Evolution and Race

If you think that prevents fraud, you're going to be taken badly by a bank some day. How does knowing the interest rate protect one against being lied to about refinancing options? Against phony appraisals? Against obscure legal language that conceals rate hikes? Against steering, when you are facing homelessness?

You really are quite naive about the world, apparently.

I listed several forms of fraud known to have been committed by the lenders, who deliberately targeted blacks in the inner city. You can read my list, which is partial, above. These are not speculations - they are frauds actually committed, actually targeting blacks, on a large scale, by Countrywide among others.

Bullshit. The opposite would be true, if anything: to the extent that anyone cares about risk, which they did not in these fraud programs, the lender is always better off minimizing it. The last person you would want to stick with a predatory ARM would be the person most likely to default on it, if you were actually planning on the person paying it back. With bad credit risks, an honest bank makes only very safe loans with lots of collateral - and then charges high interest, to cover the remaining risk.

You insist on viewing these transactions as if the lenders were operating in good faith. That is very silly. Good faith lenders would never have made those loans, let alone deceived and pushed and conned people into taking them.

Nobody has come close to demonstrating an "independent effect" - I would guess such a demonstration to be impossible, and the assertion a matter of faith, in that situation.

What environmental factors have been controlled? Not lead exposure. Not the "stage fright" effect. Not differential expectations and parenting. Not prenatal nutrition or stress or toxic exposure. Not childhood illness or allergy. Not epigenetic factors from generations prior.

And nothing at all has been controlled at the "group" level - not if you are including all of Africa in your group of "black".

So? In the first place, "safety precautions" haven't solved the problem in the US, why would they in Europe? In the second, a non-uniform effect would be an effect - one that you would have to control for, and haven't.

? Of course it does. How do you know any of your preventive measures worked?

Same thing. Think about it.

Or check around, for other studies you can follow more easily - the extreme genetic variability on the African continent is famous.

I don't care. It makes no difference to my argument.

You mean sub-Saharan Africans, right? And north-east Asians, and you don't want to include the Lapps or other Arctic people in your "European" category.

And what are you going to do about the Ainu, in Japan? Your racial categories are getting complicated. That's because the society that invented and imposed them didn't bother with the rest of the planet.

Meanwhile, not "everywhere": it's different in Brazil, and among certain reds and yellows. It was not that simple even in the US, not too long ago.

 

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Look I really cannot be bothered to trawl through another post of irrelevance, evassion and selective quote mining from you. Its pretty obvious we arent going to agree on some fundamentals such as people willingly entering into a contract with all the terms and conditions written out before them are not the victims of fraud, or that banks do charge higher interest rates to higher risk borrowers so the extra risk they are taking on from accepting a risky borrower is justified by the greater reward if the borrower doesnt default (that is why unsecured loans have higher interest rates than secured loans), which you describe as "bullshit" yet again insisting on using unecessarily coarse language.

So I am not going to respond to bullet point by bullet point, you never bother to anyway. But let me pick up on a few of your claims:

Let me repeat what I have already quoted to you from the link I gave on the matter:

"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."

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

That was from a study of the San Francisco Federal Reserve Bank, but I suppose your unsupported claims take precedence over their research. And What other factors do you expect a bank to look at beyond credit rating and income?

Another fine piece of selective quotation. The fact that some africans are less similar to each other than some europeans are to asians (note asians is not the same as blacks) is not an equivalent statement to saying that africans are more similar to europeans than to other africans. This was actually explained in the part of my answer you chose to leave out:

"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."

Your logic here is simply faulty. If I noted that there was a larger difference between 2 particular dogs than the difference that separated 2 particular cats, that would not imply the dogs were more similar to the cats than to each other. it would simply imply that the 2 particular dogs were less homogeneous than the two particular cats.

Transracial adoptions should controll for lead exposure, parenting and childhood illness. They also disprove expectations theory and stage fright too, because both of these factors are dependant on perception of race, not actual race. Well in several transracial adoptions, 50/50 black/white kids were erronously believed to be fully black. Now if stage fright and expectations are true, then they should have covereged on the black mean, the group that they were percieved to belong too, by themselves and their parents. Yet the converged on the mixed race mean IQ, their biological race.

As for prenatal nutrition, or epignenetic factors, we have the transracial adoption study in belgium of malnourished koreans into white families. Now in this case, the koreans had not recieved adequate nutrition prior to or after birth, as their biological families were poor and had been for generations. So we have a history of poverty going back generations, and poor nutrition during pregnancy. The outcome? The performed well above the white mean. If these factors are supposed to have supressed the IQ of children, then why does the evidence point in the exact opposite direction of this prediction?

Also, doesnt it strike you as somewhat problematic for the environmentalist argument that transracial adoption, which controlls for parenting, schooling, culture, socialisation, nutrition and material wealth, doesnt even reduce the racial IQ gap, let alone eliminate it? But of course, it doesnt trouble you, when all the obvious causes the environmentalists claim to be crucial are found not to be, they simply dream up a list of obscure alternative factors instead. This is a process that is neverending, your required burden of proof will never be met. If hereditarians find evidence discreditting one of your theories unsupported in any evidence, you simply dream up another.

Thats called believing only what you want to; evidence is irrelevant (unless it suits you).

So it makes no difference to your argument if the evidence shows the exact opposite of what your argument predicts? Proof, if any were needed by this stage, that you simply believe what you like, irrespective of the evidence.

 

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Anyway iceaura, we arent actually making any new points, just restating our positions over and over. And for my part, Ive no interest in endlessly retyping the same arguments to someone who repeatedly ignores those arguments that he hasnt got any answer to. You still havent addressed the following points:


"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"

 

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No argument of mine predicts anything about Jews or special subcategories of Asians.

And on what planet does controlling for borrower income and credit score control for all of society and history? Demonstrate a biological race effect? You are descending into idiocy, here. They didn't even control for relatives' income and credit score!

The bank is not here making dumbass assertions. The question is what factors you should be looking at: there's plenty of those.

They don't, by themselves. Neither do they control for the host of other factors I listed. The researcher has to do that - and parenting I don't think anyone can control.

It doesn't, and those aren't the only factors involved.

Adoption doesn't even control for adoption - a stress factor, which appears to influence brain development differently in different sociological races.

People are treated, racially in the US, according to their appearance. School and parent expectations key on the looks, not the label. Surely this is obvious?

btw: If "intelligence" is inherited, and the soiciological races turn out to reflect actual biological ones that differ in "intelligence" (agaisnt all the odds), biracial children should form a bivariate distribution, or a standard one with much larger standard deviation - not "converge to the mean" of biracials.

Give this up for week and just think about what you have been saying here.

 

“It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is the most adaptable to change.”

Charles Darwin​

​

 

Yes it does. You claim that discrimination supresses IQ scores, hence why blacks score lower. Here it clearly hasnt, we see the opposite, which makes no sense at all. Unless the gap is predominantly biological, in which case, this is perfectly possible.

Yes but I repeat I never claimed the independant racial effect on default rates was biological. I was simply refuting a claim made by someone else that the banks were simply racist.

