on culturally loaded cognitive tests. 2b The mean Black-White difference represents a difference in general intelligence

(Comment: 2a is distinct from 2b. 2b is Spearman's hypothesis. 2a is Spearman's correlation. 2b is captured in the following statement:

"Charles Murray notes that the test of reciting a string of digits backwards is much more g-loaded than reciting it forwards, and the black-white gap is around twice as large on the first test as on the second. According to Murray, there is no way that culture or motivation could systematically encourage black performance on one test while decreasing it on another, when both tests are provided by the same examiner in the same setting"

3a. Mean Black–White differences in IQ greater on more heritable subtests than on culturally malleable subtests. 3b. Studies using Structural Equation modeling support a gene + environment position. 3c. Studies on the gene x environment architecture of the race differences support a gene + environment hypothesis

(Comment: Oddly none of these were mentioned. These arguments are distinct from Spearman's hypothesis)

4, Mean Black–White–East Asian IQ differences associated with mean differences in brain size; Mean Black–White differences in IQ and brain size reflected in studies of racial admixture.

(Comment: The following statement is misleading: According to an analysis by Jelte Wicherts, the material cited by Rushton is in the form of external or postmortem cranial measurements with none using more modern MRI techniques. Such material only have a correlation of 0.2 with IQ. Furthermore, even using Rushton's data the black-white difference in brain size are small (0.6 SD units) compared to the IQ differences. Wicherts also writes that there is no reason to suppose that brain size is environmentally insensitive. Even if race differences in brain size are assumed to be entirely genetic in origin, they still leave 91–95% of racial IQ gap unaccounted for,

As the ".6 SD" is Wicherts calculation, "furthermore," needs to be followed by "according to Wicherts." Lynn (2006) makes the case that the difference in CC between Blacks and Whites is >1.2 SD based on the same data. (The magnitude of the difference depends on whether you used the pooled SD for all groups or the pooled SD of the specific groups under question.) And the last sentence is misleading by itself. It should be 5-10% of the supposed African-European difference of 30 points or 1.5 to 3 points. (In this case, the absolute value is needed to interpret the percents).

5. Mean Black White differences largely reflected in racial admixture. (Comments: The following studies have been cited in support of the genetic hypothesis:

Fernandez, 2001 (Brazil) Pick, 1929 (SA) Claassen, 1990 (SA) Owen, 1992 (SA) Weinberg et al., 1992 (US) Codwell, 1947 (US) Lynn, 2002 (US) Rowe, 2002 (US) Feguson, 1919 (US) Peterson and Lanier, 1929a (US) Peterson and Lanier, 1929b (US) Young, 1929 (US) Grinder et al, 1964 (Caribbean) Davenport, 1928 (Caribbean) Klineberg, 1928a (US) Bruce, 1940 (US) Bean, 1906 (US) Pearl, 1934 (US) Reed, 1973 (US) Green, 1972 (Caribbean) Ned and Gruenfeld, 1976 (Caribbean) Tanser, 1939 (Canada) Tanser, 1941 (Canada) Eyferth, 1961 (Germany -- yes, cited by lynn in support of a genetic hypothesis) Moore, 1986 (US -- yes, the traditional adoption component showed a nonsignificant .27 SD difference and has been cited by Murray in support of a genetic hypothesis) Willerman, Naylor, and Myrianthopoulos, 1974 (US -- cited by Rushton in support of a genetic hypothesis) Herskovits, 1926 (US -- cited by Shuey in support of a genetic hypothesis) Klineberg, 1928b (US -- cited by Shuey in support of a genetic hypothesis)

The following studies have been cited in support of an environmental hypothesis

Scarr et al., 1977 Loehlin et al., 1973 Witty and Jenkins, 1936 Tizard, 1974 Eyferth, 1969 Moore, 1986 Willerman, Naylor, and Myrianthopoulos, 1974 (Nisbett -- due to the large difference between biracials raised by Black and White mothers) Herskovits, 1926 (Nisbett -- due to the low correlations found) Klineberg, 1928b (Nisbett -- due to the low correlations found)

As for point 5, Generally, the sections on "Uniform rearing conditions" and "Racial admixture studies" neglects a number of studies cited by hereditarians; I see no rationale in the selection of the studies cited. It would probably be better to just say:

