Unpleasant Facts about Race

[IM2]

Let us cut to the chase...................

In 1969, Arthur Jensen resurrected the scientific study of racial differences in IQ, which had fallen into disrepute after the Second World War. His 120-page article in Harvard Educational Review created a controversy that shook the country. It was the beginning of Prof. Jensen’s career as perhaps the most feared and hated — but deeply respected — scientist of our time. Since then, there has been tremendous progress in the study of race and intelligence, and Prof. Jensen has been joined by a score of other scholars willing to endure persecution for studying a subject their colleagues have declared beyond the pale.

The Race-IQ Non-Controversy - American Renaissance

You should bear in mind that American Renaissance is a white supremacist propaganda outlet, published by people with no actual expertise in the relevant fields. If you want to understand how "race realists" talk about these issues then they're a good source, but you shouldn't treat them as authoritative. Rather the opposite, you should look for independent corroboration of any and all claims they make, and you should realize they will always prefer explanations which they think confirm their racist ideology over explanations which challenge it. They tend to ignore or only weakly present evidence that challenges their claims while exaggerating the strength of the supporting evidence.

The Am. Ren. piece is mostly focused on this 2005 piece from Psychology, Public Policy, and Law, and you can see the tendency from those authors as well, as Nisbett commented on at the time. To pick a few examples, from Rushton and Jensen:

"The Bell Curve (Herrnstein & Murray, 1994) presented general readers an update of the evidence for the hereditarian position along with several policy recommendations and an original analysis of 11,878 youths (including 3,022 Blacks) from the 12-year National Longitudinal Survey of Youth. It found that most 17-year-olds with high scores on the Armed Forces Qualification Test, regardless of ethnic background, went on to occupational success by their late 20s and early 30s, whereas those with low scores were more inclined to welfare dependency."
​

Elsewhere I've quoted a lengthier selection from more recent research which highlights one reason why the data used in that book is inappropriate to these questions, but obviously it would be unfair to criticize Rushton and Jensen for not having read work that wasn't published at the time of this article. But, other very relevant criticisms of The Bell Curve have been well known for a long time, for example those published in Inequality By Design: Cracking the Bell Curve. From the first chapter of that book:

"One statistic is worth noting right away because it shows that there is less to The Bell Curve than some intimidated reviewers have realized: "explained variance." Near the end of their text, Herrnstein and Murray capsulize their argument by asserting that "intelligence has a powerful bearing on how people do in life" (p. 527). However, 410 pages earlier they admit that AFQT scores, their measure of IQ, explain "usually less than ten percent and often less than five percent" of the variance in how people do in life (p. 117). What does "explained variance" mean? It refers to the amount of the variation in some outcome, like income, from zero to 100 percent, that can be explained by a particular cause or set of causes. To state that intelligence explains 10 percent of the variance in, say, people's earnings is to say that intelligence accounts for 10 percent of the differences among people in earnings, leaving 90 percent of the differences among earners unaccounted for. By Herrnstein and Murray's own statistical estimate, only 5 to 10 percent of the differences in life outcomes among respondents--the odds that they became poor, criminal, unwed mothers, and so on--can be accounted for by differences among them in AFQT scores. Put another way, if we could magically give everyone identical IQs, we would still see 90 to 95 percent of the inequality we see today."
​

Maybe Rushton and Jensen can take for granted that their audience will both be familiar with the concept of "explained variance" and the fact that The Bell Curve research supports only a fairly limited role for heritable intelligence in life outcomes, but it's a crucial detail that severely limits the relevance of this point, and the phrase "more inclined" is a pretty weaselly way of eliding that point. An effect can be statistically significant but very weak.

Similarly, with group differences in IQ both Rushton and Jensen and Am. Ren. ignore the fact that the data they are citing is now quite old. In fact, Am. Ren. insists on quoting a 15 point black-white IQ gap but we know that's not accurate and hasn't been for decades because of the differential Flynn Effect. In the study I cited earlier the gap was about 5 points for 13 year olds. Similarly, newer research on gaps in educational achievement find that the gaps have closed a lot, and are highly correlated to environmental issues (segregation and poverty). See for example this report from the Stanford Center on Poverty and Inequality:

"What explains the racial and ethnic gaps among children of similar socioeconomic backgrounds? Residential and school segregation are key drivers of unequal educational opportunity. Even among families with the same income, black and Hispanic students live in much poorer neighborhoods than white children and attend schools with greater concentrations of poverty, a result of the long legacy of racial housing discrimination and exclusion in the U.S. High-poverty schools typically have fewer resources, poorer facilities, a harder time attracting and retaining skilled teachers, and more students in need of remediation and additional services. In addition, high-poverty schools typically have fewer students whose parents have economic, social, and political resources to invest in schools. As a result, segregation is strongly correlated with academic achievement gaps, even after accounting for racial and ethnic differences in socioeconomic family characteristics. Indeed, metropolitan-area achievement gaps are more strongly correlated with segregation than they are with racial and ethnic disparities in socioeconomic status."

​

This post is already getting too long but you can go on making these kinds of critiques. Nisbett offers a lot of evidence that the Am. Ren. author doesn't really attempt to rebut, despite the fact they pretend to do so (see the link above).

Basically, to sum things up: there's lots of evidence against a strong hereditarian position on the topic of "genotocracy" in general (cf. this post again). There's a tremendous amount of evidence that achievement gaps involving traditionally oppressed minority groups are primarily driven by social differences. There's also a dearth of research using modern genetics techniques, so a lot of these debates are just endlessly dragging up decades old research. In reality, the best argument that American Renaissance could make is much more modest than what they say: it's not possible from existing evidence to prove that none of the between group differences are the result of biological differences. But that in of itself is a claim driven by a bad premise: that biological differences are innate and fixed, when in fact we know that social/environmental factors can actually drive the creation of biological differences (cf. environmental influences on testosterone levels).

The real problem with the racist position is not that it's inconceivable that genetic differences between human sub-populations could explain some variation in different social outcomes or measures. It's very likely that such differences exist. But we also know that the genetic variation across human sub-populations does not actually correspond to simple racial categories. The simple racist explanation of inequality is immediately rendered implausible just by what we know about population genetics.

We also know that the overwhelming majority of differences in social outcome (remember that it's 90% even according to The Bell Curve) are not attributable to simple and fixed biological factors. We know a lot about how social inequalities in the present are the result of social injustices both past and present, and highly correlated to measures like concentration of poverty. We even know how social inequality contributes to measurable biological differences. Racists want to find simple justifications for not dealing with any of those social issues. They want to treat differences as the result of fixed and innate biology, but the data don't support that conclusion.

