Evolution and Race

You mean the slave trade that would have been impossible without the black and arab slave traders, or indeed the black and arab slave owners, of which there were many? Infact, the islamic caliphate enslaved well over a million and a half europeans in its day. So are we going to discriminate against these groups to, and give a leg up to white descendants of slaves? And why arent whites performing so poorly having been victims of slavery? Why are blacks in europe who have no history of slavery at all performing just as badly as black people in america?

Also, why would slavery justifying discriminating against asians, who are actually more heavily discriminated against by affirmative action in some areas than whites? Is this fair and just?

And just because white people (and everyone else) used to be involved in the slave trade, does not mean that every single white person today has earnt their achievements unfairly, so this is no excuse for blanket discrimination against whites. And most white people will not have a single slave owner in their ancestry.

And whatever happened to judging on individual merit, which you yourself endorsed only a few posts ago?

Actually, the chinese superiority in IQ testing was recognised as early as the 1920s. One of the first environmental explanations that was put forward with regard to ghettos was that it helped boost the chinese IQ as they were sheltered from disruptive outside influences in their ghettos. Now the environmentalists say the exact opposite about ghettos of course.

And again, if discrimination against minorities was the cause of the IQ gap, why do chinese perform BETTER than whites? As you yourself said, they were the victims of discrimination.

That I can believe. Like I said, I was only talking about averages, there are outliers in every racial group.

The people you interract with are a small and unrepresentative sample. Plus, you cannot accurate judge intelligence from social interractions alone. Thats the main reason why we developed standardised tests. So this anecdotal experience says nothing about group averages.

As I have already told you, the 15 point gap means that a white person in the 50th centile of the white distribution is in the 84th centile of the black distribution, and a black person in the 50th centile of the black distribution is in the 16th centile of the white distribution. That is a significant difference, and as it would translate to 20 times the number of whites with IQs of 130, it could easily account for the underrepresentation of blacks in intellectually demanding professions. That being the case, it would not be appropriate to try and correct for the underrepresentation with affirmative action.

Its nothing to do with being afraid of the competition. It is simply a sense of injustice I feel at having to be far better qualified than brown people to get the exact same job, and if I have the audacity to object to this blatant racial discrimination, then it is I who is regarded as the racist.

Come back to me when youre looking for work and see a message saying that only none whites need apply. Being afraid of the competition under those circumstances has nothing to do with it, I'm not even allowed to compete.

Again, intelligent solidiers make better solidiers, other things being equal. The dont let morons pilot aircraft or tanks for a reason, and making stupid decisions endagers you and everyone else.

I never said black people were stupid, I simply said that your implication that people who werent very smart would necessarily have other talents to compensate is nonesense. Intelligence is not inversely correlated with farming, art, or morality, as you seem to be arguing.

And like it or not a 15 point gap is not "slightly" less clever, its a substantial difference. And its a difference that has large social consequences.

As for smart people inventing the atomic bomb, dont forget that the atomic bomb is what ended early a war that would have otherwise cost hundreds of thousands of american lives, and would likely have killed more japanese in the process than the atomic bomb did. Also, the idea that smart people inventing things is bad for humanity is absurd. In the stone age, infant mortality, disease, malnutrition, exposure to the elements and violence were all very real problems, and the average life expectancy was about 25-30. I think we are somewhat better off today.

Small conflicts? 2 million hacked to death with machetes in rwanda is small? And I suppose darfur and the congo are bastions of peace and harmony? The continent is riddled with poverty, crime, violence and in many areas opne warfare.

Yes white warfare had a very high death toll, because we had much more efficient was of killing each other due to technological advancement.

However, that same technology is an enormous boon. Western medcine saves tens of millions of lives every year. Western argricultural methods provide for for billions, the haber process alone feeding 2 billion of the world's population. Western technology saves far more lives from disease and starvation than it destroys with weaponary.

I am not saying that africa has made no cultural contribution, but the contribution of the west is larger by far.

So now you are conceding that the western cultural achievements are greater, having just claimed that african achievements were greater?

Anyway, you dont need to "own" the media to be a writer, musician or artist. Yes, white people have typically hard more opportunity in this regard, but thats because they happened to be the ones who built the society which could support people to devote the lives to cultural endeavors, and developed, the literacy, instruments and artistic techniques necessary for people to flourish. The fact that black people did not build such societies is not a failing of white people.

It is insanity to prentend that anyone can achieve anything. Every human is limited by his natural capabilities. Thats not to say we shouldnt strive to achieve, but we shouldnt pretend everyone can do everything, they cant.

Or maybe prosperous nations are proserous because their populations are smarter. And no it did not take "one person" to invent the compass; such inventions require a substantial foundation of scientific knowledge established by many people over many generations.

Also, this line of reasoning makes no sense. There is no reason why people's IQ would suddenly jump after these things were invented. There is every reason to suppose that smarter people are more likely to make such inventions however.

