dialecticbio.bsky.social @DialecticBio Twitter profile

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dialecticbio.bsky.social

3 years

"To do science is to be a social actor engaged, whether one likes it or not, in political activity" One of the greatest passages from Richard Lewontin's 'Dialectical Biologist' (1985)

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dialecticbio.bsky.social

@DialecticBio

3 months

IQ fans are like "IQ is the most reliable metric ever. Sure, test-retest variation is huge, and retesting is avoided because people get better at the test, meaning the error is unknown, and different tests have huge variation b/w them, but we should reshape all policy around IQ"

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dialecticbio.bsky.social

@DialecticBio

2 years

A good visualisation of why the concept of 'race' is misleading in a biological/genetic context and shouldn't be considered a real biological/genetic term

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dialecticbio.bsky.social

@DialecticBio

3 months

"what if we find a metric that's some vague proxy for IQ, that will no doubt make IQ scoring even more unreliable, and combine it with polygenic risk scoring with all its many confounds, and use this to figure out if children deserve schooling or work in the mines"

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dialecticbio.bsky.social

@DialecticBio

3 months

IQ fans are not happy with my tweets and are like "ok then, what's *your* preferred metric to reify and create a national religion around, hmm?? Because IQ is the best we got at the moment." Damn, you got me there

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dialecticbio.bsky.social

@DialecticBio

2 years

I think 'The Selfish Gene' by Richard Dawkins has done untold damage to so many people's understanding of evolutionary biology. It teaches hyper-adaptionist thinking and completely wrong ideas (e.g. "genes = units of selection"). Possibly the most damaging popsci book of all time

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dialecticbio.bsky.social

@DialecticBio

2 years

You can't predict facial phenotype from DNA, this is pseudoscience. See They don't even know the age, BMI, hairstyle, or any other identifying features, yet depict a face anyway. This tech will only end up putting innocent people in prison

Major flaws in “Identification of individuals by trait prediction using whole-genome sequencing...

Genetic privacy is an area of active research. While it is important to identify new risks, it is equally crucial to supply policymakers with accurate information based on scientific evidence....

www.biorxiv.org

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dialecticbio.bsky.social

@DialecticBio

2 years

This IQ adoption study is circulating due to a recent controversy surrounding the lead author. I've read it and want to explain how it's wrong. It jumps to a conclusion which isn't supported by the data or methods and only bolsters the fallacy of genetic determinism (1/25)

Timothy Bates

@timothycbates

3 years

Nice new IQ adoption study out to age >30yrs from @eawilloughby using polygenic scores to validate random placement, and finding scant evidence for parenting effects on general intelligence in adulthood

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dialecticbio.bsky.social

@DialecticBio

3 months

- The Genetic Lottery, by Paige Harden

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dialecticbio.bsky.social

@DialecticBio

1 year

This definition of sex that transphobes like to stick to (which @Anthrofuentes doesn't misrepresent at all) is *teleology*, not biology. To pass the laws they want, they need an "objective" definition, but biology has outliers, so they arrive at the same nonsense creationists use

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dialecticbio.bsky.social

@DialecticBio

10 months

Reminder that right-wingers once funded a bunch of scientists to breed a high IQ dog so they could prove eugenics was good or something. They couldn't do it. From 'Misbehaving Science' - Aaron Panofsky

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dialecticbio.bsky.social

@DialecticBio

1 year

I'm concerned that most biologists have a narrow conception of eugenics. Eugenics isn't just cases of historical atrocities (e.g. involuntary sterilisation), it's an ideology: that the quality of society is determined by the gene pool. It has broad implications

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dialecticbio.bsky.social

@DialecticBio

6 months

If you want to know what Gould & Lewontin thought of E.O. Wilson's Sociobiology, you can just read them directly instead of relying on some secondary commentary...

