Evolution and Race

Hey, if they got the same degree, they can do the same job. Period.

Anyway, it was nice chatting with you. You are far more logical and well informed than most people on this forum.

 

Log in or Sign up to hide all adverts.

Actually blacks struggling to get loans is due to blacks defaulting on loans FAR more frequently. That is why so many black people were involved in subprime mortgages, as subprime loans as the name suggests, were higher risk loans. Banks dont not lend money to black people just because they dont like them. They are highly impersonal institutions and do not lend based on who they like, they care only about how risky you are to lend to. Like it or not black people are riskier people to lend to.

Anyway I never said the 15 point IQ gap lead to "failure". I said it is likely to lead to an underrepresentation in highly skilled jobs, and that therefore this is not an underrepresntation that should be corrected for by AA.

That said, IQ does affect productivity in nearly all professions. You may not need to be a genious to be a police officer, teacher or secretary, but all other things being equal, more intelligence is better. And there is no reason to suppose that more intelligent people would be worse in other respects. In fact, IQ is more predictive of job performance than any other single indicator far all but the most menial jobs (and even then it has some predictive power). it is better than biographical details (education and work history) and much better than an interview.

 

Log in or Sign up to hide all adverts.

Well if they got their degree through affirmative action, not necessarily, which is why AA hurts geniunely well qualified blacks, as the suspicion of AA hangs over them deserved or not.

Also, this is no justification for discriminating against whites. Even if they have adequate qualifications, why should they get a job over a better qualified white candidate?

Ok bye

Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!

 

Log in or Sign up to hide all adverts.

Well the evidence is that their IQs would match their inherited brains, because identical twins raised apart have very similar IQ scores. More relevant with regard to race, minority children adopted into affluent white families have IQ scores barely distinguishable from other members of their race, and clearly different from their white siblings raised in the same environment.

DNA will help identify which genes are responsible for the difference if it exists, but as for determining whether or not the difference does exist, you dont really need to know the individual genes involved, you just need to look at whether or not the IQ gap remains when controlling for environmental factors, the evidence indicates yes.

There is a substantial racial admixture in black americans, about 20% on average. All this means is that the magnitude of racial differences would actually be slightly larger if there wasnt that admixture.

So would I. But the "I know this really smart black guy" argument is avery bad argument. Its the logical equivalent of me finding a very tall women, observing shes taller than most men, and concluding that the belief that women are generally shorter than men is sexist nonesense. Im talking about averages.

The relevant question would be what proportion of blacks are professionals, and what proportion are poor, and how does this compare to whites?

I was aware of that, and that is indeed the most likely reason for sushi originating in japan. However, I hardly see how this would be a point in favour of racial egalitarianism.

 

Well, no shit but at the same time, it's not like he's saying "seig heil," or anything now is it?

 

I'm OK with more scientific studies being conducted. Yeah, it seems reasonable that brilliant mathematicians are "born" mathematically "gifted" (aka: genetically predisposed to think mathematically). I'm sure this will be found to be the case. BUT, it may not be. Maybe it's a virus? Perhaps in a given population people carry a virus that infects and changes the functioning of brains? Within the infected population some people become more mathematically minded?

How do we know? For now, we're only making correlations between populations. We don't "know" if it's DNA or not. It may be methylated patterns? A virus? Viruses? Unknown prions? Ideas themselves?

Lot's of unknowns out there and at the end of the day, these studies are only correlative.

 

Well I doubt it is a virus that causes mathematical ability, or causes racial IQ gaps, because viruses you would expect to be transmitted to a broad swathe of the population, and also their effects to disappear after the immune system overcomes it. Thus you would see large fluctuations of each inviduals mathematical ability, but this doesnt happen; both IQ and mathematical reasoning in particular are highly stable once people have stopped developing and reach adulthood. And you wouldnt expect to see a large gap in IQ between the races, certainly not between long established racial groups living in a given area.

But if there is any evidence to suggest a viral cause, then I certainly wouldnt abject to it being investigated. Nor do I advocate assuming racial differences, though I do think there is a large enough body of evidence to make that as a reasonable conclusion, rather than simply an assumption.

Well the studies do show correlations, that is true, but you can see if the correlation is due to a causal link or not by controlling for other variables. Transracial adoption for example controlls very heavily for all the most significant environmental variables that might account for a racial IQ gap, and yet the IQ gap is virtually unchanged, never mind eliminated entirely.

To be clear, I dont think that environment plays no role in the racial IQ gap. Between european IQs and IQs measured in the continent of africa, I would imagine that environmental factors play a pretty significant role, between a third and a half of the gap. However, nor do i believe that biology plays no role, and racial differences found between IQ scores taken in western countries are very predominantly genetic in my view, as controlling for environment doesnt make much difference at all.

 

Neither does melanistic skin. Penny drop yet?

The relevant "forensic science" - the DNA, which is the only issue in discussions of evolved disparity - is completely dependent on sociological patterns to assign "race". It identifies geographical and sometimes cultural group origin, within a certain probability - the "race" is derived from that, with reference to a particulat racist society. The assigned "race" might be different if the society involved were Brazil's, for example. Or India's.

No, I haven't.

And as you also pointed out, we don't have very much or very good data with regard to "intelligence" variation across Africa (IQ tests beign notoriously unreliable in such circumstances even if they had been comprehensively and carefully administered across the whole continent on regular intervals) So the proper conclusion would be no conclusion - suspend judgment.

And meanwhile, in our complete ignorance, we should certainly not make such an obvious and crude error as to a priori assign all Africans to the same "race". That's just silly.

That assumption is without data support. The normal assumption, pending data, would be quite different. I doubt very much there has been a higher degree of mixing between the genetics of the Congo, the South African indigenous, and the Horn, than between the Horn and the Arabian peninsula, for example.

You are the one making the sociological races the central issue. I am the one advising you to set them aside, and conduct your analysis of inherited or evolved differences between geographically separated groups of humans without reference to them.

Another example of the kinds of errors inherent racism leads to: "blacks" matched in economic circumstances to equivalent "whites" do not default on loans more frequently. The key variable is economic situation - including such variables as wealthy relatives, educational background and job skills, etc.

The racist correctly diagnoses the likelihood of the loan applicant being subject to racism, in other words - to the extent their judgment in loaning money was correct at all. That is not a biologically supported judgment.

Again the racist invokes the a priori "race", overlooking the physical reality.

Black's were involved in subprime mortgages more frequently largely because they were targeted for fraud more frequently - the "risk" of the loan was irrelevant, due to the planned misrepresentation of this risk by the maker of the loan to the financial markets, and this is evident in the fact that the loans made were riskier than standard loans readily available. The reasons blacks and other non-whites were targeted for fraud more frequently - the overt policy of such entities as Countrywide and similar entities, make an interesting discussion about such matters as equal protection under the law, but none of them are biological as far as I have encountered.