The existance of stupid farmers does nothing to disprove the fact that intelligence is useful in farming. Therefore if our future is more farming intensive as you claim with no real justification, then we would still benefit from having a smarter population.

As for George Washington Carver, his achievements are somewhat exaggerated by black history month propaganda. Here's a link which corrects some of the myths surrounded him and other black inventors:

h t t p : / / w w w 3 3 . b r i n k s t e r . c o m / i i i i i / i n v e n t i o n s /

The magnitude of western decline will only be heightened if it is accompanied by a decline in the population's intelligence. Secondly, we are very likely to continue to live in a technologically advanced society, so technology will still be very important. The fall of the roman empire entailed a substantial loss of scientific knowledge. That is not like to be repeated as we have much more durable means of storing information, such as the internet, or data saved across tens of thousands of different computer hard disks.

So you dont think a society needs its legal institutions?

The racial groups numbers hundreds of millions. Random chance may explain why one parents' child may be less intelligent than another's. It cannot explain why a consistent trend emerges across a population of hundreds of millions. its like the difference between rolling a single six on a die and rolling a million sixes in a row. The former is perfectly possible, the latter is for practical intents and purposes impossible.

If the diversity you are referring to entails some people being less intelligent than others, how exactly is this advantageous? When would low intelligence ever be desireable?

What effect are you refering too? If you mean IQ, then amongst white people it varies very little, regardless of the particular region in europe.

 

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Also spidergoat, whilst you have gone between dreaming up one explanation after another as to why IQ differences are environmental and then claiming that if the races did differ in intelligence it wouldnt matter (inspite of the fact that what distinguishes humans from all other animals is their intellect, and this is what makes them so much more successful), you still havent actually addressed my central argument:

What reason is there to suppose that human populations which have evolved in none identical environments should have evolved identically, especially as it is plain from outward appearence that they have not evolved identically?

 

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But you can't say that, because you have no idea how smart any particular individual is.

I suggest that Europe enjoyed fertile agricultural land, which supported more intensive brain use. It was more difficult to live in Africa, so unnecessary energy intensive brainpower was selected against. I don't think the success of European races is due to their intelligence, quite the opposite. An accident of location led to larger bodies as well, just because the nutrition was available.

You have still not shown what 15 points means in real life as opposed to academic tests.

The fact is slavery institutionalized unfair conditions, which continued until very recently. Discrimination still exists, and it has nothing to do with individual merit.

Then maybe it's not very important.

I'm saying that, even with fewer resources, Africans have created among the great art and music of mankind. We would be much poorer as a species without them.

Because genes never code for just one trait. Who knows what other beneficial traits also come with it?

The division between Hutu and Tutsi was a white invention. Besides, it is small. The violence is a safety valve. Western people pretend to be peaceful and then kill tens of millions. Africans get it out of their system. The tensions were caused by lack of agricultural land, the opposite of conditions in Europe.

No, but you do need it to be remembered for it. There might have been more African artists that we have never heard about.

 

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I can say that if I am not allowed to apply for a post because of my race, then yes it is an injustice. I am not saying that I should be given a place over black people by default, I am saying that I should not be disadvantaged simply because of my race. To try and claim it isnt racial discrimination if the job specifically precludes people from certain races is absurd. And even beyond barring jobs to certain races, there is a large body of evidence to show that affirmative action results in giving places to black people with substantially lower qualifications than white people. At the top 20 american universities, the average black student has an SAT score 180 points lower than the average white student, well over a full standard deviation, which is hugely preferential treatment towards blacks.

If you have even a basic grasp of evolutionary reasoning, then you would know that if white people found intelligence more beneficial relative to black people, their evolutionary path would reflect that, and white people would evolve to become naturally smarter.

As for the universally greater fertility of europe, this isnt true. Many areas in africa are highly fertile, hence why white farmers have been highly successful in farming in Africa. The fact that white people were able to develope agriculture when black people were not indicates that they were more intelligent. It isnt the farming that promoted the intelligence, they would need to have been intelligent to develope the agriculture in the first place.

IQ test scores are predictive of many social outcomes, from education and job success, to crime rates, to rates of illegitimacy, divorce, welfare dependancy, drug addiction and virtually every other social ill. That is true within races as well as between races. And we see the lower average IQ of black people is reflected all of the above social outcomes, as IQ would predict.

Yes there is still some discrimination, affirmative action is one clear example of it. And youre right, that has nothing to do with individual merit.

Well given that what separates humans most clearly from all other species is our intellect, and given the consequences of this, then yes I would say it is important. Intelligence is what drives the advancement of science and technology, and this alone is hugely important, of all human endeavours, science is the one that most transforms our lives. Not only that, intelligence has a significant impact on all of the aforementioned social outcomes. The fact that you cannot gauge it with any precision from a conversation doesnt make it unimportant. But even socially, although you cannot accurately place someone's IQ to within say 5 points just from speaking to them, you will certainly notice the difference between someone who is very smart and someone who is very stupid.

