The question is who you believe and, more importantly, what you want to believe. Based on that you will pick theories, arguments, and studies. There are geneticists who argue that from a genetics point of view there is no evidence that, as far as humans are concerned, there is such a thing as race. There are different ethnic groups. The concept of race is an ideological one, not a scientific one. But, Ken, not "the experts" came to horrible conclusions about the Jews in the 1930s and earlier but some self-proclaimed "experts" did. They were never generally accepted by the scientific community. Nor did "people" (i.e. not all) accept these ideas just because they had been written down by some "experts". What was taught as "racial science" in the Third Reich was no scientific theory either. The majority of people wouldn't have taken note of those concoctions. It took an orchestrated powerful ideological campaign not just run by a party but by a totalitarian state permeating the whole society and being combined with terror against people with different views for many years for those crude concepts to be hammered into people's mind with some success. But even then they did not reach everyone. When it comes to defining and measuring intelligence, the IQ and logical-mathematical intelligence are often referred to exclusively as if there weren't other forms of intelligence such as emotional, verbal-linguistic, musical, spatial intelligence, etc. Likewise, intelligence is not to be equated with education since both are only indirectly related to each other. I agree with Ken when he says that differences "have more to do with culture, poverty, growing up in single-parent homes, or without the same support structure that others are more likely to have" ,let me add, ...had over decades, generations, and centuries.
I understand and appreciate that. Discussion is far more helpful than shaming people into hiding the things they believe. You believed a study that probably sounded reliable, and maybe it is. I don't know, but since it contradicts things that I do know about black people I am familiar with, I don't believe it.
It was presented and taught as science. Are there sometimes political and other motivations behind the science? Yes, I believe that there often are, and that's a part of the reason why I don't think we should be too quick to believe the experts. The Nazi scientists were the only ones the people were allowed to hear, as those who disagreed were fired from their positions, forced to flee the country, jailed, or killed. The Nazi experts were the only ones given a voice by the German media. But this wasn't restricted to Germany. Racial eugenics was all the rage in the United States at the time, too. That's quite a lot like what we have going on here in the United States, and elsewhere around the world, today, on several topics. The experts are being used to advance political goals, and to persuade people to set aside their common sense and believe things that they wouldn't otherwise believe.
Thomas, Your first sentence doesn't apply, at least in my case. I don't "want" to believe that all people don't have, on average, equal potential. Honestly, I'd wish the opposite were true.
It doesn't have to. I've meant this in a very general sense anyway. Admittedly, it was an abridged statement. What I was trying to say is that due to their socialisation, their upbringing, their concrete living conditions and many other influencing factors people hold a range of fundamental political beliefs that make some people impressionable to certain ideas and concepts and others not. In other words, those people who find the idea of racial differences attractive anyway because it makes them feel as if they belonged to a master or superior race (as happened in Germany in the 1930s), will also be more likely to absorb anything that encourages and strengthens those core beliefs. (That's what I meant by saying they want to believe this because it has a certain charm for them.) Again differently said: Certain theories or studies can't shape a person's views of the world unless there is a receptiveness for them.
Thomas, Perhaps I'm a little dense. I'm not understanding you. "Certain theories or studies that can't shape a person's views of the world unless there is a receptiveness for them." Vaguely, I think you're saying that some science is so tempered by the "wishes" of the advocate that it can't , in the end, be "science" at all. But I;m not at all sure that's what you mean.
I have a few more things to say on this issue. Wikipedia's article on The Bell Curve is universally derisive of it and I find some of their positions valid but others not. The fact that some of the studies in this area were carried out by racists or near-racists or funded by racists (such as The Pioneer Fund ) cannot negate anything that is truly factual. Good science simply doesn't care who sourced it. I'm not proclaiming that studies examining racial differences are all "good" science, merely that a fact is a fact without regard to who wants it to be or not to be. For all this article's criticisms it fails to answer some core questions. Is racial inequality in intelligence possible? Is there evidence for it? I find one position of the naysayers inexplicable - that intelligence is not inheritable. It's obvious that high or low intelligence runs in families. Don't take this as bragging because I'm not doing that, but in my own family my brother, a little above me in age, and my sister, a little below, both graduated as valedictorians of their large high school class, while I, who was smarter than either of them ( but dysfunctional ) managed only an average ranking. My parents were effectively absent in the sense of encouraging things that might lead to high intelligence. We each had vastly different experiences and educational opportunities. Yet we were all (how can I say it ) very smart. I see similar results for families of lower IQ. If one's brothers and sisters are on the dumb side then it's likely that the one will be dumb too. There are, of course, exceptions to this but they are just that - exceptions. I don't see where all of it can be subscribed to environmental factors. I hesitate to post this. It sounds arrogant and I'm not an arrogant person. But here goes.
Does the argument that intelligence (or the lack of it) runs in families necessarily imply that it runs in races of people? I know plenty of white people who are dumb as a rock.
I very much appreciate your thoughtful disagreements. Yes, plenty of white people are dumb, but what intelligence running in families suggests is that intelligence is inheritable, If so, that heritability absolutely must apply to "races" if it applies to individual families within that race. Is this not obvious?
I got this image from https://newrepublic.com/article/120887/race-genes-and-iq-new-republics-bell-curve-excerpt It's long and I have yet to read it. There is a lot of overlap, so whites should not get too cocky. Occasionally our paper will print the results of the state assessments of school performance. Invariably the districts from more affluent neighborhoods outperform middle class ones. These are all primarily white. Bell curves of those results probably look a lot like the one above. I'm white.
That graph is not too clear. It shows everything mixed. together , even though.the labels imply the left side peak is for blacks and the right side peak is for whites. It would be better if it showed a separate graph. for each race superimposed over each other without the mixing.
Then, what I'd like to know is this..............why is it, each Monday AM, when I open the front page of the Internet, there is story after story of black shootings/killings of each other? Houston, Chicago, Dallas and on and on. Yes, there is whites that kill each other, but, from Monday stores, blacks do it much, much more. Now, in talking about this, would that make me a racist?
I am racist I believe in the human race no matter their differences. If I was a racist against any other type like color I am in the wrong place as I am the only white for 5 miles and even my children are mixed as you can see by my avatar. As I said in another thread my wife one time said it would rain and there was not a cloud in the sky I laugh and checked the weather satellite, not a cloud in site and the local weather station said no rain. Not two hours later we had one heavy rain storm. I asked how you knew she said I smelled it I did not question any more. My wife with? IQ knows more than all the climate experts. Special talents are not checked by IQ
Well, what I really think is, people, in general, don't like talking about "racist or not" or "racism" in general. Just like there are those that are open minded and those that are not or not that much. A lot of people don't like talking about certain things that can tend to lead to remarks they may get. There are many topics that some "go with the flow" and others get disgusted over.
Ed, that graph is quite obscure (or maybe my IQ is too low to interpret it. ) ETA-- From that article: "We might start with a common question in America these days: Do Asians have higher I.Q.s than whites? The answer is probably yes, if Asian refers to the Japanese and Chinese (and perhaps also Koreans), whom we will refer to here as East Asians... " I think it is generally accepted that Asians have a higher IQ, but that doesn't make me hate Asians or feel like a racist. We somehow keep forgetting that there are others on this planet besides black or white.