Yawn…100 years of psychometric research has show that on average Black Africans and members of the African diaspora around the word are, according to Western standards, intellectually inferior. Likewise, 50 years of research (as reported in Jones, 2011) has shown the East Asians are intellectual superior. The only serious question is: “Why?”
Statistically, blacks score poorly on IQ and IQ-proxy exams than whites, is black genetics to blame?
In that case echo6160, could you point out which of the assumptions I’ve listedthat you disagree with?
Maybe you could simply address the evidence that has already been raised upthread? It seems that you are dismissing other arguments without even reading them.
strugglingChristian, maybe I should expand on this a bit:
I seem to recall that by the time the Civil War ended slavery, there were about 4 million slaves in the U.S. Importation of slaves from Africa ended several decades earlier. I’ve never heard of slaves being purposefully bred, and if it did happen, it’s not likely it was at a large enough scale to make a difference. We can breed dogs and cats and mice to particular specifications because they have more offspring, breed faster, and don’t live as long as we do. Their breeding is also easier to control. None of that applies to slaves. So even if there were a few plantation owners who managed to control the breeding of a few slaves for a generation or two, for the most part you had millions of slaves reproducing on their own with each other, and also with horny white plantation owners, and some Native Americans and others. Since the abolition of slavery, it’s been increasingly acceptable for African-Americans descended from slaves to have relationships with whites, Asians, Latinos, and newer generations of immigrants from Africa. So even if slavery selected for people who were athletic and hearty and it made a difference in the overall population, how would you know, and wouldn’t that effect have been pretty diluted at this point?
Accepting for a moment the truth of your statement, I can think of some more significant questions, such as “and?” and “so what?” and “therefore…?” and “why do you personally give a shit?”
Nah. I was really just threadfarting. Not threadshitting mind you, just threadfarting. I assumed it would be like farting in a crowded elevator…nobody *really *knows who did it. Except that my names on the post…darn. I didn’t think you’d make me come in and spray air freshener.
I just saw this as a conversation that will legitimately lead to nothing at all…ever. And I get it that I shouldn’t have replied to a 6 page thread without reading it all. But I just wanted to call out the motives behind it all. People trying to be politically correct about things which will no matter **what **offend many.
I’ll just come out and say it. I have known many black people, and a few asian people. The black’s I’ve known were all dumb (really…just dumb) and the asians were kind of middle of the road academics. But I consider myself smart enough to not read anything into that obviously biased anecdotal evidence. Because I know there are smart black people, it’s just not the norm around here. And there’s dumb asians…it’s just not the norm around here.
Is the goal of this discussion to finally achieve an argument which could be used to influence policymakers in some way to legislate something…in some way…which would affect one race or another?
Basically who the hell cares that (alert: racially insensitive statement coming) blacks are dumb and asians are smart and whites are *arrogant *about it all? It aint gonna change anytime soon…and there aint a damn thing anyone can do about it without publicly (meaning gov’t) acknowledging things which are distasteful (racial stereotypes) and inciting mob violence (KKK rallys) and all that jazz.
I’m of the firm belief that stereotypes exist for a reason. There’s obviously a trend somewhere. Are we gonna outlaw stereotyping?
I gave you an example in the thread on that question. You can avoid policies that assume that there should be equal group representation and assume discrimination or unfairness when that doesn’t happen (see below). Instead, I agree you should simply treat people as individuals and avoid looking at their group background. That’s a point that Professor Amy Wax makes. She proposes either adjusting disparate impact rule to reflect statistical differences, or abolishing it.
Wax, Amy L., “Disparate Impact Realism“. Scholarship at Penn Law. Paper 361.
Yes, you’re correct. Stereotypes exist for a reason.
Countless people can testify to the fact that white men have small penises.
So? It’s either true or it’s not. Right now, though, it’s just a rumor. I can’t see the harm in you testing it if you wanted, regardless of the outcome. Knock yourself out.
And are greedy, genocidal, slaveowning warmongers. It’s just our thing, you know?
But of course I’m sure that according to Chen019 and Chuck11 somehow the insulting stereotypes of white people aren’t true, while the insulting ones about blacks are.
You may want there to be a conflict, but my statements are consistent.
Intelligence is most likely hereditary, (as shorthand for “genetics plays a role in the development of intelligence in individuals”).
OTOH, I have never been persuaded that the psychometricists have actually identified “intelligence,” just test scores.
