Yes, all of this is true. And I think you've just proved my point. All sorts of "differences" can show up in random groups. The question is whether those differences are significant and meaningful (i.e., not caused by improper control groups or other confounding factors).

The variance among people of any given race in intelligence is larger than variance between races. So the question is whether those relatively minor variances seen between races are meaningful.

As I also said in my post, when you have appropriate control groups, most of that apparent disparity disappears. And even if it doesn't disappear completely, that doesn't mean that IQ is the sole measure of this monolithic entity called "intelligence" -- there could be many other things that lead to smart decisions and success in life other than that measured on an IQ test. (I'm not saying IQ doesn't measure something, but that doesn't mean it's the only thing....)

We could rephrase this question and say something like, "Would you expect the genes that govern where the heart is located inside the chest to be any different between the average african-american and somebody of european descent?" Answer -- probably not much. "Then why not other genes?"

The amount of COMMON genes between races is HUGE compared to minor differences. Those differences exist. But why would you automatically assume that any particular genes MUST be different when the vast majority of them are the same?

Look -- regardless of all of this, the reality is Watson didn't make a nuanced statement like this, "Oh, yeah, variance can reasonably happen between any group." He said nothing like that. He basically said he thought Africa was unlikely to improve its condition because black people are stupider.

That's not a nuanced statistical argument. That's stating something as a fact, and there just isn't enough evidence to support such a claim. The OP I was originally responding to was arguing that Watson's statements should be believed because he speaks the "truth."

So what I was responding to was an OP who was agreeing with a blatantly racist claim that is not supported by scientific evidence, not some nuanced "Oh, there might be some random variance" hypothesis....

Agreed. Has anyone discounted any of Watson's other scientific discoveries on the basis of this remark? I don't think so. And if not, science is still working as it should.

I'm sensing a fallacious appeal to authority coming up....

Yes, that's a true statement.

If you're looking for the place where your post went from "misguided appeal to authority" to "racist rant," this is where it happens. Exactly why is it a "no brainer" that intelligence varies significantly by race?? I've personally met some very smart people of all sorts of races, and I've met idiots from all sorts of races too. I don't feel like I've accumulated enough data to say it's a "no brainer" that one race is smarter than another -- what dataset do you have access to where you feel like this is a "no brainer"?

Also, you referenced IQ earlier, and now you're talking about "intelligence" -- are you rejecting the idea that different races might have evolved different sorts of intelligence if you're presuming they've evolved differently enough to have different adaptations in this area (and maybe those localized adapations might not be measured as precisely as a test designed mostly by white people to test white people)? I'm just mentioning one of many problems with IQ as a proxy for "intelligence," even if there were obvious differences... which there aren't. When you control for demographics and other social aspects, a lot of racial differences narrow significantly.

The big deal is when he made these remarks, he was no longer just some smart young scientist. He was an 80-year-old dude with a history of making racist, sexist, and homophobic remarks with little basis. And, let's be honest here, even many great scientists aren't always going to be "at the top of their game" anymore at 80 years old.

So your appeal to authority here is problematic in a number of ways -- a guy was recognized for an achievement more than a half-century ago, he's old, he tends to say things that aren't true or well-thought-out in public, and yet you just assume he "speaks the truth"?

Why? THAT does not strike me as a very "scientific" attitude.

No it's not. The guy has continued to revise his books and memoirs and other publications in recent years, which is more than you can say for most 86-year-olds. He has continued to publish new scientific ideas in recent years.

What actually happened is that he wrote a memoir about his life which was intended for a POPULAR audience, and in the early stages of gearing up for his book tour, he made the remarks everyone's been talking about. Most of his appearances on that book tour were then cancelled, because of reactions to a public figure who basically implied that the science on the genetics of race was settled (when it's really not -- there may be some studies that appear to agree with his claims, but there are about as many that show the opposite) and then made racist implications on the basis of this.

