Fury at DNA pioneer's theory: Africans are less intelligent than Westerners

[sasguru]

" he said Western policies towards African countries were wrongly based on an assumption that black people were as clever as their white counterparts when "testing" suggested the contrary."



"He said there was a natural desire that all human beings should be equal but "people who have to deal with black employees find this not true". "




I can understand the scientific thoery that people in different geographical areas develop differently - that makes sense. But this guy just seems to be talkin about black people in general, which is utterly disgusting, and more to the wrong, wholely untrue!

What a c*ck. Burn him.

I disagree with your approach. You seem just as emotional as he is.
Although you have a good point about how do you define "black" people.

[chef]

What a c*ck. Burn him.

broil him.. there just isn't enough broiling in this world

[realityhack]

broil him.. there just isn't enough broiling in this world

No... brown him gently under a grill.

And then test his IQ.

[sasguru]

No... brown him gently under a grill.

And then test his IQ.

[wendigo100]

are we allowed to discuss this?

Apparently not.

[XLMonkey]

it would be unscientific not to.

at one level, the underlying hypothesis that he puts forward is worthy of analysis (which is: that we know that intelligence has a genetic component; that we know that there are genetic differences between races/ethnic groups; therefore its possible that there are differences in intelligence between races/ethnic groups).

However, there are a couple of pretty big problems with analysing it objectively:
1. There is no generally agreed definition of intelligence. Most of them tend to talk about the capacity and speed with which people are able to process different types of information. However, there is no single measure that you can reliably apply that captures it (and don't start me on IQ - a measure that varies over time and improves with practice - its like saying that the length of your hair is an accurate measure of your height).
2. The tests that do claim to measure intelligence are, by their nature, culturally biased. The last time I looked at this sort of thing, the evidence was that people from African countries tended to perform poorly on reasoning tests constructed by European scientists. However, the converse also applied - people from Europe tended to perform poorly on reasoning tests constructed by African scientists. The problem (linked to point 1 above), is that it is very difficult to create tests that don't have assumptions about the cultural background and education of the tester built into them.
3. We have no objective way (that I'm aware of) to separate the effects of genetic factors from the environmental factors. So, a child brought up in a nice affluent family in America is provided with an enormous range of educational tools and stimuli from the day they are born, that a child in a poor African family will never receive. Since we know that performance on "intelligence" tests improves with practice - its inevitable that a significant performance gap will emerge over time as the two children grow up in (very different) environments.

so, on balance, I'm inclined to say that the debate is a bit irrelevant. Since we can't define and measure intelligence in a reliable way, its meaningless to try to do cross-racial or cross-cultural studies.

What would be more useful is to look at difference in people's performance at specific types of thinking tasks, and then see whether you can improve performance on the task, rather than mucking about looking for differences in something that you can't measure anyway.

[The Lone Gunman]

What if it is true? What if it turns out that <insert ethnic group here> are not as smart as the rest? What happens then?

[wendigo100]

What if it is true? What if it turns out that <insert ethnic group here> are not as smart as the rest? What happens then?

Nothing. There's one or two ethnic groups that are thought to be more intelligent than the rest. I'm not in them but it doesn't bother me because they are tulipe at football.

[_V_]

What if it is true? What if it turns out that <insert ethnic group here> are not as smart as the rest? What happens then?

Then they can claim IQ credits from the government.

[sasguru]

Further to the debate on intelligence, I'm inclined to believe that there are different types of intelligence. The sort tested on IQ tests is usually logical-verbal which most people on here would score relatively highly on.
Yet look at what a bunch of misfits and loons we have on this site