The Question of Which Race it the Most Intelligent?

The question of intelligence . . . or genetics.

I get confused about Evolution and Adaptation.
Cursory thinking . . .Adaptation is the mechanism of Evolution
I could be wrong [Please Correct me if I am]

That being the case
The question would become eventually
What are set of circumstances which forced a group of people to adapt in a 'superior' way?

Basically If conclude that X People are the Smartest . . . would they not have to have had a commonality of historical circumstances?

Rocket River

 

My point would be . .. if you looked at the personal histories of the developers
would will find a differentiating factor as to why one was better than the other.

Whether it is that one's dad was a mathematician and the other's was a plumber. Whether one's teach in 2nd grade praised him more and pushed his analytical thinking more than cursory memorization. These factors IMO affect their outcomes more than the genetic structure.

Rocket River

 

I think abundance of food or ideal living conditions might lead to higher focus on brains rather than hunting and fighting ability. I have no idea if the amount of time we are talking about could really cement those changes in a race though.

 

I think I have solved this ultimate OP question, and caucasian is apparently not the answer. See the details of my conclusion here:

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You should see if Half Price Books has a copy and pick one up. Sure, it's amazingly dated (we're talking 1956, after all), but a fun read and at the time (I read it in the '50's) very provocative. As you probably know, Heinlein won several Hugo and Nebula awards for best SF novel of the year. The novel he's probably best known for is Stranger in a Strange Land.



These stupid threads pop up every once in a while, like a mushroom.

 

Part of the problem here is the idea that evolution is working to a goal. Evolition occurs as a result of what are essentially temporary advantages. It isn't building ubermenschen. There is, IIRC, a species of dwarf hippos(or maybe it is another animal - my memory fails me) that has a tiny brain inside a much larger skull. The brain, it turns out, is by far the most energy intensive organ in your body. This animal (hippo?) was trapped on an island somewhere with poor prospects for food. First, larger animals weren't able to keep healthy, while smaller ones managed. This evolved the animal favoring smaller and smaller offspring. But the situation apparently was so limited that when there was a chance mutation limiting brain size, the brain-limited animal had a major survival advantage. In an abundant food situation, there would be no benefits - usually intelligence increases show survival benefits. But if you limit available nutrition enough, it is small brain size that becomes a net advantage.

Sometimes it can be totally random or changes in intelligence can be a side effect. Some hominids, for instance, evolved thick sculls and jaws mounting heavy muscles which were used to pulverize and eat grains. You usually see these sculls and they have a ridge running along the top. These hominids had a temporary advantage in that they had a food source that was available to them alone. But one side effect is that this advantage to eating grain also limits brainpan size and thus intelligence. Lower intelligence is a result of a side effect from another advantage.

Alternately, imagine that Albert Einstein, Marie Curie, and 100 or so of their peers (you need, IIRC, more than 100 to have a viable genetic population) are on a boat trip across the Pacific to a conference in China and their boat crashes on a fictional island where they live and form a new culture for thousands of years. If the underlying assumptions about heritability of intelligence are true, you would have a race/culture of geniuses. The superior intelligence of this group of islanders down the lines happens only because their smart ancestors happened to be all taking the same boat when it crashed - the intelligence turns out to be nothing more than a result of a totally random anomaly in the grouping of the progenitors.

The people who are proposing simplistic explanations to describe entire continents of populations are undoubtedly wrong. If we accept the dubious claim of racial variations in intelligence, it undoubtedly a result of a million different momentary advantages. You would probably be better off subdividing the so-called "races" into a million different sub categories. You would probably be better looking at ethic Greeks vs the South Slavs to the north of them - things like that. Even then, you are screwed because of cross contamination with Greeks and Slavs marrying and having children.

Again, read the Stephen Jay Gould book. When phrenology was hip, phrenologists were coming up with neat scientific-sounding phrenological explanations "proving" the superior intelligence of white people. Its funny that, even when you are talking about totally bogus "science" like phrenological tea reading, none of the results show anything unexpected, like superior black intelligence. This subject is and always has been so overwhelmed by confirmation bias that it is almost impossible to discuss. Usually discussions end up in a net increase in ignorance of the population discussing it, as some yahoo latches on to it as "science" proving what they've always "known" - that their group is superior to every other group.

 

I was thinking herpes flareup.




Maybe I should've kept that as a thought.

 

Could you indicate which people you speak of that "are proposing simplistic explanations to describe entire continents of populations"?

