I’m black and realize that most of what blacks are subjected to in the inner city is not ideal; bad public schooling etc. Or genes.
My two atheist friends pick the latter. They make an exception for me however, but I’m just a nerd. :)
They are materialists, and think that environment that blacks evolved in restricted their cognitive evolution or something like that. What do you think?
Posted: March 5th 2011
Eric_PK
I think they’re misguided.
First, measurement of IQ is a field rife with issues; there is significant cultural bias in the tests (and in testing itself) that makes it very hard to tease out valid results.
Second, they’ll need to do a lot to define what the two different populations were and what their selection pressures were and make sure that there is enough time for evolution to occur.
Third, they’re going to have to define what they mean by “black” and “white”. Here’s a good article to point them to…
Posted: March 7th 2011
brian thomson www
Here Be Dragons! If we look at IQ and the Wealth of Nations, it has a list of national IQ scores, and the 20-or-so lowest-scoring countries are all in Africa. However, as your question suggests, IQ is not simply a function of genetics, but is also affected by nutrition, education, and other local and cultural conditions.
Even if we could come to your friends’ conclusion, on the basis of evidence, that would be only the start of the problems. If you identify a problem, the next step is to try to solve it, but how would we solve a problem like that? The short answer is: we can’t, not at the moment or for the foreseeable future. Which would leave us with whole nations of people tagged indelibly as “inferior”, something which would have potentially dire consequences in itself. Is it any wonder that scientists are not keen to spend research money looking for genetic differences between the races? It would be irresponsible to point out the problem without offering a solution.
Posted: March 7th 2011