Some people have claimed that critics of the work of infamous race scientist J. Philippe Rushton can't point to any methodological issues in his work, and instead must attack it simply for being "politically incorrect", "racist", etc. These arguments have even been made by people who really ought to know better. When you see someone make this claim, point them to this post, which compiles all peer-reviewed critiques of his methodology.
Racial differences in things like criminality and maturation rates may not even exist as Rushton claimed:
Gorey & Cryns 1995
Rushton misused r/k selection theory:
Anderson 1991
Weizmann et al. 1990
See esp. this quote from Weizmann et al. (1990) on page 3: "...it is precisely this extended and oversimplified
version of the r/K model, with its rigid
specification of traits, that has been embodied
in Differential K theory." This comes after them noting that the more sweeping and extended versions of the r/k selection model have been criticized extensively by some researchers.
Graves 2002
Zuckerman 1990 (full text available for free at this link) See p. 60 (of the book): "...Rushton's theory is contrary to the evolutionary theory on which he bases his conclusions..."
Also, there are inherent issues in using the r/k model, which is supposed to apply to between-species differences, to explain within-species differences:
Fairchild 1991
Rushton is wrong about crime:
Gabor & Roberts 1990
Cernovsky & Litman 1993
Neapolitan 1998
Lynch 2000
Rushton is wrong about brain size:
Cernovsky 1990
Cernovsky 1991
Cain & Vanderwolf 1990
Willerman 1991
And also about sexual behavior:
Lynn 1989a
Lynn 1989b
Zuckerman & Brody 1988
Cunningham & Barbee 1991
Note this quote from Zuckerman & Brody's abstract: "Data on sexual behavior is based on small and unrepresentative samples of blacks. Sizes of heads and genitals are compared with no obvious connection to the primary issue of biological fertility strategies. Everything is assumed to be on a primarily genetic basis although sexual mores have shown remarkable changes in a single generation."
LOL, he's even wrong about being censored by the "politically correct" establishment in academia!
He's also been caught misrepresenting and selectively citing sources:
Weizmann et al. 1989
Cernovsky 1995: See p. 673: "...Rushton (1990a, 1990b, 1990c) also repeatedly misrepresented
findings by Beals, Smith, and Dodd (1984) on cranial capacity." And at the bottom of the same page: "Rushton (1990a, 1990c, 1991) also misrepresents the evidence
for racial differences in brain/body size ratio."
See also Fairchild 1991, p. 106, where he notes that Rushton is guilty of "repeated misrepresentations" of his cited sources.
Examples of Rushton misrepresenting sources include him citing the work of Tobias (1970) without mentioning his caveats regarding the validity of his own data (Fairchild 1991, p. 106-7; Weizmann et al. 1990, p. 9). These caveats include "...equating subjects on age, sex, body size, cause of death, time since
death, method of preservation, temperature, and
the methods employed in removing and preparing
the brain. In addition, brain development
is plastic, and brain size may be affected by early
environmental factors. Because of all these
difficulties, Tobias (1970) concluded that no adequate
racial comparative studies had actually
been conducted" (Weizmann et al. 1990, p. 9).
He also falsely claimed that papers by Ho et al. supported his claims of genetically determined race differences in brain size--they do not. In fact, Ho et al.'s reviews of their own research concluded that environmental factors best explained race differences in adult brain size (Fairchild 1991, p. 107).
He also inappropriately aggregated data on disparate populations:
Lieberman 2001
Cernovsky 1993
He also used unreliable sources:
Here, for instance, is what Weizmann et al. (1990, p. 8) write about a paper Rushton co-authored in 1987 (Rushton & Bogaert 1987): "One of the major sources
for their conclusions is an alleged report of an
anonymous French Army surgeon (1896), a
curious source for reliable data." Weizmann et al. continue by writing that: "While Rushton
and Bogaert (1987; Rushton, 1988a) describe the
work as an example of the "ethnographic
record," it might more accurately be described
as an example of nineteenth century
"anthroporn."...This work is filled with internal contradictions." And later on the same page: "It should be noted
that the French Army surgeon (1896) is not an
unimportant source. It is Rushton's (Rushton,
1988a; Rushton & Bogaert, 1987) only source
for the "data" on racial differences in clitoral
size and on the placement of female genitalia.
It is also the only source which contains comparative
"data" on male genitalia from all three
racial groups, and the only source (e.g.,
Rushton, 1988a) at all for data on erectile "angle
and texture" ("Orientals parallel to body and
stiff, blacks at right angles and flexible."
p. 1015)."
Weizmann et al. 1991 (p. 7) also make this point about another one of the sources cited in the same paper: "This is an article
by P. Nobile (1982) which is identified in their
bibliography as an article which appeared in
Forum: International Journal of Human Relations.
Professor Vidmar's colleague, Michael
Atkinson, could find no library listing of this
journal (nor could we), but he finally tracked it
down. As Professor Vidmar writes: "it is more
commonly known as the Penthouse Forum, and
can be purchased from the covered display rack
at your neighborhood Mac's Milk Store
(Vidmar, 1990).""
Cernovsky 1994 criticizes Rushton's theory for being based on "weak trends in excessively suspect data sets", and also claims Rushton's work is based on "weak, biased, and unrepresentative data".
General failure to replicate results:
Peregrine, Ember & Ember 2003
See also Neapolitan 1998 and Cernovsky & Litman 1993
And he defined his 3 main "races" inconsistently in different parts OF HIS OWN BOOK- I don't think people realize how big a deal this. It doesn't get much more dishonest than internal inconsistency in a blatant, desperate attempt to create the illusion of support for your theory. Specifically, Peregrine, Ember & Ember (2003) note that "...in Race, Evolution and Behavior, he says that Filipinos and Malays are “Mongoloid” and includes Malaysia along with the Philippines and Indonesia in comparing crime statistics but excludes all three from his analysis of cranial capacity; that the Indian subcontinent is “Caucasoid” but excludes 26 Indian samples from his analysis of cranial capacity; that Amerindians are “Mongoloid” but excludes 20 Latin American populations (especially Bolivian and Peruvian) on measures of cranial capacity; and includes the Caribbean in crime statistics but excludes Caribbean island states as “European/Negroid” mixtures for the purpose of comparing cranial capacity."
He is also wrong about twinning.
And about penis size:
Weizmann et al. 1990, p. 8: "Much of Rushton's other data (Rushton,
1988a; Rushton & Bogaert, 1987) on penis size relies heavily on studies based on Kinsey's data,
which, as Zuckerman and Brody (1988) point
out, can hardly be considered representative."
Environmental explanations make more sense than genetic ones:
Mealey 1990: "I concur with Rushton in the belief that different human groups utilize different strategies, but find the differential use of species-wide, environmentally contingent tactics a more parsimonious explanation than genetic differences."
Monday, October 23, 2017
Sunday, September 17, 2017
Is IQ really related to fertility (or other things)?
Boutwell et al. (2013) examine the association between fertility rates and IQ on the county level in the United States. In doing so, they attempt to test Rushton's evolution-based "differential K theory", but ignore the fact that fertility rates have changed significantly even on the national level in recent decades (Wicherts et al. 2010). This suggests that they've been changing even more on the county level. They also ignore decades-old research suggesting that environmental factors can account for the race differences in fertility Rushton claims are due to genetic factors. As Weizmann et al. (1990, p. 6) noted, "Bean and Swicegood (1985) conclude that one
can predict the birth rates of female minority
group members from the educational attainments
of their respective mothers (p. 21)." Zuckerman & Brody (1988) also noted that despite assumptions to the contrary by biological determinists, "there is no evidence that fertility itself is heritable."
Boutwell et al. (2013) state, in their introduction, that "IQ levels, for instance, correlate with gestation time during pregnancy (Rushton, 2004), disease rates (Templer & Rushton, 2011) and life expectancy (Lynn & Vanhanen, 2012)."
The first of these sources says NOTHING about IQ being associated with gestation period, and instead finds an association between an "r-k life history factor" that correlates with gestation period with a correlation coefficient of 0.86. What is most concerning is that this finding is based on "...a large data set of life-history variables on 234 mammalian species"--so it wasn't even based entirely, or even mostly, on humans!! Yet these "biosocial criminologists" are so desperate to make their point about IQ being the be-all and end-all in determining societal inequality, that they'll blatantly lie about what a source actually shows/says.
