hypothetical question ONLY, its not an metaphore for anything, please don’t make it be.
say 10,000 years ago or so a group sailed south from china and against all odds made it to australia. but after the luck of makeing such a long journey (with island hopping) had the bad luck to land in a harsh enviroment. then in their new home most of the crew had the misfortune to die from starvation other than a small handful of people.
the people that survive make a simply village and reproduce and get a small simple civilization going. however there was something about the original people that makes them special, they had a mutation in a gene that caused abnormal brain development, and a slight decrease in functioning. but it turns out this ‘defect’ also makes them require marginally less food (by needing less energy) and be well suited for the horrible conditions of parts of australia. and because of this they become very successful hunter/gatherers in australia, interbreeding or overtakeing all other humans there, untill there is a population in the millions by the time australia is “discovered” by the west.
assumeing its now modern times what are the issues of dealing with a ‘race’ of less inteligent humans?
for this question, assume these australians are semi-distinctive by look (say… red hair and ‘asian’ a look that can exist otherwise but isn’t terribly common). assume that the gene that allows them to survive is dominant so that a child of a normal mother/father and an australian father/mother will result in a child with australian brain development.
also assume that the reduction in inteligence is roughly 20 IQ points lower than average (of course IQ is not nearly perfect, not even close… but if it was possible to raise two children in exact duplicate conditions with australian gene being the only variable it would result in an IQ 20 points lower) with a normal curve, so australians with an IQ of 80 are as common as regular people with an IQ of 100, and australians with higher IQs like 120 are as common as IQs of 140 in another race… and IQs of 60 are as common as IQs of 80 in general population (I would assume their culture would include some sort of infanicide to deal with the greater amount of unfunctioning children)
what is the moral way to deal with this world? would you support interacial marrage with australians? do you think this would dramaticly rise racism (people extending that if australians are dumb then maybe blacks are too or something). or lower racism towards most races (due to a single scape goat). would the australian ‘geniuses’ with normal or above normal IQ have any shot at a fair life? would segregation for schools be justifyed? would the only moral thing be to pretend they are just as smart as anyone? what would the moral thing be for a country that was haveing great immigration of australians?
(please don’t take this as an allegory for hate speach, I don’t plan to say “ah ha! I was talking about blacks!!!” at any point or anything, I find this hypothetical to be interesting specificly because its unlike our world where ‘race’ differances are basicly trivial… hmm… someone might want to start a thread with the opposite senerio… with australians being 20 points smarter… as well… )
Lots of ifs in this hypothetical, and the science is just not there to support it, but the moral issue of interacial marriage is a no brainer. Unless you’re willing to disallow an IQ 100 “non-australian” person from marrying an IQ 80 “non-australian” person, why would you disallow these “australians” from intermarrying with “non-australians”?
The fact is, we don’t have an IQ test for marriage now, and we wouldn’t need one in your scenario. Presumably, there would be no new lows of IQ attainment among the “australians” that don’t already exist among “non-australians”.
The OP is subliterate, which normally I can forgive, but this is downright lazy. No attempt at correct spelling or capitalization has been made. Personally, I think it’s an insult to post such writing in GD, or anywhere on SMDB for that matter.
All of which might still be acceptable (to me–I am NOT a mod nor trying to act as one), were the OP not the most politically insensitive drivel I have read here in a long time (“insensitive” as opposed to “inflammatory,” the latter of which has been in long supply recently).
To wit, people really did go to Australia in the way described, but it was even longer than 10,000 years ago. Today in Australia there is great animosity between the two main races, white and “aboriginal,” to which fact you seem completely oblivious. Try to make your hypotheticals a little more hypothetical.
Before you start a sh*tstorm on this board about such racial differences as may occur (or not occur) in the area of IQ, please, please! at least do a little bit of background study before you post. All this my personal opinion only, thanks.
Though I am quite well aware of several people of particularly low IQ from many different “races”, several of them quite well known, whom I would prefer did not breed with the rest of us, I am not going to stop them.
