race and IQ

[devrimci_kürt]

İs there link between race and IQ?

[Kaeroll]

Controversial topic, and afaik one without a good answer. Early studies showed correlations, and offered a fairly racist interpretation. I believe the accepted interpretation of such studies is that cultural factors in the US at the time held back education for ethnic minorities.

[Baub]

İs there link between race and IQ?

Wow, thats a loaded question. Since the question itself is inherently racist(not saying you are)most folks would stay away from it. I suspect if you do some rersearch you will find that socioeconomic differences between study groups would be the determining factor in IQ test performance.

[Kaeroll]

Is it really racist to ask the question? It doesn't assume a genetic basis, and I don't find anything racist about investigating a hypothesis. It depends on the wording and intent, of course; the hypotheses "there is a correlation between race and IQ" and "white boys can't do math" are very different.

[Mokele]

There is actual evidence that differences are socially imposed. Minority students actually do measurably worse on identical tests if asked about their race beforehand (thereby purportedly 'priming' them with racial sterotypes).

 

Even more interesting, Korean-American students typically outstrip white students in the US (and test at the same level as Japanese-american students), but in Japan, where individuals of Korean descent are sterotyped as dumb and regularly discriminated against, Korean students do far worse than native Japanese students.

[Baub]

Agree. Rational point of view.

[iNow]

Perhaps a better question is to ask whether there is any strong correlation between intelligence and IQ.

[Kaeroll]

Perhaps a better question is to ask whether there is any strong correlation between intelligence and IQ.

Zing!

 

Good point though. We had a lass on University Challenge recently who has been hailed as the smartest girl in the country because she has an insane grasp of general knowledge. I'm sure she must be incredibly intelligent, but it did highlight the different kinds of intelligence and the difference between being a walking encyclopaedia and a walking textbook.

[SkepticLance]

Race versus IQ is a good question, and is not racist. The answers given, though, may be incredibly racist!

 

Genomics has shed light on this topic, as with many others. The genetic similarities between people of different races is far greater than genetic differences. Some of the physical differences seem great (eg skin colour) but are minimal in terms of genetics. Skin colour is determined by less than 20 genes, and this small number is enough to give a full range of colour from ebony black to snow white. However, there is no reason to assume any correlation between skin colour and IQ. After all, genes for skin colour are totally different to the genes for intelligence.

 

Generally, the genetic difference between you, and a person of the same race and gender living next door, is roughly the same as the genetic difference between a snow white European, and an ebony black equatorial African. Either could be smart, or idiotic.

 

As others have said, any difference between IQ test results from one race or culture to another are probably the result of environmental differences, not genetic.

[Mr Skeptic]

İs there link between race and IQ?

 

Yes, but talking about that always carries the danger of pitchforks and torches. In addition, there are many confounding factors such as nutrition, health, education, income, native language, etc. that also correlate to both IQ and race. As I understand it, it also depends on what types of questions there are, eg you could get different results when you test for spatial reasoning or mathematical capability.

 

As iNow hinted at, IQ is not the same as intelligence, though it may well be our best attempt at measuring it.

 

I've heard that about half of the difference on IQ tests is due to our genetic variability, and the other half to upbringing, based on twin studies. Not the study I read but one of the first I found:

http://www.heretical.com/miscella/rushton1.html

[syadnom]

I am not a racist, but I am also not blind to the delta between races. I think, through some investigation and some experience, that there cant be a single test to determine intelligence.

 

It would be accurate to say that white Europeans score generally higher IQs than Africans. That is just a single number. What about those things that arent measured by that IQ rating? How about creative thought? Social aptitude? How abouve physical traits?

 

Some races are going to have abilities tuned to their culture for that last couple thousand years. Africans are seen to be more physically capable on average that many other races, Japanese tend to handle engineering well as a result of a few thousand years of imperialism and honor codes which gives long attension spanse or whatever.

 

Though it may seem like a loaded question, I think that if modern society could get past the IQ thing more people could see these other strengths in races.

 

We are obviously a world of many races but are starting to blend them all. In 10,000 years what will mankind look like? I doubt there will be much distinction between races in the general population.

[SkepticLance]

As I have said before, it is not as if Africans are all olympians. However, it appears that Africans are more genetically diverse than other races. This means more at the athletic end of the bell curve. This makes sense if we assume that the portion of humanity that left Africa 60,000 years ago was not a large number, and hence carried less genetic variation.

 

However, if this is true, it also would mean that Africans contain a group at that end of the bell curve that are smarter than the rest of humanity. Perhaps Africa contains more true geniuses??

 

African variability is much greater than any other racial group. Ethiopians, for example, have quite fine facial features, while other Africans may have large lips and noses. Some equatorial Africans are ebony black, while others, further from the equator, are merely brown. Africans who emigrated about 10,000 years ago became the Pacific Melanesian group. Of these, Papuans are generally small. Fijians are big, and make great rugby players. In Africa, we have pygmies, and we have Masai, who are tall and lean.

 

IQ tests are culturally based. Cultures such as the Japanese and Koreans who are trained from youth in problem solving do well. Others do less well. There is no evidence that there is any genetic component in the superficial differences shown by IQ tests.