http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1053535713000991
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Is anyone interested in writing a response to Daniele?
I think this might become a highly cited papers for the non-hereditarians, so therefore it seems wise to respond it to before that. There are several flaws in this paper that need addressing.
It can be observed how the term “race”, although widely used in social sciences, is in itself ambiguous when applied to humans (Sternberg et al., 2005; Hunt and Megyesi, 2008), since it has no genetic foundation (Barbujani, 2005).
Race denialism. Fuerst has a good paper on race realism, so it can be mined for counter-material.
The IQ-development hypothesis has notable implications for development and social policies. Analogously to the suggestions in Herrnstein and Murray’s (1994) book, The Bell Curve, that indicated the gap in Blacks-Whites IQ scores as caused by genetic differences, thus suggesting the impossibility of improving the conditions of Blacks through appropriate policies, the IQ-development hypothesis has a logical policy-discouraging implication: since the economic fate of a people is partly determined by genes, there is no possibility of improving the lives of the poor. As clearly stated by Lynn and Vanhanen (2006, p. 293): “The persistence of differences in intelligence between nations is inevitable, and so too will be the consequence: the persistence of national differences in wealth”.
The author is completely wrong. That a difference between two groups is partly genetic does not imply that one cannot improve the situation for the group lowest scoring group. Is he really saying that things have not been improved since the 1700's for US blacks? The difference was partly genetic back then as well. I've never heard of a hereditarian who denies this.
The quote from L&V does not say this either. LV is merely stating that differences will continue to be found, not that one cannot improve things for all groups. Furthermore, LV does not think that genetics accounts for all racial differences, only part of them. From that it is obvious that environments can be improved, especially for sub-Saharan Africans which will of course improve their situation and likely their g.
In the regression, two control variables are, separately, included. The first is Chanda and Putterman’s (2007) State history index (State History) which, for present-day countries, measures the antiquity of the political organizations above the tribal level, such as kingdoms, empires or nations, from the year 1 AD to 1500. The second control variable is represented by the years since agriculture transition according to Putterman (2008), who provided data for 162 single countries, diversely to Hibbs and Olsson (2004) who originally estimated data for eight world macro-regions. Table 1 summarises the variables used in the analysis
This looks like a sociologist's fallacy to me. If these environments are partly caused by racial differences in g, then clearly one cannot control them. We should try running the dataset without these controls.
Other things?
