If you ever had any doubts that Shi Huang was a freakin’ racist, behold his latest Twitter admissions.
Whether there is a superior race is a scientific question and can only be answered by highly qualified geneticists after a thorough scientific investigation. For lay people to have a no answer to such a question prior to investigation is bizarre, non-scientific, and pure politics
People have been pushing this racist notion of a “superior race” for centuries, and it’s clearly been an example of motivated reasoning — people trying to justify colonialism and slavery. There is no point to investigating “scientifically” when it’s patently counterfactual. I question whether Shi Huang is a highly qualified geneticist, since he then goes on to justify his claim with a childish caricature of evolutionary theory.
Evolution has a progressive direction from simple to complex or from more random noise within the system to less noise, which is what science has found out, at least my science. This would put human at the top. The same logic would equally apply to different people.
Humans at the top, huh, because they have less random noise. You know, the human genome is full of random noise and garbage and selfish DNA, but bacteria, like E. coli, don’t have introns or massive chunks of repetitive DNA and all the functional genes are packed efficiently and tightly. By the criterion of “noise,” bacteria would be at the top and humans at the bottom. Even by his own fallacious reasoning he’s wrong!
This ‘great chain of being’ model of evolution is so totally 19th century (or older) stuff. No one believes it anymore, except for a lot of ignorant racists.
He’s going to have a tough time getting published in Nature again. Oh well, there’s always Quillette!
Humans are superior, eh? Then why do we commit genocide, and why are we ignoring imminent environmental collapse?
Surely the question of whether there is a superior “race” is an entirely UNscientific question, given that “race” is a cultural construct, not a scientific one?
How very primitive.
Also, yeah, the scala naturae goes back at least to Aristotle, but received its greatest development in late antique Neoplatonism (Plotinus and Porphyry), then in the 12th-14th Century Scholastic thought that inherited those ideas.
I admit I’m not a geneticist, but as a layman I’d like to have a concise definition of race and a good explanation how and why these races have managed to stay distinct from one another considering how humans move and …fuck around, before we begin talking about superiority.
And I’m prepared to be sceptical if the superior race turns out to reside in China.
Oh, never mind. As a layman I seem to have a better grasp of evolution than the highly qualified geneticist…
I do not need “highly qualified geneticists” to answer this question.
Simple observation: you can go pretty much anywhere in the world, and somewhere, not far away, there will be an area where people have lived, even thrived, without anything like modern technology. And you will look at that area, and you will not know how they did it.
People the world over can be pretty goddamned clever, I think.
As a counterbalance to the racism and xenophobia I want to show you what a proper border between two different peoples should look like (there are some nice rapids a couple of minutes in). No barbed wire to be found.
https://youtu.be/m54Qi1fA9YY
“By the criterion of “noise,” bacteria would be at the top and humans at the bottom.”
I, for one, welcome our bacterial overlords.
Oh wait, they’re already here. And more numerous than us!
Better not piss ’em off, or they might go all “flesh-eating” and NOM NOM NOM
Wasn’t “Herrenrasse” an episode of the X File? So if Shi Huang is living in that narrative universe he might feel justified. All he has to do is demonstrate the alien bounty hunter at a conference.
As far as accomplishments, I put the phylum Cyanobacteria at the top, as it has been terraforming Earth for over 3 billion years. Among the animals the most successful phylum is Arthropoda.
@9 It was definitely an episode of German history, one that really doesn’t need a remake!
If there is a superior race, wouldn’t it be Mongols? (I am just saying that because it infuriates Chinese ethno-nationalists) Or maybe Assyrians?
All the vikings managed was raiding and looting and some monastery burning.
Racists have to completely ignore population genetics and they focus on a particular point ibln time to argue superiority. Are British people superior before or after the Romans colonized them, or the Americans corrupted their gene pool? Are the Chinese superior thanks to 1 in 10 Chinese men being descended from Ghengis Khan? He was personally a genetic supernova.
Lastly, anyone who believes in racism is obviously an inferior case in point.
Kinda sorta on topic, but one of my favorite anecdotes:
There is a story, possibly apocryphal, of the distinguished British biologist, J.B.S. Haldane, who found himself in the company of a group of theologians. On being asked what one could conclude as to the nature of the Creator from a study of his creation, Haldane is said to have answered, “An inordinate fondness for beetles.”