 

Yes, and as I have already accepted, black people are not biologically uniform, of course I am aware that similar levels of melanin does not imply homogeniety. My point was simply that all the evidence suggests that in all regions of africa, IQ is relatively uniform, so in terms of IQ studies it isnt unreasonable to treat them as a single grouping, especially in the US when that grouping has biologically mixed to a high degree. The hmongs and north east asians score very differently on IQ tests however, both in the west and in their own countries, so with regard to studies of IQ it is not appropriate to group them. Moreover, they have distinct group identies in the US and are largely separate, unlike blacks, hence why data can be collected for them individually.

And at the risk of sounding tedious, you still havent explained to me why some victims of racism have higher IQs than whites, and some lower, if racism causes the IQ gap by surpressing IQ. Surely all none white groups should have their IQs surpressed to some degree if this was the case? None should see their IQs rise.

Yes but it identifies the geographical group origin of the individual by either skeletal traits, blood types or genetic clusters specific to that group. All of these are biological data. If groups from different geographical regions can be identified from purely biological data, it implies that the groups evolved differently in their geographical isolation from each other, hence why they are biologically distinguishable. This fits the difference of race as human populations biologically differentiated by geographical isolation during evolution.

Let me quote your very first post in this thread:

"It's just that there is no evidence that any of the observed inequalities - and they are few - correlate with the sociological "races" - except skin color, of course."

And in response to me saying: "If there are consistent biological differences associated with racial categories"

You replied

"Sure there are - skin color being by far the dominant one. "

So you made the assertions, both without any supporting evidence, that there are few observed inequalities between races, and skin colour was by far the dominant difference between the races. That hardly seems like someone who is keeping an open mind to the possibility of socially significant differences in IQ, if you think that the most significant difference by far is skin colour, a rather superficial attribute. They are both pretty direct statements that there are no meaningful differences between racial groups.

Complete ignorance? No it is not complete ignorance by a long shot. We have dozens of studies conducted in various regions of africa, and they converge on a mean of 70, none of which deviate from that mean by more than 5 points. So we have good evidence for the uniformity of african IQ.

However, we have no data on things like transracial adoptions or IQ of children from households lying in certain income bands collected suing more specific categories than black, because that data is collected in America, where mixing between black groups is sufficiently high as to make separating the black population into groups from different regions from africa impossible. And it is this evidence that allows us to see whether or not the IQ gap is environmental or biological (the evidence is biological).

So no, we are hardly just speculating that there is uniformity of IQ across africa, there is plenty of good data in that regard. But with regard to studies controlling for environmental factors, the data is collected using the category black. But as we know that the IQ gap is fairly uniform across the continent, why do we need to divide up specific black groupings in the US, where this would be very difficult to do anyway, for the purposes of studies? We already know that the IQ variation between these groups isnt vey large at all.

I mean mixing of black populations within america. And yes, there is good reason to suppose that blacks are more mixed in america with each other than with arabs, because arabs do not self identify as black, all sub-sahran africans do. Therefore, blacks socially segregate themselves from arabs in the US, but not from different groups of blacks. This may be less true with more recent black immigrants to the US, but amongst the long established black population in the US, where we find this IQ gap, it is the case.

I can agree that ideally it would be better to separate each population into those groups of people who evolved together in the same environment, for purposes of studies. But thats an idealised situation, and not feasible in the black american population, or indeed the white american population. There isnt enough internal division within these groups to have prevented far too much mixing for them to be divided up into separate groups. You can still get a reasonably good understanding of biology's impact on group dynamics based on racial categories which inspite of what you claim, do have biological validity. It is still perfectly possible to control for environmental factors with people categorised as black and white, and see that IQ gaps still persist, and therefore conclude that blacks, on average, are not as intelligent as whites. To say we dont have perfect data therefore should draw no conclusions from the sizeable body of data we do have is silly. You can never gather perfect data. Astronomers dont say they will ignore all the empirical data they gather with a telescope, because the telescope could always theoretically have a higher resolution.

And you still havent really addressed the point I was making here:

Even if you were to analyse group differences using specific and homogeneous groups, if it were found that there were socially important differences, the left would still insist the data was racist, the causes were environmental, the categories were still not valid, and the races were still equal in every way. So white people would still be blamed for black failures, whether responsible or not. You know this as well as I do. I am not aying you personally would, but the findings would still not be acceptable in mainstream discourse. Hence, the squabbling over the validity of the categories black and white really is skirting the central issue that many people will blindly believe in absolute racial equality, regardless of evidence to the contrary.

Like it or not, there is a substantial difference between the rates at which blacks default on loans and whites default on loans, a profit maximising company cannot simply ignore this. And actually, economic circumstance is not the key here. Black people are still more financially risky, even controlling for income.

http://www.vdare.com/sailer/100620_mortgage_meltdown.htm

"We also find that race has an independent effect on foreclosure even after controlling for borrower income and credit score. In particular, African American borrowers were 3.3 times as likely as white borrowers to be in foreclosure, whereas Latino and Asian borrowers were 2.5 and 1.6 times respectively more likely to be in foreclosure as white borrowers."

Now you mention other variables, such as relatives, but how is a bank supposed to collect and verify this kind of data? People do not secure loans against their relatives. The fact of the matter is, even after controlling for the socioeconomic data that they can feasibly acquire, banks still find that blacks are far riskier to lend to. As for education and job skills, these will be reflected in the income of the individual, and banks still find blacks riskier even after controlling for income.

No, the banks are not identifying the likelihood of the applicant being a victim of racism, they are identifying which groups are more risky to loan to even after controlling for all other collectable information.

You may not like the consequences of this, but to expect banks to behave irrationally and ignore information in a way which will hurt their profits simply to be politically correct is silly.

As I have shown, black people are riskier to lend to even after controlling for economic factors. They will therefore have a hard time getting loans, and the idea that this wont lead to their overrepresentation with regard to high risk category housing loans is silly. If you find it harder to get loans, you will be more likely to persue higher interest mortgages that are easier to acquire. And with regard to the misrepresentation of the risk to the financial markets, this doesnt mean the blacks who took out the mortgages were being defrauded; they knew the interest rates of the mortages they were taking out, and their own ability to pay for those mortgages. It was only the financial markets which were decieved, when subprime debt was repackaged and passed off as far lower risk debt than it actually was.

 

The problem is that "all evidence" in this case is a dubious collection of trivia and garbage, and it is completely unreasonable to conclude anything from it.

And no, the African groups are not "biologically mixed to a high degree" in the US. Some of them have little or no US representation at all, some are more evenly mixed with whites, browns, and reds, than other blacks, and so forth.

Inability to get good data is not a reason to base conclusions on bad data. We see that when you have better data, suddenly its inappropriate to group by sociological race - that's a clue.

Of course. That's why the Oromo should not be grouped with the San or Zulu at the very beginning of your research, as part of the organization of your data collection, for example. See my exaggerated analogy involving rabbits and koalas, above.

I am sorry if accurately description of the current physical state of affairs sounds like a closed mind, to you. But that is another clue to the nature of your approach, which needs changing.

