This is not the case. The percent of the general population that get 5 or more A-C grades in the English and Math subjects is usually about 55 percent. Also, gaps between economic classes are much larger than most ethnic gaps.
See:
http://occidentalascent.wordpress.com/2012/04/13/race-class-and-cognition-in-the-uk/

The question of dumbing down, its relevance, and other issues are addressed in the above (including in the comments)link as well as here:

http://occidentalascent.wordpress.com/2012/04/09/more-evidence-uk-math-and-reading-achievement-gaps/

both at a blog which analyses some of the data in several posts.
The Maths and English subjects do appear to correlate strongly with iq (and g)at about .7-.8, similar to the SAT’s(See Deary.). Other subjects generally show lower correlations. Iq correlations and approximate between test equivalency charts (eg: one’s probability of scoring 5+ a-c in Math/English according to iq) can be found for several test years including recent ones(first two links of #71).

Assumptions based on modern society is the point though. I’d always assumed without thinking about it that evolution would be selecting for more brains and other factors had held it back – but maybe for most of the past it wasn’t.

“but outside of an environment where famine happens every few generations, it’s hard to see how caloric needs would select against the large brained”

Well it’s not hard to see it as you just pointed it out. However if it is only 20 calories a day then that would be a very weak pressure i guess even if constant and over millenia.

I’ve heard this argument before, and it’s a bit weak.

At least in studies of modern society, it’s been shown that intelligent men father more children than the average. Intelligent women have low fecundity, but this seems to be a result of modern cultural norms and birth control, thus at best there was probably no selection for female intelligence either way in the past. Any male bright enough to come up with cultural/technological changes which are profound enough to change his own culture would have more than a good shot of fathering an above-average number of children. Presumably the somewhat elevated social status would also extend to his children, meaning booted fitness for at least two generations.

More generally speaking, it’s clear the caloric intake of brain matter is pretty equal whether it’s idling or engaging in high-level cognition. Larger brains need more resources however. The average brain is estimated to need around 260 calories per day to operate. That said, the average Asian brain capacity is only 7.66% greater than the average sub-Saharan African brain (brain size probably shouldn’t be considered on the continental level anyway, as there are big variations within continents). So we’re talking about a difference of around 20 calories a day. Certainly there’s no reason why bigger brains should develop without some selective force pushing them, but outside of an environment where famine happens every few generations, it’s hard to see how caloric needs would select against the large brained – and until the advent of agriculture, death by famine was far more infrequent than death from accidents or warfare.

If the brain is such a high cost organ then doesn’t it make sense for evolution to select for the minimum level of average IQ needed to survive in a particular environment and as a social animal that would include the effect of the brighter members of the group being able to carry the dimmer ones to a certain extent e.g. through creating adaptive behaviors via culture and/or religion for the dimmer ones to blindly follow

.
“The correlation of GSCE English/Maths to iq, and to g particularly, looks to be high.”

http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2010/aug/19/a-level-results-2010

“A-level results 2010: A-level pass rate rises to 97.6%”

A-levels are the stage after GCSEs and taken around age 18.

So…98% pass rate.

Not only has the current version of the British education system eliminated average IQ differences between ethnic groups it has eliminated the differences between individuals as well. They increased everyone’s IQ to the same level!

So, logically speaking, either they’re miracle workers or the current British education system has been dumbed down to the point where everyone can pass.

We now have fairly good estimates on admixture of white/native american/SSA for different Latino groups in the U.S. For the sake of argument, let’s consider the average IQ of the white component to be 99 – the modern Spanish IQ. Let’s consider the average Native American score to be 87 – the mean score of Native Americans. The African component is harder, given scores in Africa are undoubtedly depressed, but European admixture may have added some IQ points in the U.S. The latest admixture estimate I have seen is a mean of 14% European ancestry, so presuming the mean IQ of the European population was 103 (American white mean), the African remainder had an IQ of 82.

Using these as a baseline, I come up with the following estimates. These are for the population within the U.S., not their home country:

Mexican – 92
Puerto Rican – 93
Cuban – 95
Dominican – 90
Central American – 91
South American – 93

Mean Latino: 92

AFAIK, all of these numbers are higher than the means actually reported from either Latinos at large, or those reported from home countries. In the case of Cuba differential migration could theoretically be the difference, but this is unlikely to be the case with the other groups, who are not all that demographically different from those who stayed at home.

Thus, I’d say honest proponents of HBD need to admit that IQs of Latinos are still somewhat depressed by some environmental/cultural measure, even if they are otherwise straight-up IQ naturists. The only ways around this are either to argue that there was some selection against IQ across Latin America (or Europeans who settled were dumber than the average Spaniards), or that U.S. Native Americans and African Americans had active recent selection towards greater intelligence, which Latin Americans missed out on somehow.

