Moderation Questions and General Chat Thread

Im certainly no expert on this stuff, and dont want to derail the mod thread much more, so after this post if need be lets continue in the boc thread. But I believe, to use marriage as an example, is that there is no biological, physical manifestation of the concept of marriage. No married dna, no place in the brain you could scan and see that someone is married or not. So from a physical perspective the state of marriage doesnt exist, or isnt "real".

But rather marriage is a social construct, created by societies themselves, and what constitutes a marriage and what constitutes the expectations of married behavior is determined by each society. Age of marriage, who can get married, how many people in one marriage, etc, etc are all agreed upon at the societal level. Yet it has a very real effect on peoples lives. It is a real thing that exists, even though there is no physical indication that it does.

Edit: I copied this post to BOC so if anyone wants to reply pls do so there. Thanks

Edit 2: i also copied spaceman's post bc its way better than my answer.

mod question: is it a bannable offense to posit that there is a genetical basis for marriage (a strong interest for women to guarantee the man resources are spent on her and her kids and not spread around)? is it a bannable offense to assume at least a portion of IQ is genetically determined? because the way i see you guys talk it seems like any reference to genetics as co-determinants of any trait (even if scientifical literature very clearly tells us the opposite) seems not allowed in this forum

The codification of genetic pulsion isn't the same as a completly made up concept with no basis in reality. That something is a social construct is fairly irrelevant to claim, but whether there are objective genetical basis that create the need to culturally mediate and codify those biological pulsion, or it's a completly made up thing unrelated to any genetical propensity, trait, pulsion, is what matters right? given there are serially monogamous mammals (and birds), is it weird to claim that's absolutely obvious that marriage has significant genetical elements? ie it exists only because of our biology? while the same isn't necessarily true for "gender identity"? or the latter claim would be a bannable offense?

Where do you want to go with this?

What clear scientific literature are we talking about here?

It always comes back to eugenics with these guys, doesn't it?

IQ is a completely fraudulent metric

The vast literature about basically everything measurable being genetically inheritable to some extent including all behavioural propensities

Basically that genes almost always matter at least some for everything we care about on human beings (and so on aggregate for groups as well), and they almost never tell the whole story at the same time.

But anyone who denies any genetic codeterminant for any measurable trait or behavior of human beings is basically completely out of whack. You can completely disregard all their opinions on any topic regarding human beings basically if they are genetic denialists.

So if you have codified relationship rules since forever in all human groups, that must be linked to genetic elements of human beings to some extent. And luckily the thing is over-studied so we know a lot of details as well, and it's about the asymmetrical resource investment of women an men in reproduction for our species + the almost unique (in length) phase of weakness post birth of our offspring, which requires more active parenting for longer than basically any other mammal.

So a claim that marriage is a social construct with no genetic basis is as wrong as you can get in describing human behavior. Marriage is a social construct which codified extremely strong genetic pulsions and genetical necessity. It isn't the only possible social codification that allows for a stable equilibrium but it very probable was the optimal solution for agricultural times in societies larger than dunbar number.

So we don't have genes for marriage but we do have genes that push us hard toward marriage -like structures under some circumstances

Whos monogamous?
What society? The west? LOL
Look at the stats...

Are Charles mansons genes bad?
Or was his environment bad?

Almost certainly both

Standard marriage has been abandoned to some extent very recently (and it makes sense in industrial & post industrial societies where the labour unit isn't the family anymore, and with cheap and effective available contraception, and abortion) and will probably keep going down, that's not a negation of the fact that very different cultures (from the Incas to indians to Romans and so on), when agrarian and with local population sizes growing above Dunbar number, all developed strongly committed monogamous relationships for procreational as the codified typical structure.

Meanwhile it's fairly rare to see that in <= dunbar hunter/gatherer societies.

Genetic explanation is easy, resource commitment (on pregnancy and early parenting) is already fixed when you are all related in the group (you are never investing on someone who isn't your relative so you aren't wasting resources to benefit other genes) and the father has no where to run anyway. In those societies all able bodied adults care for all children (either directly or by gathering food for them). Ofc it's a simplification of a myriad of slightly different models but the core idea is linked to genetics.

Not sure where you read the eu- part, but when talking with people who deny the effect of genes yes it always come back to necessitate a reminder that genes actually matter every time at least to some extent when discussing human behavior.

Both for the individual and for groups.

The left has this glaring hole of science denialism , I know. The other one is usually about nuclear power and GMOs but at least in this forum I was glad to see very little denialism on those topics

So which races have the highest IQ?

the only clear human group outlier in that regard, as it's uncontroversially known in literature, is the Askhenazi (a specific subgroup of Jews, approximately of centraul european origins).

In many cases the american way of talking about "race" is void of value of course, we need specific genetic markers to identify common ancestors when talking about group genetics (which we have for the askhenazi), not random socially constructed labels (again an example of a social construct based loosely on genetics, but in the american case in particular, a pretty bad one, given the huge measurable differences among subsaharian groups, and in asia).

Even going by country in europe would be silly, like using "italian" as a race would be particualrly silly, while Sardinian wouldn't be

If they're the superior race, why does everyone else bully them so much?

They have higher IQ (a little less than a std deviation over median european groups iirc), that's an advantage which has become bigger (in terms of how much it matters in the environment) only fairly recently, for a long part of human history having an higher IQ didn't automatically translate into being stronger in confrontations with other groups.

And i am not sure what you mean with "everyone else bully them so much", askhenazis were some of the major contributors to wester society. Until recently 3 out of 9 scotus judges were ashkenazi. Einstein was, Sagan was. Feynman. I wouldn't describe Natalie Portman as "bullied by everyone" would you? Spielberg? Kanheman, Chomsky?

I mean we might be 30 years behind as a species in tech if it wasn't for Von Neumann alone.

We are talking some of the best mind in the history of the human species, coming from a group which was never bigger than 0.1% of the total human population. What are the odds if intelligence is randomly distributed?

I mean like getting enslaved by the Pharaoh and whatnot.

Those weren't the ashkenazi group as defined above. Before differentiation we have no reason to believe jews had any specially high IQ (and non-ashkenazis on average don't to this day).

Ashkenazis went through an exceptionally severe bottleneck of unclear reasons (but very visible in the genes) around 1000 years ago. It's a very recent development.

It's the jews who made Wien and Prague incredible to give the idea.

...and hollywood & wallstreet

yea we know- but you are way off in your thought process

Which races are the dumbest?

We don't have enough solid data on many micro-groups that still exist in several areas of the world to be able to rank them properly.

Moreover to be able to keep environment and genetic separated and assess only the latter we would need those groups to become integrated in western societies first, then wait a couple of generations, then test.

Otherwise the environmental confounders would just make us waste time in discussing how much their diet , education and so on determines IQ (which we know it can do to a large extent in some cases).

The question would only be useful though if someone came around claiming some lack of positive outcome for some group is entirely because of racism (or other environmental explanations linked to the behaviour of other people). And because of that narrative, ask for something from me.

As long as that doesn't happen i could care less about how much of the lower IQ of aboriginal people in australia , if any, is genetically determined.

Do you?

Why are you bringing up native Australians?

I always thought the wife carrying race was kind of dumb. But then I learned about the cheese roll.

Because some people in literature think some of them are the tested ethnic groups with the lowest IQ of all.

My question as well. Why bring it up?
Why bring up birds??! If you oppress both, not accept them in society and deny them of opportunity =
makes no sense, does it? You get no results. So why even bring it up?

Yea, thats coming from racists. Why dont you understand this?
Like with the tobbaco industry , they had agendas. Has long been debunked and overhauled by real scientists btw.