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Comment by graemep | Hacker News Reader

Given he said it in 2007, pretty much no evidence to back it up. Genetic differences between races are small compared to those within races, so much so that the concept of races does not really stand up scientifically.

He seemed to have been basing the comments on IQ tests, which are not really a good way of comparing groups of people with different cultures or education. They score an individual within a group of comparable individuals.

It is worth noting that if he had made the same statement in the first half of the 20th century it would have been mainstream science, but even then it was not so much supported by evidence but supported by a lack of evidence showing otherwise.

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> Genetic differences between races are small compared to those within races.

That is a very misleading statement. Height differences within sexes are also greater than between sexes, and yet most men are taller than most women.

No your the one that's being misleading, genetics isn't height and race isn't a coherent genetic category.

It should be noted that Watson knew this hence why he was focused on the one thing you can say very definitely about black people in America, that they have darker skin then white people and thus was trying to tie melanin to to intelegence.

Distributions are distributions. I have not stated anything on the race and intelligence issue. I am just calling out a statistical fallacy.

There are multiple significant biological differences between the sexes. There are not between races. Different races do not have entirely different organs for a start!

The parent to my post shared a common fallacy, and I’m just showing how distributions work in a way that most people will agree with and understand. You should appreciate my post if you are interested in proper statistical comprehension.

Nonsense. By 2007 it was already a settled matter. There had been decades of attempts to tease out environmental influences. We’d seen that no amount of education funding, government employment, government schools, adoption by white parents, or any other way of approaching the matter would boost black test scores close to whites’ in America. Nor could blacks find a way themselves to do it, not in any locality. It was also clear by that time that serious environmental influences on individuals were small relative to the observed performance differences between blacks and whites, which meant the theory that its environment would imply insane levels of deprivation that weren’t happening. Social scientists had already given up.

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