So the Templer/Rushton source they cite for the "disease rates" thing did in fact report a positive correlation between a bunch of state-level variables, namely, "IQ, skin color, birth rate, infant mortality, life expectancy, HIV/AIDS, violent crime, and state income". Of course, as mentioned above, some of these variables have been changing a lot in recent decades, which casts doubt on evolutionary and/or IQ-based explanations thereof. As Wicherts et al. (2010) noted, "In much of the twentieth century, fertility and infant mortality rates have been much higher in China than in European countries. This is inconsistent with Rushton’s assertion that East-Asians are more K-prone than Europeans."
As for the IQ-life expectancy relationship, the source they cite does indeed say that "All the correlations [between national IQs and health] are negative, showing that the populations of higher IQ nations are more healthy" (Lynn & Vanhanen 2012, p. 6). But the fact remains, this doesn't prove any kind of cause-and-effect relationship. As Wicherts et al. (2010b) noted, "Templer claims that the “potential of national IQs as explanatory variables” is demonstrated by correlations of national IQ with variables like GDP, adult literacy, and life expectancy. A glance at the correlation matrix in our primary paper shows that other variables associated with development have the same explanatory power as national IQ. For instance, the correlations reported by Templer (2008) are easily replicated by replacing national IQ with Proteins g/day/capita, child mortality rate, or secondary school attendance. This means that these variables have just as much explanatory power as does national IQ." There's also, of course, the potential for the ecological fallacy to affect any relationships found in this type of research (e.g. Ellison, 2007).
Addendum: Boutwell et al. (2015) claim that "Rushton's (1985a) application of life history theory to human differences has fared well at organizing the correlations of a host of human outcomes into a coherent evolutionary framework (Figueredo et al., 2006; Nettle, 2010; Rushton, 2000; Wang, Kruger, & Wilke, 2009)." Hoo boy, let's break this down.
So Figueredo et al., 2006 does say that "A number of independent literatures consistently describe a positive manifold of correlations among many common human behavioral traits considered “social problems.” Theories derived from the Standard Social Science Model do not fully account for this positive manifold or cluster of “social problems,” but Life History Theory does because it instead construes such clusters to be coordinated arrays of contingently adaptive life-history traits." So that checks out, though this claim that you can't explain it without invoking evolutionary biology seems rather fishy--correlation is not causation, and these factors could certainly be related without any biological factors involved.
Nettle, 2010, however, doesn't even mention Rushton or his theory at all, nor does Wang, Kruger, & Wilke, 2009.
Rushton, 2000 is Rushton's own book, hardly a reliable or independent validation of his theory.
Later on, we see "Although our evolutionary history has placed us as a species on the K end of the life history spectrum, natural variation is expected to position some individuals further from K than others (Rushton, 2000). Individuals falling relatively further from K will exhibit faster maturation and lower levels of parental investment (Rushton, 1985a). Additionally, they will display greater mating output (i.e., more effort invested in mating, instead of raising children), higher rates of disease and shorter life spans (Rushton, 1985a, 2000, 2004)."
Truly, it is absurd that they keep citing Rushton's work uncritically without even mentioning any critiques of it.
Sources:
Boutwell et al. (2013): http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S019188691300189X
Boutwell et al. (2015): http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1359178915001184
Ellison (2007): http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1348/135910707X180972/full
Lynn & Vanhanen (2012): https://www.ttu.ee/public/m/mart-murdvee/EconPsy/2/Lynn_Vanhanen_2012_National_IQs_-_a_review.pdf
Templer & Rushton (2011): http://philipperushton.net/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/IQ-Skin-Color-Crime-HIV-AIDS-and-Income-in-50-U.S.-States-2011-by-Donald-I.-Templer-John-Philippe-Rushton.pdf
Weizmann et al. (1990): http://philipperushton.net/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/iq-race-brain-size-r-k-theory-rushton-weizmann-canadian-psychology-1-1990.pdf
Wicherts et al. (2010): http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0191886909002475
Wicherts et al. (2010b): http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0191886909003675
Zuckerman & Brody (1988): http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/0191886988901365
Boutwell et al. (2013) state, in their introduction, that "IQ levels, for instance, correlate with gestation time during pregnancy (Rushton, 2004), disease rates (Templer & Rushton, 2011) and life expectancy (Lynn & Vanhanen, 2012)."
The first of these sources says NOTHING about IQ being associated with gestation period, and instead finds an association between an "r-k life history factor" that correlates with gestation period with a correlation coefficient of 0.86. What is most concerning is that this finding is based on "...a large data set of life-history variables on 234 mammalian species"--so it wasn't even based entirely, or even mostly, on humans!! Yet these "biosocial criminologists" are so desperate to make their point about IQ being the be-all and end-all in determining societal inequality, that they'll blatantly lie about what a source actually shows/says.
So the Templer/Rushton source they cite for the "disease rates" thing did in fact report a positive correlation between a bunch of state-level variables, namely, "IQ, skin color, birth rate, infant mortality, life expectancy, HIV/AIDS, violent crime, and state income". Of course, as mentioned above, some of these variables have been changing a lot in recent decades, which casts doubt on evolutionary and/or IQ-based explanations thereof. As Wicherts et al. (2010) noted, "In much of the twentieth century, fertility and infant mortality rates have been much higher in China than in European countries. This is inconsistent with Rushton’s assertion that East-Asians are more K-prone than Europeans."
As for the IQ-life expectancy relationship, the source they cite does indeed say that "All the correlations [between national IQs and health] are negative, showing that the populations of higher IQ nations are more healthy" (Lynn & Vanhanen 2012, p. 6). But the fact remains, this doesn't prove any kind of cause-and-effect relationship. As Wicherts et al. (2010b) noted, "Templer claims that the “potential of national IQs as explanatory variables” is demonstrated by correlations of national IQ with variables like GDP, adult literacy, and life expectancy. A glance at the correlation matrix in our primary paper shows that other variables associated with development have the same explanatory power as national IQ. For instance, the correlations reported by Templer (2008) are easily replicated by replacing national IQ with Proteins g/day/capita, child mortality rate, or secondary school attendance. This means that these variables have just as much explanatory power as does national IQ." There's also, of course, the potential for the ecological fallacy to affect any relationships found in this type of research (e.g. Ellison, 2007).
Addendum: Boutwell et al. (2015) claim that "Rushton's (1985a) application of life history theory to human differences has fared well at organizing the correlations of a host of human outcomes into a coherent evolutionary framework (Figueredo et al., 2006; Nettle, 2010; Rushton, 2000; Wang, Kruger, & Wilke, 2009)." Hoo boy, let's break this down.
So Figueredo et al., 2006 does say that "A number of independent literatures consistently describe a positive manifold of correlations among many common human behavioral traits considered “social problems.” Theories derived from the Standard Social Science Model do not fully account for this positive manifold or cluster of “social problems,” but Life History Theory does because it instead construes such clusters to be coordinated arrays of contingently adaptive life-history traits." So that checks out, though this claim that you can't explain it without invoking evolutionary biology seems rather fishy--correlation is not causation, and these factors could certainly be related without any biological factors involved.
Nettle, 2010, however, doesn't even mention Rushton or his theory at all, nor does Wang, Kruger, & Wilke, 2009.
Rushton, 2000 is Rushton's own book, hardly a reliable or independent validation of his theory.
Later on, we see "Although our evolutionary history has placed us as a species on the K end of the life history spectrum, natural variation is expected to position some individuals further from K than others (Rushton, 2000). Individuals falling relatively further from K will exhibit faster maturation and lower levels of parental investment (Rushton, 1985a). Additionally, they will display greater mating output (i.e., more effort invested in mating, instead of raising children), higher rates of disease and shorter life spans (Rushton, 1985a, 2000, 2004)."
Truly, it is absurd that they keep citing Rushton's work uncritically without even mentioning any critiques of it.
Sources:
Boutwell et al. (2013): http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S019188691300189X
Boutwell et al. (2015): http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1359178915001184
Ellison (2007): http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1348/135910707X180972/full
Lynn & Vanhanen (2012): https://www.ttu.ee/public/m/mart-murdvee/EconPsy/2/Lynn_Vanhanen_2012_National_IQs_-_a_review.pdf
Templer & Rushton (2011): http://philipperushton.net/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/IQ-Skin-Color-Crime-HIV-AIDS-and-Income-in-50-U.S.-States-2011-by-Donald-I.-Templer-John-Philippe-Rushton.pdf
Weizmann et al. (1990): http://philipperushton.net/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/iq-race-brain-size-r-k-theory-rushton-weizmann-canadian-psychology-1-1990.pdf
Wicherts et al. (2010): http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0191886909002475
Wicherts et al. (2010b): http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0191886909003675
Zuckerman & Brody (1988): http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/0191886988901365
Friday, August 18, 2017
What is the minimum % of the popular vote needed to win the electoral college?