Thank you.

 

[Asclepias]

Let us cut to the chase...................

In 1969, Arthur Jensen resurrected the scientific study of racial differences in IQ, which had fallen into disrepute after the Second World War. His 120-page article in Harvard Educational Review created a controversy that shook the country. It was the beginning of Prof. Jensen’s career as perhaps the most feared and hated — but deeply respected — scientist of our time. Since then, there has been tremendous progress in the study of race and intelligence, and Prof. Jensen has been joined by a score of other scholars willing to endure persecution for studying a subject their colleagues have declared beyond the pale.

The Race-IQ Non-Controversy - American Renaissance

You should bear in mind that American Renaissance is a white supremacist propaganda outlet, published by people with no actual expertise in the relevant fields. If you want to understand how "race realists" talk about these issues then they're a good source, but you shouldn't treat them as authoritative. Rather the opposite, you should look for independent corroboration of any and all claims they make, and you should realize they will always prefer explanations which they think confirm their racist ideology over explanations which challenge it. They tend to ignore or only weakly present evidence that challenges their claims while exaggerating the strength of the supporting evidence.

The Am. Ren. piece is mostly focused on this 2005 piece from Psychology, Public Policy, and Law, and you can see the tendency from those authors as well, as Nisbett commented on at the time. To pick a few examples, from Rushton and Jensen:

"The Bell Curve (Herrnstein & Murray, 1994) presented general readers an update of the evidence for the hereditarian position along with several policy recommendations and an original analysis of 11,878 youths (including 3,022 Blacks) from the 12-year National Longitudinal Survey of Youth. It found that most 17-year-olds with high scores on the Armed Forces Qualification Test, regardless of ethnic background, went on to occupational success by their late 20s and early 30s, whereas those with low scores were more inclined to welfare dependency."
​

Elsewhere I've quoted a lengthier selection from more recent research which highlights one reason why the data used in that book is inappropriate to these questions, but obviously it would be unfair to criticize Rushton and Jensen for not having read work that wasn't published at the time of this article. But, other very relevant criticisms of The Bell Curve have been well known for a long time, for example those published in Inequality By Design: Cracking the Bell Curve. From the first chapter of that book:

"One statistic is worth noting right away because it shows that there is less to The Bell Curve than some intimidated reviewers have realized: "explained variance." Near the end of their text, Herrnstein and Murray capsulize their argument by asserting that "intelligence has a powerful bearing on how people do in life" (p. 527). However, 410 pages earlier they admit that AFQT scores, their measure of IQ, explain "usually less than ten percent and often less than five percent" of the variance in how people do in life (p. 117). What does "explained variance" mean? It refers to the amount of the variation in some outcome, like income, from zero to 100 percent, that can be explained by a particular cause or set of causes. To state that intelligence explains 10 percent of the variance in, say, people's earnings is to say that intelligence accounts for 10 percent of the differences among people in earnings, leaving 90 percent of the differences among earners unaccounted for. By Herrnstein and Murray's own statistical estimate, only 5 to 10 percent of the differences in life outcomes among respondents--the odds that they became poor, criminal, unwed mothers, and so on--can be accounted for by differences among them in AFQT scores. Put another way, if we could magically give everyone identical IQs, we would still see 90 to 95 percent of the inequality we see today."
​

Maybe Rushton and Jensen can take for granted that their audience will both be familiar with the concept of "explained variance" and the fact that The Bell Curve research supports only a fairly limited role for heritable intelligence in life outcomes, but it's a crucial detail that severely limits the relevance of this point, and the phrase "more inclined" is a pretty weaselly way of eliding that point. An effect can be statistically significant but very weak.

Similarly, with group differences in IQ both Rushton and Jensen and Am. Ren. ignore the fact that the data they are citing is now quite old. In fact, Am. Ren. insists on quoting a 15 point black-white IQ gap but we know that's not accurate and hasn't been for decades because of the differential Flynn Effect. In the study I cited earlier the gap was about 5 points for 13 year olds. Similarly, newer research on gaps in educational achievement find that the gaps have closed a lot, and are highly correlated to environmental issues (segregation and poverty). See for example this report from the Stanford Center on Poverty and Inequality:

"What explains the racial and ethnic gaps among children of similar socioeconomic backgrounds? Residential and school segregation are key drivers of unequal educational opportunity. Even among families with the same income, black and Hispanic students live in much poorer neighborhoods than white children and attend schools with greater concentrations of poverty, a result of the long legacy of racial housing discrimination and exclusion in the U.S. High-poverty schools typically have fewer resources, poorer facilities, a harder time attracting and retaining skilled teachers, and more students in need of remediation and additional services. In addition, high-poverty schools typically have fewer students whose parents have economic, social, and political resources to invest in schools. As a result, segregation is strongly correlated with academic achievement gaps, even after accounting for racial and ethnic differences in socioeconomic family characteristics. Indeed, metropolitan-area achievement gaps are more strongly correlated with segregation than they are with racial and ethnic disparities in socioeconomic status."

​

This post is already getting too long but you can go on making these kinds of critiques. Nisbett offers a lot of evidence that the Am. Ren. author doesn't really attempt to rebut, despite the fact they pretend to do so (see the link above).

Basically, to sum things up: there's lots of evidence against a strong hereditarian position on the topic of "genotocracy" in general (cf. this post again). There's a tremendous amount of evidence that achievement gaps involving traditionally oppressed minority groups are primarily driven by social differences. There's also a dearth of research using modern genetics techniques, so a lot of these debates are just endlessly dragging up decades old research. In reality, the best argument that American Renaissance could make is much more modest than what they say: it's not possible from existing evidence to prove that none of the between group differences are the result of biological differences. But that in of itself is a claim driven by a bad premise: that biological differences are innate and fixed, when in fact we know that social/environmental factors can actually drive the creation of biological differences (cf. environmental influences on testosterone levels).

The real problem with the racist position is not that it's inconceivable that genetic differences between human sub-populations could explain some variation in different social outcomes or measures. It's very likely that such differences exist. But we also know that the genetic variation across human sub-populations does not actually correspond to simple racial categories. The simple racist explanation of inequality is immediately rendered implausible just by what we know about population genetics.

We also know that the overwhelming majority of differences in social outcome (remember that it's 90% even according to The Bell Curve) are not attributable to simple and fixed biological factors. We know a lot about how social inequalities in the present are the result of social injustices both past and present, and highly correlated to measures like concentration of poverty. We even know how social inequality contributes to measurable biological differences. Racists want to find simple justifications for not dealing with any of those social issues. They want to treat differences as the result of fixed and innate biology, but the data don't support that conclusion.

