Some comments about "race" and "intelligence"

Brad, I thought surely someone as obsessed with IQ as you would have considered it. What is your IQ? Mine is 130 which barely qualifies me as "moderately gifted" but was good enough for Mensa membership. You should try to join or at least see if you can attend an event as a guest. Experiencing "high IQ" people socially might make you re-think the merits of having a high IQ absent any other entrance requirements beyond the modest annual membership fee.

Post 81

Friday, May 11, 2012 - 6:59pm

I harp on IQ and brain data because it refutes, objectively, the widespread denial that biology plays even a partial role in explaining the racial disparities. If the egalitarians would stop promoting their fairy tale version of human evolution, then I'd happily move on to something else.

I think my INTJ personality type is more indicative of how I think than my IQ (132 according to a short Internet test) or SAT scores (I did better than the average Asian on the math part):

The Scientist
"Other people may have a difficult time understanding an INTJ. They may see them as aloof and reserved... Others may falsely perceive the INTJ as being rigid and set in their ways. Nothing could be further from the truth, because the INTJ is committed to always finding the objective best strategy to implement their ideas. The INTJ is usually quite open to hearing an alternative way of doing something."
http://www.personalitypage.com/INTJ.html

I think a lot of people here are INFPs:

The Idealist
"INFPs do not like to deal with hard facts and logic. Their focus on their feelings and the Human Condition makes it difficult for them to deal with impersonal judgment. They don't understand or believe in the validity of impersonal judgment, which makes them naturally rather ineffective at using it. Most INFPs will avoid impersonal analysis, although some have developed this ability and are able to be quite logical. Under stress, it's not uncommon for INFPs to mis-use hard logic in the heat of anger, throwing out fact after (often inaccurate) fact in an emotional outburst."
http://www.personalitypage.com/INFP.html

Post 82

Friday, May 11, 2012 - 7:19pm

I am an ISTJ but I have heard Ayn Rand described as an INTJ. In any case, my point about Mensa is that its members tend to wander all over the map outside the bounds of reason. You should read some of the wackiness in its lengthy "Letters to the Editor" section of the monthly American Mensa Bulletin.

Let us assume for a moment that you had wide agreement in this forum that strong correlations exist between geographic genetic heritage (aka race) and intelligence that science could not explain as due to other factors.

What of it?

What exactly do you expect us to do with this?

Other than abolishing so-called "Affirmative Action" quota laws and other specious violations of private property rights -- laws which Objectivists oppose anyway on moral grounds of the right to free association -- what do you propose happen next?

This is a little like the notorious survey taken many years ago that led radical feminists to call all men "potential rapists" because the survey results showed most men as being willing to rape women if they knew that could get away with it. We could have all sorts of fun with that one. The problem with tests, surveys, etc. is that they never tell the whole story. So I do not take these IQ tests and their racial correlations that seriously.

As I said, I invite you to join Mensa to experience the full effect of your own ideas for a while.

Post 83

Friday, May 11, 2012 - 8:28pm

Brad, you are a racist because you apply statistics in ways that disparage individual members of a group just because of their race.... without regard to either individual measurements, and without regard for the massive disparity between real, functional intelligence and the terribly shallow, and mostly meaningless IQ scores, and the fact that real intelligence is much more a product of choices made by individuals, than anything in the genes. Real intelligence is based upon many factors, and intellectual horse-power is just one of them (and IQ is a very poor measure of that horse-power).

But you don't want to hear any of that. Your focus has been clear for a long time - you just keep saying blacks are inferior. That is your bottom line.

