Is there a scientific consensus that there is no relationship between race and intelligence? What kinds of studies have been done in this field? Do they all show that there is no relationship between race and intelligence?
The scientific consensus is that there is no relationship. For a fascinating and exhaustive survey on this subject, read Stephen J. Gould’s The Mismeasure of Man. It’s a history of scientifically supported racism, in which Gould is able to use these “scientists’” own data to demonstrate how they mis-read or mis-interpreted–or mis-represented–their own research in order to illustrate a prejudicial conclusion. In other words, every time, in the history of science, that some “scientist” claims to have found a factual basis for racism, Gould was able show how their own data proved them wrong; no new research was ever necessary. He did the same thing in his introduction to a book that was a collection of essays reacting to one of the latest such examples of pseudoscience, The Bell Curve. I forget the title of this collection of anti-*Bell Curve * essays, but Gould’s introduction neatly sums up the weaknesses of that book’s arguments and, once again, he finds proof that its authors were wrong in their own appendix.
I think it’s more of a matter that:
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Intelligence is extremely hard to define, much less measure.
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Even if one agrees on a definition and measurement methodology, there are so many factors that contribute to intelligence that it’s hard to isolate individual causes.
Not to mention that there is generally agreement among biologists that race is not a scientifically valid concept. There are certainly regional variations among humans, but there are no clear boundaries between these variations and no clear way of categorizing people by race. One might better answer a question like: “is there a correlation between blood type and intelligence”.
I don’t know if there is a factual answer to your question, other than that there isn’t concensus, since at least one source that I know of, Jared Diamond in his book Guns, Germs and Steel, argues against it. His theory is that people in ‘civilized’ (i.e. urban or agricultural societies) are less intelligent than people who live as hunters-getherers. He claims that evolution favored people who were resistent to bacteria in civilized society, whereas hunters-getherers are better off being smart.
I know this doesn’t address the question of race, per se, since it’s more of culture or geographic location, and not race. Then again - what is race?
For a contra position that’s highly controversial, take a look at The Bell Curve, by Herrnstein & Murray. The authors (well, author - Herrnstein died just before publication) took a lot of flack, some of which they deserved but others of which they did not. A lot of the response seems to have been of the “How do you dare say such a thing” variety, rather than addressing their data (some of which does appear to have holes).
That the surviving author, Murray, appears to have been genuinely surprised at the reaction was always a bit surprising to me, particularly since some of their rhetoric borders on eugenics. But that doesn’t mean their arguments are factually incorrect. I have not yet evaluated what’s happened in the field of psychometrics since the book came out - or even the more reasoned arguments of their detractors. But if they’re even partly correct, the social consequences could be devastating in a world in which people of good will have done so much to try to erase racial difference.
Of course, those reviews were a clear result of the fact that Murray and Herrnstein deliberately avoided peer review, publishing their “study” in the popular press (even withholding galley proofs from reviewers, a standard practice that allows some investigation into a book’s quality prior to publication).
There have been several factual dissections of The Bell Curve. A few of them are referenced at the end of this article in Slate.
The web site Analyzing The Bell Curve provides links to several scientific critiques of the book.
The clearest argument against TBC is that they went out and found two tests that measure different data on distinct populations, then pretended that the tests measured the same thing and drew conclusions based on their (inappropriate) mixing of the results.
Most scientific reviewers will give Herrnstein and Murray high marks for the first half of their book, in which they lay out a fairly clear and historically correct presentation of the history of biometrics. In the second half of their book, however, they simply cobbled together some odd results that (when selectively chosen) supported the social agenda that they had each pursued for the preceeding decades.
As John Mace has already noted, one problem with any such “racial” study is that there is no clear line to delineate “race.” In the course of the last 250 years, different people have attempted to identify three, four, five, and even 60 races. The boundaries for each “race” keep shifting, so how does one correctly test the qualities of any given “race” when one cannot correctly and consistently identify members of that “race.” (For example, race relations in the U.S. are pretty consistently marked by European and African ancestry (with Asian and Indian groups being brought into the discussion over the last 20 years). However, there is ample evidence that the majority of people in the U.S. who are considered “black” have a significant number of both European and Native North American ancestors. Are they now the same “race” as the Africans of West Africa who were originally imported as slaves? Are they a new “race”? Are they simply a mixture? (And, if they are a mixture, how does one evaluate the degree to which “race” plays a part in their make-up, given that one person may be 3/8 “white” and 1/8 “Indian” while their neighbor may be 1/4 “white” and 3/8 “Indian”?)