The fact of the matter is that african cultural and artistic achievements, although not as limited as their technological achievements, are still not all that impressive. They havent achieved what the arabs have, what the south asians have, what the orientals have, or what the europeans have. All of these groups have made substantial contributions to art, literature, architecture, music and have founded great civilisations, with complex social structures, traditions and cultural events. The large majority of sub-saharan africa failed to progress beyond simple hunter gatherer tribes, with no literature or architecture, and small and relative simple societies and cultures. This only changed due to the influence of outsiders.

That is not to say they have achieved nothing, but I dont believe I ever made any such claim. Infact, my two original claims where that there is no reason to anticipated that races who evolved in different environments will be biologically identical, and that race as a concept has biological validity. Neither of which you have actually been able to refute, or have even attempted to.

Instead, you have since diverted the debate into what cultural achievements black people have made, and that intelligence doesnt matter. None of which actually are relevant to whether or not the races do differ with regard to intelligence.

Excpet if there was any obvious benefits, they would be observable in the black population today. They do appear to have a greater aptitude in many athletic persuits, that much is true. However, the social benefit of this minimal relative to the social impact of intellectual differences. Hence why we observe

And again, how is this relevant to the issue of whether or not the races are identical?

2 million is not small, and blaming it on white people is absurd. It was black people killing black people, no whites forced their hand. And I dont ever recall any white people claiming that we are naturally the most peaceful race. I would suggest however that given the same technology, no other race would have been less violent. if they killed 2 million with machetes, what would it have been like with tanks, air strikes, missiles and machine guns? And why when black and white people live in the same society, with the same access to violent weaponary do black people consistently commit far more violent crime (its 10-15 times the ammount of violent crime in america) than white people, if white people are so innately violent as you believe?

And what the hell do you mean by "violence is a saftey valve"? Murdering each other keeps them safe from what exactly? I cant imagine it is safeguarding against any fate worse than being murdered.

And you simply side step altogether my point that western technology has done far more good than harm.

As for farming is plenty of land that can be used for farming in africa (and has been since whites arrived), they simply never developed agriculture. That isnt the fault of white people.

And as you appear to be arguing that black people are naturally less violent than whites, how does this support your apparent insistence that all racial differences are environmental?

Well simply if africans failed to record their many artistic achievements, then it still means those achievements arent contributing to our society. Also, the reason why they didnt record these achievements if they were made is again because they failed to develope a literate society, so there was no medium for recording.

And again, how does this imply the races are equal?

 

Agreed.

But it's equally unethical to discriminate against non-minorities via racist practices such as affirmative action, hiring quotas, etc.

Things are so fucked up right now that those on the left regard any difference in the performance of the various races on a particular test as evidence that the test itself is somehow racist or "culturally biased".

People should be judged and treated as individuals with no regard to race whatsoever. If the result is that the majority of the NBA is black while the majority of engineers are white/asian; so be it.

PS Here are two graphs of the distribution of white/black IQ that I found via an image search

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They both seem to show a significant difference among the races.

 

No it doesn't. Africa contains a profound lack of domesticatable animals. Without the ox or the horse, extensive farming becomes impractical. Without grains, they lack the ability to store up food, which led to civilization as we know it. This only became possible when people migrated to the Middle East.

You have not proven that. There are numerous reasons why extensive farming did not develop in Africa as it did in Europe. Lack of a cold climate to store food (other than grains) in the wintertime was one factor. Lack of domesticatable animals, the climate did not promote intensive labor during the daytime, lack of grain crop species, a wide swath of Africa which is all jungle...You really need to read "Guns, Germs, and Steel":

Diamond argues that Eurasian civilization is not so much a product of ingenuity, but of opportunity and necessity. That is, civilization is not created out of sheer will or intelligence, but is the result of a chain of developments, each made possible by certain preconditions.

As judged by your own cultural values.

So have Africans, but civilization is a particular kind of social structure marked by the specialization made possible only by agriculture.

I didn't understand your question, it was worded poorly.

There is also no reason to assume that people living in two different environments would enjoy the same advantages in terms of resources, climate, and opportunities to develop a complex civilization. I have been assuming, for the sake of argument, that your premise is correct, but even that is controversial. Stephen J. Gould in particular has questioned it.

White people consistently subjugate black people, herd them into ghettos or slavery, or sharecropping. That could make anyone violent. Add that the CIA introduced addictive drugs deliberately into the black community to keep them down, and you have the result we have today. Surely you aren't suggesting that a 15 point IQ difference makes people violent?

More extensive wars. The cure for World Wars are more frequent local battles. But, I did point out that the cause of these conflicts was lack of resources, particularly arable land, not some inherent genetic trait.

That remains to be seen. When WWIII wipes out all of humanity, you are going to wish Western Civilization wasn't so clever. And then who will have the advantage? The same traits that served them well in tribal conflicts will cause blacks to prevail in those circumstances too.