And how is it idiocy to point out that the banks are justified in different treatment of races if race has an independant effect even after controlling for income and credit rating (the two most obvious factors in credit worthiness)? I never claimed that no other factors might be at play, all I claimed was that the racial gap persisted even after the bank controlls for all the information it is actually able to gather and verify. If other factors were at play, such as wealthy relatives, or cultural dispositions, how on earth as a bank meant to gather this with respect to each individual? If these are what cause the racial disparities, then banks using race a fair proxy for these factors, which, as I say, they cannot assess on a case by case basis. The data doesnt exist. What you are basically saying is that a company should hurt its profits by ignoring the best information available to it.

And you mention that they dont controll for the credit rating or income of relatives (ignoring the impracticalities of gathering this information and verifying that the person is actually related), that is becuase relatives have absolutely no obligation to pay if they default. You cannot secure a loan against a relative. So why you state that they dont controll for this as though it is somehow surprising I dont know. Hoping that wealthy relatives will step in is taking a wild gamble. Moreover, if they did controll for wealthy relatives, that would still result in more black people getting high interest mortgages than white people, as they tend to have fewer wealthy relatives.

If racial discrimination by banks wasnt rational, then someone would have made a killing by now by giving better rates to credit worthy ethinic minorities who the other banks were discriminating against irrationally, and attracted all of the valuable minority custom. Except this hasnt happened, because the bank's discrimination is entirely justified, ethnics really are riskier to lend to, and anyone who tries to treat them the same as whites with regard to interest rates will make a loss. If minorities are higher risk, then loans to them must be higher interest rate so the greater risk is offset by a greater reward, else the banks will loose money.

Why is that so hard to understand? I would suggest your inablitiy to do is the real display of idiocy.

No, the question is what factors can a bank look at. And even after they look at those factors they can, race plays a substantial independant role. So they respond accordingly.

And please stop with the pathetic childish insults like "dumbass". No, the banks are not publically going to give their rationale for discrimination as this would be a PR disaster. It doesnt change the fact that they are discriminating, and all the evidence indicates for perfectly sound reasons.

Please tell me, if my arguments are so "dumbass" what brilliant alternative information could the bank actually gather which would eliminate the independant racial effect on default rates? If you cant suggest anything, then you havent got a leg to stand on saying that their differential treatment doesnt make perfectly good economic sense.

Of course they controll for those factors, the children are growing up alongside children of a different race in the exact same households, and the differences still emerge.

If these are the factors that account for the racial differences, then your argument must be that white families typically have more favorable levels of exposure to these environmental factors, hence why they perform better than blacks (and the opposite must be true of whites relative to asians). Therefore, children growing up in AFFLUENT white households especially, should typically perform better than children growing up in a typical black home. Except their performances are totally unaffected, they all perform at their racial averages. Are you seriously arguing that every single affluent white household studied in these transracial adoptions is somehow anomalous, such that every white household provides an unusually poor environment by white standards when it adopts black children, and unusually good environment when it adopts asian children and that their adoptive white siblings perform differently from them, at the white average, even when they share the exact same home?

If you cannot grasp how transracial adoptions controll very heavily for environmental factors, then it is you who is the idiot, not I.

Also, you simply didnt bother addressing my point about transracial adoptions of malnourished korean babies, again because you have no answers at all.

Yes like I said, when one suggested environmental factor doesnt have any effect, you simply assume it must be another. That part you also left out in your selective quotations. Let me repeat the quoted passage in full:

"Also, doesnt it strike you as somewhat problematic for the environmentalist argument that transracial adoption, which controlls for parenting, schooling, culture, socialisation, nutrition and material wealth, doesnt even reduce the racial IQ gap, let alone eliminate it? But of course, it doesnt trouble you, when all the obvious causes the environmentalists claim to be crucial are found not to be, they simply dream up a list of obscure alternative factors instead. This is a process that is neverending, your required burden of proof will never be met. If hereditarians find evidence discreditting one of your theories unsupported in any evidence, you simply dream up another."

You never even consider the possibility of real biological differences. Even the most tenuous and obscure environmental causes are treated as being more plausable than actual biological differences, inspite of the fact that you yourself can give no reason for believing that africans and europeans would have evolved identically. Why is that?

The fact of the matter is, these are major environmental factors. The fact that controlling for them has no impact at all is pretty damning for the environmentalist.

Actually it does. There have been comparisson of white children adopted into such households too, and guess what? It makes no difference.

Moreover, if the stress of adoption supresses IQ, why do adopted north east asians perform BETTER than their adoptive white siblings, whose scores dont vary whether or not they are adopted.

Firstly, "stage fright" could only relate to the child's OWN perception of his or herself racially. If they dont believe it, how can they get stage fright base on race?

And appearence is precisely the reason why the parents mistakenly believed them to be fully black, as the children themselves did. So why would their parents make this mistake and no one else? Especially as the child would likely state that she or he was fully black according to their own perception, thus their friends and teachers and anyone else familiar with them would hold this belief.

It is also interesting to not that racial gaps occur on g correlated (g is what is measured by IQ tests, general cognative ability) tests that are very simple.

Of particular interest are reaction time tests. There are three buttons placed in front of the test taker, and theey must simply press the button that lights up first. There are two components, the mental and physical. The physical part is the ammount of time it takes them from first moving their hand to hitting the button. The mental part, which is the part that is correlated with IQ scores, is the time it takes for them to start moving once the button lights up, how quickly they process the information in other words.

The funny thing is, black people perform worse on the mental component and better on the physical component. How exactly do they go from having their performance supressed by expectations or stage fright to actually performing better in the space of a fraction of a second? Ofcourse, if there were simply natural racial differences between whites and blacks, then this is very easy to exlplain. Blacks are naturally better at the physical reaction time, and whites at the mental, which happens to be the g correlated part of the test. I am sure youll tell me this is somehow linked to lead exposure though, or some equally obscure cause.

That is demonstrably untrue. If this were the case, we would see this with all inhereted traits, like skin colour. This doesnt happen. The skin colour is an intermediate between the two parent races. So yes, inhereted traits you would expect to be halfway between their parental racial averages. As for standard deviation of the distributions of mixed race people, I am not altogether sure we would any greater levels of variation between mixed race people, assuming that the racial mix were the same each time. Certainly, children of the same different race parents do not have dramatically differing skin colour (though if the parents are mixed race, you do VERY rarely get entirely white or entirely black children). But in any case, I made no assertions about the variation of mixed race children, which i dont honestly know, I simply said their mean average was at an intermediate level, which it is.

Also, you say that if the races differ in intelligence "gaisnt all the odds", but you STILL havent explained why we would expect africans and europeans to average the same intelligence. Even if we found that individual groups within africa and europe differed wildly with regard to IQ (they dont at all), then this would only make it more likely that the overall averages of the two groups were not the same. You claim that you arent insisting we evolved identically with regard to intelligence, but statements like this show you are, and you are doing so with no evidence or reasoning to support the claim whatsoever. This is being a pure ideologue.

And you go on about my agenda...

If you want me to reconsider my position, answer me the very first argument I put to you:

Why should human populations that have evolved in geographic isolation from one and other have evolved indetically with regard to intelligence or anything else?

