"Scientist" claiming that the average Australian aborigine is only capable of...

I don't see how you can group anything at all on that basis, as there's almost always going to be some differences. If we group members of a religion together on the basis of their shared belief, even though they may be different from one another in every other way, I don't see any reason why we can't do the same with ethnicity. Groups are based on a shared trait or traits, not on being completely identical to all other members of the group.

Whyumadtho strongly believes all methods of grouping/classifying people are socially informed.Perhaps he has a point, to some extent, but he doesn't stop there; he refuses point blank to admit that some grouping schemes provide tangible, practical benefits.

This extends to gender as well - he believes classifying people as men or women in a binary system is arbitrary. Again the example of trans people means he's potentially getting at the shadow of a credible idea here; however, he won't even agree that classifying people into genders has any purpose at all . If he now turns around and admits how ridiculous this position is, then his entire philosophy is self-contradicted.

I'm afraid you and Sir Fox are going to find it impossible to convince him otherwise though.

Oooh, he's one of those. Well, then this whole exercise is even more pointless.

Whyumadtho strongly believes all methods of grouping/classifying people are socially informed.Perhaps he has a point, to some extent, but he doesn't stop there; he refuses point blank to admit that some grouping schemes provide tangible, practical benefits.

Oooh, he's one of those. Well, then this whole exercise is even more pointless.

I don't understand the general racism Australians have, especially against the aborigines. They seem like the most peaceful, pleasant people on Earth

You clearly don't have a grasp of what racism is.

Racism is the belief that one or more race is inherently worse, (or better), than others. I can be racist saying that all black people are inherently worthless, without having any negative or overtly positive opinions on other races.

I didn't pay too much attention to the guy and his bin comment, so I won't argue whether he is racist or not, just your inherent idea that racism = white supremacism.

Hmmmm - if he was racist surely he would have whites Britians/Europeans as the highest IQs not the chinese/japanese.

I can believe that this research did indeed find that in IQ tests aborigone tribesmen did come in quite low. But not necessarily because they lack intelligence. More to do with fact that they have no need of knowing about stuff in IQ tests, thier brains are not programmed to respond to maths and logic questions. They are wired to survival in a harsh enviroment.

Flip it round take your IQ test and make it about survival, where t find food, how to make fire, how not to freeze at night, how to hunt and forage and id bet that Europeans would be at the level of a cabbage wheras the Aborigines would come in very high scores

If your research contradicts everyday experience (clearly aborigine can do more than empty bins) you're completely wrong.

I don't understand how you can generalise and label a whole nation as racist.

you clearly didnt get what i was saying

he is white so ergo if he was being racist he'd hardly be in favour of the japanese being the most intelligent over white Europeans unless hes some kinds of white loathing racists?

If they possess a trait then they can be grouped by that trait. The problem with the arguments I've seen in this thread is that despite (using my my recent example) there being 'black', Maori and Caucasian people who both do and don't have the MAO-A allele, there is still a declaration that there are "genetic differences between ethnicities".

I'm criticising the "between ethnicities" part; for this to be valid it would mean MAO-A corresponds perfectly with whatever common element was used in the construction of the 'ethnicity' category. It is a declaration that being of ethnicity X means you differ genetically in respect to MAO-A from persons of ethnicity Y. Else, it isn't "between ethnicities", and to suggest otherwise would mean the person is unwarrantably lumping the 41%, 44% and 66% of 'black', Maori and Caucasian people, respectively, who don't have the trait with the 59%, 56% and 34%, respectively, who do. The genetic difference does not exist between ethnicities, it exists between carriers and non-carriers, who are present in all ethnicities. I'm asking how a 'black'/Maori/Caucasian distinction (used in the claim that there is a "genetic difference between ethnicities") can be created based on the incidence of MAO-A when it is clear that the trait is non-concordant with whatever was used to create the 'ethnicity' classification. My conclusion is that ethnicity is redundant and using it in discussions about the distribution of MAO-A relies on arbitrary groupings.

No. I believe the significance afforded to any given categorisation system is socially informed.

I got what you're saying, and you're still wrong.

You can be racist and white, without being a white supremacist. That is why the two terms exist, because they are not the same thing.

Racism isn't necessarily an indiscriminate hate of other cultures!!

While the IQ gap is pretty much confirmed and public knowledge, the question remains whether it's grounded in social reasons (discrimination etc.) exclusively or a mixture of social and biological reasons. Lynn is a rather controversial figure in psychology.

