Given the long and rapid discussion here on the topic of "whether average NOMINAL IQ scores of sociological populations do truly reflect the NATURAL cognitive abilities of such populations or whether they are purely culture/environmenta driven" here's another interesting observation on the topic by Malcolm Gladwell the author whose recent book "Blink" showed up the unconscious racial biases of U.S. populations when confronted with the direct visual stimuli of the African phenotype.
[b]None of the Above What I.Q. doesn’t tell you about race. by Malcolm Gladwell December 17, 2007 Text Size: Small Text Medium Text Large Text Print E-Mail Feeds If what I.Q. tests measure is immutable and innate, what explains the Flynn effect—the steady rise in scores across generations?
Related Links Audio: Malcolm Gladwell on race and I.Q. Keywords I.Q.s; Race; Flynn, James; “What Is Intelligence?” (Cambridge; $22); Flynn effect; Intelligence; Racism Correction appended.
One Saturday in November of 1984, James Flynn, a social scientist at the University of Otago, in New Zealand, received a large package in the mail. It was from a colleague in Utrecht, and it contained the results of I.Q. tests given to two generations of Dutch eighteen-year-olds. When Flynn looked through the data, he found something puzzling. The Dutch eighteen-year-olds from the nineteen-eighties scored better than those who took the same tests in the nineteen-fifties—and not just slightly better, much better.
Curious, Flynn sent out some letters. He collected intelligence-test results from Europe, from North America, from Asia, and from the developing world, until he had data for almost thirty countries. In every case, the story was pretty much the same. I.Q.s around the world appeared to be rising by 0.3 points per year, or three points per decade, for as far back as the tests had been administered. For some reason, human beings seemed to be getting smarter.
Flynn has been writing about the implications of his findings—now known as the Flynn effect—for almost twenty-five years. His books consist of a series of plainly stated statistical observations, in support of deceptively modest conclusions, and the evidence in support of his original observation is now so overwhelming that the Flynn effect has moved from theory to fact. What remains uncertain is how to make sense of the Flynn effect. If an American born in the nineteen-thirties has an I.Q. of 100, the Flynn effect says that his children will have I.Q.s of 108, and his grandchildren I.Q.s of close to 120—more than a standard deviation higher. If we work in the opposite direction, the typical teen-ager of today, with an I.Q. of 100, would have had grandparents with average I.Q.s of 82—seemingly below the threshold necessary to graduate from high school. And, if we go back even farther, the Flynn effect puts the average I.Q.s of the schoolchildren of 1900 at around 70, which is to suggest, bizarrely, that a century ago the United States was populated largely by people who today would be considered mentally retarded.
For almost as long as there have been I.Q. tests, there have been I.Q. fundamentalists. H. H. Goddard, in the early years of the past century, established the idea that intelligence could be measured along a single, linear scale. One of his particular contributions was to coin the word “moron.” “The people who are doing the drudgery are, as a rule, in their proper places,” he wrote. Goddard was followed by Lewis Terman, in the nineteen-twenties, who rounded up the California children with the highest I.Q.s, and confidently predicted that they would sit at the top of every profession. In 1969, the psychometrician Arthur Jensen argued that programs like Head Start, which tried to boost the academic performance of minority children, were doomed to failure, because I.Q. was so heavily genetic; and in 1994 Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, in “The Bell Curve,” notoriously proposed that Americans with the lowest I.Q.s be sequestered in a “high-tech” version of an Indian reservation, “while the rest of America tries to go about its business.” To the I.Q. fundamentalist, two things are beyond dispute: first, that I.Q. tests measure some hard and identifiable trait that predicts the quality of our thinking; and, second, that this trait is stable—that is, it is determined by our genes and largely impervious to environmental influences.
from the issuecartoon banke-mail thisThis is what James Watson, the co-discoverer of DNA, meant when he told an English newspaper recently that he was “inherently gloomy” about the prospects for Africa. From the perspective of an I.Q. fundamentalist, the fact that Africans score lower than Europeans on I.Q. tests suggests an ineradicable cognitive disability. In the controversy that followed, Watson was defended by the journalist William Saletan, in a three-part series for the online magazine Slate. Drawing heavily on the work of J. Philippe Rushton—a psychologist who specializes in comparing the circumference of what he calls the Negroid brain with the length of the Negroid penis—Saletan took the fundamentalist position to its logical conclusion. To erase the difference between blacks and whites, Saletan wrote, would probably require vigorous interbreeding between the races, or some kind of corrective genetic engineering aimed at upgrading African stock. “Economic and cultural theories have failed to explain most of the pattern,” Saletan declared, claiming to have been “soaking [his] head in each side’s computations and arguments.” One argument that Saletan never soaked his head in, however, was Flynn’s, because what Flynn discovered in his mailbox upsets the certainties upon which I.Q. fundamentalism rests. If whatever the thing is that I.Q. tests measure can jump so much in a generation, it can’t be all that immutable and it doesn’t look all that innate.
The very fact that average I.Q.s shift over time ought to create a “crisis of confidence,” Flynn writes in “What Is Intelligence?” (Cambridge; $22), his latest attempt to puzzle through the implications of his discovery. “How could such huge gains be intelligence gains? Either the children of today were far brighter than their parents or, at least in some circumstances, I.Q. tests were not good measures of intelligence.”
The best way to understand why I.Q.s rise, Flynn argues, is to look at one of the most widely used I.Q. tests, the so-called WISC (for Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children). The WISC is composed of ten subtests, each of which measures a different aspect of I.Q. Flynn points out that scores in some of the categories—those measuring general knowledge, say, or vocabulary or the ability to do basic arithmetic—have risen only modestly over time. The big gains on the WISC are largely in the category known as “similarities,” where you get questions such as “In what way are ‘dogs’ and ‘rabbits’ alike?” Today, we tend to give what, for the purposes of I.Q. tests, is the right answer: dogs and rabbits are both mammals. A nineteenth-century American would have said that “you use dogs to hunt rabbits.”
“If the everyday world is your cognitive home, it is not natural to detach abstractions and logic and the hypothetical from their concrete referents,” Flynn writes. Our great-grandparents may have been perfectly intelligent. But they would have done poorly on I.Q. tests because they did not participate in the twentieth century’s great cognitive revolution, in which we learned to sort experience according to a new set of abstract categories. In Flynn’s phrase, we have now had to put on “scientific spectacles,” which enable us to make sense of the WISC questions about similarities. To say that Dutch I.Q. scores rose substantially between 1952 and 1982 was another way of saying that the Netherlands in 1982 was, in at least certain respects, much more cognitively demanding than the Netherlands in 1952. An I.Q., in other words, measures not so much how smart we are as how modern we are.
This is a critical distinction. When the children of Southern Italian immigrants were given I.Q. tests in the early part of the past century, for example, they recorded median scores in the high seventies and low eighties, a full standard deviation below their American and Western European counterparts. Southern Italians did as poorly on I.Q. tests as Hispanics and blacks did. As you can imagine, there was much concerned talk at the time about the genetic inferiority of Italian stock, of the inadvisability of letting so many second-class immigrants into the United States, and of the squalor that seemed endemic to Italian urban neighborhoods. Sound familiar? These days, when talk turns to the supposed genetic differences in the intelligence of certain races, Southern Italians have disappeared from the discussion. “Did their genes begin to mutate somewhere in the 1930s?” the psychologists Seymour Sarason and John Doris ask, in their account of the Italian experience. “Or is it possible that somewhere in the 1920s, if not earlier, the sociocultural history of Italo-Americans took a turn from the blacks and the Spanish Americans which permitted their assimilation into the general undifferentiated mass of Americans?”
The psychologist Michael Cole and some colleagues once gave members of the Kpelle tribe, in Liberia, a version of the WISC similarities test: they took a basket of food, tools, containers, and clothing and asked the tribesmen to sort them into appropriate categories. To the frustration of the researchers, the Kpelle chose functional pairings. They put a potato and a knife together because a knife is used to cut a potato. “A wise man could only do such-and-such,” they explained. Finally, the researchers asked, “How would a fool do it?” The tribesmen immediately re-sorted the items into the “right” categories. It can be argued that taxonomical categories are a developmental improvement—that is, that the Kpelle would be more likely to advance, technologically and scientifically, if they started to see the world that way. But to label them less intelligent than Westerners, on the basis of their performance on that test, is merely to state that they have different cognitive preferences and habits. And if I.Q. varies with habits of mind, which can be adopted or discarded in a generation, what, exactly, is all the fuss about?
When I was growing up, my family would sometimes play Twenty Questions on long car trips. My father was one of those people who insist that the standard categories of animal, vegetable, and mineral be supplemented with a fourth category: “abstract.” Abstract could mean something like “whatever it was that was going through my mind when we drove past the water tower fifty miles back.” That abstract category sounds absurdly difficult, but it wasn’t: it merely required that we ask a slightly different set of questions and grasp a slightly different set of conventions, and, after two or three rounds of practice, guessing the contents of someone’s mind fifty miles ago becomes as easy as guessing Winston Churchill. (There is one exception. That was the trip on which my old roommate Tom Connell chose, as an abstraction, “the Unknown Soldier”—which allowed him legitimately and gleefully to answer “I have no idea” to almost every question. There were four of us playing. We gave up after an hour.) Flynn would say that my father was teaching his three sons how to put on scientific spectacles, and that extra practice probably bumped up all of our I.Q.s a few notches. But let’s be clear about what this means. There’s a world of difference between an I.Q. advantage that’s genetic and one that depends on extended car time with Graham Gladwell.
Flynn is a cautious and careful writer. Unlike many others in the I.Q. debates, he resists grand philosophizing. He comes back again and again to the fact that I.Q. scores are generated by paper-and-pencil tests—and making sense of those scores, he tells us, is a messy and complicated business that requires something closer to the skills of an accountant than to those of a philosopher.
For instance, Flynn shows what happens when we recognize that I.Q. is not a freestanding number but a value attached to a specific time and a specific test. When an I.Q. test is created, he reminds us, it is calibrated or “normed” so that the test-takers in the fiftieth percentile—those exactly at the median—are assigned a score of 100. But since I.Q.s are always rising, the only way to keep that hundred-point benchmark is periodically to make the tests more difficult—to “renorm” them. The original WISC was normed in the late nineteen-forties. It was then renormed in the early nineteen-seventies, as the WISC-R; renormed a third time in the late eighties, as the WISC III; and renormed again a few years ago, as the WISC IV—with each version just a little harder than its predecessor. The notion that anyone “has” an I.Q. of a certain number, then, is meaningless unless you know which WISC he took, and when he took it, since there’s a substantial difference between getting a 130 on the WISC IV and getting a 130 on the much easier WISC.
This is not a trivial issue. I.Q. tests are used to diagnose people as mentally retarded, with a score of 70 generally taken to be the cutoff. You can imagine how the Flynn effect plays havoc with that system. In the nineteen-seventies and eighties, most states used the WISC-R to make their mental-retardation diagnoses. But since kids—even kids with disabilities—score a little higher every year, the number of children whose scores fell below 70 declined steadily through the end of the eighties. Then, in 1991, the WISC III was introduced, and suddenly the percentage of kids labelled retarded went up. The psychologists Tomoe Kanaya, Matthew Scullin, and Stephen Ceci estimated that, if every state had switched to the WISC III right away, the number of Americans labelled mentally retarded should have doubled.
That is an extraordinary number. The diagnosis of mental disability is one of the most stigmatizing of all educational and occupational classifications—and yet, apparently, the chances of being burdened with that label are in no small degree a function of the point, in the life cycle of the WISC, at which a child happens to sit for his evaluation. “As far as I can determine, no clinical or school psychologists using the WISC over the relevant 25 years noticed that its criterion of mental retardation became more lenient over time,” Flynn wrote, in a 2000 paper. “Yet no one drew the obvious moral about psychologists in the field: They simply were not making any systematic assessment of the I.Q. criterion for mental retardation.”
Flynn brings a similar precision to the question of whether Asians have a genetic advantage in I.Q., a possibility that has led to great excitement among I.Q. fundamentalists in recent years. Data showing that the Japanese had higher I.Q.s than people of European descent, for example, prompted the British psychometrician and eugenicist Richard Lynn to concoct an elaborate evolutionary explanation involving the Himalayas, really cold weather, premodern hunting practices, brain size, and specialized vowel sounds. The fact that the I.Q.s of Chinese-Americans also seemed to be elevated has led I.Q. fundamentalists to posit the existence of an international I.Q. pyramid, with Asians at the top, European whites next, and Hispanics and blacks at the bottom.
Here was a question tailor-made for James Flynn’s accounting skills. He looked first at Lynn’s data, and realized that the comparison was skewed. Lynn was comparing American I.Q. estimates based on a representative sample of schoolchildren with Japanese estimates based on an upper-income, heavily urban sample. Recalculated, the Japanese average came in not at 106.6 but at 99.2. Then Flynn turned his attention to the Chinese-American estimates. They turned out to be based on a 1975 study in San Francisco’s Chinatown using something called the Lorge-Thorndike Intelligence Test. But the Lorge-Thorndike test was normed in the nineteen-fifties. For children in the nineteen-seventies, it would have been a piece of cake. When the Chinese-American scores were reassessed using up-to-date intelligence metrics, Flynn found, they came in at 97 verbal and 100 nonverbal. Chinese-Americans had slightly lower I.Q.s than white Americans.
