The mismeasure of population differences: A critique of Kevin Bird's critique

PETER FROST puts up some precise arguments about IQ below that may not be easily followed by all readers. So I think I should attempt a summary:

He notes that genetic studies now strongly support what IQ tests have been telling us all along: There is such a thing as educational attainment and it can just as strongly be predicted by a person's genetic makeup as by his/her IQ tests results. The genes behind IQ have in other words been substantially identifed. IQ is real and it makes a difference.

But the old, old issue of racial differences arises. Do the genes that predict educational attainment among whites also predict attainment among Africans? One answer is that by using white gene counts Africans score poorly. Both according to IQ tests and genetic scores they do badly

That of course upsets some people and arguments have been put up to say that the genes for educational success are not the same among blacks. Black genes are different, to put it crudely. So we really have to redo all our genetic studies if we want to use genes to predict black educational success.

Not much of that has been done but what is available suggests that black genetics may indeed give a poor prediction of educational outcomes. Blacks and whites may not be "equal" genetically. That of course treats blacks as being almost a separate species, which is unlikely to please everyone but that is a price you may have to pay if you want to use genetics to predict black educational attainment.

Meanwhile the "gap" in educational attainment between blacks and whites is as large as ever, no matter how you explain it. Great efforts have been expended to close that gap but nothing so far has worked. There does seem to be something in blacks that militates against high average levels of educational attainment. Genetics may one day explain it but that is out of reach at the moment. We can predict it (via IQ tests) but not explain it with any certainty


We have identified thousands of genes (SNPs) whose alleles are associated with variation in educational attainment (Lee et al., 2018). By finding out which alleles are present on the genome, we can create an estimate of cognitive ability that strongly correlates with performance on standardized mathematics, reading, and science tests (r = 0.8) and, on a group level, with mean population IQ (r = 0.9) (Piffer, 2019).

Those high correlations are made possible by the logic of sampling. To estimate the mean cognitive ability of a population, it is unnecessary to identify all of the relevant SNPs, just a large enough sample. The SNPs are "witnesses" to natural selection. We need only question a sufficient number of them to understand the strength and direction of selection, and its consequences.

Like IQ, the polygenic score differs on average among human populations. It seems to have increased during the northward spread of modern humans out of Africa and into Europe and Asia, with East Asians scoring the highest. This pattern is in line with IQ data. The mean polygenic score is also high among Ashkenazi Jews and Finns, again in line with IQ data (Piffer, 2019).

Can a mean polygenic score be used as a proxy for mean IQ? No, says biologist Kevin Bird (2021) in his paper “No support for the hereditarian hypothesis of the Black-White achievement gap using polygenic scores and tests for divergent selection.” Although Europeans and sub-Saharan Africans have different alleles associated with educational attainment, these differences, he argues, correspond to trivial differences in cognitive ability. In fact, they are more consistent with genetic drift than with natural selection.

To prove his argument, he performed two analyses on the genetic data: an Fst and a test for polygenic selection. In my opinion, both analyses are dubious.

Fst
This is the most common measure of genetic differentiation between populations. If the Fst is low, differentiation is trivial and consistent with genetic drift. If it is high, differentiation is substantial and consistent with natural selection. For SNPs associated with EA, Kevin Bird reports an Fst of 0.111. Is that low or high?

When the American geneticist Sewall Wright created Fst, he defined four categories of differentiation:

0 to 0.05 - little genetic differentiation

0.05 to 0.15 - moderate genetic differentiation

0.15 to 0.25 - great genetic differentiation

0.25 to 1 - very great genetic differentiation (Wright, 1978, pp. 82-85)

Wright's categories are widely cited. A search in Google Scholar for "moderate genetic differentiation" and "0.05 - 0.15" shows over two hundred papers.

So does an Fst of 0.111 mean moderate genetic differentiation? Not according to Kevin Bird, who sees little to none below a benchmark of 0.118. That benchmark may be valid, but it cannot be easily verified and appears nowhere else in the literature. Nor does he explain why it is better than the ones put forward by Sewall Wright. In fact, he makes no reference to the latter's benchmarks.

One may also question the Fst of 0.111. For the data source, the reader is referred to Lee et al. (2018), a study done only with European participants. Moreover, Kevin Bird used 1,259 SNPs to calculate that Fst, even though he found only 685 SNPs that had data on both Africans and Europeans. The Fst of 0.111 seems to refer only to Europeans. That value is what would be expected, but it says nothing about diversification between Europeans and sub-Saharan Africans.