I have tried to answer the question of what the min. % of the popular vote is needed to win the electoral college. CGP Grey tried to answer it in his YouTube video "The Trouble with the Electoral College", and he concluded that it was 22%. But that video was made 6 years ago, and I think it used the entire population of the state instead of the voting-eligible population. So I tried to answer the same question using more up to date data and the voting-eligible population of each state. The answer appears to be higher than CGP Grey's number: specifically, it appears that you need at least about 24.1% of the popular vote to win a bare majority (in this case, about 52%) of the votes in the electoral college. The way to do this is to win the 40 least populous states and the District of Columbia, while losing all 10 of the other states. You also have to get just 50% + 1 of the popular vote in each state, and there have to be no third-party candidates to make winning any of these states easier/harder for you. The data from my Excel spreadsheet is here in case you want to fact-check me on this.
Sunday, July 16, 2017
How to defend the indefensible: a comment on Gottfredson (2013)
In a recent hagiography about prominent "race realist" psychologist J. Philippe Rushton (who died in 2012), Linda Gottfredson of the University of Delaware claims that "Rushton is a scholar and gentleman
but it appears that his critics often act like neither" (Gottfredson 2013). She supports this claim by discussing what happened when Rushton's work was criticized in an article published in a respected journal, arguing that the resulting controversy illustrates how "mob science works to ‘‘discredit’’ valid
research and enforce collective ignorance about entire bodies of evidence." Here, I argue that Gottfredson is full of shit, and that, in fact, the issue she is discussing demonstrates academia working as intended: critics noting methodological flaws in an academic's research that lead to inaccurate conclusions.
When I first read the abstract of this article, I was a little surprised, because Gottfredson seemed to be defending someone whose research had been discredited on methodological grounds, rather than ad hominem attacks of being "racist" (for a few of many examples, see Weizmann et al. 1990, 1991; Lynn 1989a, 1989b; Silverman, 1990; Zuckerman 1988, 1990; Cain & Vanderwolf 1990, Anderson 1991). So I kept reading a full copy of the paper, and this is my response to it.
The criticism in question is Lieberman (2001), an article which states the following early on: "[Samuel George] Morton collected human skulls, measured their cranial vaults, and concluded that “Caucasoids” had the largest brains and “Negroids” the smallest, with “Mongoloids” in between (Morton 1849). A century and a half later this hierarchy would be altered by J. Philippe Rushton and colleagues, placing the “Mongoloids” in the alpha position, “Caucasoids” next, and “Negroids” last. Rushton went on to correlate brain size with IQ scores, claim a Mongoloid 1 Caucasoid 1 Negroid correlation, and use variation in IQ scores to “explain” everything from civilization to barbarism (1997a). Although this view has been invalidated by a century of anthropological research and theorizing stimulated by Franz Boas (Gossett 1965, Cravens 1978), Rushton (1996) dismisses this work as no more than political correctness."
The point being made here is that race science does not conform to scientific objectivity or to the actual conclusions that are best supported by evidence, but instead to a political/social agenda of justifying oppressing a given group of people. Lieberman illustrates this in a later section of his paper, entitled "Changing Hierarchical Worldviews". He subsequently notes that in the 1970s, researchers like Richard Lynn started publishing studies arguing that, contrary to mainstream thinking at the time, Japanese people were smarter than Caucasians, and that "The publication of these theories of East Asian superiority was preceded by Japan's becoming a “world-class economic power”" (p. 72).
Here is how Gottfredson summarized what you just read (as well as a bunch of other parts of Lieberman's paper I did not discuss above):
"Lieberman opens with a question that itself damns Rushton. A century of anthropological work has invalidated Rushton’s claims, so how can he claim to find in it a ‘‘racial hierarchy’’ for intelligence and brain size? The question is thus not whether Rushton is wrong, but why and how he persists in being so wrong. The article’s first section (‘‘Changing Hierarchical Worldviews’’) justifies the premise, and the second (‘‘Abusing Anthropological Research’’) explains the ‘‘paradox’’ of how Rushton and other ‘‘scientific racists’’ could claim to be doing science when they draw evidence from the very fields that disavow racism and the concept of race (p. 74). To justify his premise, Lieberman describes 19th century research on cranial size and its social context which, he says, was the need by Caucasians to justify their domination and exploitation of other races. He discredits that research and Rushton’s own primarily by appealing to authority in 20th century anthropology: Franz Boas’s theorizing (no link between culture and genes), official statements on race from the UN and the American Anthropological Association (no biological races, no meaningful innate racial differences), Gould’s critiques of research on intelligence, brain size, and heritability (none is valid), and anthropology’s ‘‘disavowal’’ of ‘‘hierarchical’’ and ‘‘racist’’ thinking. Lieberman also draws from stock concerns, long-since resolved, about possible methodological flaws in twin research, brain research, behavior genetics, and mental testing. He says nothing about the explosion of research in the 1990s using the Y chromosome and mtDNA to trace the evolution of human lineages as they migrated across the globe. He says nothing about Rushton’s many other 3-way results on ‘‘reproductive behavior, sex hormones, twinning rate, speed of physical maturation, personality, family stability, lawabidingness, and social organization’’ (p. 74), except to summarily dismiss them as a faulty ‘‘blizzard of data’’ (p. 78)."
So her first main point seems to be that Lieberman is relying on logical fallacies to criticize Rushton, the first of these apparently being appeal to authority by citing the extensive work of Boas, the AAA, and Gould. Well, what Lieberman cited to support this claim on the first page of his paper were two sources: a 1965 book (Gossett 1965) and a 1978 book (Cravens 1978). So he's not just invoking Boas's name as a talisman of some sort to dismiss inconvenient arguments, but instead is citing evidence to support them. It is notable that, in contrast, Gottfredson does not cite any sources to support her claim about how the concerns Lieberman raises are "long-since resolved". I would also like to note that while Lieberman may not have addressed every trait Rushton studied, other researchers have; for instance, Weizmann et al. (1990) concluded that "The predictions that Rushton derives from the r/K model are arbitrary, and these predictions are supported by selective citation and misrepresentation of the research literature and by the use of unreliable sources. Changes in human life-history traits are so rapid that there is no need to posit genetic selection to explain intergroup variation." And with regard to Rushton's results on race differences in reproductive traits, Lynn (1989a) noted the following four problems in a paper Rushton co-authored on the subject in 1987: "First, they did not explain why natural selection would have favored different reproductive strategies for different races.
Second, their data on race differences are of questionable validity because their literature review was selective and their original analyses were based on self-reports.
Third, they provided no evidence that these race differences had significant effects on reproduction or that sexual restraint is a K characteristic.
Finally, they did not adequately rule out environmental explanations for their data."
Back to Gottfredson (p. 4): "Zeroing in on Rushton’s IQ, race, and brain size analyses, Lieberman details his own list of 6 major ‘‘errors.’’ Briefly, Rushton ‘‘uses ‘race’ despite decades of findings that invalidate it,’’ his conclusions about racial differences in cranial capacity are ‘‘contradicted by evolutionary anthropology,’’ he did not account for environmental factors that surely influence cranial capacity and intelligence, his measurements tell us nothing because they are confounded or the differences they reveal are trivial in size, he cannot claim to ‘‘explain’’ a vast array of human behaviors because some of his measures and concepts may be faulty, and his ‘‘principle of aggregation’’ (e.g., grouping diverse populations into ‘‘races,’’ averaging results from different studies) is invalid. ‘"
She then dismisses the first two of these errors as mere appeals to authority. That being said, there is compelling evidence against the biological or genetic existence of race (Templeton, 2013; Long & Kittles, 2009). Moreover, though it may have been phrased as an appeal to authority, the assertion that Rushton's conclusions of race differences in cranial capacity is inconsistent with anthropological evidence is not an appeal to authority, nor is it any other logical fallacy. As Lieberman goes on to note, Rushton took his cranial capacity measurements from a 1984 study without mentioning that this study showed no significant relationship between race and cranial capacity, but did find that "climate variables were strongly correlated with cranial variation" (Lieberman 2001, p. 76). Other research supports this claim, and also suggests that cranial size varies with the development status of a country, not with race (Cernovsky 1993). Gottfredson is, therefore, being disingenuous in not mentioning the sources on which Lieberman's argument is based.
