Blacks and Intelligence

Great Debates
1

There has been chatter in recent threads discussing whether there are genetic, heritable differences between blacks and whites. Proponents support the idea that blacks perform worse on standardized exams and fail to achieve educational parity with whites because of innate, genetic differences.

In examining whether there are genetic differences between blacks and whites, my goal is to be objective and to seek scientific and biological data that supports the conclusion that blacks, as a group, will perform always perform below whites. I will not dive too much into the pedantry of learning and memory, but I will say that there are multiple ways to quantitatively test the hypothesis that blacks are intellectually burdened than their white counterparts. Individuals with Down’s Syndromeshow less synaptic markers in the cerebellum, hippocampus and frontal & parietal lobes. Similar, post-mortem experiments have been done in Alzheimer’s, schizophrenics, and even of adults who were victims of child abuse.

My suspicion is that if were differences between blacks and whites, it’d be glaringly obvious from the aforementioned post-mortem work. Since these experimenters undoubtedly would’ve used controls with non-white cadavers. Because I can’t find a study that suggest that blacks, as a group, have a paucity of protein that is required for learning and memory, I have asked proponents to produce a scientific, peer-reviewed article that supports their conclusion. Instead of evidence, proponents believe it is a matter of elimination between nature, nurture, and socioeconomic factors; proponents also believe that just because the proof of black inferiority isn’t available now, doesn’t mean it won’t be discovered the later. Because of this, it is my opinion that any discussion of race, intelligence, and biology would be unfruitful since the very hypothesis is based on faith not science.

Let us instead, resolve and assume, that there exists conclusive evidence that blacks are inferior to whites to the magnitude that standardized exams now indicate. What should the United States do with a significant portion of its population whom are drowning in the pool of their own ineptitude? Should the U.S encourage blacks to move to specific federal areas where they may till the fields and perform manual labor for a living wage? Should the U.S. be more benign and require blacks to go to school longer than their white counterparts; or, perhaps, we can reduce funding to predominately black schools since those students are less likely to achieve anyway. I’m very curious as how proponents envision the Western World dealing, head-on, the idea that blacks are not just socially cursed but intellectually damned as well.

  • Honesty
2

Ah yes, let’s revisit the Bell Curve debate.

Btw, Steven Pinker’s book The Blank Slate dedicates entire chapter 8 “The Fear of Inequality” to your question.

There is sarcasm in your rhetorical questions but society doesn’t need to segregate groups based on intelligence. Society adjusts itself to everyone’s different talents. Intelligence (as measured by IQ tests) is just one talent that is valuable economically.

I may not be “intellectually damned” but I’m certainly “vertically damned” – I’ll never be able to play NBA pro basketball. I’m also “vocally damned” – I’ll never be able to sing like Pavarotti. Does that mean society should fence me off because I can’t do those 2 desirable things? Does that answer your question?

The govt should not require blacks go to school longer or anything else they don’t want to do. Should the govt require that average height people like myself be strapped into racks to stretch our bodies to 7 feet tall so we can all play basketball?

3

I’m not sure why you’re skirting the interesting part of the debate and heading straight for a science-fiction guessing game. (Actually, I have a guess, but I’ll keep it to myself.) Oddly enough, I’m rereading Stephen Jay Gould’s Mismeasure of Man at the moment, so it’s particularly difficult to take this seriously.

So you’re positing that geneticists have found not only an objectively measurable difference in intelligence as an inherited trait, and one distributed by race, but also a huge enough difference that anyone with African origins (how much?) is “intellectually damned” beyond all doubts of bias in tests or socioeconomics or anything else? My answer to your debate is, No, even accepting this as true, the federal government is not going to form labor camps for any ethnic group or single them out in any way, nor send FBI agents out into the streets armed with brown paper bags to see who needs to be sent to a “special” school.

What becomes of thousands upon thousands of black PhDs and MDs – do they get to guard the camp? What about those of mixed race – they get to live nearby? Why do, say, those with Down syndrome get their freedom when they can be shown to have even less innate intelligence? Why don’t they get their own labor camp? Because it’s cruel and against everything our society believes in?