The issue is further muddied because there are some genuine crackpots out their making claims for “racial” intelligence (e.g., J. Phillippe Rushton) and there are also serious scholars who seem to believe in “racial” studies (e.g., Arthur Jensen).
We also have the issue that many people do not believe that IQ actually measures intelligence in any meaningful way.
So without being able to get an accepted definition of intelligence and without being able to get an accepted definition of race, the question posed in the OP becomes more or less impossible to anwer factually. All the “facts” one may choose are in dispute.
Other issues that makes comparison nearly impossible are differing education standards, and cultural influences.
Race is a slippery topic and intelligence is too.
But I’ve always been confused by the idea that it is simply impossible for there to be intelligence (however you want to define it) differences between races.
I remember seeing a show on PBS that mentioned that native Alaskans people haev evolved several adaptions over the centuries to handle the cold better. I’m recalling from memory…everything from shorter fingers and more compact body to a circulation system that is slightly different. They concluded that these native peoples were basically much better adapted to cold- no surprise there.
So why could not groups of people living in different continents evolve slightly different intelligence based on the societies they lived in? Some societies had written and spoken languages for centuries, whereas some in Africa, for example, did not. Is it possible that people in relatively advanced societies evolved to be more “intelligent”? If not, why not?
I’ll give another example which will drive people into a lather. Dogs have been bred into different breeds for only about 500 years. But people will speak shamelessly about some dog breeds being “more intelligent” than others. How can this be? They’ve only had different genes (and even then only slightly) for 500 years which is maybe 100 generations. Now I’m not saying people are dogs, or that people of different races are as different as bloodhounds and poodles, or anything like that. I’ve heard racial genetic differences are slight compared to dogs. I’m just asking what in principle is the difference.
It is very hard to take away cultural differences. Especially when there are anecdotal stories of black children being discouraged from scholastic success by being accused of “acting white”. By this culture then, to be “black” is to be an academic failure.
On the other hand, I remember reading that northern blacks were considered smarter than southern whites by the army at one point. They scored better on intelligence tests.
I don’t think anyone is saying that it would be impossible for there to be differences, just that no one has successfully measured any.
Over thousands of years, not over centuries. It is postulated, but not proven, that the cold adapted traits you mentioned are the products of adaptation to environment, just as the tall, lean frames of Africans (eg, the Masai) who live in hot, dry climates are. But you also find short stocky people in the tropics, and tall populations in northern climes, which suggest there is more going on than simple environmnetal adaptation.
More likely the other way around. In an “advanced” society someone less intelligent is more likely to survive than if he lived in a “less advance” society.
The differnce is that humans have never been genetically isolated and **purposely ** bred for different traits.
And that could just as easily be caused by different schooling environments.
Well, the implication here is that intelligence works like a number line, a one-dimensional continuum in which people can be ranked “more” or “less” intelligent above or below one another. And it just doesn’t work like that. There may well be different forms of intelligence, but we just plain don’t understand the brain well enough even to identify the categories we want to measure with any degree of consistency or coherence. If we don’t understand even the basics of what intelligence is, or if there’s even such a thing that can be legitimately labeled by the single term, then trying to rank people and “races” according to this ephemeral criterion is a pointless effort. Personally, I believe what we think of as “intelligence” is more a cognitive artifact than anything: We invented a word that broadly covered a spectrum of experience, and then, having the word in place, having a word that purports to capture a single concept, we subsequently turn around and attempt post hoc to find the single concrete concept that the word represents, failing to recognize that the provenance should work the other way around.
Well it seems as if there is a relationship between race and athletic prowess. Consider the ethnicity of winning sprinter in recent olympic games. Or winning swimmers.
It would seem unlikely that there was zero difference between intelligence (however it is measured) and race. Whether the difference is sufficiently large to be measurable is another question.