It seems that in the part of your post quoted above, you have already decided that it is impossible to have a legitimate, level-headed discussion about the topic. Yet you seem to be ignoring the 80+ replies that include quite a bit of legitimate, level-headed discussion. Perhaps there is some confirmation bias on your part?

Also, I find the opinion described in this quoted section particularly curious, especially the reference to the claim of racial variations in intelligence as "dubious", given the first few paragraphs of your post. Those paragraphs seem to do a great job of intelligently discussing the nature of this question and its applications. They are pretty good evidence that this topic is not at all impossible to discuss.

 

There are waaaay too many long posts in this thread.

 

I don't think it was a typo -- it may be that the original poster is just really, really dumb.

 

Thanks for the info.
Judging from this . . . being MORE EVOLVED is a misnomer
in that it would not indicate superior intellect
but
more a superior adaptation to surviving in the current set of circumstances
[again, I could be misinterpreting]

Evolutionarily speaking .. it is possible to 'step backwards' in intellect, physicality, etc. *If* the circumstances/environment demanded such a thing

I don't think you can say one race/group/etc is superior to another
in any meaningful way.

1st you would have to quantify superior. Which is very subjective to begin with.

Rocket River

 

If you have a glass of 100 year old Chateau Petrus, and you drop a tiny bit of turd, do you still have a bottle of great wine that you would give to the most discerning palate with just a little nugget of turd that can be fished out, or just a bottle of turd wine that you wouldn't offer to someone you really hate? The thread has enough little nuggets of turd in it that the whole thing is fouled. The only thing this thread has done is give cover in validating some dubious racial bigotry.

It has not been demonstrated that races are anything more than a construct. The one thing I get from this thread is that people are really good at making sweeping generalizations with the most minimal regard to proof because it "feels right".

 

If you were to treat all forum threads like bottles of wine where any hint of a turd would prevent you from taking even a sip, would you ever read anything on any online forum?

Of course not. So your analogy is absurd. It is not difficult to be a little more discerning and engage in quality discussion around the occasionally horrible post. And perhaps my eyes are not open, but I haven't seen many horrible posts in this thread anyway. You might just not want to call people out, but I don't see the turds you speak of and you haven't pointed to any specifically.

Perhaps you're not totally being serious. My apologies if you are, but this paragraph is somewhat ironic in that case, given that you make a sweeping generalization seemingly because it "feels right". Personally, I don't find anything wrong with generalizations without proof based on feel. Those are called opinions, and they add to the discussion as long as people don't represent them as fact or cling to them in the face of counter evidence.

 

+1, Major props for trying to shut down a thread that is obviously headed in the wrong direction

 

If I were being stared down by a lion in an African jungle, I don't think I'd want a biomedical engineer or a nuclear physicist next to me. I think I'd take my chances with the head of an African brush tribe who eats food with flies on it in his spare time.

There isn't really any valid measure of intelligence. Everybody has gifts to greater and lesser degrees.

 

You're obviously not Asian. *rimshot*

 

I'll one up you. But according to the OP's logic, I guess she just got the dumb gene

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Certainly everybody has an opinion. Its like listening to two fifteen year old virgin boys in a fight over their "opinions" about intercourse. Beyond the fact that both opinions are completely divorced from reality, it is embarrassing and off putting for everybody else who is listening.

 

Of course one must be careful and I won't go as far as Otto and say such studies are worthless but I think they are of questionable value. I mean what good does it do to determine that people with dark skins and curly hair are on average less intelligent? As this thread shows it leads to jumping to conclusions about the reasons and as you acknowledge really has no relevance when dealing with any individual or subgroup of people with dark skin and curly hair.

I'm going by what has been posted here which is says that these studies were based on North American groups. Further I will say that given the history of colonialism and slavery it is almost impossible to determine exactly how much interbreeding there might be one's background to be able to adequately account for purity of racial makeup. I will also again say that the genes that define race, physical appearance, again are a very small part of the genome and trying to tie all sorts of traits to that handful of genes ignores the vast diversity of the rest of the genome.

So yes I will say such studies are inherently flawed. If you have information otherwise on how they accounted for the problems I listed I would be interested in seeing it.

 

I will add one more thought in regard to such studies. I think trying to determine something like intelligence is going to be impossible to determine and one that leads to some very problematic outcomes. I don't though think that studies regarding things like school performance, achievement in education, and career achievement among the races are worthless because those are sociological studies and race is more of a sociological construct than it is a biological one.