If you cant answer this, and if you cant provide any evidence to show africans and europeans to be intellectually equal, then you cannot give me any good reason not to wish the biological differences between humans from different regions of the world to be investigated, so that we do not have social policy which simply assumes that all minority failings are the fault of white people (though all their success are their own, and all white people's successes are down to them being immoral).

 

Well thats all well and good but

A) How does this imply racial equality?

B) If it does not imply racial equality, how would it be a boon to us to base social policy on the assumption that all races are equal if they are not?

C) All the evidence indicates with humans at least that the smarter populations are more adpatable and more successful.

 

Maybe I realised what you are trying to do: Ignoring the argument with these methods:

a) "I accept the importance/affect/element of this, but..."

b) Dismissing the major factors presented to you without providing any substantial or valid reason.

Therefore I prefer to repeat what I already told in a different way. Until we reach some agreement on what are the basic determinants of race, IQ and being human, I have no intention to satisfy your Eugenics.

Take this: Evolution plays role in every element in this universe. Not only non-human living creatures, but also in galaxy formation, emergence of a new technology or civilization (take the evolution of computers and internet if you like). That is to say, "Evolution" is a broad concept. But it finds its meaning when it is applied to different subjects. And your human subjects happens to be a different subject than the rest of the biological existence since their artificial unnatural social environment has the power of accelerate and divert the pace and direction of biological evolution, unrecognisably.

Partly true. Because you are talking about "some" dynamics behind non-human living creatures. It is "some", because you don't mention the role of environment but focusing on time alone. Time is relative in here to

a)type of species (some species evolve more rapidly than others)
b)conditions (if there is no major type environmental pressure, species do not need to evolve in same pace within a certain period of time).

Not only these two, you are collecting arbitrary data from what you call "biology" and trying to fit it to an human social invention (Positive or Negative Social Discrimination; this topic is not biologic, is it? Can you do that? Yes you can, but that doesn't mean that others will buy it...

When did humans started to interfere evolution process of nature? You will not take it more than 100 years back (or maybe 50 years, I don't know; I only gave you the maximum time limit you can extend your acceptance depending on your understanding of "modern times"). I can go back to thousands of years (10 000 or 100 000 or even 1 000 000 000 year, depending on inventions and major human-nature isolation elements).

Do you see the difference between our perspectives?

You simply can not do that. In humans, geographical isolation might mean more than what it means for other species: You have to multiply it with social isolation too. Yet we have the real population isolation history in our hands. "Geographical isolation" history of humans are not same from one geography to another, from one group to another. Tasmanian people are the only truly isolated group of people from the rest of world population for a long time. And it is observed that they have started to drop some of the skills and technology their ancestors were using when they first arrived to Tasmania. Yet we can not ignore the "size" of their population. Indigenous American people isolated for 15000 years, yet they managed to develop more complicated societies than their ancestors because of their social structure.

I can guarantee you that I can create different species out of humans if you give me 500 years. Total isolation and selective breeding will do the job, biology allows that, nobody is discussing this. Yet we are not doing that: As humans we are aware of the fact what nature/genes alone are capable of; and we are fighting against it, not with it. How do you find this? Romantic maybe?

Now you are adding "environmental factors" to your biological evolution (check your above "evolution" definition, environment wasn't there). When will you start to see that human social structures/models/conditions also part of this "environment" and play "heavy roles" for human evolution? Never? It's your selective choice...

You see, you don't even know the level of determinacy of social factors on human evolution, yet you can simply multiply them with zero and call it "nonsense". Where does this put your "biological" evaluation? For you white people emerged out of "nowhere"; their IQ level is nothing but result of being white alone. Sorry, I don't buy this either...

My recommendation is this: Why don't we call Asians to replace all major positions in our society (I live in UK as well by the way) instead of whites, since Asians have better IQs? And this claim of yours "when nearly all factors are equalised very significantly....it makes very little difference" has no credit whatsoever. Because you are talking about a pure assumption without mentioning a time period. You don't even know what does "equalising environment" means. In my understanding, it refers to providing such a social system where we make sure there is no social, cultural pressures or obstacles in front people for "prefer not to interbreed between communities". "White prefers white, asians prefer asians and black prefers black" is again, a pure assumption and heavily depends on current social codes which are largely based upon recent colonial history of isolation.

Not only that, but everything else is irrelevance when it comes to your Eugenics, I understood this bit. But remember what I said above, I can create you a different species if I wanted, just give me a spare time and conditions. And I guarantee, it will be biological (I say "a different species", don't I?) as well. The problem is how should we behave after we know that?

Not that I have not given you any explanations. It just doesn't fit your picture. Nothing I can say is relevant to your picture.

You can simply not isolate biology. No matter how hard you try. Yes it doesn't change dramatically from evening to morning for a good reason. But that doesn't mean that it is a closed mechanism.

What makes you think that I didn't read this article when you first submitted in the beginning of this discussion? Yet, this study takes IQ and race as unquestionable parameters. You see, for a valuable scientific paper, one expects to see a clear definition of parameters before the research, observation, evaluation even starts. Can you show me which part of this paper IQ and race words are described scientifically? Nowhere. Instead, paper starts with IQ and race as if they were oxygen and hydrogen.

What is the value of this paper scientifically? As you may accept, when it comes to biology, we are talking about hard science. Human social interactions and systems which are the main topic of this paper are not subject to hard science, there is no such a thing called "social science" for a good reason, unless if you are trying to attract some customers (sorry students) to your universities and want to impress them with some respectful words. Human schooling, social interaction, reaction times, vocabulary capacity, IQ scores and etc. are not subject to science.

Is this what you call "proof"? Repeating the same thing with fancy words without bothering to submit any linguistic scrutiny and/or scientific method whatsoever? I call these kind of attempts as politics for good reason, and I will stick to my view until you come up with a serious parameters and evidence.

Try to support your view with related argument such as justice and ethics than. Not with biology. If you ask me, this topic shouldn't be in biology sub-forum in the first place.

What are the criteria of similarities and differences regarding the subject matter? As I keep repeating since the beginning: Arbitrary choice of human race and poor attempt to make it a branch of biological science. Failure.

When you give up being arbitrary, I will stop whining about it, I promise. You were not the one who asked for this policy, but you are the one who has problem with it. Although this policy is on the paper, you and I both know that when it comes to prison population and their ratio to overall population doesn't match the actual racial representation (whatever it is by the way). Again, although this policy is on the paper, in reality it doesn't match the representation of black population as it is aimed in the policy, when you take industries one by one. And also the question of "which industries" is still there. What are the percentage of black population in key areas (you name them such as Banking, Finance, Universities, etc)? You see, what you are complaining is still on paper since 1970s and if you ask me it hasn't been implemented correctly yet.

Average I assume...

Sorry about it, it's my unstoppable reaction when I smell Eugenics...

 

The skin color is a standard distribution with a larger standard deviation, as predicted - in most "biracial" progeny, anyway, apparently. AFAIK no one has compared the different kinds of "black" humans to see if crosses with whites behave the same for all.

My guess, purely speculative, would be that "general intelligence" in humans (not IQ, but some more robust measure) would behave not like skin color in humans but like track speed in horses. Special purpose intelligence (musical ability, photographic memory, etc) might act like eye color, then.