The next two claims Gottfredson makes are that Lieberman's 3rd and 4th points "disallow drawing conclusions until an infinite regress of alternatives has been considered" (p. 4). Those points are, respectively, that 3) "[Rushton] did not account for environmental factors that surely influence cranial capacity and intelligence" and 4) "his measurements tell us nothing because they are confounded or the differences they reveal are trivial in size" (Gottfredson, p. 4). In fact, though, these are both valid criticisms of Rushton's work in this area. Environmental factors like climate and development status have been discussed above, but there are other confounders as well that call his findings into doubt. As Lieberman noted, the following factors had been previously identified as affecting brain size, and therefore needing to be controlled for if you want to determine whether there's a real difference between groups: "sex, body size, age at death, early-life nutrition, early-life environment, source of sample, occupational group, cause of death, lapse of time after death, temperature after death, anatomical level of severance, presence or absence of cerebral spinal fluid, presence or absence of meninges, and presence or absence of blood vessels" (p. 77). Also, Rushton's claims about race differences in brain size are contradicted by some of the studies he cites (Cernovsky 1995).
So what about Lieberman's last two points? To recap, they were that "[Rushton] cannot claim to ‘‘explain’’ a vast array of human behaviors because some of his measures and concepts may be faulty, and his ‘‘principle of aggregation’’ (e.g., grouping diverse populations into ‘‘races,’’ averaging results from different studies) is invalid" (Gottfredson, p. 4). Gottfredson claims that "the last two [of Lieberman's arguments] demand uniformly perfect data and measurement before concluding anything from a body of evidence" (pp. 4-5). Again, not so: All that Lieberman pointed out was that Rushton did not consider yet another confounding factor: nutrition. This is explained in Lieberman's fifth point, which was that "Rushton does not relate environment, nutrition, cranial size, and IQ" (p. 78). Gottfredson, weirdly, ignores this point while going after his sixth point, namely that "Rushton claims to “explain” a vast array of human behavior" (p. 79).
What's wrong with him doing this? I'll give you a hint: it's not that his data and measurements aren't perfect. The problems include that he's glossing over differences that contradict his theory by lumping different groups together into racial categories by only using averages. Rushton's doing so also ignores the larger differences in brain size across gender than across "race", and the genders of his skulls were unknown (Cernovsky 1993). Lieberman also notes that "Rushton ranks “races” on a number of variables including cultural achievements, personality traits, marital stability, law-abidingness, mental health, and administrative capacity. These variables are usually not defined, and each represents reified aggregations of diverse behaviors that vary in their causation" (p. 79).
Naturally, Gottfredson couldn't resist ending her paper with this gem: "...it is Gould’s work on cranial capacity, not Rushton’s, that we now learn was fudged and falsified (Lewis et al., 2011)—just as Rushton said it was." Lewis et al., of course, is a 2011 study of Morton's skulls which concluded that "Morton did not manipulate data to support his preconceptions, contra Gould." Of course, she omits criticism of Lewis et al. from sources like Weisberg & Paul (2016) who wrote that "We take no issue with Lewis et al.’s remeasurements, but argue that these measurements are not and cannot be evidence for their conclusion". Other researchers have argued that Lewis et al.'s defense of Morton is inadequate, and that "Gould was right to reject Morton's analysis as inappropriate and misleading, but wrong to believe that a more appropriate analysis was available" (Kaplan et al. 2015).
Addendum: Rushton's research on international variations in crime, which Gottfredson briefly mentions in her paper, is criticized by Neapolitan (1998) for not controlling for non-race factors.
Sources
The paper this post is about (Gottfredson 2013) is here: http://www1.udel.edu/educ/gottfredson/reprints/2012RaceandRushton.pdf
Anderson 1991: http://philipperushton.net/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/race-r-k-theory-rushton-anderson-canadian-psychology-1-1991.pdf
Cain & Vanderwolf 1990: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/019188699090185T
Cernovsky 1993: http://philipperushton.net/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/iq-race-brain-size-rushton-cernovsky-j-of-black-psychology-1993.pdf
Cernovsky 1995: http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/002193479502500602?journalCode=jbsa
Cravens 1978: The triumph of evolution: American scientists and the heredity-environment controversy 1900–1941.
Gossett 1965: Race: The history of an idea in America.
Kaplan et al. 2015: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1369848615000035
Lewis et al. 2011: http://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article?id=10.1371/journal.pbio.1001071
Long & Kittles 2009: http://www.bioone.org/doi/abs/10.3378/027.081.0621
Lynn 1989a: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/0092656689900299
Lynn 1989b: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/0092656689900317
Neapolitan 1998: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1745-9125.1998.tb01243.x/full
Silverman 1990: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/016230959090002N
Templeton 2013: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3737365/
Weisberg & Paul 2016: http://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article?id=10.1371/journal.pbio.1002444
Weizmann et al. 1990: http://psycnet.apa.org/journals/cap/31/1/1/
Weizmann et al. 1991: http://psycnet.apa.org/index.cfm?fa=buy.optionToBuy&id=1991-20580-001
Zuckerman 1988: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/0191886988901365
Zuckerman 1990: http://psycnet.apa.org/psycinfo/1991-12414-001
http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/00957984930193004
http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.2466/pms.109.3.733-736?journalCode=pmsb
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/BF02088001
When I first read the abstract of this article, I was a little surprised, because Gottfredson seemed to be defending someone whose research had been discredited on methodological grounds, rather than ad hominem attacks of being "racist" (for a few of many examples, see Weizmann et al. 1990, 1991; Lynn 1989a, 1989b; Silverman, 1990; Zuckerman 1988, 1990; Cain & Vanderwolf 1990, Anderson 1991). So I kept reading a full copy of the paper, and this is my response to it.
The criticism in question is Lieberman (2001), an article which states the following early on: "[Samuel George] Morton collected human skulls, measured their cranial vaults, and concluded that “Caucasoids” had the largest brains and “Negroids” the smallest, with “Mongoloids” in between (Morton 1849). A century and a half later this hierarchy would be altered by J. Philippe Rushton and colleagues, placing the “Mongoloids” in the alpha position, “Caucasoids” next, and “Negroids” last. Rushton went on to correlate brain size with IQ scores, claim a Mongoloid 1 Caucasoid 1 Negroid correlation, and use variation in IQ scores to “explain” everything from civilization to barbarism (1997a). Although this view has been invalidated by a century of anthropological research and theorizing stimulated by Franz Boas (Gossett 1965, Cravens 1978), Rushton (1996) dismisses this work as no more than political correctness."
The point being made here is that race science does not conform to scientific objectivity or to the actual conclusions that are best supported by evidence, but instead to a political/social agenda of justifying oppressing a given group of people. Lieberman illustrates this in a later section of his paper, entitled "Changing Hierarchical Worldviews". He subsequently notes that in the 1970s, researchers like Richard Lynn started publishing studies arguing that, contrary to mainstream thinking at the time, Japanese people were smarter than Caucasians, and that "The publication of these theories of East Asian superiority was preceded by Japan's becoming a “world-class economic power”" (p. 72).
