'black people are less intelligent than white people'.....

[Thranduil]

Just the man I'm looking for. Have you heard the recent analysis on the so-called warrior gene?

People with 'warrior gene' better at risky decisions - life - 09 December 2010 - New Scientist

How it expresses itself, it seems, is very much environmental.

It is arguable whether that is a positive trait or not however. It could be either...

There are lots of people in prison for example who gambled the 'risky' option and lost. There are a lot of financial gamblers who make themselves very rich taking risky options but at the expense of society in general (i am especially considering Anglo). The ability to ignore possible negative consequences of one's choices is a controversial one.

[Capt Blah]

Sounds a bit like those studies of Hans Eysenck which purported to show that black - and Irish - people are inherently less intelligent.If i remember right he tried to demonstrate that Jewish folk are meaner as well.Classic examples of confirmation bias and now hopelessly discredited-yet endlessly quoted.Sometimes it's depressing coming on this site.I'm off out to talk to some genetically inferior chaps,ie nearly everyone according to the mad Prof Hans..........

Regrettably IQ testing has often been misused to reinforce racist bigotry.

But we should not therefore presuppose that that is what is happening when a person dares to mention this issue - there are legitimate questions about racial variances in intelligence which we should be able to address without fear, so long as we are motivated by scientific interest rather than racism.

As I stated in my previous posting, a reasoned exploration of these issues could lead to improved understanding of evolutionary processes and/or better methods of employing psychometric instruments across different ethnic groups.

We should not fence-off certain topics and declare them unacceptable.

[TheOneTruth]

Oh FFS not even going to read this thread.

[Cael]

Perhaps we should dismiss medical science too, after all it recommended bloodletting in the 19th century too.

Note that the existence of group differences is different from understanding the causes. Those won't be understood until the genes associated with cognitive traits are identified.

But your missing the point (not surprising, given your unfortunate genes). Science in the 19th century couldnt really say anything about racial intelligence, but it put forward a huge amount of stats and data that seemed to indicate that there could be something to what it was trying to say - specially for racists who were dying to have some justification for their imperialist exploitation of their empires. Today, it is no different. The IQ tests being used are entirely culture specific. People from highly regimented societies will always do better in them - since they are really just designed to test an instrumentalist mindset, not intelligence. And, as you admit, nothing much is understood about the relation between genetic structure and intelligence - or even if there is such a connection.

[reknaw]

But your missing the point (not surprising, given your unfortunate genes). Science in the 19th century couldnt really say anything about racial intelligence, but it put forward a huge amount of stats and data that seemed to indicate that there could be something to what it was trying to say - specially for racists who were dying to have some justification for their imperialist exploitation of their empires. Today, it is no different. The IQ tests being used are entirely culture specific. People from highly regimented societies will always do better in them - since they are really just designed to test an instrumentalist mindset, not intelligence. And, as you admit, nothing much is understood about the relation between genetic structure and intelligence - or even if there is such a connection.

+ 10

[Chi019]

But your missing the point (not surprising, given your unfortunate genes). Science in the 19th century couldnt really say anything about racial intelligence, but it put forward a huge amount of stats and data that seemed to indicate that there could be something to what it was trying to say - specially for racists who were dying to have some justification for their imperialist exploitation of their empires. Today, it is no different. The IQ tests being used are entirely culture specific. People from highly regimented societies will always do better in them - since they are really just designed to test an instrumentalist mindset, not intelligence. And, as you admit, nothing much is understood about the relation between genetic structure and intelligence - or even if there is such a connection.

1. If they simply measured a particular mindset there wouldn't be differences in terms of neurobiology. I posted this above, neuroscientists are making considerable progress in identifying the regions of the brain that underpin intelligence.

www.yale.edu/scan/GT_2004_NRN.pdf -

2. I'm not referring to administering tests to Bushmen (although there are tests which also show the Chiefs tend to do better) I'm talking about tests administered to people in Western countries.

3. While the gene variants linked with intelligence are not identified, that is likely to happen in China. The thing to keep in mind is that groups show different frequencies for various genes already, so I'm not confident that they'll be identically distributed for genes relating to neurological functions.

The BGI was the first outfit to clone pigs, and it has developed a new and more effective way of cloning mammals that might ultimately be applied to humans, if that were ever permitted.

But the organisation is involved in even more controversial projects. It is about to embark on a search for the genetic underpinning of intelligence. Two thousand Chinese schoolchildren will have 2,000 of their protein-coding genes sampled, and the results correlated with their test scores at school. Though it will cover less than a tenth of the total number of protein-coding genes, it will be the largest-scale examination to date of the idea that differences between individuals’ intelligence scores are partly due to differences in their DNA.

Dr Yang is also candid about the possibility of the 1,000-genome project revealing systematic geographical differences in human genetics—or, to put it politically incorrectly, racial differences. The differences that have come to light so far are not in sensitive areas such as intelligence. But if his study of schoolchildren does find genes that help control intelligence, a comparison with the results of the 1,000-genome project will be only a mouse-click away.

A special report on the human genome: The dragon's DNA | The Economist