Or maybe not. Lacking data, anything is possible.

It is you, not me, who equates all "discrimination" regardless of motive and means, context and target. That's your claim, not mine.

I think bigoted discrimination could have any, or no, effect on IQ scores, depending on its actual manifestation. For example, in the slave States of the US black persons were prevented from working in any profession requiring literacy or paying well for high-level skill, forcing almost all blacks into menial labor and resting their survival on its performance. In Europe Jews were coerced into such professions as money-lending and international trade, scribe and accountant and musician and independent artisan, and often prevented from obtaining good employment that did not rest on actual individual skill or mental ability. I see no reason to assume that all such varieties of bigoted treatment would have similar effects on any aspect of human life.

Everybody agrees it is rational, from a certain perspective. You appear to be trying to argue that it is based on some relevant feature of black people's biology - that's the issue here.

The thread is not about banking. If banks can't look at relevant biological features, why did you bring them into this discussion?

I don't believe that black children raised in affluent white homes in the US display uniform average IQs of 70 as adults.

Light skinned black people are not treated the same as darker ones, in the US. The expectations and attitudes they encounter every day, from which they form their own self-image, are different.

Interesting question. The way to answer it would be to compare different test setups, different kinds of black people, people from different environments, control for diet and disease and toxin exposure and epigenetics, etc.

Then we could start figuring out the relationship between that aspect of mental processing and "intelligence", if we wanted to and we still had something other than noise.

Let me know if anyone does that - I'd like to check it out.

There used to be a guy, maybe still is, wandering around measuring people's brain reaction time directly, by cross-hemisphere EEG registry of quick stimulus - not dependent on button pressing and lab environments, etc. He found excellent correlations with IQ scores among Western white men, with the correlation fading as he got further from Western, white, and men.

It's called the null hypothesis, and if you haven't rejected it you have no results - if you care about rigor, of course, which no one who starts out by assuming the underlying biological validity of the sociological race classifications can claim.

The evidence backing the null hypothesis - especially the great variation in African genetics, which swamp the comparatively tiny and unreliable differences between the collective African and European genetics, and lead to real trouble even identifying "Africans" as a genetic group within humans - is solid. You have to have something pretty impressive, to knock it down.

When you say things like that, you make me wonder what the hell you think I've been posting - I have been trying to get you to investigate the biological differences between humans from different geographical and otherwise isolated breeding groups for dozens of posts now. You keep bringing up the US sociological races, instead. If you start in the middle of that muddle of presumptions, you will never get anywhere. No one ever has, and they've been trying hard for hundreds of years.

 

Well IQ is fairly robust, at least, it is highly stable in adulthood, and predictive of a number of important social outcomes. I cant really see how the IQ results of mixed race people discredit the hereditarian theory.

Jews were coerced into international trade and money lending? Well jews are certainly overrepresented in intellectually demanding and highly renumerated professions, and always have been, but why would anyone force them into good jobs? Dont you think that they might be overrepresented largely because they are naturally better? And whilst they account for 3% of the population, they account for well over a third of nobel prize winners in the natural sciences. This is not a coincidence I would argue. I dont say this becuase I prefer Jews to white people, although I bear them no resentment, but simply because that is what the evidence supports.

Anyway, I do think it is a problem for the discrimination theory of the IQ gap that some discriminated against groups perform markedly better than whites. We shall have to a agree to disagree.

Except that I never did. All I claimed was that if it wasnt caused biologically by race, then the environmental factors could not be better represented by the data banks can gather than the proxy of race.

That said, I dont dismiss biology as a cause entirely, it could be. Lower average intelligence wont help financial management, and Studies show that black people have shorter time horizons. In particular, when offered the choice between one lollypop now and three lollypops at a later time, black children are more likely to go for the one lollypop now than whites. Again, a greater disposition towards immediate gratification wont help with financial management.

But whilst I believe it to be plausable I am only speculating here, and I have never made an assertion that the difference in rates of default IS biologically caused. You have falsely ascribed that to me several times now, ispite of me telling you otherwise each time.

Why did I bring it into the discussion? As I have already stated, I only broached the topic when spidergoat brought it up, I did not. I never mentioned it in any post to you, untill you took exception to my post to spidergoat. Why do I have to keep repeating this same point to you?

I never claimed they did. They average the same as other blacks in the US, 85. The african IQ of 70 I have already said probably has a substantial environmental component (though the white admixture in american blacks also would raise the score somewhat aove 70). You can disbelieve that if you like, but youre disbelieving fact. Now you could argue that this isnt caused biologically, but if the gap is environmental, then why does a massive environmental chage like adoption not close the gap?

Except that these particular mixed race children were not sufficiently light skinned to be believed to be mixed race by themeselves or their parents. And yet their averages dont deviate from the mixed race average at all. Lets assume some people identified them as mixed race, it still is the case that some clearly did not. Wouldnt the expectations therefore cause them to be at least a little below the mixed race average, if not as low as the black average?

I am sorry but yet again, when one of your theories is shown to be implausable, (expectations, stage fright) you just come up with another, setting the burden of proof ever higher, now including controlling for a huge number of factors in tests that are taken in the general population, totally unrealistic. And how would disease or malnutrition or toxin exposure similtaneously surpress mental reaction time and improve physical?

Regardless, the fact that black people go from performing worse than whites on the g correlated part of the test to better than whites on the physical part of the test within a fraction of a second, shows pretty clearly that low expectations, lack of motivation or lack of confidence are not the cause, else they would perform worse on both parts of the test.

Tell me, exactly what burden of proof would have to be met before you believed that genetics may play some role in the IQ gap and the differences in social outcome between black and white people. Also, what burden of proof do you place on the assumption of racial equality? As far as I can see, you accept it without any proof. Why the double standard?

Well the good news is the reflex test is as strongly correlated with IQ for blacks as it is for whites, and IQ is just as predictive of social outcomes for both races. Now as far as this other test goes, its the first ive heard of it, so I wont dispute you.

Except that null hypothesis are theories to be tested, not working assumptions, and our social policies are using this null hypothesis as a working assumption.

If you want to defend it is a working assumption, not a null hypothesis, the same burden of proof has to be met for racial equality as for racial inequality. You havent even attempted to support this null hypothesis evidentially.

And as for your sociological race classification claim, you still havent demonstrated how it can be the case that a category has no biological validity if members can be identified with biological data only.

And regardless of the internal variation within the categories black or white (not very much with regard to IQ in either case) it still stands to reason that if after controlling heavily for environmental factors the gap between whites and blacks is unaltered, then the gap must have a substantial genetic component, so it would be true to say that on average, blacks, or the groups that comprise them, are less intelligent than whites, or the groups that comprise them. Only a very large degree of internal variation between africans would make it possible for certain groups to not be less intelligent than whites on average, and as I say and as you always ignore, such variation is not found when specific african groupings are tested.

Ok, firstly, this is not evidence in favour of the null hypothesis at all. Saying that there is a large ammount of biological variation within africa in absolutely no way implies that blacks and whites are intellectually equal. It would be like me saying that the great biological variety found within fish implies that fish and humans are intellectually equal. It is a complete non sequitor.