"Studies on mixed race individuals and on the relation between admixture and IQ have produced ambiguous results. Some studies on mixed race individuals seem to contradict a genetic hypothesis (i.e. Eyferth, 1969) others seem to support it (i.e. Rowe, 2002) and still others have produced results which could be interpreted in support for either a genetic or an environmental hypothesis (Willerman, Naylor, and Myrianthopoulos, 1974). With regards to studies on admixture and IQ, q number of studies have shown a relation between IQ and physical indexes of admixture, but the correlations found tend to be low and the associations found could be accounted for by social factors. Some studies have show a relation between IQ and genealogical indexes of admixture (i.e. Tanzer 1939, 1941), but other studies have failed to find such an association (Witty and Jenkins, 1936). Other studies have failed to find a relation between IQ and admixture indexed by blood groups, but to what extent these studies provide evidence against a genetic hypothesis is not clear.

Likewise, adoption studies have produced mixed results...."

6. Mean Black–White–East Asian IQ differences remain (in all directions) following transracial adoption, despite early deprivation in East Asians.

7. Mean Black–White IQ differences show regression toward predicted race means

8. White–East Asian IQ differences are paralleled by a race–behavior matrix of 60 life-history traits, neonate behavior, and rates of maturation'

9. Mean Black–White–East Asian differences mesh with what is known about human evolution and map onto genetic distance measures' (Comment: these seem like silly arguments, but I didn't make them up)

--Hippofrank (talk) 10:18, 8 October 2011 (UTC)Hippofrank

Race

Just some thoughts. There are a number of unreferenced, unclear, misleading, false, and pointless statements about race in this article. For example:

1. "The official position of the American Anthropological Association is that intelligence cannot be biologically determined by race"

(This sentence does not make sense and the AAA does not say this. A better way of phrasing the AAA's position would be:

"The official position of the American Anthropological Association is that variance in intelligence cannot be explained by differences in biologically defined race since race is a biologically meaningless category")

2. "Similar findings have been reported for related populations around the world, although these studies are generally considered less reliable due to the relative paucity of test data and the difficulties inherent in the cross-cultural comparison of intelligence test scores. While the existence of racial IQ gaps is well-documented and not subject to much dispute, there is no consensus among researchers as to their cause."

(This statement is rather unclear. The existence of IQ score gaps is not "well-documented and not subject to much dispute" around the world. The existence of psychometrically unbiased gaps in the US is well documented. The existence of IQ score gaps, biased or not, in some other countries is also well documented. But gaps are well not documented around the world.)

3. "Claims of races having different intelligence were used to justify colonialism, slavery, social darwinism, and racial eugenics"

Citation needed.

4. "The authors of two articles in two encyclopedias, the Encyclopedia Britannica and the Encyclopedia of Race, Ethnicity and Society, argue that today the mainstream view is that race is a social construction that is not mainly based in actual biological differences but on folk ideologies that construct groups based on social disparities and superficial physical characteristics."

(This statement is false. Nowhere in Encyclopedia Britannica is it argued that "the mainstream view" is that race "is not based on actual biological differences" or some variant of that. Rather, it is suggested that the mainstream views is that races are not distinct groups etc. and additionally mentioned that some see race as not being based on actual biological differences.)

5. "The American Anthropological Association in 1998 published a "Statement on 'Race'" which rejected the existence of "races" as unambiguous, clearly demarcated, biologically distinct groups."

This is redundant. See 1. Worse, with respect to a genetic hypothesis, it's irrelevant. See Jensen (1998). Hereditarians don't argue that there are intelligence differences between "unambiguous, clearly demarcated, biologically distinct groups." They argue that there are intelligence differences between 1) population clusters or 2) breeding populations 3) or socially defined groups defied on the basis of ancestry. So it's not clear why the AAA's rejection is relevant. It seems there is some equivocation going on here with the term "race."

6. "The notions that cluster analysis and the correlation between self-reported race and genetic ancestry supports a view of race as primarily based in biology is contradicted by most anthropologists, who maintain that this is a kind of circular reasoning."

Citation needed.

