The Right Gets it Wrong: Genetics

Many bloggers have taken on genetics in the last week. I'd like to think they all read Biological Materialism and have been inspired to the subject, but the readership numbers of this humble blog would indicate otherwise. (It does seem that at least one of the more prominent alt-right bloggers does read along here, based on some apparent cross-pollination.) But mostly they must not be, or they wouldn't be getting things wrong on genetics so often.

One of the major services we offer here is to clear up some common economic fallacies held by our wrong-thinking brethren. Often they betray a belief that our currency is created out of thin air and remains into perpetuity, driving inevitable hyperinflation. Of course, the rampant inflation is never there, so they frequently engage in concocting theories of dark inflation to account for the discrepancy. The reality is that the created currency is equally offset by debt, and the two annihilate one another at the conclusion of the legally enforced contract.

It's time to help steer the ship right in another domain, which is genetics. The right-wing dissidents dive into the domain to counter claims made by the communists of the mainstream left, which is that disparities of outcome result from racial oppression and systemic bias. Leftists believe in a "blank slate" theory that means all variances in human outcomes must be societally driven. NonCultists observe that outcomes are well correlated to individual IQs and that, if the average IQs of the races are considered, they fall in nicely with the pattern. Ranking races by IQ and ranking them by income returns the exact same list. For all the talk of white privilege, Asians do significantly better on average than whites, and Jews better still.

Where our side goes wrong is to adopt their framework of biological materialism. That is, to assume that human traits are fully inherited through genetics. That leads to engagement of fruitless arguments, like this one recently provided by prominent race realist (and former National Review contributor) John Derbyshire. In response to this take from the Economist

Dr Watson's views about race and intelligence seem to stem from his keen interest in The Bell Curve, a book published in 1994 by Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein, that, among other things, argued African-Americans were less intelligent than white Americans and genetic differences between ethnicities played a role in the difference. Modern genetic research has largely discredited these ideas.

the Derb responded

Modern genetic research has of course done no such thing. The last 25 years of that research has not dispositively either confirmed or refuted the hypothesis that race differences in intelligence have a genetic component; but on balance I think a fair-minded observer would have to say that it's tilted the probabilities somewhat over towards Watson's side of the argument.

I think it would be fair-minded to say that the probabilities tilt somewhat in our favor. That is not a strong argument in any context. The reason that genetic research doesn't confirm or refute racial influence of genes on intelligence is because genes don't dictate IQ. No doubt intelligence is inherited, so race realists should stick strictly to proofs of inheritance, rather than relying on genetic assumptions that will perpetually confuse everyone on both sides. What they're really afraid of is that the lack of genetic evidence for intelligence (between races or otherwise) will be taken as confirmation of the blank slate theory. So what? Do we counter bad conclusions with bad arguments? It hardly matters, liberals just ignore whatever scientific results are inconvenient anyway. It's not a big deal if they misinterpret another one.

Anatoly Karlin, whose blog is linked on the sidebar, latched onto a recent study to conclude that "racial blank slatism is going to become untenable within the next few years" because "it has now been rigorously shown that Jews have more alleles associated with higher IQs than Caucasoid Gentiles." From the study, found here, it's not clear how they prevented a circular dependency. Jews tend to be correlated to genes correlated to high IQ, which tend to be correlated to Jews. What exactly has been learned? They seem to have ignored a likely parallel result of this research: that big noses and curly hair cause higher IQs.

The results indicated a .30 correlation between genetics and intelligence, which would indicate that 10% of intelligence is genetically determined. But what is being correlated? Certain genes were correlated to intelligence in one study, which correlated back to intelligence in another. So smart people are mildly correlated to smart people. They call it science. It's unfortunate that the paper comes from Western Illinois University, the nearest research university to where I grew up, but then it was always known as a party school.