IOW its just a bunch of propaganda by insecure white racists like I pointed out in the first place.

 

[MacTheKnife]

Let us cut to the chase...................

In 1969, Arthur Jensen resurrected the scientific study of racial differences in IQ, which had fallen into disrepute after the Second World War. His 120-page article in Harvard Educational Review created a controversy that shook the country. It was the beginning of Prof. Jensen’s career as perhaps the most feared and hated — but deeply respected — scientist of our time. Since then, there has been tremendous progress in the study of race and intelligence, and Prof. Jensen has been joined by a score of other scholars willing to endure persecution for studying a subject their colleagues have declared beyond the pale.

The Race-IQ Non-Controversy - American Renaissance

You should bear in mind that American Renaissance is a white supremacist propaganda outlet, published by people with no actual expertise in the relevant fields. If you want to understand how "race realists" talk about these issues then they're a good source, but you shouldn't treat them as authoritative. Rather the opposite, you should look for independent corroboration of any and all claims they make, and you should realize they will always prefer explanations which they think confirm their racist ideology over explanations which challenge it. They tend to ignore or only weakly present evidence that challenges their claims while exaggerating the strength of the supporting evidence.

The Am. Ren. piece is mostly focused on this 2005 piece from Psychology, Public Policy, and Law, and you can see the tendency from those authors as well, as Nisbett commented on at the time. To pick a few examples, from Rushton and Jensen:

"The Bell Curve (Herrnstein & Murray, 1994) presented general readers an update of the evidence for the hereditarian position along with several policy recommendations and an original analysis of 11,878 youths (including 3,022 Blacks) from the 12-year National Longitudinal Survey of Youth. It found that most 17-year-olds with high scores on the Armed Forces Qualification Test, regardless of ethnic background, went on to occupational success by their late 20s and early 30s, whereas those with low scores were more inclined to welfare dependency."
​

Elsewhere I've quoted a lengthier selection from more recent research which highlights one reason why the data used in that book is inappropriate to these questions, but obviously it would be unfair to criticize Rushton and Jensen for not having read work that wasn't published at the time of this article. But, other very relevant criticisms of The Bell Curve have been well known for a long time, for example those published in Inequality By Design: Cracking the Bell Curve. From the first chapter of that book:

"One statistic is worth noting right away because it shows that there is less to The Bell Curve than some intimidated reviewers have realized: "explained variance." Near the end of their text, Herrnstein and Murray capsulize their argument by asserting that "intelligence has a powerful bearing on how people do in life" (p. 527). However, 410 pages earlier they admit that AFQT scores, their measure of IQ, explain "usually less than ten percent and often less than five percent" of the variance in how people do in life (p. 117). What does "explained variance" mean? It refers to the amount of the variation in some outcome, like income, from zero to 100 percent, that can be explained by a particular cause or set of causes. To state that intelligence explains 10 percent of the variance in, say, people's earnings is to say that intelligence accounts for 10 percent of the differences among people in earnings, leaving 90 percent of the differences among earners unaccounted for. By Herrnstein and Murray's own statistical estimate, only 5 to 10 percent of the differences in life outcomes among respondents--the odds that they became poor, criminal, unwed mothers, and so on--can be accounted for by differences among them in AFQT scores. Put another way, if we could magically give everyone identical IQs, we would still see 90 to 95 percent of the inequality we see today."
​

Maybe Rushton and Jensen can take for granted that their audience will both be familiar with the concept of "explained variance" and the fact that The Bell Curve research supports only a fairly limited role for heritable intelligence in life outcomes, but it's a crucial detail that severely limits the relevance of this point, and the phrase "more inclined" is a pretty weaselly way of eliding that point. An effect can be statistically significant but very weak.

Similarly, with group differences in IQ both Rushton and Jensen and Am. Ren. ignore the fact that the data they are citing is now quite old. In fact, Am. Ren. insists on quoting a 15 point black-white IQ gap but we know that's not accurate and hasn't been for decades because of the differential Flynn Effect. In the study I cited earlier the gap was about 5 points for 13 year olds. Similarly, newer research on gaps in educational achievement find that the gaps have closed a lot, and are highly correlated to environmental issues (segregation and poverty). See for example this report from the Stanford Center on Poverty and Inequality:

"What explains the racial and ethnic gaps among children of similar socioeconomic backgrounds? Residential and school segregation are key drivers of unequal educational opportunity. Even among families with the same income, black and Hispanic students live in much poorer neighborhoods than white children and attend schools with greater concentrations of poverty, a result of the long legacy of racial housing discrimination and exclusion in the U.S. High-poverty schools typically have fewer resources, poorer facilities, a harder time attracting and retaining skilled teachers, and more students in need of remediation and additional services. In addition, high-poverty schools typically have fewer students whose parents have economic, social, and political resources to invest in schools. As a result, segregation is strongly correlated with academic achievement gaps, even after accounting for racial and ethnic differences in socioeconomic family characteristics. Indeed, metropolitan-area achievement gaps are more strongly correlated with segregation than they are with racial and ethnic disparities in socioeconomic status."

​

This post is already getting too long but you can go on making these kinds of critiques. Nisbett offers a lot of evidence that the Am. Ren. author doesn't really attempt to rebut, despite the fact they pretend to do so (see the link above).

Basically, to sum things up: there's lots of evidence against a strong hereditarian position on the topic of "genotocracy" in general (cf. this post again). There's a tremendous amount of evidence that achievement gaps involving traditionally oppressed minority groups are primarily driven by social differences. There's also a dearth of research using modern genetics techniques, so a lot of these debates are just endlessly dragging up decades old research. In reality, the best argument that American Renaissance could make is much more modest than what they say: it's not possible from existing evidence to prove that none of the between group differences are the result of biological differences. But that in of itself is a claim driven by a bad premise: that biological differences are innate and fixed, when in fact we know that social/environmental factors can actually drive the creation of biological differences (cf. environmental influences on testosterone levels).

The real problem with the racist position is not that it's inconceivable that genetic differences between human sub-populations could explain some variation in different social outcomes or measures. It's very likely that such differences exist. But we also know that the genetic variation across human sub-populations does not actually correspond to simple racial categories. The simple racist explanation of inequality is immediately rendered implausible just by what we know about population genetics.