7. "The notions that cluster analysis and the correlation between self-reported race and genetic ancestry supports a view of race as primarily based in biology is contradicted by most anthropologists, who maintain that this is a kind of circular reasoning. Anthropologists such as C. Loring Brace[59] and Jonathan Kaplan[60] and geneticist Joseph Graves[61], have argued that while there it is certainly possible to find biological and genetic variation that corresponds roughly to the groupings normally defined as races, this is true for almost all geographically distinct populations. The cluster structure of the genetic data is therefore dependent on the initial hypotheses of the researcher and the populations sampled. When one samples continental groups the clusters become continental, if one had chosen other sampling patterns the clusters would be different. Weiss and Fullerton have noted that if one sampled only Icelanders, Mayans and Maoris, three distinct clusters would form and all other populations could be described as being composed of admixtures of Maori, Icelandic and Mayan genetic materials.[62] Kaplan therefore concludes that while racial groups are characterized by different allele frequencies, this does not mean that racial classification is a natural taxonomy of the human species, because multiple other genetic patterns can be found in human populations that crosscut racial distinctions. In this view racial groupings are social constructions that also have biological reality which is largely an artifact of how the category has been constructed.

This whole passage is pointless. It concerns the issue whether populations can be objectively delineated -- which is irrelevant to the question of whether differences in trait X between populations however delineated have a genetic basis. This is what the statement "Earl Hunt agrees that racial categories are defined by social conventions..." ends up saying. Instead of putting a statement that is pointless and a statement that points that out, It would be simpler to put neither.

8. "Loring Brace has argued that such a clinal distribution in the trait is not possible, because the evolution of human intelligence is founded on the development of human linguistic behavior, and intelligence is therefore of equal survival value to all human groups."

Is this really necessary? Whoever put this is asking for a slew of citations to the effect that it is possible that there could be congenital population differences in IQ or that "the evolution of human intelligence is" NOT "founded on the development of human linguistic behavior." It seems ridiculous that this case would even need to be made.

9. "119] J. Philippe Rushton carries this idea a step further in Race, Evolution, and Behavior, proposing that human groups differ in intelligence due to r/K selection theory, with Africans being more r-selected and Asians more K-selected.[120]...C. Loring Brace regards evolutionary explanations for racial IQ gaps as unfounded speculation.[121] Regarding Rushton’s application of r/K selection to human groups, Joseph L. Graves argues that not only is r/K selection theory considered to be virtually useless when applied to human life history evolution, but Rushton himself does not apply the theory correctly, and displays a lack of understanding evolution in general.[122]"

This whole passage could (and should) be summarized as: "A number of theories concerning the evolution of race differences have been proposed [][][][][]. It has been argued that such arguments are speculative and unfounded. []"

10. "However the geneticist, Alan R. Templeton has argued that this question is muddled by the general focus on "race" rather than on populations defined by gene frequency or by geographical proximity, and by the general insistence on phrasing the question in terms of heritability of intelligence. Templeton argues that racial groups neither represent sub-species or distinct evolutionary lineages, and that therefore there is no basis for making claims about the general intelligence of races. He also argues that phrasing the question in terms of heritability is useless since heritability applies only within groups, but cannot be used to compare traits across groups. Templeton argues that the only way to design a study of the genetic contribution to intelligence is to the correlation between degree of geographic ancestry and cognitive abilities. He argues that this would require a Mendelian "common garden" design where specimens with different hybrid compositions are subjected to the same environmental influences, and he further argues that when this design has been carried out, it has shown no significant correlation between any cognitive and the degree of African or European ancestry."

Redundant. This should go in the validity of race section, a section on how to test for genetic differences, or a section on the tests done. This whole section should be deleted and replaced with a link to a "genetics of intelligence" article.--Hippofrank (talk) 12:50, 8 October 2011 (UTC)Hippofrank

1. I agree. 2. agree + the notion of "related populations" is highly problematic. 3. I'll provide the first ten citations for that from top scholars on race, actually they are mostly already in there. 4. I agree that there is no reason to attribute this description of the mainstream view to the two encyclopedias - it can be cited to a larger number of reputable secondary and tertiary sources, very quickly. 5. I disagree it is relevant that many of the professional organisations that specialize in race, behavior and psychology explicitly reject the notion of a biologically defined race concept. It could be redundant if the fact that this is the mainstream view was better explained before, but previous editors have lobbied against making a simple statement about the mainstream view being the mainstream view. Perhaps this is a good time to change this. 6. this is cited to Brace, Kaplan and Graves in the following sentences. 7. I disagree that it is redundant (having inserted it). I do agree with your suggestion below that the Lewontin/edwards/social/genetic race question could be better described in a condensed format that would replace this paragraph. 8. I disagree this is a powerful argument, often repeated and pretty well supported by data. 9. I agree that there is no need to give this much attention to Rushton - because it requires giving at least equal coverage of the refutations - it is better to make a flat staements that his theories are generally rejected by people who are neither pioneer grantees or white nationalists. However your proposed wordings are weasel phrases - we don't write "It has been argued" that doesn't give the reader a sense of where the argument comes from or the weight that supports it. 10. I agree that this belongs in the validity of race section and that this section should be a summary of the race and genetics article (however that would require that article to be better first). I think we are pretty much on the same page regarding how to improve the structure of the article although I suspect issues of relative weight and of specific formulations will pop up as we go to work. ·ʍaunus·snunɐw· 01:05, 9 October 2011 (UTC)

