It seems you are using the term “racist scum” as if it is sufficient to negate the hypothesis being promoted by those who are pissing you off (your term; not mine).
The question is not whether someone is a racist, however you define the term. That’s completely irrelevant. Assume they are racist scum.
The question is: Are they correct or incorrect in correlating IQ with the wealth of nations, and correct or incorrect in correlating IQ with genetic pools, and correct or incorrect in correlating genetic pools with inherent intelligence?
As Gorsnak has pointed out, you appear to have missed the point of the claim. Horses never got much farther south than the Sahel in Africa because barriers of climate (with the association of the tsetse fly and similar critters) killed them off during migrations. Similarly, the wheat, sorghum, and other crops from the Sahel were not able to make the transition to appropriate climates in Southern Africa.
Remember, the discussion is in regards to diffusion of technology and agriculture. It is not a matter of a couple of Cro-Magnons filling a raft with the appropriate cattle and crop seeds and floating down the coast of Africa in a couple of weeks to establish species in a new location (in the way that thousands of years later, Spanish explorers would introduce horses to the Americas and bring corn/maize back to Europe). It is a matter of peoples who are reliant upon specific animals or crops expanding their domain or sharing their cattle and crops with their neighbors, one generation at a time. Anyone with a domesticated horse and a bag of seed can get from Mesopotamia to the mouth of the Rhone River in a mater of weeks, but it actually took up to a thousand years for the crops and animals first domesticated in Mesopotamia to enter and become established in Southern Europe. Corn/maize first grown in central Mexico took thousands of years to “travel” only 700 miles north as variant strains had to develop to adapt to the cooler, drier conditions away from the original location.
Actually, one serious challenge they face (and resolutely avoid addressing) is the inverse of your last two questions: rather than correlating IQ with genetics and genetics with intelligence, they frst need to demonstrate that IQ correlates to intelligence for all relevant forms of intelligence and across all cultural expressions.
(There have been a few attempts to create IQ tests that are not culturally biased, but they have not actually been demonstrated to have achieved their goal.)
When I look at the space shuttle; when I look at an automobile; when I listen to Mozart; when I look at a Ming vase; when I walk around a big modern city; when I access the Internet–all of these types of things–I come to some summary conclusion about the collective skillset required to produce them, and two key components come to mind: intelligence and cooperation. When I go to an area of the world that seems primitive to me, it occurs to me that one or both of those components is missing.
I understand there is vast opportunity for disagreement on this observation. One might take the approach that those types of markers are inadequate proxies for intelligence and cooperation, and the absence of those markers should not allow one to infer a lower level of intelligence and/or cooperation. In that view, all civilizations might be much more equal than they superficially appear to be. One might also take an approach that external circumstances (disease; absent resources; climate; geography; war; politics…) have prevented a population with otherwise equivalent innate ability to triumph over those external circumstance.
I think there is ample room for discussion on the above, and much more. Simply becoming upset at someone else arriving at a “racist” conclusion doesn’t add anything to the evidence supporting one view or the other, though.
Out of curiosity, not trying to undermine your assertion, how do they test those tests? How do they know that a “cultural bias” is not, in fact, a population-level difference in intelligence? Trying to isolate one of two variables, without a foolproof way for testing for either of them, seems difficult. It’s analogous to determining which thermometer among an assortion of broken ones is correct, without any “control” to set the standard.
Quit speaking in code, what are exactly saying? Blacks could never build a spaceship? an automobile? a musician? a vase? a city? only smart whites could do such things?
That would seem to be the problem. Those people who assert that they have developed tests that lack cultural biases have to explain those tests in therms of the language and culture in which they were created. Several of them have developed tests that do not require written language skills to take, but I know of no tests that did not require instructions simplt to take. They also may include issues such as timing that may or may not be perceived differently in different cultures. (Not that a minute has a different number of seconds, but that a person in a different culture may choose to employ time differently.) Similar other issues are involved in those tests and we do not even necessarily know what those issues miught be, so declaring a test “free” of cultural bias strikes me as generally unpersuasive.
You forgot the third component: the desire to produce such things. Some cultures greatly prize development of technology; others do not. With regards to Mozart specifically, I learned last year in AP Music Theory that many African cultures focused much more on rhythm in their music, as opposed to the European concentration of tonality.
I suspect that there are better answers than “intelligence” (or even “intelligence and cooperation”) to his question, but expressing your skepticiam in a way that makes his claim look like blatant racism is not going to promote the discussion.
This seems correct to me, on a certain understanding of cooperation - to include the existence of complex social arrangements allowing for extensive specialization of labour and most importantly transmission of advanced technical knowledge from generation to generation, and lengthy periods of time for those to develop. While primitive tribal societies are highly cooperative in the simple sense that members work together to achieve goals, they are not cooperative in the sense that an advanced urban industrial society is, where members each obtain specialized expertise far beyond the general skillset of hunter-gatherers, and then trade the results of their labour is an incredibly complex marketplace. But getting from co-operative hunting to trading your C++ programming skills for Lasik eye surgery, a home theatre system, and a bottle of fine wine isn’t a matter of being more intelligent and cooperative than the next tribe so much as it is having more resources available to leverage your intelligence and cooperation. Or to put it another way, Europeans didn’t invent the scientific method because they were smart, but because Europe was rich enough that there were smart Europeans with the leisure to sit around on their asses and think about stuff other than how this season’s weather was likely to change the migratory patterns of the caribou and what that implied for when and where the year’s hunt should be held.
