Race, Intelligence and Scientific Racists

[cogar66]

I've been witnessing more scientific racists as of late, I haven't actually engaged them myself as my knowledge about this whole thing is admittedly lacking, and I was wondering what good scientific papers and books you guys recommend reading about the subject. I haven't been able to find much and help is appreciated. Thanks!

[gendoikari]

I've been witnessing more scientific racists as of late, I haven't actually engaged them myself as my knowledge about this whole thing is admittedly lacking, and I was wondering what good scientific papers and books you guys recommend reading about the subject. I haven't been able to find much and help is appreciated. Thanks!

I'll have to find the source but the only one that had any real data that I've read only showed about a 1-2% difference on average between the "highest" group and the "lowest" group. And that's the average mind you. But I think 1-2% is well within a margin of error for these kinds of tests.

That being said Asians kick our ass in standardized tests.... but that has a lot more to do with the Japanese school system than race. Outside of the privatization of high schools they got it right.

[Azula]

Scientific racist is an oxymoron.

Racism is reactionary. Therefore it is anti-scientific.

[Nox]

That being said Asians kick our ass in standardized tests.... but that has a lot more to do with the Japanese school system than race. Outside of the privatization of high schools they got it right.

Don't even get me started on Japanese school systems...

Some Japanese schools train students to use an imaginary abacus, I saw a video of a 12 year old doing massive sums such as 36,784 x 106,915 in seconds using an imaginary abacus, he moved his fingers in thin air as if there was a real abacus infront of him.

[cogar66]

Scientific racist is an oxymoron.

Racism is reactionary. Therefore it is anti-scientific.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_racism

That's what they call themselves, I'm not saying they're right.

And this post doesn't really help me understand counter-arguments against them on a scientific level.

[Kosakk]

What's the point? Those racist are so tangled up in their own beliefs.

I once argued with an racist, it was like talking to a wall. He just went on throwing his "arguments" around without ever responding to my counter-arguments.

[cogar66]

What's the point? Those racist are so tangled up in their own beliefs.

I once argued with an racist, it was like talking to a wall. He just went on throwing his "arguments" around without ever responding to my counter-arguments.

Why read Marx?

I'm trying to educate myself as well as them.

[Kosakk]

Why read Marx?

I'm trying to educate myself as well as them.

True!

I was just trying to say you might be wasting time on arguing with them.
Sorry, but I don't know any good books or blogs on the subject, though.

[Azula]

The only thing they have is that scale where they point out that the people of Equatorial Guinea have a aggregated IQ of 59, which more likely is dependent on severe starvation for several generations (EG is a capitalist hellhole).

[NewSocialist]

I've been witnessing more scientific racists as of late, I haven't actually engaged them myself as my knowledge about this whole thing is admittedly lacking, and I was wondering what good scientific papers and books you guys recommend reading about the subject. I haven't been able to find much and help is appreciated. Thanks!

You might want to consult this thread on the subject, comrade: http://www.revleft.com/vb/answering-scientific-racists-t155361/index.html?t=155361

[gendoikari]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_racism

That's what they call themselves, I'm not saying they're right.

And this post doesn't really help me understand counter-arguments against them on a scientific level.

well I can't speak for all of them but it started out as a few people who just wanted to get real data, I can't speak for them being racist or not. Scientists just don't take things at face value. if a hypothesis is raised, we have a tendency to question it and study it. So far any scientific basis on racism has not bore any fruit. In fact the studies have shown more evidence that genetics is only loosely linked to intelligence period. It's also show that the probability of being a violent offender is only loosely based on genetics, but that didn't come out of any racial studies just a few general ones.

Odd thing was there was also found to only be a small correlation to environment, at least in the few factors that were studied. This has left many puzzled as the nature v nurture debate is coming out with an answer of .... neither.

at the end of the day, if you've been running into "scientific" racists, they aren't very scientific as the scientific community has investigated the subject and found little correlation to race and ability.

[¿Que?]

There's a guy we read a lot in sociology courses called Douglas Massey who really impressed me. I think he wrote a book critical of that bell curve book too. Worth a look, my memory is not so good though, so that's all I can really say about it.

[Tim Cornelis]

I think I may have killed the thread with that statistic :S (maybe not)


There's a guy we read a lot in sociology courses called Douglas Massey who really impressed me. I think he wrote a book critical of that bell curve book too. Worth a look, my memory is not so good though, so that's all I can really say about it.