Your use of the word "egalitarian" is strange. "Egalitarian" refers to equality of outcomes in the political/social/economic context. It is the bulwark of justification for Socialism. It doesn't mean everyone has the same level of intelligence, or wisdom, or IQ - it says that people should be provided with things so that we are all equal in the end - that outcomes should be made equal. Equality under the law is different. Neither of them relate to your mistaken approaches of associating the averages of statistical studies of a group to individuals. That would be like me saying that the average white male is 5' 10", therefore Brad is 5' 10" because he is a white male. "Blacks" is a term that groups people by physiological characteristics like skin color. It is a category. Categories cannot be intelligent or stupid - only individuals can do that and they do that fully independent of race. Your attempt to make up a theory of selection that makes races differ in intelligence which is not the same as IQ is sad and transparent.

Second, you keep trying to make IQ into more than it is. The implication that IQ equals intelligence is totally wrong - they aren't the same. And that use of IQ, combined with your form of going from the general to the individual can only be understood as coming from racist tendencies.
---------------------

Further, as a psychologist, I'll say that the Jungian categories of functional preferences, or the variation known as Meyer-Briggs, or the other junk-science categories are as murky as many of Jung's other beliefs (alchemy, astrology, and the occult).

Post 84

Saturday, May 12, 2012 - 12:44am

Luke, you say you "do not take these IQ tests and their racial correlations that seriously" but some of the same objective physiological distinctions that manifest in test-taking ability also manifest in a host of other socially significant ways that any conscientious person of reason would take seriously.

Consider just some of the findings of psychologists J. Philippe Rushton and Donald Templer. These aren't touchy feely, primacy of self-esteem type psychologists who shy away from any statistics that might cause people to feel disparaged. And these psychologists aren't intimidated by the sanctimonious anti-scientists who hurl condemnatory epithets whenever a descriptive statement about reality doesn't correspond with an arbitrarily imposed social metaphysical standard of evaluation. Social metaphysics is, of course, egregiously non-objective -- and most egregiously so when it's based explicitly on others' feelings.

Richard Dawkins: What Matters Is What's True
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hRpGmvRyN_0

Rushton and Templer report racial statistics objectively in their paper "Do pigmentation and the melanocortin system modulate aggression and sexuality in humans as they do in other animals?" (http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0191886912000840):

Lynn (2002) reviewed the literature on psychopathy in childhood
and adolescence and found that Blacks averaged the highest
rates including diagnosis with childhood conduct disorder, Attention
Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD), being suspended or excluded
from school, scoring low on tests of moral understanding,
failing to live up to financial obligations such as paying back student
loans, poor work commitment, recklessness (e.g., having traffic
accidents), maintaining monogamous relationships, being
responsible parents, engaging in domestic violence, and needing
hospitalization for injuries sustained through altercations.

Rushton and Whitney (2002) analyzed the 1993�1996 INTERPOL
Yearbooks and found that across 100 countries, the rate of
murder, rape, and serious assault is four times higher in African
and Caribbean countries than elsewhere in the world. In violent
crimes per 100,000 people, the rate for African countries was
149; for European, 42; and for Asian, 35. These results are similar
to those carried out on other data sets from INTEROL and the United
Nations. They show the Black overrepresentation in violent
crime to be a worldwide phenomenon.

...[Rushton and Bogaert, 1988] examined 41 items from the Kinsey data and found that Blacks not only had a higher rate of intercourse at an earlier age and with more partners, but also had more orgasms per act of coitus, spent more time thinking about sex, and had lower levels of sex guilt. Black females became pregnant more quickly indicated by speed of pregnancy after demobilization. Race predicted sexual behavior better than did socioeconomic status...

...African descended people are over-represented in rates of sexually
transmitted diseases [STDs] such as syphilis, gonorrhea, herpes,
chlamydia, and HIV/AIDS (US Centers for Disease Control,
2009). Of the more than one million people living in the US with
HIV/AIDS in 2007, almost half (46%) were Black. The Black�White
difference in HIV/AIDS is found worldwide...

...Blacks have the most testosterone (Ellis & Nyborg, 1992), which
helps to explain their higher levels of athletic ability [Oh no, they disparaged all non-black individuals as athletically inferior! How dare they? Racist! My fragile self-esteem may never recover!] (Entine,
2000). Testosterone acts as a ��master switch.�� It goes everywhere
in the body and affects many bio-behavioral systems.

