Are black mothers subject to the same fundamental rules of biology as white mothers?
Or, perhaps I should borrow a phrase that Dorothy Sayers once used for women, and ask, “Are black mothers human?”
Cosma Shalizi (hat tip to Crooked Timber for this link) responds to Saletan’s mea culpa about failing to pick up on Rushton’s racism.
To put it in “shorter William Saletan” form, what he is saying is: I am shocked — shocked! — to discover that the people who devote their careers to providing supposedly-scientific backing for racist ideas are, in fact, flaming racists. And he does seem to be shocked, though it is hard (as Yglesias says) to see why, logically, he should strain out those gnats he displays for our horrified inspection while swallowing the camel of group inferiority (and telling his readers that camel is really great and the coming thing). This indicates a level of incompetence as a reporter and researcher that is really quite stunning …
Now, not to defend Saletan particularly, but I do understand why he’d accept the camel of group inferiority where the subject is low IQ, and balk once he sees the full implications Rushton draws from it. Because low IQ is far from the most dehumanizing thing that Rushton attributes to black people.
It’s possible, you see, to believe that one group has a somewhat lower average IQ than another, and still consider both groups deserving of human dignity. Many of us know people who are lower in IQ than ourselves, and perhaps even put us to shame in terms of their courage, or honesty, or integrity, or hard work, or any number of other things we may value. Likewise, one may believe one group has a lower average IQ than another, and believe such average differences have such low predictive value relative to all the individual information available on, say, a job applicant, as to be wrong even to consider.
One may, perhaps, even believe that black people are, on average, less able to restrain their sexual impulses and more inclined to commit crimes than white people, and that such a difference is genetic, without respecting black people’s human dignity any the less. At least, one may believe such a thing in theory. I don’t know anyone in practice who both believes that black people are genetically prone to be criminal and is prepared to treat them as equals. And in fact Rushton and that supposedly oh so well vetted scholar Richard Lynn, whom my charming new commenter is so eager to promote, lend their support to a magazine called American Renaissance, which promotes the view that “Race is important, and whites have rights and interests as a race.” Still, I’ll allow for the theoretical possibility that one could believe black people more prone to crime than white people and still think that, after all, they make fine leaders of countries and corporations alike. After all, many people think that men are naturally more violent, more crime-prone, and less capable of sexual restraint than women, and somehow that never translates into a belief that men shouldn’t hold political office or run companies, or that either their mental abilities or leadership are in any way less to be trusted than those of women.
But can anyone really respect black people in any meaningful way, while holding that black mothers care less about their children than white mothers?
The whole foundation of Rushton’s racial argument is that human reproductive strategies differ from one race to another (note: I’ve included a “nofollow” in this link to avoid driving up Rushton’s Google rank).
An evolutionary theory of human reproduction is proposed, familiar to biologists as the r-K scale of reproductive strategies. At one end of this scale are r-strategies, which emphasize high reproductive rates; at the other end are K-strategies, which emphasize high levels of parental investment. This scale is generally used to compare the life histories of widely disparate species, but here it is used to describe the immensely smaller variations among human races. It is hypothesized that, again on average, Mongoloid people are more K-selected than Caucasoids, who are more K-selected than Negroids.
In other words, “Negroids” breed like rabbits, and are about as unconcerned with their offspring as rabbits, relative to us white people.
On the face of things, this would seem an extremely improbable thing. After all, black women, like white women, have to go through about nine months of pregnancy for each child. Pregnancy costs black women as much as white women, for black women are no less prone than white women to serious pregnancy complications like preeclampsia and gestational diabetes. Black infants, like white infants, are helpless, demanding to care for, and keep their parents up at night. Black toddlers, like white toddlers, are active and liable to commit toddler suicide if you don’t keep them away from dangers they’re not old enough to recognize. Even black teenagers, just as much as white teenagers, are liable to do foolishly risky things when not supervised by adults. One would think that the same rules of biology would apply for black people as for white people: if your babies are born helpless and take a long time to produce, you’re not well equipped to follow an “r” strategy of having lots of babies and not investing much in caring for any particular one.
