The "Let's Be Agnostic About Race Science" Clowns Are in My Twitter Timeline Again...

Over on Twitter: 1500 generations since radiation from the Horn of Africa is not very many, n'est-ce pas? A genetic difference that gives you a���huge���extra 0.1% chance of surviving to reproduce will take a gene's frequency from 1% to 5% of the population in that time.

Melanin and vitamin D, lactose tolerance and herding, sickle cell and malaria���all things with an order-of-magnitude bigger than 0.1% differential? Certainly yes. Other things like "general intelligence"? Almost certainly no. I don't see how you can do the math and still claim otherwise.

And so I don't see how those who claim otherwise���or even claim "agnosticism" about whether it is likely that there are "important" differences between "races"���have done the arithmetic.

Can't do the arithmetic?

Haven't done the arithmetic?

Reject the arithmetic because they want to justify some form of racial privilege?

I don't really care.

As @ezraklein just wrote: "[such] race science... is not 'forbidden knowledge'... [but rather] America���s most ancient justification for bigotry and racial inequality..." As Charles Manski wrote back in 2011: "Decompos[ing] cross-sectional variation in observed outcomes into unobservable genetic and environmental components", no. "Measur[ing] specific genes and us[ing] them as observed covariates when predicting outcomes", quite possibly.