Discoverer of the DNA Helix: Blacks Less Intelligent Than Whites

"In a 1983 National Day address, Lee (former Prime Minister) purported that 80% of talent and intelligence was inherited while 20% was nurtured. Lee then lamented that if present population trends continued, with the poorer and less educated having larger families, the already limited talent pool in Singapore would continue to shrink and eventually endanger the island’s economic prosperity. Public policies such as the controversial Graduate Mothers Policy, geared towards encouraging graduate women to have more children, the early streaming of students in primary school, the immigration and population policy aimed at ‘maintaining the racial balance’ (a euphemism for maintaining the numerical dominance of the Chinese community) are clearly underpinned by the eugenics beliefs of the PAP leadership... These eugenics beliefs and racially biased policies are particularly offensive to Malays because of the inference that if talent and ability is largely innate then it follows that the gene pool of the socially marginal Malay community must also be inferior.
In contrast to the alleged cultural deficiency of the Malay community, the Chinese have been commended by the PAP leadership for possessing a myriad of positive cultural traits such as diligence, discipline, industry and being communitarian and achievement oriented... Such perspectives have been used to justify immigration policies which actively encourage Chinese from South and Northeast Asia to settle permanently in Singapore."

http://www.unrisd.org/80256B3C005BCCF9/(httpAuxPages)/D25519E345C638F980256B84003D7BD8/$file/drahim.pdf

An example of a government who would find such studies "useful". I think it is discriminatory to use studies that judge certain races to be more intelligent than others to justify immigration laws. But is it wrong? I am not sure.

If studies were done showing certain less affluent countries produced a higher than normal IQ and a rich country with below replacement fertility rate targeted these countries for immigration is that wrong? This is exactly what is happening in Singapore now. If I am not wrong, scholarships are being handed out to students from China and India at the Junior High level. Whether they are correct or wrong in believing such studies is one issue. Whether we judge a country to be right or wrong morally in doing so is another issue. Most countries want to be selective and discriminatory in their immigration policies. Regardless of whether belief in these studies is misguided or not, is it wrong for a country to base it's discrimination on race and measured intelligence? I honestly don't know. It is obviously selective and racist, but on the other hand countries are allowed to make these type of immigration decisions.

I have been on the receiving end of racism. I have been called a 'gook' (no I am not Vietnamese) in school, been shouted at to "go home" called a FOB etc, etc. I hate racism in that sense. Things like immigration policies however are in a different form of 'racism', and I am honestly not sure if it is wrong. It certainly doesn't seem to be legally wrong.

Sorry for the derail. In short I think these type of studies can be 'useful.' Not necessarily useful in the altruistic sense of the studies being correct factually (though they might be), but useful to governments wanting to practice eugenics.

 

. . . it is the least he can do.

Rocket River

 

Watson is a hero and I respect the sorts of statements he makes.

Anyone who is willing to challenge convential thinking with statements that they believe in vs. pressure from the outside world deserves credit for being a trailblazer.

He has apologized for saying anything hurtful, but really, all he has done is to challenge set ideas.

He's one provocative man, and people should see the benefit of that.

 

No kidding, what an Uncle Tom. Stop acting white pouhe.

 

seriously, i have no problem with the criticism of sharpton, sharpton is over the top more times than not. but to do it in this thread is scary.

 

I just saw this episode of Boondocks, 'The Trial of Robert Kelly'. It seems to be relevant to the recent direction of the discussion, at least to me.

Of course, it's 20 minutes long, so...

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ahem..

So he was misquoted. Therefore the statements are not what he means or what he believes. Where you see proactive hero from these misquoted words, I see a senile old man reduced to insane drivel.

He's meandered far beyond science and into commentary. Now his hand is caught in the cookie jar.

 

but he's said many provactive things before. we shouldn't under estimate the power of his senility. great men are often a bit of a whack job ya know

 

Yea... after thinking about it I realize that the MCRA is mostly irrelevant to the point I was trying to make.

You seem pretty smart. Please tell me what race the child of a white mother and a black father would be. So if a white dude's white wife has a black baby, does that mean that blackness is a dominant gene? In Nazi Germany, you were considered Jewish if you had three or more Jewish grandparents, and 'mixed' if you had one or more. So what's your schema for determining race?

If there is no race gene, then race is not genetic. Before you call somebody asinine, it would be prudent for you to check for internal contradictions in your arguments.

 

koko-

You're right that certain measurable traits can be more prevalent in some populations. The point I was trying to make, though, was that complex traits, like intelligence, that are determined by a wide range of DNA base pairs, do take millions of years to evolve. It doesn't really matter, though, because race is a sociological phenomenon, not a genetic one.

