Race has no scientific definition, but it certainly does have a cultural definition.
The question is: What in the hell is the question?
Are there studies that show that some cultures test lower on I.Q. tests than other cultures? The answer here is a definite yes.
Are there studies that show there is a genetic reason behind this? Not any reputible studies that I know of. Because there is no genetic definition of race.
Is there some studies out there that show there is a genetic component to intelligence? Sure there is. Check out all those eugenics sites out there. The fact that no one has any definitive definition of intelligence doesn’t stop people from trying to prove that there are some “races” that are more “intelligent” than other “races”.
Asking that the OP clarify her question is not slamming or flaming. It can’t be answered as asked.
I agree that the definition of “race” is important, but these hyper-zealous demands for a definition are rather silly in this context.
Somehow, my original question has been answered:
How is this possible without a precise definition of “race”?
Are there psychics floating around?
Or maybe my original question was good enough for a person who is acting reasonably to understand.
And what to make of these repeated demands for definitions; these insinuations that no reasonable person could ever believe in the concept of “race”?
Could it be that certain people want to foreclose discussion of racial differences? Are they afraid of what they might find? Only they know what lurks in their hearts.
Fortunately for blacks and other American minorities, the medical community does not totally believe in this PC nonsense and is aggressively seeking potential donors of various bodily tissues among non-white races.
This is a logical error. A genetic based difference does not have to map directly onto a known “race”, even if it does correlate loosely to a “race”. One example of this is the sickle cell gene, which apparently ties to malaria, as posters have noted. If tests showed that members of a particular “race” are more likely to have this sickness, would you also claim that these “can tell us quite a bit about socio-cultural factors and point out flaws in those tests”? I would hope not.
The key word in this statement is “American.” The key error is “PC nonsense.”
The people identified in the U.S. as black tend to have been brought here from very specific locations in Africa. As such, there are two or three (or some small number) rather closely associated genetic populations (who were interbred for a couple of hundred years) who now live in the U.S. This means that we can look at the culturally defined group, identified as black, and find a certain amount of correlation among predisposition to disease (sickle-cell, hypertension) among American blacks. Jill and the CDC can use some figures to establish good rules of thumb for doctors to use when doing diagnoses among Americans identified as black, and those same people will have a higher percentage of good cross-matching for organ donation.
However, when this quick guideline is extended to make broad generalizations about the (nonexistent) “race” of people who comprise West Equatorial Africans, East Equatorial Africans, Khoi-san, Fulani, pygmies, or any of the other various ethnic populations from Africa, it breaks down rather miserably.
It is possible in the United States for a doctor to decide to double-check certain health features based on appearance. It is not valid, however, to try to generalize to every person whose ancestors lived south of the Sahara, based on the attributes of the much smaller subset of those populations who were carried of the the Western Hemisphere as slaves.
I find the claim of “PC” directed against the arguments that race does not exist quite funny. The strongest and most vocal opponents of the work of Cavalli-Sforza? People who claim that his work will undermine the recognition of tribal peoples as separate creations. It was the PC crowd who went to Congress and made sure that Cavalli-Sforza’s Genetic Diversity study was underfunded. In other words, the loudest opponents of Cavlli-Sforza are the most PC people around. Yet the opponents of the data that he has collected enjoy throwing the epithet “PC” at his work.
It does cause me to wonder what political agenda is being espoused by people who insist that race has a physical reality outside its cultural identification.
Thankyou,tsunamisurfer, but I must take issue with your implication that AWC and I share or shared a common agenda.My take on her motivation is exasperation with the kneejerk reaction to any mention of race (Unless race as a valid concept is mentioned by JillGat).
Any mention of race and intelligence in the same sentence can be very dangerous. Today, up to seven different parameters of intelligence are recognized, confusing the issue, IQ tests can not but be culture biased, and no clearly superior intelligent race is evident. As a society, we value superior intelligence and ridicule feeble mindedness. Why the hell do we even want to find out if one group of people are more intelligent?
If on the other hand 498 of the top 500 graduates from Harvard were African American of West African ancestry,representing 12% of the American population, I would not buy into the argument that the African American graduates just tried harder to escape the poverty of the ghetto.
To suggest that the reason 498 of the best 500 times recorded for the 100 meter sprint in Olympic history are held by those of West African ancestry is due to cultural deprivation and not a common physical heritage is a position that I just cannot accept, and the only race issue that is of any interest to me.
I guess my reply would be that if a supposed “intelligence marker/s” only “loosely correlates” to “race”, why bring the question of race up at all? What purpose does it serve, in this particular context?
