| | Genes-> Embryology and Maternal Environment -> Phenotype -> Development (Environment & Choice) -> Intelligences -> IQ test
When a person grasps the magnitude of the conceptual distance between the clusters of alles on DNA (those present and those absent) and the meaning (or lack thereof) in IQ tests, they can only persist in a belief that race determines intelligence because they harbor racist intentions.
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The leap being made with statistical correlations is that those genes that are associated with racial characteristics result in heritable intelligence as represented by IQ tests. But this presumes that intelligence is so well understood and defined as to be quantified. I don't think they are even close in that area.
Even if they actually knew what intelligence was, the next presumption is that IQ score equal Intelligence. NOT. As Luke mentioned above when mentioning Mensa, an organization that believes high IQ and intelligence are the same, "Intelligence divorced from wisdom produces mediocrity or worse."
Another item to consider is the separatation of development in an environment from genetic inheritance - this hasn't been adequately done. The capacity to think depends upon knowledge - knowing how to think is really a collection of learned processes that correlate to culture, to family, and to psychology - and those are all areas where choice plays the key role.
Another problem is the gap between phenotype and genotype - a gap that hasn't been adequately covered.
Take embryology and the maternal environment. Both of these are major components in the translation of a specific set of genes into a specific entity. The genes code for the creation of an entity, like a recipe codes for the building of a certain dish. That is very different from thinking of the genes as a blueprint or engineering design that only represents the finished product as opposed to being a description of the process for building it. Genes are to embryology more a set of initial instructions than a representation of a finished product. When you follow a recipe for cake, the altitude, the humidity and a host of other environmental factors will play important parts - not just the raw ingredients. In the intitial stages of embrionic development, gravity, pH, and a host of variations in chemical components will change the resulting fetus. My eyes are brown, as I sit here, because my genes made coded for certain proteins and those proteins made them so. That influence of the genes mostly ended while I was still in the womb. Studies have shown that there is a significant effect on phenotype that derives not from the genes but from the environment in which they are processed to create a child from the zygote - inside the womb. In fact, one study correlated resulting IQ with degrees of maternal environment's similarity (asking, "Is there a tighter grouping of IQ scores of those sharing the same womb at the same time (twins), than with those using the same womb at a later period - immediate younger siblings - and lastly, with those who have were born to the same mother and father, but with many years between siblings." They found a significant positive correlation which by itself reduces the claim that IQ variation is due to genes. Although both views make the dumb mistake of think that IQ = intelligence.)
And finally, the genes themselves: The claim that we not only know what intelligence is in a comparable way to how we know what eye color is... well, that's just laughable. So, we don't really know what intelligence is, but we have created a test that purports to measure it, and then we infer test score variations as being due to race? Give me a break. The only thing I like about this whole misshapen equation is that it puts determinists and racists in bed together :-)
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Let's take a look at 'intelligence'
One key component of intelligence arises out of our volitional capacity. "Intelligent" people make better psychoepistemological choices - they do a better job in choosing amoung the different ways that one could 'think' and that gives them better results. They ask themselves better questions. There is a lot involved in this seemingly simple observation. It isn't just using reason over emotion. It isn't just using reason over faith. It isn't just using more rigorous logic. It also involves imagining an adequate set of alternatives so that we aren't examining an option set that doen't include the best answer. It involves forumlating questions that stay inside an appropriate context, yet share the proper direction - not just any questions will do. It involves knowing when we have questioned enough. It involves maintaining that balance between finding errors and accepting truths - at the right speed and not letting up too early.
We are rational beings, but that certainly doesn't mean we don't have emotions and feelings. Because of our capacity to reason, and our need to constantly choose amoung alternatives, and that these "alternatives" appear in our minds even though they may have no current correspondent in reality (like when we are imagining a better way to do something), and we can measure alternatives not just logically, but with emotional reactions and because emotions are the result of internalized value judgements, we have a very complex mechanism even before we consider the hierarchical structure of knowledge and the cognitive faculty needed to abstract and integrate our personal intellectual understanding of the world. We have to use 'intelligence' to separate out defensive emotions from honest, negative emotions, and we have to separate honest emotions that match with cognitive understandings, from emotions that would lead us astray. Remember any of that on your last Stanford-Binet?
It isn't race that determines 'intelligence'. It is the way one learns to choose to operate their rational faculty (a faculty that involves all the complexity of conceptualization, imagination, self-awareness, self-esteem, control of the functioning of thought in the midst of feelings and emotions, holding a thread of purposefulness, individuation and the values one has acquired, and the structure of knowledge one has integrated and indexed). Yeah, tell me that is reducible to a number, and I'll agree that the final answer to the meaning of life is 42.
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Blacks today are just as racially different from whites of two generations ago as they are from whites today. Yet the data suggest that the number of questions that blacks answer correctly on IQ tests today is very similar to the number answered correctly by past generations of whites. If race A differs from race B in IQ, and two generations of race A differ from each other by the same amount, where is the logic in suggesting that the IQ differences are even partly racial?
