race – Clear Language, Clear Mind

Species genetic variation and number of subspecies/races/breeds/breeding populations/clusters etc.

5. March 2020

A straightforward research idea: Compare the recognized count of subspecies (races/breeds/breeding populations/clusters etc.) with measures of genetic variation. The most obvious is the Fst but it’s not an optimal metric. There is some literature on this: Woodley, M. A. (2010). Is Homo sapiens polytypic? Human taxonomic diversity and its implications. Medical hypotheses, 74(1), 195-201. Fuerst,…

Population genetics

Death by affirmative action: race quotas in medicine

13. April 2019 0 Comments

See also previous 2017 post. I have been repeatedly asked about this topic, so here is a post that covers the basics. The argument goes like this: Affirmation action is used in admission to medical schools, i.e. they practice race quotas in favor of less intelligent races, in particular blacks and hispanics, and discriminate against…

intelligence / IQ / cognitive ability, Medicine

Lewontin’s famous 1972 book chapter

7. June 2018 0 Comments

Few people actually read this, which is a shame because the science is interesting for historical purposes, and the fulltext of his famous fallacy is rarely read. I believe this is a pity because it is really obvious when you actually read it. Lewontin, R. C. (1972). “The Apportionment of Human Diversity”. Evolutionary Biology. pp….

Population genetics

Large scale sex, race etc. discrimination studies: what do they show?

27. July 2017 0 Comments

Given enough motivation, QRPs, biased reviewing and time, one can build an entire literature of studies proving anything. There’s plenty of all of these to prove left-wing ideological beliefs (and libertarian in economics). However, it is much harder to QRP large N datasets to give preferred results. So, what do large scale studies show about…

Psychology, Sociology

New paper out: Admixture in Argentina (with John Fuerst)

13. June 2017

We have a new big paper out: Kirkegaard, E. O. W., & Fuerst, J. (2017). Admixture in Argentina. Mankind Quarterly, 57(4). Retrieved from http://mankindquarterly.org/archive/issue/57-4/4 Abstract Analyses of the relationships between cognitive ability, socioeconomic outcomes, and European ancestry were carried out at multiple levels in Argentina: individual (max. n = 5,920), district (n = 437), municipal…

Differential psychology/psychometrics, Genetics / behavioral genetics, Sociology

The race and intelligence question is solvable

6. June 2017

In reply to: http://nautil.us/issue/48/chaos/what-both-the-left-and-right-get-wrong-about-race http://www.geneticshumanagency.org/gha/origin-of-race-differences-in-intelligence-is-not-a-scientific-question/ There’s a new kind of ‘environmentalist’ (rather, anti-hereditarian) defense in town, or at least, one that’s not commonly seen. It goes like this: This is the first of a series of blog posts about race and intelligence. My opinions on this topic are, I think, the least popular arguments I…

Differential psychology/psychometrics, Genetics / behavioral genetics, intelligence / IQ / cognitive ability

Criticism of me and my research on SlateStarCodex’s subreddit

3. April 2017

On the commentariat here, and why I don’t think I can be associated with this community, despite liking the blog. My reply, as found in the comments. Most of it seems to be just rewritten stuff from RationalWiki’s collection of inaccuracies. I repost my reply below here for prosperity, and also for those too lazy…

Differential psychology/psychometrics, Genetics / behavioral genetics, Immigration

Notes on Steve Hsu’s second interview w/ Daphne Martschenko

17. October 2016

Back in January, Steve Hsu did an interview with Daphne Martschenko who is a phd candidate at Cambridge in education. She’s basically doing science journalism on behavioral genetics as far as I can tell. Now there’s a new interview up. I have some comments to it because Steve was a little too nice. Bias from…

Differential psychology/psychometrics, Genetics / behavioral genetics, intelligence / IQ / cognitive ability

Individual genomic admixture and cognitive ability

10. October 2016

So, I posted this: Abstract We used data from the PING study (n≈1200) to examine the relationship between cognitive ability, socioeconomic outcomes and genomic racial ancestry. We found that when genomic ancestry was not included in models, self-reported race/ethnicity (SIRE) was a useful predictor of cognitive ability/S, but when genomic ancestry was included, SIRE lost…

Differential psychology/psychometrics, Genetics / behavioral genetics, intelligence / IQ / cognitive ability

Who prefers to date people of their own race?

5. May 2016

Data from the OKCupid project. In light of a recent paper examining who prefers to date within their own religion, I recalled that there was a question about this in the OKCupid dataset, except that it is for race: “Would you strongly prefer to go out with someone of your own skin color / racial background?”…

Differential psychology/psychometrics