My problem, again, when discussing intelligence is that I don’t think you can adequately measure it. Period. Race doesn’t even have to enter into it. This is, I should hasten to add, simply MHO. But I don’t consider the scores on standardized intelligence test taken by a given individual to necessarily equal a total measure of intelligence. Cognitive skills, spatial perception, literacy, cultural literacy - Sure ( for a given cultural-socio-economic group, anyway ). But I consider intelligence in the broadest definition of the word, to be an elusive concept.
As to my example - I was being very specific. My defintion of race was a purely socio-cultural one, so it stands to reason that comparing test scores of similarily defined socio-cultural groups would yield useful socio-cultural data .
Make sense? Or am I missing your point? It’s possible - I’ve definitely never set the curve for intelligent white guys .
Autumn Wind Chick: Let me addend a couple of points on the end of tomndeb’s.
I have absolutely no doubt in my mind that tissue types taken from an African-American donor is more likely to yield a compatible match for another African-American. I applaud the medical professionals that are attempting this outreach program. But I also have absolutely no doubt in my mind that compatible matches could be found from a pool of individuals who aren’t African-American, albeit at a lower frequency. That’s the problem. IzzyR’s “loose correlation” isn’t enough to define a genetic race. As tomndeb pointed out, you’d start running into trouble applying these non-rigorous standards to larger and larger groups. An Anadaman Islander ( to steal one of tomndeb’s favorite examples ) may look “black”, but he’s more likely to find a compatible tissue donor from the Indian subcontinent, than Africa or from a pool of American blacks.
I don’t deny races exist. I deny races exist as classically defined - i.e. a race as a precisely defined, well-delineated biological subgroup of humans that corresponds to a given phenotype in terms of skin color and physiognomy. That’s all. Race, as a loosely defined cultural term ( that maps to skin color, etc. ), can be useful. Blacks in the U.S. have a higher rate of Type II Diabetes than most other groups. Is there anything wrong with special education programs on Type II Diabetes being specifically targeted at African-Americans in light of this? Of course not.
You’ll only get an argument from me if you start saying something like: People with black skin comprise a discrete genetic population that may have a genetic potential for greater or lesser intelligence than people with other-colored skin.
The fact of the matter is the genetic boundaries between black and non-black ( and is so enormously broad within that category ) is too malleable and imprecise to make any such claim.
Tamerlane
p.s. - I hearby certify that the above post is 100% vitriol free . It may, however, be hyper-zealous .
Isn’t it purely and simply curiosity? I have no preconceived ideas about what I may or may not find in the results should a study be shown to have any value. I do not need to know how things work, but I like to find out. Is that so wrong? I find it very surprising that anyone would not want to know.
You’d think that if one race was significantly more intelligent than the others, they would have dominated and destroyed their less-intelligent cousins long ago. The fact that all the ‘races’ seem to be thriving kinda flys in the face of the idea that there are major differences between them.
What is your definition of race?
It’s important! :rolleyes:
Since you don’t seem to have a definition yourself, here are three possibilities:
Colour of skin
Genetic characteristic
Social / ethnic / cultural
Now the first easily leads to racial discrimination. it is not based on any genetic or scientific evidence.
(As posted above, if a population with a particular skin colour is largely descended from an area with a particular disease, there is a likeliehood of a genetic difference. But there is no link between the genes.)
The second doesn’t exist.
The third is difficult to define. It can easily lead into areas such as ‘Children of poor people living in areas of high crime with few educational facilities tend to be poorly educated. If certain ethnic groups are confined to these areas, some people will say this proves those groups is stupid.’ They call this a ghetto.
In order to avoid such prejudice, it’s important to conduct studies scientifically. Using definitions…
Well that definition of race was skin colour, plus two geographic nationalities (plus presumably assuming all the mothers were White-skinned).
Do you know what a scientific study is?
Alternatively:
you don’t know what race is
you’re scared to define it
You think it’s reasonable to avoid giving a definition? What have you got to hide?
Tell us what you think race is, and we can all see if reasonable people agree with you.
This thread is verging on racism. It’s hanging by a, uh, thread.
There are 3 problems with the OP
Defining race
Measuring intelligence
Measuring the genetic component of intelligence
#1 and #2 are difficult, but I’ll concede that commonly used approaches are reasonbly meaningful.
#3 is hopeless. Although most researchers in the field believe that there is a genetic component to intelligence, nobody knows how to separate it from the cultural aspect.
Earlier in this thread someone made a brief mention of Stephen J. Gould’s book The Mismeasure of Man. However, since someone subsequently referenced The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, I figured a second endorsement for Gould’s book was called for.
I offer this quote taken from the Introduction of the first edition of The Mismeasure of Man:
“This book, then, is about the abstraction of intelligence as a single entity, its location within the brain, its quantification as one number for each individual, and the use of these numbers to rank people in a series of worthiness, invariably to find that oppressed and disadvantaged groups–races, classes, or sexes–are innately inferior and deserve their status.”
