White people are smarter.

I'm not sure liberals (whoever they are. You americans are always talking about them) find the idea of racial inequality (assuming it is true, for sake of argument) undermining- more irrelevent. So what if group or person A is more or less intelligent than group or person B? They should still be treated the exactly same way. Anything else would be prejudice. I can't even really see the point in discussing the 'issue', even if it is true.


Also- talking about the core idea, that genetics might be a factor in varying human intelligence: I'm not sure how you could ever claim that it is genetic, as opposed to cultural and economic. The only scientific way you really test it would be to raise one baby of every race (after properly defining the term. There's no real, solid definition) in a blank room for 30 years without any kind of interference or external variables at all. Good luck with that!

I always considered a persons intelligence level to be based on their experiences in life. Sure you get the varying genius from time to time, but overall I doubt intelligence has anything to do with race. I'm mixed, does that make me twice as smart? I'd love to say it does, but nope.

Man, I don't think any of you even read the article because a lot of what you said has been refuted exactly in the article.

I'd have to agree with Elation here: intelligence shouldn't serve an argument in the hierarchy of people. I think people should be treated differently according to their (not their ancestor's) actions, and not some baseless IQ studies, their race, or their nationality.

WW: We read the article, we just think it's a load of old rubbish. =P

"Among white Americans, the average IQ, as of a decade or so ago, was 103. Among Asian-Americans, it was 106. Among Jewish Americans, it was 113. Among Latino Americans, it was 89. Among African-Americans, it was 85. Around the world, studies find the same general pattern: whites 100, East Asians 106, sub-Sarahan Africans 70. One IQ table shows 113 in Hong Kong, 110 in Japan, and 100 in Britain. White populations in Australia, Canada, Europe, New Zealand, South Africa, and the United States score closer to one another than to the worldwide black average. It's been that way for at least a century."

"Twin and sibling studies, which can sort genetic from environmental factors, suggest more than half the variation in IQ scores is genetic."

"How could genes cause an IQ advantage? The simplest pathway is head size. I thought head measurement had been discredited as Eurocentric pseudoscience. I was wrong. In fact, it's been bolstered by MRI. On average, Asian-American kids have bigger brains than white American kids, who in turn have bigger brains than black American kids. This is true even though the order of body size and weight runs in the other direction. The pattern holds true throughout the world and persists at death, as measured by brain weight."


"The more black and white scores differ on a test, the more performance on that test correlates with head size and "g," a measure of the test's emphasis on general intelligence. You can debate the reality of g, but you can't debate the reality of head size. And when you compare black and white kids who score the same on IQ tests, their average difference in head circumference is zero."



Now to address this culture stuff you guys have been saying:

"My first reaction, looking at this pattern, was that if the highest-scoring blacks are those who have lighter skin or live in whiter countries, the reason must be their high socioeconomic status relative to other blacks. But then you have to explain why, on the SAT, white kids from households with annual incomes of $20,000 to $30,000 easily outscore black kids from households with annual incomes of $80,000 to $100,000. You also have to explain why, on IQ tests, white kids of parents with low incomes ­and low IQs outscore black kids of parents with high incomes and high IQs. Or why Inuits and Native Americans outscore American blacks.

The current favorite alternative to a genetic explanation is that black kids grow up in a less intellectually supportive culture. This is a testament to how far the race discussion has shifted to the right. Twenty years ago, conservatives were blaming culture, while liberals blamed racism and poverty. Now liberals are blaming culture because the emerging alternative, genetics, is even more repellent.

The best way to assess the effects of culture and socioeconomic status is to look at trans-racial adoptions, which combine one race's genes with another's environment. Among Asian-American kids, biological norms seem to prevail. In one study, kids adopted from Southeast Asia, half of whom had been hospitalized for malnutrition, outscored the U.S. IQ average by 20 points. In another study, kids adopted from Korea outscored the U.S. average by two to 12 points, depending on their degree of malnutrition. In a third study, Korean kids adopted in Belgium outscored the Belgian average by at least 10 points, regardless of their adoptive parents' socioeconomic status.

Studies of African-American kids are less clear. One looked at children adopted into white upper-middle class families in Minnesota. The new environment apparently helped: On average, the kids exceeded the IQ norms for their respective populations. However, it didn't wipe out racial differences. Adopted kids with two white biological parents slightly outscored kids with one black biological parent, who in turn significantly outscored kids with two black biological parents. The most plausible environmental explanation for this discrepancy is that the half-black kids (in terms of their number of black biological parents) were treated better than the all-black kids. But the study shot down that theory. Twelve of the half-black kids were mistakenly thought by their adoptive parents to be all-black. That made no difference. They scored as well as the other half-black kids."


"One, better environments produce better results. Two, moms appear to make a difference, environmentally and biologically. (Their biological influence could be hormonal or nutritional rather than genetic.) Three, underneath those factors, a racial gap persists. One problem with most of the adoption studies is that as a general rule, genetic differences in IQ tend to firm up in adolescence. And in the only study that persisted to that point (the one in Minnesota), kids scored on average according to how many of their biological parents were black."




Now I love discussion, and I haven't made up my mind, but knee-jerk reactions aren't welcome.

4 words Worldweaver...You...are...an...idiot

Meteosync didn't read the article or my comments because if he did he'd realize I wasn't posting my opinion just responding to knee-jerk reactions from people.

Disturbed Puppy I totally agree and the article sums it up well.

"evidence actually teaches us.

1. Individual IQ can't be predicted from race. According to the data, at least 15 percent to 20 percent of black Americans exceed the average IQ of white Americans. If you think it's safe to guess that a white job applicant is smarter than a black one, consider this: The most important job in the world is president of the United States. Over the last seven years, the most important judgment relevant to that job was whether to authorize, endorse, or oppose the use of force in Iraq. Among the dozen viable candidates who have applied for the job, one is black. Guess which one got it right?

2. Subgroup IQ can't be predicted from race. Go back and look at the German study I mentioned yesterday. Kids fathered by black soldiers scored the same as kids fathered by white soldiers. The explanation offered by hereditarians was that blacks in the military were screened for IQ, thereby wiping out the racial IQ gap.

Think about that explanation. It undermines the claim, attributed to James Watson by the Times of London, that "people who have to deal with black employees" find equality untrue. (The Times purports to have Watson's interview on tape but hasn't published the whole quote or responded to requests for it.) If employment screens out lower IQs, you can't infer squat about black employees. And that isn't the only confounding factor. Every time a study highlights some group of blacks who score well, hereditarians argue that the sample isn't random. That may be true, but it's also true of the people you live next to, work with, and meet on the street. Every black person in your office could have an IQ over 120.

3. Whitey does not come out on top. If you came here looking for material for your Aryan supremacy Web site, sorry. Stratifying the world by racial IQ will leave your volk in the dust. You might want to think about marrying a nice Jewish girl from Hong Kong. Or maybe reconsider that whole stratification idea."

Meteosync wrote:

I don't have to read it, I just wanted to call you an idiot because you brought racism up from the Civil War days where we took dumps on blacks and told them they are stupid, and they replied "Yes sir". What are trying to do, bring another race supremacy movement into the world? God help us.

Could you please just read the goddamn article and my comments. Again, you're having a knee-jerk reaction to this and you're not the only one. This for liberals evokes the same kind of reaction as evolution for Christians.

Fucking-a man, you're not stupid, just irrational.