As the tests have continued they have become more accurate.
Remarkable how IQ testing has always reflected the social status of human groups so well, isn’t it? Remarkable how ethnic groups that are treated as social inferiors (as were the Irish and Italians a hundred years ago) score consistently worse, and how much smarter they get once the racial animus they receive from the majority population disappears.
Remarkable that your IQ is apparently too low to draw the logical conclusion from this fact.
Inferior Negro is a great band name.
Sigh. I’m glad I studied all this extra hard for my comps. And I kept saying that those damn things had no real world applications!
**
New Deal Democrat**, while the Holocaust had obvious implications for eugenics programs worldwide, and that was a catalyst to the ending of scientific racism (which is apparently still ongoing…), it wasn’t the only reason things were changing. First, Franz Boas had been promoting a culture based view of race for over fifty years by then. Biological anthropology in the US took longer to catch up, but well before World War I, race was no longer considered an adequate way of looking at other groups in the three other subfields. Moreover, around the 1940’s, I think, Washburn was putting bio anth through what is known as the New Physical Anthropology. He demanded that bio anths stop just describing what they see, and start trying to explain it from an evolutionary perspective. He basically brought it up to date with the rest of biology, although my bio anth friends still mutter about how behind their field is. 'Sokay, so’s mine. He also wanted to look at humans from a biocultural perspective, which only makes sense as we’re biocultural critters. At any rate, using Washburn’s method, race starts to look silly. In its proper biological and cultural context, race is clearly a social structure, not a genetic one.
Probably the most important reason that race does not make sense as biological categories is because human geographical variation is clinal, not discrete. Skin color is a beautiful example of this. Skin color gradually shades into darker or lighter with latitude. There are no dinstinct boundaries where black people are on one side and whites on another. Instead, we have infinite shades of brown in between. Human characteristics are like this. There is no spot in Russia where you can draw a line with epicanthic folds on one side and none on the other. For race to be an adequate descriptor biologically, you would expect to see that, but you don’t. Blonds appear in Australia, and my white-as-toast friend has the eyefolds. Moreover, the various traits we use to describe the races don’t match very well geographically. The physical traits we describe as “black” (skin color, broad nose, tendency towards sickle cell anemia) are not universal within Africa, nor are they only found in Africa or even only in the same places.
Speaking of Africa, another reason that race is not a good description is because of them. Africans, particularly sub-Saharan Africans are, of course, the most genetically diverse peoples on Earth. Any real definition of race that lumps all Africans together is clearly false, and any one that considers sub-Saharan Africans a separate race, rather than just humans with the rest of us being subraces, is dumb. Race has actual meaning in biology, folks, and arguing this stuff starts getting like arguing evolution with someone who thinks it’s just a “theory”.
I also addressed the forensic anthropologist thing above. I’m more than happy to answer any questions, but I’ve got to go for a bit this morning. Study group and all.
Intelligence is largely about adaptation. If you were to find yourself in the middle of the Congo, how would you do? No car, no vaccinations, no cell phone. shrugs Mm-hmm. Ya don’t know if you haven’t been taught, eh?
It’s very hard to take people seriously when they claim that racial variation is really different groups of subspecies. If you want to look at different “racial” or “ethnic” groups and consider differences and similarities, that’s perfectly reasonable, but this race and intelligence by genetic variation junk is just silly.
Intelligence and cognitive function are influenced by hundreds of different factors in the cognitive development process. If you take a child and isolate him/her from birth til puberty, that child will never acquire full use of language. Is that because of genetics? Of course not.
I’m having a hard time telling if some people here are “racist” or just plain “ignorant”.
I’m guessing they don’t, but I don’t see your point.
If some differences between groups disappear when the environment changes, and others persist, that would appear to be evidence that the persistent differences are not caused by the environment, at least not the part that changed.
Regards,
Shodan
The average IQ of an African Negro is 70. This means that the average adult African Negro has the mental age of a white eleven year old in the United States.
I guess I should make my point clearer. You must be black, or you’d be able to understand this intuitively.
