This whole black IQ malarkey..

There are many other factors of intelligence and it's widely agreed upon that genetics dont play a major role at all. So by simply stating that one people are more intelligent than the other because of their average IQ, is just ridiculous, because there are sooo many important factors that haven't been considered.

- IQ is a poor measurement of intelligence. Intelligence is more complicated than that. There are different kinds of intelligence, like cognitive and emotional intelligence. Some people are musical geniuses, but cant count for squat and vice versa. They're apples and oranges, you cant just bung them all in and create an average, you have to look at them individually.

The whole idea of a "race" is down right retarded. We're all human. I'm betting that race was a concept created to just divide people. I'm not a fan of statistics seeing as you can use them to prove any silly thing you like so I'm only going to say one thing. Wealth and other socioeconomic factors are very important in this debate. Of course if you compare a country with free and encouraged education like england and a country like somalia where the education isn't free and it's harder for parents to get education for their kids, then yes the average "intelligence" of a 16 year old english kid and a somali kid might be different. But, what is intelligence? It's not black and white.

I hate topics like these because it's just people getting happy over their supposed racial superiority. Even the concept of races baffles me, surely we're all human?

Haha yeah, we wouldn't have realised people from different parts of the world were different colours with different features if some smart upper class person didn't say "Hey see that guy, he's black" Let me guess, those same upper class people force black people to commit loads of crime and perform badly in school?

"Racial categorization has a long history, and may be related to a deep-rooted psychological need to quickly identify potential enemies and allies [101]. However, the biological reality is different and, for humans, it is one of continuous variation [75], clines, and genetic boundaries that cross the geographic space without surrounding and thus defining specific isolated groups of populations [102]

[...]

They confirmed that the direct analysis of discrete samples tends to suggest the existence of clusters, roughly corresponding to continents. However, these clusters disappeared when the unit of analysis became the randomly-sampled individual, indicating that discontinuities are probably an artefact due to the discontinuous design of that and other studies. Therefore, assigning individual genotypes to groups apparently conceals the continuous nature of human diversity and entails a high degree of arbitrariness

[...]

But studies of protein or DNA polymorphisms have not shown so far is that there are clear-cut geographic discontinuities in the distribution of human genome diversity, and that clusters found for one set of markers will stay the same when different markers are considered." (Barbujani, 2005).

Typological thinking is a product of parochialism, ignorance and possibly imperialism in this case. Try not to forget that Europeans encountered much of the world by sea, which means they encountered a discontinuous population and made the same faulty conclusion that Barbujani (2005) has explained above. If you looked at how Africans (or anybody seen as the 'other' (Said's 'Orientalism', for example)) were depicted and written about in colonialist literature, it will become immediately apparent that imperialism and 'race'/typological thinking are inextricable concepts.

Let us also remember that this myth that there are X number of immediately perceptible differences amongst people that enable people to sort others into definitive 'races' is just a myth that is a product of sheer ignorance and arbitrary assignment:

"According to some modern authors [see e.g. Refs. 28-30], the classical analyses of morphological traits, such as skeletal measures or skin color, suggest a clear racial subdivision. On the contrary, a review of the relevant literature shows that that is not the case [26, 31]. Indeed, although until 1962 nobody explicitly raised doubts on the existence of biological races in humans [32], studies of human morphology from Linnaeus to current times reached no consensus on which races exist, and which populations belong to which race. Lists compiled by serious scientists include anything between three and 200 different races [33], and it is impossible for me to identify in these lists anything that can be called ‘common concepts’ of race" (Barbujani, 2005).

"The admittedly incomplete scheme of Table 1 is based on Refs. [8, 26, 29, 32]."



"[T]he term ‘Negro’ was once a racial designation for numerous groups in tropical Africa and Pacific Oceania (Melanesians). These groups share a broadly similar external phenotype; this classification illustrates ‘race’ as type, defined by anatomical complexes. Although the actual relationship between African ‘Negroes’ and Oceanic ‘Negroes’ was sometimes questioned, these groups were placed in the same taxon. Molecular and genetic studies later showed that the Oceanic ‘Negroes’ were more closely related to mainland Asians." (Keita et al., 2004).

Finally, Mishler's (2009) critique of Linnean taxonomy holds true: "Ranked classifications are a hold-over from the pre-Darwinian creationist mindset (Ereshefsky, 2002). They are not just a quaint anachronism; they are resulting in miscommunication at many levels" (Mishler, 2009).