Heck, even different dog breeds, which do, as I’ve said, differ in breed abilities and behavior a hell of a lot more than different races of people do, for the simple reason that, unlike human races, dog breeds are rigorously separated and carefully selectively bred for just those traits – even dog breeds don’t differ as significantly in their sexual behavior and level of care for their puppies as Rushton wants to claim human races do.
So, how do people like Rushton come up with what my commenter calls “mountains of peer-reviewed research by well-credentialed scholars” to support such a claim. Well, first of all you cherry pick the research. “Mountains of peer-reviewed research by well-credentialed scholars” implies that well-credentialed scholars have produced mountains of peer-reviewed research that consistently supports Rushton’s and Lynn’s claims. Not so. In fact, “mountains of peer-reviewed research” have been produced on racial differences, which peer-reviewed research is highly contradictory, and points in different directions, depending on which set of peer-reviewed studies you select. It’s not hard at all to cherry pick to get the results you want.
At this point, let me reference Cosma Shalizi’s post again, as Cosma talks about peer review, and Saletan’s reporting problems.
But let me back up a minute to the bit about relying on “peer review and rebuttals to expose any relevant issue”. There are two problems here.
One has to do with the fact that, as I said, it is really very easy to find the rebuttals showing that Rushton’s papers, in particular, are a tragic waste of precious trees and disk-space. For example, in the very same issue of the very same journal as the paper by Rushton and Jensen which was one of Saletan’s main sources, Richard Nisbett, one of the more important psychologists of our time, takes his turn banging his head against this particular wall….
The other problem with his supposed reliance on peer review is that he seems confused about how that institution works. I won’t rehash what I’ve already said about it, but only remark that passing peer review is better understood as saying a paper is not obviously wrong, not obviously redundant and not obviously boring, rather than as saying it’s correct, innovative and important. Even this misses a deeper problem, a possible failure mode of the scientific community. A journal’s peer review is only as good as the peers it uses as reviewers. If everyone, or almost everyone, who referees for some journal is in the grip of the same mistake, then they will not catch it in papers they review, and the journal will propagate it….
Put simply, the problem is that any group of quack scholars with a shared delusion can put together a journal, dub each other peer reviewers, and go on their cheerful way by endorsing each others’ work for their journal…. This isn’t even always a bad thing, since sometimes people who seem like quacks are in fact right, and doing things like starting their own journals gives them a chance to get their act together and assemble a convincing case. But all of this does mean that the peer-review filter is a very weak and accepting one, especially on controversial topics. It does not seem unreasonable of me to ask that those who set themselves up as science reporters grasp this.
(I hope no one will mis-interpret me as saying that peer review is worthless — I think some form of it is essential, it’s just not enough …
So, let’s look at a few examples of how you can cherry pick your way into scientific proof that those black people breed like rabbits (and, by the way, are prone to be criminal and not any too smart). Back to that Rushton article whose Google rank I don’t care to increase.
In the United States, Black babies have long been known to have a shorter gestation period than White babies. By week 39, 51% of Black children have been born, whereas the figure for White children is 33% (Niswander & Gordon, 1972; Polednak, 1989). Similar results have been observed in Europe, where women of European ancestry have been compared with women of African ancestry (Papiernik, Cohen, Richard, de Oca, & Feingold, 1986). Papiernik et al. (1986) reviewed other observations that, although Black babies are born earlier, they are physiologically more mature than White babies, as measured by pulmonary function and amniotic fluid. I am unaware of data on Asian babies.
It may be convenient that he’s unaware of data on Asian babies; I remember looking over statistics when my niece Uhuru was born, and drawing some hope from reading that, for micropremies, girls and babies of Asian descent were more likely to survive (Uhuru’s a quarter Japanese, and I was hoping against hope that this quarter, along with her gender, would give her a boost). I can’t find the article again, though – research on the race and health and medical differences in the US tends to be more heavily focused on black/white differences than Asian/white ones – and it’s always possible that the “Asian micropremies are more likely to survive and thrive than white ones” finding didn’t hold up for repeated studies.
