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Why can we talk about PISA results, comparing the performance of students in school, but we are not allowed to talk about differences in IQ? Bring this subject up, and you are immediately accused of racism. And yet. And yet, if there are substantial differences in intellectual capability, might this not explain some of the world's problems?
An update of a massive "study of studies" is underway; this article summarizes the work to date, and provides links to the work in progress. A quick summary of the answers to the questions no one dares ask:
- Eastern Asia (Japan, China): IQ around 105
- Europe/North America: IQ around 98
- Middle East: IQ around 85
- Africa: IQ around 70
In the first instance, it doesn't even matter why there are differences. They may be genetic, or disease related, or nutrition related, or something else. If these differences are real (and the evidence is pretty strong that they are), then we need to deal with them. Imagine if the low IQs in Africa turn out to be fixable - what would the impact be, if we could raise the IQ of an entire continent by 30 points?!
Sticking our collective heads in the sand, because the topic is not PC, is not going to solve any problems.
(Score: 1, Flamebait) by RedBear on Friday November 03 2017, @01:55AM (15 children)
Jesus jumping Christ on a bloody bicycle. This is the last straw for me for cmn32480 as an editor. I never thought this place would start looking like a Storm Front forum.
Only idiot racists want to believe that IQ tests actually objectively measure "intelligence". That's because idiot racists desperately want to believe that "the blacks" are objectively, somehow "scientifically" inferior. We don't avoid talking about this because it's not "PC". We avoid talking about this because IQ tests only measure how well a population has been conditioned to take IQ tests, and that fact has been very well established. The global results show nothing besides the fact that China and Japan have decent state-supported school systems and force almost 100% of their children to complete schooling up through at least high school, and on the other hand many denizens of the gigantic continent of Africa have a lack of resources to send much of their population to school beyond their early years.
Repeat after me: IQ tests are not tests of generalized intelligence potential. They are tests of how much training you've had in the completely artificial abstract thinking tasks that exist in an IQ test, and therefore how well you can take an IQ test. Learn to look past the superficial fact that some English-speaking test designers decades ago decided to call it an "Intelligence Quotient" test because they were ignorant enough to think they were actually measuring more than a few minor elements of the indescribable gestalt that is human intelligence. It's just a word! They were wrong! The results do not show that Asians are geniuses and Africans are gibbering idiots! Only racists want to believe that kind of idiotic interpretation of the averaged results of a highly artificial test. And it's not talking about the IQ test results that makes you racist. It's when you say stupid racist crap like this:
And this:
Careful there, if you can figure out how to raise an entire continent's IQ by 30 points you might accidentally create a master race of black people who will try to take over the world. *facepalm*
See, the problem is that you've made a giant, unsupported leap there from abstract, unbiased data measuring a population's ability to take an IQ test, all the way to a conclusion that "population A is smart and population B is dumb, and population B's dumbness must be the cause of a bunch of problems". You have to strap on a jet pack to make that kind of leap. The evidence is pretty strong that more modernized populations where more individuals make it to college level schooling are better at scoring high on IQ tests. Wow. Wait, that doesn't sound racist enough. Let's rephrase it to imply that the explanation might be genetic or caused by the entire population of Africa having brain worms! Yeah!
What explains the world's problems is racism, resource scarcity, food distribution inefficiency, lack of availability of clean water and sanitation options, the continuous destabilization of governments by other governments, the war on drugs, economic inequality, religious fundamentalism, economic policies that guarantee failure, and a thousand other things. How about we work on those before we worry about totally meaningless crap like IQ tests? Donate to Water.org and help people in the developing world get permanent access to clean water and sanitation so that more girls can go to school and stay in school instead of literally wasting their lives fetching water, and guess what? (You'll never guess.) Yeah, your stupid-ass meaningless average IQ scores will go up! Also, more people will graduate and go to post secondary schools and/or start businesses and help strengthen their local economies, but who cares about that, right? What matters is doing well on a test where you figure out which abstract geometric figure doesn't belong with the others. Have you even taken an IQ test? Do you remember the kind of useless crap that they have on an IQ test? They told me I scored 135 on mine and I'm still a bloody idiot! Just ask anybody here!
I'm done here. I can't do anything to fix stupid. I know you don't realize you're racist, but here's a piece of advice: You're racist. Try not being so racist if it it upsets you that people keep shouting "RACIST!" whenever you open your mouth. Just a thought. Even if you think your intentions are nothing but good, you're still being a racist when you go around talking about needing to "fix" the intelligence of an entire group of billions of people who all happen to be black or brown. They are human goddamn beings, each one with the potential to be smarter than you or I.