Living in Australia, so far I have not yet seen an Aboriginal person, well ... doing what everyone else would do. Sit in a restaurant, walk into a bank, sit in a lecture (or hold one). Every single one I've seen so far was sitting in a park with booze or strolling on the pavement with some friends and ... booze.

That's not meant to be discriminatory, that's just what I've observed. This said, as always in IQ there is a wide distribution and you'll find enough Aboriginal people with IQs >100 who are working as lecturers, civil servants etc.

Iq tests. Haha. What is intelligence haha.
You can study for an Iq test.

MRI-based studies estimate a moderate correlation between brain
size and intelligence of 0.40 to 0.51 (REF. 28; see REF. 29 on interpreting this correlation, and REF. 30 for a meta-analysis)

I don't understand the general racism Australians have, especially against the aborigines. They seem like the most peaceful, pleasant people on Earth

The early infanticidal childrearing mode of Austrian Aboriginals has been arguably the most abusive and neglectful of all tribal cultures. It is possible that the poor environment of the Australian desert is partially responsible for their lack of progress in childrearing, though New Guinea was nearly as stuck as they are in early infanticidal mode childrearing and they have had a far better environment than Australia.

Jarrett says that misogynist violence and child abuse in Aboriginal communities are at “catastrophic” levels. At the same time, Aboriginal culture must not be criticized, as though the violence sits outside the culture. Liberal democracies should welcome diversity, but not customs that violate human rights, she says….

Paleopathologist Stephen Webb in 1995 published his analysis of 4500 individuals’ bones from mainland Australia going back 50,000 years. (Priceless bone collections at the time were being officially handed over to Aboriginal communities for re-burial, which stopped follow-up studies).[15] Webb found highly disproportionate rates of injuries and fractures to women’s skulls, with the injuries suggesting deliberate attack and often attacks from behind, perhaps in domestic squabbles. In the tropics, for example, female head-injury frequency was about 20-33%, versus 6.5-26% for males.

The most extreme results were on the south coast, from Swanport and Adelaide, with female cranial trauma rates as high as 40-44% — two to four times the rate of male cranial trauma. In desert and south coast areas, 5-6% of female skulls had three separate head injuries, and 11-12% had two injuries.

Web could not rule out women-on-women attacks but thought them less probable. The high rate of injuries to female heads was the reverse of results from studies of other peoples.[16] His findings, according to anthropologist Peter Sutton, confirm that serious armed assaults were common in Australia over thousands of years prior to conquest. [17]…
[
n 1802 an explorer in the Blue Mountains wrote how, for a trivial reason, an Aboriginal called Gogy “took his club and struck his wife’s head such a blow that she fell to the ground unconscious. After dinner…he got infuriated and again struck his wife on the head with his club, and left her on the ground nearly dying.”[21]

In 1825 French explorer Louis-Antoine de Bougainville wrote “that young girls are brutally kidnapped from their families, violently dragged to isolated spots and are ravished after being subjected to a good deal of cruelty.”[22] George Robinson in Tasmania said in the 1830s that men courted their women by stabbing them with sharp sticks and cutting them with knives prior to rape. The men bartered their women to brutal sealers for dogs and food; in one case such a woman voluntarily went back to the sealers rather than face further tribal violence.[23]

Gob****e, thinking that he's a 'scientist' adds legitimacy to his argument. It only reinforces his view or agenda. If they have low capability it's because of their environment they are in.

Sherilee has an astonishingly accurate visual memory. She scores 100 per cent on tests designed to measure how much individuals can remember of what they see. The only clue to the cause of her remarkable ability is her race: she is an aborigine, and aborigines have a proven ability to remember the exact location of objects that far exceeds that of other ethnic groups. They can find their way across deserts, locate water holes and identify animal lairs with an uncanny accuracy. They also perform about 50 per cent better on visual memory tests than, for instance, Caucasians.

What is the aborigines’ secret? To some evolutionary psychologists, the answer is relatively straightforward. The aborigines were, for about 4,000 generations, or 80,000 years, hunter-gatherers in the deserts of Australia.

That is enough time for natural selection to have worked on increasing the accuracy of aborigines’ memory, because if you could not find your way through the desert, or to the waterhole, you would starve, and so would your children. In the competition to stay alive, an accurate memory would – to put it mildly – have been an advantage.

Are today’s aborigine children the inheritors of that process? It has certainly been speculated that their extraordinary visual memories are the result of genes selected over thousands of years by evolution.