Secondly, your claim that there is great variation between africans, and that this swamps the tiny variation between africans and europeans is complete nonesense.

If africans are so genetically disimilar, then they cannot all be virtually the same as europeans can they? Else they would be virtually the same as each other. This claim is internally contradictory, so no, do not need something pretty impressive to knock it down, I just need to point out how obviously illogical it is.

In any case, whatever the geographical variation within africa, it is less than the geographical variation found within the world as a whole. So it only stands to reason there will have been less variation in evolution between populations within africa, than within the whole of the world. The same can be said of any continent. Therefore, there will be similarities between groups within a continent that do not exist between groups in different continents. So whatever the internal variation within continental groupings of humans, roughly how we define races, we can still expect consistent differences between these groupings, and compare them.

Why do you think I am using the racial categories used in the west? Could it maybe because they are the racial categories used by the social policies in our country, such as positive discrimination? If we are going to judge the validity of such policies, we need to address the categories the policies use.

You seem to take no issue with positive discrimination using the categories black and white, yet if you think these categories are inherently flawed, you should reject the policy very strongly.

There is also the fact that the data collected for the categories black and white is far more extensive than for more specific groupings. Moreover, in the USA, there is no practical way of dividing up the black population into more specific groupings. And with regard to IQ, there is very little variation when it is measured between specific african groupings, which means that dividing the black population up into these groupings would not change the results for studies relating to IQ, a point you repeatedly have ignored.

 

A. If variations exist within a species, then there is no actual equality. In addition, every individual is unique, and the sexes are not equal.

B. There are all kinds of social policy, conceived for various purposes.

1. To address Sexism. In order to counteract the tendency for males to favor males with regard to salary and employment, where males and females are accomplishing the same job, it is necessary to have a social policy of equal pay for equal work. The statistical averages with regard to differences in natural ability do not apply if the same standards are placed on their performance. For instance, there may be more male CEOs, but that does not prevent a talented female executive from doing the job equally well if not better. That's where individual variation fits in.

2. To address Racism. Even if you acknowledge variation in abilities across races, you must agree that treating people badly is wrong. Segregation cannot work as a social policy, we already proved that. Separate is never equal. And IQ is not a fair measure when rights are concerned, (with some exceptions for the mentally retarded).

3. Affirmative action. This seems to be your main complaint. This social policy states that given equal abilities between black and white candidates, one should give some weight to the historical inequalities that contributed to the condition of blacks. A black person had to work harder to get to the same level. There weren't just slight differences in economic well-being between blacks and whites as if the playing field were equal, this was enforced poverty, where qualified blacks were shut out of many high paying jobs due to prejudice and frankly greed. As a result, black families that have the aptitude to succeed were prevented from doing so, and managed to prevail under these conditions only with extreme difficulty. If social policy is engineered, using the power of the federal government to hand out money, to give incentive to disadvantaged black families, it will tend to correct past wrongs, and give everyone an equal chance. Everyone deserves a fair chance, and as long as blacks aren't getting that, there will be no equality. There may never be equal levels of income or achievement on average between certain groups, but we deserve the chance to find out. The disadvantage in IQ may be slight, but the disadvantages in the preconditions for success are severe. To ignore this problem is to consign large segments of our population to failure. Those social failures burden everyone. So an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. If you are so smart, you will be able to demonstrate that your qualifications exceed that of other applicants to the same job. Employers also factor in salary requirements, maybe they aren't always looking for the best in one category, but the best overall value for their dollar. (That is why most companies manufacture in Asia). You also cannot know all the factors that went into an employer's decision to hire someone else, it's none of your business. Many white people take advantage of affirmative action, such as George W. Bush. Many universities give preferential treatment to the offspring of alumni, many of whom are rich and give substantial gifts to the university. This creates a cycle of elitism, just what the founding fathers warned us about. Let us reward hard work, not encourage a new class of economic royalists.
​

C. How much of the inequality that exists is due to IQ difference? How much is due to racial prejudice, the legacy of slavery, colonization, and disease? The inherent advantage of geography? The prevalence of domesticatable animals? The accident of certain inventions? I maintain that the differences are disproportional to our genetic differences, and are due to culture. The Japanese and Chinese, for instance, lagged far behind the west in terms of technology. Did relative IQ explain the difference? Or was it culture? You can see they have caught up, but it took some time. It is only recently that international travel became affordable to the masses.

 

I am not sure youre in much of a position to accuse me of dismissing things, when in my first reply to you, there are a huge number of points you havent even attempted to address.

In any case, what major factors have i dismissed without a valid reason? Name them.

Well then you wont be troubled, because I have no eugenics agenda to satisfy. I think that the government should stay out of people's family planning affairs, something they are hardly doing now with welfare, but I certainly dont defend that.

2 points here:

A) None of that even remotely suggests that different human populations have evolved equally.

B) You are painting with far too broad a brush in your application of the term evolution. Evolution is a strictly unconscious process, it has nothing to do with advances in computing. Evolution refers specifically to the way in which living organisms change over time due to particular variations being more successful at reproducing than others, and due to mutations creating new variations. Anything outside of that being described as evolution is a metaphor.

Im guessing from your unusual syntax that english is not your first language, and from the above it seems you have completely misunderstood what I was saying. The impact of evolution is to gradually change the biology of organisms. Its effects therefore, are purely biological. Saying that the selective pressures themselves are not all biological is just a statement of the obvious.

As for positive discrimination, I never said that had any impact in evolution at all. What I said was that social policy shouldnt ignore the very obvious implications of evolution, namely that it is extremely unlikely that all human populations will have evolved to be equally intelligent.

What I see is a whole load of irrelevence. You still have given no reason to believe that geographically isolated populations should have evolved identically.

I dont honestly care about the precise point in time humans started heavily shaping their own selective pressures, my only point here was that even if we do shape our environment, this only makes it more likely that we will have evolved differently, as different humans build different environments. Again you have misunderstood.

Yet more complete irrelevance. The fact that a selective breeding program could chage the biology of humans over 500 years, which I dont deny, does nothing to change the fact that if human populations evolved in different environments and faced different selective pressures, they arent going to have evolved identically. I point you have neither acknowledged, nor refuted.

I dont mean to be nasty, but your grasp of english is simply too poor for you to understand what I am saying. You repetedly attack arguments I have never made, and fail to understand the arguments I do make. It makes it pretty difficult to have a reasoned discussion with you.

The point I was making had nothing to do with evolution:

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

I didnt mention evolution. All I said was that if the IQ gap didnt decrease after controlling for environmental factors, then it stands to reason the cause is genetic. Why are you crapping on about me " adding "environmental factors" to your biological evolution" when the passage you have just quoted doesnt even mention evolution?

I said in my "definition" (it wasnt a definition, only a partial description) of evolution, had you actually read it:

"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."

I never said the process of evolution wasnt effected by environmental factors. Evolution is shaped by the environment a creature finds itself in. I said its impact is on the genome of the organism, thus its impact can be discussed purely in terms of biology.

Ok I was willing to give you the benefit of the doubt, but now I just think youre an idiot. I never said that "white people emerged out of "nowhere"" or that "you can simply multiply them with zero and call it "nonsense"" or "their IQ level is nothing but result of being white alone". I never made claims even remotely comparable to this, the entire paragraph is just gibberish.