The Asian-American success story had suddenly been turned on its head. The numbers now suggested, Flynn said, that they had succeeded not because of their higher I.Q.s. but despite their lower I.Q.s. Asians were overachievers. In a nifty piece of statistical analysis, Flynn then worked out just how great that overachievement was. Among whites, virtually everyone who joins the ranks of the managerial, professional, and technical occupations has an I.Q. of 97 or above. Among Chinese-Americans, that threshold is 90. A Chinese-American with an I.Q. of 90, it would appear, does as much with it as a white American with an I.Q. of 97.
There should be no great mystery about Asian achievement. It has to do with hard work and dedication to higher education, and belonging to a culture that stresses professional success. But Flynn makes one more observation. The children of that first successful wave of Asian-Americans really did have I.Q.s that were higher than everyone else’s—coming in somewhere around 103. Having worked their way into the upper reaches of the occupational scale, and taken note of how much the professions value abstract thinking, Asian-American parents have evidently made sure that their own children wore scientific spectacles. “Chinese Americans are an ethnic group for whom high achievement preceded high I.Q. rather than the reverse,” Flynn concludes, reminding us that in our discussions of the relationship between I.Q. and success we often confuse causes and effects. “It is not easy to view the history of their achievements without emotion,” he writes. That is exactly right. To ascribe Asian success to some abstract number is to trivialize it.
Two weeks ago, Flynn came to Manhattan to debate Charles Murray at a forum sponsored by the Manhattan Institute. Their subject was the black-white I.Q. gap in America. During the twenty-five years after the Second World War, that gap closed considerably. The I.Q.s of white Americans rose, as part of the general worldwide Flynn effect, but the I.Q.s of black Americans rose faster. Then, for about a period of twenty-five years, that trend stalled—and the question was why.
Murray showed a series of PowerPoint slides, each representing different statistical formulations of the I.Q. gap. He appeared to be pessimistic that the racial difference would narrow in the future. “By the nineteen-seventies, you had gotten most of the juice out of the environment that you were going to get,” he said. That gap, he seemed to think, reflected some inherent difference between the races. “Starting in the nineteen-seventies, to put it very crudely, you had a higher proportion of black kids being born to really dumb mothers,” he said. When the debate’s moderator, Jane Waldfogel, informed him that the most recent data showed that the race gap had begun to close again, Murray seemed unimpressed, as if the possibility that blacks could ever make further progress was inconceivable.
Flynn took a different approach. The black-white gap, he pointed out, differs dramatically by age. He noted that the tests we have for measuring the cognitive functioning of infants, though admittedly crude, show the races to be almost the same. By age four, the average black I.Q. is 95.4—only four and a half points behind the average white I.Q. Then the real gap emerges: from age four through twenty-four, blacks lose six-tenths of a point a year, until their scores settle at 83.4.
That steady decline, Flynn said, did not resemble the usual pattern of genetic influence. Instead, it was exactly what you would expect, given the disparate cognitive environments that whites and blacks encounter as they grow older. Black children are more likely to be raised in single-parent homes than are white children—and single-parent homes are less cognitively complex than two-parent homes. The average I.Q. of first-grade students in schools that blacks attend is 95, which means that “kids who want to be above average don’t have to aim as high.” There were possibly adverse differences between black teen-age culture and white teen-age culture, and an enormous number of young black men are in jail—which is hardly the kind of environment in which someone would learn to put on scientific spectacles.
Flynn then talked about what we’ve learned from studies of adoption and mixed-race children—and that evidence didn’t fit a genetic model, either. If I.Q. is innate, it shouldn’t make a difference whether it’s a mixed-race child’s mother or father who is black. But it does: children with a white mother and a black father have an eight-point I.Q. advantage over those with a black mother and a white father. And it shouldn’t make much of a difference where a mixed-race child is born. But, again, it does: the children fathered by black American G.I.s in postwar Germany and brought up by their German mothers have the same I.Q.s as the children of white American G.I.s and German mothers. The difference, in that case, was not the fact of the children’s blackness, as a fundamentalist would say. It was the fact of their Germanness—of their being brought up in a different culture, under different circumstances. “The mind is much more like a muscle than we’ve ever realized,” Flynn said. “It needs to get cognitive exercise. It’s not some piece of clay on which you put an indelible mark.” The lesson to be drawn from black and white differences was the same as the lesson from the Netherlands years ago: I.Q. measures not just the quality of a person’s mind but the quality of the world that person lives in. ♦
CORRECTION: In his December 17th piece, “None of the Above,” Malcolm Gladwell states that Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, in their 1994 book “The Bell Curve,” proposed that Americans with low I.Q.s be “sequestered in a ‘high-tech’ version of an Indian reservation.” In fact, Herrnstein and Murray deplored the prospect of such “custodialism” and recommended that steps be taken to avert it. We regret the error.[/b
Posted by lamin (Member # 5777) on :
Forgot to mention: the above text is from New Yorker Magazine(Dec. 17/07)
"Any study of the genetics of possible racial differences in intelligence must be based not on genes but knowledge of the fine structure and proteins of the brain. These can provide objective, quantifiable measures."
"Such a study must also be conducted on groups that have been rigorously matched on the basis of all the factors that can affect gene expression and protein production and processing, like age, gender, environment, diet, drug and toxin exposure - a daunting, if not impossible task."
Paul Coleman Senior Scientist and co-director of Alzheimer's research at Sun Health Research Institute
Evergreen Writes:
In addition to the "modeling" mentioned above I would add, before any study on racial differences is conducted one would have to:
1. Define intelligence 2. Define and valdate Biological Race
Posted by Djehuti (Member # 6698) on :
^ I wonder what Shaun has to say about all of this? I hope he won't be too shocked by this. LOL Posted by demMuhfughan African AmericanZ (Member # 10819) on :
quote:^ I wonder what Shaun has to say about all of this? I hope he won't be too shocked by this. LOL
As for Shaun, who cares what he would like to think, what's really good is what his reaction would be, unless it's another vague-strawman reaction. Some little tid-bits, prior reactions:
quote:Originally posted by Sundiata:
quote:Originally posted by sshaun002: Um, yes, anybody who believes in evolution and the out-of-Africa theory inherently imply that races are not of equal intelligence.
LOL!!
His bluff was called and this is the best he had to offer. My goodness, why is this guy not being completely ignored? He clearly has an extremely limited understanding of evolutionary biology as well as human population history, which is the only reason why he'd draw such a completely absurd conclusion. My god! Talk about IQ and education.
and other layman statements such as this statement in which he replied to my post:
quote:Originally posted by demMuhfughan African AmericanZ (me, What Box):
He assumes 'race', is an appropriate dichotomy of humans (ie. sub-species), without knowing that such a dichotomy in humans is invalidated by genetics, and has nothing to do with any "inhumanity" of being sperated into breeds.
quote:Originally posted by Sshaun002: The only differences between dog breeds and human races (a significant difference) is 1) ALL humans have the capacity to reason, while dogs are instinctual
How the hay does this validate 'races' (that he, not to mention, has yet to define)?
I guess we'll see:
quote: and 2) dogs were created via artificial selection while humans via natural selection.
?
(Proves his point [that races exist] how? It probably doesn't, and is just an attempt to defend his earlier made [red-herring] comments, with which he inferred that 'race' was simply an offensive notion as it compared us to dogs [as in having breeds].)
quote:Aside from this the analogy of dog breeds and human BREEDS/races holds true.
(See?)
quote: There is no "biological reality" to dog breeds. They exist on a gradient just like humans. Nonetheless, we all know that dog breeds and human races exist when all things are considered.
Actually there are different species of dog.
The dude's attack on rasol's character were little more than an attempt to bait more information out of rasol, which he avoided, since the dude showed little knowledge of what he was talking about in the first place.
Murray showed a series of PowerPoint slides, each representing different statistical formulations of the I.Q. gap. He appeared to be pessimistic that the racial difference would narrow in the future. “By the nineteen-seventies, you had gotten most of the juice out of the environment that you were going to get,” [ ] he said. That gap, he seemed to think, reflected some inherent difference between the races. “Starting in the nineteen-seventies, to put it very crudely, you had a higher proportion of black kids being born to really dumb mothers,” he said. When the debate’s moderator, Jane Waldfogel, informed him that the most recent data showed that the race gap had begun to close again, Murray seemed unimpressed, as if the possibility that blacks could ever make further progress was inconceivable.
Flynn took a different approach. The black-white gap, he pointed out, differs dramatically by age. He noted that the tests we have for measuring the cognitive functioning of infants, though admittedly crude, show the races to be almost the same. By age four, the average black I.Q. is 95.4—only four and a half points behind the average white I.Q. Then the real gap emerges: from age four through twenty-four, blacks lose six-tenths of a point a year, until their scores settle at 83.4.
That steady decline, Flynn said, did not resemble the usual pattern of genetic influence. Instead, it was exactly what you would expect, given the disparate cognitive environments that whites and blacks encounter as they grow older. Black children are more likely to be raised in single-parent homes than are white children—and single-parent homes are less cognitively complex than two-parent homes. The average I.Q. of first-grade students in schools that blacks attend is 95, which means that “kids who want to be above average don’t have to aim as high.” There were possibly adverse differences between black teen-age culture and white teen-age culture, and an enormous number of young black men are in jail—which is hardly the kind of environment in which someone would learn to put on scientific spectacles.
Flynn then talked about what we’ve learned from studies of adoption and mixed-race children—and that evidence didn’t fit a genetic model, either. If I.Q. is innate, it shouldn’t make a difference whether it’s a mixed-race child’s mother or father who is black. But it does: children with a white mother and a black father have an eight-point I.Q. advantage over those with a black mother and a white father. And it shouldn’t make much of a difference where a mixed-race child is born. But, again, it does: the children fathered by black American G.I.s in postwar Germany and brought up by their German mothers have the same I.Q.s as the children of white American G.I.s and German mothers. The difference, in that case, was not the fact of the children’s blackness, as a fundamentalist would say. It was the fact of their Germanness—of their being brought up in a different culture, under different circumstances. “The mind is much more like a muscle than we’ve ever realized,” Flynn said. “It needs to get cognitive exercise. It’s not some piece of clay on which you [...]
It's obvious that all raciallists' basis in almost all arguments regarding 'race' is rooted in wishful thinking.
Especially when their only reactions to seeing their ideas get utterly refuted is the defence tactic of blaming any facts that contradict them on some vast political conspiracy (political correctness), and ranting on about how [insert the hated here] this, and [blacks] that. Talk about desperate, lame, delusional, and a bit looney.
Speaking of lame...
Anyone else notice how lameMurray's argument was? I mean WOW. Posted by Djehuti (Member # 6698) on :
In response to the fact I presented that African immigrants are outperforming whites in the West (both in Europe as well as North America) academically and professionally...
quote:sshaun002 wrote: I think this is fantastic and demonstrates a functioning and successful immigration process. Allowing primarily African professionals into the country is exactly what should be done in America. Unfortunately we take anybody of any status from Africa, Mexico, or elsewhere instead of just the best that those countries have to offer.
LOL Exactly where did I or the source in the link I provided, did it say America or those European nations were somehow being "selective" in the immigration process?! Where did it say that America and these European nations select professionals from African countries?? The thread and the sources merely state that African immigrants in general once they do enter these Western nations excel further than whites academically in shcools and in professionally being more qualified in high intellect careers!
Obviously his racist denial has gotten the better of him, and he like many racist whites cannot admit that Africans are just like Asians in that they are high achievers in education and professions. The question is, is this due to Africans having a higher IQ than whites or is it that simply Africans like Asians traditionally take education more seriously than whites in the West??
Posted by sshaun002 (Member # 11448) on :
quote:Originally posted by Djehuti: In response to the fact I presented that African immigrants are outperforming whites in the West (both in Europe as well as North America) academically and professionally...
quote:sshaun002 wrote: I think this is fantastic and demonstrates a functioning and successful immigration process. Allowing primarily African professionals into the country is exactly what should be done in America. Unfortunately we take anybody of any status from Africa, Mexico, or elsewhere instead of just the best that those countries have to offer.
LOL Exactly where did I or the source in the link I provided, did it say America or those European nations were somehow being "selective" in the immigration process?! Where did it say that America and these European nations select professionals from African countries?? The thread and the sources merely state that African immigrants in general once they do enter these Western nations excel further than whites academically in shcools and in professionally being more qualified in high intellect careers!
Obviously his racist denial has gotten the better of him, and he like many racist whites cannot admit that Africans are just like Asians in that they are high achievers in education and professions. The question is, is this due to Africans having a higher IQ than whites or is it that simply Africans like Asians traditionally take education more seriously than whites in the West??
I will say that your link was among the best posted in the thread. I do not have an effective counter argument to explain the stats. This is terrific news.
As for your IQ comment. I have no doubt that if those Africans were tested their IQ would be above average, assuming they hold degrees from post-secondary Universities rather than merely managerial college type of degrees. Again, I don't know the specifics.