No, it means that they passed on their music by oral tradition. This might imply that their memories are better. You and I did not invent the record player, it's invention was predicated on an industrial revolution made possible by the advantageous geographical position of Europe. Since this technology has passed to Africa, there has been an explosion of recorded music there.

In fact, some of their contributions have been striking.
The African sculptures mistaken for remains of Atlantis

There has also been a clear bias in Western attitudes towards anything from Africa. This has nothing to do with relative intelligence, it's a cultural bias. This has consistently caused people in the west to underestimate black culture. Their vulnerablility to European disease also wiped out many black civilizations before the Europeans even knew about them. By the time they arrived in Africa in force, they mistakenly thought it barren and full of savages. No doubt Europe didn't look too well during the Plagues.

 

I don't deny that they test differently, but I do not agree with the premise that the cause is genetic.

 

Die young, live fast: The evolution of an underclass

 

Spidergoat, in this post, as in ever other post of yours, you have simply chosen to ignore most of my responses to your arguments, because you cant refute them. Simply ignoring what you cannot refute is hardly a good debating style. Youve basically given up any attempt to debate the evidence with me that shows the environmental explanation for IQ is inadequate, making no attempt to explain the results of transracial adoption studies, or why racism similtaneously boosts Jewish and asian IQ, but supresses black IQ. Anyway with regard to what you did answer...

It doesnt contain a profound lack of domesticatable animals, only domesticated animals, theres a difference. The wildlife of europe hardly made particularly suitable farm animals prior to domestication. I doubt if prior to domestication horses or oxen were any better farm animals than zebra or buffalos.

But in any case, you shoot yourself in the foot with this argument: If it really was impossible to farm in agriculture, and develope into more advanced societies than hunter gatherer societies, things which require intelligence, then it would stand to reason that intelligence wasnt as useful for africans as it was for europeans, and therefore they would have evolved differently.

I am aware of Jared Diamond's book, not evey claim he makes is nonesense, but any book which insists that the humans must be equal when there is absolutely no reason to believe they should be, and that biology couldnt have had any impact on outcomes, belongs in the fantasy genre. I would recommend the following book as a better alternative that deals with the same topic:

http://www.amazon.com/Understanding-Human-History-Michael-Hart/dp/1593680260

And again, the argument you are putting forward is self defeating. You are basically saying that europeans engaged in intelligent activity than africans because their environment was more conducive to it. Well that would imply that europeans had a greater darwinian value placed on intelligence by their environment, and they would have evolved accordingly.

Again, if engaging in the highly intellectually demanding activity of building an advanced society was a matter of necessity or the result of greater opportunity for europeans, then they would have found intelligence to be of greater darwinian value than africans, and evolved accordingly.

We can agree to disagree. But I would bet anything that if the cultural achievements of africans and europeans were reversed, you would go on endlessly about how much more africans had contributed to the arts.

I am sorry, but you are claiming that africans have founded great civilisations (they havent) and in the same breath explaining why they havent founded great civilisations, due to civilisations requiring agriculture. That makes no sense at all.

I have put the question to you about half a dozen times now. You never made any attempt to answer it. And I said the following:

What reason is there to believe that human populations that have evolved in different environments should have proved to have evolved identically, with respect to intelligence or anything else?

How is that question hard to understand?

Again, if one environment was more conducive to the establishment of civilisation as you claim, then that environment would more strongly favour intelligence and the population would evolve accordingly.

And Stephen J. Gould, was an ideologue and plain wrong. He asserted there was no such thing as IQ, yet every expert in the field (which gould was not) will concede that IQ is about 80% heritable and highly predictive of important social outcomes. He claimed that 19th craniologists fabricated their results to make blacks look like they had smaller skulls, but claimed the data showed they had larger skulls, but academics reviewing the work independantly found the errors of the 19th century craniologists had few errors, and those that there were not in the direction gould claimed, and that it was his results that were inaccurate. Indeed, after research had throughly debunked many of the claims in his first edition of the mismeasure of man, he simply removed the relevant section altogether in the second edition. Here's a good article on Gould:

http://www.eugenics.net/papers/jprnr.html

Well yes it probably would increase the disposition to violence. It is well documented fact that the prison population has a significantly lower average IQ than the generally population.

And as I have already mentioned, white people were certainly not the only people guilty of slavery, blacks and arabs were also highly culpable, not to mention that whites themselves have been the victims of slavery, and yet have not had the same problems. Blacks living in europe have the exact same problems as blacks in america, inspite of having no history of slavery.

And jews have been the victims of appalling discrimination, yet the jew/white IQ gap is 13 points in the jews favour.

And yet you seem to imply white people are simply naturally disposed to warfare. The average levels of testosterone in black males is 19% higher than in white males, (hence significantly higher rates of prostate cancer in the black community) a hormone which is associated with higher levels of aggression. Plus, there is already the association with low IQ and violent crime that I have mentioned. So genetics probably does play a role in why black people do engage in more violence than white people, when given access to the same means of violence. And the violence is far more prevalent in the black population even in peace time.