Steve Sailor shared some recent results from a psychology journal that correlated racial lineage to cognitive ability and showed that the extremes of fully African versus fully European are separated by almost a full standard deviation. Note that, while the term "genetic" is used in the linked paper 167 times, the comparison is actually of lineage to cognition, with "genetic ancestry" used as a proxy for lineage. These results are fine for the arguments Sailor is trying to make. Intelligence is inherited, and there are variations in the various lineages. Perfectly reasonable, and backed by data. It's when we assume the standard model of inheritance - biological materialism - that we run into trouble.

Other authors in our camp have made flawed genetic arguments. Consider the recent post by spandrell, where he makes a historical analogy to today's drug legalization dilemma.

Alcohol is actually a great example. Obviously alcoholism is a big problem in some parts of the worlds, but oddly not everywhere. In many parts of Southern Europe, alcoholism barely exists at all, while in Northern Europe is quite serious. And with peoples like US Amerindians (“Native Americans”) or Australian Aborigenes, alcohol causes severe physical and mental problems to pretty much every single one of them. “Liquid fire” some call it, for how it wastes them.

The only explanation for this fact is that humans in societies with a long history of agriculture have developed genetic adaptations to digest alcohol, while people with shorter histories of agriculture have not. This doesn’t mean that people slowly developed an adaptation while merrily drinking their wine. No, that means that every single alcoholic in France or Italy who couldn’t hold their liquor died, while the few (at the beginning *very* few) who didn’t become addicted were able to survive and leave descendants. I have no idea what percentage of the population of early farmers in Southern Europe had to die in order for widespread adaptation to wine to spread, but given how Amerindians hold their liquor, it may have been in the order of 80%.

I'm sure he's correct that societies with long exposure to alcohol have evolved adaptations to it, but much of the process is speculative. For instance, it is assumed that there was already a small subset of the population with a natural genetic alcohol tolerance. That allows the author to skirt around the thorny issue of how new genes arise. The argument couldn't be applied as a general rule. For instance, to explain giraffes' long necks, he wouldn't say, "well, there was a small percentage of the population that already had genes for long necks, then the environment changed and natural selection weeded out the other genes." Assuming the pre-existence of the gene is meant to reduce the argument to a simple mechanical process, but in either case you have a problem. If the gene already exists, then why? Do we already have all the genes we may ever need, just waiting to be used? There is actually a school of evolutionists that believe just that. They note that there is no conceivable process for evolving new genetics that doesn't fly in the face of reasonable probabilities and the timelines involved, whereas culling genes is easy. They propose that the earliest lifeforms held maximally complex genomes, and all current organisms retain some subset of the original. There is no explanation for maximally complex primitive lifeforms that doesn't invoke the supernatural. On the other hand, perhaps the gene did not pre-exist, and it evolved as needed, in the same way Darwin believed giraffes evolved long necks in response to their continuous reaching for food. How do animal behaviors feed back and influence the genome? There is no know mechanism for this other than magic. So really, the current static of evolutionary theory requires one to pick either God or magic, but most engage in all sorts of logical games to evade the state of the science as it stands today.

Also, spandrell asserts that everyone who didn't have the gene must have died. Well, that's an extreme take on natural selection. No, everyone who had the gene had a reproductive advantage. Over many generations, the gene became the dominant allele in the population. Natural selection doesn't necessarily make bad genes a death sentence, or we'd see population bottlenecks for every evolved trait. It just means that you aren't as good at reproducing as your competitors. Perhaps it just meant that others were spawning large families while you were too drunk to reasonably function. Which brings us to another post by Anatoly Karlin, Breeder's Revenge. In this one, Karlin makes the compelling case that, while modernity makes children optional and has driven down reproduction rates to alarming levels, the environment is actually culling out those without an innate drive to have kids. He notes that white birth rates are finally back on the uptick, and predicts they will continue to rise for many decades to come. This time, Karlin isn't resorting to genetics to make his case, but simply to natural selection and generic inheritance. I'd suggest genes are actually a hindrance to evolution, which is worth considering at another time.