He was not at all "hounded out of a profession," unless you consider "being a public intellectual" a profession. Show me evidence that people have refused to publish his research or took away memberships in academic societies or whatever -- then you can say he was "hounded out of the profession." He wasn't. He did lose a high-profile administrative position, but he continued to advise and do research at that place. He just lost his audence to talk to the public, which he should, given that he has a long history of saying rather nasty things and claiming a scientific basis for them when there generally isn't.

Huh? Look, you want to be a "normal scientist" and go about your day, doing research, publishing papers, whatever -- that's great. And chances are if you make some crass or racist remark to some random friends, nothing's going to happen to you.

But if you want to be a world-famous scientist and live in the public eye, you are subject to public scrutiny -- which means when you say something that's not true AND offends people in the process, you might lose your public audience.

That has nothing to do with "science." It's just the reality of being a public figure. It would be one thing if this were a single off-hand comment from Watson. It was not. He has a history of saying things that are racist, sexist, homophobic, etc., and he's been doing it for decades. (He's also, frankly, a bit of a kook in his old age, but that's a separate issue.)

You want press? You get to accept what press you create for yourself....

I absolutely agree with you that there's no need to present ideas that are demonstrably false. But "liberalism" is not something that is easily proved "true" or "false." A group stating that they are promoting "liberalism" could mean many things, but a political ideology is NOT a synonym for "truth."

I know many "conservatives" who use misunderstandings (intentional or not) or outright lying to promote their ideas, but I also know "liberals" who have done the same. And there are people who have fundamental ideas about what they think good policies might be on both sides who try to stick to the truth.

In any case, getting stuck in one's own ideological bubble means that it can be difficult to see the truth -- not always because you're deliberately lying or because any of your ideological buddies are lying. Often the sides talk past each other -- so you always get your "talking points" and never really have to seriously consider rebuttals from the other side... or if they occur, you just laugh and dismiss them, and your group of ideological friends laughs along with you, because it's easier than confronting real philosophical fundamental inconsistencies that are present in any real-world political ideology.

Whether you're a fan of the Rush Limbaugh show or NPR or Fox News or DemocracyNow! or whatever, you get the slice of "news" that best represents what the producers/editors think is important.

"Balance" is an issue not so much about truth, but about making sure that opposing opinions are considered in cases where there are real, actual conflicts with no one "truth." And it's also about running a variety of stories that sometimes might bring up "inconvenient" problems with your pet ideology.

There's absolutely nothing wrong with a magazine or whatever saying, "We're going to slant toward liberalism." But "facts" can always be selected, even if they are all true. Magazines and newspapers have to figure out what stories to run, and they will select them in ways that will promote or emphasize their ideology. For people who don't ever step outside that "ideological bubble," though, they could end up with a pretty skewed perception of the world... even if every single sentence in the magazine is "verifiably true."

That's why "balance" -- in general -- is important. Even more important is diversity of opinions, diversity of experiences, and diversity of ideologies. If you don't have those things, you can still up distorting things to adhere to your chosen ideology... even unintentionally.

(P.S. In case anyone's making assumptions and gearing up for ad hominem, let me be clear that I would never identify myself as a "conservative" (whatever that means). I believe that the one-dimensional idea of a political spectrum that encompasses all possible ideas is fundamentally flawed and leads to distortions, groupthink, and doublethink -- because all possible issues have to be crammed into some space along the spectrum, despite many underlying inconsistencies that arise.)

My home oven easily tops out over 550 with normal bake cycle on. I have multiple thermometers I use to measure it, so yes, I know what temp it is. If I put the broiler on before throwing in the pizza, I can get it even hotter. (I'm not willing to break the lock and use the self-cleaning cycle as some do -- I value my home insurance.)

But the biggest difference is the steel. Sorry, but stones just don't cut it. I didn't realize this until I got one a year ago or so, but having baked pizzas for many years, I was positively shocked the first time I used a steel in terms of the difference it made. The heat transfer is just so much higher than a stone -- it easily cuts my baking time down by at least 30%. Between the increased heat transfer from the steel and the broiler above (with its excess radiant heat), I'm easily getting to a heat transfer rate comparable to a grill with a stone over 700F.

I have no idea what "hipsters" have to do with anything. I've been baking pizza and bread long before "hipsters" became a common thing. I just like good food.