Racial admixture studies, etc

The "Racial admixture studies" section is incoherent. I suggest something akin to:

Studies on mixed race individuals and on the relation between admixture and IQ have produced ambiguous results [Lee, 2010]. Some studies on mixed race individuals seem to contradict a genetic hypothesis (i.e. Eyferth, 1969) others seem to support it (i.e. Rowe, 2002) and still others have produced results which could be interpreted in support for either a genetic or an environmental hypothesis (Willerman, et al, 1974) [Jensen and Rushton, 2005]. With regards to studies on admixture and IQ, a number of studies have shown a relation between IQ and physical indexes of admixture, but the correlations found tend to be low and the associations found could be accounted for by social factors [Jensen, 1998; Dickens, 2005]. Some studies have show a relation between IQ and genealogical indexes of admixture (i.e. Tanzer 1939, 1941), but other studies have failed to find such an association (Witty and Jenkins, 1936) [--]. Other studies have failed to find a relation between IQ and admixture indexed by blood groups, but to what extent these studies provide evidence against a genetic hypothesis is not clear [Dickens, 2005].

Likewise, adoption studies have produced mixed results...[Lee, 2010]

This cuts down on the he said she said. Perhaps, after, include a section and "frequently discussed studies" in which a select few studies can be described in more depth. (A relatively objective way to determine which studies warrant more in depth discussion is to look at the number of citations each has had. The more discussed studies are: Scarr et al., 1977 -- blood groups -- (2)Witty and Jenkins, 1936 -- genealogy -- Eyferth, 1961 -- hybrid study -- Moore, 1986 -- adoption --- Willerman, et al, 1974 -- hybrid study -- Tizard, 1974 -- "controlled rearing" --, Weinberg et al., 1992 -- adoption study. Obviously most of these studies support am environmental hypothesis -- which is to be expected since environmentalist do most of the discussing.

As I noted the following studies have been cited in defense of a genetic hypothesis:

Fernandez, 2001 (Brazil) Pick, 1929 (SA) Claassen, 1990 (SA) Owen, 1992 (SA) Weinberg et al., 1992 (US) Codwell, 1947 (US) Lynn, 2002 (US) Rowe, 2002 (US) Feguson, 1919 (US) Peterson and Lanier, 1929 (US) Peterson and Lanier, 1929 (US) Young, 1929 (US) Grinder et al, 1964 (Caribbean) Davenport, 1928 (Caribbean) Klineberg, 1928 (US) Peterson and Lanier, 1929 (US) Bruce, 1940 (US) Bean, 1906 (US) Pearl, 1934 (US) Shockley, 1973? (US) Green, 1972 (Caribbean) Ned and Gruenfeld, 1976 (Caribbean) Tanser, 1939 (Canada) Tanser, 1941 (Canada) Eyferth, 1961 (Germany -- yes, cited by lynn in support of a genetic hypothesis) Moore, 1986 (US -- yes, the traditional adoption component showed a nonsignificant .27 SD difference and has been cited by Murray in support of a genetic hypothesis) Willerman, Naylor, and Myrianthopoulos, 1974 (US -- cited by Rushton in support of a genetic hypothesis) Herskovits, 1926 (US -- cited by Shuey in support of a genetic hypothesis) Klineberg, 1928 (US -- cited by Shuey in support of a genetic hypothesis)

And following studies have been cited in defense of an environmental hypothesis

Scarr et al., 1977 (US) Loehlin et al., 1973 (US) Witty and Jenkins, 1936 (US) Tizard, 1974 (UK) Eyferth, 1961 (Germany), Moore, 1986 (US) Willerman, et al, 1974 (US) (Nisbett -- due to the large difference between biracials raised by Black and White mothers) Herskovits, 1926 (US) (Nisbett -- due to the low correlations found) Klineberg, 1928 (US) (Nisbett -- due to the low correlations found)

