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by barry-cotter 2354 days ago
> Every result ever has pointed that all races and genders are equally "intelligent" and well-suited to the same tasks.

This isn’t true. Ashkenazi Jews and East Asians have higher IQ scores than whites. Male and female scores on IQ tests are identical by construction. They have different scores on the component sub tests.

http://www1.udel.edu/educ/gottfredson/reprints/1997mainstrea...

Mainstream Science on Intelligence: An Editorial With 52 Signatories, History, and Bibliography

Since the publication of “The Bell Curve,” many commentators have offered opinions about human intelligence that misstate cur- rent scientific evidence. Some conclusions dismissed in the media as discredited are ac- tually firmly supported. This statement outlines conclusions re- garded as mainstream among researchers on intelligence, in particular, on the nature, ori- gins, and practical consequences of individu- al and group differences in intelligence. Its aim is to promote more reasoned discussion of the vexing phenomenon that the research has revealed in recent decades. The follow- ing conclusions are fully described in the major textbooks, professional journals and encyclopedias in intelligence.

2 comments

I suggest going back to school on your basic terms. Skin color taxonomies such as "white" and "black" are weak proxies for genetic diversity. Races are not taught this way anymore. This article in Scientific American puts it well in summarizing that "the mainstream belief among scientists is that race is a social construct without biological meaning."^1 "Ashkenazi Jews ... have higher IQ scores than whites" is a nonsensical statement from that perspective. You are mixing categories of ancestry and skin color. The authors of Bell Curve made the same basic mistake and were rightly skewered for it.

1. https://www-scientificamerican-com/article/race-is-a-social-...

Apply principal component analysis to human DNA, and not only does race pop out, it even coincides with the 'socially constructed' categories [1,2,3]. A 2009 survey of physical anthropologists in Europe by Katarzyna Kaszycka found that 51% (N=123) recognize biological race - 33% in Western Europe, and 70% in Eastern Europe [4]. In a review of China's only biological anthropological journal Acta Anthropologica Sinica, 324 article from the 1982-2001 period that dealt with human variation. The researchers found that "all of the articles used the race concept and none of them questioned its value" [5].

[1] https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Principal_compon...

[2] https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Individual-level_hum...

[3] https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:3D_PCA_plot_of_Xavan...

[4] http://sci-hub.tw/10.1111/j.1548-1433.2009.01076.x

[5] https://lesacreduprintemps19.files.wordpress.com/2011/07/on-...

Do you have studies that use better taxonomies of "race"? Or do you mean any statement about race is so confounded by social factors it becomes nonsensical.

Also, The original claim was:

> Every result ever has pointed that all races and genders are..

If you muddy the water wrt race, it invalidates the above claim also.

Those bell curves don't control for environmental and other non-genetic factors, making your statements - insofar as they are based on the document you linked - irrelevant to the conversation.
He wasn't commenting on which factors cause difference in test scores. He was simply saying that the test scores are different.

But it's become an unfortunate pattern that when people bring up the difference in scores, other people (like you) presume that mentioning the correlation data itself is akin to arguing that they are caused by genetic factors, and then attack them for not mentioning the environmental factors.

This is disingenuous. Did you miss where he mentioned "whites" without any context of location/upbringing/...
There you go again, attacking him for not mentioning the environmental factors.

You are too predictable. You just did exactly the behavior I criticized, in response to my critique!