So pointing out differences in intelligence is now racist?
If you are precise, and nuanced, you can say something similar without being a racist shitbag about it. The following things are all true, and probably drove the GP to his statement:
* We're largely talking about Asian-Americans, not Asians.
* Most Asian-American families have a strong focus on academics and education, from a young age
* Most Asian-American families have the socio-economic status and familial support that allows them to focus on academics and education in the first place
* Because of the environmental and cultural aspects mentioned above, Asian-Americans, in aggregate, score disproportionately higher on standardized tests than other groups, in aggregate
Nothing racist about any of the points above but they could absolutely drive someone to say "Asians are smarter" if they're willing to ignore the nuance.
Kind of sad to see how many people use throwaway accounts to comment on this thread. My previous comment is flagged.
The scarier thing is that the researchers themselves are also subject to this policing, though with a little more leeway allowed. But they can still get ostracized for making the wrong findings and you get ridiculous cases where the published data from a study clearly shows the opposite of what the conclusion says because the authors are scared of punishment from their peers. In one case, an author openly admitted this was his reason after people were confused about the apparent contradiction.
Economic and sociological factors make a massive difference to population IQ scores and are very difficult to control for because we don’t know what all the factors that influence it are.
I don't see why we should be blinding ourselves to any difference that happens to fall along racial lines. It seems like an overwhelming majority of the time once the issue is studied we find out it has nothing to do with genetics or race anyway and that it's something socioeconomic and cultural that applies to everybody and it happens to correlate with race for historical reasons. We have no problem studying mostly isolated cultures (e.g. the Amish, some tribe in the Amazon, etc) in a clinical manner without people getting their panties in a knot. Why is this not true for big groups?
Put simply, some populations have physical adaptations that make them better at certain things - be it lung capacity from ancestry in bolivia, lighter / skinnier legs from ancestry in kenya, or whatever. That's uncontroversial.
Why do we all accept without question that population genetics play a somewhat key role in athletic pursuits, but insist that intelligence or mental acuity is distributed perfectly evenly across the entirety of humanity? It doesn't really pass the smell test to be honest.
Physical challenges are unevenly distributed. Some places are very hot and others are very cold. Some places are high elevation. Bodies have adapted to these differences to produce the physical differences across races. The brain solves for the challenge of life and life is difficult everywhere. What the brain adapted to is evenly distributed.
However, I'd like to play devil's advocate with a thought experiment. Specifically, I'd like to address your fundamental assumption of equally distributed evolutionary pressure. It's true of our ancient history (which covers most of human existence), but it feels premature to ignore the potential impact of modern human societies over the last few millenia.
Imagine two identical human groups, one which spends 1000 or so years in an urban or quasi-urban setting, and one which spends the same time as hunter gatherers. Seems like some traits would be self-selected more heavily in one group vs the other based purely on environmental pressure. I.e. someone gifted with an above-average capacity for abstract modeling, but with - say - severe myopia, would find it easier to procreate in an environment where their skills are valued and their physical limitations negated, and vice versa.
Human history is long, but reproductive pressure can have a discernible impact on a population even over the relatively short time scale covered by human civilization. It's an imperfect analogy, but for instance new dog breeds only require a handful of generations (<10) to be both physically and behaviorally discernible. Why should reproductive pressures applied by different social environments, stretched over millenia, not have an impact on human populations?
I disagree with several points made here. Firstly, I would question your reasoning behind the prerequisite of the population being "small", because in fact larger societies face different and more complex challenges than small ones, which in turns favors the ability to navigate the challenges of large human groups. More to the point, environmental pressure is applied regardless of a group's size.
Secondly, an isolated population does not eliminate the vast majority of humanity - far from it. While there's always some form of mobility between societies, until very recently that was a relatively rare phenomenon. By and large people lived and died within artillery distance of where they were born.
> including any racist notions like "asian" or "black."
This is actually the first time I've heard those designations described as 'racist', but that's somewhat orthogonal and more of a passing observation
> In your dog metaphor, it's like looking at a dachshund and then saying "all dogs with short hair are also have short legs."
I don't follow this extension to my analogy, which is probably a reflection of the problems of using analogies as a discussion aid in the first place
> Between the occasional plague and the occasional famine, you have times of war and times of peace. You have changing aesthetics, shifting cultures, values gained and lost.
Yes, but at its core an urban, even if premodern, existence places emphasis on different skill sets than a hunter gatherer lifestyle. This goes back to my point above about the social challenges of navigating large human groups - aesthetics can change, but figuring out how to grapple with complex social dynamics, as opposed to taming nature, is a constant (and one closely correlated with the evolution of human intelligence to boot)
Species can and do evolve different adaptations to the same evolutionary pressures. Bret isn't convincing.
First, because minds are tremendously complex and much less well understood than things like fast and slow twitch muscles. That we see different distributions in one does not imply different distributions in another.
Second, because we have tremendous evidence of clear bias, discrimination, and oppression of certain groups and a direct link to confounds that make claims about people of certain races just being genetically smarter amazingly messy.
Third, because for physical characteristics we don’t use broad racial categories but instead use ethnicities. “Black people” don’t have the specific physical characteristics that enable the absolute peak of running capabilities. Specific subgroups do. Expanding to racial categories (that were invented by humans to justify slavery and colonialism) is fraught with peril.
Fourth, because discussion of physical traits usually looks at the very very very peak while discussion of intelligence is usually a broad claim about all members of a race. This is not the same thing.
And finally, because these arguments have been used for centuries to justify literal enslavement. To justify denying voting rights. To justify all manner of horrors because it was just obvious to eugenicists that black people were less developed. And we should be extra careful of claims that, if followed carelessly, lead to genocide.
The second one, I don't think anybody says that there is no nurture component. Acknowledging theoretical possibility of a nature component via genetics is not saying that there is no nurture component, and that it does not confound any test. We would need to design better tests.
For third, that is just a definition issue. You're saying that it is wrong to investigate differences between races, but fine to do so for ethnicities. So, let us look if there are cognitive differences between different ethnicities?
Fourth is just downright false. Subgroups living in Africa are generally darker, taller, and better runners. Subgroups in east Asia generally shorter. None of the statements about physical characteristics or intelligence are about extremes or broad strict inequalities about all members. They are always statistical distributions over the whole population.
Fifth is the crux of the matter. Are we going to stop scientific inquiry because of that? Instead of trying to stop scientific inquiry, we should debate why our liberal values are useful and should hold even if there are genetic components that determine intelligence.
Intelligence is just one small aspect out of many of what it means to be a human. It isn't special any more than having freckles is. We really need to dissolve the cult we have created around it.
To the extent that IQ means anything at all (it doesn't, past about 100), there are much greater inter-personal differences than inter-group differences, except when one of the groups is explicitly disadvantaged by the test (e.g. the test is administered in the first language of one group and the second language of the other).