We also know that the overwhelming majority of differences in social outcome (remember that it's 90% even according to The Bell Curve) are not attributable to simple and fixed biological factors. We know a lot about how social inequalities in the present are the result of social injustices both past and present, and highly correlated to measures like concentration of poverty. We even know how social inequality contributes to measurable biological differences. Racists want to find simple justifications for not dealing with any of those social issues. They want to treat differences as the result of fixed and innate biology, but the data don't support that conclusion.

Your criticism and material is outdated....see my previous post. Huge advances in the field of genetics and intelligence are being made quickly now. You are relying on old biased liberal objections based on the fallacious belief that all people are equal. You have let politics get between you and the truth.......your kind maintained a taboo on genetic and intelligence research for a long time....the taboo is now being shredded as more and more scientists are disregarding the pc bullshite that formulated the taboo.

Political Correctness Prevents Advancement of Science

 

[Asclepias]

Let us cut to the chase...................

In 1969, Arthur Jensen resurrected the scientific study of racial differences in IQ, which had fallen into disrepute after the Second World War. His 120-page article in Harvard Educational Review created a controversy that shook the country. It was the beginning of Prof. Jensen’s career as perhaps the most feared and hated — but deeply respected — scientist of our time. Since then, there has been tremendous progress in the study of race and intelligence, and Prof. Jensen has been joined by a score of other scholars willing to endure persecution for studying a subject their colleagues have declared beyond the pale.

The Race-IQ Non-Controversy - American Renaissance

You should bear in mind that American Renaissance is a white supremacist propaganda outlet, published by people with no actual expertise in the relevant fields. If you want to understand how "race realists" talk about these issues then they're a good source, but you shouldn't treat them as authoritative. Rather the opposite, you should look for independent corroboration of any and all claims they make, and you should realize they will always prefer explanations which they think confirm their racist ideology over explanations which challenge it. They tend to ignore or only weakly present evidence that challenges their claims while exaggerating the strength of the supporting evidence.

The Am. Ren. piece is mostly focused on this 2005 piece from Psychology, Public Policy, and Law, and you can see the tendency from those authors as well, as Nisbett commented on at the time. To pick a few examples, from Rushton and Jensen:

"The Bell Curve (Herrnstein & Murray, 1994) presented general readers an update of the evidence for the hereditarian position along with several policy recommendations and an original analysis of 11,878 youths (including 3,022 Blacks) from the 12-year National Longitudinal Survey of Youth. It found that most 17-year-olds with high scores on the Armed Forces Qualification Test, regardless of ethnic background, went on to occupational success by their late 20s and early 30s, whereas those with low scores were more inclined to welfare dependency."
​

Elsewhere I've quoted a lengthier selection from more recent research which highlights one reason why the data used in that book is inappropriate to these questions, but obviously it would be unfair to criticize Rushton and Jensen for not having read work that wasn't published at the time of this article. But, other very relevant criticisms of The Bell Curve have been well known for a long time, for example those published in Inequality By Design: Cracking the Bell Curve. From the first chapter of that book:

"One statistic is worth noting right away because it shows that there is less to The Bell Curve than some intimidated reviewers have realized: "explained variance." Near the end of their text, Herrnstein and Murray capsulize their argument by asserting that "intelligence has a powerful bearing on how people do in life" (p. 527). However, 410 pages earlier they admit that AFQT scores, their measure of IQ, explain "usually less than ten percent and often less than five percent" of the variance in how people do in life (p. 117). What does "explained variance" mean? It refers to the amount of the variation in some outcome, like income, from zero to 100 percent, that can be explained by a particular cause or set of causes. To state that intelligence explains 10 percent of the variance in, say, people's earnings is to say that intelligence accounts for 10 percent of the differences among people in earnings, leaving 90 percent of the differences among earners unaccounted for. By Herrnstein and Murray's own statistical estimate, only 5 to 10 percent of the differences in life outcomes among respondents--the odds that they became poor, criminal, unwed mothers, and so on--can be accounted for by differences among them in AFQT scores. Put another way, if we could magically give everyone identical IQs, we would still see 90 to 95 percent of the inequality we see today."
​

Maybe Rushton and Jensen can take for granted that their audience will both be familiar with the concept of "explained variance" and the fact that The Bell Curve research supports only a fairly limited role for heritable intelligence in life outcomes, but it's a crucial detail that severely limits the relevance of this point, and the phrase "more inclined" is a pretty weaselly way of eliding that point. An effect can be statistically significant but very weak.

Similarly, with group differences in IQ both Rushton and Jensen and Am. Ren. ignore the fact that the data they are citing is now quite old. In fact, Am. Ren. insists on quoting a 15 point black-white IQ gap but we know that's not accurate and hasn't been for decades because of the differential Flynn Effect. In the study I cited earlier the gap was about 5 points for 13 year olds. Similarly, newer research on gaps in educational achievement find that the gaps have closed a lot, and are highly correlated to environmental issues (segregation and poverty). See for example this report from the Stanford Center on Poverty and Inequality:

"What explains the racial and ethnic gaps among children of similar socioeconomic backgrounds? Residential and school segregation are key drivers of unequal educational opportunity. Even among families with the same income, black and Hispanic students live in much poorer neighborhoods than white children and attend schools with greater concentrations of poverty, a result of the long legacy of racial housing discrimination and exclusion in the U.S. High-poverty schools typically have fewer resources, poorer facilities, a harder time attracting and retaining skilled teachers, and more students in need of remediation and additional services. In addition, high-poverty schools typically have fewer students whose parents have economic, social, and political resources to invest in schools. As a result, segregation is strongly correlated with academic achievement gaps, even after accounting for racial and ethnic differences in socioeconomic family characteristics. Indeed, metropolitan-area achievement gaps are more strongly correlated with segregation than they are with racial and ethnic disparities in socioeconomic status."

​

This post is already getting too long but you can go on making these kinds of critiques. Nisbett offers a lot of evidence that the Am. Ren. author doesn't really attempt to rebut, despite the fact they pretend to do so (see the link above).

Basically, to sum things up: there's lots of evidence against a strong hereditarian position on the topic of "genotocracy" in general (cf. this post again). There's a tremendous amount of evidence that achievement gaps involving traditionally oppressed minority groups are primarily driven by social differences. There's also a dearth of research using modern genetics techniques, so a lot of these debates are just endlessly dragging up decades old research. In reality, the best argument that American Renaissance could make is much more modest than what they say: it's not possible from existing evidence to prove that none of the between group differences are the result of biological differences. But that in of itself is a claim driven by a bad premise: that biological differences are innate and fixed, when in fact we know that social/environmental factors can actually drive the creation of biological differences (cf. environmental influences on testosterone levels).