There appears to be about a 15 point “gap” between the IQs of the majority and the IQs of members of minority groups. Back when Irish and Italian people were considered not to be white, their IQs tested significantly lower than those of white people; and coincidentally, now that Irish and Italian people are not distinct from white people in the general conception, they are just as smart as their fellow whities.
Black people were and have remained a stigmatized minority group; therefore it’s no shock that their reported IQs have not changed.
If you disagree with this logic, and if you think IQ testing reveals something useful about the average intelligence of people from different ethnic backgrounds, please explain why this tool revealed something totally incorrect about Irish and Italian people (and, incidentally, Ashkenazi Jews) back then, and why we can nonetheless rely upon its accuracy now. Or else explain how it is that Jews, Italians, and Irishmen changed from dunces on pair with black folk into people as smart as (or in the case of those Jews, even smarter than) white folk over such a historically short period of time.
Ignorance, you haz it in its purest form. You think everyone should just ignore science that reaches conclusions they find uncomfortable.
What kind of scientist are you, exactly? Given your obviously nuanced and educated understanding of this topic.
Because of my ignorance (given that I’m not Jewish or Asian) I can only set my trust in the scientific consensus within the fields of anthropology and psychology, which clearly hold that that pop science book you seem to enjoy so much is totally wrong. But obviously you have some specialist knowledge that enables you to go beyond what these so-called “experts” believe.
Question for Rand Rover, Shodan, Chief Pedant, and the other scientific racists here: just purely out of curiosity, what racial groups do you believe exist? Do you consider “Malay” (southeast Asian and Pacific) to be a subclass of “Mongoloid”, for instance, or a totally separate group? What about American Indians. And for that matter, Aryan Indians (i.e. dot, not feather)? They’re awfully dark and India’s pretty poor.
Do you not see the irony of posting that in this thread?
The idea that the average intelligence of Africans is two standard deviations below that of western white populations is pretty much a reductio ad absurdum of the idea that actual general intelligence is being accurately measured by these studies. I mean, seriously. 70 is really freaking stupid.
If you bring solid, carefully collected data, you might convince me that there is some measurable difference in intelligence (though if you figure out how to actually measure general intelligence accurately do let us know) between various large human populations, but when you start out by just accepting the idea that the average Gambian is borderline mentally handicapped it’s pretty hard to take anything you say seriously. For the time being, the null hypothesis rules the day.
Hell, I’d feel some measure of satisfaction if they even came up with some evidence that “general intelligence” (or g) is in fact a valid concept. Since there’s hardly any consensus on that point among those so-called ‘psychologists’ who invented the term.
Ya’ll should watch this:
The documentary discusses just what is intelligence, whether an IQ relates to other measures of intelligence, and puts several people through rigorous tests to see who comes out on top. I thought it was pretty interesting.
That 55% number does reveal that indeed there is a lot of discussion on the subject and that is hardly a consensus, [aside] do you realize that experts on climate research agree with AGW by more than 90%? That is why we can talk about a consensus there and not here.
And this is also telling, the reality is that that 55% number is bound to be less due to the fact that most of the “great” books cited have lousy information on them.
And since I already know that Jensen is dead wrong on the idea for the reasons why there is no official statement supporting him (It is not impossible in other sciences) I have to go for the consensus in this thread, there is controversy on this subject, but the conclusions and solutions to the issues made by the crackpots in this tread are even less supported.
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v457/n7231/full/457788a.html
Well, regardless of the validity of the concept of g, it’s pretty clearly that people have varying degrees of prowess in carrying out various intellectual tasks. So even if intelligence is comprised of a bunch of non-commensurable elements that don’t correlate with each other, you could at least in theory find that some populations are measurably below others across the board, or at least across most of the board. I would expect drawing any conclusions from this sort of data would become hopelessly muddled and subjective, however, and that’s even before taking into account the way human populations all fuck each other at the least opportunity and mess up the nice genetic isolation between groups that God Intended[sup]TM[/sup].
nm
The Bell Curve wasn’t science.
I do, and yet what you call a system that prevents you from using accurate words to describe things?
Do actually believe Chief Pendent isn’t a bigot or racist? If he is why shouldn’t one be able to point out this fact?
Pendent? As in something hanging from something else?