Unless you’re suggesting that black people are on average drooling retards, I’m not seeing how that counters my point any.
Towards low-IQ individuals or towards people of racially higher probability of low-IQ?
Suppose all of society agreed that athletic ability was genetic-- if so, what should be its policy towards the non-athletic individuals?
We should do whatever we can (within our fiscal constraints) in our schools to help kids achieve their potential, whether it be academic, artistic, athletic or whatever. However, I don’t want the state to have the authority to even know what anyone’s IQ is.
The statistical data does not suggest that blacks are “drooling retards”.
Likewise, the stats also do not suggest that asians are “polymath geniuses.”
Well, Honesty’s OP did frame it as a racial question. John Mace (perhaps facetiously) reframed it as IQ question without any race component. I agree with this.
Eugenics. Exterminate the weak. That includes Stephen Hawkings. Writing out equations for black holes has no value to society. But being able to dunk a basketball does. Society has proven this to be obviously true: millions more people would rather pay to see Michael Jordan play basketball than to listen to a Stephen Hawking lecture.
If there continues to be standardized testing in public schools, the “state” will cross-reference those test scores to IQ scores like this.
Whether that SAT-to-IQ correlation is actually accurate is irrelevant – it’s good enough for the state to categorize you.
The problem is that there is no objective yardstick available – or possible – for measuring “intelligence,” because intelligence is relative and not absolute. Koko, the signing gorilla, measured poorly on IQ tests because they were written for humans; for example, when shown a picture of a flower and a cake and asked which one was food, Koko quite rightly picked the flower, and was marked incorrect. Koko was not a dumb human, Koko was a very intelligent ape.
If a white, upper middle class stockbroker from Mahattan and an African pygmy hunter/gatherer were given a standardized IQ test, the stockbroker would without doubt come out far ahead. Yet drop the stockbroker and the pygmy naked into the middle of the Amazonian rain forest and see which one is still alive in a week.
It’s all about context. We should be trying to measure not intelligence, but adaptability.
The OP seems to have confused the idea of “Blacks, as a group, have a lower average IQ than Whites” with “All Blacks have a lower IQ than all Whites”. Race is not a good predictor of IQ, and using it as one will result in bad public policy. And before we start talking about what public policy should be towards lower IQ people, we need to ask what business the government has knowing anyone’s IQ in the first place.
So then why do you feel it necessary to point out that non-genetic factors are slight? Did anything I say or anything you’ve seen in life indicate that we were talking about anything other than “slight” effects?
In which case we’re talking about the world we live in already. If no one thinks we need stupid-people legislation already, I’m not sure what anything proposed in the OP brings to the table to suggest we need to look at the world differently than we already are.
I don’t understand the point you are making. Take two groups, self-described blacks and self-described whites. You could certainly measure differences between the two groups, as in your short / tall example, and ascribe such differences to genetic bases. What I don’t see is how you could draw valid conclusions about genetics of the groups without defining their parameters. Let’s say blacks are, on average, 2 inches taller than whites in our sample group, chosen from self-described Americans, and we know tallness is coded by the gene sequence FrEd44. What is the methodology by which you can extrapolate from that to black people as a whole? I suppose (to answer my own question) from there you could go on to map the gene in world populations and draw conclusions from that, but I don’t understand how studying self-described groups alone can give you information about anything other than socio-cultural data.
Well, in this context, it’s easy: the measure of intelligence should be based on intrinsic characteristics that are needed to prosper in a 21st century Western world. If its been scientifically proven that blacks, as a group, lack the necessary genes to perform well on these exams (e.g. promotional, CAT, SAT), should we, as a nation, should we continue to them as metrics for admission and upward mobility?
Because perhaps I was reading too much into your post. You made it sound like non-genetic factors were “equal” in weight to genetic factors. I know you didn’t exactly say that but that’s how I interpreted what you said.
The stats data we have so far show that both genetic and non-genetic factors correlate to IQ. However, the stats data also show that genetic explains (predicts) IQ more so than non-genetic. Almost everyone (including you) who emphasizes the non-genetic factors never bother to mention that those factors do not correlate (regression analysis) as closely as genetic factors.
Maybe it’s a mental exercise to question the validity of IQ classification. By projecting to an absurd future scenario, you work backwards to see if our obsession on stereotyping people with IQ makes sense. If in the future, we suppose that low-IQ folks should be put into concentration camps, then maybe it makes us rethink what’s important. I dunno – ask Honesty why we’re discussing this.
How could Benjamin Franklin have an IQ of anything, when IQ tests weren’t invented until the 20th century?
Well, that is a huge IF. “Blacks” have not been “proven” anything. That the group identified as black tends to score lower on some standardized tests than the group identified as whites who, in turn, tend to score lower than the group identified as (East) Asians merely indicates that some portion of each group bunches up around certain scores. None of this “proves” much of anything. There are certainly black individuals who will score much higher than whites or even (East) Asians and (East) Asian individuals who will score much lower than most anyone else.
Unless you actually intend to propose a policy in which we look at a person’s skin or face and assign them to specific educational tracks or jobs, regardless of their individual qualities, you have nowhere to go with this question.
What are those and how do you measure them? Keep in mind that there are many ways to prosper in a 21st century world.
This has not been scientifically proven. What does it mean for a “group” to perform not as well as another “group” when there is a large overlap between the two groups? It means that you still need to operate at the individual level. So, unless you’re going to mandate IQ tests, and then channel people accordingly, there really isn’t much you can do.