Jake

@s_decatur

6 months

In a 1999 essay, Tom Wolfe described how an academic mafia set out to destroy the brilliant evolutionary biologist Edward O. Wilson. This included hysterical attacks from his Harvard colleagues Stephen Jay Gould and Richard Lewontin - demonizing Wilson as a "Nazi in embryo." 🧵

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dialecticbio.bsky.social

@DialecticBio

2 years

In this now deleted video, an evolutionary psychologist attempts to rehabilitate eugenics by defining it as simply wanting a healthy baby. This is not eugenics. It's the fallacious political ideology that the quality of a society is determined by the quality of the gene pool

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dialecticbio.bsky.social

@DialecticBio

2 years

This sleazy article paints Sabatini as a unique 'scientific genius' and his victim as the archetypal 'jealous ex-lover out for revenge', but the details of these very serious allegations are omitted:

Bari Weiss

@bariweiss

2 years

One scientist said the depiction of Sabatini's lab in the Whitehead report is "alternate reality," and the characterization of Sabatini as lascivious and retaliatory "deeply insane." Another said: "They have the wrong guy."

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dialecticbio.bsky.social

@DialecticBio

2 months

. @eyeslasho once again demonstrating his stupidity. The PCA plots shown here do not support the idea for a "biological basis for race". On the contrary, they nicely illustrate how human genetic variation is clinal and doesn't cluster into non-continuous groups.

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dialecticbio.bsky.social

@DialecticBio

1 year

'Race realists' have never provided a coherent explanation for why/how different environments supposedly selected for high or low intelligence alleles during evolutionary history. High intelligence would be advantageous in all environments!

Rebecca Sear

@RebeccaSear

1 year

Just to be crystal clear what "uncritically using the national IQ dataset" involves: the belief that most people in many different countries are intellectually disabled (IQ~70 is used as a cut-off for intellectual impairment) 👇

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dialecticbio.bsky.social

@DialecticBio

10 months

Apparently, prominent eugenicist/race scientist/data fudger Richard Lynn has died. Good riddance. His fraudulent work is a cancer on science. Hopefully now journals will retract his shit just as they've done with Rushton and Eysenck

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dialecticbio.bsky.social

@DialecticBio

2 years

@sbkaufman Probably because left-wing ideas which are considered "radical" in American politics is stuff like a minimum wage and universal healthcare, while the "radical" right-wing ideas like Great Replacement Theory inspire mass shootings. Do you see how these things aren't the same?

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dialecticbio.bsky.social

@DialecticBio

2 years

When scientists say "science is political", they usually don't mean that the speed of light is open to political opinion. Rather, the way science is organised to solve problems is dependent on and constrained by the political world in which they operate in:

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dialecticbio.bsky.social

@DialecticBio

1 month

The continued hostility that intelligence researchers feel towards Gould is interesting considering that Gould's thesis was never about how IQ is inherently wrong. Rather, his point was that IQ is weaponised by racists to justify inequality. A true point still to this day

Andrew R. A. Conway, Ph.D.

@AndrewRAConway

1 month

Oh look, a Harvard professor who has never published a paper on the topic of intelligence, has never taught a course on the topic on intelligence, weighs in on the meaning of IQ. Dude, Gould did it, 40 years ago. He was wrong then, you are wrong now. Bored.

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dialecticbio.bsky.social

@DialecticBio

1 year

This modified PCA plot (left) is consistently reposted by racists. The implication being that Africans were isolated & evolving into a separate species. This is false. The lack of "continuum" is an artefact of sampling, as seen by recent PCAs (right)

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dialecticbio.bsky.social

@DialecticBio

2 months

Right-wing coping mechanisms on display. This whole time they've been saying that DEI is killing people. But when pressed, they retreat to "uh DEI *could hypothetically* kill people, only high IQ people understand hypotheticals 😏" OK, so you now agree DEI isn't killing us...