Bring a billion African babies tomorrow to countries with the strongest school systems, raise them identically to the locals and guess what? Their IQ test scores will immediately be almost identical to the local populations. Send these amazing high-IQ genius adults back to dumb old Africa (or any other poorly-developed part of the world) and guess what? Many of their children will have much lower IQ scores due to lack of education resources. Weird, huh? Seriously, how hard is this to understand? IQ tests measure a population's consistent exposure to modern, abstract education concepts via a modern education system. Not intelligence. Get over it.
¯\_ʕ◔.◔ʔ_/¯ LOL. I dunno. I'm just a bear.
... Peace out. Got bear stuff to do. 彡ʕ⌐■.■ʔ
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 03 2017, @02:06AM (14 children)
Your wonderful argument doesn't hold water because those racial differences in IQ also hold true in the United States.
You can't explain it away based on country of origin.
Someone with a higher IQ would have caught that logic error...
(Score: 2) by RedBear on Friday November 03 2017, @03:20AM (13 children)
Um, no, racist AC, the average IQ score of African-Americans is not 70 vs 98 for white Americans. African-Americans are part of the average North American score of 98. The minor differences between average IQ scores within American ethnic populations is almost entirely explainable by higher levels of poverty (and corresponding lower levels of quality education) in the black, Latino and Native American communities. Again, cultural issues, not genetic. The differences are smaller in countries where they have less active racism and economic disparity. But I can't convince you if you have an emotional need to believe that black people are genetically inferior.
I knew I'd get a Flamebait for that post. Too undiplomatic. I don't care. I'm tired of being diplomatic with racists. Human beings are human beings.
¯\_ʕ◔.◔ʔ_/¯ LOL. I dunno. I'm just a bear.
... Peace out. Got bear stuff to do. 彡ʕ⌐■.■ʔ
(Score: 4, Touché) by Arik on Friday November 03 2017, @03:24AM (3 children)
But people that you've called racists cease to be, is that it?
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 03 2017, @05:01AM
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 03 2017, @06:01PM (1 child)
I'm tired of this bullshit argument.
Racist person says a bunch of bullshit.
Regular person calls them out.
Racist person claims "but but intolerance towards racists! TOUCHE! GOTCHA!!!"
Regular people think "what a bunch of idiotic racists."
You don't get to pull the persecution card unless you're actually being persecuted. Getting called out for racist ideologies is not persecution. Tolerance and compassion only go so far, unless you're Jesus Christ himself apparently. Real humans will fight back against genocidal and hateful ideas. Don't like it? Too fucking bad, and all the victim zingers do nothing other than show everyone you're entrenched in the stupidity.
(Score: 1) by Arik on Friday November 03 2017, @06:48PM
You start by defining whoever says something you don't like as 'racist.' Which may or may not be true, in one or another sense of the word.
And then you simply rinse and repeat. All that stuff about evidence and logic and understanding each other and preserving the peace? Nah, screw that, that's old. That would legitimize them. Punch a nazi, duuuuude.
This is thuggery wrapping itself in the flag of tolerance. This is how you act if you really want to bring civilization to a screeching halt and return us to the rule of the jungle for awhile. Got a closet full of a Che Guevara shirts and think of yourself as a revolutionary do you?
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 03 2017, @05:41AM (8 children)
In Minnesota there was a large scale experiment [wikipedia.org] to prove exactly what you're saying -- that IQ is mostly just cultural and differences within a nation can be explained by environmental/cultural factors. What they did was track for more than a decade a variety of children adopted by privileged white households. The hypothesis is pretty obvious. These children should, more or less, end up with the same IQ. Similar levels of privilege, all raised in similar households, all given more or less the same education, and so on. It would finally seal the coffin on any sort of psuedo-sciency IQ to race correlation. The sad thing (at least in terms of believing in anything like a fair world) is that the study ended up showing the exact opposite. The performance of the children was tied almost entirely to their race. And there's an interesting characteristic of IQ. At younger ages we can affect it to a reasonable amount due to environmental conditions. But regardless of whether we're a genius or a rock when we're younger, as we age IQ becomes more and more a metric that's decided primarily by genetic characteristics, which I'm using as a euphemism for racial characteristics.
But wait! There's a very easy explanation for this. Being raised by a rich white family doesn't entirely remove cultural aspects. If black individuals are more drawn to lower performing cultures then even being raised by a privileged family does not necessarily mean they themselves would adopt a more productive culture - as other individuals reactions to them, and their own self identity, might not necessarily map to their family's. It's a stretch, but it's possible. Unfortunately, the study also had a phenomenal control group for this - entirely by accident. It turns out that a number of children who had one white and one black parent were mistakenly identified as having two black parents. Their parents believed they were "fully" black, they believed they were "fully" black. They substantially outperformed the children that were actually "fully" black.