In the places where IQ tests are informative, someone with an IQ below 70 is incapable of normal social functioning. They could not, as most people in Africa can, feed and clothe themselves, find their way home from other places, and so forth. So your IQ test there is obviously unreliable, grossly off target in its evaluations. You'd best get data from some less obviously compromised source.

I don't care. It's irrelevant.

No, it's not. It's the basic, necessary base for the kind of research you claim has already been done, to support the kinds of conclusions you pretend to be drawing from evidence.

Now you are just engaged in bigoted speculation, typical of the wingnut and racist right.

Do that, and see. And meanwhile quit pretending you already have done that, because you have not.

example:

On the one hand you admit that banks are not making their decisions based on the relevant data, on the other you use their behavior as evidence for biologically based "race" inequalities. Did they target blacks for fraud based on observations of their biology? Or instead is your use of comparative foreclosure rates based on utterly invalid assumptions?

This kind of slippery, agenda driven inconsistency pervades your entire argument. You seem to have no idea how deeply corrupted your conclusions are, by being based on an a priori division of humans according to sociological race in the US.

Look, just one tiny bit of side info: no thorough study of inherent or genetic components of IQ in the US as a whole has been corrected for differential exposure to lead in childhood. We know that sociological race correlates with lead exposure in childhood. We know that lead exposure in childhood lowers IQ for life. So no thorough study of inherent or genetic components of IQ in the US can be used to establish a biological origin, other than lead exposure, for any correlations with sociological race - the factor has never been filtered out.

And that's just one.

 

Its not trivia and garbage, the data is collected from representative samples of thousands in many cases, far more rigorous research than any research to the contrary that you have pointed out. Granted, that wouldnt take much, because you havent actually referenced any evidence at all. Plus, all of these studies have been published in academic journals, who are not in the business of routinely publishing "trivia and garbage". Though I suspect you expect me to take your unsupported opinion above the view of respected academic journals.

You are simply dismissing data because it doesnt indicated what you would like to be true. You say data should be collected on specific african groups, and when I point out that such data has been collected, and it finds that there is a high degree of uniformity with regard to IQ, you dismiss it as garbage, without giving any account of what is wrong with it.

I am not saying all of africa is represented in black americans equally, I am saying that of those african descended people in america, they are highly mixed. And the average racial admixture in america is around 20%, so it is still predominantly african ancestry.

But it isnt bad data, it uses large representative samples of black americans, who, inspite of what you like to think, are not a purely sociological category. No matter how many times you deny it, a category cannot be purely sociological if its members can be identified from purely NONE sociological information. In any case, the inability to acquire perfect data IS a good reason to use the best available data. What youre arguing is that if the data isnt perfect, you should remain willfully ignorant and draw no conclusions at all from the available evidence. If researchers had that attitude, they would never discover anything. There is no such thing as perfect data. And the fact that the racial category would be rendered obselete by more specfic data that happens to be unobtainable is not a reason to say that in the absence of such data, you shouldnt use the best available.

Satelites data renders obselete older meteorological techniques, does that mean the older meteorological techniques should have simply been ignored and not used prior to the invention of the satelite? That is the equivalent of what you are arguing. If useful knowledge can be extracted from data, it should be used unless you have a better source, and we dont.

But the point you are missing is the fact that they can be distinguished using biological alone from white people is solid proof of the fact that the categories black and white have consistent differences between them, therefore it is a valid biological distinction. As I said in my very first post, neither europeans or africans are homogeneous, but europeans have more in common with other europeans and africans with other africans, than europeans do with africans, hence why members of these two groups can be distinguished from each other by biological data. Therefore, whatever the internal variation, it is still valid to compare the biological differences between europeans and africans.

Its not an accurate "description of the current physical state of affairs"; its unsupported nonesense, which you havent once even attempted to show evidence for. I have given you an article that presents a huge ammount of evidence from multiple different sources, all of which point to the same conclusion that there is a full standard deviations difference separating black and white IQs, IQ being predictive of a large range of socially important outcomes, and crucially, it is just as predictive of those outcomes for blacks as it is for whites. So to try and claim therefore that you saying skin colour is "by far the dominant" difference between the races is absurd.

You making unsupported claims in the face of contrary evidence does not suggest that my approach "needs changing".

And if you believe that skin colour is by far the most important difference between the races, then you do believe that races must be virtually identical. Afterall, skin colour simply isnt that important in modern society when we can easily guard against sun exposure, so for it to be by far the most important difference, it must presumably be true that traits like intelligence, which actually matter, must vary only trivially if at all. That being said, it then begs the question, what good reason is there to assume that human populations that have evolved apart should have proven to have evolved identically or near identically with regard to intelligence?

Yes but you are referring to the IQ of people who are mentally retarded. That is not the way to look at the IQ of a population whose average is at that level, because their intelligence clearly is not caused by discreet mental disorders in the same when that mental retardness is. It makes alot more sense to compare their mental capabilities to those of an ordinary 11 or 12 year old, with no particular mental disorder. The average IQ of that age group if they were judged according to adult norms would be around 70.

That may sound patronising, but if you think about it, it is not that implausable. The large majority of subsaharan africa did not progress beyond simple hunter gatherer societies prior to the intervention of other racial groups, and where other racial groups have withdrawn from an area, the african population in the majority of cases is incapable of maintaining any advanced infrastructure that has been built, and it falls into disrepair, and when white farmers have been replaced by black farmers in africa, the farms nearly always stop producing at anything like the levels they used to.

There is no task or activity that is performed in a simple hunter gatherer society that would be beyond the intellectual capabilities of an average 12 year old. That is not to say that average 12 year olds have the necessary social maturity, experience and physical prowess to successfully run a hunter gatherer society, but they do have the raw intellectual capability, because none of the tasks, from hunting, to carfting to tools and homes, to cooking, actually require any great depth of thought or understanding of any great degree of complexity. Indeed, there are plenty of functional white people whose raw cognative ability does not develope much beyond 12 years of age. So your claim that what the average african does day in day out in africa disproves the claim that the average IQ of the continent is 70 isnt really true.

I accept that the provision of full time education up to 16 and better nutrition could boost scores somewhat (though better nutrition would be a rise in real intelligence, not just test taking ability, so IQ supression from malnutrition represents a supression of real intelligence), however, the average IQ of 70 is far from wildly implausable as a reflection on real intelligence. Controlling for environmental factors besides nutrition (as that affects real intelligence) I doubt would boost the average IQ scores of africans much higher than 75. Moreover, a naturally lower level of intelligence will tend to lead africans to create environmental conditions harmful to intellectual developement, so biological and environmental factors are mutually reinforcing.

You arent answering the question because you know you have NO good answer. If you did you would say it. And you know perfectly well it is not irrelevant. If the environmental explanation for the IQ gap hinges on racially discrimination, then the environmental explanation needs to explain why groups that have been the victims of very serious discrimination like the Jews arent performing significantly worse than whites, but instead signigficantly better.