Anyhow, if I were to do it right, I'd build a brick pizza oven in my backyard. I don't have the time or energy for that now, and frankly I'm not that obsessed. I do have a friend who has one. Then you get to proper temp. I've used ceramic grills too, but that's a bit more work than I want to deal with every week.

In any case, I mostly make pizza in seasons when the heat for my house is actually useful, and if you are using a ceramic stone on your grill, you're probably not getting the maximum effect. Replace it with a steel plate, and you'll get much better heat transfer, probably enough to get close to a proper sub-90-second Neapolitan bake.

Yes, but only for a year. Then it will be replaced, like all words in Google products, with some obscure icon on a button -- containing four seemingly random geometrical shapes and some weird lines between them -- "obviously" (according to Google's design team "experts") having the specific meaning of " actionize."

By this point, Google's support will also have replaced clear simple words with answers to their FAQ in only pictograms. Serious users simply give up and just click random buttons for five minutes every time they need an action ("actionization"?) beyond "read" and "send," hoping to hit the right icon by accident.

The official regulations state minimum oven temperatures as 430 degrees C for the oven floor and 485 degrees C for the oven dome, with a bake time of 60-90 seconds.

That's MINIMUM of ~800F for the oven floor and minimum 905F for the air temp, to qualify as authentic Neapolitan pizza. In practice, many ovens are higher than this. I was just stating an approximation.

As I replied to a previous post, I can easily make a large pizza with no toppings (other than cheese or sauce) for less than $3 with decent (not top-of-the-line, but better than your pizza joint is using) ingredients at home, and I do it every week.

Topping prices will vary a lot. But just a few months ago I had a dinner party with 7 adults, made 4 largeish pizzas with varied toppings (including some "fancy" things from artichokes to organic microgreens, along with fresh basil from the garden, pepperoni, gourmet olives, roasted peppers and tomatoes, and onions), and the overall cost of the ingredients was around $25. We fed 7 adults and had almost an entire pizza's worth leftover. And that was for "fancy" pizzas with "interesting" toppings.

I really get tired of hearing from people on Slashdot who seem to think they're somehow getting a "deal" by eating out at fast-food restaurant or buying a frozen dinner. You want to eat that stuff, fine. But it's just not true that it's cheaper, except for special deals. Most of the time, you'd save at least 50% by making it yourself compared to a pre-packaged frozen thing, and often 60-80% over getting it from a "cheap" fast-food place. How else do you think fast-food places pay for labor, facilities, AND make a profit for the owners? How else do the frozen dinner people make money? It's not all just volume. Their profits come by the fact that you're usually paying at least twice as much as you would by cooking it yourself.

In Naples, yeah, it was something like 3 to 5 Euro at many places. Pizza is VERY cheap there. Granted, those are for large-ish single serving pizzas, but yeah, they were less than $8.99. For that price in Naples, you'd get the fancy pizza with the expensive toppings... unless you went to some "upscale pizzeria" with a view and nice table serving, rather than the common hole-in-the-wall places that are world-renowned for their pizza.

Uh, I make pizza at home all the time. I often buy top-quality flour in 50 lb. bags, where it comes to less than 50 cents/pound. (I usually share it with a friend, since I like to have a couple different kinds of flour on hand at any time, and 100 lbs. of flour would take me a couple years to get through.) With a pound of flour, I can make TWO large-ish pizzas. Cheese is the biggest expense, but the more expensive the cheese, usually the less you need. Maybe $4 for the cheese for the two pizzas, less if you find something decent on sale. You can buy better sauce in a jar/can, if you'd like, or make it yourself. In either case, you shouldn't be paying more than $1 or so for sauce for two pizzas.

Anyhow, at least once a week or so, I make two large pizzas for about $5.50 at home. That comes to $2.75/pizza, which admittedly is more then 1/4 of your $8.99 quoted price, but I was figuring closer to $10-12 for a large at Pizza Hut. (I haven't been there for a long time, and most decent pizzerias in the area charge at least that much for a large.)