It's sad, but real.
(Score: 2) by Arik on Friday November 03 2017, @08:08AM (7 children)
It actually doesn't. Circular logic proves nothing but itself, and this circle starts by assuming that the classification of the parents by 'race' corresponds to an actual racial division. It *does* correspond to a division, it's simply a social division, not a racial division.
It should not be in any way surprising or controversial that groups on different sides of social divisions have different characteristics. If the social division has been going on very long we should even expect biological differences - in a sense. Not any sort of difference of type, no, but 'statistically significant' variations in the incidents of tons and tons of specific alleles, absolutely.
And in fact, that's exactly what we see in human genetics. Virtually any set of groups you want to define have lots and lots of statistical differences, as groups. But there aren't actually any real natural fault lines, certainly no solid divisions, and the 'races' as conceived in 600bc, 1200 ad, or any of the 1890s variants, are all equally valid. Which clearly shows that none of them are valid at all. Think about it.
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 03 2017, @08:22AM (6 children)
Right. In the same way that a German Shepherd and a Chihuahua both share an extremely recent common ancestor (seriously, the earliest evidence of the wolf->dog transition is 40k years old --- humans, homo sapien, are 200,000 years old), but selective breeding led to the creation of genetically different but sexually compatible groups. In dogs we would call it a breed, in humans we would call it a race. In the same way you're not going to confuse a German Shepherd with a Chihuahua, you're not going to confuse a human of predominately 'black' ancestry with a human of 'asian' ancestry. Arguing that the fact these distinctions make people no different since we can clearly define them is rather nonsensical.
The interesting thing is if our species continued to develop, eventually we likely would have even become sexually incompatible. Evolution isn't some magic where a guy with a wand comes and taps a species turning them into another - it's just isolated samples of things, all of which share common ancestors, diverging. I mean we share a common ancestor with ants, or even amoebas if you go back far enough.
(Score: 2) by Arik on Friday November 03 2017, @08:49AM (5 children)
Roughly correct so far.
"humans, homo sapien, are 200,000 years old"
Confused. Modern humans are ~200k years old, yes.
Out of Africa is more like 70k years ago however. And isolation from Africa is shorter and more limited - ~40k in Australia and depending on who you listen to somewhere between 36-12k in the Americas.
plus:
"but selective breeding led to the creation of genetically different but sexually compatible groups."
In dogs, the first part is correct at least. But they aren't actually sexually compatible anymore.
This is actually a good example - canines are a good example of what we would see in humans if there were multiple races. There are multiple natural fault lines tending towards actual biological divisions. Wolves and german shepherds cannot normally mate, because their sexual triggers are different, their cycles don't even line up, they behave like different species. With human intervention, their sperm and egg can be brought into contact and offspring will result, but there is still clearly a sort of a biological division between them.
Just within domesticated dog breeds, we could take a Great Dane and a Chihuahua. They can't actually mate naturally either. A female Chihuahua cannot physically receive the larger male, the male Chihuahua cannot enter the larger female. Yes humans can cross them in vitro. The female Chihuahua should still not be implanted with the resulting embryo, as there is a large risk of a painful death terminating the pregnancy that would result.
Coyotes are a third case, and less well understood, so for this I'll just leave them out.
Considering only non-coyote canines, we arguably have one rather solid division that doesn't get crossed in nature, and another rather obvious fault line where extremes on either side also don't get crossed in nature.
In contrast, again, within humanity we have no clear divisions and no clear fault lines.
On a related note, we also do not have any long, sustained history of selective breeding, in the sense that has produced dog breeds.
Oh yes, it's been a common theme in fact, it's been attempted quite often. But the most basic element of it, the notions of which differences are 'racial' and which are not, varied constantly, wildly.
The current conception of 'race' in the USA is deeply rooted in the reality of the colonies circa 1640, and it literally did not exist prior to that.
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 03 2017, @10:39AM (1 child)
But if you tie up that bitch when she is in heat, the wolves will be all over her, and if they do not eat her, you got some damn good sled dogs. Exactly how far south are you, Arik?
(Score: 2) by Arik on Friday November 03 2017, @10:55AM
Good luck with the not eating her part.
You're better off tying and muzzling a female wolf. Still not all that likely to turn out the way you want.
"Exactly how far south are you, Arik?"
Are you trying to elicit clues to my physical location? *clucks tongue*
Denied.
