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from the maybe-they-only-surveyed-the-nimnobs dept.
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: 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.