It never amazes me that almost all race realists seem to deny that environment has any effect at all on IQ.
IQ’s have risen 22 points since 1930? Um, uh, um, uh. But they didn’t go up on “g”, so really there was absolutely no intelligence increase at all.
Abecedarian Project produced lasting 5 point gain? Um, uh, um, uh. Quote negative studies that produced no gain.
Iodine deficiency reduces IQ? Um, uh, um, uh, no comment.
Blacks closing the gap with Whites on IQ, surely Black children? Nope, cherry pick your studies to show no gap closing at all.
Dramatic increases in head size correlating with 22 point Flynn Effect gain? Express incredulity, deny, obfuscate, change the subject.
The sickening truth is that most race realists are just racists, and almost all of them are White. They have a vested interest in White superiority and the inferiority of other races. They are committed to a relentlessly pessimistic view of man in which environment has so little effect that we may as well all convert to Calvinism with its preterite and elect and say screw it.
People are getting stupider and the world is getting worse. Dysgenics is wracking the world, but modern humans could not possibly be smart enough to behave eugenically the way humans always have. Everything is hopeless and all environmental interventions are futile. Blacks and Browns are hopeless and Whites need to get away from them by re-instituting forms of segregation or out and out racial nationalism to get the Hell away from the non-Whites.
As with intelligence, “personality” is also fixed in the first few years of life, so a fuckup is a fuckup and a criminal is a criminal and that’s that.
Never mind racially identical groups with wildly different crime rates, crime rates in a single group that go all over the place with time.
Gloom and doom, gloom and doom.
Well, let’s toss one more firecracker into the laps of the racists.
Turns out that women with the highest exposure to a certain type of pollutants had kids who scored 5 points lower on IQ tests at age 5 than those with less exposure to polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (caused by burning fossil fuels). PAH’s are particularly emitted by cars and trucks idling in heavy city traffic.
All mothers were Domincans, so I assume that race is irrelevant. Mother’s exposure to PAH’s in the womb was associated with smaller head size in babies. Similar results are being found in China in terms of motor delays. Assuming the study is correct, we could rise IQ’s in certain groups with maximum exposure to exhausts (usually found in big cities) by up to 5 points. In the real world and across a large group, a 5 point gain especially toward the lower end is going to have some real and measurable gains.
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I don’t think race realists have ever denied that there are environmental impacts on IQ. You omitted one of the most important though: breast feeding, which evidently adds about 7 IQ points.
That said, the black-white IQ gap is real and has a primarily genetic basis – this is what all the evidence indicates. The Flynn effect is interesting but it doesn’t fundamentally change this.
Dysgenics is wracking the world, but modern humans could not possibly be smart enough to behave eugenically the way humans always have.
Dysgenics is definitely a real threat. We don’t see it yet due to the increases in things like nutrition masking the underlying deterioration of the gene pool, and also due to things like regression to the mean, but it’s there.
As with intelligence, “personality” is also fixed in the first few years of life, so a fuckup is a fuckup and a criminal is a criminal and that’s that.
Certain aspects of personality are certainly fixed from the first few years of life if not from birth (the kinds of things measured by the Myers-Briggs test, for instance), though obviously other things are not. Criminality is obviously more complex.
Robert, I’d recommend reading ‘Conversations with Arthur Jensen’ by Skeptic editor Frank Miele. Jensen fully acknowledges the environmental factors you have mentioned.
It’s also interesting to get an insight into Jensen’s thinking and his admiration for his hero Gandhi.
Yeah but every time someone claims to show some gain in IQ due to environmental means, Jensen is all over it attacking it and saying it didn’t happen. Sure, he says that in theory, but everytime someone comes up with a real-world IQ gain due to environment, he shoots it down.
Aromatics are really nasty substances. A lot of them are carcinogenic, so I don’t really find it surprising they can affect embrionary development