The real problem with the racist position is not that it's inconceivable that genetic differences between human sub-populations could explain some variation in different social outcomes or measures. It's very likely that such differences exist. But we also know that the genetic variation across human sub-populations does not actually correspond to simple racial categories. The simple racist explanation of inequality is immediately rendered implausible just by what we know about population genetics.

We also know that the overwhelming majority of differences in social outcome (remember that it's 90% even according to The Bell Curve) are not attributable to simple and fixed biological factors. We know a lot about how social inequalities in the present are the result of social injustices both past and present, and highly correlated to measures like concentration of poverty. We even know how social inequality contributes to measurable biological differences. Racists want to find simple justifications for not dealing with any of those social issues. They want to treat differences as the result of fixed and innate biology, but the data don't support that conclusion.

Your criticism and material is outdated....see my previous post. Huge advances in the field of genetics and intelligence are being made quickly now. You are relying on old biased liberal objections based on the fallacious belief that all people are equal. You have let politics get between you and the truth.......your kind maintained a taboo on genetic and intelligence research for a long time....the taboo is now being shredded as more and more scientists are disregarding the pc bullshite that formulated the taboo.

Youre linking to debunked sources. You have no credibility here lice head.

 

[well named]

Your criticism and material is outdated....see my previous post.

As far as I can tell your previous post (the neuroscience one?) is not relevant to my criticism. I agree that neuroscience will have something to contribute to studies of intelligence (as will more advanced techniques in genetics), and I agree that intelligence is heritable. The section on epigenetics is essentially just an elaboration of one of my main points, i.e. that these characteristics are not fixed in a simple way.

 

[IM2]

Let us cut to the chase...................

In 1969, Arthur Jensen resurrected the scientific study of racial differences in IQ, which had fallen into disrepute after the Second World War. His 120-page article in Harvard Educational Review created a controversy that shook the country. It was the beginning of Prof. Jensen’s career as perhaps the most feared and hated — but deeply respected — scientist of our time. Since then, there has been tremendous progress in the study of race and intelligence, and Prof. Jensen has been joined by a score of other scholars willing to endure persecution for studying a subject their colleagues have declared beyond the pale.

The Race-IQ Non-Controversy - American Renaissance

You should bear in mind that American Renaissance is a white supremacist propaganda outlet, published by people with no actual expertise in the relevant fields. If you want to understand how "race realists" talk about these issues then they're a good source, but you shouldn't treat them as authoritative. Rather the opposite, you should look for independent corroboration of any and all claims they make, and you should realize they will always prefer explanations which they think confirm their racist ideology over explanations which challenge it. They tend to ignore or only weakly present evidence that challenges their claims while exaggerating the strength of the supporting evidence.

The Am. Ren. piece is mostly focused on this 2005 piece from Psychology, Public Policy, and Law, and you can see the tendency from those authors as well, as Nisbett commented on at the time. To pick a few examples, from Rushton and Jensen:

"The Bell Curve (Herrnstein & Murray, 1994) presented general readers an update of the evidence for the hereditarian position along with several policy recommendations and an original analysis of 11,878 youths (including 3,022 Blacks) from the 12-year National Longitudinal Survey of Youth. It found that most 17-year-olds with high scores on the Armed Forces Qualification Test, regardless of ethnic background, went on to occupational success by their late 20s and early 30s, whereas those with low scores were more inclined to welfare dependency."
​

Elsewhere I've quoted a lengthier selection from more recent research which highlights one reason why the data used in that book is inappropriate to these questions, but obviously it would be unfair to criticize Rushton and Jensen for not having read work that wasn't published at the time of this article. But, other very relevant criticisms of The Bell Curve have been well known for a long time, for example those published in Inequality By Design: Cracking the Bell Curve. From the first chapter of that book:

"One statistic is worth noting right away because it shows that there is less to The Bell Curve than some intimidated reviewers have realized: "explained variance." Near the end of their text, Herrnstein and Murray capsulize their argument by asserting that "intelligence has a powerful bearing on how people do in life" (p. 527). However, 410 pages earlier they admit that AFQT scores, their measure of IQ, explain "usually less than ten percent and often less than five percent" of the variance in how people do in life (p. 117). What does "explained variance" mean? It refers to the amount of the variation in some outcome, like income, from zero to 100 percent, that can be explained by a particular cause or set of causes. To state that intelligence explains 10 percent of the variance in, say, people's earnings is to say that intelligence accounts for 10 percent of the differences among people in earnings, leaving 90 percent of the differences among earners unaccounted for. By Herrnstein and Murray's own statistical estimate, only 5 to 10 percent of the differences in life outcomes among respondents--the odds that they became poor, criminal, unwed mothers, and so on--can be accounted for by differences among them in AFQT scores. Put another way, if we could magically give everyone identical IQs, we would still see 90 to 95 percent of the inequality we see today."
​

Maybe Rushton and Jensen can take for granted that their audience will both be familiar with the concept of "explained variance" and the fact that The Bell Curve research supports only a fairly limited role for heritable intelligence in life outcomes, but it's a crucial detail that severely limits the relevance of this point, and the phrase "more inclined" is a pretty weaselly way of eliding that point. An effect can be statistically significant but very weak.

Similarly, with group differences in IQ both Rushton and Jensen and Am. Ren. ignore the fact that the data they are citing is now quite old. In fact, Am. Ren. insists on quoting a 15 point black-white IQ gap but we know that's not accurate and hasn't been for decades because of the differential Flynn Effect. In the study I cited earlier the gap was about 5 points for 13 year olds. Similarly, newer research on gaps in educational achievement find that the gaps have closed a lot, and are highly correlated to environmental issues (segregation and poverty). See for example this report from the Stanford Center on Poverty and Inequality:

"What explains the racial and ethnic gaps among children of similar socioeconomic backgrounds? Residential and school segregation are key drivers of unequal educational opportunity. Even among families with the same income, black and Hispanic students live in much poorer neighborhoods than white children and attend schools with greater concentrations of poverty, a result of the long legacy of racial housing discrimination and exclusion in the U.S. High-poverty schools typically have fewer resources, poorer facilities, a harder time attracting and retaining skilled teachers, and more students in need of remediation and additional services. In addition, high-poverty schools typically have fewer students whose parents have economic, social, and political resources to invest in schools. As a result, segregation is strongly correlated with academic achievement gaps, even after accounting for racial and ethnic differences in socioeconomic family characteristics. Indeed, metropolitan-area achievement gaps are more strongly correlated with segregation than they are with racial and ethnic disparities in socioeconomic status."