Anything else?

I am not interested in your liberal brand of trolling. I have never seen you even slightly considered anyone else's point of view.

Not so sure mate. Have you spent any time around them? Try Cape York for a holiday - most of them are lying around in their own filth - too wasted to remember their own name let alone do much more.

Ain't a bit like Crocodile Dundee.

Okay here's my opinion:

If you believe that humans evolved, and also believe in the dogmatism that race has no bearing in things such as physical ability, you're a massive hypocrite. Why? I'll explain. Your first response to this might be 'Well why would the colour of your skin affect such things?' well because there's clearly plenty of physical differences between blacks, whites, eastern asians, native americans etc than just skin colour. For example, go on Google images and search for pictures of black people who suffer from albinoism. Dosen't that help you comprihend that they have a different pallet of facial features to other races? In fact, the first usage of 'race' applying to humans was a taxomical one. 'Race' was how they used to distingish and catagorise different living things (that includes humans) who are the same sub-species. Black people evolved to live in Africa, white people evolved to live in Europe. Skin colour wasn't the only adapted feature.

Ever notice how there is a preveliance of black people in basketball, running and boxing? Up until recently this was thought to be due to purely social factors or simply dissmessed as a racist stereotype. But now scientists think they probably have an inherent advantage at these sports because of attributes they evolved to live in Africa (ie more fast twitched muscle fibres). In exchange, the reason you don't see an awful lot of black swimmers is because white people evolved these features away, because the fast twitched type of muscle fiber is denser and therefor less boyant, and unlike in Africa, in Europe there are lots of big safe water spaces.

However, despite of all this I would still agree it's imoral to treat people of different races any differently. They're still people at the end of the day.

View whyumadtho's earlier post history, and you will find only a year ago he believed that races and ethnic groups existed:


http://www.thestudentroom.co.uk/showthread.php?t=1738228

Just go through his post history on his profile, and you will find many more.

He has only radically shifted his position to deny races exist in the last year, because he has since converted to a "individualism" quasi-solipsism philosophy, where he now denies groups and clusters don't exist. He now claims for example that genders, species, cultures and even don't exist, yet less than a year ago had no problem with them objectively existing.

I've got no problem with people changing their views, how whyumadtho only took a 180 degrees turn - so he can now argue an absurd viewpoint for the sake of a reaction. It makes him feel special. I've noticed in more recent posts he now focuses on culture denialism, asking people "to define culture" and claiming cultures don't exist. Yet only last year he believed they existed:



Posted: 26-02-2011

1) If genetic differences = new 'race', why are we not all our own 'race'?

"No one denies that human populations differ in allele frequencies. The problem is that Dobzhansky seems to label any genetic differences racial differences while at the same time claiming that not every racially distinct population is a race or should be recognized as such. He wrote, for example, in response to Frank Livingstone's ([1962] 2008a) rejection of the application of the concept of geographic race to humans that: "Since human populations [. . .] often, differ in the frequencies of one or more, usually several to many, genetic variables, they are by this test racially distinct. But it does not follow that any racially distinct populations should be given racial (or subspecific) labels" (Dobzhansky 2008b, p. 298).

The difficulties in Dobzhansky's thought about the existence of biological human races were highlighted by Livingstone in his reply, in which he rejected as simply untenable "Dobzhansky's dichotomy" between the issue of the putative biological reality of human races and the allegedly unconnected issue of the nomenclatorial recognition of such biological human races. Livingstone argued that: "the concepts of a science are also logically interconnected and form a coherent, consistent theory or system. The concepts of such a system are defined in terms of one another and certain primitive terms, and then the formal, mathematical, or logical properties of the system derived (2008b, p. 300). Livingstone's point was that if the concept of race is being introduced in human population genetics because it allegedly has a scientific necessity and a unique explanatory value, then the nomenclatorial identification of human races cannot be at the same time a matter of arbitrary choice" (Maglo, 2011).

2) I'm surprised you haven't noticed it yourself, but your second paragraph was both a fallacy of composition and you were begging the question. It is patently clear that not all 'black' people are professional athletes or are bad at swimming and vice-versa for 'white' people; hence, to suggest "black people are a group because professional athletic finals are mainly comprised of black people; therefore, "they [meaning all black people] have an inherent advantage"" is incorrect.

