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[Arachno-capitalist]

Absolutely.

An intelligence test will ALWAYS be biased toward the point-of-view, educational-base, cultural-base, etc of the people who wrote the test.

...

It's all nurture, every last drop, I've never seen a study "proving" difference that didn't come down to the researchers blatantly ignoring the cultural factors involved.

So the IQ test (and every other measure of intelligence is a Jew/Asian conspiracy? Or is it a white conspiracy to make them look mediocre? I dont understand the motivations here.

Actually, theres plenty of study proving differences that have nothing to do with "nurture". Ever hear of retardation? child prodigies? Autism? etc, etc

[theinevitable]

dude, I don't give a fuck. Testing people's intelligence is a bullshit concept.
I am saying this as:
1. Someone who tests extremely well
2. A white guy
3. a psych major.

standardized tests just do not work well. environment has hell of influence on these things. and there is no way to eliminate the environmental effects, outside of creating some sort of Utopian Monolithic Society where Everyone is Treated Equally at All Times.

I mean, it is hell of impossible to cite this evidence as significant. I don't know that much about experimental methods (yet), but if there is such as A Sneeze in a Chemistry Experiment, they scrap the results. Intelligence is the sum total of a person's entirety of life experience up to that point... there's no way to differentiate "innate" IQ out...
it's just such a silly concept.

[Arachno-capitalist]

So when all the available data disagrees with your pre-determined conclusion you just write it off as hogwash?

[littlefallsmets]

It's not a conspiracy at all, arachnocapitalist. It's unavoidable cultural bias is all.

Nothing made by human hand can be neutral. It'll always be skewed by the assumptions of the human inventing it, even if the human is doing his or her hot-damnedest to not have bias.

Human condition. Renders such studies suspect at the very best to begin with.

And, yes, there's retardation and genius and autism and schizophrenia and so on.

And all of those gifts and differences occur across the "racial" spectrum, fairly uniformly, again, depending on how well a given culture is able to diagnose them, the environmental factors, the quality of medical care natally and in early life, etc.

These gifts and differences are a part of the overall gene pool, not any particular "race".

[theinevitable]

when the data comes from sources that cannot possibly correct for outside factors? yes.

[lprkn]

So, my understanding of the IQ test is that it basically grew out of the Eugenics movement as a way to measure intelligence, along with head size categorization. However, unlike skull size and Margaret Sanger's legacy, the IQ test has merely gone through many different variations in an attempt to remain relevant. The idea of a test that measures no-bullshit intelligence is an attractive one, but appears to me to be ultimately, somewhat like the unicorn.

[AugustWest]

A-CAP, please define "race" for us.

Since you are so certain it exists, perhaps you can describe it in a way that will allow us to definitively and scientifically use it as a distinguishing characteristic between any two given individuals.  What are the "races" and how do we place individuals into them?  What objective tests do we use to determine "race"?

[Doc]

Been talking about this all day with people at work, general consensus is:
a) Intelligence tests are generally culturally biased, as is the concept of intelligence. What's more intelligent: A dude fixing a computer or someone bringing down a deer using a stick and some rocks? Context is everything and if your background is different from the person giving you the test you're going to be at a disadvantage but this doesn't actually matter in this case because....

b) It doesn't seem like he's actually talking about a specfic study (except that Bell Curve book I've seen referenced a couple of times which is hardly recent data) more that he expects genetic evidence to prove him right in the long term, so until he has a study with reasonable power and significance I don't really care about his opinion. Seriously man, science doesn't care what you think, show me something. I might be wrong on this point and I'm sorry if I've missed something.