​

This post is already getting too long but you can go on making these kinds of critiques. Nisbett offers a lot of evidence that the Am. Ren. author doesn't really attempt to rebut, despite the fact they pretend to do so (see the link above).

Basically, to sum things up: there's lots of evidence against a strong hereditarian position on the topic of "genotocracy" in general (cf. this post again). There's a tremendous amount of evidence that achievement gaps involving traditionally oppressed minority groups are primarily driven by social differences. There's also a dearth of research using modern genetics techniques, so a lot of these debates are just endlessly dragging up decades old research. In reality, the best argument that American Renaissance could make is much more modest than what they say: it's not possible from existing evidence to prove that none of the between group differences are the result of biological differences. But that in of itself is a claim driven by a bad premise: that biological differences are innate and fixed, when in fact we know that social/environmental factors can actually drive the creation of biological differences (cf. environmental influences on testosterone levels).

The real problem with the racist position is not that it's inconceivable that genetic differences between human sub-populations could explain some variation in different social outcomes or measures. It's very likely that such differences exist. But we also know that the genetic variation across human sub-populations does not actually correspond to simple racial categories. The simple racist explanation of inequality is immediately rendered implausible just by what we know about population genetics.

We also know that the overwhelming majority of differences in social outcome (remember that it's 90% even according to The Bell Curve) are not attributable to simple and fixed biological factors. We know a lot about how social inequalities in the present are the result of social injustices both past and present, and highly correlated to measures like concentration of poverty. We even know how social inequality contributes to measurable biological differences. Racists want to find simple justifications for not dealing with any of those social issues. They want to treat differences as the result of fixed and innate biology, but the data don't support that conclusion.

Your criticism and material is outdated....see my previous post. Huge advances in the field of genetics and intelligence are being made quickly now. You are relying on old biased liberal objections based on the fallacious belief that all people are equal. You have let politics get between you and the truth.......your kind maintained a taboo on genetic and intelligence research for a long time....the taboo is now being shredded as more and more scientists are disregarding the pc bullshite that formulated the taboo.

Political Correctness Prevents Advancement of Science

All people are equal. Race has nothing to do with IQ.

 

[MacTheKnife]

The Race-IQ Non-Controversy - American Renaissance[/QUOTE]

You should bear in mind that American Renaissance is a white supremacist propaganda outlet, published by people with no actual expertise in the relevant fields. If you want to understand how "race realists" talk about these issues then they're a good source, but you shouldn't treat them as authoritative. Rather the opposite, you should look for independent corroboration of any and all claims they make, and you should realize they will always prefer explanations which they think confirm their racist ideology over explanations which challenge it. They tend to ignore or only weakly present evidence that challenges their claims while exaggerating the strength of the supporting evidence.

The Am. Ren. piece is mostly focused on this 2005 piece from Psychology, Public Policy, and Law, and you can see the tendency from those authors as well, as Nisbett commented on at the time. To pick a few examples, from Rushton and Jensen:

"The Bell Curve (Herrnstein & Murray, 1994) presented general readers an update of the evidence for the hereditarian position along with several policy recommendations and an original analysis of 11,878 youths (including 3,022 Blacks) from the 12-year National Longitudinal Survey of Youth. It found that most 17-year-olds with high scores on the Armed Forces Qualification Test, regardless of ethnic background, went on to occupational success by their late 20s and early 30s, whereas those with low scores were more inclined to welfare dependency."
​

Elsewhere I've quoted a lengthier selection from more recent research which highlights one reason why the data used in that book is inappropriate to these questions, but obviously it would be unfair to criticize Rushton and Jensen for not having read work that wasn't published at the time of this article. But, other very relevant criticisms of The Bell Curve have been well known for a long time, for example those published in Inequality By Design: Cracking the Bell Curve. From the first chapter of that book:

"One statistic is worth noting right away because it shows that there is less to The Bell Curve than some intimidated reviewers have realized: "explained variance." Near the end of their text, Herrnstein and Murray capsulize their argument by asserting that "intelligence has a powerful bearing on how people do in life" (p. 527). However, 410 pages earlier they admit that AFQT scores, their measure of IQ, explain "usually less than ten percent and often less than five percent" of the variance in how people do in life (p. 117). What does "explained variance" mean? It refers to the amount of the variation in some outcome, like income, from zero to 100 percent, that can be explained by a particular cause or set of causes. To state that intelligence explains 10 percent of the variance in, say, people's earnings is to say that intelligence accounts for 10 percent of the differences among people in earnings, leaving 90 percent of the differences among earners unaccounted for. By Herrnstein and Murray's own statistical estimate, only 5 to 10 percent of the differences in life outcomes among respondents--the odds that they became poor, criminal, unwed mothers, and so on--can be accounted for by differences among them in AFQT scores. Put another way, if we could magically give everyone identical IQs, we would still see 90 to 95 percent of the inequality we see today."
​

Maybe Rushton and Jensen can take for granted that their audience will both be familiar with the concept of "explained variance" and the fact that The Bell Curve research supports only a fairly limited role for heritable intelligence in life outcomes, but it's a crucial detail that severely limits the relevance of this point, and the phrase "more inclined" is a pretty weaselly way of eliding that point. An effect can be statistically significant but very weak.

Similarly, with group differences in IQ both Rushton and Jensen and Am. Ren. ignore the fact that the data they are citing is now quite old. In fact, Am. Ren. insists on quoting a 15 point black-white IQ gap but we know that's not accurate and hasn't been for decades because of the differential Flynn Effect. In the study I cited earlier the gap was about 5 points for 13 year olds. Similarly, newer research on gaps in educational achievement find that the gaps have closed a lot, and are highly correlated to environmental issues (segregation and poverty). See for example this report from the Stanford Center on Poverty and Inequality:

"What explains the racial and ethnic gaps among children of similar socioeconomic backgrounds? Residential and school segregation are key drivers of unequal educational opportunity. Even among families with the same income, black and Hispanic students live in much poorer neighborhoods than white children and attend schools with greater concentrations of poverty, a result of the long legacy of racial housing discrimination and exclusion in the U.S. High-poverty schools typically have fewer resources, poorer facilities, a harder time attracting and retaining skilled teachers, and more students in need of remediation and additional services. In addition, high-poverty schools typically have fewer students whose parents have economic, social, and political resources to invest in schools. As a result, segregation is strongly correlated with academic achievement gaps, even after accounting for racial and ethnic differences in socioeconomic family characteristics. Indeed, metropolitan-area achievement gaps are more strongly correlated with segregation than they are with racial and ethnic disparities in socioeconomic status."