The OP goes right to the heart of anti-racism, that we judge each individual on the grounds of that individual’s ability. Even though most Australians would find themselves in the lower sections of classes, there should be nothing to prevent the more intelligent ones from being a part of the higher sections. If a given non-Australian does not want to marry an Australian in order to avoid the likelihood of having less intelligent kids, then that is the individual’s right, but that doesn’t prevent anyone else from doing so. We all know how much trouble would come if we said that there were certain sections of society that could not marry…
The current year is 2004, not 1974. The funny thing about science is that what might have been “true” in 1974 is no longer “true” in 2004. This claim about human and chimpanzee genetic similarity is way out of date and quite wrong. It was made originally on the basis of the sequences of a bare handful of genes that turn out to be far more similar than the majority of the genetic sequences of the two are as general.
the reason I brought up marrage is that as I mentioned the australian gene is dominant, and so a country could experiance a large amount of immigration and intermarrage which would pull down the inteligence of the country forever irrerverably.
I too am troubled by the specificity of this “hypothetical”. The same question could have easily been asked using made-up landmasses and made-up ethnicities.
That said, I believe
would be the answer. Why? Well, because we have no way of knowing just how much the Australian IQ is due to genetic or cultural influences. Also, I find it unlikely that all Australians would have a low IQ. It would probably be distributed fairly normally. Even if the mode is 80, you’d still find Aborigines scoring way above that. Five percent could have “above average” intelligence. How fair would it be to those folks to automatically assume they’re dumb and warehouse them in special ed.? I normally treat people like they’re smart unless they show me otherwise. I don’t see why native Australians shouldn’t get the same treatment.
Also, I find it hard to believe that their condition would be so dominant. Mental ability is so complex that I really doubt it would be sensitive to one copy of a gene. Even folks with Down’s Syndrome–who have a mutation at the chromosome level–show a broad range of mental abilities. If it’s not one gene that confers this phenotype but a complex of genes, you’re not going to see the ironclad dominance you’re saying would happen.
It wouldn’t be fair to advocate systematic reproductive discrimination against the native Australians just because they are more likely to possess a gene than other groups. Europeans are more likely to carry the cystic fibrosis gene. Central European Jews are more likely to carry the Tay Sachs gene. West Africans are more likely to carry the sickle-cell anemia gene. And yet intermixing in these groups occurs without dire consequences.
your far too eager to look for a fight, did you nodice that the first and last sentence both are saying that its not a metaphore for ANYTHING. the reason its an interesting senerio is because our planet was lucky that all the races are nearly perfectly equal, but no law of physics said it needed to be that way.
I know there were aborigines there, and thats why I mentioned that the group would displace the humans already liveing there. thats specificly why I put it 10,000 years ago, so that it would be no existing group.
first of all, don’t call them aborigines… they are not… aborigines is a real group… these people would not be them, and would come centurys after them.
second, why the hell is it so hard to belive this is hypothetical? I used a real landmass because I wanted to set it on earth, the ethnicity IS fictional, I wanted it to be plausable for discussion… no people left china directly to australia 10,000 years ago (aborigines moved island by island at an earlyer time)… there is no million person population of red headed people with asian features in the desert of australia. I picked australia because its a large island that could hold a large group of humans for a long time before they met the rest of the world, thats all.
if I made a better or more plausable explanation than ‘a gene did it’ then people would definitly be jumping on THAT saying that it was something I belived or was some hidden motive… the fact it works in an unbeliveable way is a good thing, it will let you know that its not a real phenominon. it works the way I say it works because thats how the hypothetical world is set up, its one gene that makes a protein that retards IQ exactly 20 points… magically. if I gave a more realistic senerio you would accuse me of claiming its real… more than people have already.
I suspect that a mere 20 IQ point decrease (whatever it is that IQ tests measure) would correspond only to the tiniest drop in energy requirements. Any reduction in brain function large enough to engender a significant decrease in calorific daily needs would, I venture, result in the individual eating the test rather than merely doing badly at it.