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dialecticbio.bsky.social

@DialecticBio

3 months

You know race science supporters have absolutely nothing because they constantly have to resort to citing these opinion polls from psychologists asking what their vibe is about the genetics of race-and-IQ topic., instead of actually citing genetic studies directly.

AnechoicMedia

@AnechoicMedia_

3 months

@whstancil Two anonymous polls show a plurality of psychologists agree with a genetic contribution to race gaps. Two polls are hardly the end of the discussion, but they should frame our expectations. Crucially, those opposed aren't interested in doing their own anonymized poll to rebut.

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dialecticbio.bsky.social

@DialecticBio

1 year

Missed this paper when it first came out. "Getting genetic ancestry right for science and society" (2022) Great visualisation of how sampling bias can create PCA plots which give the impression that human genetic variation isn't clinal

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dialecticbio.bsky.social

@DialecticBio

1 year

"A male is someone who produces sperm... oh, your sperm count is zero? ok, well, your body was *designed* to make sperm by the loving Creator, so ignore that inconvenient fact" Notice how these teleological definitions don't deal with empirical facts, but arbitrary ideals?

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dialecticbio.bsky.social

@DialecticBio

3 months

I am reminded of how the best race-and-IQ experts have trouble answering basic scientific questions like "what is the error associated with the measurement of IQ?"

Daniel Litt

@littmath

3 months

Apparently conventional wisdom among race science wackjobs: tests don’t work if you [checks notes] study for them

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dialecticbio.bsky.social

@DialecticBio

5 months

Reminded of this Richard Lewontin essay from 'Biology Under the Influence'

Nate Silver

@NateSilver538

5 months

@TheStalwart That's because you're actually a smart person instead of a weird academic and so you understand that capitalism works because it reflects human nature as selected for through thousands of generations of evolution.

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dialecticbio.bsky.social

@DialecticBio

3 months

The worldview of the race science fanboy seems to be highly malleable. They claim the field of genetics is "based" and supports them... until it's shown it doesn't, so they claim it's because genetics has been compromised by "the woke", or geneticists are lying out of fear.

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dialecticbio.bsky.social

@DialecticBio

1 year

This is straight up fascist rhetoric. Glorifying a mythological past, reifying a "natural" social hierarchy, framing the "culture war" as a struggle for the survival of the species, etc. Fascists love to weaponsise the language of biology

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dialecticbio.bsky.social

@DialecticBio

4 months

I really think the guy here is a severe case of "your brain on biological essentialism". From this worldview, average differences b/w men and women turn into ridiculously huge chasms, where you become so certain that even *untrained* men can outrun the top women track athletes.

Track Spice 🌶️

@trackspice

4 months

A female D1 track star Alahna Sabbakhan raced a man who insisted he could beat her. The result is going viral

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dialecticbio.bsky.social

@DialecticBio

10 months

The past few weeks I've seen racists frequently repost this image (originating from Stormfront). It cherry picks an old PCA plot in humans that shows sampling artefact "gaps" and misinterprets that as evidence of genetic separation b/w human "races" on par with separate species

dialecticbio.bsky.social

@DialecticBio

1 year

This modified PCA plot (left) is consistently reposted by racists. The implication being that Africans were isolated & evolving into a separate species. This is false. The lack of "continuum" is an artefact of sampling, as seen by recent PCAs (right)

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dialecticbio.bsky.social

@DialecticBio

2 years

It's pretty disgraceful to call yourself a "Darwinist" or claim you work in an "evolutionary" field and defend hyper-adaptationist thinking. Reminder: Darwin knew not everything can have an adaptive explanation and got sick of the way evolution got twisted by such people

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dialecticbio.bsky.social

@DialecticBio

1 year

More self-serving logic from hereditarians. It's taken as a self-evident truth that during human evolution, selective pressures on cognitive ability were stronger outside of Africa than within Africa, but not an iota of evidence is ever provided for this. "it just was trust me!"