Thank you for a reasoned and measured post.
But I find it untenable and dangerous to “set aside a certain minimum percentage” of firefighters, soldiers or policeman simply because of a well intentioned goal of diversity.
I agree that the criteria should be fair and appropriate----and in the case of the firefighter, it is both fair and appropriate that the firefighter be able to lug that hose up the WTC stairs. Lowering standards in the name of diversity endangers lives.
Not likely, and a dangerous experiment.
If the primary job of the firefighter in the field requires a high level of strength and stamina than it doesn’t take a Phd in Fire Science to see that a person (man or woman) who doesn’t have those attributes is an inferior candidate; and in certain occupations may endanger lives.
+1
Perhaps there is a middle route where people with a lack of physical strength (male or female) can work in a support role; maybe drive the fire trucks for example. But perhaps not; perhaps every hand is needed in some fires and it makes for an inferior force to have weaker individuals employed.
I find it absolutely revolting that we would have such a suicidal dedication to a goal like diversity that we would endanger lives.
That was what would have happened in the New Haven case. The city was actually going to throw out the results that got the most qualified people promoted to higher positions. You would have had lesser qualified candidates in those positions under the guise of diversity. Is that worth lives in New Haven?
I find it ridiculous that one day I will have to explain to my daughter, born in 2003, why she has to suffer discrimination because of things that happened 40 and more years before she was born.
Oh, it gets much worse than the New Haven case. In the 1990s, Chicago spent a fortune on devising the perfect unbiased police and fire promotion civil service tests. When the test creation process was complete, everybody in Chicago agreed that, finally, a non-discriminatory test had been perfected. Of course, it turned out that whites ended up earning 95% of the scores high enough for promotion, so a political firestorm ensued.
For a while, Mayor Richard M. Daley stoutly defended a test on which no expense had been spared, but eventually he caved in and announced that some of the top scorers would get promotions but other worthies would get promotions too, based on “merit” in order to bring “diversity” to leadership positions. This “merit” system was extended to firefighters. Now if you think about it, this is far worse than a quota system, in which you would at least get the best black and best white candidates as fire officers. No, in this case you simply lowered standards, across the board.
Naturally this system was ripe for patronage, and even ended up benefiting a convicted (white) arsonist.
This is why I say that race differences in intelligence aren’t terribly interesting in their own right, but because we have a political culture that says differences in outcomes are de facto racism, and throws out tests that demonstrate otherwise, with these kinds of consequences, then it becomes very important to persuade people otherwise.
Yes.
I am suggesting that it means nothing to argue against genetic differences as a cause for phenotypic differences among race-based cohorts simply because a defined cohort is more genetically diverse than the comparison cohort.
Imagine, for instance, that a very diverse group of humans branched out. Imagine that one of those branches had a set of genes coding for a particular characteristic. Now compare the two groups. One group is more genetically diverse; this has nothing to do with whether or not a characteristic difference is genetic.
The only issue is whether a phenotypic expression is nature or nurture. If all blacks score lower on IQ tests than all asians (as an average, but I get tired of saying that) and this score differential persists even when nurturing influences are controlled for, then the difference is nature–genetic. It’s irrelevant whether “blacks” is a genetically-related cohort, or even a reasonable grouping. (Both may well be true, but it’s not the point). We could take a cohort of “All Harry Potter fans” and compare it with “All Nancy Drew fans.” If we control all the nurturing variables and find a difference, the difference is genetic.
The argument with blacks/whites/asians–racial categories–is that nurturing influences cannot be controlled for. It’s not that the racial categories are somehow provably internally related.
It might be useful to postulate how some groups of humans gained differences in the frequency and distribution of various genes, but it’s not necessary to do so to make a genetic argument for racial cohort differences. Nor is it relevant to argue which racial groups are more diverse. We already have lots of examples of genes more prevalent by racial category–sickle cell is a common example–and with the advent of genomics and genomic-based pharmacotherapy, we’ll be able to get much more specific. Even as we get much more specific, we’ll still find gene expressions that vary by racial category. It’s not as if the general concept that various racial groups have genes which are much more prevalent within that group is completely unsupported.
Dolph Lundgren and Arnold Schwarzenegger are both polymaths who happened to find the most success acting in action films. Lundgren has a Master’s degree in chemical engineering, speaks five languages, and was an Amphibious Ranger in the Swedish military in addition to being a black belt in Kyokushin karate.
Schwarzenegger was able to sculpt his own body to exact dimensions and had to calculate the most precise amounts of foods and fat, protein, sugar intake, etc, in addition to precisely the right amounts of exercise and rest per day - and this was at a time before the widespread use of growth hormone and other powerful steroids that created the “mass monsters” of modern bodybuilding, so I’d say it took some serious intelligence to figure it all out. He’s also a confirmed genius at selling his own image; you don’t become governor of California by being stupid.
It’s not surprising to me that those two had IQs equivalent to Einstein or Benjamin Franklin; Bush I don’t know about. I don’t think he’s as stupid as people make him out to be, though. It takes a high level of intelligence to fly a fighter plane.
Chief Pedant: Thank you, I see the point you’re making now. Assuming one could find a genetic marker for intelligence, one could certainly test for its presence or absence in a given group of people, whether self-defined or not. I still question the utility of imposing artificial, culturally-created boundaries on data sets; what does it add? It’s like comparing Chicagoans to New Yorkers. Unless the marker for intelligence is bound up with the one that marks features causing one to be categorized as one “race” or another, it would only muddy the data.