Well like I say, I, unlike you, have actually given some evidence, so I can perfectly legitimately claim to be drawing my conclusions from the evidence. I see the evidence related to transracial adoptions, to jews and north east asians, rich black households versus poor white households, to regression to the mean, and even to racial variations in skull size found in data collected from the army for the purpose of fitting helmets (north east asians have larger skulls than whites, who in turn have larger than blacks), so it cannot be accused of racial bias because it wasnt collected with the intention of racial comparissons, and in every case I see that the environmentalist explanation is wholly inadequate. I started the thread hoping I might here some compelling arguments as to why we should expect the races to have evolved equally, you have actually admitted there is no such reason, or to see some compelling evidence presented to demonstrate racial equality, and ive seen no evidence at all, let alone compelling.

As for saying that an unobtainable standard of evidence is a basic necessity to be able to draw any conclusions at all, that is nonesense as Ive already said. There is no great variation between different black groups in IQ when it is measured, and in order for blacks as a whole to have an IQ 15 points lower than whites, necessarily the majority of specific african groups must also have a significantly lower IQ that whites, at least those represented in the black american population. It is therefore perfectly possible to argue that the reason why blacks overall perform worse than whites, may at least in part be caused by a natural difference in overall intelligence.

How is it bigotted to point out that the left insist on racial equality in the face of overhwhelming contrary evidence and when evolutionary reasoning alone would predict racial inequality even independant of evidence?

I could equally say you are engaging in the attacks on personal character entirely typical of leftwing morons who know they have no hope of winning a debate on the basis of fact and reasoned argument. It would be no worse an argument or any greater a cheap pot shot.

So you expect me to conduct my own research on the average IQ of every african nation? Thats a very reasonable demand. In any case, I do not need to for 2 reasons. Firstly, it has already been done and as ive said about half a dozen times, the results are of high african uniformity with regard to IQ. Secondly, the claim that all or most of the african populations studied independantly will have lower average IQs than the white population (I didnt actually originally assert that, but simply said if it was true, you would still say the data must be wrong) is self evidently true, because blacks as a whole have lower IQs than whites, so in order for the category to have a lower average than whites, most or all of the members of that category must also have lower averages than whites, else they wouldnt score worse than whites overall.

 

No, it isn't.

For one thing, that isn't true - the biological data just assign them a geographical area and a set of relatives. For the racial classification you have to refer to the society whose classification scheme you are - for some reason - adopting. The San might very well assign the Zulu and the Dutch to the same race, and themselves to another, for example - and they could easily find biological differences in correlation. Why not use their system?

For another, your logic is backwards - the differences should be classified first, and then an examination made to see if categories we can usefully label "black" and "white" afterwards fall out.

It is the defining difference in the sociological classification. It is your classification criterion. If you don't like it, drop the sociological races as your classification scheme.

Most people can see a significant difference between the way different sociological races, religions, and other groups, have been treated in the US. Those who can't see any relevant differences between a group often accused of owning all the banks and a group normally and coercively housed next to any local source of toxic waste after 250 years of slavery, may be puzzled about the issue - but I don't know how to help them.

The right way to look at an IQ test that scores competent and successful mainstream adults in a society as mentally retarded, as mentally equivalent to people who cannot tie their shoes, is that it is not giving us useful information.

Complete bullshit. Farming and pastoral societies dominated Africa, metallurgy was common, large towns and cities were built, hunter gatherer societies lived in the forest and desert regions.

You can't do stats either. No surprise.

I expect you to quit drawing invalid conclusions from garbage "data", and recognize that you have none of the evidence that you need to support your assertions.

 

I never said that banks were not making decisions on relevant data. They make their decisions on the basis of all the relevant data available to them, inlcuding race, which is relevant data because it has a powerful independant affect; even controlling for income and credit rating, black people are 3.3 times as likely to default on payments. What I actually said was that banks could not account for data such as relatives to lend support a) because you cannot verify or collect this data as a bank and b) there is no saying that relatives will pay out anyway, they will have no obligation to do so. You dont secure your loans against your relatives.

Also, you will note I never once claimed that the cause of this difference was biological in origin. Lower intelligence probably doesnt help with financial management, but I am willing to accept that environmental factors may play a powerful role, thoough that is by no means to say those factors are the fault of white people. it could easily be failings in their own culture, such as culture that celebrates profligate, conspicuous spending ie. "bling". The only difference I have claimed to be very overwhelmingly genetic is the IQ gap, and even that only as measured in western societies. I have also argued that this plays a significant contributing role in the gaps in other social outcomes, but by no means the exclusive role.

And i have also already said that as black people knew the interest of the mortgages they were taking out, as well as their own finincial circumstances they were NOT the victims of fraud with regard to subprime mortages, that is a stupid thing to say.

What exactly is my agenda? When I have challenged you on your previous pathetic accusations of white supremacism, you were curiously quiet when I pointed out that claiming whites were the third most intelligent group doesnt really fit the bill of white supremacism.

Of course, ignoring inconvenient facts is something of a specialty of yours it seems.

You seem to have no idea how incapable you are of even examining compelling evidence out of a refusal to accept a difference in intelligence between black and white people, when you yourself cannot provide any good reason to believe they should be equal, therefore insist that the data is iredeemably faulty, even with overwhelming evidence to the contrary. You still havent explained how racial categories with no biological validity can be distinguished from exclusively biological data. You still havent explained why we find a 15 point IQ gap between supposedly purely sociological categories, A GAP WHICH IS COMPLETELY UNDIMINISHED EVEN WHEN YOU CONTROLL VERY HEAVILY FOR SOCIOLOGICAL FACTORS. Please enlighten me, if not biological in nature, how can the black white IQ gap not even be slightly dimished by transracial adoption, which heavily controlls for all the major socioeconomic differences that exist between these supposedly purely sociological categories.

Its not that you are simply drawing different conclusions from the evidence, you simply refuse to look at it, assuming a priori it must be wrong. Even with regard to data collected by specific region in africa, something you said would repetedly would make comparissons a valid exercise, you dismissed as "garbage", without even looking at it yourself, something I know for a fact, because you didnt even know it was contained within the journal article i linked, inspite of the fact that a clear reference was made to it on the fourth line of the said article. No, you just dismissed it out of hand, because you didnt like the fact that it showed, contrary to your insistence that africa was completely heterogeneous, that with regard to IQ at least, africa was hihgly homogeneous.

Except that the "sociological" races are not correlated with lead exposure in every country. Yet the black white IQ gap is the same in every western society, regardless of lead exposure. Moreover, the dangers of lead have been acknowledged for many decades now, and preventative measures have been put in place accordingly. No narrowing of the IQ gap has resulted from this.

 

Because the zulu have more in common biologically with the san, than the san have with the dutch. So it would make no sense for them to categorise themselves as different from the san but the dutch as the same. Frankly, im getting tired of repeating the exact same argument on this topic which you never actually attempt to refute, so ill just repost:

"But the point you are missing is the fact that they can be distinguished using biological information alone from white people is solid proof of the fact that the categories black and white have consistent differences between them, therefore it is a valid biological distinction. As I said in my very first post, neither europeans or africans are homogeneous, but europeans have more in common with other europeans and africans with other africans, than europeans do with africans, hence why members of these two groups can be distinguished from each other by biological data. Therefore, whatever the internal variation, it is still valid to compare the biological differences between europeans and africans."