Here is how Gottfredson summarized what you just read (as well as a bunch of other parts of Lieberman's paper I did not discuss above):
"Lieberman opens with a question that itself damns Rushton. A century of anthropological work has invalidated Rushton’s claims, so how can he claim to find in it a ‘‘racial hierarchy’’ for intelligence and brain size? The question is thus not whether Rushton is wrong, but why and how he persists in being so wrong. The article’s first section (‘‘Changing Hierarchical Worldviews’’) justifies the premise, and the second (‘‘Abusing Anthropological Research’’) explains the ‘‘paradox’’ of how Rushton and other ‘‘scientific racists’’ could claim to be doing science when they draw evidence from the very fields that disavow racism and the concept of race (p. 74). To justify his premise, Lieberman describes 19th century research on cranial size and its social context which, he says, was the need by Caucasians to justify their domination and exploitation of other races. He discredits that research and Rushton’s own primarily by appealing to authority in 20th century anthropology: Franz Boas’s theorizing (no link between culture and genes), official statements on race from the UN and the American Anthropological Association (no biological races, no meaningful innate racial differences), Gould’s critiques of research on intelligence, brain size, and heritability (none is valid), and anthropology’s ‘‘disavowal’’ of ‘‘hierarchical’’ and ‘‘racist’’ thinking. Lieberman also draws from stock concerns, long-since resolved, about possible methodological flaws in twin research, brain research, behavior genetics, and mental testing. He says nothing about the explosion of research in the 1990s using the Y chromosome and mtDNA to trace the evolution of human lineages as they migrated across the globe. He says nothing about Rushton’s many other 3-way results on ‘‘reproductive behavior, sex hormones, twinning rate, speed of physical maturation, personality, family stability, lawabidingness, and social organization’’ (p. 74), except to summarily dismiss them as a faulty ‘‘blizzard of data’’ (p. 78)."
So her first main point seems to be that Lieberman is relying on logical fallacies to criticize Rushton, the first of these apparently being appeal to authority by citing the extensive work of Boas, the AAA, and Gould. Well, what Lieberman cited to support this claim on the first page of his paper were two sources: a 1965 book (Gossett 1965) and a 1978 book (Cravens 1978). So he's not just invoking Boas's name as a talisman of some sort to dismiss inconvenient arguments, but instead is citing evidence to support them. It is notable that, in contrast, Gottfredson does not cite any sources to support her claim about how the concerns Lieberman raises are "long-since resolved". I would also like to note that while Lieberman may not have addressed every trait Rushton studied, other researchers have; for instance, Weizmann et al. (1990) concluded that "The predictions that Rushton derives from the r/K model are arbitrary, and these predictions are supported by selective citation and misrepresentation of the research literature and by the use of unreliable sources. Changes in human life-history traits are so rapid that there is no need to posit genetic selection to explain intergroup variation." And with regard to Rushton's results on race differences in reproductive traits, Lynn (1989a) noted the following four problems in a paper Rushton co-authored on the subject in 1987: "First, they did not explain why natural selection would have favored different reproductive strategies for different races.
Second, their data on race differences are of questionable validity because their literature review was selective and their original analyses were based on self-reports.
Third, they provided no evidence that these race differences had significant effects on reproduction or that sexual restraint is a K characteristic.
Finally, they did not adequately rule out environmental explanations for their data."
Back to Gottfredson (p. 4): "Zeroing in on Rushton’s IQ, race, and brain size analyses, Lieberman details his own list of 6 major ‘‘errors.’’ Briefly, Rushton ‘‘uses ‘race’ despite decades of findings that invalidate it,’’ his conclusions about racial differences in cranial capacity are ‘‘contradicted by evolutionary anthropology,’’ he did not account for environmental factors that surely influence cranial capacity and intelligence, his measurements tell us nothing because they are confounded or the differences they reveal are trivial in size, he cannot claim to ‘‘explain’’ a vast array of human behaviors because some of his measures and concepts may be faulty, and his ‘‘principle of aggregation’’ (e.g., grouping diverse populations into ‘‘races,’’ averaging results from different studies) is invalid. ‘"
She then dismisses the first two of these errors as mere appeals to authority. That being said, there is compelling evidence against the biological or genetic existence of race (Templeton, 2013; Long & Kittles, 2009). Moreover, though it may have been phrased as an appeal to authority, the assertion that Rushton's conclusions of race differences in cranial capacity is inconsistent with anthropological evidence is not an appeal to authority, nor is it any other logical fallacy. As Lieberman goes on to note, Rushton took his cranial capacity measurements from a 1984 study without mentioning that this study showed no significant relationship between race and cranial capacity, but did find that "climate variables were strongly correlated with cranial variation" (Lieberman 2001, p. 76). Other research supports this claim, and also suggests that cranial size varies with the development status of a country, not with race (Cernovsky 1993). Gottfredson is, therefore, being disingenuous in not mentioning the sources on which Lieberman's argument is based.
The next two claims Gottfredson makes are that Lieberman's 3rd and 4th points "disallow drawing conclusions until an infinite regress of alternatives has been considered" (p. 4). Those points are, respectively, that 3) "[Rushton] did not account for environmental factors that surely influence cranial capacity and intelligence" and 4) "his measurements tell us nothing because they are confounded or the differences they reveal are trivial in size" (Gottfredson, p. 4). In fact, though, these are both valid criticisms of Rushton's work in this area. Environmental factors like climate and development status have been discussed above, but there are other confounders as well that call his findings into doubt. As Lieberman noted, the following factors had been previously identified as affecting brain size, and therefore needing to be controlled for if you want to determine whether there's a real difference between groups: "sex, body size, age at death, early-life nutrition, early-life environment, source of sample, occupational group, cause of death, lapse of time after death, temperature after death, anatomical level of severance, presence or absence of cerebral spinal fluid, presence or absence of meninges, and presence or absence of blood vessels" (p. 77). Also, Rushton's claims about race differences in brain size are contradicted by some of the studies he cites (Cernovsky 1995).
So what about Lieberman's last two points? To recap, they were that "[Rushton] cannot claim to ‘‘explain’’ a vast array of human behaviors because some of his measures and concepts may be faulty, and his ‘‘principle of aggregation’’ (e.g., grouping diverse populations into ‘‘races,’’ averaging results from different studies) is invalid" (Gottfredson, p. 4). Gottfredson claims that "the last two [of Lieberman's arguments] demand uniformly perfect data and measurement before concluding anything from a body of evidence" (pp. 4-5). Again, not so: All that Lieberman pointed out was that Rushton did not consider yet another confounding factor: nutrition. This is explained in Lieberman's fifth point, which was that "Rushton does not relate environment, nutrition, cranial size, and IQ" (p. 78). Gottfredson, weirdly, ignores this point while going after his sixth point, namely that "Rushton claims to “explain” a vast array of human behavior" (p. 79).
What's wrong with him doing this? I'll give you a hint: it's not that his data and measurements aren't perfect. The problems include that he's glossing over differences that contradict his theory by lumping different groups together into racial categories by only using averages. Rushton's doing so also ignores the larger differences in brain size across gender than across "race", and the genders of his skulls were unknown (Cernovsky 1993). Lieberman also notes that "Rushton ranks “races” on a number of variables including cultural achievements, personality traits, marital stability, law-abidingness, mental health, and administrative capacity. These variables are usually not defined, and each represents reified aggregations of diverse behaviors that vary in their causation" (p. 79).
Naturally, Gottfredson couldn't resist ending her paper with this gem: "...it is Gould’s work on cranial capacity, not Rushton’s, that we now learn was fudged and falsified (Lewis et al., 2011)—just as Rushton said it was." Lewis et al., of course, is a 2011 study of Morton's skulls which concluded that "Morton did not manipulate data to support his preconceptions, contra Gould." Of course, she omits criticism of Lewis et al. from sources like Weisberg & Paul (2016) who wrote that "We take no issue with Lewis et al.’s remeasurements, but argue that these measurements are not and cannot be evidence for their conclusion". Other researchers have argued that Lewis et al.'s defense of Morton is inadequate, and that "Gould was right to reject Morton's analysis as inappropriate and misleading, but wrong to believe that a more appropriate analysis was available" (Kaplan et al. 2015).
Addendum: Rushton's research on international variations in crime, which Gottfredson briefly mentions in her paper, is criticized by Neapolitan (1998) for not controlling for non-race factors.
Sources
The paper this post is about (Gottfredson 2013) is here: http://www1.udel.edu/educ/gottfredson/reprints/2012RaceandRushton.pdf
Anderson 1991: http://philipperushton.net/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/race-r-k-theory-rushton-anderson-canadian-psychology-1-1991.pdf
Cain & Vanderwolf 1990: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/019188699090185T
Cernovsky 1993: http://philipperushton.net/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/iq-race-brain-size-rushton-cernovsky-j-of-black-psychology-1993.pdf
Cernovsky 1995: http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/002193479502500602?journalCode=jbsa
Cravens 1978: The triumph of evolution: American scientists and the heredity-environment controversy 1900–1941.
Gossett 1965: Race: The history of an idea in America.
