I’m probably going to be in Portland this weekend (Imbler, not Maine). If anyone wants to have coffee (or actually, coffeed mud) @ Stump Town (on Belmont) on Sat. or Sunday email me (this doesn’t include you B.H.G.-I’ll give you a call before I show up).

Some comments on my post More Census Gleanings may have got lost in the site changeover. Please repost any comments and questions and I will try to reply.

One of my replies that got lost was about the IQ of ‘Blacks’ in Britain. My post said that the Black-White differential was less than in the US, but this was questioned.

First, it should go without saying that there is no such thing as the IQ of a population. There is just the average score of a population on particular tests. The results of particular tests tend to correlate together, but a difference of 5 points or so in the population mean on different tests would not be unusual.

In my comments on the Black-White differential in Britain I was relying mainly on the following:
[1] Nicholas Mackintosh, IQ and Human Intelligence, OUP, 1998
[2] A. West, C. Mascie-Taylor, and N. Mackintosh, Cognitive and educational attainment in different ethnic groups, J. Biosocial Science, 1992, 24, 539-554
[3] N Mackintosh and C. Mascie-Taylor, The IQ question (1986), appendix to an official report on ethnic minority education in Britain.

The gist of the various studies, summarised in [1], is that early studies (1960s and early 70s) on Blacks in Britain tended to show average IQ around 85 (with Whites around 100): a similar differential to the US. However, the samples included very recent immigrants, and when these were stripped out, the gap was narrower. More recent studies (1980s onward) have shown a further narrowing of the gap. Notably, the Child Health and Education Study (1980) shows a difference of only about 5 points on non-verbal tests and 9 points on verbal tests.

There is a potential pitfall in making comparisons over time if the meaning of ‘Black’ is changing. Most obviously, there has been a large increase in the proportion of mixed-race children. However, this pitfall appears to be avoided in reference [2], where children with parents from different ethnic groups were excluded from the study. In this study West Indian (Black Caribbean) children aged 7 to 15 had mean scores between .24 and .77 standard deviations below the White British control group, varying according to age group, the average over all age groups being about .5 s.d., equivalent to about 8 IQ points.

If anyone knows of a reputable recent study that shows a differential of more than 10 IQ points (about 2/3 of a standard deviation), I would be interested to know. Also, do American readers know of any data on Black Caribbean immigrants to the US? They have the reputation of doing better, both educationally and economically, than American blacks, but I don’t know of any IQ data.

DNA study to settle ancient mystery about mingling of Inuit, Vikings asserts the headline-but read on, the story makes clear that it won’t settle jack. Did some of the Greenland Norse become absorbed into the skraeling peoples? Surely. But if you read any of Gretel Ehrlich’s books on Greenland you will note how much intermarriage has occurred between Danes, natives and other visitors since “re-contact” (one Inuit family notes proudly their Jewish ancestry from an early 19th century merchant in This Cold Heaven). I am skeptical that even “pure” Inuit who seem phenotypically non-European have escaped Danish taint in the past 300 years. I am a big fan of using genetics to answer historical questions, but ’tis often far easier to falsify than validate, and the archaeology to me implies that 1) Most Greenlanders left for Iceland or 2) if they were desparate they became accultured to Inuit methods and lost their Christian faith and European ways. Because there is an alternative and more plausible pathway to explain the presence of exogenous DNA from Scandinavia this seems more like a publicity stunt than an honest quest for an answer.

Via Human Races. Also, I recommend The Greenlanders if you are curious to read a novelization of the history & culture of the Norse.

Future Pundit posts on some new research by Robert Plomin indicating that abnormal cognitive function (learning disabilities) is the tail end of the normal spectrum. Kind of reminds me of the arguments over Asperger’s Syndrome-is it an illness, or part of the normal human continuum? As we’ve noted before-assortive mating by IQ, personality and occupation might be resulting in an increase in the number of people expressing the symptom’s of Aspergers-where before the various locii might be smeared throughout the population, they are now being brought together in the children of newly affluent and socially acceptable (marginally) geeks.

Posted by razib at 02:24 PM

Is Australia the world’s gayest country? A few points….