There may be overall differences in average intelligence among large groups, but nothing that I have seen indicates that such differences are significant.
To use the favored example of the “race” promoters, if we look at fast sprinters, we find a significantly high number of them with West African ancestors. However, the fastest sprinters are actually outliers even within that group and I have seen no evidence that if we wandered into any racially mixed neighborhood in the U.S. and ordered every citizen to line up together and sprint for 100 meters, that all (or even most of) the black folks would beat all the white folks to the line–or even that any more than that one or two of the black folks would beat out everyone else, regardless of perceived “race.” And sprinting is just one single athletic ability that says nothing about the ability to run long distances, walk longer distances, perform well on the parallel bars, hurl a discus, pitch a baseball, or turn a wrench against a stubborn bolt. Similarly, all the efforts to measure “intelligence” seem to ignore any number of mental activities, even though the proponents of such tests are so enamored of their mythical g.
So intelligence is hereditary.
We have not found a legitimate and accurate way to measure it.
There are multiple aspects of intelligence that are never measured, (while the aspects that are measured are invalidly compared across cultures).
Claims that one group is “smarter” than another are based on flawed claims that measurements work.
And beyond those problems, of course, is the separate issue that most people who want to talk about “race” like lumping lots of disparate groups together who are not that similar, then making broad generalizations about the groups as if they were similar. Is the “black race” taller or shorter than the “white race”? Are we talking about Maasai vs Greeks? Scandinavians vs pygmies? The question is meaningless and attempts to make similar comparisons of intelligence or athleticism or housekeeping abilities are equally meaningless.
Countless sexually unsatisfied white women can testify to it’s veracity.
My mother was very glad she didn’t marry an anatomically inferior white man.
It would be interesting to see this factual evidence. I never have.
Beyond that, of course, even if a few random slave owners did practice breeding, it was never a common event and the actions on a handful of plantations throughout the Southern U.S. would have had no chance to actually modify the physical characteristics of the entire group in the limited time available to them.
Psychometrics has greater predictive value than anything else in psychology. I recommend you read this post and in particular Gottfredson’s paper linked within it.
It’s also discussed in the slides to this Google talk.
The significance is that there is group inequality in certain roles.
Gottfredson, L. S. (2006). Social consequences of group differences in cognitive ability (Consequencias sociais das diferencas de grupo em habilidade cognitiva). In C. E. Flores-Mendoza & R. Colom (Eds.), Introducau a psicologia das diferencas individuais (pp. 433-456). Porto Allegre, Brazil: ArtMed Publishers.
Selective breeding among slave owners was extremely common.
“I’ll sleep with that one, and that one, but not that one.”
That’s selective breeding, right?
Did you read it?
From the leader of the Pioneer fund? You want to hold on to that kind of evidence?
And the three rebuttals are also in the last link you gave us.
Damning with faint praise, given psychology’s ability to predict anything.
I’ve read it long ago. It still makes the assumption that all these various tests are actually converging on some mythical g, rather than that they simply test language and skills that rely on a limited number of skills while ignoring others.
Yes, people need to read the papers and decide where the weight of evidence lies. To me it seems overwhelmingly in favour of at least a partial genetic explanation.
So if a test reveals that a child is intellectually handicapped, or that a person on death row lacks the mental capacity to form intent, you would dismiss it because they only measure a limited range of skills?
Note also, with MRI scans neuroscientists are rapidly uncovering the neurobiological basis for fluid intelligence.
www.yale.edu/scan/GT_2004_NRN.pdf
Anthropologists have their own world and are entitled to their own language. Mayr, himself, noted that the definitions he was discussing included elements that were not strictly biological. Beyond that, while he never got arouind to identifying the specific groups on which he would hang the label of “race,” his discussion included a lot of smaller groups that, if accepted as “races” would have meant that he was not actually talking about the three or six or whatever big “races” that most people identify with that word. So we are back to populations with “race” being a misleading word.
Again, you are moving the goalposts all over, using a smattering of polls from non-biologists, (with, interestingly enough, a decided trend toward avoiding the word “race.”
I have read lots of those claims. They are unpersuasive.
And if an intelligence difference was caused by educational deprivation, then it would cease to be a genetic issue.
You need to see a genetic difference among (perceieved) “races”; I don’t.
Populations, or at least major geographic populations essentially mean the same thing as race.
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v461/n7265/box/461726a_BX1.html