The African populations in the countries where this is happening is quite small compared to the US or France for example. You must also take into account propotional distribution. If Whites make up 80% of a population and 30% of them don't have a degree, while Africans make up 2% of a population but 80% of them hold degrees, there are still far more Whites with degrees. But not every White person is going to have a degree - you have to have somebody bag your groceries. Anyway, you get the point. Immigrants are not necessarily representative.
Still, the stats are hopeful.
Posted by sshaun002 (Member # 11448) on :
Studies like these show that there is some bias involved in portions of the tests:
But these are small bits that don't really push the aggregate data on racial IQ all that much (and it's been noted that small test bias may exist, but is merely statistical in nature, especially for native born English speakers). The reason Murray seemed unimpressed with Flynn is because he understands g and is aware of the aggregate data of IQ studies done for the past 30 years, and he knows that smarts run in families - thus when he says that more dumb black mothers were having kids a couple decades ago, it means it is virtually impossible for those offspring to be mentally average much less geniuses. This is tough, bruises the ego, and is harsh, but it's also closer to the truth than believing that "if they study hard, they can achieve like everybody else". That's something that I'll tell my kids, when I have kids, but even I know it's not true. My kids will be able to achieve what their genes allow them to, provided that all other things are equal.
C. Loring Brace's comment that one cannot compare groups until centuries have passed where groups have been treated equally is absurd. He's essentially saying that we can NEVER compare groups of people since groups of people never have been nor ever will be treated equally. So his position is rubbish and unscientific.
Posted by Doug M (Member # 7650) on :
What is rubbish is the fact that you don't understand that 1000 years ago the IQ of the average Western European must have been VERY LOW, as evidenced by the fact that their civilization at the time ranked at the bottom. But so what? Now they are at the top. IQ has nothing to do with it. It is all about individual desire and personal responsibility. Individual desire including being willing to STEP OVER EVERYONE ELSE to get to the top. Much of the reason for the rise of 'the West' was the transfer of knowledge from the ancient places where such knowledge originated. That coupled by the destruction of the ancient cultures which produced such knowledge, laid the foundation of the West being where it is today. The Greek Library of Alexandria and the Moorish Universities of Spain are historically the two biggest intellectual centers of the ancient world and BOTH were based on knowledge transfer from older cultures in Africa and the East to Europe. And this transfer was one way, meaning that while Europe was quick to soak up knowledge from everyone else, it is sure stingy on giving it back. Or, even more ironic (or sinister), after all this knowledge was collected in these places, it was subsequently destroyed, along with the cultures that produced it. But not after a lot of it had been transferred into the hands of Europe, from whence they could build on, taking advantage of the accumulated knowledge and wisdom of many cultures that went before them, who did what they could not. And then they talk that trash about IQ. On top of that, when discussing blacks in America 30 years ago, it must be remembered that 30 years ago America was MORE RACIST than it is today. Analyzing IQ in America as some cop out for the FACT of racism is nonsense. Europeans were not and are not racists because of IQ, therefore any such nonsense of a IQ difference between "races" not only is nonsense because there ARE NO RACES, but it is nonsense because IQ is not the reason why some cultures get ahead. Again, all this is another lame attempt to cover up years of racist exploitation of people around the world via statistical evidence for things that have happened after the fact. Europeans built their civilization on the backs of many people over the last 500 years and it did not matter WHAT the IQ of these individuals were. The only thing that mattered was that Europeans had guns and these other people didn't. So all this nonsense about IQ being the basis of the development of civilization, when wars, disease and disasters play as much of a role in the development of civilization as any other factor, is pure nonsense revisionist fantasy.
The other nonsense point of view is that the model of Western civilization is the epitome of what civilization should be. Of course that is a bunch of nonsense right there. If everyone went around the world and tried to exterminate or conquer everyone else that was not of their "race", the world as we know it would not be a very nice place to live in. On top of that, if every country was as industrially developed as "the West" and everyone consumed as much as individuals in "The West", the resources on this planet would be much closer to being totally depleted and there would be MORE WARS as countries struggled to get their share of what is left.
But idiot retards in the West want to have an excuse to have more than their fair share of the earth's resources, so now they want to use IQ as some measure of how much a person is worth or how much of the earths' resources they should be able to consume("predict success"). The fact is that 'The West' never intended for everyone else to have the same standard of living as they do. They actually would rather everyone else were to somehow die off or "dissappear", or at least accept that they are second and third rate, which means they don't really deserve ("cannot develop") more sophisticated means of consuming MORE of the earth's resources ("civilization"). What they are really doing is trying to avoid the obvious, which is that civilization as we know it is headed for destruction because it consumes too much. Modern industrial consmumer driven economies produce too much junk that is not really needed other than to keep people employed. It has gone way beyond what is needed for comfortable survival. On top of that it is typified by waste. Sooner or later something will have to give, but of course "the West" would prefer that this something be all the dumb people who are consuming too much. I guess all those dumb folks in most of the world who only get by with 1/10th of what "the West" consumes will have to get by with 1/5th, while 'The West' continues business as usual.
Posted by sam p (Member # 11774) on :
Intelligence is far too complex to measure. A huge weakness in one area can be totally overcome by a strenght in another area. There are probably hundreds if not thousands of components to intelligence. Even visual acuity and hand eye coordination are parts of what make up a fully functional animal.
Language plays an enormous role both in cognition and in how intelligence is measured. Any sort of real or functional defect in language will have a tremendous impact on results but can have almost no bearing on the "intelligence" of the individual being measured.
Emotional status at the time of test taking as well as attitude can have a huge effect on results.
Real intelligence is grossly overrated in any case. Most adults do quite well on IQ tests even if they scored low as children. People simply learn at different rates. It's not consistent with known facts to rate intelligence by standardized means. It's absurd to expect a dolphin or whale to get a single question right but they are obviously more intelligent than some people.
I've said it before but racial differences are of no practical import anyway. It's foolish to expect someone to be smarter than you because he's Japanese or expect someone to nap at noon because he's Mexican. Individual differences are much greater than racial differences.
It also seems absurd to believe that intelligence has been increasing on average. There is an obvious decline in education that has been going on since 1900 and accelerated rapidly after WWII. High school graduates rarely hav the type of abilities that were common of their counterparts 100 years ago. If this research is real then we are expected to believe that schools no longer teach facts or knowledge, just intelligence.
I don't believe a word of the article. It is well written but from a perspective that is alien to me.
Posted by sam p (Member # 11774) on :
Doug M;
History is written by individuals. Individuals fight wars and make discoveries. Individuals invent technology and advance the race.
Certainly most of us are trapped in our time and place and this can determine how we live our life and see history and the world, but we are still not only the product of our enviroment but the creator of it. That we don't see the latter is because it's so hard to see other perspectives.
Posted by Sundiata (Member # 13096) on :
Shaun, please don't start again. You seem a bit more receptive here, but if you are entering this thread in bad faith and with a fixed agenda, then closing the other thread was pointless. A lot of your previous comments were beyond asinine and were deliberately antagonistic and inflammatory, but hopefully you've learned the art of persuasion to where next time you won't have to resort to such tomfoolery.
Maybe "Alive-(What Box)" shouldn't have even addressed you, but I only hope that your chaotic and disorganized style of argumentation doesn't leak over into other threads. As far as I'm concerned by how you've represented yourself, this isn't even a non-issue anymore, which is why the best that you can muster in rebuttal is arbitrary points of disagreement, ad hominem attacks, wrought with a complete misunderstanding of the implications that you try so hard to reduce, but cannot, or no rebuttal at all, which you admit is this case here.
One good thing I can say however, is that it seems that you may not be a lost cause as some of the information presented to you, you do seem to find compelling, even though by nature you detest such truths that you are beginning to forcibly admit to (whether internally or externally).
Posted by Doug M (Member # 7650) on :
quote:Originally posted by sam p: Doug M;
History is written by individuals. Individuals fight wars and make discoveries. Individuals invent technology and advance the race.
Certainly most of us are trapped in our time and place and this can determine how we live our life and see history and the world, but we are still not only the product of our enviroment but the creator of it. That we don't see the latter is because it's so hard to see other perspectives.
The problem is that there is no race. The only advances are for the HUMAN RACE, not a separate "sub" race. ALL human advancement as a whole is the cumulative sum of the achievements of humanity over many thousands of years. No one "sub" race is any more special in this regard.
Posted by Djehuti (Member # 6698) on :
^ LOL As usual Sshaun fails to see that he lost his argument long time ago-- since page 1 of his thread.
Why? Because scientifically 'race' does not exist and IQ depends on alot of factors including learning environment and whatever genetic factors are involved cannot be associated with certain populations. Posted by sam p (Member # 11774) on :
I couldn't agree more and that's what I tied to say.
Well, maybe a little more. While race has no real meaning in most individual's lives, it does have some meaning in medicine since different "races" can react differently to different pathogens or medications.
This is probably mostly indicative of "family" differences since there may be nothing at all that affects every individual of a race that doesn't also apply to other races.
Posted by Djehuti (Member # 6698) on :
^ you contradict yourself. If "race" does not scientifically exist, then how can you do you speak of different "races" having different reactions to medications??
The fact is it is not "race" that determines different reactions to different medications, but family history and on a greater scale population history! Population is NOT 'race'. Posted by Sundiata (Member # 13096) on :
^Indeed, immunity and susceptibility to certain diseases and/or medicines in no way qualifies as a criteria for or an indicator of race. Sickle cell anemia for instance, isn't restricted to black Africans. In fact, it's more prevalent in Greece than it is in South Africa, despite it being commonly referenced (by most lay men) as a "black disease".
Posted by Djehuti (Member # 6698) on :
^ Correction. The reason why Greeks have sickle cell is because they have black African ancestry!
But you are right to say that sickle cell is not a black African disease but a tropical disease, specifically one that is an adaptation to malaria!
As you can see in the map above, there are four varieties of sickle cell with three of those (Senegal, Benin, and Bantu) occuring in Africa while one (Arab-Indian) is Eurasian in origin. Greeks however do not have the Eurasian form but the African, specifically Benin form of the disease which is dated to the Neolithic-- the exact same time their African lineages such as E3b is dated to as well as the introduction of Neolithic culture.
Posted by Sundiata (Member # 13096) on :
^I stand corrected. Nonetheless it's a useful example to extrapolate on. Though I wonder why Brace figures that the tropical variety has its origins in the Middle East among agriculturalists, despite its wide distribution in tropical Africa. Haven't read too much on that particular hypothesis.
Then if we take that scourge sickle-cell anemia, so often thought of as an African disease, we discover that, while it does reach high frequencies in some parts of sub-Saharan Africa, it did not originate there. Its distribution includes southern Italy, the eastern Mediterranean, parts of the Middle East, and over into India. In fact, it represents a kind of adaptation that aids survival in the face of a particular kind of malaria, and wherever that malaria is a prominent threat, sickle-cell anemia tends to occur in higher frequencies. It would appear that the gene that controls that trait was introduced to sub-Saharan Africa by traders from those parts of the Middle East where it had arisen in conjunction with the conditions created by the early development of agriculture. http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/first/brace.html Posted by sshaun002 (Member # 11448) on :
quote:Originally posted by sam p: [QB] Intelligence is far too complex to measure. A huge weakness in one area can be totally overcome by a strenght in another area. There are probably hundreds if not thousands of components to intelligence. Even visual acuity and hand eye coordination are parts of what make up a fully functional animal.
This is true, IQ cannot measure the full range of intelligence and it cannot measure creativity and personality traits - all of which taken together form somebody's intelligence. However, IQ has predictive value regardless of it not being an all-inclusive measure. It's the best we have and it has real life effects.
Another interesting tidbit is that reaction time correlates highly with g.
quote: Language plays an enormous role both in cognition and in how intelligence is measured. Any sort of real or functional defect in language will have a tremendous impact on results but can have almost no bearing on the "intelligence" of the individual being measured.
True, this is why tests have been designed for English speakers and non-Native English speakers. The latter uses non-verbal questions.
quote: Emotional status at the time of test taking as well as attitude can have a huge effect on results.
Absolutely. This is why doing more than one IQ test is ideal because after taking several of them, the average score is around your true IQ level.
quote: Real intelligence is grossly overrated in any case. Most adults do quite well on IQ tests even if they scored low as children. People simply learn at different rates. It's not consistent with known facts to rate intelligence by standardized means.
I'm afraid this is completely incorrect. Most adults score close to what they scored when they were 7 - 15 years old. The beauty of IQ is how stable it is. Although one gains experiences and information/knowledge throughout life, their base intelligence remains constant.
quote: I've said it before but racial differences are of no practical import anyway. It's foolish to expect someone to be smarter than you because he's Japanese or expect someone to nap at noon because he's Mexican. Individual differences are much greater than racial differences.
True, but racial disparities between groups become apparent in academic settings. When you go to a University campus and see no black faces but tons of Asian faces it says something. Likewise, when you have an integrated school, and all the advanced classes are filled with White students and the basic classes are filled with Black students, people see this is a racial problem. Blame gets spread around a lot - teachers aren't doing their jobs parents say. The teachers are doing there jobs but you can only make lemonade out of lemons.
quote: It also seems absurd to believe that intelligence has been increasing on average. There is an obvious decline in education that has been going on since 1900 and accelerated rapidly after WWII. High school graduates rarely hav the type of abilities that were common of their counterparts 100 years ago. If this research is real then we are expected to believe that schools no longer teach facts or knowledge, just intelligence.