Via that guy Massey I found a sociology professor name Tukufu Zuberi who wrote about racial statistics: Thicker Than Blood: How Racial Statistics Lie.

It sounds promising, however the above statistics seems pretty convincing (unless it used false data)—I doubt he discusses or refutes it though.

[Thirsty Crow]

I'd like to point out that school performance is very much connected to language, in the sense that people coming from a specific class background (in this case, class-racial background) might be speakers of a dialect, which can result in educational problems since the child is forced basically to acquire the standard as a kind of a second language.
This means that there is no equality of opportunity since there is no equality of conditions.

I'd suggest Peter Trudgill's "Introduction to Sociolinguistics" where these issues are discussed.

[Apoi_Viitor]

Statistics time.


Eyferth (1961) examined the IQs of several hundred German children fathered
by Black GIs during the post-1945 occupation and compared them with the
IQs of children fathered by White GIs. The children of the Black GIs had an
average IQ of 96.5. The children of the White GIs had an average IQ of 97.
Because the (phenotypic) Black–White gap in the military was similar to that for
the U.S. population, these data imply that the Black–White gap in the U.S.
population as a whole is not genetic, even in part (Flynn, 1980, pp. 87–88). The
results seem particularly telling because it seems highly likely that environmental
conditions were inferior for Black children.


Tizard, Cooperman, and Tizard (1972) studied Black and White children
assigned to a highly enriched institutional environment. At age 4 or 5, the White
children had IQs of 103, the Black children IQs of 108, and mixed-race children
IQs of 106. The Black children were West Indian and the White children were
English, and though it is possible that the Black children were born to more
intelligent parents than the White children, Flynn (1980) has argued that the
difference could have been only enough to eradicate the Black advantage in IQ
score, not to turn the advantage to the Black children.


If the Black–White IQ gap is largely hereditary, then children having one
Black and one White parent should have the same IQ on average, regardless of
which parent is Black. But if one assumes that mothers are particularly important
to the intellectual socialization of their children and if the socialization practices
of Whites are more favorable to IQ development than those of Black mothers,
then children of White mothers and Black fathers should have higher IQs than
children of Black mothers and White fathers. This could of course not have a
plausible genetic explanation. In fact, it emerges that children of White mothers
and Black fathers have IQs 9 points higher than children with Black mothers and
White fathers (Willerman, Naylor, & Myrianthopoulos, 1974). This result in itself
suggests that most of the Black–White IQ gap is environmental in origin. But
because mothers are not the only environmental influence on the child’s IQ, the
9-point difference might be regarded as a very conservative estimate of the
environmental contribution to the gap.

http://cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/sloth/nisbett-on-rushton-and-jensen.pdf

[Lucretia]

Scientific racist is an oxymoron.

Racism is reactionary. Therefore it is anti-scientific.

This kind of response concerns me, because your phrasing suggests you first arrive at a political position, then on the basis of that political judgment you start making scientific pronouncements. You are right that race is unscientific, but that has nothing to do with its political use -- either by black people struggling under the banner of racial solidarity, or by right-wing reactionary racists. It is unscientific because the category "race" is bereft of any actual content. Read Bob Carter's excellent "Realism and Racism" to get a fuller understanding of why.

The short explanation is that race is often used as a stand-in for multiple variables, some genotypically conditioned (such as skin color) and others cultural. And in cases where it is used to refer to genotypic differences, the category elides gradations of variance, so that a "white" person's skin color can be more similar to a "black" man's, than it is to other "white" men's.

[cogar66]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=76rUyKANIfw

1) Charles Murray's Longitudinal Study on the Relationship Between Income and IQ: http://www.webpondo.org/files/opinion/iq%20and%20economic%20success.pdf

2) World IQ Scores:

Richard Lynn and Tatu Vanhanen (2006). IQ and Global Inequality. Washington Summit Publishers: Augusta, GA. ISBN 1593680252

3) American Psychological Association Report on Intelligence

Intelligence: Knowns and Unknowns, American Psychologist, Feb 1996 Official Journal of the APA http://www.lrainc.com/swtaboo/taboos/apa_01.html

4) Race and Crime Correlation:

The g-Factor: The Science of Mental Ability (Human Evolution, Behavior, and Intelligence), Arthur R. Jensen, ISBN-10: 0275961036