If your “master race” is being out-competed by the “vermin”, you’ve already falsified your premise.
Oh really?
You could as well argue that if there is a superior race, it would be obvious to everyone and no one would need a “thorough investigation by highly qualified geneticists”.
You could also use Shi Huang’s sloppy nonreasoning by assertion without proof to argue that whatever the superior race is, it isn’t the Chinese. For much of their recent history, they were poor and backward and often conquered by such riff raff as the Mongols, the Manchurians, and the Europeans. A small number of Europeans dominated China for decades.
They did produce such things as the largest civil war in history, the Taiping Rebellion, and the horrors of Mao and his mistakes and famines that killed tens of millions. Their main accomplishment in the 20th century was to overbreed and end up with 1.4 billion people surviving with difficulty on a wrecked landscape.
(I don’t actually believe that and this is just a sarcastic example of cherry picking data points to make a false argument.
It is what racists like Shi Huang do though.)
Shih Huang would have good career prospects in the British Conservative and Unionist Party, once he gets kicked out of science.
“Highly qualified geneticists” have been making “thorough scientific investigations” of race and IQ for over a century now.
They have yet to come up with a consensus that there is such a thing as a superior race, whatever that is.
That fact right there is telling you something both important and obvious.
There isn’t one.
This is a repost of a simple point I’ve made before.
IQ is very malleable and changeable and there is a heritable component but it isn’t all that high.
In Realityland, if you want to look at racial/ethnic groups that almost always score low on IQ tests, that is…the Irish. Historically, the Irish have been the poster group for dumb people.
Well, OK the Irish for many decades scored low on IQ tests.
It turns out that lately, Irish IQs have been rising and are now equal to the British. They are equal to WASPs in the USA.
The point that can easily be made over and over again is that IQ is very changeable and mallable.
It is effected by many variables such as socio-economic status, early childhood nutrition, early childhood upbringing, education quality, culture, and so on.
We can say that there is a heritable component to IQ but it isn’t really all that high.
I find the pull quotes ambiguous as to what he means by “race.” The second quote suggests that he means the “human race” in general is superior to other animal types, not that some specific human ethnic group is superior to other human groups. The later is what I usually think of as “racism”. I’m not sure what to call the concept of human superiority over other animals.
I’m going to make a bold prediction that his definition of genetic “noise” will turn out to be as much vapourware as “specified complexity.”
Ten words in and already catastrophically wrong.
It’s nice when people explicitly link their racism to their human supremacy – saves me some time.
Evolution has a progressive direction from simple to complex . . .
Hmm. Like from carbon based to silicon based? I guess we’ll soon find out.
Tardigrades!
robro you didn’t read his quotes very closely.
He is making an analogy here.
There is a great chain of existence and humans are on the top.
There are also a large number of human types, “different people”, and one group of those humans has to be superior to all the rest. He even says that in another Tweet.
This is stupid. It is also wrong in the present case.
What if all those different groups vary by 1% or even 5%. That is in fact, what we see with human ethnic groups. As a species, we are all rather similar genetically and a lot of this is due to constant gene flow between populations.
Shi Huang is an out racist and most likely, considers his ethnic group, Han Chinese to be the superior race.
BTW, we’ve already discussed his crackpot theory that genetic diversity is correlated and causal with being a dull witted ethnic group.
Everything we know about genetics and evolution says the opposite.
Heterosis is a known and common phenomena.
Populations and species with low genetic diversity are considered in danger of extinction.
My Microbiology professor in college used to say that there are more bacteria living on you and in you than there are cells of your own body. IIRC, it’s not even close. By sheer numbers, bacteria have us beat.
@12 Marcus “If there is a superior race, wouldn’t it be Mongols? (I am just saying that because it infuriates Chinese ethno-nationalists)”
Or maybe we could say the Uyghurs are superior, and that’s why the Chinese are persecuting them now.
@19 robro “I’m not sure what to call the concept of human superiority over other animals.”
Speciesism.
@18 raven and others hinted at it: IQ is just a highly biased measure of competence at a test geared toward a specific societal educational context, not a measure of ‘raw’ intelligence.
And, as we published 8 years ago: “There is no top to the food chain”, when it comes to predation, wisdom or intellect.
Sadly, intelligence is not wisdom and often very intelligent people are amoral or immoral. PZ’s article on Caroline Ellison is a case in point.