I agree. I believe that g has remained relatively constant during the century.
Posted by sshaun002 (Member # 11448) on :
quote:True, but racial disparities between groups become apparent in academic settings. When you go to a University campus and see no black faces but tons of Asian faces it says something.
Sorry to inform you but it has been shown ad nauseum that Africans excel above both Asian immigrants and U.S. born citizens.
Posted by Mmmkay (Member # 10013) on :
^^ He just *wont* ever *get it* I'm afraid. That says something about the guy.
He's obviously never heard of "sociology" and the differences that can accrue between two culturally and sociologically different groups of the same *race*.
Posted by Sundiata (Member # 13096) on :
quote:Originally posted by Mmmkay: ^^ He just *wont* ever *get it* I'm afraid. That says something about the guy.
It says a whole lot.
quote:He's obviously never heard of "sociology" and the differences that can accrue between two culturally and sociologically different groups of the same *race*.
Nor does he want to know. He chooses to remain willfully ignorant for his own comfort.
Posted by sshaun002 (Member # 11448) on :
quote:Originally posted by Sundiata: Nor does he want to know. He chooses to remain willfully ignorant for his own comfort.
As you can see, there is no consensus in the scientific community about the existence of race. You put forward links saying it doesn't exist (from members of the scientific community) and I put forward links saying it does (also from members of the scientific community).
My "willful ignorance" is in that I choose one position and you and everybody on this board adheres to the other view. Neither one of us is right, or "willfully ignorant" since neither position has been proven true or false.
However, I have the weight of laypeople and history on my side. You have the politically driven members of the scientific community of the past few decades on yours. Race has always been noticed and noted throughout history in all cultures where people came into contact with other races.
Posted by Sundiata (Member # 13096) on :
quote:Originally posted by sshaun002: [QB]
quote:Originally posted by Sundiata: Nor does he want to know. He chooses to remain willfully ignorant for his own comfort.
As you can see, there is no consensus in the scientific community about the existence of race.
Yes there is..
The following statement was adopted by the Executive Board of the American Anthropological Association, acting on a draft prepared by a committee of representative American anthropologists. It does not reflect a consensus of all members of the AAA, as individuals vary in their approaches to the study of "race." We believe that it represents generally the contemporary thinking and scholarly positions of a majority of anthropologists. http://www.aaanet.org/stmts/racepp.htm Posted by sshaun002 (Member # 11448) on :
quote:Originally posted by Sundiata:
quote:Originally posted by sshaun002: [QB]
quote:Originally posted by Sundiata: Nor does he want to know. He chooses to remain willfully ignorant for his own comfort.
As you can see, there is no consensus in the scientific community about the existence of race.
Yes there is..
The following statement was adopted by the Executive Board of the American Anthropological Association, acting on a draft prepared by a committee of representative American anthropologists. It does not reflect a consensus of all members of the AAA, as individuals vary in their approaches to the study of "race." We believe that it represents generally the contemporary thinking and scholarly positions of a majority of anthropologists. http://www.aaanet.org/stmts/racepp.htm
Majority doesn't mean a true consensus, especially if that majority respresents slightly over half (say 51% in favor). The AAA position is from 1998. The PBS link I posted is from 2000. In 2000, little over half of anthropoligists believe race doesn't exist.
Posted by markellion (Member # 14131) on :
quote:Originally posted by sshaun002: As you can see, there is no consensus in the scientific community about the existence of race. You put forward links saying it doesn't exist (from members of the scientific community) and I put forward links saying it does (also from members of the scientific community).
My "willful ignorance" is in that I choose one position and you and everybody on this board adheres to the other view. Neither one of us is right, or "willfully ignorant" since neither position has been proven true or false.
However, I have the weight of laypeople and history on my side. You have the politically driven members of the scientific community of the past few decades on yours. Race has always been noticed and noted throughout history in all cultures where people came into contact with other races. [/QB]
People, including very smart people, also thought the world was flat because of lack of evidence to the contrary
Posted by Sundiata (Member # 13096) on :
quote:Originally posted by sshaun002:
quote:Originally posted by Sundiata:
quote:Originally posted by sshaun002: [QB]
quote:Originally posted by Sundiata: Nor does he want to know. He chooses to remain willfully ignorant for his own comfort.
As you can see, there is no consensus in the scientific community about the existence of race.
Yes there is..
The following statement was adopted by the Executive Board of the American Anthropological Association, acting on a draft prepared by a committee of representative American anthropologists. It does not reflect a consensus of all members of the AAA, as individuals vary in their approaches to the study of "race." We believe that it represents generally the contemporary thinking and scholarly positions of a majority of anthropologists. http://www.aaanet.org/stmts/racepp.htm
Majority doesn't mean a true consensus
No, but it means exactly what it states. The reality of race is only held as true by a fraction of biological anthropologists and evolutionary biologists. Getting yourself tongue tied over the exact meaning of what a true consensus consists of is irrelevant.
Posted by sshaun002 (Member # 11448) on :
quote:Originally posted by markellion:
quote:Originally posted by sshaun002: As you can see, there is no consensus in the scientific community about the existence of race. You put forward links saying it doesn't exist (from members of the scientific community) and I put forward links saying it does (also from members of the scientific community).
My "willful ignorance" is in that I choose one position and you and everybody on this board adheres to the other view. Neither one of us is right, or "willfully ignorant" since neither position has been proven true or false.
However, I have the weight of laypeople and history on my side. You have the politically driven members of the scientific community of the past few decades on yours. Race has always been noticed and noted throughout history in all cultures where people came into contact with other races.
People, including very smart people, also thought the world was flat because of lack of evidence to the contrary [/QB]
This view was never widely held. It was propaganda intended to show the evils of religion and how religion stifled scientific progress.
Posted by Sundiata (Member # 13096) on :
^This is incorrect..
12th Century European world map:
Posted by markellion (Member # 14131) on :
quote:Originally posted by sshaun002: ]This view was never widely held. It was propaganda intended to show the evils of religion and how religion stifled scientific progress.
I was referring to ancient times in Greece actually, before that guy in Alexandria proved it was round
Also, Aristotle and most other Greeks were strongly against the Atomic theory
Posted by Mmmkay (Member # 10013) on :
Why are we arguing over whether medieval Europeans thought the world was flat? Who cares if they did'nt or they did'nt, but I suppose he wants to be *right* on everything.
Another in a long line of diversions coming from the same clown.
Posted by sshaun002 (Member # 11448) on :
quote:Originally posted by Mmmkay: Why are we arguing over whether medieval Europeans thought the world was flat? Who cares if they did'nt or they did'nt, but I suppose he wants to be *right* on everything.
Another in a long line of diversions coming from the same clown.
I'm not the one that mentioned it.
Posted by Ebony Allen (Member # 12771) on :
Still trolling the forums, sshaun. You're just asking to get your ass banned. Why won't Heru, ausar, or someone ban this idiot? He really is getting on a lot of people's nerves here, including mine.
Posted by Alive-(What Box) (Member # 10819) on :
However, they don't really portray the creative aspect which makes humans so unique.
Nor do they convey the ability to develope critical/basic thinking skills, nor do equal the the ability to more efficiently aquire Knowledge, or any other mentioned skills.
Anyone of you agree or disagree with the following two quotes:
quote:You can enhance your brain's power by being in the right state for learning. 'State' refers to the mental and physical condition of your body-mind. Are your thoughts drifting and jumping all over the place? Are you focused on one idea or task? Are your muscles tense? Is your breathing fast? Are you relaxed and breathing calmly? For learning, the best state to be in is one in which your body is relaxed and your brain-mind is alert and focused. This state is technically called the alpha brainwave state. Alpha refers to the speed, or frequency, of the electrical impulses in your brain. Researchers have named four brainwave frequencies, from high to low; beta, alpha, theta and delta. Alpha is a state between what is generally called your conscious (beta) and your subconscious (theta) states. Alpha is that state between waking and sleeping. You're in alpha when you're visualizing, imagining or daydreaming in a calm, relaxed state. To help you put your brain-mind into this power learning alpha state, here are five areas of concern to assist your brain empowerment program.
quote:It is not a question of whether you are intelligent. The fact that you are reading this demonstrates that. Understanding HOW you are intelligent and strengthening your brain's power is what we will do here. Your brain is the master muscle of your body. We have 100 billion brain cells, and each brain cell can make thousands of connections with other brain cells. Although we use very little of it, your brain could easily store the contents of 10 million 1,000 page books! You are capable of learning all the known languages on Earth, learning every song ever written, playing every known musical instrument, understanding all known mathematical formulas and still have room left over. As you are reading this, you are becoming smarter; your mind is expanding [...]
No it doesn't, because human populations cannot objectively be divided into discreete groups based on physical appearance and such appearances do not necessarily correlate with lineage. Thus 'race' does not scientifically exist. This has been explained to you ad-nasium, but apparently your mind cannot grasp this. Posted by Djehuti (Member # 6698) on :
quote:Originally posted by Sundiata: I stand corrected. Nonetheless it's a useful example to extrapolate on. Though I wonder why Brace figures that the tropical variety has its origins in the Middle East among agriculturalists, despite its wide distribution in tropical Africa. Haven't read too much on that particular hypothesis.
Simply because these Middle Eastern agriculturalists have African ancestry!
Posted by sshaun002 (Member # 11448) on :
No it doesn't, because human populations cannot objectively be divided into discreete groups based on physical appearance and such appearances do not necessarily correlate with lineage. Thus 'race' does not scientifically exist. This has been explained to you ad-nasium, but apparently your mind cannot grasp this.
Just because divisions aren't perfect (fuzzy boundaries) and judgements made via physical appearance isn't 100% accurate does nothing to legitimize your idea of races not existing.
My word of advice to you and those like you is to put aside the "race doesn't exist" nonsense. It discredits everything else you say and makes one view you with suspicion. I realize there are a couple of scientific organizations and individuals here and there that will argue there are no races (often times because they're in an area of study in which there is very little difference between racial groups), for political reasons, but this only weakens your cause. Nobody in their right mind outside of pseudo-scientific-political circles is ever going to buy into such nonsense.
Stop posturing and get with the program.
Posted by Ebony Allen (Member # 12771) on :
The only one who is buying into pseudo-science is you, sshaun. Just because people have differences physically, genetically, and skeletally does not mean they are of different races. And you say scientist who argue that there are no races do it for political reasons? You are the one who is not in your right mind.
Posted by Ebony Allen (Member # 12771) on :
Lamin shouldn't have started this thread. I just knew sshaun would come in here and cause trouble. He just seems to be attracted to mess about I.Q. (especially blacks having a low I.Q.)and different "races". Do you have an inferiority complex, sshaun?
Posted by Sundiata (Member # 13096) on :
No it doesn't, because human populations cannot objectively be divided into discreete groups based on physical appearance and such appearances do not necessarily correlate with lineage. Thus 'race' does not scientifically exist. This has been explained to you ad-nasium, but apparently your mind cannot grasp this.
Just because divisions aren't perfect (fuzzy boundaries) and judgements made via physical appearance isn't 100% accurate does nothing to legitimize your idea of races not existing.
My word of advice to you and those like you is to put aside the "race doesn't exist" nonsense. It discredits everything else you say and makes one view you with suspicion. I realize there are a couple of scientific organizations and individuals here and there that will argue there are no races (often times because they're in an area of study in which there is very little difference between racial groups), for political reasons, but this only weakens your cause. Nobody in their right mind outside of pseudo-scientific-political circles is ever going to buy into such nonsense.
Stop posturing and get with the program.
You must be either the least informed individual or biggest spin doctor I've ever ran across on these forums. Statements like these expose how oblivious you are.
I realize there are a couple of scientific organizations and individuals here and there that will argue there are no races
^ Certainly that is the most widely held view as race is generally an after thought in the vast majority of scientific literature, namely in anthropology. It is just not a useful way of assessing population relationships and biological affinities as it is too subjective and basically arbitrary.
THE CONCEPT OF RACE, racial thinking, and approaches using perceived racial schema are part of a theoretical worldview deemed by most anthropologists to be incorrect and passe.
You are simply delusional Shaun. You've done nothing but refer to pseudoscientists in order to support what ever variety of claims you make, yet somehow find the gumption to cast similar, yet unfounded accusations against legitimate research and a majority view within the scientific community? Surely you are merely trolling again. Posted by sshaun002 (Member # 11448) on :
quote:Originally posted by Ebony Allen: Lamin shouldn't have started this thread. I just knew sshaun would come in here and cause trouble. He just seems to be attracted to mess about I.Q. (especially blacks having a low I.Q.)and different "races". Do you have an inferiority complex, sshaun?
I don't believe blacks are inferior. I believe they founded Ancient Egypt along with other early civilizations and have been given short shrift due to European hegemony.