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dialecticbio.bsky.social

@DialecticBio

2 years

The heavily implied message here is that Science will be set back now because of Cancel Culture/metoo. Cures for cancer will be delayed because Sabitini was just that damn good at science. But anyone who's worked in research knows this notion of "lone geniuses" is ridiculous

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dialecticbio.bsky.social

@DialecticBio

4 months

Unsurprisingly, racists have recently started using Richard Lynn's fraudulent "national IQ dataset" race science to justify the apartheid and dehumanisation of the Palestinian people.

AsperGirl

@an0nygir1

4 months

This explains a lot - Palestinians Average IQ: 78 - South African Average IQ: 69 - Palestinians are BID, Borderline Cognitively Impaired - South Africans are MID, Mildly Cognitively Impaired - MID/BID correlates to outwardly directed aggression - MID have trouble reasoning…

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dialecticbio.bsky.social

@DialecticBio

1 year

Agree that Dawkins books are terrible. They're over reliant on bad metaphors, myopic in evo theory, and are vehicles for his reactionary rants, such as against affirmative action (Ancestor's Tale), or the welfare state (Selfish Gene). He's an embarrassing relic

Also DevoEvoMed on 🦋

@DevoEvoMed

1 year

Every @RichardDawkins book.

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dialecticbio.bsky.social

@DialecticBio

1 year

@SebGorka So people are more at risk of dying by suicide and accident when they are around guns? That doesn't help your pro-gun position, Seb

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dialecticbio.bsky.social

@DialecticBio

1 year

It's quite impressive how these race science fanboys keep consistently repeating decades old fallacious arguments and never learning how correlation works. (Text from Schiff & Lewontin 1987)

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dialecticbio.bsky.social

@DialecticBio

4 months

Enough with this garbage. Trying to do "race is genetically real" but "leftisty" is stupid and not the brilliant argument these people think it is.

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dialecticbio.bsky.social

@DialecticBio

2 years

This is the best paper I've read about the limitations of polygenic risk scores, both in a technical sense and in terms of social benefit 'Polygenic risk, population structure & ongoing difficulties with race in human genetics' - Kaplan & Fullerton (2022)

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dialecticbio.bsky.social

@DialecticBio

2 years

This is a bleak end-point of the commodification of science. Biotech start-ups cynically peddle fake DNA physiognomy testing apps to over-funded police departments. The police can then continue to target innocent people but now say they were "scientifically" justified to do so.

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dialecticbio.bsky.social

@DialecticBio

4 months

Have I got just the book recommendation for you: - no rape, incest, violence, etc. - no taxes - no conflict at all - just dream-like descriptions of fantasy cities - is one of the best fantasy books ever written - written by a white guy

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dialecticbio.bsky.social

@DialecticBio

2 months

I highly recommend this paper: "The Mythical Taboo on Race and Intelligence" It takes a close look at how fans of race science manufacture just-so stories to give themselves a facade of scientific authority.

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dialecticbio.bsky.social

@DialecticBio

6 months

Maybe this attempt at a joke/gotcha would hit if there were a contradiction in the genetics field. But there isn’t. Polygenic scores don’t translate across “races” because they don’t even translate within “races”. It's not because "race is biological"

Noah Carl

@NoahCarl90

6 months

Race is not biological. Also, polygenic scores trained on one race don't work on other races due to biological differences between them.

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dialecticbio.bsky.social

@DialecticBio

2 years

Science is too politically correct these days, and by that I mean editors at Science don't let you write a response like this to critics anymore

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dialecticbio.bsky.social

@DialecticBio

1 year

Racism really does make you dumber. In the mind of "monitoringbias", the new human pangenome "owns the libs" somehow. Also, this forbidden truth is published in Nature, but only last month Nature was "woke" and censoring truth. Make up your mind

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dialecticbio.bsky.social

@DialecticBio

1 year

How exactly does one measure a "design plan" of an individuals phenotype? If a "design plan" is what a body can do, then there's no limit to the design plans of the body. A body has the design plan of a chair

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dialecticbio.bsky.social

@DialecticBio

3 months

Steve Sailer, who usually never shuts the fuck up, completely dips when pressed on specific points in this thread. The man has wasted his entire life being a supposed expert in race-and-IQ, yet never bothered to read anything that isn't fake science. He's washed.