Kaplan et al. 2015: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1369848615000035
Lewis et al. 2011: http://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article?id=10.1371/journal.pbio.1001071
Long & Kittles 2009: http://www.bioone.org/doi/abs/10.3378/027.081.0621
Lynn 1989a: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/0092656689900299
Lynn 1989b: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/0092656689900317
Neapolitan 1998: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1745-9125.1998.tb01243.x/full
Silverman 1990: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/016230959090002N
Templeton 2013: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3737365/
Weisberg & Paul 2016: http://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article?id=10.1371/journal.pbio.1002444
Weizmann et al. 1990: http://psycnet.apa.org/journals/cap/31/1/1/
Weizmann et al. 1991: http://psycnet.apa.org/index.cfm?fa=buy.optionToBuy&id=1991-20580-001
Zuckerman 1988: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/0191886988901365
Zuckerman 1990: http://psycnet.apa.org/psycinfo/1991-12414-001
http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/00957984930193004
http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.2466/pms.109.3.733-736?journalCode=pmsb
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/BF02088001
Friday, July 7, 2017
Even more ridiculous, risible bullshit slips into the JCJ
The Journal of Criminal Justice has been criticized for allegedly using predatory and unethical citation practices to inflate its impact factor.(1) But it is with a recent paper published in the JCJ(2) that its credibility has clearly and definitively been flushed down the toilet. The paper deals with the issue of race and crime in America, and does so in a blatantly political manner from the very first sentence of the abstract (try to restrain your laughter as you read this if you are in a public place): "This article examines race, poverty, and criminal behavior ignoring criminological orthodoxy adding two features that spoil the politically correct mantra that black crime results from white racism." What is the first of these features? The authors then answer this question as follows: "Adding East Asians, who surpass white Americans in almost every index of prosocial behavior despite experiencing a history of prejudice and discrimination aimed at them, casts serious doubt on that contention. To be consistent with structural arguments for black poverty and crime, proponents would have to attribute Asian successes and low crime rates to pro-Asian bias on the part of whites to their own detriment."
So what we have here is a blatant attempt to legitimize the debunked "model minority" myth underlying so much of white people's resentment toward African Americans in America. Naturally, they would turn to a journal edited by Matt DeLisi, the co-author of the book "Conservative Criminology"(3), to try to give these views a large audience.
But aren't Asian Americans a "model minority"? No, for two reasons:
1) Lumping the income of all Asian Americans together masks the fact that not all Asian Americans are successful, and some groups thereof are in fact significantly poorer than are whites.(4)(5)(6) This is partly because of significantly greater variation among Asian Americans in terms of their economic experiences.(7)
2) Arguing that because Asian Americans can be successful in spite of discrimination, African Americans can too, if they only work hard, ignores the fundamental differences in the type and magnitude of discrimination experienced by the two groups over American history. (8)
Moreover, the fact that Asian Americans' mean income is higher than that of whites and blacks is of little relevance to blacks, given the way Asian Americans generally came to America. To quote the Brookings Institution: "Asian-Americans have in fact been a uniquely hyper-selective migrant group. The share of well-educated Asian immigrants is in fact higher than the American population average. This alone is likely to influence outcomes, since there is a clear connection between parental education and the education achievement of their children."(19)
Anyway, now I'll deal with more bullshit arguments in the paper that is the subject of this post.
Later on in the same paper, the authors state:
"Asian Americans have suffered widespread prejudice and discrimination in the U.S. but not only do they commit far less crime than African Americans and enjoy higher income, they also commit less crime and enjoy higher mean household income than whites. This spoils a good politically correct criminological story."
Of course, numerous studies have shown that most differences in crime between blacks and whites are accounted for by racial differences in structural factors such as family disruption, (9)(10) racial isolation and segregation, (11) exposure to violence, (15) and racial inequality. (12) Segregation is especially important, because it results in blacks being exposed to family and neighborhood factors that increase the odds of violent crime perpetration more than whites are, by creating areas of concentrated poverty. This, in turn, increases rates of unemployment and out-of-wedlock births among blacks in these areas of cities, resulting in higher rates of violence among blacks. (16) While African Americans tend to live in, on average, highly segregated neighborhoods, Asian Americans do not. (21) The stuff about out-of-wedlock births is especially important given what the authors say about blacks having so many births out of wedlock, and how this is the real source of their problems.
But what about Asians? Why do they commit crime at relatively low rates? A recent study looking at delinquency reported that the answer to this question is "a combination of protective factors, including lower levels of strain, strong bonds to school, and less exposure to delinquent peers." (18) Moreover, Southeast Asians in America used to have high rates of welfare receipt, crime, and other social problems, and to a large extent this is still true today. (20)
And a few paragraphs later, the authors try to hand-wave away the point I made by saying,
"It would be naive to suggest that the lingering effects of slavery and racism have not had at least some effect on the behavior of blacks in America, but this does not explain why they would be so affected by their history of victimization when Asians seem not to be affected at all."
The authors also sprinkle bits of superficially plausible and inflammatory bullshit throughout their paper, arguing that perhaps the whole "institutional racism" thing is just made up by academics whose careers depend on the putative existence of widespread racism in modern America, even if it doesn't really exist. Ostensibly, this is because "those with a vested interest in keeping racism alive talk about such things as “symbolic racism” and “laissez-faire racism,” which are supposedly expressed subconsciously." The evidence that discrimination against African Americans, as well as the effects of past discrimination, is still alive and well has been summarized elsewhere, (12) (17) as has the evidence for the existence of subconscious racism. (22) It is hard to believe that absurd conspiratorial bullshit like this, on which conservative BS arguments about climate scientists wanting to profit off the climate change "gravy train" are based, got published in an ostensibly reputable peer-reviewed journal.
Contrary to the authors' statements, black culture does not promote violence; instead, their rates of violence are higher due to family disruption and other factors mentioned above. (13) (14)
In short, the authors attack a weird sort of straw man when they argue that "politically correct" criminology attributes racial differences in crime to differences in poverty. This has always been an oversimplification, when in fact, it is concentrated disadvantage that is at work--which has never been (and certainly is not now) the case for Asian Americans to nearly the extent to which it is for African Americans.
References:
1) http://retractionwatch.com/2015/09/22/self-citation-explains-crime-journals-boost-in-impact-factor-analysis/
2) http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0047235217300880
3) https://www.amazon.com/Conservative-Criminology-Restore-Balance-Sciences/dp/0323357016
4) http://aapidata.com/stats/national/national-poverty-aa-aj/
5) http://www.urban.org/urban-wire/model-minority-myth-hides-economic-realities-many-asian-americans
6) http://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2017/04/19/524571669/model-minority-myth-again-used-as-a-racial-wedge-between-asians-and-blacks "Racism that Asian-Americans have experienced is not what black people have experienced," Kim said. "Sullivan is right that Asians have faced various forms of discrimination, but never the systematic dehumanization that black people have faced during slavery and continue to face today."
7) https://www.americanprogress.org/issues/race/reports/2016/12/20/295359/wealth-inequality-among-asian-americans-greater-than-among-whites/
8) http://www.understandingprejudice.org/readroom/articles/affirm.htm
9) https://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=tV6MAQAAQBAJ&oi=fnd&pg=PA177
10) https://academic.oup.com/sf/article-abstract/75/2/619/2233487
11) http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/1088767997001003004
12) https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20689680
13) http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1540-4560.t01-1-00005/full
14) https://www.jstor.org/stable/2779588
15) http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0022427898035002002
16) http://content.healthaffairs.org/content/24/2/325.full
17) http://thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(17)30569-X/fulltext
18) http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/15377938.2013.837854?src=recsys&journalCode=wecj20
19) https://www.brookings.edu/research/asian-american-success-and-the-pitfalls-of-generalization/
20) https://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=N2pyIc8VoWcC&oi=fnd&pg=PA224
21) https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4193596/ "... levels of segregation are highest for African Americans and lowest for Asians with Hispanics in-between. "
22) http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/019027250807100103
More stuff you can read if you want about structural factors, race, and crime:
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1745-9125.2001.tb00934.x/full
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1745-9125.1999.tb00491.x/full
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1745-9125.1999.tb00493.x/full
A great summary of the issue of Asian Americans, crime, and the model minority myth:
http://tamaranopper.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/Nopper.Asian-Americans-Deviance-Crime-and-the-Model-Minority-Myth.pdf
Addendum #1: Another blog post also debunking the same paper (this post is by University of Washington professor Callie Burt: https://calliehburt.wordpress.com/2017/08/03/this-again-a-response-to-walsh-yu-2017/)
Addendum #2: I was recently pleased to learn that Rebecca Stone, assistant professor of sociology at Suffolk College (who I had never heard of until just now), has also taken note of the giant pile of BS this paper is. She has posted a Twitter thread (that was posted last summer when this paper was first published, but which I didn't notice until just now) expressing astonishment at the absurd ad hominems and other logical fallacies in this pathetic excuse for a paper. You can read her tweets here.
