Posted on 06/07/2014 5:58:40 AM PDT by Jack Black
A Troublesome Inheritance: Genes, Race and Human History, by Nicholas Wade (Penguin Press, 288 pp., $27.95)
In 2001, the New England Journal of Medicine published an editorial provocatively titled “Racial Profiling in Medical Research.” The author, Robert Schwartz, reiterated the commonly held view that no biological basis exists for race, and then argued that physicians should not consider race in their research or medical practice. This prompted a sharp response from geneticist Neil Risch, who pointed out that numerous studies had demonstrated significant genetic differences among humans based on continental ancestry, suggesting evidence of five distinct races. Among the reasons for recognizing such variations: research shows that people of different races sometimes vary in their responses to medicines.
(Excerpt) Read more at city-journal.org ...
The dog-whistle being "in America".
I'm certain that blacks in other civilized countries around the world don't have this IQ problem.
Of course, the second a brilliant African doctor moves to the US, his IQ numbers are flushed down the dumper by the demographic "African-American" culture's average.
Actually, black Africans have similar average IQs to African/Americans. (Actually, slightly lower, as would be expected from a low-income country.) Those few who come here are fairly obviously the cream of the African crop.
What about black Brits...at least they can speak properly.
Isn't there a culture in the world where there is a black demographic that thrives in an education-rich environment, and whose "average IQ" can be more fairly assessed?
You see plenty of blacks on the floor of the NY Stock Exchange, they can't be dummies doing that, and they probably shouldn't have their "average IQ" unfairly downgraded by the gang-banger/ghetto-rat "mentality".
Teutoburger Wald. Right.
Followed by a couple of decades of Roman armies stomping all over Germany in reprisal.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Germanicus
The Roman Empire had a natural boundary at the Sahara and Atlantic. In Germany, Scotland and Syria they had to define a border, or keep expanding forever. No natural boundaries.
The Empire decided, quite rightly IMO, that the effort of conquering and occupying Germany was not worth the gain. Obviously, if Germany had been occupied and assimilated, there would simply have been another border with barbarian tribes on the other side, just farther away from the Roman heartland and therefore even harder to defend effectively.
The Romans eventually decided to defend the line of the Rhine and Danube, which seems as logical as any.
This dilemma of where to place the border is similar to that of Israel today. Some call for Israel to conquer and annex land because attacks are launched on Israel from that land. But of course there will still be attacks launched from the land beyond the new borders. So unless one can reach a natural border, there is no logical stopping point.
Despite the defeat in 9 AD, the Romans successfully defended the frontier for more than 300 years thereafter. The various incursions by German tribes, all repelled eventually, were all related more to internal Roman difficulties. Civil wars and such, which were endemic.
As Roman defeats go, Teutoburger Wald was really fairly minor as far as losses go.
Cannae, for instance, resulted in 2x to 4x the number of dead Romans, at a time when the resources of the Roman State were MUCH smaller. IOW, something like 75% of the Roman Army, not 10%.
Teutoburger Wald was strategically important because it eventually convinced the Romans not to expand farther into northern Europe. But it was a Roman loss, not a German victory, since the Germans never even tried to invade and conquer Rome, whereas the Germans spent most of the next couple of decades running away and hiding from Roman armies.
http://isteve.blogspot.com/2012/02/is-white-black-cognitive-gap-smaller-in.html
AFAIK, there is no country in the world where black IQ scores are comparable to those of European descent in advanced countries.
FWIW, IQ tests are intentionally designed to minimize the effects of education and culture, to measure "raw intelligence," which psychometricians refer to as "g."
One can certainly argue about whether they have succeeded at this goal. But it is perhaps telling that it is universally agreed that some tests are more effective at measuring "g" rather than education or acculturation. In general, black Americans' achievement gap on these type of tests is somewhat lower, putting a major dent in the theory that the gap is primarily the result of cultural bias.