Generally of British Isles stock (kind of sound gay to start with)
Disproportionately descended from inmates (male mostly)
Sometimes work in the outback with nothing in a 100 mile radius but dingos and your “comrades”
Most mammals in Oz are weird, why shouldn’t the people turn a bit queer after a few generations?
Had an Ozzie roommate that liked to “do it” with ugly chicks once-guys are just the next step….

Jason, any input?

If you watched The Magdalene Sisters, can you answer the poll below on which one is the pretty one? Me and a leprechaun got into an argument on that point….

On a non-trivial note-Corante, the new home of Derek Lowe, is a pretty phat tech news portal! Also, I’ve also been reading Behavorial Genetics in the Postgenomic Era for the past few weeks in my spare time. The chapters on molecular biological methods & quantitative genetics and g are what I zoomed in on-but there’s a lot of stuff in it that will interest someone more well versed in psychology. There is one chapter that shows how heritability (in this context the proportion of phenotypic variance attributable to genetic variance) increases as one moves up the socioeconomic ladder, something that shouldn’t surprise GNXP readers.

The Muslims are Coming! The Muslims are Coming! declares this article over that Tech Central Station. The author makes plausible projections of the low European birth rate + the inevitable drop in Islamic birth rates to come to the conclusion that about 25% of Western Europeans might be Muslim within 50 years. Among the working age population that portion could be as high as 40%.

Are you terrified yet? Well, calm down, the author makes the case for the emergence of a "mélange" civilization. It would be Islamo-Christian, with antecedants in the early Ottomon polity. The problem I have is that such cultures have always existed within the Dar-al-Islam, but they tend to be anterior to the eventual development of a more thoroughly Muslim polity that reduces the non-Muslim population into dhimmitude. Of course, we are not slaves to history, Westen Islam could spark a Reformation in the faith, but I simply want to remind everyone that the rising Muslim elites have a long history of initial cooperation with the non-Muslim powers that be until the time when the dhimmi become disposable. Also, let me note that many of the dhimmi families that allied themselves with the early Muslim powers later converted to Islam and became part of the Muslim elite. The assumption is that the 75% of Europeans that are predominantly post-Christian will remain so and not convert to Islam in the presence of a vigorous religious tradition-but history teaches us that active organized religious minorities can transform societies that have no alternatives[1].

fn1. Need I elaborate that many of the above assertions could also apply to pre-Enlightenment Christianity? A modus vivendi often existed with the old pagan religions of Europe along the margins of Christendom. The ancient precedent for this behavior seems to be the period between The Edict of Milan in 313 A.D. when the Christians received official toleration from the Empire and 392 when Theodosius the Great banned private pagan worship-the Christians clearly waited until they possessed the commanding heights before dispatching their pagan rivals. After the Battle of Frigidus the pagan elite of the Western Empire finally converted to the new religion.

test

The World on PRI had a segment on a Sikh Indian American running for a senate seat in Illinois as a Republican. The piece highlights the fact that the candidate dresses like a traditional Sikh. What get’s on my nerves about this sort of piece are moments like when a spokesmen for an Indian American Republican group says they (Indian Americans) are “natural” Republicans. This is all glossy marketing, after all, Jews, blacks and now Latinos have been “natural” Republicans as well. Working class whites from the south are also “natural” Democratics (post-1964 presidential politics). Politics is more complex than pre-digested soundbites and many choices are obviously individual. Our culture is so saturated with discourse framed in identity politics and the importance of group affiliation that even the putatively individualistic Right now views issues through that lens. Perhaps that’s what most irritated me when National Review editor Ramesh Ponnuru profiled Indian American Republican Bobby Jindal, who is running for the spot of governor of Louisiana. I know that Ramesh might be able to bring some extra perspective because of his commonalities with the candidate-but I don’t want this to be such a big factor that non-white conservatives (or liberals, or fill-in-the-black) are stuck in the same box as black conservatives, always being dictated & defined by race from both the Left & the Right through both ostracism & encouragement despite their attempt to argue that we need to transcend ethnic affiliation as a key organizing principle of civic life.

Interesting archaeological find, a 6 foot (1.83 meters) tall female Germanic warrior who fits the martial model of her Celtic precedessor Boadicea. Interesting read in the context of previous posts on Celtic & Anglo-Saxon ancestry in the British population-if a warrior queen crossed the seas it seems likely other frauleins also made the journey.