Begging the question because we still haven't established what 'black' even is, but this is the form of your fallacy of composition:
A) Most individuals in professional athletics are 'black'
B) These individuals are part of the 'black race'
C) Therefore, every individual in the 'black race' can be a professional athlete

"Another simple approach is looking for diagnostic alleles by which individuals might be assigned to groups. Typically, these are rare, population-specific alleles associated with disease, and that is a problem, because pathologic alleles are diagnostic in a sense, but they are present in just a few individuals. Consider Tay-Sachs disease, whose incidence is notoriously high, with a carrier frequency around 1/26 [34] among Ashkenazi Jews, versus 1/145 to 1/166 in other populations of European descent [35]. It is possible to define the Ashkenazi Jews as those with the highest frequency of the Tay-Sachs allele [1], although as other populations, e.g. the Irish [35] show comparable carrier frequencies. But, more to the point, 25/26 Ashkenazi Jews do not carry the Tay-Sachs allele, and hence in this way one defines a set of subjects at risk, not a race" (Barbujani, 2005).

Your argument is even less tenable given you are taking a few professional athletes and arguing billions of people have something in common with them.

All you're doing is making a group based on who has X (in this case, those who are professional athletes). Since not all 'black' people are professional athletes, they are excluded from this group; since some 'white' people are professional athletes, they are included in this group. None of this supports your argument.

3) Your trait selection is entirely arbitrary. Why have you chosen athleticism as the basis of categorisation? Why not height, shoe size, hair colour, neck length, etc.? Traits are non-concordant and overlapping.

"Studies of different markers yield an even more complicated picture, where the only common element we can recognise is that each one is inconsistent with all the others. The only way we see to interpret this contradictory set of results is to admit that its incongruences are not due to errors in the choice of the markers or of the methods, but rather represent a basic feature of human diversity. In other words, different genetic polymorphisms are differently distributed over the planet, and their distributions are not generally correlated. Clusterings are always possible, but the fact that two populations fall in the same cluster (or in different clusters) when described at loci A, B, C does not imply that they will fall in the same cluster (or in different clusters) based on loci X, Y, Z. In addition, differences between populations are often so subtle that the location of boundaries may change substantially even when the same data are analysed under different assumptions on the mutational model (Barbujani and Belle, 2006)."

If you want to select multiple traits in order to construct a 'group' you are implicitly admitting both your trait selection and specificity (i.e, where you no longer choose more traits to refine the categorisation) is arbitrary/socially constructed.

"Given the multitude of dimensions along which people and objects might be perceived as either dis-similar or similar, the question remains why some dimensions become salient and important for categorisations and others do not. For instance, Medin and Wattenmaker (1987) point out that plums and lawnmowers are unlikely to be categorised together, even though they are clearly similar on a number of dimensions (both weigh less than 1000 kg, both cannot hear, both have a distinct smell, both can be dropped). It is not the case that one comparison dimension is objectively more relevant than another one, and that empirical reality would dictate which dimension should be attended to. Rather, the choice of comparison dimensions is informed by socially constructed meaning. However, if the choice of relevant dimensions is subjective rather than objective, judgements of relative similarity between objects are necessarily subjective too. Thus, again, perceived similarity does not straightforwardly stem from objective similarity – there is a disjunction between the two" (Zagefka, 2009).

4) Leading from 3, you have failed to construct a dichotomy. If possessing X means you are a 'race', not possessing X means you are the opposing 'race'; i.e., there are only two states. You cannot say possessing X means you are a 'race' then pretermit the logical corollary that not possessing X means you are also a 'race'. It is entirely arbitrary to argue those who possess X are a 'race' (ignore the inverse), those who possess Y are a 'race' (ignore the inverse) and those who possess Z are a 'race' (ignore the inverse). You have arbitrarily constructed three groups based on a selection of traits that is also arbitrarily determined.

1) If genetic differences = new 'race', why are we not all our own 'race'?

That's a nonsensical fallacy.

Things must be categorised.

What is fallacious about it?

You can arbitrarily categorise things by anything you want, as Zagefka (2009) explains.

Can you tell the difference between an apple and an orange ? How ? What markers do you go on ? How can you determine it ?

You're wrong.

Race and ethnic grouping are two DIFFERENT things. Whyyoumad has never disputed that different ethnic groupings exist, but that the concept of a "black race" and "white race" etc are incorrect.