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points by pingou 23 hours ago | 0 comments

I don't think many people dispute the fact that the environment plays a role in intelligence. Not even many people dispute that there is some heritability to intelligence. What is in dispute is whether that heritability means that some races are on average genetically more intelligent than others (and another problem is how to define intelligence).

[–] graemep 20 hours ago

How do you define races? As I said in another comment definitions shift and they are different in different countries. I have an encyclopedia from the 1950s that defines South Asians as "Caucasoid". Some East Africans were also defined as "Caucasoid" historically.If we define races on the basis of genetic similarity then almost everyone whose ancestry is from Eurasia is the same "race", but people whose ancestry is African belong to multiple races.

[–] pigpop 16 hours ago

Race was only ever a stand in before we had an accurate understanding of genetics.

[–] graemep 14 hours ago

Yes, but people seem very reluctant to accept that. They keep trying to pretend that genetics backs their culture's definitions.

[–] thin_carapace 23 hours ago

I don't understand how the precedents could lead to any question regarding the disputed conclusion

[–] logicchains 22 hours ago

If we define intelligence as IQ then the evidence is overwhelming that the average differs among races. Even in Singapore, which has a very high standard of living, nutrition etc., we still see Chinese Singaporeans perform significantly better than Malay Singaporeans on various measures of intelligence, with Indian Singaporeans somewhere in the middle. The same pattern is seen among Chinese, Indians and native Malaysians in Malaysia, and globally when we compare the mean IQ scores of China, India and Malaysia.

[–] graemep 20 hours ago

There are significant cultural and economic differences between those communities. These will be similar between Singapore and Malaysia. The Chinese and Indians are sufficiently recent immigrants for their culture to still have a lot in common (they speak the same language, follow the same religions, have inherited attitudes) with the places their ancestors came from.

[–] pingou 21 hours ago

That could also be explained by cultural differences, I don't think the evidence is overwhelming.

Or it could be discrimination. There are studies that show that black and white mixed races children did not score any higher than children with two black parents, while white people score higher than black people on average, which may point to some discrimination impacting IQ.

[–] JuniperMesos 20 hours ago

Discrimination against whites in favor of blacks doesn't lower white IQ.

[–] tptacek 12 hours ago

No, you mean to say "if we define intelligence as the output of IQ testing", which clarifies that you're projecting from statistical surveys (with all sorts of potential confounders) rather than some directly queryable and innate attribute of people.