He also seems to have left out opportunity. If humanity is (depending on which early ancestor one wishes to claim as human) 250,000 years old, then the earliest “civilizing” efforts only go back to about 10,500 years ago with the very earliest crop domestication. This means that all serious development has occurred in about 4.5% of human history. Similarly, all locations on the globe had achieved the beginning levels of an agricultural society (necessary for any further development) by about 2,000 years ago, so the difference between early bloomers and late bloomers, overall, is only about 8,500 years, or 3.5%. With those sorts of rather small differences, (which, themselves, appear to be based more on the luck of geography than on inherent skills), there does not appear to be any reason to presume that there is a substantial difference among peoples. Given that technological development requires both a society sufficiently stable to support it and a bit of luck in stumbling onto the correct direction to take it, small changes in beginning steps look much larger than they really are from our short lifespans. Given that technology appears to progress geometrically (or at some similar rate), minor changes in start date will be displayed in major differences between cultures when a snapshot is taken of a particular year. (And since one culture getting a jump start in travel, weapons, desire for conquest, and disease can seriously disrupt a culture that is only behind them by a tiny bit on the scale of development, it is rather presumptuous to claim that just because Arab nations had advanced mathematics, astronomy, physics, metallurgy, and navigation in the eleventh century, then Europeans are simply too stupid (or insufficiently cooperative) to ever catch up.)
I’m asking a reasonable question. Is this not what he’s saying?
Maybe he is saying that before the spaceship was invented, the Soviets lacked this undefinable genetic intelligence; before the automobile was invented, the Americans also lacked undefinable genetic intelligence. If he is saying that these things are a measurement of a society’s inherent genetic intelligence, I would reply then ‘how do you explain that these things are just modern inventions’.
or maybe he didn’t say this, maybe he said the that ‘primitive’ people (blacks??) have never and will never be associated with the modern inventions of intelligent people (Asians??? whites???). I would reply with a list of things that could be attributed to these ‘primitive’ people (whoever they may be).
I suppose. However, in any discussions of “race” and intelligence, you are going to frequently encounter the propositions he has put forth. Do you think it is better to shout down such propositions with cries of “Racism!” (which might be true, or which might not be true), or is it better to meet those propositions on their own ground and probe them to see if they carry any weight or whether they are utterly baseless. (Hint: if they carry some kernel of truth and you simply shout them down rather than discovering where the truth may veer into error, you are not going to persuade anyone because they will see the kernels of truth being shouted down and never get to see either the logical errors or countervailing truths that may lie behind them. You will also never discover any more comprehensive truth that may include portions of both your facts and the facts of your opponent, leaving you open to a more successful attack on your position in the future.)
(Besides, we really disapprove of name-calling in this Forum, even backhanded and suggestive name-calling. )
I am avoiding naming any population because I am NOT trying to argue the point about whether or not a given genetic pool is more (fill in the blank) than another. Those arguments can go on forever. As I have said elsewhere, I believe that modern genetic studies will be able to settle this scientifically, one way or the other. I have also cautioned against putting all one’s marbles on one side or the other lest you end up wrong.
I’d like to think that the family of man can move past worrying about Mother Nature’s gene distribution, and I’d love to see a time when our gene pool is so intermingled that there are no isolated gene pools or races.
What I AM trying to say is that the scientific/observational underpinnings are not undermined by simply flinging out the term “racist.” I sensed in the OP an anger that anyone might even think there are inherent measurable differences among races. I personally think it’s a perfectly reasonable conclusion that there may be genetic differences, even if I wish there were not. (In any case, no one should be so foolish as to assume an individual is at the exact mean of a wide overlapping spectrum within his group.)
And just so no-one wastes too much time attacking that position: I am not saying it’s the only conclusion or the best conclusion, or anything else. I’m just saying that if scientific study has been used to get to it, it’s a reasonable conclusion and that where someone has applied science to arrive at it, the science should be attacked, and the labeling should be avoided.
Then you should quit your baiting and do us all a favor by naming these scientific/observational underpinnings and not throw out some vague attributes of some vague group.
No, if you don’t fit a stereotype you are an outlier. The ‘perfectly reasonable’ conclusions that are being put froth by these university professors is that Africans are sub-human with animalistic qualities.
You will note that i have not addressed you using my dreaded Moderator powers. I am not accusing you of name calling or having violated any rules.
I am trying to forestall this thread from degenerating to that level, particularly when such a fall would be unnecessary. Note that what caught my attention was
In itself, it is not name-calling and provoked no Moderator action from me. OTOH, such questions have often been the opening shots in what later became vitriolic personal attacks. My only suggestion was that it would be better to discover where a poster stood with more neutral questions.
Note that Chief Pedant’s actual point appears to be that, without taking a specific stand on either side of the discussion, he simply finds it a bit unwise to dismiss scientific inquiy for societal reasons rather than letting the science discover the facts.
Without having any use for Rushton or his ilk, I would tend to agree with that position. If Rushton cherry-picks his data (as he clearly does) or cooks his data (an act of which he has been accused, but not in any forum that would threaten his tenure), then the science will destroy his pronouncements while not leaving any niggling doubt in the minds of some that the “Truth” had been “suppressed” for political expediency.
I’ve been dipping into Hayek’s Road to Serfdom and in it he states that the freer, within the framework of law, the country is, the more prosperous it is. Modern examples that come to mind are North and South Korea - the former an impoverished dictatorship, the other a much freer society (I wouldn’t really have called it a democracy until recently) - and America and Mexico - America being a free democracy with very little corruption, and Mexico until very recently almost a one-party state with rampant corruption.
Much of Africa is grossly corrupt, with little respect for law, and as per Hayek it is poor. Nothing to do with race.
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