I guess the lesson is, in a globalized marketplace, those whose products are attractive to the greatest number (and who are not bigoted away from serving that market) will get the most profit!

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sarah_Silverman

From the blog post you linked to,

Among humans in general, intellectual capacity seems to decline with age. Indeed, there are statements in the literature that IQ declines from one’s twenties onwards (presumably among European Americans). Is this decline due to natural aging processes? Or is it prewired into the human organism?

Perhaps the ability to acquire new information becomes less useful with age and perhaps this was even truer in ancestral humans. What we call ‘intelligence’ may have originally been an infant trait that humans lost as they grew up. With the expansion of our cultural environment, natural selection would have progressively extended this infant trait into older age groups, and more so in some populations than in others.

This makes a ton of sense. I kick myself for never thinking about it.

I have written one text which presents evolutionary psychology from such a developmental perspective [1,2,3], but I don’t recall it presenting that theory, either.

The only hiccup I can think of, is why the same increase in heritability of intelligence with age would also occur for personality and political orientation?

[1] http://www.tdaxp.com/archive/2007/01/13/evolutionary-cognitivism-introduction-race-of-man-races-of-men.html
[2] http://www.amazon.com/Origins-Human-Nature-Evolutionary-Developmental/dp/1557988781
[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolutionary_developmental_psychology

“Throwing in more environmental differences would make an innate difference less significant and harder to detect. But why would it disappear? It should do so only if the family environment were, on average, more conducive to learning in the biracial group. Both groups, however, had the same kind of family environment, i.e., a single German mother brought up the children”

Thank you for the timely piece by James Flynn.

I’m rarely impressed by Dr. Flynn, and the September 3, 2008, article is no exception.

Black women, however, are effectively trapped because so few white men marry them and stay with them: only 2 per cent of black women are raising a child with a white man today. The

If Flynn’s hypothesis is right, the willingness on the part of white men to marry black women has been declining.

I’m not sure how he can validate this — is he arguing that white attitudes toward miscegenation with black femaels is worse now than 40 years ago?

Flynn also makes a number of rhetoric nature-v-nurture points. Instead of addressing them all, because it is tiring to reply to such baseless allegations again and again, I will take just one that he obviously spent time on:

Let’s consider just one other bit of evidence. The environment for black people in the US may look bleak but there is one group of black Americans whose children were raised elsewhere. After the second world war, white and black soldiers of the American occupation force in Germany fathered children. By the ages of between 6 and 13, tests showed that the children’s IQs were broadly similar, though this does not settle the debate: the numbers are too small, and there was a mental test to qualify for the army so the soldiers were not a random sample.

Flynn actually smahes his own argument! The military requires passing an IQ test to enter. Further, the military tries to drive those with higher careers away from the infantry. So American GIs who were having kids — regardless of race — had IQs within a certain range. That their kids also have an IQ in this range only demonstrates that IQ is partially heritable.

Eddie,

Family relationships among the very small fraction of southern whites and blacks who lived inside planation houses would be interesting. I recall a discussion that argued that black female house slaves had more liberty than white female wives of slave-holders, as the second experienced far more social sanctions than the first.

Regardless, the historical parity among sexes for blacks marrying outside their race (with a slight bias toward black female doing so) implies it is not historic. It may well be political — perhaps the black racists of two generations ago were far more effective in turning black females than black males — but it is not a continuing tradition from the past.

Thank you for the informative — if dispiriting — comment.

There is also the whole cultural mindset of “us” against “them” that is repeated incessantly in poor black communities from the church rhetoric (ala Rev. Wright and co.) to the school system reality (where students often attend poorly funded schools and see white and middle-class students attending better schools).

As well, there seems to be an attitude of “you’re asking for trouble” from older blacks, even middle-class and above. This is the attitude that shocks the most. People who should absolutely know better repeating that nonsense to impressionable young black women.

Lere,

That is an exceptional article. One thing the author does not mention is the rate of homosexuality among black men. While some of it is overstated in the media (ala the Down Low), that probably drops another at least 7-8 eligible black men off that ratio.

I went to the General Social Survey online application [1,2], and entered the following variables

Row: RACE (Race of Respondent)
Column: HAPMAR (Happiness of Marriage)
Control: INCOME (Total Family Income)
Filter: SEX(2) (Respondents Sex(=Female))

Across income levels, black females are substantially less happy in their marriage than white females

For example

Income less than $1000
White: 70.9% very happy
Black: 26.4% very happy

Income more than $25,000
White: 92.4% very happy
Black: 4.5% very happy

Eddie,

How much flack do such colorblind black females face? Is disapproval to miscegenation culturally normative, in your view?

[1] http://sda.berkeley.edu/cgi-bin/hsda?harcsda+gss04
[2] http://www.gnxp.com/blog/2006/09/data-access-to-gss.php

If his theory is correct, though, there should be more black women living in unhappy marriage–that being the alternative to staying single or out-marriage for a woman who can’t find a good husband within her own community. Does evidence exist for this?

I am happy to offer a chuckle now and then.

Dan,

Absolutely! I have witnessed this with black females who dared to date outside of their race, as I experienced prior in my dating life years ago and witnessed all too often in school and the Navy. A real shame. I will forward my close friend that book you mentioned.