In short, any plan that divided society based on genetics would cause massive social unrest, leading to martial law andy any number of unpleasant scenarios. Personally, I think that there’s enough stupidity to go around in general that a genetic deficit in a small percentage of the population can be absorbed without anyone really noticing.

4

Why bring the racial component into it at all? If you think intellectually “substandard” citizens should be channeled into manual labor type jobs, just give everyone an IQ test and put the “substandard” group, regardless of race, into those jobs. Even if Blacks, as a group, have some genetic factor which makes them score lower on IQ tests, there are still plenty of Blacks who are going to score higher than lots of Whites.

5

IQ tests are horrid anyway. They only measure certain kinds of intelligence.

I scored 124 on one before but I find most people easily surpass me in social, and langauge skills. Are street smart smooth talkers with low scores smarter then me?

I can be very creative sometimes, but I also can be very uncreative. Are creative people with low scores smarter then me?

I say yes they all are.

6

There’s a major problem with any suggestion that Blacks are a genetic group. There is more genetic diversity in Africa than in the other populated continents put together. Europe is essentially a peninsula, and white Americans (the people who seem most interested in comparing themelves against blacks) largely come from the end of the peninsula. That is not the case for Africans. Even if you limit it to African-Americans, you still have a problem assigning genetic homogeneity. True, most of their African ancestors came from West or West-Central Africa (but not all), but most of them also have some ancestry from Europe (the gene pool from which they are often held to be distinct) and many from various Native American tribes.

While there may be genetic factors many have in common, e.g. those that cause sickle-cell anemia, the group is far too diverse to make sweeping statements. I know a lot of medical studies use race as a category, but that’s bad science, really. Where is the evidence that blacks form a genetically discrete population?

7

Exactly. Of course the problem is that we have these sort of “disparate outcomes” litmus tests that treat it as a great surprise when blacks score 1SD lower than whites on a “supposedly objective” test. Then we must run around trying to come up with some explanation, from pervasive racism to claiming that the test must somehow be biased. Unfortunately these accusers are never required to point out actual bias, only point out inequality of outcome.

Race differences in intelligence would be a lot less interesting, to everyone except for the skinhead brigade (and I guess the all-pervasive East Asian supremacists), if our legal and educational systems do not insist on inherent equality of outcome, with the resulting contortions and cognitive dissonance that this policy requires.

8

IQ tests are biased and represent only rote intelligence. True ‘intelligence’ incorporates such factors such as wit, success, love, happiness etc.

Albert Eistein, Benjamin Franklin and Garry Kasparov’s IQs were/are 160… the same as Dolph Lundgren, Arnie and George W.'s.

9

Before someone claims that “race is a social construct,” let me present this genetic mapof Europe that manages to separate out not races but different European populations based on principal component analysis of SNPs. Any single allele has little predictive power, but many together can be extremely powerful (and most interesting traits, including the inherited component of intelligence, are multifactorial, relying on more than one gene)

10

If we take the assumption that almost any two groups–racial self-categorizations; men/women; tall/short–are going to perform differently on both standardized tests and in the real world, then our job as a society is to try and create a society that is as just as possible for all, creates equal opportunity for all, and extends a helping hand to those with lesser ability or lesser opportunity.

It seems to me we’re stumbling through that fairly reasonably.

The notion that you expressed in your last paragraph to genetically-based group inequality seems patently absurd, as well as destructive, for it only furthers balkanization.

Let us assume, for example, that women are genetically less able than men–as a group–to perform some of the physical tasks required for firefighting. (Say, hauling hoses up the World Trade Center…). Should we just say “No women firefighters”? What about the women who could meet the physical requirements? What about skillsets women could bring that don’t measure well on physical strength testing? Rather than focusing on arguing how much of an immutable genetic difference there is between the two groups, maybe we could:
1. Examine our criteria and make sure they are as fair and appropriate as possible.
2. Set aside a certain minimum percentage of firefighting jobs for women, recognizing that there is a value in the goal of diversity on the force, and that the physical test for which there are immutable genetically-based differences–while important and legitimate–is not perfect.