Polygenic selection analysis
The second analysis is more relevant but poses another problem. There are two possible ways to calculate the effect size of each allele. One way is to use between-family data, and the other is to use within-family data. When Kevin Bird used the first dataset, he found a clear difference in genetic capacity for educational attainment between Europeans and Africans. When he used the second dataset, he found a much smaller one that could easily be explained by genetic drift.

Kevin Bird prefers the second dataset. All things being equal, it would indeed be preferable. There would be less statistical noise because siblings have similar upbringings. With less noise, population differences could more easily be identified. Yet, here, we see the opposite: Europeans and Africans are significantly different in the between-family data but not in the within-family data. The reason is that the between-family data came from over a million participants whereas the within-family data came from 20,000 sibling pairs. Being smaller, the second dataset had a lot more noise. All things being equal, it should have had less. But some things were not.

If we repeat the analysis with a much larger sample of sibling pairs, there would be less noise and Europeans and Africans would clearly differ in alleles associated with educational attainment. Kevin Bird anticipates this eventuality. Even with a much larger within-family dataset, "there is still likely to be some level of confounding from population structure" (Bird, 2021, p. 7). He elaborates on this point:

[...] the [polygenic] scores might be biased by a variety of factors, including the nonrandom ways that society is geographically structured [...]. For instance, Black people in the US, for reasons unrelated to genetics, live in areas with poorer air quality and more exposure to environmental toxins (Bird, 2021, p. 8)

Yet, as he notes further on, the SNP alleles were identified only in European participants, and the effects on educational attainment were estimated only from European data. How, then, could different alleles among Europeans be spuriously associated with differences in educational attainment among Europeans because of socioeconomic deprivation among Black Americans? How do the latter enter the picture?

Kevin Bird is right on one point: cognition in other human populations may not be accurately predicted by alleles identified from European participants or by allele effects calculated from European data. This is especially so for sub-Saharan Africans, who seem to have a different architecture of cognition (Fuerst et al., 2021; Guo et al., 2019; Rabinowitz et al., 2019). That factor, however, would introduce even more noise into the data and decrease, rather than increase, any measurable differences between Africans and Europeans.

It does look like cognitive evolution has followed a different trajectory among sub-Saharan Africans. Rabinowitz et al. (2019) found that the polygenic score of Black Americans predicts some abilities better than others, notably general academic success (pursuit of postsecondary education) and compliance with rules (absence of a criminal record). For school tests, it has some power to predict ability in mathematics but none in reading. Processing of language may be the mental domain where people of sub-Saharan African descent have undergone the most cognitive evolution since their separation from other ancestral humans.

https://peterfrost.substack.com/p/the-mismeasure-of-population-differences

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US privileged elite preach diversity but practise intolerance

Among the many depressing realities to emerge in the wake of Hamas’s medieval attack on innocent Israelis is the failure of multiculturalism across the developed world to temper – let alone stamp out – anti-Semitism.

Scores of rallies attended by tens of thousands of Americans popped up across the US over the weekend seeking to justify Hamas’s horrific terrorism.

In Baltimore, speakers at one rally repeatedly called to “end the scourge of Zionism” and “destroy Israel” as cars drove past, honking in approval.

But nowhere is the moral rot more egregious than in the nation’s most prestigious universities, which, for all their talk of “diversity” and “inclusion”, have become intellectual wellsprings of militant intolerance.

Where university students half a century ago protested for free speech and pacifism, a large minority at America’s most elite educational institutions would appear to prefer a holy war alongside the aggressive exclusion of any ideas deemed “harmful” or too contrarian. Incredibly, 31 student organisations at Harvard University signed off on a public statement last week that declared Israel was “entirely responsible for all unfolding violence”.

The views of highly privileged, teenage brats might not be too concerning, but their high tolerance for outrageous views also appears to extend to university administrators. Harvard’s president was quick to condemn Russia for its invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, but his successor, Claudine Gay, said nothing immediately in the wake of last week’s heinous crimes against Israel.

Professor Gay, widely celebrated as Harvard’s first black president, was quick to issue a statement in mid-2020 following the death of George Floyd, saying she “watched in pain and horror the events unfolding across the nation this week, triggered by the callous and depraved actions of a white police officer”.

But Hamas’s brutal murder of well over 1000 innocent people, including around 30 Americans, was not enough to move her until a public outcry compelled a statement that extolled the virtues of free speech.

