Half of any population is less intelligent than average. So an argument could be made that “most” people in an modern high tech environment fail to thrive for certain values of thrive.
It now seems that your definition of intelligence is tied to said environment. You’re basically acknowledging that the tests that produce the values you like are biased in favor of that environment. I guess you don’t mind that a high tech intelligent person might not have features of intelligence that would allow them to survive outside that environment?
Intelligence is related to education as well.
However, people think that genious are just a little bit more than a very intelligent person. But when you met a real genious in person, you realize they are actually beings of another cathegory.
Not really. I mean, okay, it depends on your definition of genius. An idiot savant or someone absolutely obsessive about a single subject is a little odd. However, people of very high intelligence are just folks. I tend to test extremely well, but I think that’s a skill, not an indication of my overall intelligence. I have friends who I consider much smarter than me, and many of them aren’t very good at standardized tests. It just so happens that my intelligence is expressed in a certain way- I’m good at math and computers, and it’s that kind of thinking that gets tested with IQ tests and the SATs and GREs.
NDD, what do you think would happen if Bill and Melinda Gates decided to adopt aboriginal infants, ignoring that there would rightly be an outcry? Because, see, there’s a world of difference between living as the uber-privileged children of a super rich American couple, and living as a member of an extreme underclass. Their kids would still have a certain amount of racism directed against them, but they would also be buffered by billions of dollars, enough food, high quality education, and so on. And you still think their average IQs would be low enough that the Gates would have to find special schools for them? Do you really think that any child of Bill Gates would be unable to learn how to use a computer? That only seems possible if the child has too many problems to live on his or her own, which is clearly not a common scenario for aboriginals.
Look up the naturalistic fallacy. Even if there are systematic group differences it doesn’t imply people have to become nazis. Also, groups overlap considerably in various traits.
Far more people have died as a result of blank slate ideologies. Kulaks in Russia, Mao’s cultural revolution & Pol Pot’s year zero wiping out intellectuals etc
Can you provide a cite? Which adopted children? Were they addicted to drugs when they were born? How old are they? Is there a difference between an affluent white couple adopting a black child and an affluent black couple doing the same? How many years, if any, did they spend in foster care or group homes?
Social Darwinism and Nazism were, at most, based on a third grader’s understanding of evolution. They made the whole thing overly simplistic and wrong. That doesn’t mean that evolution is wrong or inherently evil, either. Us humans are really, really good at taking morally neutral or even positive things and using them as an excuse to do absolutely appalling things.
The lead article in the June 2005 issue of Psychology, Public Policy and Law, a journal of the American Psychological Association, examined 10 categories of research evidence from around the world to contrast “a hereditarian model (50% genetic-50% cultural) and a culture-only model (0% genetic-100% cultural)”…
Trans-Racial Adoption Studies. Race differences in IQ remain following adoption by White middle class parents. East Asians grow to average higher IQs than Whites while Blacks score lower. The Minnesota Trans-Racial Adoption Study followed children to age 17 and found race differences were even greater than at age 7: White children, 106; Mixed-Race children, 99; and Black children, 89.
Adolf Hitler claimed with little evidence that “Aryans” were superior to other racial groups. In doing so he ignored the achievements of Semites in the Near East, and Orientals in the Far East. Nevertheless, it is not true that all racial groups are genetically equivalent. Anyone who argues that they are ignores different average performance levels, and reveals a basic ignorance of how evolution works.
I think I’ve already explained why Rushton is a shitty source. He does shitty, shitty science. Data mining and using other people’s data to find correlations and so on is one thing, but what he does… The poor numbers do not deserve being tortured so. The problem is, he has a tendency to use aggregate data from sources that simply are not all that great. This articlef (pdf) talks about some of the difficulties with the data Rushton and Jensen use and then lay out their own methods and math. They show an increase in mean black IQ, which they think started in the late 1950s or late 1970s, depending on which test you use. I did also see another source that claimed that black children adopted by white children have higher test scores as children than their fellow black kids. Alas, I didn’t have time to look at that more closely last night, and now I don’t remember where it was. However, that study is not nearly the trump card you seem to think it is. I swear, that man only continues to get published because journal editors like a good controversy.
This psycho-racist hijack of yours (in a thread about psycho-racists who hijack threads) has been dead for a while now. Start giving your final nutjob rantings now, cuz this thread is about to be closed.
You simply do not understand what we’re saying, and you, quite frankly, do not understand human evolution or human behavior. Yes, there are clearly differences between geographic groups. My family is clearly not from Africa or Australia or the Americas. However, we’re also clearly not Nordic or Italian, either. Geographical differences are simply not explained well by racial categories. I forget if you posted those articles or someone else, but one of them argued that scientists wanting discrete categories was asking too much of the definition. It’s not. There are plenty of people who think that Neanderthals and humans are but subspecies, not separate species. Any Neanderthal morphological trait there is, you can find it in humans as well. However, when you map actual Neanderthal and early modern human morphological traits, you find that they barely overlap. That is simply not what’s happening with races. You’ve got people in Italy and India that do not have black skin or hair of that texture, but they are susceptible to sickle cell anemia. Black hair is all over the place, but blond hair pops up in some surprising places. Olive skin tone is everywhere. Robust and gracile bones are everywhere. There are no constellations of features that group anything like as well to make racial categories a useful method of describing humans.
The different human races differ as much and in the same way as different animal breeds. People of your persuasion claim that race is a social construct, but you usually support affirmative action. Why should those who imagine that they are Negro be given special preferences?
My persuasion. I like that. I think that affirmative action has its place because race is a social construct. There are still people like you out there, assuming that TaNesha Jones simply won’t do as well on the job as Susan Jones and rejecting black folks in higher numbers. It may not be readily apparent, but “I just don’t think TaNesha will fit in with our culture” is alive and well. Look at MIT. I’m pretty sure that the people doing the hiring back in the day weren’t twirling their mustaches, cackling with glee at their oppression of women. It was subconscious, but it made a huge difference. They had to work on getting better gender equality in hiring and pay. It’s the same with minorities. Now, there are cases where it clearly doesn’t work out, but I think that’s because a lot of companies take the lazy way. They don’t bother to hire the qualified black or Latin@ workers, they just hire any old minority who walks in the door. That’s not helpful. But taking a good, hard look at your practices and purposefully working towards equality is helpful, as MIT shows.