5) Race and Skull Size:

Danielle Posthuma, Eco J.C. De Geus, Wim F.C. Baare, Hilleke E. Hulshoff Pol, Rene S. Kahn and Dorret I. Boomsma (2002). "The association between brain volume and intelligence is of genetic origin". Nature Neuroscience 5 (2): 83--84 http://www.nature.com/neuro/journal/v5/n2/full/nn0202-83.htm

Johnson, F.W.; Jensen (1994). "Race and sex differences in head size and IQ". Intelligence 18 (3): 309--33. http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/0160289694900329

6) Correlation Between Skull Size and IQ

Rushton, J. Philippe; Ankney, C. Davison (2009). "Whole Brain Size and General Mental Ability: A Review". International Journal of Neuroscience 119 (5): 692--732 http://informahealthcare.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00207450802325843

7) Race and Testosterone

Rushton, J. P. (1995). Race, Evolution, and Behavior: A Life History Perspective (2nd special abridged ed.). Port Huron, MI: Charles Darwin http://www.charlesdarwinresearch.org/Race_Evolution_Behavior.pdf

8) MAOA Gene, Violence, Impulsivity, and Race

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/01/090121093343.htm
http://brainethics.wordpress.com/2006/07/11/maoa-and-the-risk-for-impulsivity...
http://journal.nzma.org.nz/journal/120-1250/2441/

9) Heritability of IQ:

http://www.sciencemag.org/content/250/4978/223.long
http://www.springerlink.com/content/t0844nw244473143
http://cdp.sagepub.com/content/13/4/148
Intelligence: Knowns and Unknowns, American Psychologist, Feb 1996 Official Journal of the APA http://www.lrainc.com/swtaboo/taboos/apa_01.html

10) IQ Tests Are Not Biased, Controls for Income, Culture, Expectations, and Nutrition don't Eliminate the Race and IQ gap

Jensen A R. Bias in mental testing. New York: Free Press, 1980. 786 p. [University of California], Berkeley, CA

Neisser, Boodoo, Bouchard, Boykin, Brody, Ceci. "Intelligence: Knowns and unknowns". American Psychologist http://internal.psychology.illinois.edu/~brobert/Neisser%20et%20al,%201996,%2...

Mackintosh, Nicholas J. IQ and Human Intelligence. Oxford University Press, 1998, page 174. http://www.oup.com/us/catalog/general/subject/Psychology/CognitivePsychology/...

(Page 31-33) http://www.charlesdarwinresearch.org/Race_Evolution_Behavior.pdf

11) Genetic Markers for Race

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1196372/
http://www.sciencemag.org/content/298/5602/2381.abstract
http://www.springerlink.com/content/f53386k412547652

12) Anotomically Modern Humans Left Africa Between 60,000 to 125,000 years ago

http://www.english.globalarabnetwork.com/201004095443/Culture/british-archaeo...
http://anthropology.net/2011/01/27/125-year-old-hand-axes-from-jebel-faya-uae/
Martin Meredith (10 May 2011). Born in Africa: The Quest for the Origins of Human Life. PublicAffairs. p. 148. ISBN 9781586486631. Retrieved 14 June 2011. http://books.google.com/books?id=WrR9OShae2wC&pg=PT148#v=onepage&q&am...

12) Nisbit's Original Essay:

http://www-personal.umich.edu/~nisbett/racegen.pdf

13) I forgot to add this in the video, but Contrary to Nisbit's claims, the Race and IQ gap is not decreasing in the US. Furthermoreand the IQ Gains from Rigorous from Cognitive Interventions only show Improvement in IQ scores temporarily (they disappear entirely in the long run)

http://psychology.uwo.ca/faculty/rushtonpdfs/2006%20PSnew.pdf
http://www.charlesdarwinresearch.org/2010%20Review%20of%20Nisbett.pdf

Any responses to this?

I know Rushton is a pretty much bogus source but I don't know much about A. Jenson. Any critiques of Jenson out there?

[cogar66]

http://cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/sloth/nisbett-on-rushton-and-jensen.pdf
Besides this one.

[syndicat]

IQ is not a measure of "intelligence." Intelligence has to do with a variety of different skills...including skills that cannot be measured by some standardized test. so "IQ" is a misnomer. the name reflected the biases of the American eugenicists in the World War 1 era who propagated such tests, and drew fallacious inferences about racial, ethnic and class inferiority being genetic.

