The Illusion of Inherited Intelligence (Autobiographical & vs. Ask Yourself)

this video partly presents a set of
totally autobiographical and personal reflections and it's partly making a broader political point or at least raising a question I've never really heard anyone else raise our people maybe becoming a little bit more racist and a little bit more credulous in relation to the seemingly magical significance of DNA ancestry and bloodlines because on the one hand people are having smaller and smaller families they have fewer brothers and sisters they can compare themselves to and on the other hand we have the progress of DNA technology being available to the general public people can now send their drop of blood to a laboratory and be told all these magical mysterious things about their thought their past in the long term I think these are really powerful forces shaping self perception and the political conception of bloodline lineage so on and so forth simply having fewer brothers and sisters it would be difficult to exaggerate the impact that has on on Western culture I've known a couple of people in my life who like myself had parents with gave birth to conceived an enormous number of children my father at nine kids and when your father has nine kids you grow up constantly confronted with both the meaningfulness and the meaninglessness of DNA of shared ancestry shared heredity what have you so when I encountered someone like Isaac Isaac as a youtuber as YouTube names ask yourself when I encounter someone like Isaac who was for about two years sincerely fascinated by different kind of racist theories of DNA and IQ the theories about how racial groupings reflect different levels of intelligence and you know I'm not insulting him here I'm just saying he filmed this Durer fascinating he found this way of thinking fascinating and he come on his discord again this one on for about two years there were hundreds of witnesses thousands of witnesses because these were large discussions involving large numbers of people he would come on and he would he would denounce people who disagreed with him as quote-unquote biology deniers I think only only neo-nazi see it's that kind of verbiage and a lot of people took him aside and said look Isaac you think about delve it's like you're picking up some some key terms here from the kind of fascist fringes of the political spectrum other people just don't talk this way about the relationship between DNA and and intelligence so for kid like him he comes on the internet and he encounters this sort of fully fledged discourse about race and the heredity of intelligence and some of it seems at least at first glance academically respectable and he's not really reading the books he's not really doing research into this in a deep way he's responding primarily to YouTube videos about it and his own kind of logical free association so his his point about being a quote/unquote how would you deny er was as follows he'd claim look you know height and athletic ability all these things all these genetic predispositions they're not equally distributed around the globe so therefore if you dogmatically assert that intelligence is equally or randomly distributed around the globe then you're you're in denial about biology now of course this is linked to a philosophy that is in my opinion overtly racist and racialist but there's an implicit contrast here just to being someone who grew up with eight brothers and sisters who have nothing in common with you and who above all else do not share the same level of intelligence and do not share the same type of intelligence with you do you have the same kinds of affinities and interests and talents that you do so even my my brothers and sisters who are my my half-brothers and half-sisters and normally don't refer to massage but these are children my father had with women other my mother I have more in common with them genetically then I could ever possibly have with someone else who shares the ethnic category of Jewish I have infinitely more in common with my half-brother any one of them then I could ever have in common with somebody else who historically their family has been defined as Jewish for let's say five hundred years who happens to bump into me on the street of New York City and we have started a conversation say oh you're Jewish I'm Jewish too um by the way religiously I'm not part of the Jewish faith we just mean the ethnic category and that that kind of thing does happen to me from time to time in Victoria just before we left Victoria BC Canada west coast of Canada we me and my girlfriend both we struck up a conversation with a guy in a in a coffee shop and I would have never guessed based on appearances that he was Jewish and amusingly he also didn't guess based on my appearance that I was Jewish I think I do look pretty stereotypically Jewish but whatever anyway moving beyond these kinds of physical resemblances the idea that when I meet this guy I feel some kind of deep kinship and specifically an intellectual kinship that I think we've inherited the same intellectual potential that's a very very tough sell for someone like me partly just because I have so many brothers and sisters now I can remember debating in parallel with people in Cambodia the saben and Cambodian not in Laos in Cambodia and Laos both those countries those countries were just making the transition from having large families everyone having large numbers of brothers and sisters to having you know smaller numbers of brother and sisters families having just two or three kids and in total that demographic shift was happening while I was there but there still were the you know fully grown adults who were walking around a lot of them came from families that had like eleven kids and of course the you know they'd say something to me like well my parents had 11 kids and today six of them are alive that kind of thing was not uncommon at all in Cambodia and Laos when when I was living there but I can remember debating with someone in in Cambodia someone who believed in astrology so let's be clear we don't here mean the European tradition of astrology but an Asian tradition of interpreting when you were born under what what year and what positions the Stars that this tells you something with a person's intellectual character their mental attributes and what we're saying you know do you really think you have something more in common with someone he was born with with this star sign let's put it that way more with these stars aligned then you have in common with your own brothers and sisters and appointed look you have so many brothers and so many sisters how much do you have in common and the person of sight do you know they thought it but I already knew them well enough really nothing really this person was quite alienated from their own family we were talking in English you know so how many of her brothers and sisters even wanted to learn