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Friday, December 6, 2019

Race Science: not even wrong

Pinkerite attempted race science recently in a two part series, but the more recent post on Charles Murray has inspired me to do it again.

In the Murray post I quoted a five-year-old article by Carl Zimmer in the NYTimes entitled "Black? White? A Murky Distinction Grows Still Murkier" which includes this statement about Latino ancestry based on genetic testing by 23andMe:
Latinos, on the other hand, had genes that were on average 65.1 percent European, 18 percent Native American, and 6.2 percent African... 
And this inspired me to have another go at race science.

Now we know how important Jean-Philippe Rushton is to the world of race science. Rushton was cited eleven times in The Bell Curve.

Rushton published an article for white supremacist VDARE in 2007 called Indians Aren't That Intelligent (On Average),

He's referring to South Asian Indians. Sorry leading race science proponent from Bangladesh, Razib Khan.

In that same VDARE article Rushton uses Richard Lynn's race calculations:
East Asians (Chinese, Japanese and Koreans) obtain the highest mean IQ at 105. Europeans follow with an IQ of 100. Some ways below these are the Inuit or Eskimos (IQ 91), South East Asians (IQ 87), Native American Indians (IQ 87), Pacific Islanders (IQ 85), and South Asians and North Africans (IQ 84). Well below these are the sub-Saharan Africans (IQ 67), the Australian Aborigines (IQ 62), the Bushmen of the Kalahari Desert, and the Pygmies of the Congo rain forests (IQ 54).
Notice that there is no "Hispanic" category mentioned. But elsewhere in the article Rushton cites (returning the favor) The Bell Curve:
There are large inequalities in average IQ scores between groups. Herrnstein and Murray's (1994) The Bell Curve reported that the average IQ for "African" Americans is lower than those for "Latino", "White", "East Asian", and "Jewish" Americans (IQs = 85, 89, 103, 106, and 115, respectively, pp. 273-278).
So The Bell Curve race categorization scheme includes "Latino" but does not include "Native American."

Then in a 2010 paper Rushton and Arthur Jensen (Jensen was cited by The Bell Curve 24 times) use this race classification scheme:
 Jewish (mean IQ = 113), East Asian (106), White (100), Hispanic (90), South Asian (87), African American (85), and sub-Saharan African (70). 
As we know thanks to Quillette's staff race science proponent Bo Winegard, his brother Ben and their co-author Brian Boutwell, race science says you can sort "groups" any which way that is convenient for you. Clearly Jensen and Rushton abide by this.

So let's do the math of Hispanic ancestry combined with race science IQ claims.

ANCESTRY
IQ CLAIM
%
WEIGHT
WEIGHTED AVG
European (White)
100
65.1
0.651
65.1
African (Black)
85
6.2
0.062
5.27
Native American
87
18
0.18
15.66



TOTAL
86.03

So the IQ should be 86 based on ancestry (and race science claims of genetic IQ) rather than the claim of 90 based on the demographic category "Hispanic."

Once again race science has failed.

But considering how incoherent its classification schemes are, I think it's more accurate to say race science is not even wrong.

UPDATE: I've reworked the numbers with the remaining average Latino ancestry to get closer to 100% and turns out race science is even more wrong (and not-even-wrong) than I thought. Starting at Cleanup on Aisle 88.

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