What’s certain is that differences between the races, in the US, in length of gestation, are heavily influenced by economics. As a New England Journal of Medicine article puts it, “Race very often serves as a proxy for poverty.” What’s even more interesting is that social and economic differences may even explain the neonatal survival paradox: while black infant mortality over all is higher than white infant mortality, very low birth weight black babies survive at a higher rate than very low birth rate white babies. A racial difference that supports Rushton’s claim about different reproductive strategies? Don’t be so sure. It turns out that research in the Czech Republic shows the same difference between babies born to low income Czech mothers and babies born to higher income Czech mothers. Poor babies, you see, have a shorter gestation period than rich babies, regardless of race. It’s theorized that, since rich women are better equipped to carry their children to term than poor women, premature birth and very low birth weight are “a more important distress signal” in the rich than in the poor. Hence the paradoxical reversal in survival rates.
Black precocity in physical maturation continues through life. On well-standardized tests, scores indicate that Black babies from Africa, the Caribbean, and the United States mature faster on measures made from birth to 12 months in coordination and head lifting, in muscular strength and turning over, and in locomotion; at 15 to 20 months, Black babies are more advanced in the ability to put on clothing …
I don’t have time to look up the data on this one, but I do want to note where there’s a potential for cherry picking here. In addition to the possibility that Rushton might be picking the studies which go in his direction on “precocity” and ignoring the ones that don’t (as it’s been demonstrated that he does with studies on brain size), there’s also the question of how “precocity” is measured. Let’s say you give a number of tests to black children and white children. Black children are better than white children of the same age on some tasks, and worse on others. What does it prove when the white children outscore the black children? Well, white people are just naturally smarter than black people. What does it prove when the black children outscore the white children? Well, being more advanced at putting on clothing than other babies of your age certainly can’t be a sign of any sort of intelligence, because we know black babies have to be stupider. Rather, it all goes to prove that black children grow up fast, and can therefore be ignored less invested in by their “r strategy” mothers.
The frequency of dizygotic twins per 1,000 births is less than 4 for Mongoloids, 8 for Caucasoids, and 16 or greater for Negroids (Bulmer, 1970). Subsequent reviews of twinning rates in the United States (Allen, 1988) and Japan (Imaizumi, 1992) have confirmed these data.
You might think that the frequency of dizygotic twins would be an obviously genetic thing. And you might well be wrong, since it turns out that dizygotic twins are more common among women with a higher BMI; obesity, these days in the US, is more common in the poor than in the rich. In any case, notice just how small is the twinning difference relative to the behavioral differences it’s supposed to explain. Black mothers, I guess, don’t weep as much as white mothers when their sons go to prison in much larger numbers, because they have an ever so slightly higher chance of having twins.
Testosterone levels may underlie other behavior traits differentiating the races, for they have been found to be 19% higher in a sample of Black U.S. college students than in their White counterparts (Ross et al., 1986). In an older group of U.S. military veterans, Blacks measured 3% higher in testosterone level than Whites (Ellis & Nyborg, 1992). Another study, of testosterone metabolites, showed a 10% to 15% higher incidence in Black Americans than in White Americans and a still lower incidence in the Japanese in Japan (Hixson, 1992).
Here, Rushton is cherry picking his studies. It turns out that the relationship between testosterone and race is more equivocal than he wants to claim, with some researchers finding no difference in serum androgen levels. That doesn’t mean that racial differences in testosterone levels aren’t worth studying – they are, because even if the likes of Rushton may use a finding of higher testosterone in black men to argue that they’re naturally criminal, doctors could use the same finding to, for example, influence their treatment of prostate cancer (which does, in fact, differ in prevalence and expected outcome for different races). It doesn’t mean that the studies Rushton cites don’t exist; there are, in fact, some studies that show particular populations of black men, particularly young black men, having more testosterone than white men in the same set. Maybe eventually this will be proven to be a real difference between the races, maybe even a genetic one. But that’s not where the evidence stands now. Right now, we have equivocal evidence on hormone level differences that might or might not be real, and that might or might not, if real, be caused by environmental differences. And Rushton is cherry picking to make it look as if the evidence is stronger than it actually is.