Earlier this year, Harvard was ranked last among 248 US universities for enabling free speech on campus, according to a survey of more than 55,000 undergraduates conducted by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression. A 2021 survey by student publication the Harvard Crimson found 3 per cent of its faculty identified as conservative, less than 20 per cent as moderate and the rest as “extremely liberal”, which in the US context is more likely to signify support for Palestine.

In June, Harvard offered its employees a two-hour workshop on “addressing microaggressions at work”. Heaven forbid staff accidentally use the wrong pronoun, but mass murder … “well, it’s complicated”. Harvard isn’t the only elite institution exhibiting support for terrorism. Last week at Stanford – the Harvard of the west – a teacher was reportedly suspended for physically separating Jewish students from others in class and downplaying the Holocaust.

Of course, the concerning trends predate Hamas’s latest attacks. In 2022, nine student law groups at the University of California, Berkeley sought to ban any speaker who promoted Israel on campus.

Perhaps part of the cause must be these institutions no longer accept the best and brightest. The growing capture of the Democrats by university elites, as their blue-collar support dwindles, has left one of America’s major governing parties with an existential division.

Much is made of Republican squabbles over Donald Trump and the party’s inability to pick a speaker, but these divides pale in comparison to the minority of Democrats who instinctively sided with Hamas. Last week Democrats in Michigan’s state legislature refused to support a bipartisan resolution condemning Hamas. Prominent congresswoman Rashida Tlaib flies a Palestinian flag outside her office on Capitol Hill.

The Chicago branch of Black Lives Matter – which enjoys wide support among Democrats – issued a repulsive graphic on social media of a Hamas paratrooper above and an “I Stand with Palestine” slogan.

Democratic congressman Ritchie Torres denounced the Democratic Socialists of America rally held in New York in support of Palestine “as an anti-Semitic stain on the soul of America’s largest city”, but for moderate Democrats it’s a very uphill battle.

President Joe Biden delivered one of the best speeches of his presidency last week, aggressively condemning Hamas as terrorists and declaring America’s unequivocal support for Israel. But news reports suggest the President and his very closest advisers significantly changed the text from what was a more lukewarm expression of support. His Secretary of State, Antony Blinken, issued a tweet calling for a ceasefire immediately after the attacks, and then deleted it.

When I went to watch a rally in Baltimore, I was struck by how few Arabs appeared to be in a crowd of mainly young people who you might expect to see at a trans rights march or “save the planet” rally. Most of them were wearing Covid masks. At first it might seem a strange combination, especially given Islamic fundamentalist groups loathe LGBTQ rights. But Black Lives Matter, anti-Semitism and “Covidianism” seem to share a preference for authoritarian, dogmatic approaches to politics.

That America’s elite universities – at the very least large segments of the student body and administrators – have become so infested with odious ideas presages an ominous future. “What I saw at Harvard was a total disgrace. I would run the other way if I saw any of those kids wanting a job from me, I can tell you that,” Republican Florida Governor Ron DeSantis said in a speech last week.

The best hope is their extremism ultimately destroys their prestige, and new institutions of higher learning emerge.

https://www.theaustralian.com.au/world/us-privileged-elite-preach-diversity-but-practise-intolerance/news-story/11c105ed72c117ec1851c4d45a73236e

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Restricted Speech and the Arrogance of the Overeducated

In American society today and in other Western and industrialized nations, an insidious movement has taken hold, denying the rights of those with whom one disagrees to have a platform.

Stifling Classrooms

In academia, for example, overeducated professors, who should know better, have little tolerance for viewpoints that differ from their own. As such, classrooms have become stifling. If you're a student who leans Right, you might have to keep a low profile for the entire semester in order to receive a grade that will not ruin your grade point average.

Discussing controversial topics, particularly in institutions of higher learning, should be something participants look forward to. Yet, respecting the rights of others who have differing views is rapidly becoming passé.

Why are those in control, namely professors, deans, and high-ranking university officials, no longer champions of free speech? What prompted them to create “safe spaces” that are not safe from groupthink and restricted ideas?

What do academics fear if an opinion that differs from theirs? If an opinion is outrageous, it likely will be dismissed by those who have the capability to illuminate its flaws articulately. If an idea is less than outrageous, then engage in healthy debate and do your best to dissuade its adherents. To not hear it at all speaks volumes. To have no need even to attempt to find common ground says more about the opinion gatekeepers than those with differing viewpoints.