So what we have here is a blatant attempt to legitimize the debunked "model minority" myth underlying so much of white people's resentment toward African Americans in America. Naturally, they would turn to a journal edited by Matt DeLisi, the co-author of the book "Conservative Criminology"(3), to try to give these views a large audience.
But aren't Asian Americans a "model minority"? No, for two reasons:
1) Lumping the income of all Asian Americans together masks the fact that not all Asian Americans are successful, and some groups thereof are in fact significantly poorer than are whites.(4)(5)(6) This is partly because of significantly greater variation among Asian Americans in terms of their economic experiences.(7)
2) Arguing that because Asian Americans can be successful in spite of discrimination, African Americans can too, if they only work hard, ignores the fundamental differences in the type and magnitude of discrimination experienced by the two groups over American history. (8)
Moreover, the fact that Asian Americans' mean income is higher than that of whites and blacks is of little relevance to blacks, given the way Asian Americans generally came to America. To quote the Brookings Institution: "Asian-Americans have in fact been a uniquely hyper-selective migrant group. The share of well-educated Asian immigrants is in fact higher than the American population average. This alone is likely to influence outcomes, since there is a clear connection between parental education and the education achievement of their children."(19)
Anyway, now I'll deal with more bullshit arguments in the paper that is the subject of this post.
Later on in the same paper, the authors state:
"Asian Americans have suffered widespread prejudice and discrimination in the U.S. but not only do they commit far less crime than African Americans and enjoy higher income, they also commit less crime and enjoy higher mean household income than whites. This spoils a good politically correct criminological story."
Of course, numerous studies have shown that most differences in crime between blacks and whites are accounted for by racial differences in structural factors such as family disruption, (9)(10) racial isolation and segregation, (11) exposure to violence, (15) and racial inequality. (12) Segregation is especially important, because it results in blacks being exposed to family and neighborhood factors that increase the odds of violent crime perpetration more than whites are, by creating areas of concentrated poverty. This, in turn, increases rates of unemployment and out-of-wedlock births among blacks in these areas of cities, resulting in higher rates of violence among blacks. (16) While African Americans tend to live in, on average, highly segregated neighborhoods, Asian Americans do not. (21) The stuff about out-of-wedlock births is especially important given what the authors say about blacks having so many births out of wedlock, and how this is the real source of their problems.
But what about Asians? Why do they commit crime at relatively low rates? A recent study looking at delinquency reported that the answer to this question is "a combination of protective factors, including lower levels of strain, strong bonds to school, and less exposure to delinquent peers." (18) Moreover, Southeast Asians in America used to have high rates of welfare receipt, crime, and other social problems, and to a large extent this is still true today. (20)
And a few paragraphs later, the authors try to hand-wave away the point I made by saying,
"It would be naive to suggest that the lingering effects of slavery and racism have not had at least some effect on the behavior of blacks in America, but this does not explain why they would be so affected by their history of victimization when Asians seem not to be affected at all."
The authors also sprinkle bits of superficially plausible and inflammatory bullshit throughout their paper, arguing that perhaps the whole "institutional racism" thing is just made up by academics whose careers depend on the putative existence of widespread racism in modern America, even if it doesn't really exist. Ostensibly, this is because "those with a vested interest in keeping racism alive talk about such things as “symbolic racism” and “laissez-faire racism,” which are supposedly expressed subconsciously." The evidence that discrimination against African Americans, as well as the effects of past discrimination, is still alive and well has been summarized elsewhere, (12) (17) as has the evidence for the existence of subconscious racism. (22) It is hard to believe that absurd conspiratorial bullshit like this, on which conservative BS arguments about climate scientists wanting to profit off the climate change "gravy train" are based, got published in an ostensibly reputable peer-reviewed journal.
Contrary to the authors' statements, black culture does not promote violence; instead, their rates of violence are higher due to family disruption and other factors mentioned above. (13) (14)
In short, the authors attack a weird sort of straw man when they argue that "politically correct" criminology attributes racial differences in crime to differences in poverty. This has always been an oversimplification, when in fact, it is concentrated disadvantage that is at work--which has never been (and certainly is not now) the case for Asian Americans to nearly the extent to which it is for African Americans.
References:
1) http://retractionwatch.com/2015/09/22/self-citation-explains-crime-journals-boost-in-impact-factor-analysis/
2) http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0047235217300880
3) https://www.amazon.com/Conservative-Criminology-Restore-Balance-Sciences/dp/0323357016
4) http://aapidata.com/stats/national/national-poverty-aa-aj/
5) http://www.urban.org/urban-wire/model-minority-myth-hides-economic-realities-many-asian-americans
6) http://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2017/04/19/524571669/model-minority-myth-again-used-as-a-racial-wedge-between-asians-and-blacks "Racism that Asian-Americans have experienced is not what black people have experienced," Kim said. "Sullivan is right that Asians have faced various forms of discrimination, but never the systematic dehumanization that black people have faced during slavery and continue to face today."
7) https://www.americanprogress.org/issues/race/reports/2016/12/20/295359/wealth-inequality-among-asian-americans-greater-than-among-whites/
8) http://www.understandingprejudice.org/readroom/articles/affirm.htm
9) https://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=tV6MAQAAQBAJ&oi=fnd&pg=PA177
10) https://academic.oup.com/sf/article-abstract/75/2/619/2233487
11) http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/1088767997001003004
12) https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20689680
13) http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1540-4560.t01-1-00005/full
14) https://www.jstor.org/stable/2779588
15) http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0022427898035002002
16) http://content.healthaffairs.org/content/24/2/325.full
17) http://thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(17)30569-X/fulltext
18) http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/15377938.2013.837854?src=recsys&journalCode=wecj20
19) https://www.brookings.edu/research/asian-american-success-and-the-pitfalls-of-generalization/
20) https://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=N2pyIc8VoWcC&oi=fnd&pg=PA224
21) https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4193596/ "... levels of segregation are highest for African Americans and lowest for Asians with Hispanics in-between. "
22) http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/019027250807100103
More stuff you can read if you want about structural factors, race, and crime:
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1745-9125.2001.tb00934.x/full
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1745-9125.1999.tb00491.x/full
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1745-9125.1999.tb00493.x/full
A great summary of the issue of Asian Americans, crime, and the model minority myth:
http://tamaranopper.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/Nopper.Asian-Americans-Deviance-Crime-and-the-Model-Minority-Myth.pdf
Addendum #1: Another blog post also debunking the same paper (this post is by University of Washington professor Callie Burt: https://calliehburt.wordpress.com/2017/08/03/this-again-a-response-to-walsh-yu-2017/)
Addendum #2: I was recently pleased to learn that Rebecca Stone, assistant professor of sociology at Suffolk College (who I had never heard of until just now), has also taken note of the giant pile of BS this paper is. She has posted a Twitter thread (that was posted last summer when this paper was first published, but which I didn't notice until just now) expressing astonishment at the absurd ad hominems and other logical fallacies in this pathetic excuse for a paper. You can read her tweets here.
Friday, May 19, 2017
Sources of racial disparity in arrest and incarceration: a critique of Beaver et al. (2013)
The paper by Beaver et al. (2013) makes multiple false assumptions to reach an inaccurate conclusion, which is at odds with multiple previous studies on the subject of racial disproportionality in the criminal justice system. The first of these assumptions is that all crimes can reasonably be lumped together in the category of "violence", and that all of them are equally likely to result in arrest and incarceration. The second is that violence is a reasonable way to approximate the extent to which one engages in criminal activities, as well as the severity of these activities.