I could go on, but you get the idea. Those supposed “r strategy” black mothers, who just don’t invest as much in their children as white mothers, are a figment of Rushton’s imagination, carefully constructed by highly selective reporting of studies, to put a “scientific” face on his bigotry. Or, as someone else once said,
I have borne thirteen children, and seen most all sold off to slavery, and when I cried out with my mother’s grief, none but Jesus heard me! And ain’t I a woman?
On the IQ front, check out the Talking Squid on why the best argument for genetic racial differences in IQ fails.
December 1st, 2007 at 7:06 pm
When you recall that a really large number of people (evol psych types) seem prepared to believe easily that male and female and human beings pursue different and opposite reproductive strategies, various human mothers doing so seems plausible. (I don’t believe either.) But it’s well known that fewer children heavily invested in vs more children less invested in is a pretty universal difference between well off and poor humans of every place and time.
Most if not all of these arguments were not so long ago applied to some groups of white people (southern europeans, the irish) by other groups of white people (snobs).
Jean
December 2nd, 2007 at 3:57 am
Higher IQ types are better able to comprehend the benefits of deferred gratification to improve long-term life outcomes. Nobody is holding guns to black heads saying “Breed!!” It is an intellectually short-sighted decision (70% Out-Of-Wedlock in USA) freely made and demonstrative of group low IQ (whites 25%, Asian-Americans under 20% OOW births). The inability to recognize and plan for a long-term better future is why low-IQ blacks are doing so poorly overall despite all their opportunities (notice how they ran Zimbabwe into the ground when handed a thriving nation on a platter in 1982…)
Checkout pg452 of The Bell Curve (you do have the book don’t you?). The SAT scores of the best blacks in the country, children of black attorneys/politicians/successful business people, on entering Ivy League universities, are 200 points down from whites (these are best blacks in the country, free ride, don’t pay a dime, prized by schools to pump their diversity numbers). The whites, however, aren’t the best since many are legacy admissions, children of big-donor alumni families, who don’t have to meet quite as stringent admission requirements. Race group differences in IQ are REAL and GENETIC.
December 2nd, 2007 at 8:33 am
Try South Africa and Namibia, my white supremacist commenter. Take a look at the IMF database. Select South Africa, select GDP adjusted to constant dollars, start from a couple of years before the end of apartheid in 1994, and set your ending date to the present, 2007. Notice how GDP, in constant dollars, increases in South Africa every single year after the end of apartheid. Notice how the economy does not collapse when the majority black population finally gets equal rights. Namibia, likewise, gained independence in 1990, and there, too, black people showed a noticeable lack of a tendency to run the country into the ground once they had control. South Africa and Namibia are among the ten richest countries in Africa. No, you wouldn’t be cherry picking your data at all by picking Zimbabwe for your example of black people’s inherent genetic abilities, would you? Let’s pick Germany during the Weimar republic, shall we, and use it as an example of white people’s inherent inability to manage inflation.
In 2005, the International Monetary Fund estimated that five of the world’s ten fastest growing economies were in Africa. But you wouldn’t be cherry picking your examples at all by making Zimbabwe your representative for the continent, and ignoring those growing economies, would you? Africa is poor relative to the rest of the world, sure, but it’s hardly the uniform portrait of disastrous inability of stupid black people to manage their affairs that you’d like to paint. The CIA has rated Equatorial Guinea as having the fourth highest GDP in the world. Mauritius has grown wealthier since independence. But, no, you wouldn’t be cherry picking your examples at all by making Zimbabwe the representative for the whole continent.
As for fertility rates, take a look at >vital statistics from the CDC. Total non-Hispanic black fertility rate, 67.1, and total non-Hispanic white fertility rate 58.5. Not that far apart, and both well behind the total Hispanic fertility rate of 96.9. On the other hand, if you look at worldwide fertility rates, you find several African countries (not Hispanic ones) in the lead. My point? Who breeds how much (and when) is highly influenced by culture and circumstance, not the result of some sort of hardwired genetic predisposition to r or K strategies, as the likes of Rushton would have it.