​

This post is already getting too long but you can go on making these kinds of critiques. Nisbett offers a lot of evidence that the Am. Ren. author doesn't really attempt to rebut, despite the fact they pretend to do so (see the link above).

Basically, to sum things up: there's lots of evidence against a strong hereditarian position on the topic of "genotocracy" in general (cf. this post again). There's a tremendous amount of evidence that achievement gaps involving traditionally oppressed minority groups are primarily driven by social differences. There's also a dearth of research using modern genetics techniques, so a lot of these debates are just endlessly dragging up decades old research. In reality, the best argument that American Renaissance could make is much more modest than what they say: it's not possible from existing evidence to prove that none of the between group differences are the result of biological differences. But that in of itself is a claim driven by a bad premise: that biological differences are innate and fixed, when in fact we know that social/environmental factors can actually drive the creation of biological differences (cf. environmental influences on testosterone levels).

The real problem with the racist position is not that it's inconceivable that genetic differences between human sub-populations could explain some variation in different social outcomes or measures. It's very likely that such differences exist. But we also know that the genetic variation across human sub-populations does not actually correspond to simple racial categories. The simple racist explanation of inequality is immediately rendered implausible just by what we know about population genetics.

We also know that the overwhelming majority of differences in social outcome (remember that it's 90% even according to The Bell Curve) are not attributable to simple and fixed biological factors. We know a lot about how social inequalities in the present are the result of social injustices both past and present, and highly correlated to measures like concentration of poverty. We even know how social inequality contributes to measurable biological differences. Racists want to find simple justifications for not dealing with any of those social issues. They want to treat differences as the result of fixed and innate biology, but the data don't support that conclusion.[/QUOTE]

Your criticism and material is outdated....see my previous post. Huge advances in the field of genetics and intelligence are being made quickly now. You are relying on old biased liberal objections based on the fallacious belief that all people are equal. You have let politics get between you and the truth.......your kind maintained a taboo on genetic and intelligence research for a long time....the taboo is now being shredded as more and more scientists are disregarding the pc bullshite that formulated the taboo.[/QUOTE]
Youre linking to debunked sources. You have no credibility here lice head. [/QUOTE]

Let us cut to the chase...................

In 1969, Arthur Jensen resurrected the scientific study of racial differences in IQ, which had fallen into disrepute after the Second World War. His 120-page article in Harvard Educational Review created a controversy that shook the country. It was the beginning of Prof. Jensen’s career as perhaps the most feared and hated — but deeply respected — scientist of our time. Since then, there has been tremendous progress in the study of race and intelligence, and Prof. Jensen has been joined by a score of other scholars willing to endure persecution for studying a subject their colleagues have declared beyond the pale.

The Race-IQ Non-Controversy - American Renaissance

You should bear in mind that American Renaissance is a white supremacist propaganda outlet, published by people with no actual expertise in the relevant fields. If you want to understand how "race realists" talk about these issues then they're a good source, but you shouldn't treat them as authoritative. Rather the opposite, you should look for independent corroboration of any and all claims they make, and you should realize they will always prefer explanations which they think confirm their racist ideology over explanations which challenge it. They tend to ignore or only weakly present evidence that challenges their claims while exaggerating the strength of the supporting evidence.

The Am. Ren. piece is mostly focused on this 2005 piece from Psychology, Public Policy, and Law, and you can see the tendency from those authors as well, as Nisbett commented on at the time. To pick a few examples, from Rushton and Jensen:

"The Bell Curve (Herrnstein & Murray, 1994) presented general readers an update of the evidence for the hereditarian position along with several policy recommendations and an original analysis of 11,878 youths (including 3,022 Blacks) from the 12-year National Longitudinal Survey of Youth. It found that most 17-year-olds with high scores on the Armed Forces Qualification Test, regardless of ethnic background, went on to occupational success by their late 20s and early 30s, whereas those with low scores were more inclined to welfare dependency."
​

Elsewhere I've quoted a lengthier selection from more recent research which highlights one reason why the data used in that book is inappropriate to these questions, but obviously it would be unfair to criticize Rushton and Jensen for not having read work that wasn't published at the time of this article. But, other very relevant criticisms of The Bell Curve have been well known for a long time, for example those published in Inequality By Design: Cracking the Bell Curve. From the first chapter of that book:

"One statistic is worth noting right away because it shows that there is less to The Bell Curve than some intimidated reviewers have realized: "explained variance." Near the end of their text, Herrnstein and Murray capsulize their argument by asserting that "intelligence has a powerful bearing on how people do in life" (p. 527). However, 410 pages earlier they admit that AFQT scores, their measure of IQ, explain "usually less than ten percent and often less than five percent" of the variance in how people do in life (p. 117). What does "explained variance" mean? It refers to the amount of the variation in some outcome, like income, from zero to 100 percent, that can be explained by a particular cause or set of causes. To state that intelligence explains 10 percent of the variance in, say, people's earnings is to say that intelligence accounts for 10 percent of the differences among people in earnings, leaving 90 percent of the differences among earners unaccounted for. By Herrnstein and Murray's own statistical estimate, only 5 to 10 percent of the differences in life outcomes among respondents--the odds that they became poor, criminal, unwed mothers, and so on--can be accounted for by differences among them in AFQT scores. Put another way, if we could magically give everyone identical IQs, we would still see 90 to 95 percent of the inequality we see today."
​

Maybe Rushton and Jensen can take for granted that their audience will both be familiar with the concept of "explained variance" and the fact that The Bell Curve research supports only a fairly limited role for heritable intelligence in life outcomes, but it's a crucial detail that severely limits the relevance of this point, and the phrase "more inclined" is a pretty weaselly way of eliding that point. An effect can be statistically significant but very weak.