In my opinion only the 7 studies mentioned above -- if any -- warrant in dept discussion, as they have each been cited more than half a dozen times. Does anyone else have an opinion on such a revision? I think we can all agree that the section as it currently reads is awful. --Hippofrank (talk) 19:32, 8 October 2011 (UTC)Hippofrank

I think that rather than attempting to give a detailed account of the studies it is a better approach to select one or two reputable secondary sources that treat the topic of admixture and intelligence and see how they weigh the material and then emulate that weighting. ·ʍaunus·snunɐw· 00:51, 9 October 2011 (UTC)


I just want to add a point. And I swear to be assuming good faith and neutral point of view. If someone did it here, he or she probably do not understand almost nothing about our race relations, and as such can not be specialist in the matter of race and miscegenation in Latin America (where it is widely common). In Brazil, almost everybody is triracial with ~80% of European descent. I'm pale, I had natural straight blonde hair (nowadays straight to mildly curly, medium brown), amber eyes and freckles and I'm son of 2 multiracials, and grandson of a Black Man, darker than the usual in Brazil. My grandfather came from an area of historical slavery, and he had sufficient European descent to make me and in a certain point my mother White. This is nothing unusual here. Conclusions about intelligence based in Race in Brazil are plain bullshit. IQ average in educated upper and middle middle class Brazilian black persons in Rio de Janeiro, Porto Alegre, São Paulo, Recife or Brasília will certainly be really much higher (105+) than among White and Japanese-Brazilian people in little towns or the countryside making part of lower or lower middle class depending on the poor public education, receiving most of their information via TV and other more unsophisticated media, receiving huge sexist and heterosexist stimulus, making part of degrading youth subcultures (a problem greater when talking about poor peripheries) and developing perverse world views and attitudes (less than 87). As, I imagine, would happen in all over the world with similar conditions.

And it is just pointless for our black people because they proved to be mostly "Caucasian" in genetics since children of slaves were mostly doomed to infant mortality or more slavery except from a curtain period in country's history. Most of the survivors which perpetuated Black African ancestry among us were mulattoes since the White Man cared about his kids. Mulattoes who appeared "blacker" or "whiter" tended to procreate among themselves due to "cor" Brazilian racial prejudice. Everybody miscegenated so they received more European ancestry. Generations with consolidated African phenotypes led to 80% European descent black people as their descendants, and generations of light mulattoes who had kids with "criollo" and/or European Brazilians led to people with Caucasian phenotypes. But at genetic level, everybody, branco, pardo or negro, is somewhat of the same race, that simple. It is useless except if the IQ average data is collected from indigenous villages, quilombos, European settlement-based towns and people more easily identifiable in urban developments with "pure" (or almost) Portuguese, East Asian and Middle Eastern descent and then compare with the average Brazilians with perceived Amerindian, African, Triracial, Latin European, non-Latin European, East Asian and Middle Eastern descent, but it hardly happen. Not doing so is fomenting certain social relations and attitudes with pseudo-science.

I do not want to add "biased" or "unsourced" information, but what I stated here are known facts said by other Wikipedia articles itself. As I read before in this discussion, people explain Black/White intelligence by North American racial relations and the scientists are mostly focused in "Western", North American specifically, relations and meanings of race. Well, these standards exclude mentioning about multiethnic societies, with highly miscegenated people, which also follow racialized subdivisions and as such the arguments about Race and Intelligence by the foreign concepts become a more uneasy idea since people in the same top/bottom of the society, independent of the genes (but having a "racial minority" phenotype and as such identified as non-white, or the inverse, by its surrounding society are a good way to show how these factors can be socially constructed), will show the same effects of these researches. Finally, what I want to say is that people can not just use random IQ average tests in various societies around the world without methods and information about how race is constructed there. They can not pick up some "blacks", some "multiracials", some "third world whites" and say that it show how their world view about racial genetic differences and its depth in complex human individual variations as intelligence is correct as if it completely reflected their original society. Can someone say that it is science? Lguipontes (talk) 21:56, 10 October 2011 (UTC)

Cool story bro. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 86.189.17.201 (talk) 14:26, 17 October 2011 (UTC)

race and genetics, rewrite

Maunus has claimed, along with others, that the "race and genetics" section gives undue weight to a genetic position. To "correct" for this, he and others have tossed in a number of irrelevant and redundant statements. As a result, the section is, in my humble opinion, incoherent. I suggest that we all collaborate on a rewrite of this section to make it more coherent and to give it the appropriate weight it deserves (perhaps 1/2 of what it has). To avoid a revert war, we can create two discussion topics below, a "rewrite of the race and genetics section" and a "discussion about a rewrite of the race and genetics section" topic, and hammer out a rewrite there. This section can be condensed and simplified quite a bit --Hippofrank (talk) 20:15, 8 October 2011 (UTC)Hippofrank (or previously, Chuck)