c) There are certainly differences between people of different ethnic backgrounds (or races or whatever you want to call them), since it seems to have become stupidly important in this thread I'll define race as people from a breeding group that is relatively large but that has also been relatively isolated for the last (at least) few thousand years and therefore certain genetic traits have become more common than in other breeding groups. Examples include: sickle cell anemia in african males and low alcohol tolerance in people of asian background due to lack of aldehyde dehydrogenase enzymes. Anyway the point is we are not all the same under the skin and this is important because it can have very significant impact on medical treatments especially when treating large numbers of people in impoverished areas, it's also a crying shame that people make such a fuss over this because it makes it harder to do research that suggests there is any difference without getting shouted down by people who care more about their narrow world view than reality. That said just because a trait is common in a particular race is no reason to apply it mindlessly to all people with that background, probability is great but just because 50% of some group have a probability of x each individual has a 100% probability one way or the other. On top of that intelligence is fuck*ng complex thing, nature vs. nurture and all that and I for one would be suprised if a varying levels of intelligence (however you want to define it) was simply a function of genetics, beyond severe disabilities natch.

and finally:
D) fuck*ng HELL WATSON! You discovered the double helix, why fuck with your legacy over some opinionated drivel. If you think there is actually a difference do a good study and present the data, that is how science fuck*ng works.

Aight, that's me done. Who's next?

[Arachno-capitalist]

A-CAP, please define "race" for us.

Since you are so certain it exists, perhaps you can describe it in a way that will allow us to definitively and scientifically use it as a distinguishing characteristic between any two given individuals.  What are the "races" and how do we place individuals into them?  What objective tests do we use to determine "race"?

I didn't invent the concept of race. But its just plain silly to say that there aren't recognizable broad groups of human beings from various common ancestries who, while still human, have developed as a population with a greater degree of genetic similarity than the world as a whole. A larger version of a family, if you will.

Tribe A migrates from NJ to Alaska and Tribe B migrates to Texas. If just by chance the members of 'A' happened to be slightly more intelligent than 'B' and continue to interbreed with each other and build a population then the traits originally dominant will, over a long period of time, approach a standard distribution, but in the period of transition may favor greater intelligence to a diminishing degree. When society advances so that they are able to travel and trade and date between tribes, the population size will lend towards an even more normal distribution. I believe the data show that since it has only been a couple hundred years of such substantial interaction between "races" that we are still approaching this normal distribution for all populations. In the meantime, however, the original differences of the migratory groups will persist to varying degrees.

The examples previously given by other members here serve to support this conclusion. Re: African-Americans vs. African IQ results, Jewish vs. European.

[AugustWest]

I think "there's no such thing as race" is just too vague and undefined a statement,

Then define "race".  In a scientific sense.

Clearly "race" exists, as a social construct if nothing else.  But we're talking about biology here, not sociology. 

What I understand you to be saying is that there is an objective classification system which may be used as a predictor of an individual's physical, intellectual or emotional characteristics.  So I'll ask again:

What is race?  What are the races?  How do we test for it?

Because it seems to me that unless we can agree on answers to those questions, any "scientific" study which uses "race" as a variable is pretty shaky.

[CortJstr]

Then define "race".  In a scientific sense.

Clearly "race" exists, as a social construct if nothing else.  But we're talking about biology here, not sociology. 

And "race" is widely variable depending on where you are. I've talked to European and Asian friends online who were dumbfounded to find out that in the US we consider White/Caucasian and Hispanic/Latino to be different things. They were like, "but people from Mexico are white. Why would you need a separate checkbox for them on a form?" Of course we do sometimes combine India, China, Japan, Korea, and Samoa all into one checkbox, which they found equally crazy.

[littlefallsmets]

And... even if you come up with something CLOSE to a "scientific" definition of a race...

A combination of ranges of parameters, facial features, flesh tones, etc?

You're never ever ever gonna find a "black" gene or a "white" gene or whatever.

You MIGHT even figure out what SEQUENCE of genes makes you fit those parameter.

But all of those genes are in every "racial" gene pool. If you had the time and the bread and the willing subjects, you could definitely "breed" a white-looking person out of a "black" gene pool and you could "breed" an Asian-looking person out of a "white" gene pool and so on.