The complexity of the tasks acheived by many jungle-dwelling folk is such that there is no reason to think that they should be any worse at “IQ things”, were they to be instructed in such formal thinking from an early age. I believe you are hypothesising brain differences far in excess of any such differences in existent humans.
You went through the trouble of talking about mutations and natural selection that I just assumed you cared about the realism of your scenario. The fact that you don’t makes me wonder what kind of discussion you’re hoping for. All the rational justifications for NOT discriminating against native Australians are based on the fact that human populations aren’t as simple as you’ve laid out. If we can’t view this problem using what we know about genetics and population biology, what’s the point?
Wooly OP, poorly argued, full of improbable science and unlikely scenarios.
The whole thing rests on supposing that we know a way of accurately measuring intelligence and therefore can all relax and be thankful that all ‘races’ on Earth are equal. But what if they weren’t?!
Problems with your scenario are;
1/ IQ, and any other measurement of intelligence, is subjective and culturally biased.
2/ Intelligence is not a purely inherited characteristic. It can’t be, see 1 above.
3/ The intelligence of any newly discovered ‘race’ has always been disparaged anyway, regardless of the facts. Human history is a sad succession of treating native people of newly discovered lands as sub-humans. We don’t need any thought experiment on what would happen if they actually had been.
4/ Regardless of the above, inter-marriage and breeding has always occurred.
5/ Hardship as a evolutionary pressure has tended, it is believed, to increase human intelligence. Not the other way around.
assume the brain drop is only a side effect to an overall change that I won’t try to come up with an exact mechinism for (since it doesn’t matter).
I am talking about brain differances far diffrent than differances in real humans… that is my sole intention. this is HYPOTHETICAL, humans that live in jungles are no diffrent than you or I, these people in my made up imaginary story are diffrent, and thats how they are hypothetical, nothing like it exists, NOTHING, the question is “what if it did?”. not “does it?”
in the OP I said that I knew IQ was a poor indicator, its just a guide, assume the people would have the deficit no matter what culture they were raised in, or how you raised them. and that if you changed to a diffrent test that it would have a similar 20% drop.
its not, this imaginary gene “the australian gene” is, it works by binding a protein to pixies and faries which results in a decrease in inteligance and also an adaptive feature to the enviroment.
and every single time it was wrong, and thats lucky for the world, but what would the world be like if it was so?
acceptable
someone doesn’t understand evolution it seems! other than the oddness of the gene, my senerio is perfectly valid from an evolutionary point of view. there is no magical path that evolution has us on thats towards smarts that it leads no matter what.
I think the OP raises an interesting scenario, although perhaps it could have been better defined. Read Harry Turtledove’s book “A Different Flesh”, which posits that Homo erectus crossed over to the Americas a million years ago, and that there was no subsequent interaction with Homo sapiens sapiens until the European age of Exploration. Christopher Columbus didn’t encounter native american humans, but rather tribes of Homo erectus. Here we have creatures that use stone tools, use fire, and have a simple language, but are clearly genetically less intelligent than modern humans. What would be the consequences of that?
It just so happens that all extant humans are members of the same subspecies, and are extremely closely related. But that didn’t neccesarily have to happen, there could conceivably have been populations of archaic Homo sapiens or neandertals or Homo erectus or Australopithecines that survived into modern times.
Would the presence of Homo erectus mean more or less racism? On the one hand, it is demonstrated that some people clearly are less advanced than others, and so the idea that some races are less advanced than other races might seem more obvious. But it would also be much easier to show the commonality of all Homo sapiens sapiens when contrasted with Homo erectus.
What would be the legal status of Homo erectus? Should they be given full human rights? Could they be used for medical experiments? Slave labor? Suppose hybrid children could be produced. Would it be unethical to have sexual relations with an erectus? Would it be unethical to produce a hybrid child? Would it make a difference if the child was a sterile mule, or if it could produce children? Even if we grant an erectus legal protections, the clearly cannot function as legal adults in our society. Should the be under some sort of perpetual guardianship, like mentally retarded adults and children are?