Thanks! This is the kind of answer I was looking for, not to be told that it doesn’t/can’t exist.
The only question I’d have is would affirmative action policies in this case be intended to “cherry pick” members of the group into jobs they’re capable of, so that they’re not all painted with the same broad brush? In the current world, there’s a lot of divisiveness about the application of similar policies.
What difference does it make if Joe has an IQ of 80 and is a member of the “smart” group or if he is member of the “stupid” group? Unless the bell curve had little overlap, we’d still just be dealing with individual differences, not predictable by group membership. And over time, as the groups intermarried the lines would blur even further.
It’s worth saying that, for human beings, individuals are so variable that group means don’t tell you that much of interest about the individual.
Men may make better leaders than women on the whole, but that doesn’t mean that, say, Mitt Romney would be a better leader than Elizabeth Warren.
Is this just an example/hypothetical, or do you actually believe that this is inherently true?
Actually Joe is a member of a subset group of the smart group called the “also stupid group”.
I don’t think so, not unless you think AA “cherry picks” currently. Personally I don’t think it does.
I think discrimination against this group would be rampant and undeniable. Even unbigoted people would have a hard time not being biased. So if we think AA is a guard against discrimination, one that has at least some utility now, it seems to me that we would need it even more under this hypothetical.
A member of a stigmitized minority who has a genius-level IQ would be a boon for a university wanting to showcase its diversity while keeping its academic reputation intact. All I’m saying is that if this is true today (and I think it is), then it would especially be true if that stigmitized minority was found to be also burdened by bad genes.
It’s not like disabled folks aren’t already favored by preferential admissions and hiring policies.
There is already a group that is disproportionately arrested and imprisoned. Over 93% of prisoners are men despite men making up less than half of society. There is no question that being a man is genetic. Despite this, no one argues that men should receive lighter sentences or other privileges in the justice system simply because they are men.In fact it is the opposite, men receive 63% longer sentences for the same crime.
If there was evidence that the vast majority of men who are imprisoned possess different brain wiring or chemistry due to their genetic make-up (sex-linked or otherwise), you better believe there would be compelling arguments made about how unfair this is. We don’t execute the mentally handicapped. We provide special services for the criminally insane. Individuals who have mitigating circumstances are given more lenient sentences.
The reason we don’t give males a special break is because we asssume that “maleness” alone doesn’t detract from personal responsibility. But if we have a subpopulation that has impaired reasoning, it doesn’t make sense to punish members of this group the same way we would “normal” people.
Maybe the criminal justice system wouldn’t change, but I think this would be tragic.
No, the prevailing theory is that all pure Neanderthal lines died out, but there was some interbreeding with Homo sapiens and many of us have Neanderthal ancestors.
Or more intelligent. The ashkenazi jews have an iq about one standard deviation to the right of average, As a result they are over represented in stem fields, medicine, business, law, etc. The world responds to that with jealousy and violence. So being more successful would make a group a target just like being less successful would. We enslave and Rob those we consider inferior, then get violently jealous of those we consider more successful. The nazis hated blacks because they thought they were monkeys. They hated jews because they thought jews ran the world.
<Zap Brannigan> Sexy, Sexy Evolution </ZB>
15 points over tens of thousands of years would likely be enough to get the lower intelligence group exterminated. If that wasn’t so, then logically such groups would actually exist, or even be common.* Something *has pushed all of humanity (including men and women, who have significantly different brain architecture) to have the same average intelligence; evolutionary pressure is the most plausible explanation.
Let us bear in mind that at present we have no non-controversially reliable method of testing or even defining intelligence. Some psychologists believe there is a single general intelligence factor, g, but Howard Gardner posits a more complex model with at least seven independent axes of personal intelligence of different kinds – a person could be gifted in verbal-linguistic intelligence and deficient in logical-mathematical, etc.
IQ tests do measure something, some stable personal psychological characteristic, in the sense that if you take two well-designed tests five years apart you will probably get roughly the same score each time; but what thing that is is far from settled.
Meh. In a hundred years or so, a significant portion of the population will be designed genetically to optimise any number of desirable traits. Any given child might inherit 40% or so of its genome from its father, 40% or thereabouts from the mother, and 20% from a pool of desirable and probably trademarked genes. Racism and racial disadvantage will be a thing of the past, at least for those who can pay.
I don’t think you would need to focus on racial groups as much as intelligence groups. We all need a job, each race will have it standouts and under achievers some raqces may average out better or worse than others so it realy doesn’t need to be addressed by way of genetics.
I think we do it about once a week, in our regularly scheduled “I’m not a racist, but black people really are genetically inferior” thread. They’re always flavored with a delicate whiff of “if we’d all just acknowledge this, it would be so much better for them, because we could help!” aroma, to try and make the overt racism go down better.
You need to read a book on human evolution that’s less than 20 years old.
There are no Neanderthals running around. And no, a few percentage points of Neanderthal DNA aren’t the same thing.
Of course, that’s white Homo sapiens since the Neanderthals only ever lived in Europe. So, there’s your basis of white racial superiority. We iz de cavemenz! Alley-Oop! Oogah-boogah! Yabba-dabba-doo!
If we do develop drugs and/or therapies to boost IQ, we need to know who to target them too. Which mean, most likely, identifying people whose biological parents had low IQs.