Also, the idea that black people are engaging in civil warfare to prevent more extensive wars is absurd. Constant fighting and skirmishing does not decrease the likelihood of future warfare, it increases hostilities and keeps you in a perpetual state of conflict. Also, are you seriously telling me that they have as a conscious motive the desire to avoid larger wars? People kill for lots of reasons, but not generally to avoid killing.

So we can blame whites for wiping out all of humanity in a nuclear war which hasnt happened yet and may never will, but we cant give them gredit for developing modern medcine and agriculture, things which they have actually done?

And I can see no reason why black people would come off any better out of a nuclear war than white people.

Not developing literacy does not indicate having better memories, it is indicative only of being a primative culture. And the industrial revolution was the result of european technological advanges, not our geography.

Diseases did not cause black people to regress from great civilisations back into the stone age. If such civilisations ever existed, there would be archeological evidence for them, and the great majority of africa there is no evidence of any civilisation at all. The simple truth is, for large swathes of africa, primative tribal communities was as advanced as it got before outside intervention. Further, the black death wiped out a third of europes population, and europeans did not descend into hunter gatherer tribes.

 

Again, please explain to me, why would you make this assumption? What good reason is there to think that populations that evolved in different environments should have evolved identically?

Seeing as you cannot seem to give any line of reasoning nor any compelling evidence to support your belief in racial equality, your refusal to accept that there may be a biological component to the observed racial differences in IQ, even when controlling for environmental variables, hardly seems reasonable.

It is simply blind faith in egalitariansm. Not believing what the evidence indicates, just what you would like to be true.

 

I didn't want to get dragged into a discussion of the exact data and methadologies of the actual studies. Not only am I not trained in these things, they are boring. So, I'm commenting in a general way on things that are within my knowledge. I think it suffices to note that these studies are refuted by reputable scientists, which means that the results you hold up as a fact are just tentative. I can argue assuming they are correct, or I can offer alternative explanations. Neither approach will be definitive on this forum.

I did suggest that Asians and Jews are whiter than black people, and so even if they are victims of racism and anti-semitism, it's nowhere near what blacks experience, even those adopted by white families.

You are wrong in this regard. A wild horse can be broken, but a zebra cannot. Elephants can be domesticated, but they do not breed well in captivity.

I suggest that hunter-gatherers need to be much more clever than a farmer. A farmer does the same kind of thing every day, but a hunter-gatherer must confront new challenges every day. I suggest that Africans invented the most important things in human history- fire, stone tools, and language.

Considering how recent in human history we appeared, it is far more likely a hypothesis that culture is more important than biology.

I'm not saying that. When available, Africans smelted bronze and steel, it's just that there was no reason to invent the plow or the wheel. There was no advantage to it.

I doubt your assumption that an advanced society requires advanced people. The vast majority of people in a society are not inventors or great thinkers, they are just followers, simple farmers, craftsmen, soldiers... If you were dropped on a desert island, could you reinvent the computer or the cell phone? I bet not. Would you even know how to hunt and trap animals for food? Probably not. We have become specialists, and that isn't always an advantage when conditions change.

They have actually, but they did not build lasting monuments like the Egyptians or Aztecs. Their civilizations were smaller for the reasons I already mentioned. They could not accumulate wealth in the same way because they lacked grain. We actually thought the same thing about South American peoples before we discovered that we were wrong. But the great civilizations of South America were founded on corn crops.

I accept that rapid evolution is possible given genetic isolation and different environments, but it is not akin to speciation in that the races now have permanent immutable qualities. If we can change so much in only 10,000 years or so, we can certainly change again, maybe even more rapidly given our diversity.

I suggest civilization is a result of agricultural advantages, which allow the accumulation of food from year to year, which means fewer famines. Famine can reduce the frequency of genetic traits that code for high energy processes like complex problem solving. It can also make people smaller (i.e. the pygmies), and more likely to accumulate fat in times of plenty. Yes, this is natural selection at work, but it also means that these traits are no longer being selected for in western nations. If this dynamic is indeed at work, it would be unfair to discriminate against blacks for having gone through this particular evolutionary sieve when white people have not. They still possess equal potential in their gene pool, it just takes a different environment to bring it out (to say nothing of the fact that our gene pools are now merged).

Was their IQ the cause of their criminality, or was their environment the cause of their IQ as well as their criminal activity?

I'm not talking about blame, I'm talking about social conditions that lead to a cycle of poverty. Europeans can be just as discriminatory as Americans, in spite of only indirectly funding the slave trade. (For instance, they funded the slave trade).

Jews have a cultural value of education, and in spite of being discriminated against, had a higher level of cultural unity. Their culture was not destroyed in their movement to America. Their families were largely not torn apart. They can also pass for white.

