Posted on 04/06/2018 7:01:28 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
‘I am worried,” writes Harvard geneticist David Reich in the New York Times, “that well-meaning people who deny the possibility of substantial biological differences among human populations are digging themselves into an indefensible position, one that will not survive the onslaught of science.”
Reich was responding to anticipated resistance to his forthcoming book, Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Human Past. The “well-meaning people” Reich references are those who argue that race is a “social construct,” that there are no significant genetic differences among people of different racial ancestry. Maybe there are differences in appearance and other physical traits, these people say, but there definitely aren’t any in intelligence.
Such people responded with rage and fury to the publication in 1994 of Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray’s book, The Bell Curve. That book, solidly based on the then-available psychological research, explored differences among races in intelligence as measured by rigorous IQ tests.
Herrnstein and Murray’s conclusion was that those differences are the result of both nature and nurture—genes and environment—in as yet unknown proportions. They predicted that research like Reich’s would provide a clearer understanding of just how much is genetic.
Reich obviously wishes to avoid the demonization endured by Murray, who was shouted down at Middlebury College just last year. Reich is at pains to say that his findings should not be used to justify racist practices, such as the slave trade, the eugenics movement, and the Holocaust.
He also makes a point that is obvious to the ordinary person but that he—and some of his critics who wrote to the Times—thinks needs reiteration, which is, as one reader put it, “differences in individuals vary far more widely than populations.” When we are comparing traits of people with different genetic ancestry, we are looking at averages, such as the differences between American whites’ and Asians’ IQ scores. (Asians’, on average, are higher.) But within the white and Asian populations, there is wide variety—which can be represented as a bell curve.
The assumption of “well-meaning people” is that ordinary Americans aren’t capable of grasping this. My view is that they understand it very well. They have learned—from school, from work, from everyday life, from public events—that there is a wider variation within each measured group than there is among measured groups.
To take a concrete and accurate example, they suspect that even if blacks might on average score lower than whites on average in intelligence tests, it does not change the fact that former president Barack Obama is a highly intelligent person. Indeed, you can read reams of anti-Obama commentary and look in vain for claims that he was not smart enough to be president.
In arguing that racial differences do not justify racial discrimination, Reich steps out on some possibly dangerous turf. “Most everyone accepts that the biological differences between males and females are profound,” he writes, though some Times readers would volubly disagree. Yet, “we should accord each sex the same freedoms and opportunities regardless of those differences.” A fortiori, we should do the same for those with different racial ancestry, whose average differences are far less profound.
It’s a strong argument. Contrary to the fears of “well-meaning people,” the difference in average racial IQ scores does not undermine the case against racial discrimination. Ordinary Americans can and do see that racial discrimination against individuals is irrational and that the advances in knowledge about genetics by Reich do not make it any less so.
But the continuing existence of racial gaps, even as the IQ scores of all groups rise (that’s the Flynn effect, identified and named by Herrnstein and Murray), does undercut the case for racial quotas and preferences and the “disparate impact” legal doctrine established by the Supreme Court 47 years ago.
The justification for quotas is the assumption that in a fair society, we would find the same racial mix in every school, every occupation, and every neighborhood. Any significant deviation from statistical equality, in this view, can be evidence of persistent racial discrimination.
This notion suffuses the behavior of leaders in colleges and universities, in large corporations, in government at all levels. Many such leaders regard enforcing quotas as a moral duty, even if they place people in positions for which they’re unprepared. For these “well-meaning people,” David Reich has a (probably unintentional) warning: Science is undermining the rationale for the work you’re doing.
Where else are they going to go to? Studying Contract or Constitutional Law?
They don't have the ability to do it. A grievance merchant is a grievance merchant plan and simple.
https://www.worlddata.info/iq-by-country.php
https://iq-research.info/en/average-iq-by-country
You post about as much as anyone on this forum
And you never saw this?
anything about Native American intelligence?
-asking for Elizabeth
The next stage in medical research & development will move beyond isolating and identifying critical genetic markets that cause favorable expressions. With the ability to repair and correct defective genes, procedures like limb regeneration, organ harvest and, yes, cognitive improvements will become standard and commonplace.