Are you seriously denying that there is an element of PC in this discussion? Or are you only saying that you don’t think there should be one?
Tamerlane
I mentioned earlier that I don’t think this type of information serves a useful purpose. Nonetheless, it is important to be accurate even when discussing such issues.
Unless there were other (e.g. genetic) differences (in average) between the two populations.
Badtz Maru
I don’t think any informed opinion considers the possibility that there could be such “significant” or “major” differences in average intelligence. The issue is about relatively minor differences.
Well, I check back into SD and what do I find? The same old nonesense. Well, I will not be able to follow the inevitable round and round but I thought I would make a comment.
Now, I am more than slightly annoyed that grienspace has yet to wrap his mind around the substantive critiques I, and others, offered in the past for his fundamentally distorted and unfounded comprehension of descent. But at least he puts out his bona fides unlike a fundamentally dishonest OP. Let me try, briefly once more -and please do excuse some strange spelling errors, I have yet to acclimatize to the French keyboard once more:
I rather have found that AWC is frustrated by her inability to defend her racialist ideas.
As for Jillgat’s usage in re NCDC etc Edwino some weeks back posted a fine link to a NEJM article on this very subject and the hangover of genetic group assumptions among clinical researchers, often inappropriately.
Here we go again. I am sure that you may be able to muster some recollection of our last encounter wherein I identified rather fundamental factual problems with the description “African American of West African ancestry” in terms of attempting to imply as you do some kind of essential coherence. Unsurprisingly this did not quite sink in. Let me give it another go.
(a) AfAm descent in quite diverse in re Africa vs non-Af with significant and locally dependent inputs of Am Ind and of course European (and for Carib derived folks, Chinese and India) inputs. Such variation renders rather ridiculous the bland and ultimately fundamentally inaccurate “West African descent” since of course you are simply privilidging some superficial morphological signs which happen to show up without real meaningful indication of overwhelming presence of any “West African” derived package of traits, presuming for the sake of argument there is such. I called this racialism last time for in the final analysis that’s all it is, albiet rejiggered to appear more sophisticated.
(b) In re AfAm heritage from Africa we still find immense diversity, since (i) Central and even East African (Mocambique notably) populations contributed to AfAm pops --not the frequent reference in Creoles to Africans as Kongos – although as I recall per Phillip Curtin’s work the vast region of West Africa does provide a majority of North American blacks. Even within this zone there is immense diversity, and a notable difference in physical types between North Sahelian/Saharan folks and southern “forest zone” folks, which corresponds to some fairly important ecological divisions. Again, here again following authorities such as Curtin and Thorton, Am blacks come from both areas, per slaving records, and thus can not be described as coming from a homogenous area (any more than humanity in general is homogenous, for a similar comparision, imagine characterizing an area stretching from Spain to Russia as being of one people, and this without the extent data indicating higher diversity among the relevant populations.
In light of these two fundamental observations, I fail to see very much scientific basis for a description which if it is to have an explanatory value at all, must presume a degree of hologeniety in the target population (or if we opt for a weaker suggestion, must presume a degree of homogeniety private to the runners which is dependent on a presumed trait package passed on from these ‘black’ ancestors, despite the immense incoherence just outlined) It takes some degree of willful ignorance not to see how tortured this explanation becomes, never mind the counterfactual that West Africans themelves don’t stand out, although some small subset of East Africans do. Presumably the sole explanation for them is some West African heritage.
In short, your characterization is best described as hyper-reductionist with a willful ignoring, I might say ignorance, of fundamentally contradictory data. Yet tyou carry on, apparently as it provides an appropriately simple explanation. Assuming the conclusion is what we call this.
I know you “just can’t accept” anymore than AWC apperently can, but that’s just too bad since your characterization is quite simply wrong. Not off, not just not quite right, wrong. Now, if one wants to engage facts and so forth, and let go of a priori positions, it should be become rather easier to understand and free you of unfactual positions/
So hand wave up false characterizations all you want, the science points in other directions.
I wrote Edwino some time back about creating a sort of mock trait distribution file, simplified so as adequetely illustrate how traits are distributed through populations and their interactions since it seems to me that G and others misconceptions arise just from this, a lack of an understanding of the genetic implications of their a prior assumption and how the same has already run aground on the incompatibility. I think it might be useful to continue working on this, although it’s a bit difficult to find a way to present something meaningful which is neither too complex nor too simple and thus too distortive.
In sum:
It strikes me in re the OP there are two levels at which we can understand it.
Most generously a question in re race and intelligence as socially constructed with no further implications in re genetic differences.