To be clear, I'm not a fan of the idea of inherent average racial intelligence differences. If someone is able to prove scientifically that there is no such difference, nobody would be more delighted them me. I would love for the Declaration of Independence to be literally as well as metaphorically true.
Unfortunately, wishing (or refusing to look) does not make something true. If there is no inherent racial difference, the only other logical explanation for consistent weaker performance by certain groups is discrimination by others. Which can lead to nothing but eternal hatred and recrimination.
“But it was a Roman loss, not a German victory, since the Germans never even tried to invade and conquer Rome, whereas the Germans spent most of the next couple of decades running away and hiding from Roman armies.”
Germans eventually DID sack Rome (as did Celts); Germans had no reason to hide from an aggressor that, as in Scotland, huddled behind defenses and bribed their way out of defeat for centuries as they died a slow death. There are a lot more Germanic people in northern Italy today than Italians in southern Germany.
Righto. Germans eventually sacked Rome.
I hope you realize how ludicrous it is to draw a line between Teutoburger Wald in 9 AD and the Sack of Rome by Alaric in 410, as if it were part of a continuous conflict, with A leading directly to or causing B.
That’s 401 years. 401 years ago from this year, Pocahontas was captured by the English settlers of Jamestown.
Yet without the foreshortening of history induced by a two thousand-year gap, we don’t think of the events of 1613 as directly causing things that happen this year. Except possibly the celebrity of Senator Elizabeth Warren.
The Romans routinely kicked the crap out of the Germans for 500 years. For most of this time, the Germans raided into the Empire, looted what they could carry, and then ran away as fast as they could. Quite often, it wasn’t fast enough.
The Romans stopped dominating the Germans militarily only when their own empire fell apart around them.
A distinction without a difference. The basis of the article is that geneticists can look at your DNA and easily classify you into one of the five main races, and with more markers can further classify you into your ethnicity. So YES, there is a clear biologic basis for race: your DNA. It doesn't get any clearer than that, does it?
Really, I doubt it. There are lots of high school track teams, and lots of people who run on them, but invariably the people making it to the Olympics are black. And, it's not just the USA. Countries like the UK and France, that have even smaller black populations, send black sprinters to the Olympics too. Is selection bias working in every country as it does in the USA, despite very different cultures.
What are the five main races.
According to the article: Sub-Saharan African, European, East Asian, American, Austrailia and Oceania.
Which sounds like what 19th century scientists came up with. The 1775 treatise "The Natural Varieties of Mankind," by Johann Friedrich Blumenbach proposed five major divisions: the Caucasoid race, Mongoloid race, Ethiopian race (later termed the Negroid race), American Indian race, and Malayan race, but he did not propose any hierarchy among the races.[44] Blumenbach also noted the graded transition in appearances from one group to adjacent groups and suggested that "one variety of mankind does so sensibly pass into the other, that you cannot mark out the limits between them".[45]
So the basic ideas that were popularized are now backed up by DNA:
The mapping of the human genome, with its extraordinary complexity, has helped us understand this picture. Initial research showed that all humans shared the same basic genes and even most of the same so-called alleles, or alternate forms of genes. But over time, geneticists have come to understand that humans cluster into groups based on the frequency that alleles reoccur. The most basic clusters correspond to continental ancestry. Five are recognizable in the genome. The first belongs to those whose ancestors remained in sub-Saharan Africa. The other four pertain to those whose ancestors traveled and ultimately settled in Europe, in East Asia, in the Americas, or in Australia and the Pacific Islands. Subsequent studies based on more refined DNA markers have allowed researchers to see more numerous and distinct groupings, which frequently correspond to what we might describe as ethnicities. “The more DNA markers that are used . . . the more subdivisions can be established in the human population,” Wade observes. Geneticists now estimate that about 14 percent of the human genome has changed under evolutionary pressures over the last 30,000 years,
Where do Indian, Pakistani or Burmese fall on that scale?
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