Twenty-one Oxbridge colleges took no black students last year

The response on Oxford's website sums everything up brilliantly. Yes, the statistics are disgusting and there is a serious problem, but Oxford are not to blame and blaming it on racism is ridiculous.

The response on Oxford's website sums everything up brilliantly. Yes, the statistics are disgusting and there is a serious problem, but Oxford are not to blame and blaming it on racism is ridiculous.

Two groups that form distinct clusters are likely to exhibit different frequency distributions over various genes, leading to group differences.

This leads us to two very distinct possibilities in human genetic variation:

Hypothesis 1: (the PC mantra) The only group differences that exist between the clusters (races) are innocuous and superficial, for example related to skin color, hair color, body type, etc.

Hypothesis 2: (the dangerous one) Group differences exist which might affect important (let us say, deep rather than superficial) and measurable characteristics, such as cognitive abilities, personality, athletic prowess, etc.

Note H1 is under constant revision, as new genetically driven group differences (e.g., particularly in disease resistance) are being discovered. According to the mantra of H1 these must all (by definition) be superficial differences.

A standard argument against H2 is that the 50k years during which groups have been separated is not long enough for differential natural selection to cause any group differences in deep characteristics. I find this argument quite naive, given what we know about animal breeding and how evolution has affected the (ever expanding list of) "superficial" characteristics. Many genes are now suspected of having been subject to strong selection over timescales of order 5k years or less. For further discussion of H2 by Steve Pinker, see here.

The BGI was the first outfit to clone pigs, and it has developed a new and more effective way of cloning mammals that might ultimately be applied to humans, if that were ever permitted.

But the organisation is involved in even more controversial projects. It is about to embark on a search for the genetic underpinning of intelligence. Two thousand Chinese schoolchildren will have 2,000 of their protein-coding genes sampled, and the results correlated with their test scores at school. Though it will cover less than a tenth of the total number of protein-coding genes, it will be the largest-scale examination to date of the idea that differences between individuals’ intelligence scores are partly due to differences in their DNA.

Dr Yang is also candid about the possibility of the 1,000-genome project revealing systematic geographical differences in human genetics—or, to put it politically incorrectly, racial differences. The differences that have come to light so far are not in sensitive areas such as intelligence. But if his study of schoolchildren does find genes that help control intelligence, a comparison with the results of the 1,000-genome project will be only a mouse-click away.

I personally do not believe Oxbridge to be racist, however I think they could acquire information regarding the race of those applying pre-interview.

The KCL application portal lists your name amongst other personal details on the site, contradicting the believe that they only "see" your UCAS ID number. If they can attain such details then surely the candidate's race can be discovered with relative easy by any University?

Where is there a space on the application form to say you're black?

You can choose to declare your ethnicity somewhere on the UCAS website I think

Unless you can provide a source for this I will just have to assume you're making it up to suit your agenda. I'm almost certain that 1/3 of white applicants are not successful given that applications for places are way in excess of 3 to 1 for most courses and most applicants are white.

In any case, it still wouldn't necessarily be a sign of racism, as Oxford say "Once black students do apply, Oxford's own recent analysis shows that subject choice is a major reason for their lower success rate. Black students apply disproportionately for the most oversubscribed subjects. 44% of all black applicants apply for Oxford’s three most oversubscribed subjects (compared to just 17% of all white applicants). That means that nearly half of black applicants are applying for the same three subjects, and these are the three toughest subjects for admission."

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Two Oxbridge colleges took no male students last year

Shocking!

It's not really, it's quite consistent with years of psychometric results showing a 1 standard deviation difference between groups.

Gottfredson, L. S. (2005). Implications of cognitive differences for schooling within diverse societies. Pages 517-554 in C. L. Frisby & C. R. Reynolds (Eds.), Comprehensive Handbook of Multicultural School Psychology. New York: Wiley.

http://www.udel.edu/educ/gottfredson/reprints/2005cognitivediversity.pdf

Read my post silly.

Two Oxbridge colleges took no male students last year

Only two, LOL? There are three all girls colleges just a Cambridge. Are you suggesting that a lucky male has managed to get himself enrolled at one of them?

I'm pretty sure you do state your race on the UCAS form so Oxbridge (or any other university) would be able to know your race before you even apply