One person's aggression is another's ambition and sex drive, all good things in their proper context. Low testosterone is also linked to earlier death in males. Hey, Africa can be a tough place to live, and it creates a tougher kind of human.

I do give them credit for those things, but if not for an accident of geography, they would never have happened.

No? Greater athleticism, greater promiscuity, increased aggression... valuable traits in the apocalypse. No one is going to value an HDTV engineer in such a time.

But they were driven by a culture of specialization, which can only occur with agriculture. They didn't have to grow food AND invent things. They could sit on their asses inventing things and then BUY food.

There are indeed abandoned civilizations found in Africa. Just like in South America, we ask what happened to the Mayans? They didn't dissapear, they just reverted to simpler states of organization due to environmental catastrophe. Europeans lived among domestic animals, and this gave them immunity to many diseases that Africans were vulnerable to. The first explorers would have introduced these diseases to the African population and the result would be similar to the Native Americans.

Because they always had agriculture to fall back on.

 

Hmongs are not favored. Jews are white. What is your actual question here?

Which you have not bothered to reference, if it is in there. You keep blithering on about "race" as sociologically defined in the US.

I have made no such argument. My entire argument here is simply that your idea of "race" is entirely sociological, and no sound conclusions about genetics or inheritance or evolution can be drawn from such an intrinsically bullshit classification.

You might as well try to compare rabbits and wallabys, in one category, with raccoons and koalas, in the other, to see if the differences between your two "races" (the hoppers and the walkers) were genetic or circumstantial.

Nobody is arguing that there cannot be biologically founded differences between biologically grouped populations of humans. The problem comes from your insistence that the sociological races make a reasonable biological grouping - when you do that, you confound your entire investigation by eradicating the natural boundaries you were interested in, and including by definition the very sociological forces (the ones that define sociological groups) you were interested in screening out.

So why don't you go after that, and forget this race stuff?

The differences between the various extremely disparate and separately evolved groups on the continent of Africa would make a very good place to start such an inquiry. But you insist on lumping them together, in one group!

You're off on the wrong foot. Start over.

Nothing particularly "crypto" about it.

 

I'm willing to agree that there may be average IQ differences when comparing different populations of people. However, I'm just not convinced we're comparing apples with apples and pears with pears.

If we could take the brain out of an Black American child and switch it with a White American child and each child is raised in a different environment I feel like the IQ's would match with their physical appearance not their inherited brain - because I think the environment plays that much of a role. I'd also like to know the role methylated DNA plays and if so, if methylations can be inherited.

We will probably just have to wait until better DNA test kits come out. Which they are coming. I'd say it's another 7-12 years and we'll each know our DNA profile as well as have a good idea of ancestry.

Speaking of which, didn't one of those rap stars have his DNA run and he found only 40% was south African and the rest was Native American (which is Asian) and European and Arab (which kind of pissed him off because he's all about being "Black"). So? I wonder if his IQ was plotted if it would be as "Black" and how many "Blacks" have less "Black" DNA (aka African) then they think? Say less than 50%.

Has anyone compared Black professionals IQs against White-Trash? I bet we'll find Blacks are way smarter

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That aside, did I mention Japanese have gut bacteria that have genes from bacteria that live on seaweed (e.coli bacteria must have swapped genes with the bacteria that live on seaweed in the gut). So Japanese can get more nutrition out of a sushi role than non Japanese, including other Asians. So, there you go

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Proportionally more deleterious genetic variation in European than in African populations

 

Dr. Venter and other researchers say that those traits most commonly used to distinguish one race from another, like skin and eye color, or the width of the nose, are traits controlled by a relatively few number of genes, and thus have been able to change rapidly in response to extreme environmental pressures during the short course of Homo Sapiens history.

...By contrast with the tiny number of genes that make some people dark-skinned and doe-eyed, and others as pale as napkins, scientists say that traits like intelligence, artistic talent and social skills are likely to be shaped by thousands, if not tens of thousands, of the 80,000 or so genes in the human genome, all working in complex combinations.

The possibility of such gene networks shifting their interrelationships wholesale in the course of humanity's brief foray across the globe, and being skewed in significant ways according to "race" is "a bogus idea," said Dr. Aravinda Chakravarti, a geneticist at Case Western University in Cleveland.


...Since the African emigrations began, a mere 7,000 generations have passed. In addition, because the founding population of immigrants was small, it could only take so much genetic variation with it. Because of that combination, (a limited founder population and a short time since dispersal) humans are strikingly homogeneous, differing from one another only once in a thousand subunits of the genome.

"We are a small population grown large in the blink of an eye," Dr. Lander said. "We are a little village that's grown all over the world, and we retain the genetic variation seen in that little village."