The IQ debate really centers around contemporary societies IMO. All I ask is that you not ignore the data. There are still some unanswered questions, but it seems like the door is closing and people are going to have to come to grips with some semblance of genetic determinism. In other words, the adolescent with an IQ of 75 can never aspire to be a surgeon. There are disproportionately more people with this IQ range in some populations than others. You don't want to call it race. That's fine, but it doesn't change the heartache these individuals are going to face (and more importantly, perception from the masses).
The disconnect arises because people like you, who have above average IQ, and who are not familiar with IQ research, incorrectly assume that just about ANYBODY can do what they want if they just put their mind to it. The science says this is not true. The person with an IQ of 75 is virtually doomed to a certain role in life (or at least not able to participate in certain things). He/she can become a famous actor, athlete, singer, and so forth, but these are limited. Outside of those arenas they are limited and confined to service jobs.
Posted by Sundiata (Member # 13096) on :
quote:Originally posted by Djehuti:
quote:Originally posted by Sundiata: I stand corrected. Nonetheless it's a useful example to extrapolate on. Though I wonder why Brace figures that the tropical variety has its origins in the Middle East among agriculturalists, despite its wide distribution in tropical Africa. Haven't read too much on that particular hypothesis.
Simply because these Middle Eastern agriculturalists have African ancestry!
How bogus, it can more easily be explained the other way around, but hey, most know first hand that Brace isn't perfect, even though he is useful on a lot of fronts.
Posted by Sundiata (Member # 13096) on :
quote:Originally posted by sshaun002:
quote:Originally posted by Ebony Allen: Lamin shouldn't have started this thread. I just knew sshaun would come in here and cause trouble. He just seems to be attracted to mess about I.Q. (especially blacks having a low I.Q.)and different "races". Do you have an inferiority complex, sshaun?
I don't believe blacks are inferior. I believe they founded Ancient Egypt along with other early civilizations and have been given short shrift due to European hegemony.
The IQ debate really centers around contemporary societies IMO. All I ask is that you not ignore the data. There are still some unanswered questions, but it seems like the door is closing and people are going to have to come to grips with some semblance of genetic determinism. In other words, the adolescent with an IQ of 75 can never aspire to be a surgeon. There are disproportionately more people with this IQ range in some populations than others. You don't want to call it race. That's fine, but it doesn't change the heartache these individuals are going to face.
Why is this guy not banned? It's gotten to the point where he's merely turned into a broken record and now argues by way of circular reasoning and loon bin predictions based on his established inferiority complex and wishful thinking. The reason they're called populations is because at present, they form a non isolated entity that can be defined in terms of geography. That has nothing to do with taxonomy. Such genetic arguments have already been refuted given the unshakable fact that most human variation is with in (not outside of) Africa, so EVEN if your genetic determinism applied, it can't pigeon hold Africa due to the said genetic diversity there. People would vary significantly, yet even that is immaterial seeing as how 85% of human variation is at the individual level, which is why "race" can't apply.
Posted by sshaun002 (Member # 11448) on :
You guys just don't get it. That's fine. Let's agree to disagree. No more discussions on race and IQ from me. Let's get back to discussing Egypt.
Posted by Alive-(What Box) (Member # 10819) on :
What do you guys think?
quote:» Visual Spacial(see, draw, visualize it, mind-mapping) Visual-Spatial intelligence makes it possible for people to perceive visual or spatial information, to transform this information, and to recreate visual images from memory. Well-developed spatial capacities are needed for the work of architects, sculptors, and engineers. The students who turn first to the graphs, charts, and pictures in their textbooks, who like to "web" their ideas before writing a paper, and who fill the blank space around their notes with intricate patterns are also using their spatial intelligence. While usually tied to the visual modality, spatial intelligence can also be exercised to a high level by individuals who are visually impaired. People with well developed spatial- visual intelligence enjoy drawing, designing, looking at pictures and images, slides, videos, and films. They are especially proficient at imagining, visualization, sensing changes, doing puzzles, and reading charts and maps. They absorb information best through visualizing, using the "mind's eye", and by manipulating and working with pictures and images. This intelligence can serve a variety of scientific ends; as a useful tool, as an aid to thinking, as a way of capturing information, and a way to formulate and solve problems, and graphically represent patterns. Visual/ Spatial intelligence: Perceives objects accurately, relies on sight and ability to visualize, forming mental pictures, imagining, able to manipulate mental images and represent things graphically. Preferred Activities: Guided imagery, collages, labelling, pictures, pretending.
» Mathematic/Logical(quantify, think it, conceptualize) Logical-mathematical intelligence enables individuals to use and appreciate abstract relations. Scientists, mathematicians, and philosophers all rely on this intelligence. So do the students who "live" baseball statistics or who carefully analyze the components of problems--either personal or school-related before systematically testing solutions. People with well developed logical mathematical intelligence are sensitive to logical patterns and relationships, to functions, propositions, and hypotheses. They can easily use categorization, classification, inference, generalization, and calculation. They are "natural" critical thinkers, and adeptly handle long chains of reasoning. These individuals learn best when provided with opportunities to classify, categorize, and work with abstractions and to experiment. They like to figure things out by asking questions, exploring and finding the order and logic in the content to be learned. They are usually good at math and in logical problem-solving. Logical/mathematical intelligence: works with numbers, deductive and inductive thinking, recognizes abstract patterns, performs complex calculations, and is able to reason scientifically. Preferred Activities: Calculations, numbers, scientific thinking, sequencing, logical problems
» Linguistic(read, write, talk about it, listen to it) Linguistic intelligence allows individuals to communicate and make sense of the world through language. Poets exemplify this intelligence in its mature form. Students who enjoy playing with rhymes, who pun, who always have a story to tell, who quickly acquire other languages--including sign language--all exhibit linguistic intelligence. People with well developed linguistic intelligence find their fullest identity in writing or in verbal storytelling. They are articulate, accurate spellers, and avid readers. They often think in words, and learn well by listening to others speak, by reading, writing, and verbalizing. They love to play with language, are good at remembering names, places, dates, and trivia. If these people are given the opportunity to hear, see, and say words associated with the desired outcome, they will readily learn practically anything of interest to them. Linguistic intelligence: Those with this intelligence can analyse their own use of language, have a good memory, understand grammar well. Preferred Activities: Creative writing, reading, explanations, journal writing, biographies, feelings, reports
» Bodily-Kinesthetic(build, act, touch) Body Kinesthetic intelligence allows individuals to use all or part of the body to create products or solve problems. Athletes, surgeons, dancers, choreographers, and crafts people all use bodily-kinesthetic intelligence. The capacity is also evident in students who relish gym class and school dances, who prefer to carry out class projects by making models rather than writing reports, and who toss crumbled paper with frequency and accuracy into wastebaskets across the room. People with well developed bodily - kinesthetic intelligence process knowledge through their bodily sensations and learn best by touching, manipulating, and moving. They often have a natural sense of how their body should act and react in demanding physical situations. Learning is best facilitated by providing a kinetic component, where the learner can interact with space in some way to help them process and remember the new information through their body. Bodily/Kinaesthetic intelligence: Have a good wisdom of bodily movements and can connect mind and body. They have good awareness and control of body movements. Preferred Activities: Dancing, acting, drama, role playing, inventing, physical gestures
» Musical(sing, play it) Musical intelligence allows people to create, communicate, and understand meanings made out of sound. While composers and instrumentalists clearly exhibit this intelligence, so do the students who seem particularly attracted by the birds singing outside the classroom window or who constantly tap out intricate rhythms on the desk with their pencils. People with well developed musical intelligence excel at remembering melody, noticing the rhythms of life, and usually keep perfect time. They are hummers of tunes, singers of songs, probably play an instrument, and often listen to music. These learners get new information by listening to melodies, writing musical notations, or in using rhythm to help them master new concepts. They are able to hear music and rhythm accurately, to remember, master, and eventually produce musical sequences. Musical intelligence: These people possess a sensitivity to tone and sound, also a sensitivity to the structure of music Preferred Activities: Chants, music, singing, rhythmic patterns, humming, instrumental sounds
» Inter-personal(interaction, cooperative learning, social) Interpersonal intelligence enables individuals to recognize and make distinctions about others' feelings and intentions. Teachers, parents, politicians, psychologists and salespeople rely on interpersonal intelligence. Students exhibit this intelligence when they thrive on small-group work, when they notice and react to the moods of their friends and classmates, and when they tactfully convince the teacher of their need for extra time to complete the homework assignment. People with well developed interpersonal intelligence have a strong sense of empathy and concern for others. They are often natural leaders, and take others "under their wing". They are almost always with a group of people and have a wide circle of friends and acquaintances. They like to talk with others, to teach others, and to organize, mediate and communicate in group activities. They generally understand people and instinctively know how to work with them. They learn best when given the opportunity to interview others, share ideas, and to cooperate and collaborate to complete any task. Interpersonal intelligence: These people are cooperative in groups, good at role play, discussion, communication and teamwork, and have the ability to see all points of view and are good at group projects. Preferred activities: Feedback, co-operative groups, discussions, group projects, teamwork, interviews, team assessment
» Intra-personal(connected to personal life, make choices, independent) Intrapersonal intelligence helps individuals to distinguish among their own feelings, to build accurate mental models of themselves, and to draw on these models to make decisions about their lives. Although it is difficult to assess who has this capacity and to what degree, evidence can be sought in students' uses of their other intelligences--how well they seem to be capitalizing on their strengths, how cognizant they are of their weaknesses, and how thoughtful they are about the decisions and choices they make. These type of people have an ability to reflect on internal states, have a good metacognitive awareness, good concentration, higher order reasoning, and an awareness of personal feelings. People with well - developed intrapersonal intelligence have an accurate picture of their inner self - their strengths and weaknesses, their inner moods, goals, intentions, motivations, temperament, beliefs, and desires. They have the capacity to cultivate superb self - discipline, self - understanding, and high self - esteem. They seem to be self - motivating, need their own quiet space to work in, and "march to the beat of a different drummer". These learners take in knowledge more easily through independent study and self - paced instruction. They absorb new information best when involved in individual projects. Preferred Activities: Reflection, autobiography, focusing, goal setting, higher order reasoning, awareness of personal feelings
» Spiritual(Naturalist) Spiritual (Naturalist) intelligence allows people to distinguish among, classify, and use features of the environment. Farmers, gardeners, botanists, geologists, florists, and archaeologists all exhibit this intelligence, as do students who can name and describe the features of every make of car around them. Spiritual(Naturalist) intelligence. These type of people find it easy to categorise plant names and recognize animals. Preferred Activities: History, philosophy, religion, botany, geology
All are independent of each other and help explain a person's specific abilities in certain areas. The multiple intelligences framework also helps identify particular
Posted by Doug M (Member # 7650) on :
quote:Originally posted by sshaun002: You guys just don't get it. That's fine. Let's agree to disagree. No more discussions on race and IQ from me. Let's get back to discussing Egypt.
There wasn't anything to get. You want to believe in races by any means necessary and will use anything to define race, even though those things do not define race. You should have stopped talking about it a long time ago, since you obviously dont know what you are talking about, especially if you think blonde hair or lactose intolerance defines a race. I guess Europeans are a different race because they didn't have cows in the Neolithic, so they developed into a non dairy subspecies.
In fact, most of the world is lactose intolerant, which means little because we know quite well that many pastoral Africans have diets that consist ALMOST COMPLETELY of milk. On top of that we also know that cow domestication occurred in many sites all over the world, all EXCEPT Europe. Therefore, another example of how data is twisted to support a ridiculous point of view.
If IQ was a reliable proof of European superiority, why all European civilizations stemmed from Mediterranean people who have substantial African blood...who is the dumberer?Northern European or Southern Europeans who salvaged Europe from the total ignorance and barbarism that was widespread there...
Posted by markellion (Member # 14131) on :
quote:Originally posted by AFRICA I: If IQ was a reliable proof of European superiority, why all European civilizations stemmed from Mediterranean people who have substantial African blood...who is the dumberer?Northern European or Southern Europeans who salvaged Europe from the total ignorance and barbarism that was widespread there...
Simple, because Civilization has nothing to do with innate intelegence of the population and everything to do with geography, climate and other factors
The thing is some people seem to think intelegence wasn't important to building Civilizations in ancient times, but it's important now, to try to explain how blacks and Mexicans and Arabs can be inferior but still built there own Civilizations
Posted by AFRICA I (Member # 13222) on :
shaun you evaded my question are you sefarad or ashkenazi?
Posted by Djehuti (Member # 6698) on :
^ You don't have a good attention span, do you?? He is neither! He said on the first page of his thread that he is not Jewish at all!!
quote:Originally posted by markellion: Simple, because Civilization has nothing to do with innate intelegence of the population and everything to do with geography, climate and other factors.
The thing is some people seem to think intelegence wasn't important to building Civilizations in ancient times, but it's important now, to try to explain how blacks and Mexicans and Arabs can be inferior but still built there own Civilizations
Of course any major advancement is associated with intelligence. The question is how is it high intelligence is associated with some populations but not others or worse-- populations that are racially classified?? Again advanced cultures were developed by peoples around the globe, with most of them in the tropical to sub-tropical regions. Yet why is today, high intelligence is associated with peoples from colder latitudes i.e. lighter-skinned or specifically whites??
