Michael Tracy is Full of Shit

Michael Tracy has been the subject of lots of criticism recently due to a string of tweets surrounding race. It all started with this tweet:

I have no idea who these people are or where exactly in France they are burning the building down, but I agree that there is probably no ideological motive. Not a bad tweet overall, but it’s where I would mark the start of the meltdown.

He later followed this up doubling down on comparing stupid teenagers and rioters:

It is true that groups of teenage boys can do silly things - in high school me and the boys would shout “Viva Franco” into the street from hotel rooms and break into our high school. I don’t think that’s exactly comparable to burning down a building, though.

Phase 2:

Both of these people should stop talking about culture. It’s the genes, culture is just a red herring.

Phase 3:

Nothing major here either, just some countersignalling and status-regulating emotions towards certain parts of the DR sphere. Otherwise, this could have been ignored as the odd bad tweet if it wasn’t for the copious amounts of coal on his timeline.

Phase 4:

This part of the constitution was signed in 1958. I think it would be smarter to characterize France by something that has been around much longer than 64 years. I wonder… What could that be?

Phase 5:

Dumb argument. If aliens invaded the United States and set up a puppet government, would you argue that being human wasn’t an aspect of being American because it wasn’t in the constitution?

Phase 6:

Sure he isn’t “denying genetics”, but he’s dodging the topic like a motherfucker. What’s your estimate for the heritability of the BWIQ gap? is race genetic? are different races of people even psychologically different? I would care for an answer!

Phase 7:

Now this is where he descends into madness. Several professors and university faculty have been cancelled for their opinions about race - notably James Watson, Bryan Pesta, and Noah Carl. There may or may not be some research coming out about this soon… But I would rather keep my mouth shut.

Phase 8:

At this point, there is no turning back from the descent into mental disability. He has done what Joseph Bronski calls LACing - endorsing one piece of evidence in favor of one theory and ignoring all of the other evidence against it. At this moment, all of the best evidence suggests a genetic origin in racial differences in IQ, which consists in 3 main lines of evidence.

1. The high heritability of intelligence

In adult samples, intelligence is about 85% heritable, regardless of whether this is estimated using direct relatives (e.g. MZ and DZ twins comparison, twins reared apart) or more high quality evidence using extended family. High hertiability by itself doesn’t necessarily qualify as proof that differences between groups are heritable as well, but it almost does once you consider that race differences in the heritabiltiy of IQ are nonexistent or miniscule.

2. The BWIQ gap exists after you control for parental SES, which has been one of the preferred explanations for the existence of group differences in psychology and social status.

3. Differences in polygenic scores for educational attainment predict IQ between racial and religious groups.

For further reading, I would recommend Emil’s summary of the literature about race and IQ or The Occidentalist’s ‘The facts that need to be explained’.