I would certainly expect north east asians to be overrepresented in those ares in which they are naturally more able (they are) and believe they should not be discriminated against by positive discrimination, as they currently are in the USA. But I never claimed that all posistions should go to members of one race, I specifically said they should be distributed on merit not skin color in my first post, and as there is substantial variation within the races, there will be members of every race in top professions if given out on merit. It is simply those races that have lower IQs on average you would expect to be relatively underrepresented.

No I am not talking about a pure assumption, I am stating a fact: Transracial adoptions, which heavily controll for major environmental variables, do not close the IQ gap. The time period of the adoptions was from babies till adulthood in this particular study. So theres your time period.

Ok that last part doesnt even make any sense. I mean seriously, what the hell is "in front people for "prefer not to interbreed between communities"" supposed to mean? But anyway, if black babies are adopted into white families, then the racial differences in environmental factors, like wealth, culture, education, parenting, socialisation and education are all controlled for. The represents a major equalisation of environmental factors between the races in the case of transracial adoptions, an equalisation which has no effect on average IQ.

You really are a moron arent you? Where in my argument about inturpreting the results of transracial adoptions did I ever about preference for one's own race? Oh wait, I didnt, so why are you saying that I made these claims as "a pure assumption" when I never made them at all?

I do think that the preponderence of evidence strongly indicates that people do prefer members of their own race, But I never stated that, and certainly not with reference to transracial adoptions, so what in the hell are you going on about?

Baftan, I describe alot of what you write as irrelevant because it is. You are to stupid to follow through a line of reasoning logically, and make all sorts of arguments that are complete non sequitors, ie irrelevant. Further, you frequently decide to go off at a tangent, responding to claims I never even made, and going into discussions have nothing to do with the point being discussed.

You talking about my eugenics program is a prime example of this. I havent put forward in single argument in favour of eugenics, I have only actually recommended that the governments in the west stop discriminating against whites and other successful groups through affrimative action. Moreover, whether or not I had a eugenics agenda wouldnt have any bearing on whether or not humans evolved identically all over the world.

You still havent refuted my argument that humans in different environments would have evolved differently in all probability, nor made any attempt to refute the evidence which supports this reasoning. Instead, you make baseless and irrelevant ad homs about me supporting eugenics, which even if true, wouldnt refute a word I said.

Again, this really is irrelevant. How we ought to behave after you hypothetically have made you new species is an entirely subjective matter, with no relevance to the claim that humans in different regions of the world are not biologically the same, which is either objectively true or objectively false.

It isnt me being blind to reason when I say your arguments are irrelevant, it is an unfortunate matter of fact, brought about by your own inability to grasp basic logic or even understand what is written before you.

I never claimed that biology doesnt interract with non biological factors, which you are bizzarely under the impression I have.

The article was published in an academic journal which specialises in this area, and where such terms will already be well understood by the readership, hence why they dont bother to define them. it would be like a book on advanced calculus explaining what addition is.

I however already have described race and IQ in this thread. I am not going to repeat myself again.

The social sciences are a major field of academia, including subjects like pyschology, economics and politics to name but a few. Your ignorance is astounding.

And you can certainly apply the scientific method to social phenomena. You gather empirical evidence, and then seek to find the most logical and coherent explanation for the observed evidence. It may not be as precise a science as physics, the subject matter is far larger and more complex, so it is unsurprising that you cannot describe a society as precisely as a subatomic particle. But that doesnt mean you cannot investigate and attempt to understand it.

At least when I use fancy words, I construct reasonably coherent and grammatically sound sentences, which is more than can be said of the incomprehensible mess of words you insist on polluting the internet with.

And I have come up with serious evidence, in the article I linked. None of which you have attempted to dispute. And given that you havent provided any evidence to support your position, youre in no position to demand any more evidence from me (especially seeing as you cant say whats wrong with the evidence ive provided).

As for repeating the same arguments, well the reason I do that is because you repeatedly ignore them. If you either refute and concede to the arguments I make, then I will stop repeating them. But the fact that you STILL havent explained why we should expect humans in different environments to have evolved identically is a pretty significant omission on your part, and we cant have a sensible debate without you addressing it.

This is pure moralistic fallacy. To say the question of whether or not the races are equally intelligent should be answered with reference to morality or ethics is absurd. Whether or not the races are intellectually equal is an objective matter, it is true or it is not. This is a point which I made in the very first post. You might as well tell me to decide whether or not the earth is flat on a moral basis.

"What are the criteria of similarities and differences regarding the subject matter?" does not make sense, so I cannot answer that question.

However to attempt to answer what I think you may have been asking, the racial categories, though determined arbitrarily (as with all categories in science, including species) do represent real biological differences. They are those differences that have arisen from having evolved and adpated to different selective preasures in different environments.

Yes I do have a problem with it. It assumes the races are equal, which they are probably not, and justifies penalising white people on the basis of this. Therefore, to challenge the policy, you have to challenge the assumption of racial equality, which necessarily means you have to talk about race.

Again, I am struggling to see a coherent point being made here. But if you are arguing that positive discrimination is justified because too many blacks are in jail and too few at university, then I would argue that the policy can only be justified on this basis if you can show that there are no biological differences between the racial groups affirmative actions works with, that would account for these differences in social outcome. Again, i point I made in the very first post, and which you havent been able to refute.

Yes, the average IQ of mixed people is halfway between the average IQs of the 2 parent races. Was this meant to discredit what I said? All you have done is said that you assume a comment that specifically discussed things in terms of averages was talking about averages.

Its your unstoppable reaction to make cheap shots when you assume people to have an agenda which they dont and gave no indication that they did? Proof, if all of what you wrote above wasnt enough, that you are an idiot.

 

They are not "my theories", they are common in the general literature, and you haven't dealt with any of them yet. And there are a lot of them - you have taken on a serious project here, in attempting to rule out the dominant role of the sociological influences of a sociological structure enforced as pervasively, coercively, and profoundly as race is in the US.

Not in Africa. With IQs at 70, they'd starve to death.

None whatsoever. It's possible. It would be much more likely if you started with some biologically plausible way of classifying people by race.

Sure. You let me know when you have succeeded in controlling heavily for environmental factors - that will be some time after you have figured out why competent adult Africans consistently score as mentally retarded, why the gap remains the same under the Flynn Effect (that is, it affects blacks disproportionately), why the effects of differential lead exposure fail to register in your interpretation of the US scores, why balcks but not whites score higher on IQ tests they don't know they are taking, and so forth.

It argues against your proposal of a coherent population of Africans, especially one that all belongs in the same evolutionary lineage different from the one that includes whites.

The null hypothesis does not require production of supporting evidence. You have to reject it.

I take no relevant issue with sociological employment of sociological categories. It's your attempt to base evolutionary or other biological arguments on them that is so very unlikely and unsupported.

 

This is what "you think". Forget about huge numbers; just name one of them. I can go back and read your reply, yet I don't see anything other than dismissing what I asked you.