You have still yet to explain how a category can be purely sociological if its members can be indentified without reference to ANY sociological data, nor have you explained how it can be completely non biological if its members can be identified by purely biological data.

Yet again, you simply ignore what you cant explain.

The races are defined in the first instance by their differences, some of them social, some of them obviously biological, like skin colour, and common ancestry. Blacks may not be biologically homogeneous, but they share more common ancestry with each other than they do with europeans, a point you repeatedly ignore. As such, making comparrisons between the groups is valid.

As an analogy, there are large differences between horses and humans. But horses and humans have alot more in common with each other than fish, so it is a perfectly legitimate exercise to compare mammals with fish, whatever the internal variations within these groups.

Skin colour may be the defining trait races, I never disputed that, but it is NOT "by far the dominant one" as you claimed. (did you just concede that the races, which you claimed to be purely sociological are defined by a biological trait by the way?) And as you have conceded that the races are defined by a biological trait, why would you assume those same races to be biologically identical with regard to intelligence. Oh wait I forget youre not assuming it, youll just dismiss all the evidence which indicates they do differ out of hand.

And again we are back to discrimination. What was your explanation for why the victims of the holocaust outperform whites by a large margin again?

Oh yes, you said it wasnt relevant.

The frequency with which you churn out this same argument in one guise or another, no matter how often it gets discredited by the hard fact that some groups that have suffered serious discrimination do infact perform better than whites not worse (for which you give no explanation at all, dismissing it as irrelevant), is truly remarkable. No matter how obviously this argument fails to explain all the observations, indeed, makes predictions that are the exact opposite of what is actually the case, you still cannot bring yourself to admit that its wrong. But, as with everything else it seems, if the evidence doesnt fit what you would like to be true, you ignore it.

Environment accounts for the IQ gap - Transracial adoptions show no significant narrowing of the IQ gap - ignored

Racism accounts for the IQ gap - Jews and east asians score higher than whites - ignored

Racial categories are purely sociological and have no biological validity - Races are defined by the biological trait of skin colour (by your own admission), and members can be identified without any reference to sociological information, indeed using only biological information such as DNA, blood type or skeletal structure - ignored

The data is "garbage" because it uses to broad categories - Data collected using precisely the specific group categories you kept insisting on show that there is no great variation in IQ between different blacks, and that the IQ is uniformly significantly below the white average, regardless of which region of africa the data is collected from - ignored

IQ tests are predictive of virtually every important social outcome, and are the single best indicators of job performance of all but the most menial jobs, and even then have a 20% correlation, which isnt trivial. But I suppose yes, youre right, its not useful information if all it predicts is crime, earnings, academic success, drug addiction, single parenthood, divorce, produtivity, levels of political participation and so on, and predicts most of these things far better than parental socioeconomic status.

To quote you "complete bullshit". But if you wish to invent history, or are stupid enough to believe afrocentracist propaganda, which I have heard variously claim that blacks built the pyramids, and africa developed maths, the early jet engine and computers, then a serious discussion isnt likely to occur.

The majority of humans in subsaharan africa were not in large towns and cities. This is a region that didnt develope literacy or even the wheel. And unlike the egyptians, they did not have the fact that a wheel would be useless in the desert for an excuse.

There were some areas that built up beyond hunter gatherer tribes, hence why I only said the majority, but the majority of africans did not progress beyond a very primitive existance, hence why they were so easily overcome by the arabs and europeans.

If you are going to be a smart arsed idiot, then at least do it by making a point with real bite. If you have any basic grasp of mathematics, then you would know that with any reasonable values, that statement must be true. Yes technically, you could have the majority of africans smarter than whites and still have them average 85. But if say two thirds of blacks average an IQ of 105, (which is neither a huge majority, nor a large ammount above the white average) in order for the average to be 85 overall, the remaining thrid would have to have an IQ averaging 45. So yes, in the realms of the remotely plausable, to obtain an average of 85, you necessarily have to have the majority of the specific african groups that make up the black population average below the white average in terms of IQ. You cannot plausibly have less than a majority of black subgroups with an IQ below the white average and still have an overall average of 85.

At the very minimum, you could have 51% of africans with an IQ of exactly 100, the white average, and still have a majority not less intelligent than whites. But this would still require the remaining 49% to have an IQ just below 70 to give an average of 85, a 30 point gap.And as i say, the data from africa indicates that there isnt even close to this level of variation. So does my claim still seem so ridiculous?

Calling data published in respected journals garbage without having even examined it is moronic. Calling the conclusions drawn from it invalid, without even knowing what the evidence is, is equally moronic.

Tell me, how is the data that showed that average IQs across africa all clustered around 70 garbage, when this data was collected with regard to specific groups of africans, as you are constantly banging on about?

Like I said, several posts ago, the issue of categories is a complete red herring. Regardless of what categories are used, you will refuse to accept any data which shows sizeable differences in IQ. the fact that you refuse to accept the results even when they use the categories you specifically demanded shows this.

 

Also iceaura, it is notable that the great majority of what I write in each post you simply ignore, inspite of it being in direct response to the points you raise, and all relevant to the discussion.

You instead cherry pick quotes out of context to misrepresent my arguments, and then make argue against the selectively chosen quotes, with lines of reasoning that are actually refuted by the large chunks of text you choose to leave out.

In other words, you are dodging the arguments I actually make, and simply misrepresent what I say and take issue with that instead.

A prime example of this is the very last point you mae in your last post.

You selectively quoted the following:

"So you expect me to conduct my own research on the average IQ of every african nation? "

And replied:

"I expect you to quit drawing invalid conclusions from garbage "data", and recognize that you have none of the evidence that you need to support your assertions."

The full quote was:

"So you expect me to conduct my own research on the average IQ of every african nation? Thats a very reasonable demand. In any case, I do not need to for 2 reasons. Firstly, it has already been done and as ive said about half a dozen times, the results are of high african uniformity with regard to IQ. Secondly, the claim that all or most of the african populations studied independantly will have lower average IQs than the white population (I didnt actually originally assert that, but simply said if it was true, you would still say the data must be wrong) is self evidently true, because blacks as a whole have lower IQs than whites, so in order for the category to have a lower average than whites, most or all of the members of that category must also have lower averages than whites, else they wouldnt score worse than whites overall."

You pretend that when I say that I cannot be reasonably expected to conduct IQ tests in every region of africa (as you recommended I do - "Do that, and see. And meanwhile quit pretending you already have done that, because you have not" - your telling me to gather data from every region of africa) this means I have no basis on which to claim that african IQ is uniformly lower than whites, and then deliberately leave out what immediately follows this which points out such tests already HAVE been done and find high degrees of uniformity in african IQ regardless of where it is tested, and that the scores are all substantially below the european average. And further, even if there was significant variation in the scores (which there isnt) it still stands to reason that the majority of individual african groups must score lower than whites in order for the african average to be so much lower (barring huge variation in the scores, which like I say, the evidence flatly contradicts).