Stay safe friends. Brace yourselves for a new year full of destructive weather and destructive factions.
Also, I find that there is no simple or clear or accurate definition of ‘superior’. It all depends on your weighting of numerous factors: intelligence, wisdom, honesty, etc, We support the concept that the most ‘superior’ and successful society (race?) is the one that treats it’s most vulnerable people the best.
Raven @ #24 — Thanks for pointing out the “different people” line. I read it, but with a different sense in mind. He does not explicitly say different ethnic groups of people (“races”), but he may be just hedging being explicit about his racism in these tweets. I can definitely see his elitism: some people are superior to others because of their genes. I would not be surprised that he happens to find this correlates with certain ethnic groups over others.
I really hate having to think about all the reasons that racist and faithists and all the peeople who live in the fantasy world but here we are
just some thoughts, there is no more important or better part of a chain all are equal they just have a different place the middle or the ends alone they are just rings with little utility unless attached to something else.
superior does not always mean better but can mean just the top noting its position it is not just a value quality
racist and all the others are stuck in having to always make value judgments about things and always people. There is something of the 12 yr boy in their “reasoning” that it sounds like which girl is pretty and for what reason. without having any experience with girls other then they are on the other side of the playground
Also: when people start talking about one race being 1% better on IQ tests, or whatnot, ask them if they understand regression toward the mean.
Whether there is a superior race is a scientific question and can only be answered by highly qualified geneticists after a thorough scientific investigation.
Is he trying to imply that no such investigation has yet been done? If so he’s full of shite — and I think he knows this, given his failure to even discuss any previous investigations or research, or even to state that he’s looked for same and not found any.
The second quote suggests that he means the “human race” in general is superior to other animal types…
No, he’s definitely talking about different subgroups within the human species. He’s not attacking any notions of other species being equal to humans, because no such notions abound. Also, when he’s saying that “genetic diversity” drives down the average IQ of a group, he’s not referring to the offspring of human-animal couplings.
Evolution has a progressive direction from simple to complex or from more random noise within the system to less noise, which is what science has found out,…
Which reminds me of a query about genetics I posted 5 years ago, which went unanswered. It involved a too-lengthy-to-reiterate book quote, so I won’t repost it; the sort=of gist:
(“Lower organisms” pings my bs detector too, but the book cited dates from 1982, sexist title & all, when they weren’t so discerning as us advanced 21st-centurians…)
… at least my science.
In the obligate hierarchy of everything, Shi Huang science ranks above all those other kinds!
He’s not attacking any notions of other species being equal to humans, because no such notions abound.
A starving alley cat would still consider itself his superior, by breeding and attitude.
Gros Michel and Cavendish are the banana’s “superior” race (according to your friendly multinational distribution groups). The first was eradicated by a fungi in the 50’s, the second will be in a few decades (I just watch a fascinating doc on the banana business)
What any species needs (human and banana included) is the most diversified gene pool possible, to avoid being wiped out by a single nasty bug and having room to develop new useful traits when needed. Fun fact, it applies to a lot of non biological systems too.
I’m no biologist but I’m pretty sure it’s literally incompatible with the whole superior race idea, no real research needed.
When politics/ideology takes over a mind, science/rationality leaves.
I’m aware I only exist to feed and house my mitochondria.
bcw bcw @ # 37: I’m aware I only exist to feed and house my mitochondria.
Are you sure you don’t mean “cats”?
nomdeplume @ # 36 When politics/ideology takes over a mind, science/rationality leaves.
Does that work the other way ’round?
@39 seems not…
For some reason I doubt that Shi Huang is ready to submit himself to the superior humans once science established who they are.
Hmmm…so WHICH race IS superior? Let me guess who he nominates ….
[ For lay people to have a no answer to such a question prior to investigation is bizarre, non-scientific, ]
The old shifting of burden of proof.
“For lay people to say god does not exist without having studied the bible is bizarre”
You owe me one million dollars, prove you don’t or pay up.
@18 Raven,
You say that
The point that can easily be made over and over again is that IQ is very changeable and mallable.
But the site that you link to argues that while this may be the case for the relative IQ of Ireland vs England it is not so for Chinese IQ results.