And that's using mid-level ingredients, not the cheap stuff. I can definitely make a gluten-free crust with free range chicken and organic veggies for $8.99, though I hate gluten-free pizza crust.

If you allow me to buy the cheap pre-shredded bulk bag of cheap cheese, crappy bulk flour, and those jars of nasty sauce most people use, and I'll cut the costs down to less than $2 per pizza, easy. Pizza is one of the cheapest foods to make, particularly if you're light on the cheese and heavy on crust. Raise the oil content of the crust to make it richer (and more fattening) like many of the chain pizzerias do, and you have a calorie bomb that could feed a family of 4 for a few bucks at most.

Says someone who must never have eaten actual good pizza. Pizza Hut's pizza is really nothing like, say, the pizza I've eaten from a pizzeria in Naples where the pizzas are thin-crust, baked in an oven that's about 1000 degrees F for maybe a minute or so. But hey, that's probably too high of a standard. Pizza Hut's pizza is nowhere near the top of my list of "decent" pizzerias in the U.S., either.

That's nice and all, but I can also make my own crust in about 5 minutes, let is sit overnight in the fridge, take it out and toss it the next day, top it with whatever toppings I want -- with whatever quantities I want, choosing whatever quality toppings I want to buy -- and throw it into my oven on the hunk of pre-heated steel that best simulates a Neapolitan experience in a home oven.

And for investing maybe 15-20 minutes of my time (less than the time it would take me to drive to and from Pizza Hut), I get a pizza that's astoundingly better than Pizza Hut, for maybe 1/4 of the cost. Even if I have a kid or two who eats free, I still probably get it for less than 1/2 of the cost with higher quality ingredients, AND I get to choose exactly what ingredients I'm feeding my kid.

Ah... you're from the UK. That explains a lot. "Hell is where the police are German, the lovers Swiss, the mechanics French, the chefs British, and it is all organized by the Italians."

In all seriousness, though, it's a really useful skill to learn to make pizza at home. It doesn't take a lot of time, it's cheap, and it can really taste a LOT better (than Pizza Hut, anyway).

(P.S. Sorry about the British joke -- there's a lot to say for English food. Fish-and-chips, Yorkshire pudding, and nothing like a good ole "fry-up" for breakfast. Mmmm... black pudding....)

Some studies claim that. Other adoption studies have shown that black kids basically do the same as white kids when both are raised by white families. You can argue about which studies are better, but there's not a clear answer, unlike your (pardon the pun) "black-and-white" argument.

Okay, let's talk about these in turn.

Because even if they live in the same neighborhoods, blacks disproportionately end up in worse housing conditions. From that link, which compares randomly sampled groups of Whites and Blacks living in an urban environment in the same city: "Racial disparity in urban children's blood lead levels appears to be due to differences in housing conditions and environmental exposures. While [various factors] contribute to blood lead for both Black and White children, Black children, who in this study were largely impoverished and lived in pooly maintained rental housing, are also exposed to higher levels of lead-contaminated house dust and to painted surfaces and floor that are in poorer condition. Thus, housing condition and exposure to lead-contaminated house dust appear to be major contributors to the racial disparity in children's blood levels.

Next?

Well, we know that black moms are more likely to be deficient in folic acid. Part of it is dietary; from the link: "certain groups, including women of childbearing age and non-Hispanic black women, are at risk of insufficient folate intakes. Even when intake of folic acid from dietary supplements is included, 19% of female adolescents aged 14 to 18 years and 17% of women aged 19 to 30 years do not meet the EAR. Similarly, 23% of non-Hispanic black women have inadequate total intakes, compared with 13% of non-Hispanic white women."

So, diet is a big reason, and if black moms are deficient and feed a similar diet to their kids, well, you might guess that the kids could end up deficient. Other studies have noted that black women are less likely to have access to supplements or pre-natal vitamins that might provide adequate folic acid content.