Alfred Binet, who invented what became the IQ test and standardized school tests based on it, never saw it as measuring some inherent trait. He wanted a measure that could find which school children were having a harder time learning, so more resources could be directed to bringing them up to speed.

one particularly significant study on race and intelligence was a study done of children in Germany whose mothers were German women and whose fathers were white and black GIs. the study showed that there were no significant differences in regard to performance on tests between the children of the white and black fathers.

It would be useful to read "The Mismeasure of Man" by Steven Jay Gould.

[cogar66]

Statistics time.







http://cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/sloth/nisbett-on-rushton-and-jensen.pdf

Apparently IQ moves more towards heritability as we get older. From 0.45 to 0.75, so those studies done on children are flawed.

[syndicat]

Apparently IQ moves more towards heritability as we get older. From 0.45 to 0.75, so those studies done on children are flawed. your first sentence is meaningless. anyway, they tracked them over time.

[Seresan]

If blacks have lower IQ's on average than whites, or Asians having higher IQ's than whites, It would be because of mistreatment, culture, stereotypes, education, poverty, and the like. Race has little to do with it. How the race is treated has everything to do with it.

Asian parents continue the tradition of hard work and dicipline with their American children, blacks growing up in ghettos with bigger things on their mind than school... Things like that are what create any divide there is. Racists create their own reasoning, in a way.

[black magick hustla]

don't bother with this discussion. "scientifc" racists are quacks and nobody takes them seriously. they only exist in the internet (because real science is jewish or some shit), methheads roleplaying nazis, and idk sad people in general, certainly not the vanguard of "whitedom" by any means

[CAleftist]

The problem with IQ tests is that they are inherently biased toward a certain set of standards; white, bourgeois, educated. People who score well on IQ tests tend to come from better-educated families, wealthier families, and those people tend to be white.

Furthermore, IQ tests only measure traits and abilities that have to do with analytical and logical intelligence. They don't score things like empathy, emotional stability, social skills, and most importantly, how a person applies their abilities-otherwise known as "work ethic."

Congratulations, you scored high on an IQ test. Doesn't tell you anything meaningful about a person, and regardless, dividing people up by "intelligence" is the most reactionary bullshit imaginable. Social Darwinism, anyone?

[Seresan]

[QUOTE=CAleftist;2212319]Furthermore, IQ tests only measure traits and abilities that have to do with analytical and logical intelligence. They don't score things like empathy, emotional stability, social skills, and most importantly, how a person applies their abilities-otherwise known as "work ethic."
QUOTE]

Nor does it include abstract invention, creativity, or artfulness. Those are the traits that can change society, and therefor the most important ones. What would develop if people could only work within pre-established boundaries?

[Book O'Dead]

I've been witnessing more scientific racists as of late, I haven't actually engaged them myself as my knowledge about this whole thing is admittedly lacking, and I was wondering what good scientific papers and books you guys recommend reading about the subject. I haven't been able to find much and help is appreciated. Thanks!

"Scientific" racism is in the same league as creationism.
For me the definitive text to rebut it is:

The Mismeasure of Man
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mismeasure_of_Man
Stephen Jay Gould
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Jay_Gould

[∞]

Indeed, infant malnutrition is proven to cause lower IQ in later life.

And the question is are they poor because they're dumb, or are they dumb because they're poor?

However, I think many on the left (and all progressives and moderates) have not not take a fair stance on the issue at hand because they're afraid any discussion on race will open op the opportunity of institutionalised racism.

Take these statistics:
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d0/1995-SAT-Income2.png

http://www.abag.ca.gov/bayarea/planning/5a.gif

I don't know if they are real, by the way.

To me, the whole issue of race is irrelevant. For example, let's assume we can indeed group races according to intelligence. That whites have higher intelligence than blacks, for example whites have an average IQ of 100 and blacks have an average IQ of 90... so what? Should whites therefore enjoy greater privileges? To argue this--like white supremacists do--is to say that a white individual with an IQ of 78 should have more privileges than a black person with an IQ of 130 by the mere fact that the average intelligence of their race of which they happen to be a member is higher and lower respectively! That's insane! People ought to be judged by their individual merits and actions, not by that of their race.

Three words. Neil Degrasse Tyson.