What do you mean, “hope”? From a scientific point of view, “hope” is irrelevant here. What we are scientifically constrained to recognize is that we don’t know whether or not it’s going to be erased, because we don’t have a clear scientific understanding of what causes it.
From a scientific point of view, we are obligated to keep recognizing that fact until we do attain a clear scientific understanding about the cause(s). We don’t get to just arbitrarily proclaim at some point “Aw hell, I’m tired of remaining in uncertainty on this issue, so I’m just going to make up my mind the way I want to and declare the question settled.”
It’s the fact that you keep trying to make that arbitrary proclamation that gets you called unscientific.
Those are two separate hypotheses, neither of which is seriously disputed, but neither of which implies what you’re trying to infer from them.
Yes, there are genetic differences between specific populations, and there are even some genetic differences on average at the level of very broadly defined racial groups, although there’s much more genetic mixing and variability among broadly defined racial groups than among distinct specific populations.
And yes, the social/cultural/ethnic groups that we call “races” are associated with different measured levels of achievement in tests or assessments of certain abilities.
But that doesn’t prove that any specific achievement difference is caused by some genetic difference. The fallacy you fall into, time and time again, is the belief that because you see a correlation between achievement and race in some category, therefore you must be justified in ascribing that to a genetic cause.
And right there is where you and science part company.
Yep. Sure does. You are basically saying “I’m a typical liberal douche who believes anything the other liberal douches tell me to believe.” Good day, sir.
That’s our Rand Rover for you. The National Academy of Sciences, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Meteorological Society, the American Chemical Society, the American Institute of Physics, and hundreds of other scientific organizations? Just a bunch of “liberal douches” whose consensus views on scientific issues relevant to their fields of expertise are no more significant than the opinion of any other “liberal douche”.
Hint, Rand Rover: it’s not BrightNShiny who ends up looking stupid when you make that kind of argument.
Are you going to admit that you lied about my position in this thread? I’m not going to respond to this last bit, since it is again, an attempt to ascribe a position to me I don’t hold. Is it really so difficult for you not to make up positions and attempt to ascribe them to me?
What’s even more ridiculous is that I very clearly stated that I don’t know either way about AGC-science issues. Apparently, stating that you don’t know something is an affirmative statement of belief in Randy’s bizarro world.
In most of the race realist blogs I’ve read they think the Germans and Russians trying to rid themselves of Jews was one of the most idiotic decisions in history because the Jews are an extremely high IQ group that any nation would be crazy to want to get rid of due to their successes in science, technology, and literature.
Oh, the Nazi stereotypes did portray the Jews as being plenty intelligent. The Nazis smeared the Jews not for being dumb or unable to succeed intellectually, but for being (allegedly) sneaky, disloyal, un-German, greedy, lascivious, ugly, power-hungry, and evil. (Due to their genes, of course.)
How about the lack of educational opportuinities in subsaharan Africa. As I said before, when you are kept from school because either you have no money for the tuition, no money for food and clothing and have to go out and rummage the garbage and farm, looking to feed yourself and your families, you have no way to get female sanitary supplies and are restricted to the home one week a month OR refused an education because you are female … how do you expect to compete in a modern world where you need to be educated to even get a job, or your country has few jobs that pay any decent amount of cash.
The colonial powers in africa made damned sure that blacks had little to no opportunities to do much of anything except be servants, farm workers, shop attendants, factory workers. once the whites were gone, you had people with no real training in how to run a country left in charge. No wonder they fell back on warlordism, tribalism and kleptocracy.
Yes, it’s not like whites went to Africa to teach them how to govern. They went there to rule over the inhabitants and only backed down when ruling was no longer profitable, or morally acceptable.
O-Kay
Way I see it - fine if you want to be an uber-skeptic, and occasionally refer to scientific studies of links between race and IQ. You’d be wrong, IMO, but you may just be honestly mistaken. I think **Randy **fits in here, and he just likes tweaking liberals’ noses. Whatever floats his boat, it’s 5 minutes less for him to mistreat his valet.
However, if you come into every thread that even mentions Africa or the developing world, and push your “Blacks are genetically inferior, in [ahem] ‘higher-cognitive areas’, if you know what I’m saying, nudge-nudge”, even when your own fuckng cites say different, well, you’re obviously a racist troll, pushing a distinct agenda. Enough said. I’m not wasting any more time on **Pedant **or **Chen **or Polecat.
I’ve long stopped taking those posters seriously because they sound so eye-bulgingly stupid. When you see the same arguments getting rehashed in every thread they contribute to, it’s not difficult to conclude who actually has the intellectual problem.
Hey, has Chief talked about the NBA yet? I need to set my watch.
Unfortunately, I’ve had the misfortune to spend some time with these people. The basic idea they put forth is that Asians are are smarter, but weaker in all other ways, and often they’ll say that blacks are stronger physically, but weaker in all other ways. Only white folk have the perfect balance.
Ooopsie; you keep forgetting a key part of the point. It should be:
" …the belief that because you see a correlation between achievement and race in some category, and despite a normalization of nurture no equivalent achievement is ever attained in any system anywhere, therefore you must be justified in ascribing that to a genetic cause."
And you are right; because I see quantified differences over and over again, and because we have been unable to erase those differences despite sincere and focused efforts to normalize nurture (and I’ve given a handful of examples above), I do attribute that difference to genes.
You may continue to hold out hope that this is incorrect. And frankly, Kimstu, it is a hope. The attitude of those opposed to this idea that genetics are responsible for the differences among us is based on hope. Hope. It’s a hope that has not come to fruition in all these years of trying, and it’s a hope that clings to belief in egalitarianism which has not a shred of evidence going for it. It’s a hope that flies in the face of what educators see everyday in, for instance, the quantitative sciences in every institution of higher learning in the world, and what the public sees on every basketball court or marathon or sprinting event. Pretending that “science” is indeterminate here hides behind exactly the same sort of argumentation advanced by the tobacco lobby when they pretended the “science” was unsettled around tobacco and lung cancer.