...Rushton and Templer (2009) found skin color correlated with crime in 113
countries (homicide, 0.34; rape, 0.24: and serious assault, 0.25) as
well as with IQ (0.91), GDP (0.57), HIV/AIDS (0.56), birth rate
(0.87), longevity (0.85), and infant mortality (0.76). Rates of murder,
rape, and serious assault correlated with those of HIV/AIDS
(0.48, 0.57, and 0.42, respectively). Templer and Rushton (2011)
replicated their international findings with data from the 50 US
states. Skin color, measured by the percentage of Blacks in the state,
correlated with infant mortality (0.41), longevity (0.66), HIV/AIDS
(0.74), birth rate (0.12), murder (0.84), robbery (0.77), assault
(0.54), and also IQ (0.48), and income (0.28).

...Life history theory (LHT) may explain why darker individuals
are more aggressive and sexually active and why these traits covary
with longevity, birth rate, infant mortality, speed of maturation,
and many other characteristics (Templer, 2008; Templer &
Rushton, 2011).

Post 85

Saturday, May 12, 2012 - 2:18am

There is about a 60-point range in lab-measured IQ in humans (2 standard deviations above and below the mean). This range captures about 98% of all humans. That's 60 points of IQ variation for us to explain. Differences in manganese levels explain more than 10% of this already, and differences in lead levels explain more than 10% of this also, and -- rather than being overlap (so that when added together, they would actually amount to less than 20% of the total variance in IQ -- effects from these 2 metals are additive.

Now, if just 2 environmental factors already explain more than 20% of the variance in lab-measured IQ in humans, then it is physically impossible for the heritability of IQ to be 85%. This is because there is only 100% of anything. It is a way to think straight about reality. Once environmental factors are shown to explain a part of the 60-point variance in lab-measured IQ in humans, then heritability cannot be claimed for that part that was "lost" to the environment. To do so, to sit there and say that even though the differing levels in these 2 metals explains over 20% of the variance in IQ in humans -- even though they explain more than 12-points worth of IQ difference among humans -- to sit there and say that it is even possible that 85% of IQ is heritable ... is absurd. And it is absurd behavior even if it is performed by "experts."

Manganese

Manganese concentration was measured in home tap water (MnW) and children's hair (MnH). ... The median MnW in children's home tap water was 34 �g/L (range, 1-2,700 �g/L). ... There was a 6.2-point difference in IQ between children in the lowest and highest MnW quintiles.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20855239

Lead

A log-linear model for concurrent blood lead level provided the best fit, and suggested a decline of 6.9 (95% CI 4.2�9.4) IQ points over the range of 2.4�30 �g/dL (the upper and lower 5th percentiles of the distribution).

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3155319/?tool=pubmed

Both

An additive interaction was observed between blood lead and manganese levels, with a steeper lead-associated IQ decline observed among children with a manganese level greater than the median value (14 �g/l).

[same reference as above]

If heritability (genetics) explained 85% of the variance in IQ scores, then it would explain over 50 points of difference in measured IQ (85% of 60 points). However, because 2 metals already explain 13 points of this difference in IQ, genetics cannot be postulated as a having that large of an effect. Now, there may be over a dozen environmental factors such as lead and manganese, and many of them may be additive (as are lead and manganese). This means that the heritability of IQ may be as low as 15% -- even if all of the working professionals in the field (i.e., the "experts") say differently.

Ed

(Edited by Ed Thompson on 5/12, 2:20am)

Post 86

Saturday, May 12, 2012 - 7:56am

Ironically, there's an ignorant presumption of equality regarding the internal, biochemical environment of people -- when you say that it's pretty clear that intelligence is genetic.