Why do I need a link to claim that race is not genetic? There is no evidence that it is. If you think I'm wrong, find a link yourself.

Yes, there's something wrong with saying all blondes are dumb.

 

That would be half white, half black. Kind of a mocha, like Derek Jeter, Halle Barry and Tyra Banks.

It means some of the genes that lead to skin color came from the father, and some of them came from the mother. The baby is mixed, not black. There is no race gene, there are a number of genes that control things like skin color, hair color, eye color, hair texture, etc. Typically, when we refer to race in America we are talking about skin color.

Without knowing the race of the parents, I would say eyeball by skin color. That is what we typically mean by race in America. If you can eyeball the parents, then you can assign fractional race values to the kid, like half black half asian (or blasian). You are just trying to overcomplicate things. Hakeem Olajuwon - black, Yao Ming - asian, Rudy Tomjanovich - white. Very simple.

There is no single race gene. There are a number of genes that determine your race. Anything that transmitted to your children through your genetic material is genetic, not just things controlled by a single gene. Being a human being is genetic and that requires tons of genes. Mom and dad aren't going to have sex and make a manatee, but that doesn't mean they both have that one human gene.

 

Stupidmoniker, there is a distinction that needs to be made. Both of you are pointing out different things.

There are genes that determine what the color of our skin is. That's fairly obvious and no one disagrees with that.

But what's different and socially constructed is our perception of race. Humans have taken skin color and divided them up into rigid categories. Black, White, Brown, "Asian," etc..

But those categories aren't products of genetics. They're products of human society. What do you call some of the people from Tamil Nadu in India. Their skin is actually darker than many in African, yet they're not associated with "Black" and "blackness." The same could be said for Hispanics. People in Spain look different from people in Mexico. (although over time that distinction has gotten progressively smaller) The skin color is still different and many people in Spain still look more caucasian but we tend to conflate them with people in Latin America. What about people in Pacific islands. Many of them look "Asian" but we don't associate the two. Or people in East India who ethnically look Asian but culturally and linguistically different. They're called Indian in many cases.

The point is that our categories of race are social products. We group people not exclusively by the color of their skin but also by other factors such as language, heritage, and culture. Race is real but our categories are not. The same goes with sex and gender. Sex refers to the biological differences between male and female. Gender refers to the social distinctions created by human society. Those distinctions are social constructions of the role and perception of men and women and have nothing to do with genetics.

 

Why do the forms you need to fill in for your Texas driver's license ask about a person's race? We do not have that in the respective forms in Germany.

 

Genes don't determine race.

 

that's right. race is determined by how much time your parents spent in the sun right?

 

All of that may be true, but colloquially, race is just another word for skin color. David Ortiz, for example, is black. It doesn't matter that his is from the Caribbean and has a Latin name and speaks Spanish. You look at him, and he is black. The general conception of race is the color of your skin, not your language group or where you are from. A black guy from Nigeria and a black guy from Los Angeles (or a white guy from Serbia and a white guy from Paris, or whatever) probably speak different languages, with different accents, and have very different names. That doesn't mean that they are different races, at least according to the common usage of the word. That conception of race is based on skin color, and skin color is genetic.

LSD obviously knew that is what we were talking about because he asked if blackness was a dominant gene and he asked what race a baby born to one black and one white parent were. He never mentioned differentiating between Asians and Pacific Islanders, or Spaniards and Latin Americans.

 

Sharpton's a combative, ignorant felon who makes his living promoting self-victimization: the mother's milk of black laziness and inferiority. He's a living, breathing ethnic stereotype; and the fact that his comments are excused or defended by other blacks - the fact that blacks consider him more of a leader than Clarence Thomas, Condoleeza Rice or Ward Connerly - probably proves Watson's (since retracted) point for him well enough.

 

Well, I grew up in Baytown and have only lived up here for five years due to work. But yeah, outside of Memorial (Husker) stadium on game day, closest brother's probably three states over; so that probably affects my commentary a bit.

 

so you feel you're less intelligent. maybe you need to get out and meet some more black people. I'll shoot you an email. you'd be surprised how meaningless sharpton is to the everyday black person, whom you clearly need to get to know.


sharpton is a media creation, the sooner you realize the sooner you can stop your self hatred.

 

He has no interest . . .
He has his ideals of how the U-People act and think
and has no real interest in them except to distance himself from them as much as possible
That's the way I see it . . .

Rocket River
" . . . You're not like the others. . . . you're different" - what some folx long to hear