Debunking Race “Science”

The recent resurgence of racism has spawned a resurgence of interest in race “science”.  Unfortunately rather than continuing to teach these wrong-headed ideas in context along with all the ways they’re wrong-headed, the topics mostly are not taught or are glossed over.  As such, I think there’s inadequate communication for why these things are wrong.

However it’s mostly this resurgence of racists and the inadequate debunking that I’m attempting to address.  I’ll try to tackle that by collecting the various types of arguments made by race “science” and displaying the flaws within them.

Heritability != Genetics

First, these two concepts must be understood – “heritability” and “gene x environment interactions”.  The measure that most of these studies attempt to approximate is “heritability.”  The largest estimates of heritability of IQ put it at 50-60%.  However heritability != genetics.  Heritability = genetics + gene x environment interactions.  So within that 50-60%, there are also gene x environment interactions, which cause an unknown portion of that  effect

Imagine you live in a society where they think people with big noses are ugly.  As a result, they treat them badly.  Let’s say you have a gene that codes for a big nose, and you end up depressed because everyone thinks you’re ugly and you can’t find a romantic partner.  Now was that an environmental or a genetic effect?  It’s an example of a gene x environment interaction.

However race “scientists” will throw around this “heritability” estimate, and strongly imply that it consists of all genetic factors which change the way the brain functions.  What they either don’t realize or gloss over is that hidden within this metric would be the effects of the very discrimination based on skin color that they are trying to claim is not real, or is justified.

Twin Studies

The most common type of paper cited by the race/IQ crew are the twin studies.  They ultimately produce a heritability estimate which has all the flaws stated above in the conclusions it implies.  However there are other issues with the twin studies.

One sad result of the glossing over of race “science” in psychology and cognitive science classes, is that these studies and the facts they misrepresent are not just used by racists.  They’re mistakenly cited among perfectly reasonable people on topics unrelated to race, which not only spreads misinformation, but also provides credibility to the claims of the racists by legitimizing the bad science they cite.

The biggest problem with the twin studies revolve around their assumption that they successfully isolated the environment of the twins.  First off, that’s essentially impossible for a variety of reasons, so a decent scientist shouldn’t just assume it and take the resulting heritability estimates at face value.  They should at least acknowledge the difficulty of isolating environmental effects and emphasize that they’ve established a *cap* on heritability only.  But even aside from the theoretical difficulty, there are obvious practical issues with the data.  Issues which are common throughout twin studies.

Just a few examples: First many of the twins were often raised together for the first few years.  As you can read below, this is when some of the most critical fundamental concepts for children are being developed.  So these years raised together would be expected to have a strong impact.  Second, many of the twins in these studies kept in touch for significant periods of their lives.  And third, many of them were raised by extended family members–somehow that was considered a completely independent environment.  Hopefully it’s clear how these issues would completely invalidate the assumption that the environments were independent.  [source]

So these twin studies are essentially useless for determining anything other than a cap on genetic influence because they not only conflate heritability with genetics, but they also don’t effectively establish independent environments, and they sweep many obviously impactful confounding environmental variables under the rug.  As a result the heritability numbers they come up with are clearly inflated as well.

Misconceptions about how the brain works

Another issue that the race/IQ crew seems to have is that rather than spending effort understanding what exactly intelligence is and how it works in the brain, they’re hyper-focused on analyzing differences for these numbers between races.  Yet we don’t really understand what the numbers mean.  The modern models we’ve developed for how the brain works don’t really make sense with the model that the race/IQ crew imply with the emphasis they put on the IQ metric.

We learn to remember.  That’s why we don’t remember things when we’re very little until a certain age.  We have to figure that out.  Now granted, it’s mediated by some genes.  But the process of turning those genetic predispositions into actual intellectual activity is guided by experience with the environment, and not just environment but language.  Babies learn how to use their fingers and toes.  They learn the concepts of up and down.  These fundamental concepts become the essence of how we break the world down.  However as they’re learning these things, they’re also being exposed to concepts that their parents pass to them through language and conscious and even subconscious gesturing that they’re doing.

So both the parents and the genes are subtly guiding the baby in what concepts to form, but the actual thinking is the baby’s own emergent “software” which is bootstrapped by concepts which are specially formed by its particular interaction with the environment.  It’s this “software” which is has the biggest impact on the way we process the world.  One person might break the world down more primarily into “interesting / not interesting”  and another might break the world down more primarily into “good / bad.”  They will experience things in a very different way.  Depending on the situation one may be much more advantageous than the other.  Neither is necessarily “wrong” inherently.  Genetically coding that difference would be an evolutionary disadvantage, because times change, cultures change.  A brain which is stuck breaking down the world in a certain way will end up with a disadvantage.

Instead, it appears what the human brain does so well is essentially act as a sponge for the environmental influences around it.  We can see this in the way the brain maintains so much flexibility.  Neuroplasticity allows the same part of the brain to switch functions if a certain sense is disabled.  The brain abstracts  fundamental concepts from the environment, with the guidance of concepts that are passed down through language, prosody, gesture, etc., ultimately creating a unique combination of filters and integrations for processing the world.

There are almost an infinite number of ways to prioritize these different dimensions along which you can break down the world. And people can create their own dimensions which may have no verbal name, but may just be associated with a feeling particular to them.  They can use genetically-coded hardware for one concept (e.g. color processing), to help process another concept (e.g. music), which they’ve learned to process in a parallel way resulting in synesthesia.

With this view can see the complexity in how people use their brains to break down the world, and we can see how unlikely it is that the majority of it is genetically encoded.  Hopefully we can also see that–given that normally developed human brains appear to have largely the same order of magnitude of capacity for creating and processing these concepts–the particular configuration of concepts in a persons that change how they break down the world are almost certainly going to be the deciding factor in their ability to perform on certain problem solving tasks in a certain realm versus another.  We can also see why these different perspectives could be extremely valuable.  Any software engineer can tell you that the particular abstractions that you apply to a problem, and the order in which you apply them, can make all the difference.

Somewhat speculative side note to tie this into the rest of the themes of this blog: the flexibility of the brain and its role as essentially a semiotic sponge is evidence that the institution is a primary  construct in human development.  We can’t understand our divergence from other primates without understanding human institutions as living organisms.  For instance, rather than try to understand language as a communication between 2 individuals, it must be understood as part of the institutional “code” of the society.  Language allows people to mutually constrain each others’ behavior in specific ways that serve to propagate the institution they’re a part of.