Given an opportunity to alter one's appearance and intelligence, which standards do you think the masses will aspire & apply? Given the opportunity to improve society, what levels of funding do you think governments will make available as part of large scale social programs? Faced with the prospect of a literal 'brain race', what kinds of military funded R&D projects will be fast tracked in a made dash to remain competitive?
What Murray said in the Bell curve was all true. What was never said (at that time) were research programs already underway to rectify the problem. The recent news the scientists have already identified around 50+- specific isolate genes that contribute to cognitive ability is merely the beginning.
It's a compendium of different studies but they vary between 66 and 80.
So nature and nurture can product low IQ expanses of people who are unable to form societies, or at the same time in different places find a set of people who are able to orderly form societies, such as the Chinese Courts, European Kingdoms, or as the Greeks who gave Western Civilization a world where logic and nature nurtured enlightenment.
Class is product of physical size & strength combined with mental acuity. The Normans who conquered England were bigger, stronger and smarter. They took what they wanted, screwed who they liked, and established control systems to make sure no one could challenge their authority.
It has always been this way. It's why the lower classes are small, ugly and stupid.
I have a distinct feeling she won't take the ancestry.com test because she is 25% OWN (short for Old World Neanderthal) which accounts for the cheek bones as well as 'other things'.
This has a world map as well as a list of countries by IQ with references.
https://iq-research.info/en/average-iq-by-country
Remember, Science is heresy when it doesn’t fit the narrative of the Left.
For later
300 years ago the European Kingdoms at war with one another followed first the French Diplomacy and Banking constructs along with a form of Queensbury rules to ensure ruling elites were not killed when conquered. At the same time in the West, Christianity quelled the blood lust to kill every living person in a siege city or encampment. When the West started taking prisoners or allowing the former opposition to manifest it created the cancer that Mao tse Sung so eloquently identified as “No Man, No Problem”. Had we not evolved due to both a survival instinct and religious social structure, we would have killed everyone as the Hunter-gatherers and the Genghis Khan did before our current time. Of course Mao also made sure anyone he allowed to live would bear the brunt of the Korean Was such as sending in the former Nationalist forces to Korea, or other front lines with Russia.
Does it have an data for members of the U.S Congress?
Thanks for the links. Here’s what I notice:
The countries ranked at the top are:
Hongkong, Singapore, South Korea, Japan, China and Taiwan.
Is it because they are INHERENTLY superior in intellect, or is it because their educational system INSTILLS hard work and discipline?
And if we had the same discipline and hard work instilled in some African Countries for a generation, would the IQ results not be similar? Or are they INHERENTLY limited in their intellectual abilities?
I am also surprised to see Israel ranked LOWER than the USA or even the poor country, Mongolia on the IQ scale. Jews, despite their small population, disproportionately have the most scientific and Nobel prize winners in the world.
Which group is pulling their average IQ down?
Questions, questions...
“despite all the burbling on about individualism..”
That silly stuff out nation was built on.
“FReepers would do well to accept this reality.”
Cant wait for the left to apply this to us, so you can come here and complain about our technocracy and how we our losing our individual liberties as a result.
Or maybe you seriously think you are on top of some pecking order?
The intentional population substitution taking place in Europe & N America - with Muzzies and Hispanics respectively - is being done with the intention of exacerbating existing class differences.
S America and MENA are the two remaining predominantly non-democratic regions that are ruled by elites with no concern as to economic disparities and/or challenges to their rule.
These types of command and control systems are now being put in place to service the advantage of elites in the cradle of Western Civ. The British aristocracy doesn't care if the lower classes are Cockney or Islamic; it's all part & parcel to them.
Same true stateside - who wants gun toting freemen aggressively asserting their rights when they can be replaced with willing & compliant, weak and small latinos?
I suggest that people should study a little bit of history. It is nothing really more than competition over scarce resources. The name of the game is to dominate & control adversaries - whether they be domestic or foreign. Slavery, indentured servitude, asset distribution, criminal justice, the list goes on that provides the mechanism for ensuring power & control.
Muzzies challenging Euro elites? LOL. The stupid and ignorant (Muzzy avg IQ is 92) can never hope to compete with 115-125 (avg IQ of elite).
Oh wow, so many comments. So little time traveling back home soon. Plus hard to type on iPad.
Yeah, everyone knows how strong and smart royalty has historically been. And how aristocrats are always better human specimens than peasants.
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