Probably because blacks tend to consume a lot less dairy, which is often known to correlate with iodine deficiencies. From this study, "The NHANES and NCS UI [iodine level] data suggest that non-Hispanic black women have lower UI concentration than other women. Additionally, non-Hispanic black women had lower dairy consumption.... Non-Hispanic black women reporting rates of dairy consumption is consistent with recent data on U.S. population reports of lactose intolerance... among females, 50% were non-Hispanic black, 30% non-Hispanic white, and 20% Hispanic. Self-diagnosed lactose intolerance and consequent avoidance of dairy products may be on the contributing factors in the racial/ethnic differences we have shown in UI concentration."

That study is on pregnant women, but dairy consumption in general is lower among blacks. However, in utero iodine deficiency has already been shown to cause significant IQ deficits. Heck, Europe is also concerned about it: "In 2004, the WHO estimated that 43% of European children at ages 6â"12 years had insufficient iodine intake, and a 2010 UK study in school age girls revealed that 51% of children evaluated were iodine-deficient." So, it's not just American blacks -- once again, that last link notes that there have been major dairy initiatives in parts of Europe to address the issue.

Next?

Oh, I don't know -- maybe because they tend to be poorer and disproportionately single moms and can't afford taking time off from work to suckle a kid for many months unlike those who are more well-off? Or maybe because for many, many years in the U.S. it was considered "low-class" to breast feed when "high-tech formula" was available, and once those practices were finally adopted by lower-class people (including many black communities), all the evidence in the past few decades started to show up contradicting previous studies and saying breast is better? There are lots of possibilities here. Also, many studies show that black communities tend to lag in adopting by advice from doctors. (For example, the SIDS initiative to emphasize back sleeping has lagged a lot more in minority communities too, after previous generations of doctors emphasized tummy-sleeping.) Until recently, doctors were mostly white, and white doctors have a bad history of treating blacks poorly -- so when doctors are now suggesting something that used to be "low-class," don't you think there might be some resistance to the idea?

And just in case you think I'm making up the idea that black women may still be getting worse medical care, you might actually look at recent studies which suggest that hospitals in poorer and blacker neighborhoods are worse at recommending breastfeeding.

Actually, people DO know the answers to these questions, or at least have some pretty good reasons that have come out of studies. And a lot of them have to do with socioeconomic issues, cultural trends, etc. It's only YOU who apparently doesn't know the answers to these questions.

Oh, but according to one of your other posts on this thread, you DO seem to know the answer.

Immediately after noting the black/white IQ disparity, you quickly launch into a discussion of genetics. To me, that clearly implies that your preferred explanation is genetics, i.e., actual racial differences caused simply because someone is black or someone is white.

Well, guess what? The world is more complicated than that. Causality is really hard to establish. And even though you've identified some interesting correlations with race, it doesn't mean that those are genetic in origin. In fact, a lot of good research (such as the few things I've cited here) proposes a lot of explanations which are not based in race at all to your questions.

It's one thing to be an ignorant racist. It's even more insidious to go around asking probing rhetorical questions implying that there are significant differences in intelligence related to race when there's clear research addressing your rhetorical questions.

Did you bother to read your cited article into the next section, where various hypotheses that explain part of the racial differences may come from differences in health, nutrition, socioeconomic environment, and test bias? Or continue further down your link, and read about how attempts to find actual genes related to intelligence have failed so far?

It's simply false to claim that "most studies have found it makes a negligible difference," as you might also find in various adoption studies, which have split (again, from one of your own links) in terms of their evidence about whether environmental factors can explain racial differences. Simply being raised by a white family, according to some studies, can raise IQ enough to account for almost the entire gap you identified. Other studies claim some differences remain.

But, more specifically, your particular citation of "twin studies" doesn't actually say what your post claims -- your citation says that home environment explains 25-35% of overall intelligence variance in the population at large. In other words, if you dropped a random kid (of whatever race) into a random household, on average the effect of the home environment might account for 25-35% of the reason why some kid has an IQ of 140 and another has an IQ of 80. That's a very different question from asking how much of the 15-point (or whatever) racial gap might be explained by household differences, since a 15-point difference in means between races is much smaller than the variance between the highest and lowest IQ people in general. It's certainly possible statistically for home environment to explain 25-35% of the IQ variance at large, but 100% of the gap between races -- I'm not saying it does, but you're quoting one statistic and applying it to another situation that doesn't make much sense.