What you are saying is that -- on the inside (biochemically) -- people are all equal, so that differences in performance can be explained by reference to other things, such as their genes. But we are not all the same on the inside. Some of us are walking around with about 0.42 micrograms of lead per deciliter of blood. Others, unfortunately, are walking around with 30.0 mcg/dL (over 70 times as much lead).

For all of this railing against the egalitarian pipe-dreamers with their "their fairy tale version of human evolution", it'd pay to look in the mirror and see if you aren't promoting another fairy tale at the opposite end (regarding the differing internal, biochemical environments found when you actually sit down and draw blood from the subjects).

Post 87

Saturday, May 12, 2012 - 9:07am

Ed, you apparently don't even understand what explaining IQ variances means. We could do a lab test where some kids were exposed to lethal levels of arsenic and others weren't. 100% of the variation on the subsequent IQ tests might be attributable to arsenic. Does that mean IQ broadly speaking is 0% heritable? No, because in the real world most people don't get arsenic poisoning.

And in the real world, Manganese exposure doesn't differ significantly enough among enough people to explain anywhere near 10% of all IQ differences among all people on average.

You're grasping at straws. First you claimed blacks had low IQs due to chemicals in Louisiana. Then it was due to culture. Then it was denial of race as a concept. Then it was that IQs aren't really important anyway. Now it's back to the periodic table.

Twin studies show that IQ is mostly inherited and identifiable in the brain itself (http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn1520-iq-is-inherited-suggests-twin-study.html). All chemical factors combined explain less than economic and cultural factors, and all these influences put together have less explanatory power than inheritance. "Less" does not mean "zero." You know full well that absolute genetic determinism is not my position. You deliberately misrepresented it to try to make my contextual, empirically derived balanced view on the matter seem as dogmatic and unreasonable as your categorical refusal to acknowledge any genetic causation whatsoever for the racial IQ gaps.

You think that because you can Google some study and appropriate its findings without understanding them, you alone can foist onto reality an opinion wholly of your own that IQ could be only 15% genetic? You're asking people to believe the cluelessness-bespeaking bullshit you spewed out on a whim and disregard the real experts who study this subject for a living and report that IQ is around 75% genetic?

Your cavalier rejection of well-established science and the entire range of reasonableness it made available to you is senseless. Your self-indulgent subjectivism is deplorable and insufferable. You'll believe what you want to simply because you want to. I can't deal productively with a mind like that, and I never should have made the effort.

You�ve gone through the motions of pretending to be interested in the realities of race, IQ, and heritability. You�re not and never were. You sacrelized your preconceptions to make them impervious to facts. You tortuously constructed incoherent strings of red herrings and ever-changing ad hoc rationalizations for disbelieving all the evidence for any racial differences in cognition. All you had to say was simply that you didn't want to believe in racial differences, for whatever reason, and that, by primacy of consciousness, you wouldn't. You instead went to ridiculous lengths to obfuscate your operating philosophy.

I don't call myself an Objectivist, but I feel like I'm the only one here actively defending its foundations. I think I've run out of motivation to continue in that endeavor. I have hundreds of thoughtful fans on youtube for whom I can be creating value instead. I would have been satisfied to reach just one valuer of truth here. And I did reach one, who messaged me privately with words of support.

Regardless of agreement or the lack of it, what is, is. Anyone reading this can deny the realities of race or condemn race realists for pointing them out, but the racial differences won't go away. They're still there. And aspects of reality, once observed directly or learned indirectly, have a way of seeping into the subconscious in spite of the rationalized protests of the conscious mind (this is demonstrated through implicit association tests).

It is:

Post 88

Saturday, May 12, 2012 - 11:01am

I have hundreds of thoughtful fans on youtube

Yeah, but have you counted the number of thoughtful dissenters, thoughtful people who consider you a racist? My guess is that you have more dissenters than supporters.

Have you separated out those 'fans' (the term makes me want to laugh) who shave their heads or have swastika tattoos?

