The Question of Which Race it the Most Intelligent?

I have not read that book! I mainly wanted to find a way to tease you about NASA in this (stupid white person) thread.

 

You know that can't be true. That is why we have people who excel and others who fail no matter how hard they try. Not everyone is created equal. All those asian students who study so hard if they dont have the innate ability it wont do a thing for them. Sure they will improve and probably do better than someone who doenst study or work hard but they wont make it too far if they are just not capable of whatever they are trying to achieve. Hard work only gets you so far and the rest is your natural gifts.

 

well that could be a valid point which was my point exactly. These traits (physical ability or intelligence) are passed through our genes.

 

Yes, but it seems you were talking about blacks in general. If we swapped the races during slavery, one could say there would be more white than black people playing in the NBA or NFL.

 

I know a few Nigerians that I met in college. Yes, they are quite ambitious and motivated. I think the studies that were cited are looking at races in general. It specifically cites that you will individuals or subgroups across the whole spectrum of the bell curve.

 

I was thinking about that thread after I saw Precious with some friends.

 

well that is simply because of racism and whites didnt allow the blacks to play. Only when they allowed the BEST to play (not based on skin color) that blacks slowly took over the league simply because they were the best athletes. This is exactly why I am against affirmative action in schools. Only the smartest and most qualified should get in and it should not be based on skin color.

 

Biologists do not consider race as socially defined (black, white, Asian) with scientific validity. It's more like populations and subgroups.

 

It impossible to dismiss all outside influences.
Some 'habits' and 'obstacles' are installed as early
maybe even before age 5.

Training the mind to learn needs to start early
and alot of times it is either not done
or
done improperly.

Also . . .some folx simply learn DIFFERENTLY
Different has never meant superior or inferior
just DIFFERENT

Rocket River

 

Agree with most of your points and I did not dismiss outside influence. You seem to be dismissing the genetic component. It is definitely a combination of both which I don't think anyone argues against. I have a few developers that report into me. One works crazy hours and works so much harder. But it doesn't matter how many hours he puts in or how much harder he works he will never be a better developer than this other guy who just has it in him.

 

That's so off that I can't even google a pic of facepalm.

 

Right, now it's a rushed typo according to you too

Heh, do you open with the word "rookie" every time you reply to somebody who spends less time on this board or am I just specially privileged to be on the receiving end of it?

Of course the irony isn't lost on me. Seems like most people, including me, just felt it was insignificant. If pointing that out was the highlight of your entire day then I apologize for trying to ruin it.

 

But this is the problem is that race as we understand it of skin color is only a small part of the genome when their is actually more genetic commonality across the whole of humanity than within. This was shown by the Human Genonome study which took a very broad sampling of humanity to construct the genome.

The races themselves are very diverse and any general judgement on any race overall isn't necessarily going to apply to any group or individual within that race. Generalities for things like which race is smarter or more athletic end up not having real applicability given that diversity and really only end up inflaming racial tensions rather than being informative.

 

It's culture and society, not race. The easiest example is schools. In Asia, there is no such thing as a summer vacation. You don't take three months off to forget everything you just learned. You go to school all year. The summer break is a holdover from the days when Western children helped their parents on the farm in the summer.

Exactly. There is as much diversity within a specific race as there are races. It's just one of a few billion ways we choose to divide ourselves. You could just as easily pick some arbitrary characteristic like blonde hair and blue eyes, then say that people with these traits have higher IQ's.

Oh wait....

 

You assume that this information is only relevant if it can be applied to a group or individual within a race. But that is exactly what it should not be used for.

Instead, it can be used to look at evolution and the effects of various circumstances on people. One example was mentioned earlier in the thread. Perhaps if Asian and European races have slightly higher IQs, that was an evolutionary adaptation necessary to handle more challenging environments.

 

Exactly right. People assume that when this topic comes up, the ultimate goal is to denigrate a particular race. But there are far more useful results from this type of information.

For example, if there is a genetic component, can we see if more intelligent people breed at different levels? For example, we know the poor tend to have more kids than the rich. If people with intelligent genes tend to have fewer kids as well, then we're slowly dumbing down society. If they tend to have more kids, then we're likely getting more and more intelligent as a world population. Or you can track correlations - are people with more genetic intelligence more at risk of certain diseases or medical conditions (autism, for example, seems to have a lot of savant effects - is there a correlation there)?

There's all sorts of useful information that could come out of this type of research.

 

But the very title of this thread shows that such information is used to make generalities about races. That will inevitably lead to making judgements about individuals and groups within a race.

While there might be an academic interests in such there still is the problem of defining things like "intelligence" and then applying that to evolutionary development. For example as I mentioned earlier about New Guinean Tribesmen. They live in one of the most challenging environments yet in this thread we see arguments put forward that Asians and Europeans have higher IQ's technically if challenging environment is the standard then shouldn't New Guinean Tribesmen, Inuit and Saharan tribesman dominate intelligence test since those people live in the most challenging enviroments while people from Mediterranean Europe, Japan and the Pacific Northwest have lower intelligence since those are some of the least challenging environments?

We also run into the problem that race based upon physical appearence again encompasses a very broard range of people who have lived for generations in all sorts of enviroments. For instance Asians / Mongoloid people have lived for thousands of years in every climate from desert to arctic. It seems to me that the appearance of having an extra fold in the eyelid, straight black hair and swarthy skin would have very little to do genetically with intelligence especially if you are arguing that intelligence is influenced by evolutionary adaptation.

Just to add another thing to. There is another big problem to trying to tie intelligence to race especially if you are using the America's to conduct a statistical survey. While physically you have Caucasians, Africans, Asians and Native Americans who are genetically very close to Asians. Given the history of colonialism and slavery there has been a massive interbreeding. Saying that blacks on average score less on IQ test means that as race they are genetically inferior to whites when it comes to intelligence ignores that within North American blacks there is a substantial amount of caucasian ancestry and at the sametime in many American whites African ancestry. Just basing things based upon appearance ignores the whole diversity in the background.

 

IQ tests are misleading.

 

I don't know if I'd call it inevitable, but sure that's definitely a likely outcome. That doesn't mean that's what the study was intended for, that doesn't mean we should accept those judgments, and that doesn't mean those judgments are accurate or relevant. It just means that one must tread carefully when discussing this subject.

The rest of your post does a good job describing the difficulties in obtaining and analyzing the data for these types of studies. But those difficulties don't make the studies less valuable or less appropriate. That just means it's harder to get good information. And nobody is claiming otherwise.

Perhaps this is true, but I highly doubt this is what most researchers actually do. This is just your simplified assumption of how such a study would be implemented. In reality, it takes a lot more thought and effort to perform this type of research, and the problems you talk about are some of the many issues that must be addressed. I wouldn't assume that just because these complexities exist that it would be impossible to account for them, or that they haven't already been accounted for in existing research.

 

get ready for the nazis and the black militants to start posting here. Each one claiming that their race is the best until it ends with just two guys arguing back and forth nethier giving any valid points until the thread is locked.

Until then, sit back, kick off your shoes, and get ready for the online race war.