 

Yes you did. Your argument is biological. reread your posts, and catalogue the data the banks use, none of it biological, according to you (according to me, the banks were picking fraud targets - I posted a link, and you can read the court documents in the various trials for yourself - but the data was from the same pool of social circumstances)

Then why did you post it? What argument are you trying to make here?

My argument is somewhat different. I am claiming that "black people", as an evolutionary lineage or group, do not exist. I am claiming that several evolutionary lineages of human being have melanistic skin, and that the a priori odds (plus the evidence we have) are that some of them are more closely related (genetically) to some yellow, red, or white people than they are to various other groups of black people.

Several courts of law have ruled otherwise, and more lawsuits are pending - some of them "class action".

As you appear to be honestly confused in this matter, some more detail: "Steering" people into bad loan types when they qualify for better, fraudulent appraisals of property, dishonest assurances of refinancing opportunities, deliberately confusing legal language in documents, bait and switch tactics for pressure selling financial products, and similar techniques of fraud (these are crimes) work on white people too - it's just that black people have less access to honest and competent legal or financial help, tend to be in more desperate housing circumstances after the last couple of decades of economic trends, have less education and lower literacy levels, and have less generational, family, or personal experience with banking and lending large sums of money. They made good targets, and companies like Countrywide deliberately targeted them.

If someone tells me that the average IQ of all tribes and groups of Africans, individually and collectively, uniformly across the continent, is 70, how much further do I have to look? IQ tests are famously unrelaible outside their designed application, and that result is ridiculous.

The US sociological races do not even exist in every country. So?

No one has studied that - you couldn't possibly know.

They haven't taken care of the problem - the lead exposure differential still exists, right now, in children.

Your opinion. The San have a different opinion. The DNA analysis tends to agree with the San, in this particular instance. http://www.physorg.com/news185644363.html

Talking "race"? They can't. All identification by race is sociological, strictly - no one can be identified by "race" without reference to a sociological classification - you seem to prefer the US one, for some reason.

And I will keep on churning it out as long as you bring irrelevancies into this discussion. No group other than sociological black people has been treated as those people have been and are being treated, and so you have to account for that difference in environment - which holds even with adoption and the like, btw - before you can draw conclusions about genetic factors. You have not begun to do that - which is OK, neither has anyone else.

Then you have to deal with the genetic factors independently of the sociological race. No one has done that either.

Yeah - uniformly 70. The only thing we learn from that is that there are serious problems with the test used.

They didn't even correct for environment - malnutrition, childhood disease prevalence and kind, parental care features. C'mon.

As I said: farmers and pastoralists, rural, small towns and river bank communities. Not hunter gatherers. People like this, for example: http://africa.si.edu/exhibits/resources/mali/index.htm

"Excuse"? The agenda leaks through again.

The ones in the northeastern and northern irrigation communities had writing and arithmetic - but you probably wanted to rule them out as not "subsaharan". They were black, though, as far as we know. Several groups smelted iron - before Europeans figured it out. And yes, there are fair odds that the people who built the pyramids were "black", in the US sociological classification system.

The wheel is not much good without the draft animal and the road, btw - no one without pulling animals and a temperate climate on flat ground used wheels, historically, even if they did invent them (as the South Americans did, for chilren's toys).

The statement you made was about groups, not majority of one group. And it was invalid, as an inference, for reasons directly relevant to the argument you were attempting to make.

Look: you have no argument here, and your apparent view of black people, their history and circumstances, is sheer ignorance out of some kind of racist group's pamphlets or website. Step back: what are you trying to argue, and why?

 

1. Evolution of humans can not be evaluated only by nature/biology:

Even if you come up with numbers showing that some group of people present different scores on some tests, and even if you claim that these differences have certain concentration on genetic pool (biologic indicators), still we have a problem: Human evolution, unlike other creatures, do not depend uniquely on natural surroundings. That is to say, if you take social reasons out of equations, the meaning and implications of these biological differences doesn’t make sense. Because the evolution of human beings, especially talent and intelligence related areas, depends on what kind of civilization they are living in, what sort of family background, nutrition opportunities, culture, challenges/tasks, available education throughout generations.

If we can improve IQ scores of a group of people via changing their social surrounding dramatically, that means only one thing: Biology is only the reflection of our social policy. If your claim was categorically correct, no matter how hard we try, we couldn’t improve average IQ of group of people via social modifications. If we can do that, I mean if we can change IQ scores through social changes, your claim simply collapses. You have to prove that no matter how much we improve the conditions, IQ level will not increase within three or more generations.

Questions: Can you do that? Can you show us if black, Asian or other populations will never reach the IQ level of white people? And not only that, can you also prove that if we change the social conditions of white people for three or more generations, their overall IQ scores will not drop dramatically?

2. The word Race doesn’t produce same meaning for humans as it does for other creatures of nature:

The main reason of this is simply because we can not pinpoint the dynamics of race among humans as we can do for other animals/living things. Why? Again because of our complex relations among each other as well as with the rest of the nature. Even the simple so called “natural necessities” such as available nutrition, sheltering, security which plays determinant roles in IQ development is highly politicised for humans. It is practically impossible to isolate any single biological difference from its political background.

Only one example: Last 500 years, European policies colonised and segregated certain geographies of the planet and its human population according to skin colour and intentionally prevented them from accessing same opportunities as they benefited. Who can claim that what Europeans did was “natural”? I think it was highly political, cultural and social. Just as politics can change the entire chemistry of eco-system, it is able to affect the IQ level of group of people. After all 500 years of systematic selection and oppressing policies it would be amazing if we didn’t see any change whatsoever between two different groups of people in terms of scoring some tests. Still, after all those years, if we improve the life standards of subject groups with some policy change, we can improve their average IQ level. This is what you call “positive discrimination”:

It is extremely misleading and ignorant way to isolate certain percentage (of genes, of IQ scores) without questioning the dynamics behind these numbers.

Questions: Can you prove that IQ indicators of a group of people without political, social and cultural background of these results? What does “biological differences” actually mean when it comes to understanding of underlying reasons behind these differences? Is it a scientific way to focus on certain numbers but not mentioning the causing effects?

3- Using biology as an excuse for racial selection is an arbitrary, dangerous and misleading parameter if we take only one side of reality:

I brought you two perspectives: One was we share same human DNA, the second one was everybody is different. You denied both of them to make your race case more visible, important and worthy to focus on. If you ignore the similarity between human gene pool your “similarity” claim among white people and among black people are equally ignorable. What makes you think that common DNA and common origin of humans are non-sense while community of your selective group of people are important? What makes your biological/genetic similarities of a group more valuable than the biological/genetic similarities of entire human species? Why should we take your similarities important and worth to think about while we dismiss other similarities (among all humans, among women, among sub-groups of white people, among musicians, among old people, among this or among that)? What makes your similarities distinctive among other similarities? I’ll tell you what: Politics. It has nothing to do with biology.

