Not only is the term race generally useless, but a full understanding of intelligence remains illusive. LHOD mentioned several components, but the list seems endless and questions remain about what is required.
Deeg, you hit it right on the money.
The last explanation that I read had that at 100% of us. Future scientific studies may offer other explanations, but it is my understanding that we all had ancestors that came “out of Africa” into Asia and spread from there.
I find this particular statistic astonishing, and it makes the data seem fishy to me. Wealth is normally a very good indicator of success in education (sadly). It’s rare where I meet an affluent black family whose children are not studying to be lawyers or doctors or some such.
But perhaps the situation is very different in the U.S. to here.
A few people have put the question of why it is often not acceptable to voice the hypothesis that blacks are on average not as intelligent as whites.
Well, the main reason for me, is that such a finding could create problems for society. Humans have a tendancy to generalise, and if you tell people whites are more intelligent on average, then people will really interpret that as “I’m smarter than any black person, because I’m white” (or the opposite in the case of a black person).
I’m a dark-skinned (mixed race) person with a well above average IQ and I can often tell when people are making a generalisation like this already.
Give people some reason for actually thinking like that, and no amount of positive discrimination (which I’m against, btw) can stop society being split down the middle.
Now, an obvious objection is that science should not concern itself with sensibilities. True, but what is there to be gained at this time from finding any average IQ difference between any population groups?
Note that I’m not acknowledging that such an IQ difference exists.
Can someone post a list of ‘races’ and how I can tell whether someone in is one group or another please? The science has to start somewhere.
Absolutely nothing is to be gained by showing that one race has an average higher ability (be it IQ, athletics, music…) UNLESS a charge is made that underperformance of a given cohort (including race) cannot be due to inherent differences and must instead be due to other factors, and in particular is the fault of the rest of society. It is ONLY the advancement of that charge that brings the “inherent difference” defense any reason to exist. If we stop making the charge and we stop trying to categorize cohorts into “race” there is no need to pay attention to race at all–indeed, it’s divisive and very harmful to do so.
In the issue raised in the OP, the study cited shows that low income is not an explanation for black SAT differences in the US. This is not some sort of isolated study showing black-white performance differences on standardized tests; this black-white difference is nearly universal. For instance, despite exactly equal college preparation (taking students from all colleges taking the same exam), the black-white difference in Medical College Admission Test scores is enormous. http://www.aamc.org/data/facts/2005/mcatgparaceeth.htm This would suggest that another common explanation–different preparation opportunity–is equally weakly supported with evidence. This also provides an explanation for why scores of higher-income blacks might be lower. We have very aggressive recruitment of blacks into medicine and other high-paying professional fields here in the US, and low standardized admission scores are overlooked in order to get more proportional representation by race. It makes sense (if differences are inherent) that parents with low standardized scores are going to be more likely to have children with low standardized scores…
There are many explanations commonly suggested for why race-based differences cannot be innate. The looseness of “self-described black” as a race cohort is often presented as obvious refutation for race-based innate differences.
The argument goes like this:
Race is a genetically non-linked category.
It is meaningless, therefore, to ascribe genetic differences using race as a category.
The argument completely misses the point, however. Any two cohorts being compared need only contain a higher distribution of individuals with a given genetically-based potential in order for that cohort to (as an average) be superior. Whether the cohort is otherwise genetically linked is irrelevant. If “black”, as a cohort, contains more individuals with superior innate athletic ability, it’s going to be disproportionately represented in the NBA whether or not the individual athletes are genetically linked to one another. It may be, for instance, that the meta-cohort of “black” contains a large sub-population where those NBA genes are prevalent enough to skew the whole group, or it might be that the alternate cohort (white, let’s say) has a paucity of that particular gene(s), even if whites are unrelated to each other.
I think arguments about how to define race–for those determined to define it–should wait til we unwrap the genome more fully. That’s proximate enough to render current speculation unnecessary. Observationally, in the meantime, there is not much to be gained by trying to prove that populations achieve their success only because of forced and not innate differences. If you toured the Caribbeans (or, for that matter, any part of the world), for example, you’d find that success parallels (self-described) racial categories with blacks underperforming mixed-race underperforming whites and asians. This would hold true across every country and every culture. You’d be left with coming up with non-US explanations for this racial hierarchy, and on and on it would go. It’s not as if one can look elsewhere in the world to demonstrate how baseless the possibility of inherent differences must be since they are found only in the US.
But then this is just a confusion. A bunch of we’re not entirely sure what is doing we don’t know what. Don’t get me wrong, let’s move the research forward. But to claim that there’s “intelligence genes” when we can’t even reliably determine what we mean by intelligence seems jumping the gun, no?
You’d be hard pressed to find a geneticist who doesn’t believe that intelligence is genetic. Read Stephen Pinker’s NY Times magazine article from a few weeks ago for a really good, accessible, review.