English you know I'm talking to a Cambodian person who made a huge effort to get fluent in English and take on the kind of career she took on how many share your interests in research and politics and all the other things that created this the conditions for us to have this conversation obviously and the answer is not at all so why do you think why are you going to believe that you have all these things that come with somebody just on account of the the position of the Sun or the position of the stars at the at the moment they were born and you and you wouldn't have that income with them if they'd been born one month earlier or one month later um whatever the the scenario will be DNA appeals to a very natural sort of ego trip in the same way that astrology does it appeals to a sense of specialness on the basis of things that are arbitrary and things that can be tested and and falsified you know and there's a there's a reluctance where people let go of the ego trip and to let themselves question tests and falsify those those claims of those ideas now conversely I have the situation with my relationship with my own daughter my daughter has spent very little time with me since she turned one year old so during the first year of her life I was with her all the time but of course she can't really remember that most of us don't have a lot of memories in the first year of our lives and then after I split up with her mom I've seen her for just a few weeks here in a few weeks there on a court-appointed schedule so the similarities I have to my own daughter in attitude and I mean these are not just striking to me but my mother has also meant my taught her aunt at various times and it's kind of amazing and when my daughter was like two and a half and three years old she was saying things and behaving in a way that was shockingly similar to myself when I was a small child and we all knew she didn't get these behaviors from imitating me and she definitely did not get these behaviors by responding to the same kinds of circumstances so I mean I grew up in Toronto Canada I grew up in Ontario also Ottawa a few plays with that not worth mentioning I grew up in Ontario Canada speaking only English with two parents and bizarre circumstances and my daughter grew up with a single mom and her grandmother in the South of France and she grew up during those years speaking French and German and English English in the mix a totally different school system totally different culture totally different era and you have these unbelievable similarities of character you know obviously we resemble each other an appearance of some extent to I can see the heredity that way so I mean it's it's very appealing to want to believe that these these characteristics are hereditary but you see the fragility of what this belief is based on there's nobody else on this earth I can really have as much in common with genetically as what I have in common with those two people mentioned my own mother and my own daughter and yet at the same time you have to be able to appreciate the alienists the distance the unbridgeable gulf between you and this other person the difficulty of feeling that you'll ever know them that you'll ever understand them and they'll ever understand you I'm going to end this video by directly answering the challenge that Isaac put to me that ask yourself put to me summoning up the context both of my own family experience this sense of extreme alienation I have when looking at who my brothers and sisters are who my own parents are that I have so little in common with them all these different examples of how more or less the same DNA plays out and then the strange sort of kinship and similarity that I can see my own daughter given that personal context and given also the political context that I've conjured up to some extent that the world is a changing place partly because people have access to DNA tests also even just computerized databases showing what their family history based on government records and that sort of thing people have access to that personal history as never before and that's going to have political ramifications as never before in that context then is my position what Isaac would characterize as being a quote unquote biology denier am i dogmatically asserting that what people perceive as intelligence or people measure as intelligence is completely non errata Terry or do I believe it's completely right of Terry or something in between well I think it's really important in this case to answer a question with a question that challenges the presupposition of how substantive and palpable this thing called intelligence really is what if I told you that I had a dream last night I mean a dream in the literal sense of a kind of hallucinatory visionary experience while I was sleeping I don't mean a dream in the sense of a plan or an aspiration or a career let's just say I had a dream last night and I tell you this whole dream and whatever various surreal things happen in this dream and then I told you that I'm certain I had this dream because my father had the dream before me and my grandfather I had the dream before that and let's just say you were plied what what do you what are you talking about did your father tell you that I said no did your grandfather tell you that no no we never talked about it but had never had any conversation about this dream I'm just sure I'm just sure that dreams are hereditary you would reply and say that's crazy that's insane how why how could you leap to this conclusion well what we're talking about when we talk about intelligence especially fully formed intelligence in adults like myself I'm 40 years old it is on the one hand something that resembles dreams it's something that is produced by Trine's that you have a dream and you then act on it and pursue it it's into the realm of such you know impalpable and fleeting things that rest in a very uncertain way on such crude and simple facts of biology now the counter-argument I've said this many times before is the extent to which intelligence really does rely on having good vision good hearing good health not being [ __ ] not being mentally impaired not having an impaired like dyslexia that prevents you from developing in a certain way because it prevents you from reading so I should say that if a visual impairment also if you have poor vision then your ability to read is impaired and it's more effort for you and so on if you have poor hearing and it's just harder for you to listen to a lecture or listen to an audio book for this reason these are all things that are gonna constrain and direct the development of your intelligence the same way they will constrain and direct your ability to drive a car now if my daughter has a dream that she can get ahead in women's wrestling as a sport that will lead her if she pursues this dream to develop her mental and physical capacities in a whole different direction and she would