Posted by markellion (Member # 14131) on :
quote:Originally posted by Djehuti: Of course any major advancement is associated with intelligence. The question is how is it high intelligence is associated with some populations but not others or worse-- populations that are racially classified?? Again advanced cultures were developed by peoples around the globe, with most of them in the tropical to sub-tropical regions. Yet why is today, high intelligence is associated with peoples from colder latitudes i.e. lighter-skinned or specifically whites??
Simple, racism isn't based on logic. Someone told me Great Zimbabwe was built by Phoenicians; someone else said Hindus built it when they came to mine minerals there
Others have told me Kushites were dark skinned Caucosoids, the Egyptions were Irish. The Chinese, Koreans, Japenese ect. were mixed and Civilized with white people thats why they were succesful. The average African is retarded, any black person with any hint of intelect is mixed
Oh and don't forget the black invention myths website, dedicated to showing black people never did anything
Oh and native American Civilization was built by white people which disapeared before the Spanish came Posted by markellion (Member # 14131) on :
Like I said the success of Civilizatins can't be explained by intelegence
Posted by sam p (Member # 11774) on :
quote:Of course any major advancement is associated with intelligence. The question is how is it high intelligence is associated with some populations but not others or worse-- populations that are racially classified?? Again advanced cultures were developed by peoples around the globe, with most of them in the tropical to sub-tropical regions. Yet why is today, high intelligence is associated with peoples from colder latitudes i.e. lighter-skinned or specifically whites?? [/QB]
Advancement is based on individual effort in almost all cases. Intelligence is highly overrated.
Sure, there can be great difference between an intelligent person and a moron but when you get down to it intelligence won't answer any of the important questions. Society is more in need of people who can hit the gas when the light turns green than can fix a car or order an XRay.
Posted by sshaun002 (Member # 11448) on :
quote:Originally posted by markellion: Simple, racism isn't based on logic. Someone told me Great Zimbabwe was built by Phoenicians; someone else said Hindus built it when they came to mine minerals there
Others have told me Kushites were dark skinned Caucosoids, the Egyptions were Irish. The Chinese, Koreans, Japenese ect. were mixed and Civilized with white people thats why they were succesful. The average African is retarded, any black person with any hint of intelect is mixed
Oh and don't forget the black invention myths website, dedicated to showing black people never did anything
Oh and native American Civilization was built by white people which disapeared before the Spanish came [/QB]
Anybody who makes these false claims are obviously foolish.
Posted by sshaun002 (Member # 11448) on :
quote:Originally posted by sam p: Advancement is based on individual effort in almost all cases. Intelligence is highly overrated.
These sentences are contradictory or don't make sense. Because intelligence is an individual effort doesn't make it overrated. That's precisely why it's so important. Without those few smart individuals we wouldn't have lights after dark, computers, planes, or even crops.
quote: Sure, there can be great difference between an intelligent person and a moron but when you get down to it intelligence won't answer any of the important questions.
No one thing can explain everything, but to say that intelligence doesn't answer or help to answer MANY important questions is false.
quote: Society is more in need of people who can hit the gas when the light turns green than can fix a car or order an XRay.
I completely disagree. Society needs both but there is always a surplus of the former. Without the latter, society would collapse quickly. Who is going to fix the electric grid when it fails? Without that, no lights, no heat, no air conditioning, no working gas pumps stoves tvs radios, no fresh veggies. You get the point.
Posted by sam p (Member # 11774) on :
Sshaun002;
We have different perspectives here but...
quote:Advancement is based on individual effort in almost all cases. Intelligence is highly overrated.
...is hardly contradictory. All advancements have come in tiny increments. A process is discovered or an invention is made based on observation and then many generations and thousands of individuals make tiny improvements. The international space station didn't arrive full blown any more than the plane at Kitty Hawk or the internal combustion engine.
It's not intelligence that underlies technology, it's language. People design rockets and don't understand how a wheel functions. College students lose games to monkeys. It's all part of a big whole.
You can look from a vantage point that values knowledge or you can look from a vantage point that admits we are a social animal first, last, and always. There will always be someone who can fix a car or know when XRays are indicated, but it is cooperation that makes living together possible. Thank God it's not intelligence or we'd still be swinging from trees.
Posted by sshaun002 (Member # 11448) on :
quote:Originally posted by sam p: Sshaun002;
We have different perspectives here but...
quote:Advancement is based on individual effort in almost all cases. Intelligence is highly overrated.
...is hardly contradictory. All advancements have come in tiny increments. A process is discovered or an invention is made based on observation and then many generations and thousands of individuals make tiny improvements. The international space station didn't arrive full blown any more than the plane at Kitty Hawk or the internal combustion engine.
It's not intelligence that underlies technology, it's language. People design rockets and don't understand how a wheel functions. College students lose games to monkeys. It's all part of a big whole.
You can look from a vantage point that values knowledge or you can look from a vantage point that admits we are a social animal first, last, and always. There will always be someone who can fix a car or know when XRays are indicated, but it is cooperation that makes living together possible. Thank God it's not intelligence or we'd still be swinging from trees.
I agree that advancement is cumulative. Where intelligence comes in is 1) in being able to comprehend and synthesize all of the current cumulative data enough to add something new onto it, even if it's novel. That novel addition may be considered a "breakthru" 2) meta-discoveries in which one person seemingly creates a paradigm or introduces a form of understanding that derives less from every day experience but more purely from high abstract thinking. For example: calculus. How could men create such mathematics? Surely they had to understand basic arithmetic but it required more than merely adding a simple component to what we know of math to come up with calculus. High intelligence is an absolute necessity for something like this, and luckily calculus is also a very useful math for practical purposes (unlike some other forms of math).
Posted by sam p (Member # 11774) on :
It's interesting you mention the calculus. It was Newton who "invented" it and is credited with saying "if I have seen farther than other men, it is only because I stand on the shoulders of giants". Newton was probably one of the greatest geniuses of all time and was right up there with Imhotep, Socrates, DaVinci, and Einstein, but still he propelled the race forward by only a few years. It has been suggested he had aspergers syndrome and was reputed to be petty and protective of his career. He was appointed mint master and offered a position at Harvard but was disliked by many of his contemporaries.
Individual effort is critical for all advancement and genius can underlie many of these individuals' success but luck plays a large role and their education is basic to it. Without cradle to adulthood care and education all these great men would have been essentially babes in the woods. Rudimentary calculus had been discovered by Arabs centuries before Newton came up with it. Einstein's work was heavily influenced by his wife.
People make contributions in many ways and some are little more than cogs in a wheel, but the race is dependent on smooth operation and needs those who can fix cars or order XRays. But the fact remains that intelligence is ephemeral and in many respects greatly overrated. Just as technology or religion can't answer most basic questions neither can intelligence. Sure if you believe in a deity and believe you know It, then you can make decisions based on it. But just as no amount of science can tell you if it'll rain the first day of spring you'll find no more certain answer anywhere. Do you really think the typical dullard would even suspect he wasn't a genius if he didn't have anyone to compare himself to? How about animals? Is it not apparent they think essentially the same way? They may not use complicated language in their ruminations but they often display all the characteristics of intelligence. Even birds are known to invent tools and use resources in new ways. Zoo animals sometimes alert handlers to their own errors.
This isn't to say intelligence is of no value. We all know this isn't the case. It's simply that intelligence is far more widespread than humans want to admit and far less important to most aspects of corporeal existence.
Posted by KemsonReloaded (Member # 14127) on :
Theirs no such thing as IQ!
Posted by sshaun002 (Member # 11448) on :
quote:Originally posted by sam p: It's interesting you mention the calculus. It was Newton who "invented" it and is credited with saying "if I have seen farther than other men, it is only because I stand on the shoulders of giants". Newton was probably one of the greatest geniuses of all time and was right up there with Imhotep, Socrates, DaVinci, and Einstein, but still he propelled the race forward by only a few years. It has been suggested he had aspergers syndrome and was reputed to be petty and protective of his career. He was appointed mint master and offered a position at Harvard but was disliked by many of his contemporaries.
You say that he propelled the race only a few years. This is conjecture and entirely subjective. It's also quite common for geniuses to be sociable delinquints. Suffice it to say that I'm no genius and people love me whereever I go haha.
quote: Individual effort is critical for all advancement and genius can underlie many of these individuals' success but luck plays a large role and their education is basic to it. Without cradle to adulthood care and education all these great men would have been essentially babes in the woods. Rudimentary calculus had been discovered by Arabs centuries before Newton came up with it. Einstein's work was heavily influenced by his wife.
Luck plays a role as does education but these factors are often accounted for when taken on the whole. It's true that one has to be able to develop and provided rudimentary education (or at least exposure to books so one can take up self-learning). But the Newton's of the world are far from the only individuals to have all of this handed to them. Most people that do could never and will never achieve what the Newton's have given the same thing.
We tend to engage in relationships with people who are like us. If Einstein was influenced by his wife, it's likely because his wife far from the intellectual average.
quote: People make contributions in many ways and some are little more than cogs in a wheel, but the race is dependent on smooth operation and needs those who can fix cars or order XRays. But the fact remains that intelligence is ephemeral and in many respects greatly overrated. Just as technology or religion can't answer most basic questions neither can intelligence. Sure if you believe in a deity and believe you know It, then you can make decisions based on it. But just as no amount of science can tell you if it'll rain the first day of spring you'll find no more certain answer anywhere. Do you really think the typical dullard would even suspect he wasn't a genius if he didn't have anyone to compare himself to? How about animals? Is it not apparent they think essentially the same way? They may not use complicated language in their ruminations but they often display all the characteristics of intelligence. Even birds are known to invent tools and use resources in new ways. Zoo animals sometimes alert handlers to their own errors.
Religion and technology can answer many questions, not about the supernatural but about human history and capabilities. It's easy to see how technology played the decisive role in victories in historic battles. It's easy to see the ways in which certain religious beliefs inspired men or condemned them to certain fates. Intelligence is another factor that should naturally be considered. It is one among many other factors - cultural, political, geographic, economic - that together paint as accurate a picture as possible.
I disagree that animals display intelligence resembling humans. They're instinctual and any parallels of their behavior with advanced human intelligence is nothing more than humans projecting human qualities onto animals that do not exist.
quote: This isn't to say intelligence is of no value. We all know this isn't the case. It's simply that intelligence is far more widespread than humans want to admit and far less important to most aspects of corporeal existence.
Who is saying that intelligence is not widespread? Nearly every scientist believes their are geniuses the world over. This is not the statistic in question. The question is the "per capita" distribution of intelligence within different populations. Is this not a valid hypothesis?
I agree that one cannot put too much stock in intelligence alone (and this is where the racialist scientists hit a brick wall; they want to pretend that intelligence is the pre-eminent factor in all human events when this is obviously not true).
Posted by Djehuti (Member # 6698) on :
quote:Originally posted by sam p: It's interesting you mention the calculus. It was Newton who "invented" it and is credited with saying "if I have seen farther than other men, it is only because I stand on the shoulders of giants". Newton was probably one of the greatest geniuses of all time and was right up there with Imhotep, Socrates, DaVinci, and Einstein, but still he propelled the race forward by only a few years. It has been suggested he had aspergers syndrome and was reputed to be petty and protective of his career. He was appointed mint master and offered a position at Harvard but was disliked by many of his contemporaries.
Individual effort is critical for all advancement and genius can underlie many of these individuals' success but luck plays a large role and their education is basic to it. Without cradle to adulthood care and education all these great men would have been essentially babes in the woods. Rudimentary calculus had been discovered by Arabs centuries before Newton came up with it. Einstein's work was heavily influenced by his wife.
People make contributions in many ways and some are little more than cogs in a wheel, but the race is dependent on smooth operation and needs those who can fix cars or order XRays. But the fact remains that intelligence is ephemeral and in many respects greatly overrated. Just as technology or religion can't answer most basic questions neither can intelligence. Sure if you believe in a deity and believe you know It, then you can make decisions based on it. But just as no amount of science can tell you if it'll rain the first day of spring you'll find no more certain answer anywhere. Do you really think the typical dullard would even suspect he wasn't a genius if he didn't have anyone to compare himself to? How about animals? Is it not apparent they think essentially the same way? They may not use complicated language in their ruminations but they often display all the characteristics of intelligence. Even birds are known to invent tools and use resources in new ways. Zoo animals sometimes alert handlers to their own errors.
This isn't to say intelligence is of no value. We all know this isn't the case. It's simply that intelligence is far more widespread than humans want to admit and far less important to most aspects of corporeal existence.
You do realize that while Newton based some of his work on earlier researchers. The roots of calculus, advanced algebra was practiced by various non-European civilizations as well.
Posted by sam p (Member # 11774) on :
quote:Luck plays a role as does education but these factors are often accounted for when taken on the whole. It's true that one has to be able to develop and provided rudimentary education (or at least exposure to books so one can take up self-learning). But the Newton's of the world are far from the only individuals to have all of this handed to them. Most people that do could never and will never achieve what the Newton's have given the same thing.
We tend to engage in relationships with people who are like us. If Einstein was influenced by his wife, it's likely because his wife far from the intellectual average.
I think you're missing my point here a little. My contention isn't that Newton wasn't intelligent. My contention is that no plant or animal on the planet is as intelligent as you believe the typical idiot is.