For example, the reported Chinese PISA scores are far above those of the United States and nearly every European country, many of which are almost totally urbanized and have incomes ten times that of China. Even if we attempt to exclude Europe’s less affluent and lower-performing immigrant populations, and consider only the PISA averages for native Europeans, China’s numbers were exceeded only by the natives of Finland, Germany, Switzerland, and the Low Countries. Consider that this performance was achieved by a country which was still mostly rural, and whose rural incomes averaged little more than $1000 per year.
Although opinions may certainly differ, I regard this new evidence as very strong support for my “East Asian Exception” hypothesis. I believe it is almost unimagineable that any non-East Asian population of rural villagers with annual incomes in the $1000 range would have tested IQs very close to 100. Just consider the generally dismal IQ scores we find in Southern Europe, the Balkans, Argentina, and Chile, where incomes are often ten or twenty times that level.
We would certainly expect Chinese numbers to rise further as the country continues to develop, but my point is that East Asian IQs seem to possess a uniquely high floor compared with those of any other population group.
https://www.theamericanconservative.com/raceiq-irish-iq-chinese-iq/
This is a theory, not a fact. He even calls it a hypothesis. “…I regard this new evidence as very strong support for my “East Asian Exception” hypothesis. I believe
There isn’t a whole lot of data to support it.
One of the things that the Chinese do is report math and PISA scores from elite high schools in China where the very brightest kids go, as average and then argue that Chinese kids are superior to all others.
The other problem is that both the Russians and Chinese regard statistics as a tool of the state. In other words, they just make them up and they always make Russia/China look good.
To take one example, China reports only 5,000 or so dead from Covid in 2022. That number isn’t even remotely close to the truth and no one believes it.
This is an extraordinary claim that is going to require a higher level of proof than, “I believe”.
When you look closer, the actual data that Asians have higher IQs than whites or anyone else falls apart.
From the article below; ” When the Chinese-American scores were reassessed using up-to-date intelligence metrics, Flynn found, they came in at 97 verbal and 100 nonverbal. Chinese-Americans had slightly lower I.Q.s than white Americans.”
From a careful study of IQ scores, you could say Chinese are dumber than average.
I’m sure this is within the margin of error and as already noted, a lot of variables have a huge effect on IQ scores. Meaning they aren’t dumber than others any more than the Irish or Italians are.
Flynn has noted that IQ scores have been rising for many decades within the same populations. So much so that IQ scores and tests get routinely renormalized so the average IQ is set to 100.
Flynn brings a similar precision to the question of whether Asians have a genetic advantage in I.Q.
This is an excerpt from a much longer article on the Flynn effect and the malleability of IQ scores over time and across environments.
@46 Raven
Unz knows about and considers the Flynn effect when he discusses how Chinese IQ scores from poor rural areas match western scores from much richer urban areas. He seems to have been unsure about it’s importance but coming down against it recently because of 2009 test results. At the end of the excerpt that I have copied and pasted below he describes Chinese results as absolutely astonishing .
So the question remains “how much can we trust the Chines to accurately report their IQ and examination results.
……suppose we examine the many hundreds of national IQ samples collected by Lynn and restrict our attention to those from deeply impoverished and/or overwhelmingly rural populations. Virtually every such East Asian case comes in at or well above 100, while scarcely a single such non-East Asian population scores anything close to 100. The worldwide bifurcation between East Asians and other groups seems almost absolute.
However, a closer examination of the underlying data later led me to consider that the evidence was possibly less strong than I had originally imagined. The vast majority of the East Asian IQ studies reported by Lynn include few details of the circumstances under which they were conducted, but those that do almost invariably turn out to be based upon urban samples, and hence are not necessarily representative of national scores. This raises the possibility that most of the remainder were similarly urban. Whether my IQ urbanization hypothesis is correct or whether cities merely attract brighter people, it is well known that urban populations usually tend to have higher IQ scores, so if the East Asian IQ data did turn out to be almost entirely, any ethnic conclusions would be weakened.
As a related example of this, when the international academic PISA scores were announced last year, the 15M Chinese megalopolis of Shanghai ranked at the absolute top, with scores averaging far above those of any nation in the world, drawing some attention. Since PISA scores are a crude proxy for IQ, Shanghai was estimated to score a very high 111, but as China’s most elite urban center, it was almost certainly a major national outlier, and not to be taken as a fair comparison to national averages elsewhere. (The same was true for the high IQs of Chinese city-states such as Singapore and Hong Kong). Although there were hints that China’s larger scale PISA scores were also very strong, these were merely hints.