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 03 2017, @02:07PM (2 children)
I wouldn't be so quick to try to create some sort of authoritative timeline out of Africa. Recent discoveries indicate individuals leaving Africa as far back as 270,000 [nytimes.com] years ago.
The point I was making was simply that we've been separated *far* longer than is necessary to begin to form unique 'breeds.' And breeds was an analog for races. In other words, same species sexually compatible groups sharing a common ancestor. E.g. I'm certainly not suggesting that any group of humans are different species. Rather that we're all simply different breeds. And these breeds do carry inherent and often times large genetic differences.
And yes, we do have a lengthy history of selective breeding. It's caused by continental divide. This is why many whites are considered of 'European' descent even though European is quite a bizarre notion given the vast array of diversity within that. But those groups 'trapped' on the continent were left to mate only among themselves and thus all share common ancestors much more recently with one another than they would for instance with any Asians, Native Americans, Indians, or Africans. Races, and breeds, on the tree of genetics are essentially cousins - sometimes quite distant. Another interesting example are the Japanese. The Japanese developed their own divergent traits as a result of isolation from other Asian groups. Nonetheless, they still share far more in common with a Chinese than they do with e.g. a Native American simply because their nearest common ancestor is much closer.
(Score: 2) by Arik on Friday November 03 2017, @06:22PM (1 child)
Your point was understood, it's simply incorrect.
"And yes, we do have a lengthy history of selective breeding. It's caused by continental divide. This is why many whites are considered of 'European' descent even though European is quite a bizarre notion given the vast array of diversity within that. But those groups 'trapped' on the continent were left to mate only among themselves and thus all share common ancestors much more recently with one another than they would for instance with any Asians, Native Americans, Indians, or Africans. Races, and breeds, on the tree of genetics are essentially cousins - sometimes quite distant."
This is extremely confused and in part flat out wrong. Let's try to unpack this a little. Your claim is that 'continental divide' generated the necessary division between populations, but as I've already noted, the only groups that were actually separated from the main population for significant amounts of time were the Australians and the Americans. And those groups aren't really any more divergent than the rest of us, despite having had arguably long enough periods of isolation for long enough for that to happen, for whatever reason, it did not.
Furthermore you have everything reversed here. Europeans are virtually homogenous in comparison with Africans, not the other way around. If we grouped humans by genetics and set the threshold down low enough to get a reasonable number of groups, you inevitably wind up with one big group that includes everyone outside of Africa and also many Africans. And the remaining groupings would all be primarily found in Africa. This is because human populations radiated out from the rift area in all directions, and only one direction led to a navigable coast line - the one to the northwest. They reached the coast, found the living good, and were able to expand across Eurasia, Oceania, etc. quite quickly by mostly sticking to the coastlines. Interiors were originally settled along rivers. This is a relatively fast process even starting from a small population. But backfilling inland areas was still a slow process.
Back in Africa, all the groups that went out in different directions were hardly idle. But they weren't skirting along coastlines, they were radiating out into enormous inland areas from the start. Southern and western parts of Africa have coastlines that are particularly uninviting. So it took a long time, many many generations, to get to those parts of the continent by land.
Anyway, the point was that the genetic differences exist but not in a way that actually lines up with your notion of race. As you stated pretty clearly here, your assumption (and you're far from unique) is that all 'black' is roughly the same, while the white and the yellow and the red etc. represent diversity. In fact, genetics reveals the truth is nearly exactly the reverse of that. Virtually all of our races genetic diversity is in Africa, while all the non-african populations are, to use your language, 'close cousins' not just with each other, but still with the African source population as well!
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 04 2017, @04:39AM
Yes, the tens of thousands of years humans were outside of Africa is far more than sufficient to develop into various breeds. The evidence is visible not only in physicality, but mentality, and numerous other even very high level measures. And of course the genetic differences are vast.
And no, I did not say or even suggest all blacks are mostly the same. Straw manning is a great indicator of your belief in your own words... I simply discussed the fact that as groups are isolated away from one another, they tend to merge into different 'breeds' with their differences becoming, aggregately, larger than the population they separated from. Japanese have [much] more in common with Japanese than any Asian individual, even though the period of their separation is only ~15,000 years. And Asian individuals, including Japanese, have more in common than they do with any 'black' individual.
The reason I use 'black' as a catch all (which I suppose is where you're getting your straw man from) is the same reason you use 'white' as a catch all. Skin color is more indicative of 'breed' than geographic location. Even in dogs - a German Shepherd is certainly no more German in location than an British Bull Terrier is British in location. And similar a white is no more European in location than a black is African in location.