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by tasogare 2354 days ago
The point is that brain is an organ like any others, and thus also affected by the evolutionary pressure. Nothing is truly equal at birth between humans (or animals) except for twins so it’s really specious to consider that intelligence, which is based on a physical organ, is somehow magically exactly the same for everyone. And once the fact that there is indeed individual variations is accepted, it’s not too far stretched to understand why there could be a different average intelligence between population.

The second thing is most people interpret mean (average) wrongly. It does not mean that every individual of group X is less intelligent than group Y. If all those activists had a better mathematical education they could probably deal better with the facts instead of harassing people who state them.

1 comments

No-one denies that there are differences in average intelligence between different populations. The claim that there is variation in intelligence between populations is practically equivalent to the claim that there is variation between individuals in intelligence, since given individual variation, it must be the case that some groups of individuals will have higher means than others. This could only fail to be the case if nothing was correlated with intelligence.

The controversial (and incorrect) claims are (a) that there is a scientific notion of 'race' and (b) that genetic differences between these 'races' are responsible for certain observed differences between certain populations.