Basically, they’ve done genome wide linkage analyses to find genes that link to higher IQs, or other measures of cognitive function. Yes, on this board, we can hand wave and say that these measures are not accurate at all, but they correlate to what we call “intelligence” sufficiently that the scientific community has pretty well accepted that these genes, and no doubt others to be discovered, are involved in biological functions that result in “intelligence”.
I think you actually hit the nail on the head though. There is more than one type of “intelligence”, and the specific human intelligence that evolved, did so when we broke off from other apes; we’re all pretty fucking smart, in other words. Has that intelligence evolved differently in different populations based on selection pressure? I have little doubt that it has. I think different genetic populations, which may correlate with what we call “race” did possibly inherit different genes that manifest intelligence differently. This is on a much smaller scale than the intelligence that arose to differentiate (all of) us from apes. It also doesn’t mean that one population is any “smarter” than another.
But, interbreeding of those populations over the tens of thousands of years, it’s not really a terribly useful measure on a global scale. Since these differences are likely small compared to the original evolution of human intelligence, and likely interconnected with each other, and result in different manifestations of intelligence, it makes the discussion intractable.
So, my guess is that certain populations have genes that predispose them, slightly, toward certain kinds of intelligence. Those populations may, or may not, correlate to “race”. The impurity of nearly all genetic populations makes these discussions pretty moot; all of these genome wide studies are done in rare, highly pure, genetic populations because once you leave these, the data becomes impossible. It does not mean one population is any more or less likely to succeed in intelligent pursuits than another.
I’ve read a bit of Pinker (The Language Instinct, The Blank Slate), and even without it I have little doubt that there is a genetic component to, let’s say, potential intelligence. In this sense I think it is safe to say there’s an assortment of “intelligence genes.” I’d go on, but the rest of your post neatly summarizes exactly what I would say. 
Oh, absolutely, it would only be “potential” intelligence by genetics. I know a number of people that I think are genetically brilliant, but lazy bums, who never amounted to anything!
You’re being facetious, but this is actually a good question. The African-American population is not evenly distributed across the country. Wikipedia has a nice map based on the 2000 census; as you can see, the southeast has a higher percentage of black residents than other regions of the US. More than half of all African-Americans live in the southeast. Outside the south, African-Americans tend to be clustered in major metropolitan areas such as Detroit, LA, and New York City.
Compare this to the map showing the distribution of white Americans. Very few parts of the US are at least 50% white; large areas of the country are at least 85% white.
This means that a comparison of all black students in the US to all white students in the US is largely comparing black students in the southeast and big cities to white students across the whole country. If public schools in the southeast and big cities tend to be not as good as public schools in other areas – and while I don’t have a cite handy I don’t think it’s too wacky to suggest that this is often the case – then this would have a more pronounced effect on black test scores than white test scores. There are also a number of other environmental factors with a potential effect on school performance that vary according to region, things like food prices/nutrition, pollution, and quality of available health care.
I basically agree with this. As an extreme example, one could construct artificial Group A which consists of {Laotian people and Nigerian people} and artificial Group B which consists of {Eskimos and Swedes}.
In such a case, one might observe that people in Group A tend to have darker skin than people in Group B and reasonably hypothesize that the difference is due to genetics.
I hope this would be clear from context despite my mistake, but I meant “Very few parts of the US are NOT at least 50% white”.
Is whatever definition your map uses for “black” (or African-American) good enough for the purposes of this discussion? Or will we bog down in the same “there are more Ashanti in Detroit than Australian aborigines in LA” that we seem to get stuck on?
Regards,
Shodan
tim314, har har. It took long enough.
You’re going to have to expand on this category because it’s not remotely convincing to me. “Smokers” is an unambiguous category, unlike ‘black people’, which is at least partly a social construct. Getting lung cancer is an unambiguous state, unlike ‘intelligence’ – whether we mean ‘raw intelligence’, if so what kind, or ‘acquired intelligence’, etc. There are no equivalent uncontrollable, unquantifiable variables to cultural causes when it comes to why people get lung cancer (though there are WRT why people smoke!)…
It’s very odd for me, as well. I’ve read reports in the UK saying that the income/class of a student’s family is drastically more important than even the quality of a school, for example. So two students attending the same crappy inner-London comprehensive are likely to achieve very different academic results if one’s family income is £40, 000 and the other £15, 000.
This is completely contradicted by the BBC cite in my OP; of exam results in 2004 for mid/late teens. NB black Caribbeans are more likely to be mixed race than Black African!
Since there’s not going to be much of a discrepancy between the average familial income of girls and boys, maybe the significant gender difference is based in biology?!
And how consistent is this universal hierarchy of intellectual inferiority of black people? It’s not even consistent in the US over twenty years:
These tests do not measure raw intelligence.
The following is an intersting read about standardized test and what they’re supposed to measure.