“Differences” is also same story: You dismissed the individual differences between people. On what basis? You already accepted that black females have more similarities to white female than black men. Yet you found it unimportant as human females share similarities to chimpanzee females. What makes your “racial” differences more important than gender differences? On what basis individual human differences are less important when it comes to racial differences? If two groups of people or two individuals are genetically “different”, what makes one type of biological difference more important than other type of difference? IQ? What they produce? Talent? What are the racial determinants of these elements? Aren’t they arbitrary themselves? Who will decide one type of biological difference makes more sense than other types of biological differences? Banks? Universities? Governments? I’ll tell you what: Politics. Nothing else but overall human politics that employ one type of difference over others.

Overall, “similarities” as well as “differences” among human populations can be found on DNA level. Yet both can be grouped depending on arbitrary political choice, play of difference, linguistic terminology; just to create and favour a group while creating and dismissing other. Biology or science has nothing to do with it.

Questions: What are we going to do with mixed raced people? How are we going to separate or combine them? According to which biological/genetic criteria? Or do you suggest that we should never allow people to get mixed with one another?

 

With regard to fraud, you have repetedly ignored my point that it cannot have been fraud as all of the relevant information was available to the black people who took out mortages, they knew the interest rates, and their own earnings. It is not fraud.

I never said that blacks defaulting on loans was a biological disposition, just that race had a significant independant effect. You havent been able to refute this, nor explain why it would make any sense for banks to ignore race if this is the case.

It was a response to spidergoat who cited it as racism, Simply corrected him saying that they didnt do it out of any dislike of black people, but purely because it made economic sense. I didnt raise the issue initially.

My argument is somewhat different. I am claiming that "black people", as an evolutionary lineage or group, do not exist. I am claiming that several evolutionary lineages of human being have melanistic skin, and that the a priori odds (plus the evidence we have) are that some of them are more closely related (genetically) to some yellow, red, or white people than they are to various other groups of black people.

Except of course, the reason why black people are targetted for high interest mortgages is because they are riskier even after controlling for economic factors, 3.3 times as risky. And you cannot say that is due to fraud, because even if given a bad offer (i still maintain the banks have perfectly good grounds for idnetifying blacks as riskier and charging higher rates accordingly) they still would have known if they could afford the mortgage or not. Also, if it is true that they are more likely to default even with the same income, what has legal advice got to do with it? They have the same income, they can buy the same advice.

How is the result ridiculous? you still havent explained how day to day the average black african demonstrates an ability to grapple with more academically demanding activities that the average 12 year old.

And I never said all individual scores are 70. I said all the average scores, regardless of which region clustered around 70 and showed little deviation, the bush people of the kalahari being the only group that is markedly lower.

Simply saying a result is ridiculous doesnt make it so, and you have not explained why it is ridiculous.

Except that the categories of black and white do exist in every western society, and if lead was the cause, you would not expect it have an uniform impact accross every country, because many african immigrants arrived in europe after the dangers of lead were recognised and saftey precautions taken. No difference in the IQ gap. Nor any difference to black children's IQ when raised in an affluent white household. Are they too suffering from lead poisoning?

Basically, the lead explanation is totally inadequate to explain the black white IQ gap, as with every other environmental explanation you have offered.

Yes they most defintely have. The IQ gap is found to be 15 points in every western society. The history of lead exposure is not the same in every country, and many african migrants have arrived after exposure to lead was cut out, with no difference in outcome. Nor has it improved the black scores of africans born after these preventative measures. It doesnt take a specific study to discover whether or not lead has an impact, if you see no change in the IQ gap, after preventative measures have been introduced. If there was a sudden closure of the gap after such measures, then a study may have been warrented. But plenty of environmentalist researchers who want to show the races to be equal are about, and none of them have bothered with any such study, that should tell you something.

And as for your claim that they havent dealt with the problem, I can assure you, in england they have. We have saftey measures introduced for precisely that purpose.

The article claimed that the different africans had less in common genetically with each other than europeans and asians. It did not say that they had more in common with with europeans than other africans.

This isnt really a very profound point. There are three broad groupings of human biological groups, negriods, caucasoids, and mongoloids. Europeans and south asians are both caucasoids. The fact that 2 negroid groups are more different than 2 caucasoid groups doesnt disprove that negroids do not have more in common with each other than caucasoids. And europeans specifically will be even more homogeneous than simply caucasoids. So I still dont see how you have show that black white comparissons are untenable.

And as I have already said, different black groups are heterogeneous, and if there are some attributes they are very disimilar in, then it wouldnt be appropriate to stick them in a single grouping. This is not the case with regard to IQ however.

Labelling europeans as white and africans as black is not specific to the US, it is used everwhere. And the IQ gap is found to be the same in every western society, where the large environmental factors found in africa are greatly diminished.

Yes, but other groups have been discriminated against. Lets say that ani-black discrimination must have been the worst, fine, then they would perform the worst. However, the victims of the holocaust, or the japanese imprisoned during the war, should also have worse IQ scores than whites, even if not as bad as blacks, if your discrimination explanation is to be believed.

You still cannot explain why jews and north east asians perform BETTER than whites.

Yes, because we cannot identify as yet which specific gene does what. That does not mean we should ignore the large body of evidence available to us that indicates genetic IQ gap between africans an europeans that is remarkably consistent.

You still havent given any explanation why the average of 70 is so implausable. Name one activity the average african does which requires a depth of thought or complexity that is beyond a 12 year old? And why do they consistently fail to maintain all but the most basic infrastructure when left to their own devices?

Well its difficult to correct for malnutrition when so few white people are malnourished. But we do know from transracial adoptions

And if you read my previous posts, you would have know I already said such envrionmental factors probably play a significant factor in lowering the IQ 15 points below blacks in the west.

Thats a nice example, but again i didnt say all of africa, just the majority Your link doesnt disprove that. The bottom line is, africa was found in a very primative state relative to either the europeans, arabs, south asians, orientals, and so on. There is nothing about their achievements that disproves an appriciably lower natural intelligence.

Yep, that agenda that you have still yet to define, beyond white supremacism. Though you still havent explained why I claim jews and north east asians to be smarter if this is so.

And I am not even sure why you are seizzing on the word excuse as though that somehow indicates a dislike of black people. My only point was that in egypt, the absence of the wheel made perfectly good sense because a primative wheel does not function well in a desert.

North eastern africa? You mean like egypt? No, they werent black, look at the artwork. Where black people are depicted, it is as slaves, not the ruling elite.

Saying the pyramids were built by blacks (you say fair odds, very compelling) is a pure afrocentracist claim. It is the kind of nonesense spouted by louis farakhan. It is however, flatly contraditcted by the egyptian artwork.

You say they were black as far as we knew, but point to no evidence. But what we do actually know is that the areas that you have described as being most advanced are the areas of africa where there are substantial non negroid or non black populations. Doubtless coincidental I am sure.