I don’t think there is a consensus. If you read the evolutionary psychology thread at yahoo groups, you will see actual scientists arguing about it.
You have a bunch of tricky ingredients that add up a big mess:
A. Intelligence is hard to define and measure. Room for superb argument here.
B. Race is ill-defined. Room for infinate argument here.
C. Very difficult to separate DNA-based intelligence from environmental and factors.
D. Political minefield.
There certainly are population (not necessarily race-based) differences in cognitive abilities, but trying to separate actual IQ from all the other factors is almost too difficult to be worthwhile.
It would seem that way, but it isn’t necessarily true. Different ethnic groups have dominated different sports at different times in history. If there’s been some peer review scientific articles on the subject, you might have a point, but what you are relying on is anecdotal, non-scientific observations.
It would seem extremely likely that any difference in the mean intelligence would swamped by the variation and the ability to actually measure intelligence with any accuracy.
[QUOTE=John Mace…you might have a point, but what you are relying on is anecdotal, non-scientific observations.[/QUOTE]
Absolutely, it wasn’t that long ago, when Blacks were considered too mentally and physically weak to play with, let along compete against whites…what happened, a sudden burst of evolution?
And it’s all subjective…if I take a test with say a 1/2 hr time limit and get 70% right, but you get 35% right…people will say I’m more intelligent. However say the same test is now 1 hour and I still get 70%, but now you get 90% right…what does that mean? What if I guessed at 1/2 of my answers?
Who’s more intelligent? What’s more valuable? Speed and Intutitiveness or Patience and Skill? Who judges?
C’mon let this race based science finally die out, it’s done enough damage.
You may be correct. I do recall, however, reading somewhere that there is a measurable difference between “black” and “white” people with regard to bone density and fat content. It is supposed to explain why black swimmers are not as successful as their white counterparts.
Could have been. What I remember reading in the “popular science press” was something about blacks and whites having different ratios of fast vs slow twitch muscle fibers. But I don’t believe that idea has survived rigorous scientific peer review.
At any rate, there are many physical features for which the mean in given populations is significantly different (eg, height). And that will effect the number of elite athletes in certain sports coming from a given population. One hardly expects to see many proffessional basketball players from the Filipines.
But it’s trivial to measure success in a sport as compared to measuring success in the area of intelligence.
I would suspect it is more likely that intelligence varies between genders more than between geographic populations, since there is ample evidence in the animal kindgom of signficant behavioral differences between males and females.
Scientifically, this question makes no sense, because scientifically, there’s no such thing as ‘race’. Let’s all say this again: Scientifically, there’s no such thing as race!
It is possible to identify some genetic differences between different populations. Clearly, bushmen pygmies have some general genetic differences from Masai. And there are well-known variations, such as sickle-cell anemia having a higher incidence in many populations from malarial regions of Africa.
BUT these different genetically defined populations have NO relationship to cultural ‘races’ such as ‘black’ or ‘white’, which are pretty much based exactly one, mostly-inherited trait: skin color. In other words, if you look at real genetic differences in a bunch of traits, skin color doesn’t correlate very well with the other traits. In other other words, you can’t tell much about a person’s genetics from looking at their skin color. Think about the bushmen and Masai again – they’re both dark-skinned, but clearly not too related, genetically. Or what about a dark-skinned native of India, or an Australian native. Clearly very different populations, but all ‘Black’.
In fact, there’s more real genetic variation among different dark-skinned African populations than among all other populations in the world. In other words, the best way to make genetic groups for human populations would be several groups within Africa, and then every population outside of Africa (including European, Asian, Native America, etc.) grouped together.
BUT even this level of classification is not very useful because variation within any population is generally much higher than variation between two populations. In other words, even where there’s an average difference between two populations, there’s so much overlap that it’s impossible to say anything useful about any individual.
All this is in addition to the fact that as tomndebpointed out, in the U.S. (and almost all of the America’s generally), most dark-skinned people have significant non-African ancestry,
Scientifically speaking, we may as well be arguing about whether bumps on the skull correspond with intelligence.
That is of course, leaving aside the whole argument about what ‘intelligence’ is and how to measure it, and what kinds of biases there are in how you do that. Again, The Mismeasure of Man is a great book.