Talk:History of the race and intelligence controversy/Archive 6

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Letting people check for themselves

The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

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How about we add it like this:

Nonetheless, in recent years scientists have found thousands of the SNPs (single nucleotide polymorphisms) associated with educational attainment (a close proxy for IQ) in what are known as genome-wide association studies. It is now possible to check whether these genetic variants are evenly distributed across races in publicly available databases. 5.171.96.57 (talk) 19:04, 1 October 2021 (UTC)

References

Disagree, as these are still very tenuous findings and we already know that race maps very poorly onto SNPs. — Shibbolethink ^{(♔ ♕)} 21:10, 1 October 2021 (UTC)

What findings? the genome wide significant associations with EA or the fact that you can check their incidence by race in a publicly available database? 5.171.96.116 (talk) 01:11, 2 October 2021 (UTC)

That's not how Wikipedia works. We depend on reliable mainstream secondary sources to evaluate primary sources. We don't present statements sourced to primary sources, such as a technical database, and "let people check for themselves". NightHeron (talk) 02:02, 2 October 2021 (UTC)

Agreed. None of those sources have anything to say about the history of the race and intelligence controversy. Firefangledfeathers (talk) 02:06, 2 October 2021 (UTC)

I agree with the points made by User:Shibbolethink and User:NightHeron. Also, much is not understood about these SNPs and their effects accross (and even within) groups. For instance, many of the SNPs have been found to be less predictive of educational attainment in groups of African descent than in groups of European descent. (As I have written before) It is in doubt that all of the alleles/combinations thereof predictive of educational attainment in Europeans will necessarily be equally so in distant populations such as Africans (who may also have their own EA alleles less found in Europeans). (As European, and increasingly Asian, populations have been significantly more sampled and studied than African populations in this regard.). (Even in groups of European descent, the amount of variance they influence is small, not yet well understood, and possibly/sonetimes overestimated.)

From: https://www.geneticsandsociety.org/biopolitical-times/genes-success-not-exactly

"In some studies this is what is suggested, and it is mentioned that genes that seem to influence educational attainment in groups of European descent have significantly less predictive power for African Americans. First, our within-family analyses suggest that GWAS estimates may overstate the causal effect sizes ... Without controls for this bias, it is therefore inappropriate to interpret the polygenic score for educational attainment as a measure of genetic endowment. Second, we found that our score for educational attainment has much lower predictive power in a sample of African-American individuals than in a sample of individuals with an European ancestry ..."

Thus making an addition such as that proposed above would also seem to be unjustified and misleading. What can be meaningfully "checked" or concluded is hardly apparent for a non-specialist reader from raw data and primary sources, and should instead, if presented, be sourced from a reliable secondary source(s). Also, since none of the proposed sources mention both race and intelligence, such an addition here would be a fairly clear case of WP:Synthesis. Skllagyook (talk) 02:22, 2 October 2021 (UTC)

Ok, how about for now we add the first sentence like this:

In recent years scientists have found thousands of the SNPs (single nucleotide polymorphisms) associated with educational attainment (a close proxy for IQ) in what are known as genome-wide association studies. Collectively, these SNPs account for about 10% of the variance in educational attainment in European populations.

And then we add:

Whether these SNPs are evenly distributed across races and the significance of said findings remains controversial.

References

The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.