probably end up being the type of teenager and the type of adult that has relatively little in common with me the dreams that interested me the dreams that I took inspiration from whether in the sense of a literal dream or things I encountered in the real world when I was awake that I fastened on to and thought about or fantasized about or that I aspired to imitate or learn from those things shaped the development of my intelligence and they became what other people now perceive as my intelligence and by the same token I never learned to drive a car I never learned to play any musical instrument and if the example of wanting to become a wrestler say women's Olympic wrestling if that's a little bit too hard for you guys to visualize just imagine how different my whole life would be if I had learned a musical instrument and I let's not say I was a rock star or terribly famous but if I had just learned to play the guitar and I'd played in a local band in downtown Toronto the way that would have shaped my teenage years and my college years and my development it would have changed where I was spending time what I was reading probably just wouldn't have been read books it would have changed the women I was sleeping with and hold my sexual and social development it probably would have involved me in drugs and alcohol in a different way or for a different length of time my youth and my development into adulthood all would have been unbelievably different if I had learned to play guitar and I don't even mean that I became a successful guitarist well I knew other kids when I was a teenager if I just started doing kind of open mic nights and battle of the bands and small local gigs if I started doing shows that a hundred people attended five hundred people attended which in downtown Toronto that time was quite easy to do it's quite a lively local scene for four gigs on a on a small scale that way and of course if you got up to the level of doing an audience of 5,000 or actually making money out of it then your life would change immeasurably in those directions for those reasons so what we talked about with intelligence whether you're looking at the final product or the first impulses that lead you to that final product is something so evanescent it's something so unreal and so impalpable that's the product of circumstances and cultural institutions like whether or not you have access to a library and what kind of education you have it's linked to all these things in such a powerful way one of my brother's was a guitarist as his career that was the main thing he did his whole life from from early teenage years or from childhood into old age all these guys are old men now I'm the youngest so they're all older than me there's no sense in which I can say that our genetic kinship is more powerful in shaping who we were and we've become then the difference between the fact that he became deeply engrossed in the guitar and that led to certain kinds of women he pursued and certain kinds of women who pursued him and a certain lifestyle and you know all these things all the things bundled up with being guitarist from I can remember seeing him when he wake up in the morning and the first thing he'd do before he ate breakfast was get at his guitar and start playing his guitar you know obviously this was decades and decades and it was his career but still the fundamental discipline that guitar brought to his life and from my perspective also the fundamental lack of discipline that he was someone who never developed an interest in political reality there's a profound shaping influence on his life you know from childhood through adulthood there's no way I can look at the DNA we have in common as being more powerful and more important in shaping who he became then that choice he made to play guitar and the series of choices I made some of which I can remember it's very clear indistinct choices and some of which are wrapped up in all kinds of contradictory emotions for why I was drawn to care about certain things and drawn to read about certain things and develop myself in a different way so in this sense yeah I can spend time with my daughter and I can be shocked at how much we have in common and again the time we spend together is so little due to this lousy Court decision in France but whatever and you know on the other hand I can look at my own parents my own brothers and sisters and see how little we have in common and that allows me a lens to challenge or it leads me it incentivized me to challenge what so many people today seem to feel is a very compelling argument in favor of racism in favor of scientistic racism specifically in favor of the theory that the progress of history for example Europe's domination over Africa in the colonial period Europe's genocide in North America and South America not to mention Australia another one genocide Olympia lism that this can in some to some extent be morally justified explained and even valorized as an innate at hereditary difference produced by unequal levels of of IQ unequal levels of genetic intelligence so these things may be easy to believe in and they may be appealing for people to believe in and it's in a sense much more humbling or genuinely even humiliating to look at yourself and look at your brother and realize hey the fact that you watched music videos on MTV the fact that you listened to some albums and LP and you decided you wanted to be like that guy you wanted to be like that guitarist you wanted to live that life and you were gonna work so hard I remember my brother he didn't have a teacher he didn't have lessons or anything he taught himself how to play the guitar that you were gonna go to the library and get those books and sit down next to the radio and practice and try to do the same guitar lines from that song you had that vision you had that dream and you poured your talent into it that that's really determined you know the kind of man you are and what we now perceive as intelligence and the fact that I didn't or that I found that repulsive that I that I moved away from that the the sense that everything we value as intelligence may rise and fall with something so seemingly trivial something so shallow something that's even less palpable than Europe than your bloodline that's maybe quite a scary thing to realize and maybe if we took it seriously it would inspire all of us to not waste our time playing video games or not waste our time doing downhill skiing or maybe even not waste their time playing guitar or listening to music but would realize we'd realized the extent to which these choices and how we discipline ourselves and what we do with our minds the dreams we have and how we respond to them how we adopt a type of discipline or lifestyle in response to our dreams in response to things we take inspiration from that that is much much more powerful than the blood that when we're born happens to be flowing in our veins Danton [Music]