Hi Hippofrank, I am glad to see that you've decided to register. I basically agree that my solution was unelegant, and that writing a balanced section from scratch would be better. I currently I don't have the time to dig into that old material again. If you write up a section and post it here on the talk page for comments and suggestions for improvements I think that might be a good way to go about it. ·ʍaunus·snunɐw· 00:49, 9 October 2011 (UTC)

An error

It is said that "Murray in a 2006 study agree with Dickens and Flynn that there has been a narrowing of the gap", (Ref.: "Evidence from the Children of the 1979 Cohort of the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, 2006) The opposite, Muray reversed that statement: "Data for three Peabody achievement tests and for the Peabody picture vocabulary test administered to children of women in the 1979 cohort of the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth show that the black-white difference did not diminish for this sample of children born from the mid 1970s through the mid 1990s. This finding persists after entering covariates for the child's age and family background variables. It is robust across alternative samples and specifications of the model. The analysis supplements other evidence that shows no narrowing of the black-white difference in academic achievement tests since the late 1980s and is inconsistent with recent evidence that narrowing occurred in IQ standardizations during the same period. A hypothesis for reconciling this inconsistency is proposed." You should edit this modification. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 88.147.18.253 (talk) 04:30, 22 November 2011 (UTC)

U.S. bias?

In the first section, only U.S. data is spoken of—the American Anthropological Association, the American Psychological Association, experiments performed in the United States, et cetera. Perhaps there might be data available which isn't limited to the U.S. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Samilo78 (talk • contribs) 23:57, 4 December 2011 (UTC)

I recall making a similar comment myself many months ago. I have now decided that the reality is that this is primarily a US topic, because of that country's historical separation of races. Few other advanced countries with the ability to do so would have had the motivation to study this subject with such intensity. HiLo48 (talk) 00:12, 5 December 2011 (UTC)

Blacks have lowest IQ?

No suggestions to improve article; see WP:TPG and WP:NOTFORUM. Johnuniq (talk) 01:25, 30 October 2011 (UTC)
The following discussion has been closed. Please do not modify it.

This study [21] indicates that Sub-saharan African black people have the lowest IQ of all the worlds races. Is this true? Pass a Method talk 18:14, 24 October 2011 (UTC)

The short answer is no. The long answer is hopefully to be found in the article.·ʍaunus·snunɐw· 18:20, 24 October 2011 (UTC)
This is a talk page for discussions on improving the article, not for answering questions on the subject. I suggest you read the article for yourself, and then decide whether you think the study you link to (by Rushton and Jensen, two highly-controversial figures) is meaningful. Of course, you'll have also to decide whether you think that 'race' is anything more than a social construct, and whether 'IQ' is actually an objective measure of intelligence. If you want simple yes-or-no answers, this topic isn't a good place to find them. (And yes, the answer is 'no' if the question has any meaning in the first place, which is highly doubtful) AndyTheGrump (talk) 18:23, 24 October 2011 (UTC)


Hmm. Race is a social construct. Odd considering the basic biological principles of natural selection and geographic isolation. Suggest you read http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allopatric_speciation to get a basic idea. 80.1.163.50 (talk) 21:16, 26 October 2011 (UTC)

Suggest you read it yourself. "Allopatric speciation may occur when a species is subdivided into two genetically isolated populations". This clearly hasn't happened for Homo sapiens. Last time I looked into the matter, we seemed to be putting a great deal of effort into curing genetic isolation in the conventional manner. Yes, there is a great deal of genetic diversity, but the divisions we apply to such diversity ('races') are arbitrary social constructs - self-evidently, since nobody can agree on how many there are, and who belongs in which. AndyTheGrump (talk) 21:53, 26 October 2011 (UTC)
Yes, it is undisputed that blacks have the lowest IQ. (on average) Sorry about the obfuscator bots. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 94.116.185.96 (talk) 06:34, 28 October 2011 (UTC)
It is disputed, on the grounds that neither 'blacks' nor 'IQ' have any real meaning. Sorry about the misrepresentation. AndyTheGrump (talk) 18:30, 28 October 2011 (UTC)