Similarly, with group differences in IQ both Rushton and Jensen and Am. Ren. ignore the fact that the data they are citing is now quite old. In fact, Am. Ren. insists on quoting a 15 point black-white IQ gap but we know that's not accurate and hasn't been for decades because of the differential Flynn Effect. In the study I cited earlier the gap was about 5 points for 13 year olds. Similarly, newer research on gaps in educational achievement find that the gaps have closed a lot, and are highly correlated to environmental issues (segregation and poverty). See for example this report from the Stanford Center on Poverty and Inequality:

"What explains the racial and ethnic gaps among children of similar socioeconomic backgrounds? Residential and school segregation are key drivers of unequal educational opportunity. Even among families with the same income, black and Hispanic students live in much poorer neighborhoods than white children and attend schools with greater concentrations of poverty, a result of the long legacy of racial housing discrimination and exclusion in the U.S. High-poverty schools typically have fewer resources, poorer facilities, a harder time attracting and retaining skilled teachers, and more students in need of remediation and additional services. In addition, high-poverty schools typically have fewer students whose parents have economic, social, and political resources to invest in schools. As a result, segregation is strongly correlated with academic achievement gaps, even after accounting for racial and ethnic differences in socioeconomic family characteristics. Indeed, metropolitan-area achievement gaps are more strongly correlated with segregation than they are with racial and ethnic disparities in socioeconomic status."

​

This post is already getting too long but you can go on making these kinds of critiques. Nisbett offers a lot of evidence that the Am. Ren. author doesn't really attempt to rebut, despite the fact they pretend to do so (see the link above).

Basically, to sum things up: there's lots of evidence against a strong hereditarian position on the topic of "genotocracy" in general (cf. this post again). There's a tremendous amount of evidence that achievement gaps involving traditionally oppressed minority groups are primarily driven by social differences. There's also a dearth of research using modern genetics techniques, so a lot of these debates are just endlessly dragging up decades old research. In reality, the best argument that American Renaissance could make is much more modest than what they say: it's not possible from existing evidence to prove that none of the between group differences are the result of biological differences. But that in of itself is a claim driven by a bad premise: that biological differences are innate and fixed, when in fact we know that social/environmental factors can actually drive the creation of biological differences (cf. environmental influences on testosterone levels).

The real problem with the racist position is not that it's inconceivable that genetic differences between human sub-populations could explain some variation in different social outcomes or measures. It's very likely that such differences exist. But we also know that the genetic variation across human sub-populations does not actually correspond to simple racial categories. The simple racist explanation of inequality is immediately rendered implausible just by what we know about population genetics.

We also know that the overwhelming majority of differences in social outcome (remember that it's 90% even according to The Bell Curve) are not attributable to simple and fixed biological factors. We know a lot about how social inequalities in the present are the result of social injustices both past and present, and highly correlated to measures like concentration of poverty. We even know how social inequality contributes to measurable biological differences. Racists want to find simple justifications for not dealing with any of those social issues. They want to treat differences as the result of fixed and innate biology, but the data don't support that conclusion.

Your criticism and material is outdated....see my previous post. Huge advances in the field of genetics and intelligence are being made quickly now. You are relying on old biased liberal objections based on the fallacious belief that all people are equal. You have let politics get between you and the truth.......your kind maintained a taboo on genetic and intelligence research for a long time....the taboo is now being shredded as more and more scientists are disregarding the pc bullshite that formulated the taboo.

Political Correctness Prevents Advancement of Science

All people are equal. Race has nothing to do with IQ.

Bwaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa I got a bridge in brooklyn I will sell you.

 

[Montrovant]

Intelligence is somewhat ill-defined, which makes it nearly impossible to measure with any degree of accuracy. There are too many aspects to intelligence which can be influenced by various factors.


Assuming IQ is an accurate measure of racial intelligence or life outcomes is attempting to force a complex subject into a simple box.

 

[well named]

There are also interesting studies that use newer methods to find associations between genetics and things like educational attainment, rather than IQ. From studies I've seen that measure is somewhat more robust than IQ but does suffer from some of the same problems, e.g. it's clear a priori that neither IQ nor educational attainment are purely functions of genetics, and it's difficult to distinguish genetics from environmental effects.

But, there's a fairly good overview of Genome-wide Association Studies (GWAS) here. It's likely that the power of this method will improve over time, and I suspect that some methods from machine learning research may prove important as well, but one of the interesting outcomes of a lot of the recent research is that the predictive power of GWAS on things like educational attainment is roughly similar to what I pointed out about The Bell Curve. So for example in this 2018 study of ~250k individuals they found genetic correlates of educational attainment which explained about 7% of the variance, right in the middle of the 5-10% range mentioned before. In other words in this study it's still the case that 90% of the differences in educational attainment between individuals is not explained by genetic differences between them.

It's reasonable to expect that increased sample sizes will continue to increase the amount of variance that can be explained through GWAS methods, so the 7% figure will go up, but the data also suggest that it's not linear, there are diminishing returns dependent on just how heritable educational attainment is. I had quoted a selection from Conley's The Genome Factor before, and one of the findings in his research is that the heritability of educational attainment has actually decreased slightly over time in the US. His explanation:

"Perhaps social advantages have become cumulative over generations, and, as schooling has become increasingly important to economic security, degrees have become a cultural mechanism through which social advantage is passed on in spite of genotype. Think legacy admissions." (p. 65)
​

Other research into the heritability of educational attainment has found an enormous variation across countries, but with large environmental factors universally. But the differences across countries also point, in and of themselves, to the complicated relationship between genes and environment. Some of it is pretty simple: we're measuring how much of the differences between people might be explained by different genes, which isn't quite the same thing as measuring to what extent any individuals attainment is down to genes or something else. But you can think of genes as expressing some maximum potential. Some people clearly have a higher potential than others -- no matter how hard I try I'm not going to become a chess grandmaster, and I gave up 15 years ago But if I had grown up in dire poverty and been malnourished that would have also severely impeded me reaching anywhere near my much lower max chess potential. If I had worse educational opportunities that would have done the same for educational attainment. Social institutions that privilege members of some groups over others (again think legacy admissions) have similar effects.

But at some point if we actually sorted out all of those issues so that each individual was guaranteed equal opportunity to reach their full potential then you could anticipate two things happening

1) the amount of inequality between individuals would get smaller, on average, compared to the present. This is clear from the fact that those environmental factors are the single largest factor in the variance in current studies in most countries

2) the remaining variability between individuals would be mostly genetic, i.e. we would certainly still observe differences between individuals.

The reason I wanted to comment more on all of this is because it also highlights where people go wrong: they think that we've already accomplished this! That is, by saying that the differences between individuals or groups are primarily genetic they are implicitly arguing that we've already eliminated all of the important environmental factors. That's really the motivation behind the argument, and why it's political: the point is to argue against social policies meant to reduce inequality by arguing that inequality is driven entirely by innate differences between people. That's why it's important to realize that the data shows very clearly that this isn't true. Not just in the case of inequality between ethnic/racial groups but along class lines, by nationality, and so on.