(To use an analogy, this would be like doing a study to see whether reviewing one's notes helps in test performance, and noting that reviewing notes seems to explain 25-35% of the reason why some people score a A and others score D. But then I also note there appears to be a half-letter-grade gap in the mean scores of men vs. women on the test. I cannot just assume that reviewing notes accounts for only 25% of the gender differences without actually knowing something about how gender and studying correlates, particularly if I knew that one group skewed in a particular direction, like most tested black people skew toward certain types of home environments. To do so is a major statistical fallacy.)

And this doesn't even begin to get into the question of whether IQ is actually a good measure of general intelligence for all cultures, or whether specific IQ tests may be culture-laden in ways that don't adequately assess useful intelligence for different societies or different groups. MANY psychologists, other scientists, and even the psychometrics people who are involved with IQ test design have leveled a number of criticisms at whether IQ tests should be the only way or best way of measuring general intelligence.

Look -- I'm not saying racial differences don't exist. I'm saying the literature is very clear that there are a boatload of confounding variables which make it REALLY HARD to compare "general intelligence" (whatever that means) between groups. Many of those environmental and social factors skew in the way that tends to produce underperformance in blacks.

Whether that accounts for ALL of the IQ gap is difficult to determine, but your assertion that "The scientific results show" that race has significant effects, and the opposing view is "nonsense" is a dubious claim at best. Whatever IQ measures, there are clearly enough confounding factors that it's really difficult to estimate the magnitude of racial differences. Maybe it's a lot; maybe it's a little. But you are inappropriately claiming victory in an argument where there is a huge amount of conflicting evidence.

I wasn't aware I had a "problem." I was in fact discussing those who "have a problem" with drinking -- and therefore are out of balance.

I have no problem with the idea of "balance." The problem in this situation is that the researchers are talking about two different evolutionary adaptations, and they are claiming opposite factors are driving them, including ones that are out of balance.

I absolutely agree this is possible. But the problem is that the authors of this study are not that nuanced in their explanation. They are not only claiming the origin for the desire to drink alcohol, but also the origin of drinking to EXCESS and alcoholism.

But the mechanism they proposed for an adaptation to process alcohol in humans requires an explanation that would select against such drinking to excess (i.e., primates can't defend their territory because they'd be too drunk). Don't you see the contradiction here?

On the one hand, we're "programmed to overconsume," but on the other hand, such overconsumption wouldn't allow us to evolve the study's special gene in the first place (according to the researchers' explanation).

I'm not saying these two separate things couldn't have evolved in something like this way, but the authors' explanations depend on contrasting selection pressures. Perhaps one trait evolved under one circumstance in one environment, and conditions changed a few millennia later, leading to the other development. Or perhaps there's an even more complex explanation.

The point is that TFA's description makes little sense as a SINGLE explanation for two different adaptations, despite the fact that TFA claims one thing if the first paragraph I quoted and then requires the opposite behavior in the next paragraph which begins "the [preceding] discovery might explain..."

I think you missed my whole point about "just-so" stories. I'm not saying what you're saying is false or that things couldn't have evolved that way. I'm saying that you made up a very nice story based on relatively little evidence -- just your speculation -- to explain a complex evolutionary phenomenon that could have all sorts of complex causes and explanations.

That's exactly the sort of thing that should be criticized. Just because "Well, I can make up a possible story that could explain something" doesn't mean it happened that way. You need, well, perhaps a little more evidence, not just "Let's say that...."

Uh, yeah. That's obvious. I wasn't at all disagreeing with that. What I'm pointing out is that TFA is talking about two separate evolutionary developments. On the one hand, evolution explains a gene that avoids constant drunkenness to process alcohol. On the other hand evolution explains the psychological tendency toward constant drunkenness in the form of alcoholism by connecting such a thing to a pleasure center. Obviously those who are able to process alcohol will get the biggest evolutionary advantage from eating food with it (as you say), but how does that lead to alcoholism unless you begin to select for people who can't control their alcohol intake and drink to excess (which is the opposite trend)?