No, I don’t own The Bell Curve. Why would I? There’s this thing called a library where I can find it any time I please. I prefer to spend my book budget on other books. BTW, you have read Thomas Sowell’s critique of the book, haven’t you? I’ll note that the best of the crop black students at top schools sometimes manage to outperform the top white students in real achievement (and some white alumni outperform some black ones – my point is that both have potential, not that the black ones are inherently better), however much you may like to suggest that even their best and brightest still aren’t as good as us. Take, for example, Mark Dean, holder of three of the nine patents for the original IBM PC. I guess he must just hav>e been one of those weak affirmative action admissions to Stanford, just not up to snuff compared with the legacy white admissions, eh?
Use all the capital letters you like, my white supremacist commenter; it still doesn’t change the fact that you’re cherry picking, and that your proof of genetic racial differences in intelligence isn’t there. The Flynn effect alone punches a giant hole in your case, whether you want to admit it or not.
December 2nd, 2007 at 8:40 am
And to Jean, yes, a lot of these differences are differences between rich and poor, so it’s no surprise they can get used to show the inferiority of whichever ethnic group happens to be currently poor (once upon at time Irish and Eastern and Southern Europeans, now blacks).
December 2nd, 2007 at 11:36 am
First, I’m not a white supremacist, Asians are proven supreme in the characteristics that produce strong civilization. Suspect you’ve taken the standard approach in a losing position to attack the messenger.
Second, see Lynn and VanHanen, “IQ & Global Inequality” ranks world nations against measured national IQ averages. Virtually the entire bottom of the GDP barrel, and corresponding IQ, is in Africa. No cherry picking there.
Finally, Flynn Effect or not, at any given frozen point in time, the observed racial IQ gaps are essentially constant. Any time blacks go head to head on a cognitive playing field, the same gaps are found: SAT, ACT, MCAT, LSAT, and every local/standardized state test. Same gaps are seen anywhere in the country despite all the special attention, focused funding, and spoon-feeding. Even with all the administrative cheating by districts under pressure to avoid NCLB sanctions. IIRC Sowell was talking about one school in Washington DC, hardly a representative sample.
Genetics is the only credible explanation for the gaps.
[LG/Sappho: I follow a longstanding "rule of three" in my Internet discussions. That rule is, that I'll go any number of rounds of discussion with people on the net, including people I disagree with, if I think that we're learning from each other or getting something out of the discussion. If I don't think so, I cut off the discussion at three rounds. This is the last comment I'll be approving on this topic from BigDon, and, since this is my blog, I'll give myself the last word here. If BigDon wishes to respond to me any further after this, he can do it on his own blog, wherever that may be.]
December 2nd, 2007 at 12:58 pm
BigDon, I know all about the “Asians are really the smartest” dodge for pretending you’re not a white supremacist. That works for you because the Asian IQ edge doesn’t correlate with wealth and power to anywhere near the degree that the white IQ edge does (either within this country or internationally); model minorities are very convenient as long as they don’t actually run things. Sorry, no, I’m not “attacking the messenger” by naming your views what they are. If you state that white people are intrinsically smarter, less criminal, etc. than black people and that black people just inherently run anything they control into the ground, that’s racism and white supremacy, whether you like the right name for it or not.
Yes, you were cherry picking on Africa. The fact that African countries are on average poorer does not prove your point that black people are genetically less competent to run their affairs than white people are (the argument you were making with Zimbabwe), if some African countries have improved their GDP, and sometimes even their relative ranking, since they ceased to be colonies managed by white people. Picking Zimbabwe as your example of the inevitable result of black self-governance is like picking OJ as representing the inevitable character of any star black athlete.
I can see that you haven’t read, or don’t properly remember, Sowell’s critique, because it relies on far more evidence than one school.
The gaps you mention have not remained constant by any means. The gap between blacks and whites has been narrowing, over the same period in which the Flynn effect has been operating; the narrowing of the racial gap on IQ tests along with the increase in everyone’s IQ gives strong evidence for an environmental component in group IQ test results. Furthermore, ethnic group rankings have not remained constant on IQ tests; Southern Europeans and those currently high scoring Ashkenazi Jews once scored much lower, relative to other groups, than they do now.