And besides, I thought you didn't care what people thought of your ideas.

I did reach one [RoR member], who messaged me privately with words of support.

I'm so happy for you. One of the hundreds of people here, who is so ashamed of his support for you that he had to keep it private. A brave fan to add to your collection.

Twin studies show that IQ is mostly inherited and identifiable in the brain itself

IQ is a test score. Test scores are not heritable, and IQ does not equal intelligence.
----------

Here is the thing.... If you believe that people have some degree of free will, and that they make choices that are usually in accord with their values, and that they have values that were formed from association with their parents, their peers, their neighborhood, their media choices, and above all, with those they look up to, then you must try to distinguish what is the cause of bad behaviors... genes, or the identification with a subculture of bad values. People "inherit" bad values from their parents, peers, pop culture and their neighborhoods. To start saying that high crime statistics, or poverty, are caused by genes common to a race is, in this light, totally ignorant. It makes it clear that you engage in tortuous process of selection and twisting of thoughts to support you goal - painting blacks as inferior because they are black and assigning negative character traits based upon being black.

(Edited by Steve Wolfer on 5/12, 11:05am)

Post 89

Saturday, May 12, 2012 - 12:01pm

I perceive Brad's argument is simply that the political social engineering of equal outcomes on the premise that unequal outcomes are due exclusively to racial discrimination has little basis in fact; a reprise of Charles Murray's "Bell Curve". I believe Charles Murray had benevolent intentions, I see no reason to believe differently of Brad. Count me as a second person to contact Brad with words of support.

To say a person's "values" are more important that intelligence is a bit disingenuous given that a person's values are due to a large degree to their intelligence.

Post 90

Saturday, May 12, 2012 - 12:52pm

Mike,

Brad's argument is that blacks are intellectually inferior because they inherit smaller, less effective brains.

You said, "To say a person's 'values' are more important that intelligence is a bit disingenuous given that a person's values are due to a large degree to their intelligence."

Values, if laid out on a spectrum, would not correlate, in any direct way, with intelligence. If they did, you would never find highly intelligent people who are capitalists AND highly intelligent people who were socialists. The truth is that we choose our values in a way that is far more complex than some correlation to intelligence. Very bright people can, and do, choose bad values. People of slightly below average intelligence can, and do, chose good values. I'll repeat again, IQ scores are not intelligence, intelligence does not correlate with values, and neither character nor value positions arise from our genes.

Brad does not understand what real intelligence is (I don't blame him for that, since few psychologists even have a good grip on that), but his persistent use of group average IQ scores as an indicator of the actual intelligence of an individual - based upon the individual's race - is bad reasoning, and something he should, but hasn't, paid attention to.

Brad's particular arguments for genes implies that man does not have free will, and that crimes, poverty, and deficient intelligence have nothing to do with choices made, with the values of the subculture the person chooses to identify with, or the beliefs of family they grew up in, or the education they received. His argument relegates free will, individual choices, environment, nurture... all of those.... to a back seat of little or no importance because of his idea of some gene that is race based as the dominate cause of intelligence, crime, poverty, etc.

I too believe that Charles Murray was benevolent in his intentions. I don't grant that same sanction to Brad because I took the time to watch many of his YouTube videos and have read his posts here and his replies to his 'fans' and his detractors on YouTube. You, of course, are free to draw your own opinions.

Brad hasn't been very forthcoming - here on RoR - as to what he would do in the political arena, say in immigration for example, based upon his racial theories - ask him that, or spend some time looking at his YouTube posts.

Post 91

Saturday, May 12, 2012 - 1:28pm

Brad, you have a religious-level conviction in the biochemical equivalence of humans. You are a biochemical egalitarian and it seems that no amount of reasoning will convince you otherwise. All you do is commit the fallacy of Appeal to Authority and then carefully focus only on your own "authorities."