By Clive Harper, a professor of pathology in Sydney, may have discovered evidence that it is more than just a theoretical possibility. He found that the visual cortex – the part of the brain used in processing and interpreting visual information – was about 25 per cent larger in aborigines than in Caucasians.

A sample of adopted and fostered aboriginals (typically of mixed European and aboriginal ancestry) children in Adelaide that had been reared in the homes of Australians showed performance on tests of conservation of quantity and conservation of weight that was significantly poorer than the norms for Europeans, although on other tests, including serration, the Nixon test, and the Peabody Picture Vocabulary test, the performance approximated European norms (Dasen, de Lacey, & Seagrim, 1973). The majority of the children were also reported to be below average in school work, and most were reported to experience particular difficulty with math. Since being raised in a European background controlled for differences in the environment, that aboriginal performance was below European norms is strong evidence for a genetic difference….

Of course, aboriginals need not do poorly on all tests. Kearins (1981, 1986) reports on experiments measuring memory for spatial location of objects. She found that aboriginals did better than whites. Since this was true of aboriginal who were at least a couple of generations removed from their original lifestyles, while these did not differ much from those who were less acculaturated, it appears likely that there is a genetic difference here. Kearins argued that this spatial ability was very useful for pathfinding in the desert. However, Drinkwater (1976) did not find such an advantage for a sample of non-desert aboriginals, although Kearins pointed out that even performing at the white level was impressive, since the aboriginals in general did not do this well.

Additional evidence of aboriginal superiority at spatial relations is supplied by Kearins (1988). She found that when day care children (4 to 4.5 years of age) were asked to indicate by pointing the direction to their home, 58% of the aboriginal children were correct while none of the university day care center children could do this and only 5% of those in an urban blue collar center, while the aboriginal children were significantly worse at knowing their addresses, ages, or at counting than were the white children. The aboriginal children were also significantly better at the kindergarten game of fishing (catching artificial fish) which required speed and manual dexterity.

A possible explanation for the aboriginal advantage in spatial memory is provided by (Klekamp et al.,1994) who report that Australian aboriginals have a larger visual cortex than Caucasians.

The brains of Australian aborigines also show a prominent lunate sulcus at a higher rate than in other races (Baker, 1974, p. 293), which Baker notes indicates that "the visual area does not extend nearly so far round the posterior end of the occipital lobe on to its lateral surface" in Europids as in Australids. This is a feature considered by some to be relatively primitive. Also the percentage of skulls with fronto-temporal pteriorn or one or both sides is much higher in Australids (and Negrids) than in Europids of Europe (Baker 1974, p. 299). It is not known what the implications, if any, of these morphological differences are for brain function. However, the tendency that some observers see for the Australian aborigines to retain many primitive features is very consistent with their isolation having prevented the genes for many traits from having reached them.

A possible biological basis for low intelligence in Australian aborigines is provided by their relatively small brain sizes, which is reported to be about 85% of that for the normal European (Baker, 1974, p. 292), with some of the smallest brains reported in normal people being found among them (Coon, 1962, p. 411). The most recent work (Klekamp et al., 1987) confirmed earlier work by finding a statistically significant difference in fresh brain weight with aboriginal brains averaging 1241 grams, versus 1421 for Caucasians. Harper & Mina (1981) reported statistically signifucant (p<.001) brain weight differences (from the same set of brains) in paired samples matched for age and height. Brain size (as measured by either head size or magnetic resonance imagining) is known to be correlated with intelligence (see the list of studies in Lynn 1991b; Miller, 1994; Rushton, 1994, 1995; Rushton & Osborne, 1995, and Rushton & Ankney, in press).

Hmmmm - if he was racist surely he would have whites Britians/Europeans as the highest IQs not the chinese/japanese.

I can believe that this research did indeed find that in IQ tests aborigone tribesmen did come in quite low. But not necessarily because they lack intelligence. More to do with fact that they have no need of knowing about stuff in IQ tests, thier brains are not programmed to respond to maths and logic questions. They are wired to survival in a harsh enviroment.

Flip it round take your IQ test and make it about survival, where t find food, how to make fire, how not to freeze at night, how to hunt and forage and id bet that Europeans would be at the level of a cabbage wheras the Aborigines would come in very high scores

chinese and north koreans have higher average iq's than whites on average. these are extremely poor areas, many times down to subsistence levels. yet they still score very high on tests that white men have created.