“Intelligence and educational achievement” Ian J. Deary
http://www.psy.ed.ac.uk/people/iand/Deary%20(2007)%20Intelligence%20intelligence%20educational%20achievement%20nfer%20cat.pdf

“Cognitive Abilities Test (CAT) and GCSE grades: 2009/10″
https://lesacreduprintemps19.files.wordpress.com/2012/02/glassessment.pdf

The Black-White gaps, especially White-African, in English/Maths and Key stage 4 Math/reading exams are small. The Somali-White gap in particular is somewhat larger than the general White- African gap which looks small to non-existant.(See the last source which breaks down Africans, Pakistanis, Europeans and others into more specific groups. )

http://occidentalascent.wordpress.com/2012/04/09/more-evidence-uk-math-and-reading-achievement-gaps/

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AonYZs4MzlZbdHk1UVhtaXRoZU5SNnBjdFY3Nm9hWXc#gid=

“Ethnicity and Education:
The Evidence on Minority Ethnic Pupils aged 5–16″
https://www.education.gov.uk/publications//eOrderingDownload/DFES-0208-2006.pdf

Razib,

If anything I was a little surprised that you thought it was fit to mention Lehrer’s post on the decline effect in one of your posts lately as noteworthy exception to poor science journalism industry (if I can recall correctly)

To me, this man is dangerous because he demonstrated in that article that he was willing to fabricate things in order to prove his point. More specifically, in order for this thesis to have science-wise applicability, he decided to invent evidence about Physics, the most robust of the physical sciences.

He wrote that the ‘weak coupling ratio’ of a decaying neutron had fallen by ten sigma. Since my area of relative expertise was Physics and that my instructor for a course that semester was in the team at NIST who study neutron decay, it became instantly clear that this man didn’t know what he was talking about. (in fact, it was in the ‘not even wrong’ category, as what he probably wanted to say was axial vector in the weak coupling constant, which we use to calculate a ration)

Anyway, no amount of emailing or writing the new-yorker to retract this assault against fundamental science was useful. I remember just being really annoyed with how you can get away with something if it’s cryptic enough and not published to an audience who has any level of expertise or understanding of the subject matter. I wrote to this man again recently, asking him to do the right thing and own up to all the things that he has made up because undoing and erasing the internet’s memory of falsehoods is almost impossible, even if new yorker retracts or corrects something.

I am just pissed off that it has to be an inconsequential Bob Dylan quote that has caught the publics attention and not the important frauds.

I’m wondering what folks think about Judith Rich Harris’s hypothesis in The Nurture Assumption that black-white test score gaps are at least in part due to her group socialization model.

To recap to those not familiar, she believes that IQ as we age becomes more hereditary, and less environmental, because we seek peers similar to ourselves. Thus kids who might start out with a little trouble in school end up in subcultures which think “studying is for suckers,” which causes them to stop trying hard at all. In black students, there’s the added racial element – students who attempt to excel are claimed to be mocked by their peers for “acting white.” As most young people want to conform to their peers, these group efforts to drag performance down are generally successful anywhere where there are enough black students to form an independent social network.

Harris interprets this as the reason why the biracial children of U.S. soldiers in Germany showed IQs identical to white children of U.S. soldiers in Germany – they mainly went to schools where they were the only “black” kids, so they had to conform to the dominant (somewhat studious) culture. In addition, they were totally unaware of what an African-American was supposed to do in school.

In addition, she cites intriguing, but anecdotal, cases where there are two different black ethnicities in a school – African Americans and Haitian/Jamaican Americans. In both cases the latter groups remained relatively studious when compared to the African-American cohort in school – they were derided as “acting white,” but their own social identify formed which distinguished them from “African-Americans” in part by trying hard in school, so the criticism fell on deaf ears.

I find her arguments highly plausible – probably the best social arguments for gaps in performance I have read. It explains other strange factors which have been noted as well. Like how black adoptees into white families typically start out with high IQs which drop to the mean for the race by high school. As high schools usually have a larger population than elementary or middle school, it’s easy to find a black social cohort to conform to. In addition, the British test scores I saw earlier this year which showed British of African descent closing the gap entirely (while those of Caribbean descent still scored lowly). I spent a year living in Britain, and the two communities do have rather little to do with one another, so such gap is easily explainable by socialization.

It seems it would be easy to undertake a study to test this part of the hypothesis. Compare IQ, SAT scores, WORDSUM – some measure of intelligence – between black students who went to overwhelmingly black schools to those who went to schools with only a handful of black families. If Harris is right, the latter should score much closer to white students than other black students.