Sasha Gusev

@SashaGusevPosts

3 months

@Steve_Sailer I've addressed your blather in detail here. Now perhaps you can indulge me in addressing some questions you dodged from previous discussions.

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dialecticbio.bsky.social

@DialecticBio

10 months

'Human races are not like dog breeds: refuting a racist analology' (2019) cc @HollyDunsworth This paper should be required reading

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dialecticbio.bsky.social

@DialecticBio

2 months

More delusional nonsense from the racist hack, @eyeslasho . The reality is quite disappointing for him: geneticists have looked for these "innate group differences" (i.e. signals of divergent natural selection for cognition) and haven't found anything that supports his racism.

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dialecticbio.bsky.social

@DialecticBio

1 year

Revisiting one of my favourite reviews, 'Contingency and determinism in evolution: Replaying life’s tape' (2018) The concept of contingency is nicely demonstrated with the example of adaptations in the woodpecker and the aye-aye

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dialecticbio.bsky.social

@DialecticBio

6 months

'Heritability within groups is uninformative about differences among groups: cases from behavioral, evolutionary, and statistical genetics' 'Race Science' just can't stop losing

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dialecticbio.bsky.social

@DialecticBio

1 year

Arguing with "race realists" often follows a motte-&-bailey style sequence. First they'll claim that "races" are discrete genetic clusters like subspecies. When that's shown to not be the case, they'll switch to "but human variation exists!", a fact no-one disputes

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dialecticbio.bsky.social

@DialecticBio

2 years

Just sharing this quote from Lewontin out there again, which is still as relevant as ever...

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dialecticbio.bsky.social

@DialecticBio

1 year

Do we really want transphobes making & enforcing policy based on such a teleogical definition of sex? They already want to inspect children's genitals. What next? Inspecting your "design plan" for making gametes? Scientists need to push back

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dialecticbio.bsky.social

@DialecticBio

1 year

Most eugenicists of today aren't advocating for forced sterilisation; they've learnt from the Nazi failure. They're advocating for CRISPR/polygenic embryo selection for "high IQ" as well as policies that nudge the "low IQ" to have fewer children. It's all "positive" eugenics now

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dialecticbio.bsky.social

@DialecticBio

1 year

@nathancofnas "b-but it's impossible for a Black woman to be more qualified than a white guy 😭" You have nothing, cry more

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dialecticbio.bsky.social

@DialecticBio

1 year

This is a great point because the comparison of 'cold winters theory' to flat-earth tier drivel is no exaggeration. One of the proponents of 'cold winters theory' (Satoshi Kanazawa) literally assumed a flat-earth in his calculations "proving" it correct

PERNICUS

@SexbeanPernicus

1 year

It's funny that racists feel the need to try and intellectualise their beliefs and all they can ever come up with is flat-earth tier drivel like this.

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dialecticbio.bsky.social

@DialecticBio

2 years

Huge stuff. We can imagine the Earth shattering implications for how we approach education, or even parenting. The Bell Curve is vindicated, etc.... Except none of this is even remotely true. This study uses the wrong analysis, resulting in a completely wrong conclusion 12/

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dialecticbio.bsky.social

@DialecticBio

1 year

@nathancofnas Do you have their qualifications on hand or something and saw that they're unqualified? Or are you imputing such data from your mind palace?

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dialecticbio.bsky.social

@DialecticBio

6 months

Did this race science obsessed weirdo decide to stop reading the paper at this paragraph because he thinks it vindicates him? The paper is about the non-existence of biological human races (it's even in the title).