Safe Spaces are Unsafe

Schools and other institutions that have set up safe spaces and media, internet giants, and other gatekeepers of American discourse who seek to cancel people, as opposed to protecting their free speech, ought to reflect upon what they are doing. Someday, maybe they'll hold an opinion that differs from those with whom they currently identify. Then what will they do? Stifle their true feelings?

Freedom of speech, as often observed, requires that you are going to hear things that you find to be offensive or that upset you. Soon enough, you might say things others find outrageous and offensive. That is what free speech is all about. If all speech has to toe a certain line, then it is not free speech.

Being exposed to ideas that upset you or notions you've never previously considered is part of free speech in a free society. Free speech is the cornerstone of a true democracy and a true representative republic such as the United States. Yet, free speech is squelched every day in America by those on the Left who believe that they have a lock on what is right, true, and good. They do not.

Notably, those among us who are highly educated – professors, literate journalists, and other media gatekeepers – could be the most vigorous champions of free speech in our society. Professors could encourage students to share different viewpoints. The media could be more tolerant towards those having opinions that differ from theirs.

Biden and Company Are Bad News

When the Biden Administration tells the social media giants to diminish Conservative voices, in effect, it is conveying that they can't afford to have differing viewpoints aired; that might be risky. People might start thinking for themselves instead of conforming to the groupthink that Leftists have concocted.

When a celebrity or noted figure makes an erroneous statement, even from 40 years ago, and the gatekeepers on the Left clamber to cancel this person, they are being elitists: “You are less worthy than we are and not entitled to your position in society. We must shun you and ensure that you do not progress in your career. We must hold you out as an example.”

Yet, who among those Leftist gatekeepers has not made such a statement, certainly in their youth, let alone during their prime working years? And who, indeed, ought to be canceled as a result of a single statement? Even if that statement is horrible, still, it must be tolerated because that is the essence of free speech.

Surrendering Over Your Rights

You are free to disassociate with such a person individually, but when you allow the gatekeepers of political correctness to prevail, you have surrendered your right to free speech. You simply don't realize it

https://townhall.com/columnists/jeffdavidson/2023/10/15/restricted-speech-and-the-arrogance-of-the-overeducated-n2629855?utm_source=thdailypm&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=nl&recip=6139244

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Has Soviet-style self-censorship come to Britain?

There is now more free speech in the East than in the West

Heli-Liis VÕrno

When the Soviet system fell in my native Estonia I was 17 years old. I’d spent the entirety of those years mastering the main rule for surviving the USSR: you needed two separate identities. One was for home and those you trusted, the other for public places: we knew that in front of outsiders or certain relatives, you simply didn’t speak about some topics. If you followed the rules and kept the two identities apart, you could survive and even prosper. But if you mixed the two worlds up, woe betide you.

My grandparents – who’d separated in the early 1950s – led lives that illustrated this. My grandfather had joined the party and never said a word against the regime. For this he was allowed to have a new flat, a summer house and a car – a Moskvitch! My grandmother, meanwhile, never hid what she thought of the Soviet occupation, and her life was correspondingly harder. She knitted at night to make ends meet and grew vegetables in her backyard.

Superficially the USSR was supposed to be Paradise on Earth. Free education, free healthcare, a guaranteed job and housing. But what could you do with that education? You couldn’t scheme under communism – it goes without saying – to become a world famous rockstar or a multimillionaire entrepreneur. You couldn’t even dream of going travelling or visiting the countries whose languages you learned. As for that guaranteed job, it was often nominal, to save you from state-prosecution as a ‘parasite’, and the same applied to accommodation. Everything needed to be checked and ‘permitted, and whoever you were, you were expected to show up to May Day parades, wave the red flag and speak never less than glowingly of the Party.

Britain has started to remind me of the system I thought I’d left behind forever

Of course we knew about the Free World – a colourful place full of hope, we believed, and we longed to join it. We watched overseas TV channels if we could tune into them and listened – if we could avoid the frequency-jamming – to channels like the BBC World Service: a message from that Free World we longed for. By the time the Soviet Union fell in 1991, we were ready for every kind of freedom: to think, speak, gather, travel, freedom to succeed and, sure, the freedom fail too. All the freedoms, here we come!

I came to UK in 2011 after a decade in Asia, fully confident I was entering another free society. I could, within reason, say whatever I wanted to whomever I wanted. Holding different opinions, post-Soviet, from someone else hadn’t been a problem: we’d argue and end with compromise or simply agree to disagree.