Sure Newton was intelligent but only in comparison to the rest of we dummies. He was the product of his enviroment just as we all are. Man simply doesn't have the grasp that he believes he does. It's not intelligence that provides the sense of wonder but consciousness. This consciousness is shared by all creatures on the planets. It's not intelligence that sets man apart from the animals but language (and perhaps the civilizing influence of woman ). It's not intelligence which created Newton or the automechanic, it's language.
Yes, there is such a thing as intelligence and it is not distributed equally among people. The differences can have large consequences for individuals but in a culture or population they are generally unimportant. Smart people are smart everywhere and idiots are idiots everywhere. And none of them is nearly so smart as you think they are.
There are many reasons that we feel so smart. We see our handiwork everywhere we look. We live lives of ease and take control almost everywhere we go. We have endless technology and facts at our disposal.
And, of course, we're forever talking about it.
Posted by sshaun002 (Member # 11448) on :
APES or ANGELS?: A Summary For many readers this book will be a mind-altering experience. It has a thesis that is a challenge to the conventional thinking of most Christians and their counterparts, the secular humanists. It offends both for very good reasons. It speaks the truth about Darwin's views on human origins and race. Contrary to the beliefs of most academicians and educated readers, Darwin had two dangerous ideas instead of one. Daniel Dennett was perfectly right about the first, which was the notion that natural selection operated in a way that precluded explanatory intrusions from outside the natural world. In other words, metaphysics has no place in biological explanation. Things spiritual, like vitalism and finalism, are simply inapplicable to evolutionary biology. The second idea is rarely mentioned in politically correct America- that the human races are different in sometimes significant ways. Indeed, inequality is a normal condition of nature. Darwin's clash with Christianity is winding down because modern science is a foundation of western culture and it fully accepts the truth of natural selection and the evolution of life(including man). It is ironic that as the struggle with Christianity declines, a new struggle emerges- the battle over racial differences. Liberalism evolved into radical egalitarianism as it swept over America, creating an authoritarian political correctness that contradicts our Constitution. Modern genetics now threatens the liberal myth of human equality. These Darwinian conflicts are playing out amidst our culture wars, a battle that could transform us into another Brazil. Radical egalitarianism and multiculturalism are ideologies aimed at dismantling our great Anglo-European tradition. Forces of erosion are at work which may make our nation's greatness a faint memory. The battle with creationism is essentially over in Europe and it is winding down in the U.S. Science always wins fights over the facts of nature! Eddies of ignorance will persist in American society where fundamentalism exists, but educated elites have long since agreed with Darwin. Liberal relativism erodes our standards of excellence and even undermines our Christian morality, a morality that seems closely connected to our moral instinct. With their power in academia liberals will submit to "white guilt" as they treat blacks as eternal victims, distorting reality to make outcomes equal. Darwin, however, may be vindicated on the matter of real racial differences, causing agony among idealistic liberals who must relinquish their lofty dreams. Scientific humanism has always touted critical thinking as a supreme goal of education, but it is threatened by the irrational side of liberalism that savors post-modern subjectivism. Today we see "diversity training" imposed on young people in a Stalinist manner. Propaganda and groupthink are current weapons of the PC martinets. In reading this survey of how Darwin came to his dangerous ideas, you may appreciate how important science and critical thinking are in a society gripped by wayward versions of liberalism. Both evolution by natural selection and racial differences are discussed in this book in order to illumine Darwin's two "dangerous" ideas-one that threatened Christianity and one that now threatens liberal humanism's egalitarian dream. Social scientists will be exposed as propagandists for radical egalitarianism rather than as true scientists. The movement to eliminate the word "race" is evidence of political motivation rather than scientific honesty. To examine the conflicts related to Darwinism the book includes a brief treatment of Darwin's life and works, the battle against creationism, the case against supernaturalism, a brief survey of human evolution, and a review of current issues bearing upon human nature and race.
You people are going to have to come to grips with the reality of evolution and what it means for differences between populations.
“Apes or Angels? is a good read.” -A.W.F. Edwards Professor of Genetics, Cambridge University
“Apes or Angels? Is a fascinating study of the development of Homo sapiens” -John Irving Editor, Academic Questions
“You have put together a wonderful book!” -Henry Harpending Professor of Anthropology, University of Utah
“Apes or Angels is a well-written, serious book.” -Steve Hsu Professor of Physics, University of Oregon
“ One feature of the book, which I appreciated, is the large number of heterogeneous facts. You have clearly read widely." -James F. Crow Professor Emeritus of Genetics, University of Wisconsin
“ I find myself in agreement with all you have said (on racial differences in Ch. 3) -Ralph Holloway Professor of Anthropology, Columbia University
Posted by sshaun002 (Member # 11448) on :
Of course your reply will simply be "you don't understand what clusters really means" or other such hollow claims.
This thread belongs to the Ancient Egypt section. Posted by sam p (Member # 11774) on :
It always comes back to the same thing; if it can be shown that the average intelligence, visual acuity, dexterity or other attribute of a race or group is inferior to the average of another then what is to be done? What does it really matter to me or ANY OTHER individual?
Yes, political rectitude has come to levels that can only be considered insane in much of the world. Education is suffering but it's not so much caused by the rectitude as by layer after layer of government intervention and regulation. It's caused by the propensity of people to sue over thje most trivial of matters but there are no suits caused by the fact that the schools fail to teach millions upon millions to even read. This can't be blamed on lack of intelligence or PC when the real reasons are so apparent. No one is responsible in the schools and teachers are hamstrung. Parents don't care and children simply give up since it's cooler that way.
Again I ask, what's the value of such knowledge even if it could be proven? Are we going to set up camps to exterminate members of specific races? Or maybe those with less than 20/ 30 vision?
If someone wants to set up camps for poor drivers you could likely find some support. Posted by rasol (Member # 4592) on :
Shaun/fool: Why are you still here trolling your thesis of -> IQ-elitism-according-to-and-illiterate-racist-idiot.
RE: Of course your reply will simply be "you don't understand what clusters really means" or other such hollow claims.
^ Or you'll laughably imply that you understand anything at all about genetics, and other self evidently ludicrous claims.
Shaun/fool continues to troll by cut and pasting reviews from books he's never read about topics he does not understand.
Instead of trolling on the internet, you need to back to senior year of high school and get that 'ever elusive' diploma. Posted by yazid904 (Member # 7708) on :
We seem to be confusing the IQ version of modern intelligence instead of looking at all the spheres that it may be contained therein. The survival instinct and IQ intelligence (the bigger or larger, the better) are at opposite ends of the spectrum. Social integration and observation of surroundings may not be worth much today but it was the building block of how we are here today! The tsunami in Thailand brought to fruition that distinction when you have a modern societal construct vs a stone age mentality (again, a modern construct for naked aborigines!) to wit, the beach people, sophisticates, modernized group vis a vis the aboriginal people, who when they saw the change of the sea, they knew it was time to move to higher ground!
Posted by Djehuti (Member # 6698) on :
quote:Originally posted by rasol: Shaun/fool: Why are you still here trolling your thesis of -> IQ-elitism-according-to-and-illiterate-racist-idiot.
RE: Of course your reply will simply be "you don't understand what clusters really means" or other such hollow claims.
^ Or you'll laughably imply that you understand anything at all about genetics, and other self evidently ludicrous claims.
Shaun/fool continues to troll by cut and pasting reviews from books he's never read about topics he does not understand.
Instead of trolling on the internet, you need to back to senior year of high school and get that 'ever elusive' diploma.
Indeed. This M.O. of his-- citing reviews of books he's never read and apparently on subjects he does not fully grasp-- is a sign of desperation.
The boy's so-called thesis was refuted pages ago in this thread. He needs to face it.
quote:Originally posted by the other troll: This thread belongs to the Ancient Egypt section.
Sure. Why not. Better to have all your trolls under one bridge, huh. Posted by sshaun002 (Member # 11448) on :
quote:Originally posted by sam p: It always comes back to the same thing; if it can be shown that the average intelligence, visual acuity, dexterity or other attribute of a race or group is inferior to the average of another then what is to be done? What does it really matter to me or ANY OTHER individual?
Yes, political rectitude has come to levels that can only be considered insane in much of the world. Education is suffering but it's not so much caused by the rectitude as by layer after layer of government intervention and regulation. It's caused by the propensity of people to sue over thje most trivial of matters but there are no suits caused by the fact that the schools fail to teach millions upon millions to even read. This can't be blamed on lack of intelligence or PC when the real reasons are so apparent. No one is responsible in the schools and teachers are hamstrung. Parents don't care and children simply give up since it's cooler that way.
I don't know what is to be done, but I'm deeply concerned because differences in culture and average IQ continue to play themselves out in the American landscape. I feel such divisions will only exacerbate problems as more foreigners (particularily Mexicans) invade the heartland.
We know that race has always played a huge role in history from the Egyptians to present-day. People from all cultures made distinctions between themselves and others based on physical characteristics; when they had the upperhand they always believed they were superior to whomever was at the bottom.
What about the housing crisis which has effected Blacks disproportionately? When lenders do not give loans to Blacks who are a risk, they're considered racist. When they do provide loans and a crisis erupts, the lender is considered racist. But I believe this is largely a function of economic status which is an indirect indices of IQ (planning ahead, understanding how to pay for a home, knowing how to protect oneself through the lending process, doing one's own risk-assessement, and so on).
What about Affirmative Action programs that are being scaled back which are translating into less Black and Hispanic enrollment, but increased Asian enrollment (White enrollment remains fixed or sometimes decreases slightly due to Asians competitiveness).
Although these programs aren't intended to help in the first place (only created to fill the pockets of the Special Interests) they exacerbate the divisions and ultimately will fail because they do not take into account what we know about IQ and IQ distributions.
This is troubling to me and I ask for your guidance. America will implode if we continue on this course, not to mention the policies of war and big business greed that is tearing apart the fabric of our nation.
Posted by sam p (Member # 11774) on :
So long as individuals are succeeding or failing based upon their efforts rather than their race, religion, ethnicity, or sex I don't see a particular problem.
Segregation alone is a negative thing for people who live in segregated areas but this probably won't be a natural state in the long term. In the shorter term almost all inner city schools have failed and are not providing an education to most children in those areas. This is wholly unacceptable but until people demand the problem is fixed and are willing to accept the responsibility to see that it is, these schools will be turning out an underclass composed of most of the individuals of all the races who have the misfortune of being in them.
It is not only the administrators who have to be held responsible but the teachers, children, and parents as well. So long as kids run the schools and gangs are tolerated their is no chance of a turnaround.
Posted by Masonic Rebel (Member # 9549) on :
^If you are so concerned about the Nation then why are you promoting Pseudoscience ?
When according To George Washington
"All men are created equal"
Question: sshaun002 was George Washington wrong ?
Thurgood Marshall
Posted by Alive-(What Box) (Member # 10819) on :
quote:is George Washington wrong?
Of course, even if all men weren't equal, it would only make sense to go about things as if they were to see what the case really is.
This simple logic and the simple fact that they feel a NEED to have to tell others their 'place' puts the true issue out on display; a fear of in-adequacy.
That's right, KKK members fear that they are genetically in-adequate, and must put forth extreme effort in order to "survive".
Since the second-half of my post in his thread got cut off, and then the thread locked, I'll paste it:
quote:Originally posted by Sundiata:
quote:Originally posted by sshaun002: Um, yes, anybody who believes in evolution and the out-of-Africa theory inherently imply that races are not of equal intelligence.
LOL!!
His bluff was called and this is the best he had to offer. My goodness, why is this guy not being completely ignored? He clearly has an extremely limited understanding of evolutionary biology as well as human population history, which is the only reason why he'd draw such a completely absurd conclusion. My god! Talk about IQ and education.
Yes, I too wonder why he isn't completely ignored.
I mean, the guy apparently confuses allelles, population clusters, and genetic distances, with 'race' and his posts are getting more and more clearly sporadic and his mood (from what I can glean from his typing) more frantic.
He confuses species - as in: of Dog - with human populations indigenous to certain geographies.
He assumes 'race',
quote:Sshaun002 Let's suppose it is
He assumes 'race', as an appropriate dichotomy of humans (ie. sub-species), without knowing that such a dichotomy in humans is invalid because of genetics, and has nothing to do with "inhumanity".
You know he's going crazy when several posts in a row are none other than his own, in which he feverishly responds to the members of this board, and upon seeing rasol's post, he posts:
quote:Originally posted rather tellingly by sshaun002: Rasol's usual logical fallacies. Nobody on our board openly agrees with Shaun (they agree inside, but can't admit it) therefore he is wrong and we are right. We're the majority after all. Don't take him seriously. Shut him up. Nobody needs to hear such truths. It's dangerous.
then, when several respond to him,
he still comes back to rasol who hasn't even responded yet with these lame ad-hoc & red-herring antics:
quote:Originally posted by sshaun002: ThePeople Versus rasol
ThePeople: Genes and environment effect IQ
rasol: Yes but environment has greater influence
ThePeople: But environment can only take a person as far as they're genes allow
rasol: Yes, but "blacks" and "whites" are of equal intelligence. This is a given. It must be accepted outright as true. Besides, race isn't real.
