Norik
[14] Master
@CaptainHook : You make some great points. I have to respond to a couple of them...
It's also important to note that these are average scores for each ethnicity, and when the majority of people in one group are in poverty, education is compromised (you need to get a job to support your family and can't finish school, you can't afford college, you work all day long so you can't dedicate much time to your children, etc) so of course IQ averages are skewed and favor wealthier groups.
So no, of course IQ scores don't favor certain cultures, but they do favor conditions under which intelligence can better develop (and certain races are born under these conditions more often than others because of historic reasons).
There's also this and, more importantly, this.
I, like you, feel that humanity is headed down this path as well. Traits that were once crucial to our survival (resistance to heat and drought in Africans, body hair in Europeans who lived in colder climates, better stamina in low-oxygen climates in Peruvian mountain Indians, etc) are now rendered meaningless by globalization and the modern way of life. As the more developed countries lose their xenophobic stances and religion continues to decline in importance, I can totally see an amalgamation of races forming over time. This has already been happening in South America for over a century, and North America is next. I'm not too sure about the rest of the world just yet (especially with the way Muslim immigration is reshaping popular European opinion on the topic) but it's bound to happen eventually.
They don't... technically. It's a lot more about upbringing and early education than it is about culture/race (and this, of course, varies from family to family). The one thing most Asian American and Jewish American families have in common is they are -on average- far more demanding towards their children academically speaking than any other group. Having gone to high school in a multicultural city, I can tell you that all the Jewish and Asian kids (along with a few Haitian and Indian kids) were forced by their families into taking all AP classes, even when they were clearly having trouble and hated it. Because of their exposure to these challenges, these kids ended up developing remarkable problem solving, analytic, and time management skills when compared to the rest of the school. And of course, this results in higher IQ scores.
It's also important to note that these are average scores for each ethnicity, and when the majority of people in one group are in poverty, education is compromised (you need to get a job to support your family and can't finish school, you can't afford college, you work all day long so you can't dedicate much time to your children, etc) so of course IQ averages are skewed and favor wealthier groups.
So no, of course IQ scores don't favor certain cultures, but they do favor conditions under which intelligence can better develop (and certain races are born under these conditions more often than others because of historic reasons).
There's also this and, more importantly, this.
It's funny because this -aside from being absolutely true- encapsulates how our perceptions of race have changed over the past couple of centuries. Sure, having different breeds of dogs makes little sense now that they're just pets, but do you know why we have different kinds of dogs? If you look at the domestication of the wolf and the eventual creation of the dog, you can see that certain traits were favored over others, creating a type of evolution called artificial selection (aka: survival of what's most useful to humans). Nowadays these breeds, which were once designed with specific uses in mind, are all treated the same, so suddenly they stop being useful and the problems of inbreeding become more evident. This leads us to the desire to mix races, and eventually, to the loss of all breeds in favor of a "post-racial" dog, which resembles the proto-dogs of human prehistory but come with all the advantages of several centuries of selective breeding (increased intelligence, improved behavior, etc).
I, like you, feel that humanity is headed down this path as well. Traits that were once crucial to our survival (resistance to heat and drought in Africans, body hair in Europeans who lived in colder climates, better stamina in low-oxygen climates in Peruvian mountain Indians, etc) are now rendered meaningless by globalization and the modern way of life. As the more developed countries lose their xenophobic stances and religion continues to decline in importance, I can totally see an amalgamation of races forming over time. This has already been happening in South America for over a century, and North America is next. I'm not too sure about the rest of the world just yet (especially with the way Muslim immigration is reshaping popular European opinion on the topic) but it's bound to happen eventually.