...Another cause of group differences is the so-called founder effect. In such cases, the high prevalence of an unusual condition in a population can be traced to a founding ancestor who happened to carry a novel mutation into the region. Over many generations of comparative isolation and inbreeding, the community, like it or not, became "enriched" with the founder's disorder. The founder effect explains the high incidence of Huntington's neuro-degenerative disease in the Lake Maracaibo region of Venezuela, and of Tay-Sachs disease among Ashkenazi Jews.

[This last paragraph is what I meant by intelligence caused by a "random mutation". The genetics of some groups are dominated by the effects of one or a few founding members.]


http://www.trinicenter.com/sciencenews/raceandgenetics.htm

 

Doesnt this imply that the races DO differ in significant ways? It is odd, whenever I say that white people differ from blacks in a way that favours whites, then you insist the races are equal. Yet if there are some ways in which the races appear to differ that favours blacks, you claim blacks are simply naturally better. Blacks may have fewer genetic disorders than europeans, I dont know or particularly care. What I do know is that variations in average intelligence have a far larger impact on populations than rare disorders, and I also know that unless it can be established that the races are equal, social policy shouldnt pretend it is so.

Anyway, seeing as you said at the top of one your posts that you basically arent actually going to bother debating the evidence, and seeing as you have yet again declined to explain why human populations involved in different environments should be equal, nor given any evidence to support this argument, I dont really see why I should spend another half our typing responses to each of your vacuous and fallacious arguments, especially as any points of mine you cant answer youll just ignore anyway.

If that sounds harsh, you have for example made the silly argument yet again that because average people cant invent things average IQ of populations doesnt matter to technology, inspite of me having pointed out to you several times that average IQ of a population makes a huge difference on the numbers of exceptionally smart people. Or the claim that hunting requires more intelligence than farming. Farming requires planning ahead with crop rotations and managing the land throughout the year, as well as developement of some fairly sophisticated tools. Thats a bit more thought involved than throwing a spear.

And not a single one of your arguments actually pertain to whether or not we should have social policies based on an assumption of racial equality.

 

I have given evidence why human populations aren't significantly different. I have said that we have been through an evolutionary bottleneck, and that the world population has exploded rapidly only recently. Then I gave a link to some geneticists that say the same thing. I'm open to considering your premise, but I'm not sure this is the forum for discussing the exact details of statistical analysis or genetic data. I'm not an expert in the field, just an interested layman.

The fact is we did not evolve substantially in different environments, we evolved in Africa, and then spread out quickly after the last ice age, and then aquired minor variations due to the environment, such as skin color or disease resistance.

They aren't based on genetic equality, they are based on the principle of political equality, and the righting of past wrongs. This also only applies to government institutions and those that get government funding. Since white people are the majority, they cannot claim unfairness, since there are far more opportunities out there that aren't controlled by affirmative action.

 

Hmongs are a separate group. You are refering to people laos, vietnam cambodia and thialand. By north east asians I refer to chienese, japanese and koreans. Slanting eyes does not imply the same biological group. And unlike in subsaharan africa where there is relatively high uniformity in IQ scores, there evidence shows that both in their own countries and in the west, hmongs test worse on IQ tests than north east asians. Therefore, with regard to IQ it is not appropriate to treat them as a single group.

And jews are a distinct biological group from other whites. They have practiced selective reproduction for centuries, and have hereditary diseases especially associated with them which clearly indicates the fact that they are not biologically the same:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medical_genetics_of_Jewish_people#Tay.E2.80.93Sachs_disease

None of which answers the question, which was very clear, inspite of your apparent confusion: Why, if racial discrimination accounts for the poor performance of blacks do groups which have been discriminated against perform better than whites? Even if jews were the same group as whites (they arent, and have been subject to enormous discrimination, ever heard of the holocaust?) this would explain why they perform better. Nor does hmongs performing worse than whites explain why north east asians perform better. You simply ducked the question here.

Yes, it is in there. And I shouldnt need to reference it, the article lists all the categories of evidence it addresses in the very first paragraph, the very first of these that is listed is "the worldwide distribution of test scores", which was on the fourth line of the article. It isnt my fault if you didnt bother to even look at it.

An argument which I have repeatedly said is counterfactual and ignores forensic science which can identify race very reliably from COMPLETELY NON SOCIOLOGICAL INFORMATION. How, therefore, can the racial categories be purely sociological? It is ridiculous to maintain they are purely sociological characteristics if they correlate with a consistent set of genetic differences.

Seeing as you are talking about completely different species, that analogy is total garbage. The fact of the matter is, whether you like it or not, racial categories are NOT purely sociological. The most consistent difference between black and white people is skin colour, that is NOT a sociological difference. There clearly is some biological variation between racial categories, and there is no good reason why one of those consistent differences between the groups couldnt be average intelligence, especially when all the empirical evidence indicates that this is so.

Well to be fair every time i suggest that intelligence could be one of these biological differences, I find that other people in this thread insist that any apparent difference in intelligence observed is caused by the environment, something you yourself have done.