I have presented scientific articles concluding that intelligence might be as little as 15% heritable. I have reasoned out why that might be true at the same time as a broad consensus otherwise (because many scientists do not understand biochemical individuality and its effects on IQ scores).

So there!

Ed

Post 92

Saturday, May 12, 2012 - 1:47pm

Your basic error is that you do not know how to go about proving something is genetic or not. It's a philosophy-of-science issue. There's a 3-step process that's correct, and then there is a sham process that's popular among pragmatists.

Correct 3-step process for proving something is genetic:

1) Identify environmental factors that affect intelligence
2) Control for them
3) Explain the remainder of variance with genetics (twins studies, genetic manipulation, etc)

And here is the sham process:

1) Assume that you are already in an epistemological position to have known about all of the environmental factors that might affect intelligence
2) Control for that specific group of factors
3) Explain the remainder of variance with genetics (twins studies, genetic manipulation, etc)

Pragmatists practice science with blinders on. They only keep in their view those studies which have caught their attention. This is a criticism of "evidence-based medicine (EBM)" -- it doesn't rely on a system-building theory, but just casually grabs the scientific headlines of the day and treats them as absolute. Ask a pragmatist what the scientific reality is about something -- and he''ll point to headlines made in scientific journals. "Those headlines", he'll say, "are what reality is." Much of the research you cite involves researchers using the sham process. They would not even know how to comment on the research that I have cited. They wouldn't even know how to explain it. In the lead studies, the biggest differences are at the lowest level of lead exposure (meaning that a very large portion of the population is involved).

Ed

(Edited by Ed Thompson on 5/12, 2:58pm)

Post 93

Saturday, May 12, 2012 - 3:18pm

Here's an analogy

Three scientists -- Prag, Matt, and Ist -- decided to study whether the ability to balance on one foot is genetic. They gathered a bunch of identical twins and a bunch of unrelated folks as controls. They had read from previous scientific articles on the matter that when you perform the test with the subjects -- when you time how long it is that they can stand on one foot -- that it was important to limit the environmental exposure to beer for at least 12 hours before the test. What was found in previous studies was that participants who had consumed a lot of beer before the test could not stand on one foot for very long (before falling over).

Prag, Matt, and Ist all-of-a-sudden felt cocky. "Haha! We have discovered all of the environmental factors that affect the primary outcome of our study! We are ready to go ahead and test the subjects!" They carefully screen out participants who had consumed a lot of beer before the test. Looking at the pre-study questionnaire, one of the participants complains:

There is no question on your pre-screening questionnaire regarding previous "balance training" -- such as having a background in ballet. Don't you want to know about whether some of your participants have had balance-training?

"No," the scientists retort, "balance training has not been shown in a scientific study to have ever affected someone's ability to stand on one foot. Therefore, it's irrelevant."

"But ..." says the participant ...

"But nothing!" say the scientists, "If it doesn't exist in the headlines of a major scientific journal, then it either doesn't exist at all, or it doesn't matter one way or the other. We have controlled for everything that has shown up in the headlines of major scientific journals. Therefore, we have adequately controlled for confounders in our study."

Post 94

Sunday, May 13, 2012 - 8:09am

What will I find, Brad, if I go back through all of your citations here, making a complete laundry list of publications -- and then check them to see how many of them performed phlebotomy in order to draw blood to check for potentially-confounding lead levels?

Will I find that 100% of them did it?

Will I find that 50% of them did it?

Will I find that 10% of them did it?

Will I find that 1% of them did it?

What will I find?

Post 95

Friday, May 18, 2012 - 8:57pm

Brad ... [background noise: crickets] ... hey Brad ... did you hear that the CDC is revising it's safe level of lead downward because current lead levels were found to be hampering IQ too much (i.e., because environment is more important as a factor in determining someone's IQ than had been previously believed)?