Reminders from my first post:

-"the percentage of non-white population in your country/city/region and compare it to the percentage of representation of this population within the job sector you are applying for"

-"Is there any method to discover the "natural lower level of average intelligence?". Do you know such a scientific method?"

(Your answer to this question was the subject article)

-"What is race?"

(Your answer was "arbitrary" and "variation" alongside "continuous gradual changes", "we couldn't differentiate any biological species if we didn't use race" nonsense... Define "race" as a parameter, make an intelligable definition.)

-"What if we separate them depending on gender?"

(Dismissed by saying "Gender is an instructive example" and giving similarities between human female and chimpanzee female: irrelevant: we are talking about human beings)

-"What is social, what is natural"

(What you said on this: Nothing. Go back and read your gibberish).

Government and welfare policy and families... No, I accused you with Eugenics. This is the definition of it from Wikipedia (come up with a different definition if you like, I don't mind):

"Heritability of IQ". Sounds familiar?

Oh yes, my English is terrible, you are unlucky aren't you? You can always ignore me any time you wish. Now let's get back to this evolution issue: I guess you should come up with an "evolution" definition as well; because you simply play with the word however suits your purpose. Then we will hear the usual stuff: "I never said this", "I never said that". Give us a reference mate, so we can decide whether or not you said things or you didn't...

I already told you in my first post: Nobody is identical. Yet you found this what? Totally irrelevant. So do me a favour, satisfy my quest that I've been raising since the beginning: Provide some criteria on evaluation of "similarities and differences". Some measurement, some level, some border; anything. So we can find if anything else fits this description or not. Or just say this: "I don't care any other similarities or differences other than "race". But if you are going to do that, come up with a clear definition of "race".

What do you care Matthew? These "even if we do shape our environment, this only makes it more likely that we will have evolved differently, as different humans build different environments". Do you mind if I ask you when you will stop consuming these "differences and similarities" words arbitrarily and give us some criteria? "Not caring about precise points" only makes your argument less valuable than before.

Acknowledged or refuted? So you didn't understand this bit, is that so? Let me clarify for you, in its simplest form: We don't do biology in our social constructions. We simply don't give a shit what biology says when it comes to human social institutions and policies. Not any more.

You can be nasty as much as you like, but if you keep blurring your arguments with not providing substantial definitions I will get worse, I might even start to speak a totally different language.

Evolution is and will always be here: Check out the title of this thread.

Now you want to strip off IQ,race, genetics and environmental factors from evolution by saying "I didnt mention evolution. All I said was that if the IQ gap didnt decrease after controlling for environmental factors, then it stands to reason the cause is genetic." You are free to do that, I simply see no reason why should we concentrate on genetics alone without its surrounding environment.

Don't come up with "I never said this" and "I never said that" type of defending, what you are saying since the beginning sounds like you are focusing on an isolated idea of genetics. This attempt puts your argument in such a situation where you can employ geographical separation as a cause and reason behind genetic diversification when you wanted, yet possibility of same (or a new) environment (in humans it also means social conditions) making relevance on current genetic map becomes irrelevant.

How come? What type of logic is that? You can claim that environment is a factor, you have no problem with that. However, you can also claim that just because "impact" is on the genome (impact of what? impact of environment, yes) of organism, thus... Thus can be discussed purely in terms of biology. Could it be because you want to ignore the cause and just to focus on effect/result/reflection. If I was as ignorant as yourself, I would easily claim that "since genome changes due to impact from environment, the result (genetic change) is totally irrelevant, we should concentrate on environment as we can cause any impact if we change the environment, and genome will follow or react accordingly". And I can do this only using your argumentation sentence above. How can you stop me doing this comment?

Naturally you will think that I am an Idiot. Now tell me, my lack of understanding is due to my environment (your unsubstantiated argumentation and its dubious logic), or my own level of understanding (IQ level)? Let me answer on behalf of you: Since you are keen supporter of isolated genetic reasoning, my environment has no effect on my understanding whatsoever; it's all because of me. How is that? Have I started to grasp your point?

"Naturally more able"... Human beings have nothing to do with nature, at least not in their social systems. We don't collect our social strata and order from natural examples. There is no state, courts, bureaucracy, libraries or anything similar in nature. If you enter such a problematic words into your claims, don't accuse me with talking gibberish, you simply take away my entire concentration and I'm losing my sense of balance. Choose your words carefully. What does nature to do with social positions? But this is your core argument isn't it? You say that "We should organise our laws and regulations according to nature". No we simply shouldn't. This is a "no no" area...

I don't deny the numeric results of Transracial adoptions. My objection is on the methodology of this study as much as interpretation of the results. In one word they are inconclusive when it comes to deducing a conclusion. Social status (which is a complicated and major determinant of what we call "human"), economical and other physical conditions (such as nutrition) and historical background of these black kids are not represented thoroughly. We simply don't know the exact algorithms behind intelligence. We don't know how psychological elements (being member of a black minority in a racially problematic society) play roles on intelligence. I know you will bring the Jewish example to the table, but simply Jewish people are not easily spotted in community as much as blacks and they are not practising the similar tension. Therefore, it is not easy to say "blacks are oppressed and Jewish people are oppressed, yet one of them score lower than whites other one score higher than whites, that means oppression plays no role". It's not easy, because we simply don't know how "being easily spotted in society" makes difference on intelligence. If we consider that humans are highly social mammal creatures and social signals can make a person lose his/her mind or can even make individuals physically sick, it only means there is a more complex system is going on behind the curtain, a.k.a. human brain.

And where we stuck to get a conclusive result, the only way is to interpret the existing result one way or another, or to ignore totally. We may simply do more harm. That's why overall social policies in Western countries are inclined to compensate at least the wrongdoings of near history. Until we get a conclusive evidence or result.

People prefer to interbreed within the same communities; namely whites with whites, black with blacks "in general". I don't know how you interpret this fact (I am not going to accuse you beforehand), but cultural elements play a heavy role behind of these choices. People know what kind of societies they are living in, they are not stupid. Human beings behave according to their social surrounding; they are aware of the social expectations around them. In some societies, where visible racial differences are nearly zero, people are socially restricted to start families with religiously or ethnically similar communities, they are discouraged to go for "others". So before we start to question "racial attraction", we can not even be sure if social climate does/doesn't impose other types of restrictions; we simply have a huge question of social barriers in our hands. Before we say anything about nature or natural attraction when it comes to interbreeding (or any other human issue for that matter), we have to make sure social is sorted first. Can we ignore this in favour of "race" (in terms of "visible differences between humans") argument? I don't think we can, I don't think we can ignore social at all.

If individually "being black" still makes some sense within larger society, being adopted by a white family will only make a small improvement "in short term". Moreover, this may even contribute psychological tension for this person and the expected benefits of , for instance, growing up in a better nutritional environment will not play a significant role "in short term". But if we are talking about two or three generations, it's a wide open guess.

You must be really "slow" (you can take this in derogatory mean if you like, it's optional) if you just realised that I am a moron. (By the way when it comes to English, I don't know the meaning of "inturpreting" from above quote, but I'll take it as "interpreting" anyway). Imagine I misinterpreted you, imagine you have never said anywhere in this thread that "people tend to select partners from their own racial communities"; can you still claim that there is no such a tendency in society? Can you ignore that? The problem arises here: What is the underlying reason behind this, biology or society? That's the main point.