Also note the point another commenter of mine made about “subcategories that indicate sources of variation that are more certainly more causal than skin pigment, and may in fact go toward defining what “race” means in social and experiential terms. Or put differently, skin pigment may be an occasion for the really causal factors. For instance, in historical army intelligence tests, black soldiers from Ohio had significantly higher average scores than white soldiers from Arkansas.”
You might also look at an old Slate article, The Bell Curve Flattened.
With that, I am through talking with you. I have led you to water; it’s up to you whether you choose to drink it, or to cling to your prejudices.
December 2nd, 2007 at 6:34 pm
Some of this has been said, but here’s my two cents.
What does 200 points mean in intelligence. If blacks were taking that test along with whites that would mean both would be around the median and not some standard deviation from it. They both would be on top of the curve not on the flat portion which is always implied.
A score of 1000 out of 1600 meant in my day that you could get into a decent college, so when admissions got tighter approximately 40 years later, that changed to 1200, did that mean that people got dumber. In my day most black people were not going to colleges that required you to take the SAT, so my statement applies to mostly white people.
That brings up another point; just how many blacks, have taken the SAT and would that be a representative sample of the population to be statistically valid. I don’t even think enough black people took any IQ test. Test for the military, the SAT and other educational test aren’t IQ test, they are test for specific knowledge. If that were the case my Army entrance test results should have been consistent with my SAT and Merit Scholarship test (separate in my day).
December 2nd, 2007 at 9:26 pm
I suspect group SAT scores in particular may also be heavily affected by who is more likely to take SAT prep courses (and even whether you take the PSAT beforehand). I seriously doubt the prep courses are either, a) completely ineffectual in raising people’s scores, or b) given to an even distribution of people of all ethnicities. If we’re talking about a 200 point difference in combined SAT scores, different levels of practice for the test could well account for a non-trivial part of the difference.
December 3rd, 2007 at 5:39 am
The whole score thing as presented by “Big Don” (a screen name that suggests he may have certain minor insecurities) as universal and constant is actually a U.S. factoid – I doubt the SAT, ACT, MCAT, LSAT are often taken anywhere else in the world. So all that shows is that there is a big difference in the level of black vs white USAmerican college entrants – which is 1) hardly likely to come as news to anyone and 2) far from being only explainable by genetics
If genetics were the explanation, US blacks, who largely have some white and American indigenous ancestry as well as African, should come out ahead of black Africans on all of these measures. No one seems to be making that case.
Why does anyone want to believe they’re genetically superior? Is it somehow better to have better genes than to have had other kinds of advantages? One can take credit for neither.
December 5th, 2007 at 8:20 am
I recall my Stanford alumni magazine relating research showing that it’s better to tell your child “you worked hard” than “you’re smart.” Evidently having your special intelligence and giftedness be the thing that’s reinforced doesn’t prepare you so well to recover from failure. Another potential problem with overemphasizing IQ as the source of all success (even racial arguments aside).
December 10th, 2007 at 9:58 am
I just noticed above, where i said “if genetics were the explanation” I meant, of course, IF we were taking the group genetic superiority premise as valid, which I certainly am NOT!
The smart vs work hard thing comes up all the time in parenting and school discussions. I personally don’t feel that it’s necessary not to tell kids they’re smart – someone else will, anyway, if I don’t – but I emphasize that getting good at anything takes practice, that even experts who are grownups make mistakes, and that what counts is whether something is your best effort, not whether it’s good by some arbitrary external standard, that everyone has things they are and aren’t good at, and so on.
December 10th, 2007 at 10:02 am
By the way, on the subject of the behavior of mothers, I highly recommend the fascinating book _Mother Nature: Maternal Instincts and How They Shape the Human Species_ by Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, a primatologist and anthropologist.
December 11th, 2007 at 8:27 am
I’ve been meaning to read Hrdy. Maybe sometime after Christmas.