no, I'm not an IQ guy myself

Since some have asked, in response to my recent post on IQ and race-- no, I'm not a booster of IQ. You can read far smarter and more qualified people than I describing why a measure like IQ (or g) is deeply insufficient to approximate intelligence, or indeed why even "intelligence" as a static, comprehensive, or meaningful term is deeply problematic. (Although there are of course those who will insist that these perspectives are merely the product of well-intentioned sentimentality.)

Additionally, "race" and "black" have never been defined to my satisfaction in these discussions. Again, this is the kind of stance that is commonly dismissed as politically correct or romantic, but I find it simply a sensible consideration of the facts. When we're talking about ancestry and heredity we're talking about complex genealogical lines that are particularly tangled when you're talking about black Americans. Using terms like "of African ancestry" is deeply problematic when talking about black Americans, who represent a totally unique group and who have a genetic heritage loaded with the influence of other groups such as white Americans and Native Americans. It seems to me, from a common sense (read: inexpert) position, that "black" can't mean much if it includes both a first-generation Somalian who now lives in Los Angeles and can trace his lineage to the same town going back hundreds of years, and also someone whose family in Cleveland came by way of Alabama via Haiti via being captured as a slave from what is now Liberia, and whose lineage includes a Greek grandfather and a Cherokee great-grandmother and the slaveholders who raped their way into his background. I'm willing to be educated on why the term is still useful despite this lack of common background, but I keep not hearing that argument.

I engage on this issue using those terms and those assumptions because I want to critique the arguments that flow from their assumptions. And even accepting their assumptions that intelligence is one quantity that can be distilled down to individual numerical scores, and that broad designations of race and ethnicity are meaningful categories for making informed assumptions, their arguments strike me as a comprehensive failure. Again, show me the actual mechanism at work here. Point to the genes, the chromosomes, the alleles, demonstrate how those affect gestation, and prove that they lead to the phenotypical outcomes of lower IQ.

I'll show my cards and say that I don't think that will happen, because I don't believe intelligence, whatever that means, is like having lobed ears or blue eyes. Even if it were, I don't think it can be boiled down to a measure like g. But even if I did, I'd need to see the mechanism. Call me a stickler.