ThePeople: Humans cluster according to geographic region and those fuzzy boundaries can be called race. It's no different than calling different breeds of dogs breeds or races even though there are fuzzy boundaries between dogs.
raso: you can't compare humans to dogs. You just can't. It's inhumane.
ThePeople: For argument's sake, let's say there is a black and white race. The blacks historically are those residing in subsaharran Africa and whites historically in Europe. With my own eyes, and with their own admission, they can be categorized using phenotype because alleles are more frequent in one group over the other, so this seems to be fair.
rasol: ok, but just remember there is more variation within Africa than outside of Africa because Africa is the cradle of humanity
ThePeople: um, yeah. Anyway, if we seperate these groups they have average disparities in IQ of 1 standard deviation or MORE.
rasol: this is due to malnutrition, racism (real and perceived), educational background, income level and poverty, broken schools, breastfeeding or lack thereof, test bias, and culture.
ThePeople: ok, but even if we eliminate malnutrition from within both groups that we're studying, the gap still exists.
There are more opportunities today than ever before, yet the gap remains exactly as it did 50 years ago. There are more role models than ever. Racism was felt by others such as Jews, but it didn't lead to a gap in IQ scores for them. In fact, no matter the conditions, their IQ has always been higher than Native Whites.
Education has effects on IQ. So let us remove kids who have had no education from the study. If we focus on those who have been provided with education (both in black homes and white adopted homes), we still see the IQ gap. Likewise we see the gap between middleclass advantaged blacks and Whites come from poverty. The Whites still outscore the blacks. It seems to me these aren't sufficient explanations.
Blacks aren't breastfed as frequently. This is true, but any small gains in breastfeeding (which is minimal if it exists at all) has no real effect on the large gap.
IQ tests were largely biased in the early days. Measures have been taken to reduce the bias. The APA says there is no apparent test bias and it is understood that IQ tests are not biased to native born english speakers. Likewise cross-cultural IQ tests use non-language IQ tests. We find the black-white gap, still, in light of no widespread test bias. If test bias existed, it's strange that it effects all blacks in all black cultures across the globe virtually the same, and for Whites and Asians for that matter.
Culture does play a role but blacks don't belong to one monolithic culture. They belong to many cultures whether it be Canadian, American, British, African, and so many in between. Yet blacks consistently score at least 1 SD lower than Whites regardless of the culture they're submerged in. It's troubling.
rasol: the legacy of racism of colonialism in Africa and slavery in America has a lot to do with their low scores
ThePeope: ok, but what about those African countries that didn't have colonialism? What about Black kids born who never experienced slavery or the Civil Rights era? The scores are the same for them as well.
Do you think, maybe there is a genetic difference?
rasol: Absolutely not. I told you from the start that there is none. Therefore there is none. You're a low IQ idiot. You're embarrasing yourself. Race DOESN'T EXIST. You've defeated your own argument. We like to toy with low IQ, poor trash like you who try to take pride in race for your own shortcomings.
ThePeople: But I'm not poor. I'm university educated, grew up and live in middle-class home. I've never actually taken an IQ test but since there is a correlation between IQ and scholastic achievement, I'm certain that I'm at least average if not slightly over the average.
rasol: you're pathetic, a foolish loser trying to pass off your pseudo-science superiority. You're not even acquinted with the great works of Gould and Lieberman. They single-handledly dismantle all 100 years of your research. I don't care about The Bell Curve, the G Factor, Hart's book, or anything else. It's obviously false and the mainstream doesn't agree with it.
ThePeople: Mainstream media or mainstream science? If you're referring to science, the community is in a consensus that environment and genes play a role in intelligence, and that the gap is not completely environmental. They're also in agreement that nobody knows what causes the gap.
rasol: You're repeating yourself. Race doesn't exist. Of course there are individual differences. You're proof. You're ignorant so you obviously have low IQ. You're one of the dumbest people I've ever dealt with. Everybody is laughing at you.
ThePeople: All I will say is that we can derive wild explanations for what we see among the races. Blacks failing in america, england, and everywhere else they go may have various myriad reasons. But we can go on all day about those supposed reasons. However, according to Occam's Razor, if a simpler explanation fits and accounts for all the above, it should probably be applied. The common factor in what we see is lower average intelligence of blacks. Lower intelligence on average, would actually account for the failings of blacks everywhere.
I may have fun dealing with these later.
quote:Originally posted by sshaun002: [A greater percentage of] Black Americans, it is said are disproporionately malnourished and this is why they [All?]score poorly on IQ tests.
One reason, yes.
A greater percent of the population corresponds to a greater percent of lower scores.
quote:One would think that Blacks would also be represented disporportionately low in athletics for the same reason. But the opposite is true.
Thus it's not nourishment that's the real underlying issue. It's innate limitations.
Interesting, you'd use the words, "innate limitations". Speaking of people with such, I'll explain this in baby terms to you:
Professional sports is a field that selects the top top tip top athletes; how can you link malnutrition on average to few select individuals who you know bery well don't have any malnutrition issues...
actually, the opposite is true.
quote:Originally posted by Mmmkay:
quote:Originally posted by sshaun002:
quote:Originally posted by Mmmkay:
quote: Africans have the highest educational attainment rates of any immigrant group in the United States with higher levels of completion than the stereotyped Asian American model minority.
% with college degrees: 43.8 So much for that!
Percent of graduates says nothing about raw academic scores and the admissions process. Considering all types of affirmative action goes on, discussed behind closed doors, this is not surprising. Nobody can claim Harvard discriminates against blacks. They have their black now too, see!!
Wrong. Even in California (where affirmative action was struck down) the same results play out.
quote: Researchers at Princeton University and the University of Pennsylvania who have been studying the achievement of minority students at 28 selective colleges and universities (including Berkeley, Columbia, Yale and Duke) last year found that 41 percent of the black students identified themselves as immigrants, children of immigrants or mixed race.
quote:Originally posted by sshaun002: The connection to the East is made in Hart's book. He makes it very clear that Whites were not civilized and are the hairiest and considered by other racists as smelly.
None of this means anything with regard to the modern world and what does or does not have predictive value in it.
Eureka! So, if you had an IQ test 1000 years ago and gave it to ancient Britons, WHAT would your PREDICTION BE as far as their future SUCCESS?
ROFL!
Don't forget the clown said it has no implications on today.
I wonder if he means to imply that European whites have evolved in a manner such as to have increased their intelligence since then???? Scientific proof??! LOL
Posted by Djehuti (Member # 6698) on :
^ Why are you arguing with someone who has been refuted since page 1 of this thread?
By the way, I get the feeling that this whole argument of racial IQ is just emotional compensation for the perhaps devastating fact that the greatest or most popular civilization of the ancient world-- the one which built the pyramids-- was black African. LOL Posted by sshaun002 (Member # 11448) on :
All men were created equal but evolved differently (or unequally).
The point about athletics is that if malnutrition is a huge problem in black communities then they should be underrepresented in both athletics and academics. However, they're overrepresented in athletics notwithstanding, and underrepresented in academics. I do not take the position that this demonstrates intellectual differences as the difference can in part be due to cultural factors, however it simply supports that populations differ in many ways physiologically due to differences in evolved geographic regions. Similarly average intellectual difference in all likelihood occured.
I do not accept that Black Americans are representative of Africa nor are the meager 65 IQ tests that have been done in Africa. But the 100's of tests done on Black Americans is representative of Black Americans. Also, there does appear to be a trend between climate and average IQ. It works for other groups in the same manner. Samoans are Asians, but darker due to climate - they score low on IQ tests compared to Asians who developed in colder climates. Ditto for Indians in India - North > South.
I haven't answered some of your questions because you haven't answered mine. What is the difference between a dog breed and a human race?
Posted by Djehuti (Member # 6698) on :
^ Has it ever occurred to you that the problems are purely social and not biological as your biological determinism driven mind wants to believe?
Hint: the answerse were given on page 1 of this thread.
quote:I haven't answered some of your questions because you haven't answered mine. What is the difference between a dog breed and a human race?
That was also answered on another thread, but apparently you seem to have relapses of amnesia.
Dog breeds are the result of natural selection. While human races don't even exist because the resultant physical variation you see today is the result of natural selection and such physical variation is not divided evenly but grades from population to population, and more importantly such variation has no correlation to factors such as intelligence.
Posted by sam p (Member # 11774) on :
quote: ...and more importantly such variation has no correlation to factors such as intelligence.
I think it's easier to say such differences haven't been proven than that they can't or don't exist.
Certainly you're right that there aren't real world differences between races but there are obviously real world type differences among people.
I suppose the discussion is still pointless since ultimately the only thing that matters are the individuals. Other divisions seem to always be invented for racist or political reasons.
Posted by Djehuti (Member # 6698) on :
^ Unless you can point out a specific trait like skin color and say that there is a direct correlation between melanodermy and low IQ then all arguments should end.
Posted by Mmmkay (Member # 10013) on :
^^Exactly. The problem is that they can't, hence the ad-hominem spam.
Posted by meninarmer (Member # 12654) on :
I like to use real world examination of parallels. One really good one are the two biggest phenoms of boxing management, Don King and Bob Arum
Bob Arum is a New York born Jew will attended Harvard for his law degree. IQ around 120.
Don King is a street thug who barely completed high school before being incarcerated. If tested, his IQ would fall in the average around 80-90.
Comparing the real world performance of the two, Don King is the number 1 promoter in the world with Arum at number 2 with King leading Arum by a HUGE gap.
Arum is quickly losing the number 2 spot to Oscar De La Hoya, a near retired boxer with a 12th grade education and likely an IQ comparable to King's. In spite of his Harvard edcation, Law degree, Jewish support network, and higher IQ, Arum can barely compete against the two.
Likewise, Bill Gates scores pretty low on the IQ scale also. So did Einstein who flunked many of his standard tests. Still that didn't stop sub 100 IQ, cocaine & alcohol addicted George Bush from becoming president of the US.
Like race/credit scores/education level, IQ is an artificial gate erected by whites to exclude. After observing the poor performance of high IQ shoe-in's, people are beginning to realize the inaccuracy of using IQ as an predictable standard of intelligence.
Posted by Djehuti (Member # 6698) on :
^ Actually IQ is a real assessment based on real factors of intelligence. The problem is that such factors can be influenced by social environment such as a person's learning environment. Of course there are other instances where it is natural or genetic in that some individuals are born with exceptionally high IQs, however since when do such individuals correlate with race? There are are instances of such geniuses coming from African countries as Nigeria as well as Asian countries such as India. I've heard more about them than Europeans. Perhaps this means Africans and South Asians are naturally smarter than Europeans(?)
quote:Originally edited by Djehuti: Dog breeds are the result of artificial selection. While human races don't even exist because the resultant physical variation you see today is the result of natural selection and such physical variation is not divided evenly but grades from population to population, and more importantly such variation has no correlation to factors such as intelligence.
Sshaun you may want to converse with Evergreen here, since he has some striking theories based on the same root assumptions as you. Posted by Alive-(What Box) (Member # 10819) on :
quote:Originally posted by meninarmer: Still that didn't stop sub 100 IQ, cocaine & alcohol addicted George Bush from becoming president of the US.
Like race/credit scores/education level, IQ is an artificial gate erected by whites to exclude. After observing the poor performance of high IQ shoe-in's, people are beginning to realize the inaccuracy of using IQ as an predictable standard of intelligence.
(LOL [whispers] - (Bad last example!))
Actually I IQ is a good assessment of intelligence (knowledge and thinking ability) but isn't any indicator of innate ability - especially racial innate ability.
I can see clearly - those who think more, or were at least, subjected to the right environment, and learned or were taught more will have higher IQs.
Please don't use George Bush as an "IQ is invalid" example.
Posted by sam p (Member # 11774) on :
quote:Originally posted by Alive-(What Box):
Actually I IQ is a good assessment of intelligence (knowledge and thinking ability) but isn't any indicator of innate ability - especially racial innate ability.
I can see clearly - those who think more, or were at least, subjected to the right environment, and learned or were taught more will have higher IQs.
Please don't use George Bush as an "IQ is invalid" example. [/QB]
There is a reasonably good correlation between scores and the specific parameters of intelligence that it checks but there are many such parameters and it checks only a few. Look at idiot savants for instance. They might score very high or very low on tests.
More importantly is that a fully fuctioning brain has to be able to tie in all of its intelligences and all of its knowledge to behave accordingly. Since we act on beliefs it follows that these play an important role in intelligence as well. There simply isn't a test that even attempts to measure these aspects. This means there is a correlation between scores and functional intelligence but very intelligent people can score very low and very unintelligent people can score very high.
I simply don't believe it's a good measure for many or most individuals.
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] he said. That gap, he seemed to think, reflected some inherent difference between the races. “Starting in the nineteen-seventies, to put it very crudely, you had a higher proportion of black kids being born to really dumb mothers,” he said. When the debate’s moderator, Jane Waldfogel, informed him that the most recent data showed that the race gap had begun to close again, Murray seemed unimpressed, as if the possibility that blacks could ever make further progress was inconceivable.![[Eek!]](eek.gif)
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). It's not intelligence which created Newton or the automechanic, it's language. ![[Confused]](confused.gif)
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