You see, you didn't claim that but let's say I did. It still doesn't make a great difference to the value of your transracial adoptions: This study is measuring current society, and we simply don't know whether genetic difference or the social pressure on subject individuals play the biggest role on its results. You prefer to go for genetics (as you mentioned, even criminal DNA analysis can understand who is black and who is not): Yet, when it comes to one of the most complicated area of socially alert human brain (intelligence), you want to play Sherlock Holmes. And you are telling me this is scientific, is that so?

This "Eugenics" issue makes you really excited, doesn't it? It was carefully selected to substantiate your argument more clearly. I can take couple of insults if it's going to make you bit more relaxed.

I even gave you an extreme example on how we can produce different species out of humans. But for the rest of your what you call "reasoning", and "evidence", I think you should find more ignorant souls than yourself. While you are dismissing the entire complexity of human beings, focusing on a problematic study, and demanding "justice" out of it, I can only find myself too unfortunate that I'm still trying to reason with you...

I already told you, we should act "against non-human nature" when it comes to our social order. Isn't it obvious: I offer you to suspect from your selective objectivity. I offer you to question what you think "true" or "false": these are not the universal rules of thermodynamics. It's something you can not even formulate properly, so just imagine the overall situation in here.

It's obviously because of my level of IQ, what else?

Another individual IQ issue...

So parameters are not described. You could just say that instead of finding elitist excuses.

You have never. Show me the part that you "defined" Race and IQ. I don't mind if you didn't in this thread, I don't mind if your linked articles didn't. Just come up with intelligible definitions of Race and IQ.

If you are going to play with me "describe" games, you will get more "unbearable" scrutiny for your mumbo jumbo.

When it comes to "science", what you call "social" has no more value than a pile of shit. I know because I studied it, it's my area of expertise. Your empty "academia, subjects including this and that" doesn't make any sense to me. If you are going to start seriously talking about my ignorance, you should come up with a definition of "science" and "social" first. I could address you another thread where I already discussed this issue extensively, yet I would love to hear your arguments from scratch. Why don't you open a new thread in relevant sub-forum and invite me there? Have you got enough stamina for this?

You gather "empirical evidence", you say... Do they smell like chemicals? Or can we measure them like electrons? Hang on, you mentioned physics as well didn't you? Oh, it's obvious you are a new graduate. As I say, I would love to hear your arguments.

I called it "fancy words" out of courtesy. You can also construct "grammatically sound sentences", can't you, poor sod.

I told you before, I tell you now, and if you don't change your position I will tell you again: You only come up with pile of shit. And your linked article smells worst than shit, it smells hardcore Eugenics.

But you are repeating yourself...

You were the one who talked about a social policy of "positive discrimination", you were the one who claimed social disciplines are serious sciences, you were the one who tried to link biology to races. I'm afraid nobody will buy any of your inconsistent linking and evaluating ability. If you seriously plan to get some respect to social science, stop stealing terminology from hard science and start to learn how morality and ethics (as well as politics) play role in human social environment and in its dynamics.

That explains how you've been mocking biology and arbitrarily consume words such as race and IQ without being able to give any definition whatsoever...

So "scientific categories are determined arbitrarily". If I take this definition seriously I only repeat my previous claim that this thread should be in different sub-forum, not in "biology", but hey, I believe mods do not mind to entertain this travesty in here, so let it be. However, even if "scientific categories are determined arbitrarily", your "not-yet-defined-human-race" doesn't occupy any scientific category.

This is why you are not defining race in general and human-race in particular: Because you can easily ignore "racial equality". You are taking the political definition of race next to biological one, empty the meanings of them, make a mouthful nonsense out of it and present it as "justice" , "science" and who knows what else?

Let me guess: The reason for number of black population in jails is again due to wrong interpretation of biological differences between races. Congratulations, why don't you write this brilliant idea of yours to government, maybe they find it interesting and start a brand new policy on this issue. I believe if they make you an advisor for this new policy; things will be transformed more smoothly. Yet, I can see the future: More blacks in jail.

I was trying to figure out your sense of "justice" in biology sub-forum. Don't get too excited...

Thanks for your clarification, I was suffering from an identity crisis for some time. Now I can see things more clearly.

 

RE: OP

I got to thinking.

I wonder if there could be slight changes in amygdala volume versus race and IQ. That could explain why Black Americans are labeled with the so-called "Black Rage" and why White Americans tend to display more psychopathic tenancies like serial murder and Citi Bank CEO?

Checked PubMED didn't see anything on race in particular - but I didn't look hard.

People with slightly larger amygdala tend to feel the emotion "fear" more acutely (supposedly) - it's actually the other way, and only noticeable on psychopaths and maybe Banking CEOs... but, meh. So, maybe Africans are slightly more emotional. This may make sitting an IQ examination slightly more difficult (I mean, these things take hours). Whereas individuals with slightly smaller amygdala seem to have less feeling of fear, score higher than average on IQ tests and will happily put a knife in someone while thinking about the washing, or sell a house to someone knowing it will destroy their life and then put their entire family out on the street 8 month later (grandmother included) while thinking about the washing.

This could explain a lot. Historically that is. Everything from religion to colonization. Who knows?


Maybe if people were given a bit more of a break while taking the exam, African Americans will on average score much higher than "Whites" or "Asians"? See, it's little things like this that make one wonder how important IQ tests are and what are they measuring?

 

Baftan, I have trawled through your posts several times before, each time finding more illogical and irrelevant arguments, as well as utterly false claims about what I am supposed to have said than the previous time.

I am not about to do it again. You are clearly incapable of reasoned debate, incapable of rudimentary logic, and come to that, largely incapable of writing intelligable prose. Arguing with you is pointless; when I point out the obvious flaws in your arguments, you simply ignore it or deliberately pretend I have said something I havent, and refute that instead. I am not going to waste any more time doing it.

One final point baftan, it is rather telling that you still havent give any answer to the main argument made in my very first post:

What reason is there to suppose that human populations that were geographically isolated during their evolution and faced different selective pressures would have evolved identically with respect to intelligence or anything else?

 

IQ tests dont always take hours at all. They are often quite short. Some of the most simplistic tests that are correlated with IQ take a matter of minutes, and it really makes no difference to the racial trends found.

As for white people having less fear and being more prone to murder, youre wrong on both counts.

Whilst there are more white serial killers, these account for a tiny proportion of overall murders, and with regard to murders in general, blacks commit about 8 or 9 times the number of murders per head of population as do whites, who in turn commit about 3 to 4 times the number of north east asians.

With regard to fear, black people are generally found to have higher levels of self esteam than whites, who in turn have higher self esteam than asians.

And the order of average IQ score from lowest to highest is blacks<white<north east asians

 

You might have realised that this thread is not in Biology sub-forum any more.

Now, you've been reported on three grounds.

 

*** MOD NOTE ***

This is the comment from Hercules Rockefeller (mod of the biology sub-forum) that would have been posted if this thread hadn't been moved here. While we don't quite have the same solid grounding in HS as there is in biology we do have standards.
MB's argument has failed to meet them.
Thread closed.