It can be easily demonstrated that within any racial (the very word is difficult to define) group, the range of intelligence (or just about anything else) is complete. The smartest European no smarter than the smartest Ugangi.



Thus, you are reduced to arguing that distributions are uneven among human groups. Maybe. That's true for blook types. Hard to assess for some as ineffable and culturally-bound as intelligence.



This actually is not a problem at all for darwinists, only for what Mayr likes to call -- with due regard for priority -- Social Spencerists. "Social Statics" came out the year before "Origin," you know.

Harry:



But it has nothing to do with range--it's averages. The fact of African albinos doesn't make blacks identical in skin color to whites.

Yes the range
is complete, but how about the variance/standard deviation? Here's one: women and men have the same mean on most IQ tests, but the variance is larger for men. Women's distributions are more sharply peaked about the mean; men's form a lazier distribution. Thus at the extremes of the distribution, there exist more male morons(and geniuses) than women. Perhaps
something similar applies to other groupings of humans.

Group intelligence seems a lot more due to nurture rather than nature.



Genetic arguments don't really wash with me since humans haven't been breeding separately for a long enough period for them to be all that different given that intelligence is a complex genetic trait with myriad environmental and physical factors contributing to the phenotype.

Ali:



Then how come the races differ so much physically?

Murtaugh links to a nice review of The Bell Curve by Thomas Sowell in which he states that IQs by ethnicity have been low for every ethnic group when it immigrated to the U.S. from authoritarian countries, including Jews, but within a generation IQ typically rises significantly. What's exceptional are blacks, who seem to have made an authoritarian country for themselves here in the U.S. The studies Sowell cites argue that ethnic IQ variations are mainly cultural in origin.



Until the dominant cultural IQ variations are removed by globalization, it will probably be hard to know if there are any significant genetic IQ variations between ethnicities.

I don't think any of the critics of The Bell Curve actually bothered to read the book. If they did read it, one suspects they might have mentioned its most provocative (and weakest) argument, about the stratification of society by IQ. But how often does that EVER come up in a review or critique?



Still, it was easier for people opposed to the existence of intelligence to attack The Bell Curve as racist than it was, say, to attack the corpus of Arthur Jensen's work (although that was their real target all along).

pj:



That begs the question: how can there not be?

oj:



Hard work, application and the right environment can all boost intelligence.



Physical appearance can't be consciously altered and is made up of a whole range of separately inherited traits.



KW: I've known about the cognitive elite idea proposed in the book, but on the surface it seems so dumb that it merits instant dismissal.

Hmm...with friends like you, who needs enemies, OJ? Evolution does not rule out
racial differences in intelligence, but it doesn't rule them in, either. It is easy to find an evolutionary explanation for the prevalence of the sickle-cell anemia gene among blacks (it provided protection from malaria, in the areas of Africa where that disease was most prevalent), but nobody has advanced a "selective pressure" argument to explain differential distribution of intelligence genes. So although Murray and Herrnstein are right that components are intelligence are heritable, and thus subject to evolutionary pressure, they didn't show (as they claimed) that this, rather than environmental effects on intelligence, was the reason
for the performance gap between blacks and whites.

Charles:



But the tenor of the opposition is that such variance is impossible and that to suggest that it may exist is in and of itself racist. I'm merely asking if it isn't almost inevitable?



If we can identify the different races even by sight, why wouldn't we expect various tests to be able to identify them too. That's not to say that there's one test and it shows superiority or inferiority--it seems equally likely that you could devise tests where each group scored higher than the others, precisely because they are so different. I just don't get how people can believe--for any but reasons of political correctness--that the same evolutionary and breeding processes that make us all so different physically can have left us identical mentally.

oj - If you agree that it's possible that blacks on average are genetically 3 IQ points better than whites, and also that whites are genetically 3 IQ points better than blacks, then why is it hard to accept that blacks and whites might be genetically equal in IQ? Clearly all are possible.

Charles:



Actually, eastern European jews have (on average, obviously) the highest IQ scores of any ethnic group and also the highest rates of a number of neurological diseases:



discussion




Of course, this is exactly what evolutionary theory would predict if they were more dependent on intellegence for survival than most humans over the last few hundred years.

If you believe in evolution, then it is impossible to conclude that distinct groups must have identical brains, particularly when they have dealt with widely different environments. (Eskimos vs. !Kung, for instance)



Similarly, how could men & women, with such distinctly different tactical and strategic goals, combined with wildly different physical characteristics, not
have different brains.



The left would have us be infinitely moldable playthings for their pet political theories.



Conservatives understand that human nature is not malleable.



In this respect, the theory of evolution is decidedly conservative.



Regards,

JG

JG:



It doesn't even require evolution. We can take the wolf and turn it into either a toy poodle or a Saint Bernard--how can 50,000 years of human breeding render all ethic groups' brains identical?

oj, the human races do not differ so much physically. We are all the same species and (for some taxonomists) subspecies.



Below that you are in the territory of race or variety, a very subjective part of taxonomy.



We humans are by no means so different one from another that race can be certainly determined from a skeleton.



50,000 years of breeding is trivial, in evolutionary terms.



The misconception here about the significance of range is just another example (among scores on this blog) tha most people do not understand darwinism. Range is variation. Variation is crucial to darwinism. You cannot just blow it off.

All;



I must agree with OJ on this one. You all seem to believe that OJ is claiming that there exist differences, where as I understand him to mean something entirely different. If we take P to be the proposition "there are no genetic racial differences in intelligence", then OJ is saying "P must be proven, not assumed". OJ is not making claims about the truth value of P, but about others who take P as an axiom and become incensed when P is in any way questioned or proof demanded for P. It is certainly the case that if one accepts evolution, then one must accept that P requires proof.



PJ; To answer for OJ, because the equality case occupies a vanishingly small area of the universe of possible outcomes and is therefore unlikely to occur without some forcing function.

OJ:



We agree--it can't. Or rather, one should be completely astonished if it did. In fact, if human intelligences were identical across all groups, I would have to reconsider my belief in evolution and start rethinking this whole intelligent creator thing.



Not much chance of that, though.



Regards,

Jeff Guinn

Harry:



Can you tell a Hawaiian from a Dane by looking at them?



If yes, then why do you insist that their minds are identical?

As noted above, the existence of differences in innate intelligence amond racial groups is of no value is assessing the worth of the individual man or woman whith whom we are confronted. Its importance lies in its refutation of the basis for racial quotas. BTW, its nice to know that osmeone else has read at least part of the works of Herbert Spencer, who primarily dealt with cultural and social evolution, not physical evolution. HS saw evolution as a kind of unifying principal explaining the rise and spread of civilizations. Social evolution moves at the speed of light, compared to physical evolution. Naked savages will cut their trees with steel axes and shoot their monkeys with shotguns as soon as these impliments become available. We should prefer to say that Darwin was a biological Spencerian.