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dialecticbio.bsky.social

@DialecticBio

1 year

Surely, a male body is "meant to" be at least 6'6", muscular, have 20/20 vision, be able to throw a spear, etc. Do men who fall outside of this biological "design" ideal no longer true biological men? If a woman requires a C-section, does she also violate the ideal "design"?

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dialecticbio.bsky.social

@DialecticBio

1 year

Which is completely dumb. It assumes archaic Africans didn't also need to plan ahead for seasonal droughts/changes in food supply, or hunting expenditions, or war. Lynn assumes surviving in Africa is a cake walk with no thinking required.

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dialecticbio.bsky.social

@DialecticBio

1 year

Incredible. Cyril Burt's IQ results are fabricated and it's delusional to try to deny this. See: Even Jensen--the biggest Burt apologist--had to admit the data was bad and the unfortunate work of a senile old man

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dialecticbio.bsky.social

@DialecticBio

2 years

One of the stupidest bits of race(ist) science I've read in a while: Richard Lynn believes that Kalahari hunter-gatherers have an IQ of 55 (mental equivalent of an 8 year old European child). He justifies this ludicrous assessment saying "European 8 yr olds can pick berries"...

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dialecticbio.bsky.social

@DialecticBio

1 year

Humans are surprisingly far less genetically variable than other species despite covering the entire globe. A result of us being a relatively young species with lots of gene flow

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dialecticbio.bsky.social

@DialecticBio

1 year

Or is a "design plan" what a body is "meant to do" under "ideal circumstances"? In which case, how is "meant to" defined in biology? Now we're back to square one. A body is "meant to do" many things than just make gametes.

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dialecticbio.bsky.social

@DialecticBio

9 months

Oh dear, Hanania claims he's not into the whole biological racism thing anymore, angering his racist audience

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dialecticbio.bsky.social

@DialecticBio

4 months

Race realists can't ever make a convincing argument from genetics (because it doesn't support them), so when challenged they end up retreating to bro-science shit like "ok b-but how come NFL cornerbacks are all Black huh??" Weak

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dialecticbio.bsky.social

@DialecticBio

2 months

Reminder that @eyeslasho is a terrible liar and a racist hack. He blatantly misquoted David Reich to make it sound like Reich agrees with his racist fantasies, gets called out on it, whines like a baby, then quietly dips when he can't defend his own bullshit. Pathetic

Sasha Gusev

@SashaGusevPosts

3 months

Let's see what's those ellipses are hiding ...

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dialecticbio.bsky.social

@DialecticBio

1 year

Every 'race realist' explanation for why we *should expect* Africans to have evolved lower intelligence makes no sense. It's all ad hoc justification for their own racist ignorance and sloppy scientific standards.

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dialecticbio.bsky.social

@DialecticBio

4 months

The state of the current discourse:

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dialecticbio.bsky.social

@DialecticBio

1 year

The fact that it's an ideology, and not just a set of practices (i.e. involuntary sterilisation of "unfit" members of society) means that it can (and has) evolved with time. Biologists opposed to eugenics need to catch up

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dialecticbio.bsky.social

@DialecticBio

3 months

Been seeing racists repeat this talking point a lot lately. It originates from this paper Though as far as I can tell, that paper got it wrong & used unrealistic model assumptions. Follow up studies disagree (Ref 7 = paper above)

Lisan al-Yakub

@godsgayesttard

3 months

@whstancil Black people aren’t 20% Neanderthal. West African populations have some (2-19%) admixture of an archaic hominin (likely homo habilis). Neanderthal admixture is predominant in European and Middle Eastern populations.

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dialecticbio.bsky.social

@DialecticBio

2 years

Now with these technical issues out of the way, for the next part of this thread (to be continued soon), I want to discuss how this study fits into a larger historical context in race/IQ/genetics debates and how it serves to bolster genetic determinism... 25/

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dialecticbio.bsky.social

@DialecticBio

9 months

No.