The authors base their analysis on the assumption that individuals with lower IQs are more likely to be arrested and incarcerated, as are individuals who commit more serious (i.e. severe) crimes. As they state on page 30 of their paper, "...both offense severity/frequency and IQ correlate with criminal justice processing, with...individuals with lower levels of overall intelligence being more likely to be arrested and processed by the criminal justice system." The second of these assumptions is hardly debatable, and is clearly supported by the studies the authors cite (Beaver et al., p. 30). However, the assumption that individuals with lower IQs are at a higher risk of arrest and incarceration is not supported by the studies cited by Beaver et al. For example, the first one they cite in support of this claim is Diamond et al. (2012), which shows that prison inmates with lower IQs commit more violent acts in prison. This, however, is not the same as being more likely to be arrested or incarcerated, partly because committing violent behavior in prison, obviously, cannot lead to either outcome if the perpetrator is already incarcerated. Similarly, the authors misrepresent the results of another study they cite for this claim, which showed that "Low IQ was related to antisocial behavior at age 5 years and predicted relatively higher antisocial behavior scores at age 7 years when antisocial behavior at age 5 years was controlled" (Koenen et al. 2006). This is, again, hardly the same as being more likely to be processed through the criminal justice system. These misrepresentations undermine the authors' claim to be controlling for factors (other than race) that can influence the likelihood of such processing.
The authors also assume, absurdly, that their scale measuring lifetime violence is an effective way to approximate the frequency and severity of an individual's criminal offending. Previous studies examining whether differences in offending explain racial differences in incarceration rates have used a more detailed and accurate methodology that does not lump all criminal offenses into the category of "violence". For example, Langan et al. (1985) estimated the number of blacks expected to be incarcerated by "multiplying the number of black offenders by the crime-specific probability of a white offender going to prison" (p. 678). He then compared these data to the percent of prisoners serving time for a specific offense to see if blacks were overrepresented to the expected % of black prisoners for that offense (Langan et al. 1985, table 4, p. 677). Langan found that "even if racism exists, it might explain only a small part of the gap between the 11% black representation in the United States adult population and the now nearly 50% black representation among persons entering state prisons each year in the United States" (p. 682). Lastly, Beaver et al. provide no source for their estimate of the magnitude of the violence-arrest/incarceration relationship, nor for the IQ-arrest/incarceration relationship, which is essential to know that they are controlling for these factors correctly.
These methodological issues undermine the conclusions of Beaver et al.'s paper.
Sources:
Beaver et al. 2013: (abstract, full text download link)
Diamond et al. 2012: (abstract)
Koenen et al. 2006: (PMC full text)
Langan et al. 1985: (PDF)
The authors base their analysis on the assumption that individuals with lower IQs are more likely to be arrested and incarcerated, as are individuals who commit more serious (i.e. severe) crimes. As they state on page 30 of their paper, "...both offense severity/frequency and IQ correlate with criminal justice processing, with...individuals with lower levels of overall intelligence being more likely to be arrested and processed by the criminal justice system." The second of these assumptions is hardly debatable, and is clearly supported by the studies the authors cite (Beaver et al., p. 30). However, the assumption that individuals with lower IQs are at a higher risk of arrest and incarceration is not supported by the studies cited by Beaver et al. For example, the first one they cite in support of this claim is Diamond et al. (2012), which shows that prison inmates with lower IQs commit more violent acts in prison. This, however, is not the same as being more likely to be arrested or incarcerated, partly because committing violent behavior in prison, obviously, cannot lead to either outcome if the perpetrator is already incarcerated. Similarly, the authors misrepresent the results of another study they cite for this claim, which showed that "Low IQ was related to antisocial behavior at age 5 years and predicted relatively higher antisocial behavior scores at age 7 years when antisocial behavior at age 5 years was controlled" (Koenen et al. 2006). This is, again, hardly the same as being more likely to be processed through the criminal justice system. These misrepresentations undermine the authors' claim to be controlling for factors (other than race) that can influence the likelihood of such processing.
The authors also assume, absurdly, that their scale measuring lifetime violence is an effective way to approximate the frequency and severity of an individual's criminal offending. Previous studies examining whether differences in offending explain racial differences in incarceration rates have used a more detailed and accurate methodology that does not lump all criminal offenses into the category of "violence". For example, Langan et al. (1985) estimated the number of blacks expected to be incarcerated by "multiplying the number of black offenders by the crime-specific probability of a white offender going to prison" (p. 678). He then compared these data to the percent of prisoners serving time for a specific offense to see if blacks were overrepresented to the expected % of black prisoners for that offense (Langan et al. 1985, table 4, p. 677). Langan found that "even if racism exists, it might explain only a small part of the gap between the 11% black representation in the United States adult population and the now nearly 50% black representation among persons entering state prisons each year in the United States" (p. 682). Lastly, Beaver et al. provide no source for their estimate of the magnitude of the violence-arrest/incarceration relationship, nor for the IQ-arrest/incarceration relationship, which is essential to know that they are controlling for these factors correctly.
These methodological issues undermine the conclusions of Beaver et al.'s paper.
Sources:
Beaver et al. 2013: (abstract, full text download link)
Diamond et al. 2012: (abstract)
Koenen et al. 2006: (PMC full text)
Langan et al. 1985: (PDF)
Wednesday, March 15, 2017
What White Privilege Doesn't Mean
I feel compelled to make this post because there are lots of straw men arguments that conservatives have been using to argue, incorrectly, that white privilege does not exist. In this post, I will identify these straw men and explain why they do not accurately represent the concept of white privilege (hereinafter WP).
So without further ado, I present a list of things that the concept of WP does not mean:
1. "All white people are rich and successful."
Bullshit. This seems to be widespread among right-wing Internet trolls. In reality, WP refers to averages, and patterns within racial groups. These patterns establish that whites tend to have, on average, higher standards of living than do other races, and that they benefit more from certain factors outside of their control than do other races. Conversely, WP advocates are, or at least can be, aware that members of other races are sometimes economically successful.
2. "All successful white people are only successful because of their privilege."
Again, this is a completely baseless generalization which creates a giant straw man version of WP. There is no question that other factors are involved on an individual level, such that many people of all races in all countries become successful partly or mostly because of their own hard work. However, on a society-wide level, on average, whites tend to have more opportunities to be economically successful than other races, which is what WP actually means.
3. "Other factors have no effect on how economically well-off you are, only WP does! Silly leftist SJWs, why don't they understand economics? If they did, they'd know that two-parent privilege far dwarfs white privilege."
In short: we do. There are other kinds of privileges that exist as well as WP. Simply acknowledging that WP exists does not equate to claiming that no other privileges can possibly exist too.
4. "All white people should feel terrible about themselves/white guilt b/c of their privilege, which makes them successful without having to work by exploiting all other races!"
No, they shouldn't. This does not occur as a result of deliberate decision-making occurring today, but b/c of many societal factors that act to make things easier for whites than for other races. To the extent it is intentional, it is not b/c white people are conspiring to formulate an evil plot against other races, but b/c a few of the powerful ones did decades ago. The vast majority of white people have nothing to feel guilty about in this respect, as it is not their fault.
So without further ado, I present a list of things that the concept of WP does not mean:
1. "All white people are rich and successful."
Bullshit. This seems to be widespread among right-wing Internet trolls. In reality, WP refers to averages, and patterns within racial groups. These patterns establish that whites tend to have, on average, higher standards of living than do other races, and that they benefit more from certain factors outside of their control than do other races. Conversely, WP advocates are, or at least can be, aware that members of other races are sometimes economically successful.
2. "All successful white people are only successful because of their privilege."
Again, this is a completely baseless generalization which creates a giant straw man version of WP. There is no question that other factors are involved on an individual level, such that many people of all races in all countries become successful partly or mostly because of their own hard work. However, on a society-wide level, on average, whites tend to have more opportunities to be economically successful than other races, which is what WP actually means.
3. "Other factors have no effect on how economically well-off you are, only WP does! Silly leftist SJWs, why don't they understand economics? If they did, they'd know that two-parent privilege far dwarfs white privilege."
In short: we do. There are other kinds of privileges that exist as well as WP. Simply acknowledging that WP exists does not equate to claiming that no other privileges can possibly exist too.
4. "All white people should feel terrible about themselves/white guilt b/c of their privilege, which makes them successful without having to work by exploiting all other races!"
No, they shouldn't. This does not occur as a result of deliberate decision-making occurring today, but b/c of many societal factors that act to make things easier for whites than for other races. To the extent it is intentional, it is not b/c white people are conspiring to formulate an evil plot against other races, but b/c a few of the powerful ones did decades ago. The vast majority of white people have nothing to feel guilty about in this respect, as it is not their fault.
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