Not to mention the cases that blow the whole argument to hell, such as Barak Obama definitely "looking" black but clearly being "half-white" or the Lana Lang on Smallville, definitely looking "Asian" but being "half-white" or so on.

And then... oh boy... the baseball players who you'd call "black" until they opened their mouths and their accent would suddenly make you wanna call 'em "Latin" in some fashion or manner.

Applying hard-science things like genetics and species definition to completely completely COMPLETELY culturally constructed concepts like "race" are total bullshit.

My brother and I have the same father and mother. We're Italian and Slovenian and Belorus in extraction. We're at the slavic-swarthy end of the "white" spectrum but if you asked 99.999% of Americans in the year 2007 what we are ethnically, you'd definitely say:

"White".

Same two parents, a full-blooded Slovenian woman, a half-Italian half-Belorus father. Everybody white.

And yet... even though we're full brothers and anyone would call us both white, we're both completely European in extraction...

I've seen many times where people ask my brother if he's some part Asian, because he has squinty eyes and thin jetblack hair.

And I've experienced many times where people assumed that I had a Jewish grandparent, because I have thick dark brown hair and a certain shape to my nose.

When he's with his girlfriend of full Thai extraction, he gets it even more.

When he's with multiple members of my dad's side of the family, he never gets it at all, because even though he has squinty eyes and thin jetblack hair, he's surrounded by very Italian looking people who he's clearly related to.

When I was in the Adirondacks, where there was almost no Jewish population, I never got it.

When I was in New York City... or at Syracuse University where the majority of students were from the NYC area... I got it all the time.

Race is a made-up thing for the purposes of the hard-sciences this dude is an expert in.

He has confused his expertice into another field and that's regrettable.

But it's also completely wrong.

[Arachno-capitalist]

Im not sure but I believe the subjects in the bell curve at least were self identified as "Asian", "Black","White", etc. On this level I dont see how a mistake could be made. (We certainly expect a much higher level of detail when asking college students to identify themselves on applications for scholarships, or public employees on job applications). Its pretty easy to know what continent you're from. Further, it generates a large sample size for each group and thus more accurate results.
Ethnicity has been and will continue to be used in scientific studies. Im not the guy who decided it was real and useful, that was decided by a community of people with many more letters after their names.

[AugustWest]

Im not sure but I believe the subjects in the bell curve at least were self identified as "Asian", "Black","White", etc. On this level I dont see how a mistake could be made. (We certainly expect a much higher level of detail when asking college students to identify themselves on applications for scholarships, or public employees on job applications). Its pretty easy to know what continent you're from. Further, it generates a large sample size for each group and thus more accurate results.

Ok, so what is the criteria?  Geographic?  If I'm a native of the area between the Caucausus and the Pacific Ocean?  Therefore Turks and Japanese are racially equivalent?

Or is it a skin tone thing?  What is the exact epidermically reflected wavelength that divides a "Black" from a "White"?  Where do albinos fit in?  Or over-zealous tanners?
 

Ethnicity has been and will continue to be used in scientific studies. Im not the guy who decided it was real and useful, that was decided by a community of people with many more letters after their names.

Ah.  The appeal to authority.  Let's see how you respond to an analogous argument.

Many well known and degreed political and economic scholars (e.g.Marx, Engels and Lenin) agree that communism is a useful and effective system for running a country.  Therefore it must be true.

Im not the guy who decided it was real and useful, that was decided by a community of people with many more letters after their names.

OK, fair enough.  If you can't give me your own definition of "race", give me the current definition approved by the folks with many letters after their names.

[KeithHernandez]

Many well known and degreed political and economic scholars (e.g.Marx, Engels and Lenin) agree that communism is a useful and effective system for running a country.  Therefore it must be true.

Well, you got that part right.



Also, there is only one race that scientists have been able to identify--that being the human race.  That is not to say that A-CAP is completely wrong, just, well, way overzealous.  I am in the whole nurture camp myself, but if changes could occur to change color, could they not have changed other things within a group?