Literacy was also useless I presume. And in any case, the wheel is far from useless even without animals to pull carts. its far easier to transport with the wheel even if it is humans pulling. Ever heard of that space age piece of technology called the wheelbarrow? That would have been even more useful in africa than europe if they had no animals to haul for them.

No, my statement was that in order for the overall black average to be 85, the averages of the constituent african groups must be all or mostly less than the white average of 100, barring huge variation in the IQ scores between the individual african groups, which the research in africa shows isnt the case. You havent explained how this is wrong.

It is not sheer ignorance and it is not off a racist groups website. the article I linked was published in a respected academic journal. And there is nothing ignorant about pointing out that the black and white group differences in IQ are not significantly diminished by controlling for any environmental factors. That is a statement of fact, and your refusal to acknowledge it is what is ingorant, wilfully ignorant.

As for my motive, I said in my first post, I want there to be a serious discussion about the implications of evolution on geographically isolated populations, rather than implementing important social policies on the assumption that there is no important biological variation between humans from any region of the world.

I have focussed in particular on the evidence that shows that the black white IQ gap, which would account for underrepresntation in highly skilled jobs, is genetic not environmental (if you want me to believe otherwise, explain regression to the mean, explain rich blacks versus poor whites, explain transracial adoptions, explain differences found in skull size from army data for fitting helmets and so on) and therefore the blanket discrimination against whites by AA is unjustified.

If you wish to defend these policies, show me the data that proves black people are equally smart as whites in average. And it is no argument to defend AA by saying that black isnt a valid category, because black is the category AA uses.

 

And iceaura, I see no attempt to defend you shameless cherry picking and misrepresntation of quotes, or your repeated evassions and point blank refusal to acknowledge incovenient evidence. Let me repeat:

"But, as with everything else it seems, if the evidence doesnt fit what you would like to be true, you ignore it.

Environment accounts for the IQ gap - Transracial adoptions show no significant narrowing of the IQ gap - ignored

Racism accounts for the IQ gap - Jews and east asians score higher than whites - ignored

Racial categories are purely sociological and have no biological validity - Races are defined by the biological trait of skin colour (by your own admission), and members can be identified without any reference to sociological information, indeed using only biological information such as DNA, blood type or skeletal structure - ignored

The data is "garbage" because it uses to broad categories - Data collected using precisely the specific group categories you kept insisting on show that there is no great variation in IQ between different blacks, and that the IQ is uniformly significantly below the white average, regardless of which region of africa the data is collected from - ignored"

 

The first point to note baftan, is that you havent replied to a single one of my rebuttals directly. Not one. I am inclined to cynical and think that maybe you havent got very many good answers to the points I made in my first reply to you.

Erm, evolution refers specifically to the genetic change in a population over time due to selective pressures. So yes, its impact can be discussed purely in terms of biology.

Now it is true that in modern society, evolution is not goverened by natural selection (though natural selection would have been the key selective pressure for most of our evolutionary history). There are more artificial factors of selection created by human society. But as societies are differ from region to region just like environment, then this fact doesnt make it any more likely we will have evolved uniformly, it makes it less likely.

Therefore, there is still good reason to believe that geagraphically isolated human populations will have evolved differently, and will be biologically different as a result.

As I have said in previous posts, transracial adoptions controll heavily for environmental factors, and it does nothing to close racial gaps in IQ.

Also, your claim that if you can adjust IQ at all through environmental factors, this would mean that biology is just a reflection of social policy is nonesense. Firstly, the genetic makeup of a population can be adjusted by social policy, but not very quickly. Biological differences are durable, and they do not simply reflect current policy. Secondly, the IQ gap can be caused by genetic and environmental factors, it probably is. But if controlling for the major environmental factors has no significant impact on the IQ gap, as transracial adoptions find, then you can reasonably conclude that the gap is substantially genetic.

Well asians arent going to reach the IQ of white people, they would have to fall to the level of white people. I have already linked a journal article in this thread that looks at ten categories of evidence, and they do not find any significant closing of the racial IQ gaps, even when environmental factors are controlled for. This very strongly indicates that if environmental factors were equalised, the gap would still be large, as even when nearly all factors are equalised very significantly, like with transracial adoptions, it makes very little difference.

I am sorry, but this is a whole load of irrelevance. Whether or not certain groups have treated other groups differently in their societies (I dont deny that they have) has absolutely no relevance to whether or not geographically isolated human popualtions would have evolved differently or not.

You still have given me no explanation as to why we should expect human populations in different regions to have evolved identically. Discriminatory treatment really isnt relevant to this.

And your claim that you cant isolate biological and environmental causes isnt really true. Transracial adotions controll for environment heavily, but biology not at all, and the racial IQ gap remains unaltered, as I have said. This implies that IQ gap is predominantly genetic. If it was predominantly environmental, transracial adoptions should greatly diminish the IQ gap, if not eliminate it entirely. They dont.

If you would care to expand on that? Researchers have tried to analyse whether the IQ gap between the races is genetic or environmental, by controlling for environmental and genetic factors. The conclusion is that the gap is predominantly genetic:

http://www.udel.edu/educ/gottfredson/30years/Rushton-Jensen30years.pdf

Yes, let me cut and paste:

"Transracial adotions controll for environment heavily, but biology not at all, and the racial IQ gap remains unaltered, as I have said. This implies that IQ gap is predominantly genetic. If it was predominantly environmental, transracial adoptions should greatly diminish the IQ gap, if not eliminate it entirely. They dont."

As for what biological differences means with regard to these differences, it means that genetic differences cause a natural difference in the average intellect between human populations from one region of the world and another.

Look, I have never advocated ignoring individual differences. Indeed I have advocated treating individuals as individuals, on the only social policy I actually discussed: positive discrimination. But you seem intent on defending this social policy, which uses racial categories, not individuals, and not the human species as one indivisible group. Therefore the only way to determine the validity of this policy is to look at the characterisitics of the racial categories. So that is how I justify using the category of race.

Your argument here is that if you want to look at racial differences, then why not look at individual differences. If you want to look at racial simarlarities, why not look at human simarlarities. Well the simple answer is that the specificity of the categories you use should reflect the subject matter you are addressing. In the case of affirmative action which is based on race, the appropriate specificity of category is clearly race.

So please stop whining about the way I have chosen to arbitrarily divide up the human population. I didnt. It wasnt me who asked to have an affirmative action policy based on race that assumes races are equal biologically. But seeing as we do have such policies, I think it is perfectly reasonable to investigate whether or not the races are actually equal.

I think I have already mentioned in the thread that mixed race people, as the hereditarian theory of racial differences would predict, have characteristics intermediate between their parent races. This is certainly the case in appearence, and IQ also, mixed race individuals averaging on IQ tests half way between the averages of their parental races.

And as for the pathetic cheap shot about me suggesting that interracial coupling should be legally proscribed, when did I ever advocate any differential legal rights on the basis of race?