However, that has all now changed, as blogger Anatoly Karlin has located the 2009 PISA scores for a dozen major provinces on the Chinese Internet, and published a lengthy post presenting and analyzing them. These scores are indeed truly remarkable, and completely confirm the apparent pattern of Lynn’s IQ samples, in which desperately poor East Asians tend to score at or above the levels of the most successful and well-educated Western populations.
The twelve provinces whose scores were released do include several of China’s most developed and best performing areas, including Beijing, Jiangsu, and Zhejiang, as well as Shanghai, so the average is probably a bit above that for the country as a whole. But since the total population is at least well into the hundreds of millions, heavily rural as well as urban, the average PISA score of 520—corresponding to an IQ of 103—cannot be too dissimilar from the overall Chinese figure. And with China’s per capita GDP still only $3,700 and well over half the population still living in rural villages when the tests were conducted, these are absolutely astonishing results.
Houseplant, Unz isn’t even an expert in the field much less Ruler of the Universe.
He is one guy and who cares what he believes or finds astonishing.
Wikipedia: Ronald Keeva Unz is an American technology entrepreneur, political activist, writer, and publisher. A former businessman, Unz became a multi-millionaire in Silicon Valley before entering politics.
.1. Your entire argument is a fallacy, Appeal to Authority, that authority being one guy who isn’t even an actual authority.
.2. Your second argument is to just repeat your first point over again.
This is boring.
.3. Your third argument is to just ignore everything I posted from the New Yorker article that “proves” that Chinese are dumb.
Unlike Unz, Flynn really is an internationally recognized authority.
I’m not wasting any more time on a racist troll, which you clearly are, and clearly a dumb one at that.
I don’t know whether you are Chinese or Asian or not, but I do know you aren’t very bright.
Houseplant, Unz isn’t even an expert in the field much less Ruler of the Universe.
He is one guy and who cares what he believes or finds astonishing.
Wikipedia: Ronald Keeva Unz is an American technology entrepreneur, political activist, writer, and publisher. A former businessman, Unz became a multi-millionaire in Silicon Valley before entering politics.
.1. Your entire argument is a fallacy, Appeal to Authority, that authority being one guy who isn’t even an actual authority.
You were the one who presented him as an authority in your first post (@18), not me.
I am not even disagreeing with you, Chinese test results could be partly or completely fabricated. But Unz seems to have considered the Flynn effect so your post from the New Yorker may be redundant.
1. Your entire argument is a fallacy, Appeal to Authority, that authority being one guy who isn’t even an actual authority
You were the one who presented him as an authority in your first post (@18), not me. I am not even disagreeing with you, Chinese test results could be partly or completely fabricated. But Unz seems to have considered the Flynn effect so your post from the New Yorker may be redundant. Hope this is clearer than my last post
https://www.nedblock.us/papers/heritability.pdf
Ned Block makes an argument for a possibility that almost no one, including liberal anti-racists, has considered or articulated and would likely be shocked by: If there is a genetic component to the (empirically established) “IQ gap” — the difference between the average IQ of whites and the average IQ of Blacks–then Blacks are just as likely to be (on average) genetically intellectually superior to whites as v.v. This follows from the fact that it is impossible to disentangle genetic and environmental contributions to the gap. There’s no reason why it couldn’t be that, if all of the environmental disadvantages for Blacks were removed, the average IQ of Blacks would exceed that of whites (if the premise that there is a genetic component to the gap is true).
This is completely bogus. Your analogy is crap: studying the bible is not analogous to doing a scientific investigation–the former is not a requirement but the latter is. And the burden of proof is on the one who makes a claim. Both the claim that there is no superior race and the claim that god does not exist bears that burden (as do the far more common inverse claims). The problem with Huang’s statement is that the thorough scientific investigation has been done and has yielded no evidence of genetically superior intelligence of one race over another, so it’s perfectly reasonable for lay people to reject the ideologically-driven claim that there are genetically superior races. There is an empirically established gap between the average IQ of whites and the average IQ of Blacks, but that gap has declined as environmental conditions for Blacks has improved, undermining the notion that there is a genetic basis for the gap.
See Angela Saini’s book Superior: The Return of Race Science (https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/42042093-superior)
If you think those tweets are bad:
https://subspecieist.com/race-iq/shi-huang/