"Blacks" means people with sub saharan african ancestry, verified by a high degree of interobserver correlation, "IQ" means the result of a test thought to indicate overall mental ability, and supported by mainstream psychology. There can be no question that these terms have meaning. Any attempt to suggest otherwise suggests a kind of Orwellian detachment from reality. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 195.191.66.227 (talk) 11:12, 29 October 2011 (UTC)


The consensus is that there are group differences in intelligence. The controversy is whether genetics has something to do with these differences. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 65.92.20.49 (talk) 18:32, 7 December 2011 (UTC)

Tags and problems with the article

The recent removal of the tags brings to fore the issue of the stagnant state of this article. While some sporadic work has been done on this article, the nature and quality of the change has generally been hampered by both burnout from previous editors, a lack of new editors with interest and perspective, and habitual interruption by editors interested in promoting their favored POV. In truth, what may be the best approach would be to dump most of the article, and simply summarize one of the many current secondary overview sources on the matter, instead of presenting a comprehensive rehash of the historic debate, complete with extensive arguments from those arguing against the mainstream. I've replaced the tags, and invite other editors to work towards such a goal, though I expect significant work will again be met with stiff resistance from those who chaffe at the idea that IQ has not been shown to be a racial trait. aprock (talk) 17:47, 12 December 2011 (UTC)

I'll add that if anyone feels like addressing specific section tags through edits, or removing specific section tags because they've been resolved, as opposed to stale, I fully support that sort of bold editing. Likewise improving then removing is also welcome. I'll try to make some time later in the week to do some research on specific sources and sections to help in this regard myself. aprock (talk) 18:13, 12 December 2011 (UTC)
you're absolutely right about anticipated resistance. the only way forward is to bring the matter of undue weight given to fringe theories to the fringe theories noticeboard.-- mustihussain  23:24, 12 December 2011 (UTC)
collapsing per WP:TPG and WP:NOTFORUM. aprock (talk) 17:42, 13 December 2011 (UTC)
The following discussion has been closed. Please do not modify it.


If you mean me as someone you can expect "stiff resistance" from, I won't oppose edits that improve the article's neutrality. For example this edit was fine, though I don't agree with the justification in the edit summary. Psychology, Public Policy and Law is a journal published by the APA so it satisfies WP:RS. But the paragraph removed still violated NPOV because it's unbalanced to include Jensen and Rushton's arguments without including the counter-argument from someone like Nisbett. So you won't see me going against edits like that.

The article certainly could still use improvement, but we need to not go about the changes haphazardly. In the past it's sometimes happened that editors were rushing forward with large changes while not participating in the discussion about those changes on the talk page. Working towards consensus is very difficult when people aren't willing to discuss their edits.Boothello (talk) 01:08, 13 December 2011 (UTC)

...And now we have an example already of someone trying to make a highly visible change without discussion. Hipocrite has moved the link to scientific racism up to before the beginning of the lead, suggesting that this "see also" link is more centrally important than the link to History of the race and intelligence controversy, Heritability of IQ, or Flynn effect. It's unreasonable to say that the scientific racism article is more important to this article than any of those others. To single out the scientific racism article as deserving this special place, you'd need to demonstrate that it deserves it more than any of the other sub-articles in the R&I topic area which could also be linked there. I don't think it does, so I'm reverting this change until consensus can be established.Boothello (talk) 05:28, 13 December 2011 (UTC)

sigh aprock (talk) 05:31, 13 December 2011 (UTC)
What do you want me to do? Some edits aren't helpful and that's why we need discussion. When Miradre was involved, you and Maunus did an excellent job stopping him from messing up the article in a hereditarian direction. But sometimes edits are unbalanced in the opposite direction too.Boothello (talk) 06:11, 13 December 2011 (UTC)
Make constructive edits that improve the article instead of acting as a gatekeeper, requiring your consent before changes get made. aprock (talk) 08:34, 13 December 2011 (UTC)

Aprock, what is the "mainstream" here? Mainstream among whom? Not based on your own opinion, but reliable sources. FYI, IQ has been shown to be a racial trait beyond any reasonable doubt. The debate is about causes.--Victor Chmara (talk) 12:15, 13 December 2011 (UTC)