Of course, this still raises issues, in some ways thornier ones than 100% genetic differences would. It implies that in order to achieve African-American equality, a major portion of African-American culture (or at least, youth culture) needs to be effectively destroyed, with the next generation of children either sequestered from older kids entirely, or sent off in very small groups to overwhelmingly non-black schools. I doubt many would enjoy this solution in the short term, even if it works in the longer run.

This may be difficult to evaluate because (as has been observed here iirc) “negrito” and “pygmy” phenotypes have been independently converged upon in numerous instances, so in lieu of ancient skeletons it seems like it’s difficult to say whether any particular short-statured group arrived that size or became smaller in situ.

But maybe weapons are enough of a leveler (we’re not like fish limited by jaw gape) and human body size range not extreme enough for this to be readily evident … though I do wonder about other trophic distinctions — many Philippine negritos seemed to spend a lot of time hunting for frogs.

Japanese immigrants in the 1880s-early 1900s really represents two separate streams. There was a bulk immigration to Hawaii of mostly peasants from predominately rural areas of three prefectures (Yamaguchi, Kumamoto and Okinawa) to work the sugarcane plantations. They composed the majority of immigrants there. However direct migrants to the mainland USA were much more evenly spread from across the nation and included many urbanites and skilled workers as part of a self-selected stream. Part of this stream did end up in Hawaii, where they ended up being much more predominant in higher occupations such as shopkeepers, publishers and community leaders amongst the Japanese (to the point where it caused tensions within the community due to regional rivalries and linguistic differences).

More interestingly, many of the more ambitious and entrepreneurial amongst the three dominant group would use their worker’s contracts as a foot in the door to America. When their contract was up, they would go to the West Coast where wages were higher and there was more chances for upward mobility. The ones that did go to the West Coast ended up doing better in the long run on some key indicators. They sent a higher proportion of their children back to Japan for higher education and generally had higher rates of secondary school completion. Also, interestingly, they had a greater sense of ethnic nationalism than the Japanese of Hawaii who had lower rates of Japanese language retention and interest in the Japanese Empire in the second and third generations (though this may be an artifact of a development of a “local Japanese” plantation identity and alienation from the first generation priests and school teachers brought in from Japan who tended to take a low opinion on the “Japaneseness” of Japanese born and raised in Hawaii).

In Hawaii nowadays, Japanese-Americans do well enough, probably above the general population mean, but they don’t have a “model minority” status. For every doctor, professor and politician, there’s ones that are simply average road crew workers, office drones and farmers. Heck on the neighbor islands there are still communities of rural Japanese-Americans not overly differentiated from the mixed-Hawaiian and whatnot communities around them that have a very blue collar existence where the main hobbies are fishing, pig-hunting and driving around pick-up trucks on huge tires. Lots of the brightest of those communities stay in Honolulu or the mainland after college. I would note in general that Hawaii has a bad problem with brain drain, no matter what ethnicity. Those with the mind and drive often leave here and never look back (as recent American history demonstrates).

Your positions on race are being invoked by Jason Antrosio on a post at Cochran’s and Harpending’s blog West Hunter, “Platitude Storm: Race as a Social Construct.” Antrosio’s comments here, and subsequently at 7:33 pm.

If Antrosio’s writing is straight, Harpending is simply misinterpreting his nuanced and HBD-aware position on race, and the post’s concerns are a tempest in a teapot. Other possibilities also suggest themselves.

http://www.ronunz.org/2012/08/05/unz-on-raceiq-response-to-lynn-and-nyborg/

As in, the higher number of genetic characteristics overwhelms those of the other parent and allows them to be present in the child.

What is striking about Slitty Eye’s data is that even the lowest scoring province comes in at above 100. I think that underlines your point. On Paul Conroy’s model, even if the lower scoring ones went to Indonesia because it was less challenging than the USA (hard to imagine), those people were smarter than the average bear.

re: lehrer. my own interactions were fine, if cursory. i wasn’t going to say anything, though i was shocked at what he did. but now i’m kind of pissed at how he threw brendan mahrer under the bus:

http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/pyramids-meaning/201208/jonah-lehrer-charmed-me-then-blatantly-lied-me-about-science

it’s one thing to make shit up, but another to pin the blame on others. i also have to add that the chris of mixing memory, who is out of blogging now, did bring to my attention jonah’s deficiencies as an analyst very early on in 2006. chris’ knowledge of the area of cognitive neuroscience was way higher than mine, so i couldn’t judge at the time, though i took it seriously. but it seems he was right in 2006.

i hope jonah figures things out though.