Brad? ... [more crickets]

[even more crickets]

:-)

Post 96

Saturday, May 19, 2012 - 10:36am

Mike, you wrote,

I perceive Brad's argument is simply that the political social engineering of equal outcomes on the premise that unequal outcomes are due exclusively to racial discrimination has little basis in fact; a reprise of Charles Murray's "Bell Curve". I believe Charles Murray had benevolent intentions, I see no reason to believe differently of Brad. Count me as a second person to contact Brad with words of support.

Yes, I think that's his main point -- that average differences in socioeconomic status are due less to discrimination than to average differences in intelligence, which (as you say) was Charles Murray's thesis. This is not an unreasonable conclusion. Even Thomas Sowell agrees with Murray here. He just doesn't think that the IQ differences are largely genetic. But then you write:

To say a person's "values" are more important that intelligence is a bit disingenuous given that a person's values are due to a large degree to their intelligence.

As I wrote in Post 58, there have been notorious injustices and abysmal failures in societies governed by races whom Brad regards as having superior intelligence (e.g. Asian and Caucasian): Communist China, the Soviet Union, Nazi Germany, the nationalist regime under Chiang Kai-shek, Japan's savage military, Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge, the Vietnamese communists and today, North Korea. These dysfunctional murderous regimes would rival any of the injustices and failures produced by ignorant third world kleptocracies. If, as you say, a person's values are due in large part to their intelligence, how do you explain the hideously corrupt values that resulted from races with allegedly superior intelligence?!

Human beings are rational animals, regardless of the degree of their intelligence, and are therefore capable of grasping moral principles such as individual rights. It doesn't take a genius to understand that concept. Uneducated people can be taught it. If it were not for Ayn Rand, I would not have recognized the principle of individual rights in the way that I have. I was not smart enough to discover it on my own, but I was able to learn it. So is anyone, to the extent that he or she is capable of reasoned judgment.

Whether they possess high or low intelligence, human beings are capable of grasping and respecting pro-life values. They are also capable of ignoring them. Character and virtue are not the same as intelligence. People with modest intelligence can have admirable character; people of supposedly high intelligence can be murderous scoundrels, as the sordid history of tyrannical regimes has clearly demonstrated.

(Edited by William Dwyer on 5/19, 11:04am)

Post 97

Saturday, May 19, 2012 - 1:21pm

Excellent post Bill - I sanctioned even though I don't completely agree with this statement:

I think that's his [Brad's] main point -- that average differences in socioeconomic status are due less to discrimination than to average differences in intelligence, which (as you say) was Charles Murray's thesis.

I believe that this is a side point for Brad and that his main point has always been a claim that black's are inferior because he believes that they are less intelligent, due to genetics, than other races.

You wrote:

Even Thomas Sowell agrees with Murray here. He just doesn't think that the IQ differences are largely genetic.

I believe that Sowell does not agree with ANY part of the socioeconomic status of this or that race as being genetic.Here is a blurb regarding Sowell's book: "Race And Culture: A World View" - Encompassing more than a decade of research around the globe, this book shows that cultural capital has far more impact than politics, prejudice, or genetics on the social and economic fates of minorities, nations, and civilization.

Sowell demonstrates that cultural values are the overwhelming determiners as opposed to local conditions, environment, social structures, or genetics.

We, as individuals - not as a group and not as a race, choose our values. Often people identify with a group and that identification includes adopting many or most of that group's values. And that is the major determiner in how history is formed, and how the well-being of different groups are determined. All individuals choose values and good value structures reward success, and bad value structures hold the individuals back.

You wrote:

Human beings are rational animals, regardless of the degree of their intelligence, and are therefore capable of grasping moral principles such as individual rights.

So true... well said. Your examples did an excellent job of presenting one of the fact I've been trying to get across: Intelligence is not the same as values - they don't correlate.

Post 98

Saturday, May 19, 2012 - 4:38pm

This was fascinating. Worth watching:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kU0ei9ApmsY

Post 99

Saturday, May 19, 2012 - 6:48pm