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dialecticbio.bsky.social

@DialecticBio

1 year

Another thing: the transphobe view isn't really about biology, it's about biological determinism. Notice the missing steps between "sex is the design plan to produce sperm or eggs" and "laws should be enacted around this"? The assumption being birth determines one's social role

dialecticbio.bsky.social

@DialecticBio

1 year

This definition of sex that transphobes like to stick to (which @Anthrofuentes doesn't misrepresent at all) is *teleology*, not biology. To pass the laws they want, they need an "objective" definition, but biology has outliers, so they arrive at the same nonsense creationists use

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dialecticbio.bsky.social

@DialecticBio

2 years

Remebered that its 50th anniversary is coming up in 2026 and it would be interesting to read some retrospectives and up-to-date critical reviews

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dialecticbio.bsky.social

@DialecticBio

2 years

The fatal flaw which makes this entire study worthless and false is that estimating the heritability of the study participants says nothing about how malleable IQ is or not. Heritability is not the right tool for this job. 13/

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dialecticbio.bsky.social

@DialecticBio

2 years

Also anyone genuinely curious about the Sabatini story should read this: The Weiss article is a PR piece rather than journalism. The majority of the details described in the legal document are conveniently not mentioned

Jessica Cantlon

@CantlonLab

2 years

David Sabatini’s sexual harassment — lots of witnesses in the new legal filing against him, lots of clear examples of policy violations. Item 67 is…yeesh. Grateful to the witnesses for going ‘on record’.

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dialecticbio.bsky.social

@DialecticBio

1 month

lol

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dialecticbio.bsky.social

@DialecticBio

10 months

The 'race-IQ' fans love this classic study because they think it supports their ideas about biological race and racial intelligence, etc. But it doesn't. Also the study itself has issues and doesn't generalise, which they consistently ignore.

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dialecticbio.bsky.social

@DialecticBio

1 year

@Unashamed366 "evolved separately" There's been gene flow b/w adjacent populations throughout history, as seen by 'isolation by distance' patterns in genetic variation "hundreds of millions of years" H. sapiens migrated out of Africa 55-65k years ago "subspecies"

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dialecticbio.bsky.social

@DialecticBio

1 year

Lots of offended responses from 'race realists' here. The big criticism being that it's presumptions of me to assume that intelligence would be advantageous in all environments, because maybe there's some unknown trade-offs b/w environments...

dialecticbio.bsky.social

@DialecticBio

1 year

'Race realists' have never provided a coherent explanation for why/how different environments supposedly selected for high or low intelligence alleles during evolutionary history. High intelligence would be advantageous in all environments!

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dialecticbio.bsky.social

@DialecticBio

5 months

It should probably be concerning to those who work in the field of Behaviour Genetics that the field has attracted people who are into Nazi stuff like this.

taylr

@taylr

5 months

alexandros giannelis is listed as living in dinkytown and is listed on the u of MN website as working the psychology department

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dialecticbio.bsky.social

@DialecticBio

1 year

And the obvious but inconvenient truth of the situation is staring them in the face: 1. the IQ tests themselves don't translate well across cultures or education levels, so aren't measuring "intelligence" 2. Richard Lynn's IQ data is a work of fraud

dialecticbio.bsky.social

@DialecticBio

2 years

More examples of how fraudulent Richard Lynn's national IQ estimates are: … (2010) "[Lynn's] exclusion rule was applied only to samples that averaged relatively high IQs, but not to samples that averaged IQs near or below 70"

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dialecticbio.bsky.social

@DialecticBio

1 year

Remembering a couple of great papers. Most enzymes are inefficient, as demonstrated by how directed evolution experiments on them can drastically improve their catalytic efficiency. Imperfection abounds in nature