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/sats/test/views.html
I think there are a handful of posters that want to make that case that black people are inferior to white people and that inferiority is genetic based. I think it’s too complex and too inconvenient for them to consider past and present social conditions and how those things shape certain outcomes. It’s hard to figure out what the effect of being black is in this country when you’re not black and you have certain preconceived notions.
GAAAHHH!!!
You just brought back memories long buried.
I taught High School for awhile and college for some time.
3 years of the college was in Georgia.
Smart black students who wouldn’t consider math and the sciences because they didn’t want to look too smart for their family/friends. They would deliberately do worse on tests for the same reason.
AAARRRRRGGGGG! So frustrating!
I have no proof, but I also think the ‘culture’ theory has merit. Poor whites don’t admire education either but they do not run screaming from it either. This is probably the difference.
I don’t know what your point is. Every category used by man is a social construct.
Our hypothetical tobacco industry executive could easily argue that the category of “smoker,” is ambiguous. Does it include a guy who tried a cigarette one time 10 years ago? a month ago? Somebody who smokes 1 cigarette a week?
At some point, you will have to draw an arbitrary line. For example, a life insurer might define a “smoker” as somebody who has used even 1 cigarette or cigar in the past 3 years.
Why should somebody who took one puff from a cigar 2 years and 11 months ago be considered a “smoker” while someboyd who smoked a pack a day of cigarettes until 3 years and 1 month ago not be considered a “smoker”? Who is really at more risk of developing a smoking related illness?
(Similarly, the phrase “lung cancer” is probably not as unambiguous as you think. )
I highly doubt that. For example, I’m pretty confident, if you studied it, you would find that smokers who otherwise take good care of themselves are less likely to get cancer than smokers who do not. I’m not going to bother asking you for a cite for your claim since you are pretty clearly just shooting from the hip.
Besides, in the epicycle game, the burden would be on YOU to disprove the explanations I toss out.
Lies, damn lies and statistics.
Statistics are used all the time to support all sorts of things which they really do not support.
Some years ago I came upon a piece of news which I found amazing and which gave me a whole new view of statistics. It was a long time ago and I do not remember the exact numbers but I remember enough to rebuild a similar example. I am making up all the numbers but they serve to illustrate the point.
At a certain university statistics showed a higher percentage of men were accepted than of women. 65% of men who applied were admitted while only 52% of women who applied were admitted. This was taken as clear proof of discrimination and something had to be done about it… So the university conducted further research to ascertain which schools specifically were discriminating. They centered on schools A and B and found out that: Of a total of 100 male applicants, 80 had applied to A of which 60 (75%) were accepted and 20 had applied to B of which 5 (25%) were accepted. The overall acceptance rate was thus 65%.
When it came to the women, out of 100, 40 had applied to A of which 32 (80%) were accepted and 60 had applied to B of which 20 (33%) were accepted. The overall acceptance rate was thus 52%.
BUT now we see what would seem impossible and that is that even though the overall acceptance percentage of women was lower than that of men, when analyzed by schools the percentage of women accepted is HIGHER in every single case! (80 Vs. 75% in A and 33 Vs. 25% in B)
It turns out no school was discriminating. What was happening is that more men were applying to the college which was easier to get into while more women were applying to the college which was more difficult to enter. But in every case it was more difficult for the men to enter even though they had a higher overall acceptance rate
You can probably find similar cases with race etc.
Originally Posted by Chief Pedant:
“If you toured the Caribbeans (or, for that matter, any part of the world), for example, you’d find that success parallels (self-described) racial categories with blacks underperforming mixed-race underperforming whites and asians. This would hold true across every country and every culture. You’d be left with coming up with non-US explanations for this racial hierarchy, and on and on it would go. It’s not as if one can look elsewhere in the world to demonstrate how baseless the possibility of inherent differences must be since they are found only in the US”
I was referring, of course, to the rank within a particular Caribbean nation, since such a restriction holds all populations being ranked within the same environment, so to speak. That is to say, if you studied the Dominican Republic you’d find blacks at the bottom tier, mixed-race in the middle tier, and whites and asians at the top tier.
If you select out a sub-population of emigrating Dominicans, I suggest that the population which manages to emigrate out is much more likely to be at the upper tiers for their particular population group–emigration self-selects for the best and brightest.
It’s true that Caribbean blacks tend to be mixed race–and also may tend to be more successful than some local black populations in the US, for instance (although I do not know this to be true and American black populations also have varying percentages of white ancestry, of course). This is consistent with (though obviously not proof) that genetic factors are involved in the success of populations.
Perhaps, rather than telling a lengthy, irrelevant, and uncited anecdote, you’d like to explain how the US Census data on race does not support my assertion that the African-American population is largely concentrated in the southeast and big cities. I didn’t think this was at all a controversial claim, and I must say I’m rather surprised it’s upset you so much.
Um… how can I put this… My post was intended in support of yours. Maybe if you read it in that light you will understand it better. It was meant to illustrate that if you are comparing things which are not really comparable you can arrive at erroneous conclusions.