That is not an accurate representation of mainstream scholarship, which notes that IQ is weakly correlated with race, but then notes that race may not even exist, and then that the correlation may just be autocorrelation. Hipocrite (talk) 12:23, 13 December 2011 (UTC)
Could you cite this "mainstream scholarship"? Races obviously exist as socially recognized categories. Whether or not these races correspond to some predefined taxonomic scheme is irrelevant.--Victor Chmara (talk) 12:58, 13 December 2011 (UTC)
[22]. Hipocrite (talk) 13:40, 13 December 2011 (UTC)
If there is no such thing as race, then by definition there can be no racism, scientific or otherwise. You can't have a meaningful conversation about something that does not exist. Perhaps the article should be re-named "arbitrary social categories and intelligence"? Asteuartw (talk) 14:42, 13 December 2011 (UTC)
Read the linked statement to understand how race is a social construct. Hipocrite (talk) 14:49, 13 December 2011 (UTC)
So what? Atoms, genes, and gravity are also social constructs. That does not mean that they are useless in science. Races in America are social constructs based on genetic differences[23]. There are racial differences in IQ, and there is no consensus on what causes them[24][25]][26].--Victor Chmara (talk) 15:57, 13 December 2011 (UTC)
No, Atoms, genes and gravity exist. Please don't use cherry-picked primary sources when the secondary sources disagree. Hipocrite (talk) 15:59, 13 December 2011 (UTC)
Sorry, but you would have flunked your philosophy of science class. Atoms, genes, and gravity are human constructs, not things that exist in nature. They are theoretical entities constructed on the basis of observations, just like race. The definitions of each have varied widely across time. Naive realism is incompatible with modern science.
My sources above are not cherry-picked. Two of them are consensus statements by intelligence researchers, one is a large meta-analysis of racial/ethnic differences in cognitive ability, one is a study showing that self-identified race corresponds to distinct genetic clusters, a routine finding in population genetics. You will not find a single reliable data-based source that claims that there are no racial differences in IQ. The cultural anthropologists that you draw on may disagree with me, but they have no expertise in psychological measurement and their pronouncements are not based on data. So, when we're talking about what's mainstream in race and intelligence, it matters whom you ask, e.g. intelligence researchers or cultural anthropologists.--Victor Chmara (talk) 16:41, 13 December 2011 (UTC)

The idea that an editor who is not aware of the mainstream position is going to act as gatekeeper is nothing less than baffling. This is quickly rising to the level of disruption. aprock (talk) 15:40, 13 December 2011 (UTC)

Going to act as a gatekeeper?? What the hell are you talking about? Tell me, using reliable sources, what the mainstream view is. The Mainstream Science statement and the APA report, for example, say that the cause of the black-white gap is unknown. Is that the mainstream view?--Victor Chmara (talk) 16:07, 13 December 2011 (UTC)
No, it doesn't. The statement says "Given what we know about the capacity of normal humans to achieve and function within any culture, we conclude that present-day inequalities between so-called "racial" groups are not consequences of their biological inheritance but products of historical and contemporary social, economic, educational, and political circumstances." You know, the conclusion, where they state their conclusions. Hipocrite (talk) 16:16, 13 December 2011 (UTC)
I'm not talking about the AAA statement. Please read more carefully.--Victor Chmara (talk) 16:43, 13 December 2011 (UTC)

At this point I'm going to bow out of the discussions and restate the invitations that I made above. To any editor who is concerned about the article, especially those who are going to actively examine each and every edit, please be bold and make the changes you think are needed. aprock (talk) 16:26, 13 December 2011 (UTC)

Why is it that whenever someone claims that the environmental determinist story is the mainstream position, and I ask them for sources for that view, none are ever forthcoming?--Victor Chmara (talk) 16:48, 13 December 2011 (UTC)
Perhaps because these references were given to you a dozen times and you still keep denying they exist. Your interpretation of the APA report'/ concludion, for example, while they do state that we still don't know all the causes of the IQ gap, do state that the existing evidence for a hereditarian cause is currently weaker, less than that for environmental causes. --Ramdrake (talk) 21:05, 13 December 2011 (UTC)
  1. ^ S. Scarr and R.A. Weinberg (1976). "IQ test performance of black children adopted by white families". American Psychologist. 31 (10): 726–739. doi:10.1037/0003-066X.31.10.726. {{cite journal}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
  2. ^ S. Scarr and R.A. Weinberg (1976). "IQ test performance of black children adopted by white families". American Psychologist. 31 (10): 726–739. doi:10.1037/0003-066X.31.10.726. {{cite journal}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
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