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dialecticbio.bsky.social

@DialecticBio

2 years

No evidence that colder environments forced the evolution of bigger brains in humans 'Different environmental variables predict body and brain size evolution in Homo' (2021)

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dialecticbio.bsky.social

@DialecticBio

1 year

There's something about this graph of a journal similarity network that makes certain people have a mystical experience when they see it. "What secrets lie within the circle!? The humanities moving away from the truth!!" The circle is an arbitrary shape:

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dialecticbio.bsky.social

@DialecticBio

6 months

It's funny how arguing with 'race realists' follows this exact pattern. Every time they realise they can't win the argument based on what the genetics literature actually says, they devolve into creationist-like talking points like "how can evolution be real if race not real??"

Sasha Gusev

@SashaGusevPosts

6 months

@thebirdmaniac @efox303 @NoahCarl90 These conversations always end with someone firmly convinced there are genetic racial differences asking the most naive questions like "what is culture?" or "how do species form?" or "what is human history?"

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dialecticbio.bsky.social

@DialecticBio

2 years

Compare and contrast the Weiss article (shown left) with the plaintiff (right). The Weiss article compeltely ommitts that Sabatini... - created a culture of fear - interfered with the investigation by threatening lab members - punished members who didn't engage with his sex talk

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dialecticbio.bsky.social

@DialecticBio

1 year

New paper argues that predictions from life history theory (r/K selection theory), where harsh environments = "fast" life history strategies (i.e. poor people have more children, etc.), make no biological sense. Historical data indicates the *opposite*

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dialecticbio.bsky.social

@DialecticBio

6 months

New preprint goes through Gregory Clark's PNAS paper from a few months ago and absolutely rips it to shreds. It's mind-boggling just how amateurish Clark's paper is. Many supposedly serious hereditarian intellectuals gave it their seal of approval too

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dialecticbio.bsky.social

@DialecticBio

1 year

I am in full support of evolutionary psychologists discovering evolution: i.e. how biology is imperfect and not everything can be reconciled with adaptationism.

Diana S. Fleischman

@sentientist

1 year

Darwin said "The sight of a peacock gives me nightmares" because he couldn't figure out how evolution created their tails. I'm trying to figure out how doves and pigeons can be so terrible at making nests and choosing a spot to raise their young (images from…

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dialecticbio.bsky.social

@DialecticBio

3 months

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dialecticbio.bsky.social

@DialecticBio

3 months

Wrong + pathetic cope. See real genetics studies, not some dumb confounded correlation with ancestry. E.g.

AnechoicMedia

@AnechoicMedia_

3 months

There does exist genetic data on ancestry and IQ and it looks exactly like hereditarians predicted. Then one of the only people to actually publish a study like this got fired for it, and the NIH now prohibits doing any studies on race and intelligence with genetic data.

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dialecticbio.bsky.social

@DialecticBio

1 year

Putting aside the assumptions about genetics here (which are bullshit), it's interesting to see a conservative admit that their political/economic worldview is a just an extension of a biological determinist worldview

Adam Bienkov

@AdamBienkov

1 year

Matt Goodwin says developments in genetic science will make younger generations more conservative as they understand the "inherent differences" between different groups.

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dialecticbio.bsky.social

@DialecticBio

2 months

Interesting responses from the race science fans here. Normally they say races are subspecies, use dog breeds as an analogy, and share 4chan memes about how races should be considered separate species. Now I'm told they never once believed race was genetically discrete. Ok then.

dialecticbio.bsky.social

@DialecticBio

2 months

. @eyeslasho once again demonstrating his stupidity. The PCA plots shown here do not support the idea for a "biological basis for race". On the contrary, they nicely illustrate how human genetic variation is clinal and doesn't cluster into non-continuous groups.

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dialecticbio.bsky.social

@DialecticBio

1 month

In some good news, it's encouraging that more and more people are deciding they need to push back against race science. The way Elon's twitter/X has boosted insane racists on the platform has only made scientists more organised against them

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