If we broaden that little example to the rest of society, we may be delighted with a third potential outcome: what we thought was a good-faith effort to simply be inclusive ends up providing us with an even better firefighting force. It may not, but it seems to be worth trying.

What we should avoid doing, in my opinion, is pretending that various cohorts of humans–racial categories, in your example–are identical simply because we wish they were. There is no evidence of that, and whether one looks at the NBA (over-represented by blacks) or Engineering PhDs (overrepresented by asians), it seems self-evident that equal opportunity does not result in equal outcomes, and that therefore–at a group level–we are not created genetically equal. So what?

I don’t think it furthers an attempt at a reasonable discussion to pretend that if one accepts genetic differences among race-based cohorts then an appropriate response might be to channel that cohort into some sort of second-tier status. It seems to me we are determined as a society to work for exactly the opposite: find ways to give a helping hand up to everyone, of any color, and never assume that the color of an individual’s skin is an a priori indicator of their ability.

11

This is not accurate.

IQ tests do have limitations and they certainly are not the be-all-end-all of what makes a human being valuable to society.

However, they do not measure “rote” intelligence. A person could memorize an entire encyclopedia and every word in the Oxford dictionary and still test badly on an IQ test. IQ tests do not test information recall. They test pattern analysis. Skills in rote memorization do not help with the infinite varieties of pattern analysis scenarios on the IQ tests.

Conversely, you could have someone who was very good at pattern analysis but was unable to remember a 7-digit phone number you gave him 10 minutes ago.

12

The question is not whether blacks are a genetically-based group–this is a common strawman–but whether or not group differences between (self-described) blacks and other (self-described) cohorts are genetically-based. I typically use the example of short and tall groups as a simple example. The group of tall people has a different average genetic expression for tallness than the group of short people, even if those two groups are not otherwise related. It’s not necessary to show that the cohort is otherwise related; at issue is only the prevalence of the tallness gene set. While the argument about how blacks as a group are more genetically diverse than any other group is popular, it’s not relevant.

13

For those new to the topic, William Saletan has a series of articles on Slate that gives some background on the debate. This topic is obviously rather underexposed, particularly on the non-vitriolic channels on both sides, so educate yourself! :slight_smile:

14

I am sidestepping that debate because its based on faith. There aren’t any studies that suggest blacks are less intelligent than whites yet that hasn’t stopped people from firmly believing in that hypothesis. Its like trying to convince a theist that there isn’t a God based on empirical data; it’s stupid, pointless, and inevitably is akin to bashing your head agaisnt the wall.

  • Honesty
15

I don’t understand this part.

(Is this OP being “meta”?)

16

Expound on this.

Are you saying that overrepresentation by blacks in the NBA and Asians in Engineering are due to genetic differences?

17

Unfortunately, various outside influences likely factor into intelligence beyond just genetics.

Nutrition
Parental attention
More complex world
School attendance

Until these are equalized between the races or fully quantified such that math can be used to determine where to lay the blame, there’s no knowing the factual answer to the question.

At any rate, a person is as worthy as they are. A genius is a genius regardless of the odds that he would have ended up that way.

18

Yes, but g is widely accepted to be around 70% genetic. Of course if you’re a starving child in Africa you’re likely never to reach your potential, which is why the Micronutrient Initiative is doing what it’s doing:

However in the U.S., these two problems were almost completely solved decades ago—by fortifying salt with iodine and flour with iron and other micronutrients.

I refer you to my post explaining how the Flynn effect is slowingdown.

19

For everyone or just whites?

20

Everyone on both sides already acknowledges environmental factors also affect IQ.

The key point is that heredity (genetics) has been shown to be a better predictor (“prediction” meaning mathematical regression analysis) than nutrition, adoptive parents, and all the other things you mention.

In any case, the OP has skipped the “nature vs nurture” debate and asked a more focused question: Suppose all of society agreed that IQ was genetic – if so, what should be its policy towards the low-IQ individuals?