Yet increasingly, Britain has started to remind me of the system I thought I’d left behind forever. Of course, it isn’t called communism this time, but various names like ‘Diversity’, ‘Equality’, ‘Inclusion’, ‘Multiculturalism’. Just like communism, it takes the ideals of the brotherhood of man but then adds on others from western individualist tradition – LGBTQ rights, open borders, MeToo (a full pantheon is getting ever more complex, potentially wrong-footing you at every turn). Like communism, it presents many ideals which, on the face of it, are hard to disagree with: equality of the sexes and of different races, for example – and then constructs a kind of secular religion out of them.

It’s one of the central ideas of Christianity that humans are inherently flawed and sinful – and the new religion too seems to be drawing on this. Anyone failing to abide by this religion’s tenets must repent at once – or rather, in Newspeak, ‘Educate Yourself’ and ‘Do Better’. This doesn’t involve the physical re-education camps of the USSR (not yet), but compulsory (re)training sessions in anti-racism, anti-sexism and anti-ableism already abound.

If you’re ostracised, you have two choices, as you did under communism: either apologise profusely and publicly and grovel to the current orthodoxy, becoming, if not a good little member of Komsomol, then a vocal and obedient ally to BLM or LGBTQIA+ (or whatever the currently favoured minority is) – or never be seen or heard of again. As in both systems, the Evil needs to be rooted out and the witches burned. Just as saboteurs and dissenters had to be removed from Soviet society, the perceived racists, bigots, transphobes, misogynists, and toxic males etc. must vanish before the Western Paradise on Earth can be achieved. Of course, the categories are constantly ramifying as are the varieties of ideological crime. One of the main features of an institutionalised religion is that it has answers to all questions – and the ones it doesn’t have answers for, you’re not allowed to ask.

Just as in the USSR, there is the issue with language and the reality it hides. ‘Democracy’ in the USSR was often the obligation to vote for one single candidate chosen for you by the Party. ‘Rule of the Proletariat’ meant rule by a small group of high-ranking Party workers. Likewise, in the Newspeak of the West, ‘inclusivity’ means making sure anyone who disagrees is not included. ‘Diversity’ spells a deadening uniformity of thought. And ‘equality’ frequently means shamelessly privileging one group over another. As to that equality, while the old communists were obsessed with the economic kind, the new communists are fixated on culture and history. The current rewriting of Britain’s past, with many dubious claims, to give minority-cultures an equal historical standing here is merely the same old taking from the ‘rich’ and giving to the ‘poor’ – except in cultural form.

This doublespeak is developing at an alarming pace, and if you don’t self-censor, you risk punishment. In the Soviet Union this came from the Party and its adherents, but in modern Britain the sources of correction are more scattered and omnipresent – it’s a multi-headed dragon, seemingly everywhere and nowhere, making it even more scary. Your neighbour may be with you on some topics, but could have signed up to their own pet cause – Refugees Welcome, Climate Change, Trans-allies – you simply don’t know. So to avoid social cancellation it’s easier simply to avoid certain issues – especially the important ones – altogether. And, you can’t help wondering, is that neighbour a true believer, or someone simply as scared to express a wrong thought as you are? It’s all increasingly familiar.

The recent debanking of Nigel Farage was a prime example of a step into new territory. After long denials from the bank it soon became clear the reason was simply disagreement with his politics. All wrapped in the elaborate justifications of the Newspeak – ‘his views did not align with our values’ or were ‘at odds with our position as an inclusive organisation.’ It was the closest thing one had seen to the Soviet jailing of dissidents, and you couldn’t help wondering what new level of punishment, to keep the masses in line, was going to come next. ‘If this can happen to me it can happen to you,’ Farage said. And as someone brought up in the ex-Soviet system, I can tell you he’s right.

So I find myself facing a dilemma: whether to pack up all of our belongings and move, perhaps back to Eastern Europe – to the Free East, where I don’t have to sing to the red rainbow flags. Or correct my speech to avoid being detected by the KGB Trans Allies. Or get labelled a dissident Alt-Right.
Or perhaps I should simply stay in the UK after all and enjoy the feeling of being back home. Back home to keeping my mouth shut.

https://www.spectator.com.au/2023/10/has-soviet-self-censorship-come-to-britain/

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My other blogs. Main ones below:

http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)

http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)

http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)

http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)

http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)

http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs

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