Except that the sociological definitions DO correlate to different regions of the world. Black people are of african descent, and whites of european descent, this is a clear geographical separation that would likely have resulted in separate evolutionary paths. No, they are not internally homogeneous groups, but there is less difference between europeans and other europeans, and europeans and africans, so comparissons can still be made, especially where the empirical evidence shows a consistent pattern of differences.

As I have said and as you have ignored, africa is NOT very disparate with regard to IQ its highly uniform, on the evidence we have specific to regions. I never said I insist on lumping them together, I simply said that the evidence is collected based on self indentification for the most part, and people self indentify as black or white, not danish or senegalease. The data for more specific group comparissons is much less, and dividing black america up into such groups would be impossible because of the high degree of mixing between different black groups. Therefore it makes more sense to look at the characteristics of the group as a whole

Also, lets be honest here, if research was conducted using more specific categories, and it found that all or most of the groups in africa had lower average levels of intelligence than whites, would this dispell the taboo over racial comparissons? Would people become more receptive to the notion of biological variation between the races? No, they would not, you know that as well as I do.

To say the central issue is the individual racial categories is a red herring. The real controversy here is that people do not want to challenge the notion that human populations do not differ in any important way. You in your first post said that skin colour was overwhelmingly the largest difference, and you have yet to give a reason why skin colour could change significantly, but other characterisitics could not, nor why the empirical evidence shows consistent and large differences in IQ regardless of which environmental variables are controlled for.

Well theres a nice cheap shot accusing me of white supremacism. Clearly you have a different understanding of the word supremacism to me however, because a never claimed whites as being supreme intellectually, indeed, my claims flatly contradict that statment.

Or am I supremacist because I want even handed treatment regardless of race and people to be judged in individual merit rather than assuming that all minority failings must be due to white racism, and having blanket discrimination against whites accordingly?

 

A difference of 15 IQ points cannot lead to "failure". The vast majority of jobs in this country do not involve skills like nuclear physics or genetic engineering! To cite a recent controversy, black farmers couldn't even get loans to invest in their property. This has nothing to do with their relative IQs compared to white farmers, it was due to racism.

 

I can appriciate youre not an expert, but it is silly to insist that the achievement gaps must be environmental as you have, and then refuse to grapple with the evidence. If you dont feel yourself capable of understanding the relevant evidence, thats fine, but if that is the case, at least have the humility to not dogmatically insist that your belief in the gap being 100% environmental must be correct.

And no, you have not addressed the question about why humans who have evolved in different environments could not have evolved differently. When we know that traits ranging from skin colour to bone structure, to hormone levels, to rates of maturation, to disease resistance, it simply not an adequate argument to say that we havent evolved separately for long enough for variations in intelligence to occur. There has been substantial variations in many other characteristics, there is no reason why intelligence should be exempt.

As for ventner;s argument, I dont find it compelling. To say that we only differ with regard to colouring, and that these things can change more rapidly than intelligence is simply not true. Firstly, we have not evolved differently only with regard to pigmentation. Facial features, bone structure, bone density, duration of pregnacy, rates of maturation, proportions of sexual organs, hormone levels, enzyme activity, disease resistance, muscle and fat levels all vary biologically between the races. So while it may be a small number of genes that controll pigmentation, it is a very large number of genes that controll all of those charcterisitcs.

Secondly, it is not logically sound to say that pigmentation is controlled by only a few genes, and intelligence by more (which is probably true) therefore in the time it takes pigmentation to change, no variation in intelligence can occur. If some of the genes controlling pigmentation can have evolved differently then some of the genes controlling intelligence can have veolved differently also. As there are more genes involved in intelligence, the it is true to say that a smaller proportion of the genes involved are likely to have changed (although this isnt guaranteed) but that is not the same as saying no genes have changed at all. And those that have could have had a sizeable difference on average intelligence. In any case, there have been many changes besides pigmentation like i say, involving large numbers of genes, so the point is moot. Substantial differentiation has occured, and there is no logical reason why this couldnt affect intelligence.

Ventner, maybe a prominent scientist, but there are other prominent scientists that disagree with him, watson being one of them, who like ventner worked on the human genome project. Also, ventner is an ideologue who has said things with regard to race that are simply untrue. He claimed that races cannot be distinguished from DNA, inspite of the fact that forensics departments with less sophisticated equipment than that which the human genome project has access to do so all the time, a fact he could not have been unaware of. This is clearly politically motivated.

Yes they are based on racial equality. The reason why black underrepresentation in highly intellectual areas is seen as an injustice in need of correction is because it is assumed that blacks would perform equally to whites were environmental factors equalised. No one suggests that the achievement gap between geniuses and kids with downs syndrome needs to be bridged by affirmative action, for example, because everyone accepts that there is a large gulf in natural ability and you cannot reasonably expect equal outcomes. If it were accepted that the black white achievement gap was genetic, then people would recognise that this too should not be addressed by affirmative action as equal outcomes cannot be reasonably expected.