I can't take any of this seriously so long as any research on race and intelligence continues to be banned as heresy rather than being discussed scientifically.
Genetic diversity within continental races, including that of Sub-Saharan Africans, are mostly a consequence of genetic drift.
While genetic diversity between races are from selection. Thus the inter-racial genetic differences are more likely to manifest in trait differences that humans find more meaningful (which I use purely in a descriptive manner, not prescriptive), such as physiological (medical, metabolic), psychological & behavioral (personality), cognitive (intelligence), and of course physical (appearance, athletic).
The intra-racial differences that arise from genetic drift result in things that are still tangible genetic differences, e.g. ABO blood group frequencies, but don't map well onto characteristics that human societies place emphasis on as much.
And to address your point that:
>The genetic diversity of "black" alone exceeds the rest of the world combined.
This is because the level of genetic diversity as influenced by genetic drift is primarily a function of population size, and Africa being the origin of the Homo sapien species, and probably the Homo genus as a whole, has always had the highest level of effective population size. Thus genetic drift in Africans is least likely to be able to cause allele fixation on particular genes, and so such diversity is better preserved. But as already mentioned, these forms of genetic diversity is less likely to impact the observed traits that most humans, both academics/social scientists and your average joe, find "meaningful".
OK, then let's do it right. But I think you know that isn't really the issue here. Nobody is putting out studies on correctly defined races by genetic groupings and intelligence either because the topic is still considered heresy. Your point that the commonly used definition of race is inaccurate is simply deflecting from this fact.
The point is there is no such thing as a “correct” grouping. The choice of what constitutes a group is completely subjective, it all depends on how far you choose to zoom in or out.
There are correct ways to group but there is no correct group size. Clustering algorithms inherently require some choice of sensitivity. There is no single correct choice for a given set of data, it all depends on what you’re trying to accomplish.
Many sub-Saharan African populations, such as Bantu-speaking West Africans, exhibit relatively lower genetic diversity compared to the Khoisan people, who typically have light brown skin. The Khoisan lineages diverged from those leading to Bantu and other sub-Saharan groups around 100,000–150,000 years ago, making them one of the most ancient human ancestries.
Most domesticated animal breeds are highly inbred so have much tighter genetic boundaries. It's much more similar to doing genetic research on human families, which is definitely fruitful.
Well then I have good news for you: you can begin taking it seriously, because research on race and intelligence is an active field of research that is not suppressed and produces lots of papers --- in several different disciplines, including psychometrics (the Intelligence Journal people), behavioral genetics, and molecular genetics (the GWAS people).
edit since i was feeling really daring today i found an old archived page of a wiki holding a lot of interesting thoughts from him, such as eugenics to prevent the loss of western civilization, and other points that at this point you should imagine. link: https://web.archive.org/web/20250416005529/https:/rationalwi...
This criticism seems to mostly be that he is associated with bad people who say naughty things. Maybe he is a bad scientist, but where are all the well designed scientific studies that show his conclusions are wrong? That's what I care about, but they don't exist because you would never get funding and even to propose running such a study would be career suicide.
the entire microuniverse of some rationalist/pseudoscience groups feeling really "rational" and then having racist, sexist, (insert -ist or -ism here) views is a bit of a joke at this point
You are a perfect example of what I am talking about. That is an obvious lie. Of course it means something scientifically because it refers to a genetic grouping. e.g. black people are much more likely to have the genetic disease sickle cell anemia. Nobody seems to have much of a problem with that statement but if it were a gene related to intelligence you people would lose your minds.
If it isn't a scientifically valid concept, then why did the NIH label the genetic data by race?
Races are not genetic groupings, they are social constructs whose boundaries evolve over time, which is particularly clear when they are formalized in a way which resista change and that formalization drifts increasingly far from the current common usage, such as the way the White racial category in common usage in America currently roughly corresponds to the the subset of the White racial category that excludes the Hispanic ethnicity in the US Census categorization.
The construction of race at any given time and place will tend to have non-zero correlation with genetic frequencies, in part by chance and in part because it is usually largely (but not entirely) drivn by appearance which is to some degree associated with some aspects of underlying genetics.
> e.g. black people are much more likely to have the genetic disease sickle cell anemia.
People with ancestry in sub-Saharan Africa (and within that, even more West Africa), India, the Middle East, and Mediterranean are more likely to have the gene that provides malaria resistance with one copy and sickle cell disease with two than other populations.
While the highest incidence group is also commonly “Black” in most constructions of race, a lot of the American perception of it as a nearly exclusively Black disease is because the population perceived as Black in the US is heavily drawn from West Africa, and the US population also underrepresents other populations in which it is more common than average AND does not include, and may not construct as Black, populations constructed as Black elsewhere in the world where it is not common.
You are 100% correct, but also 100% missing the point. When I say white people are more likely to carry the gene for cystic fibrosis, or black people are more likely to carry genetic risk factors for kidney disease, nobody will reply with a long winded explanation claiming that statement is invalid because "white" and "black" are not scientifically valid because... Comments like yours appear only when the topic of intelligence comes up, so I conclude that the real problem you have with this is the subject of intelligence, and not the categories.
And when the science on race and intelligence came out, the response of the scientific community was not "your categories are bad, and here is my study on intelligence that actually uses scientifically valid genetic groupings." It was "any further science on this subject will not be funded and if you express disagreement it will risk your career."
You mean people are more sensitive on sensitive topics? What? The topic used to justify horrible atrocities over time has a higher bar of scrutiny? What? Why’s that?
And are you sure there aren’t studies on genetic groupings and intelligence? That seems quite a claim.
The problem here is that "black" can mean anybody with dark skin from anywhere in the world.
The sickle cell stuff is likely related to the fact that most "black" people in the US are descended from slaves that pretty much all came from the same small region in West Africa.
My point here is that this problem only seems to be brought up when the research has to do with intelligence. If you talk about genetic differences between "black," "white," or any other racial grouping on any other metric nobody ever brings it up as in my example above. So, while I acknowledge the fundamental weaknesses of the category, I have to conclude that the real objection here isn't the categories, but the topic of the research.
Most of the examples that you've used gain very little from added specificity. It's essentially linguistic laziness. That linguistic laziness is not identically consequential in all contexts.