At that level we can simply look to the differences registered in various intelligence testing, and their evolution. I believe a number of folks have already commented on this, the Flynn effect and so on. As such we know that (a) differences are narrowing and are now within a SD, if I recal correctly? (b) intelligence tests are fraught with problems at the individual level, let alone the group level and intelligence remains poorly understood as a social phenomena let alone a biological one. What we really mean by it is obscure.
However, the wording and past habits of AWC rather suggest she is still ad infinatum it would appear, seeking out genetically based racial differences to hang her hat on.
That issue, on the basis of the classic races and the most common constructions of race has been very well dealt with here and in the past. Why AWC keeps up the coy little game is beyond me since she neither defends her evidence opinions with facts nor truly responds nor engages the evidence.
Of course scientific research is valuable. Just look round your home for the benefits of it. Computers, TV, microwave, even the humble can-opener.
Now scientific research does need:
an open mind (no good only selecting results that ‘prove’ something you want)
clear definitions (how else can others test your theory?)
careful collection of data (don’t let bias creep in)
thoughful analysis of the results (what other possible causes could there be?)
Here is a scientific theory (which I just made up)
Blue-eyed people are the purest race.
OK, how do we test this?
First let’s check our definitions. (Autumn Wind Chick, you can just skip to the next paragraph)
When we examine eye colour, we soon see there are three categories: blue, brown and others.
I understand that eye-colour is genetic. Therefore there is a race of blue-eyed people. (None of your wishy-washy ‘ethnic’ stuff here!).
A blue and a brown-eyed parent can produce either blue or brown-eyed children.
Even two brown-eyed parents can sometimes manage blue-eyed children.
However two blue-eyed parents can only have a blue-eyed child.
Clearly this proves my proposition.
Now we need to do further research to see what other advantages the ‘pure-bred’ have over the others.
Would you like to follow this one up, Andy?
As many others have pointed out, there is no real difference.
What is interesting is the 2 following facts.
Genes are very important, latest research on siblings ( because they usually have the same social advantages ) and identical twins show that IQ is largely set at birth.
The one with the higher iq ‘in general’ does better, even if they are not the one who goes to college.
2. Smart women are kinda losing out, this is because they go to college and have kids late and less kids.
Those who have kids young tend to have more.
Perhaps IQ is working against people ?
HOWEVER… having said that, environment factors, social factors etc. are important especially as they can deny opportunity ( i.e good schools ).
To be honest, i think a lot of it is whinging, if your from a minority you can say 'i have been a given a bad deal because of my skin colour '… but its a kind of denial, a lot easier to accept than ‘ok, i sat an iq test with people of the same colour and didn’t do too well, why is that !’
At my college I had law and economics lecturers from africa and shared a house once with a smart asian guy who now earns mega bucks and is marrying a lawyer.
I also know a black window cleaner who reckons he is kept down by his skin colour, even though he doesn’t want to study for a better job.
Perhaps if college entrance was based purely on an entrance IQ exam and free i.e. no fees there would be more people from the minority groups.
Actually some of us are still waiting for a definition of race. What’s yours?
‘are’, not ‘is’*
Do you mean twins have the same social advantages? Here in the UK, the oldest son of siblings inherits (e.g. the Monarchy). Surely you know about research showing that elder children (and children of different sexes) are treated differently?
And I would love to know how you test IQ at birth!
‘IQ’, not ‘iq’*
Perhaps you could define ‘better’, and your use of ‘in general’.
So women lose out if they have less kids? :rolleyes:
Please choose between:
you must be doing well then :eek:
no, criminals are the real menace to society
This is called anecdotal evidence. I mean there’s a stupid guy in the film ‘The Big Lebowski’ called the Dude, but that doesn’t mean all people called dude… (voice trails off)
Let me get this straight. You went to college?
Don’t mind me, I’m a teacher
It’s fascinating to watch the mental gymnastics that race-deniers go through in order to bless uses of race that they deem appropriate, such as in organ donation, while condemning those that are non-pc, such as athletics.
Of course, it’s easy enough to crush these little games.
How? Well, take my original question, and assume that “race” is meant in the exact same way as it is meant when used by public health authorities in the context of finding matching donors for bodily tissues.
Hurts to have your agenda exposed, eh?
Anyway, my hubby wants to use the 'puter, so, I’ll leave with a “thousand word” point.
Drawing conclusions about a larger group based on a small number of olympic athletes seems odious to this poster.
Statistically, this involves using the tail of a distribution to form conclusions about the average. Not an intelligent practice. If anything, I would think that it would say more about the variance, although I would prefer a more direct measurement. Heck, maybe it’s the kurtosis that varies.
.
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. It may, however, be hyper-zealous 
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(which I just made up)