"U.S. society today is very nearly a pure meritocracy, perhaps the purest there has ever been."

EqualityHound wrote:

AA is inclusive, not exclusive. It seeks to include people from ALL races. Why should just the students with the highest GPA and test scores get into the top universities? Is there any evidence that they will contribute the most to our society and world? No. Look at the past, present and future Leaders of the Free World - did they have a 4.8 GPA and 1600 SAT score? No. Selfish high-scoring students who study all day to give themselves the best chances at college admissions are nothing to be impressed with. Their lives are all about themselves. What have they done for the world?

They will contribute more to society than most.

Most of these students will eventually earn above average salaries. More income means more taxable income. More taxable income means more money for roads, schools, police, etc.

They may be selfish, but they do contribute a lot to society -- monetarily at least.

In America today, racism is the #1 problem. Never hesitate to challenge racism. Never let people sluff of race as an issue on LR or anywhere else.

rattler wrote:

The problem with arguing that the U.S. is currently a "pure meritocracy" and that class is determined by intelligence is that you are saying that, by and large, minorities must be less intelligent than whites.

East Asians are more intelligent, on average than whites. Blacks, Latinos, Aborigines, Native Americans are less intelligent than whites, on average. These are of course not the only differences:

Sorry, that study has been disproven as racist and culturally biased.

Link?

https://www3.nationalgeographic.com/genographic/

Liar Liar Liar wrote:

Europe is totally integrated. There are no segregated neighborhoods.

What are you talking about. Minorities are noticeably absent from positions of power in many European nations/companies. This (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jwpO-nnFY9g) does not happen in America.

This (http://www.globalissues.org/HumanRights/Racism.asp) is a good resource as well.

Disproven wrote:

Sorry, that study has been disproven as racist and culturally biased.

Reality has been disproven?

stop being dense wrote:

East Asians are more intelligent, on average than whites. Blacks, Latinos, Aborigines, Native Americans are less intelligent than whites, on average. These are of course not the only differences:

http://www.charlesdarwinresearch.org/Race_Evolution_Behavior.pdf

Race, Rushton, And Us

Getting Used To What We Can't Change

One marvels that a creed widely doubted in private, unsupported by evidence, and manifestly incorrect, can become compulsory in a society, shape its policy, and arouse furious support. Radical egalitarianism is such a creed -- the notion that people, both individually and in groups, are born equal and, preferably, identical. It would then follow that all differences arise from nurture.

What if they don't?

As a matter of daily experience we observe that some individuals are bigger, smarter, better athletes, superior artists, better singers. It isn't all nurture: Raise me as Michael Jordan was raised, and I would still be short and slow. We also observe that some groups consistently excel others. We pretend otherwise because the penalties for not pretending are severe. Most of us know we are pretending.

There is at the University of Ontario a scholar named J. Philippe Rushton, much in disrepute among the clergy of nurturism. He is a sociobiologist, a member of an outcast class holding that much of behavior is biologically shaped. His book, Race, Evolution, and Behavior, is intensely reviled among the keepers of proper thought.* It purports to describe and explain differences in intelligence and behavior among races. This we must never, ever do.

I don't give it blanket endorsement, but its central thrust is sufficiently in accord with daily experience as to be worth pondering. In outline:

The IQ of East Asians (Koreans, Chinese, Japanese) is about 106, of Eurowhites 100, "blacks" in America 85, blacks in Africa 70. He does not in the book deal with Jews, but Ashkenazi Jews average 115. The East Asians have a particular advantage in mathematics.

Why?

The moment one recites the statistics, frantic counterarguments arise. Race doesn't exist or, contradictorily, isn't important. Intelligence doesn't exist, can't be defined, or can't be measured. Tests are biased. In short, anything that gives an undesired answer undergoes summary rejection.

Now, readers may reach such conclusions as they think best. But allow me two questions and an assertion. The first question: Do you not know some people who are unquestionably smarter than some others? The second question: Given that races demonstrably differ in appearance, size, bodily proportions, biochemistry, brain size, and a thousand other things, is there any obvious reason why they should not vary in intelligence? In behavior?

The assertion: The people who devise tests of intelligence, as anyone may discover by reading, are neither fools, nor bigots, nor unaware of the problems of testing. Dismiss them only after much reading and careful thought.

The thesis of the sociobiologists is as follows: Men evolved about 200,000 years ago in Africa. Some migrated to Europe about 100,000 years ago and, then being in genetic isolation from Africa, evolved into the Caucasian race. Roughly 40,000 years ago some of the Caucasians migrated to Asia and, in genetic isolation, evolved into East Asians.

Life in northern Europe, runs the argument, was far more difficult than it had been in Africa because of, if nothing else, harsh winters. Survival required not just the intelligence to keep warm but also cooperation, forethought, planning, and cohesion. The people who would become East Asians, living in still more difficult conditions, needed more of these qualities. Those who survived had them.

This may be true. It may not. In evolutionary circles, plausibility trades as evidence. Yet it fits.

Says Rushton, on the basis of many years of research, there exists a clear gradient in many things from yellow to white to black. Asians have somewhat larger brains than whites who have substantially larger brains than blacks. Measured aggressiveness follows the same pattern of a small gap between yellow and white and a larger gap between white and black. The pattern applies for other characteristics: East Asians are lowest in testosterone levels, latest in entering puberty, lowest in size of genitals, degree of criminality, sex drive, rates of fertility, rates of divorce and promiscuity. Blacks are at the other extreme, with whites falling between.

Rushton is no fool. He knows that some of these things are influenced by variables other than the innate. He knows the pitfalls in cross-cultural measurement. Yet, he asserts, the pattern remains. In the United States, for example, crime is very low among East Asians, academic performance very high, divorce rare, families small.

In short, his thesis is that while environment obviously matters in determining outcomes, our capacities and behavior are very much influenced by genetics. The idea is not new, merely forbidden. Rushton et al however make a careful evidentiary case that is not easily ignored, unless you have determined in advance to ignore it.

Nurturists disagree with the sociobiologists. Behavior that seems racial, they argue, is in fact determined by culture. The question is tricky. Culture may itself be to a considerable extent the expression of biology. If East Asians are by nature less aggressive than whites, perhaps because of lower levels of testosterone, one would expect the lack of aggressiveness to be embodied in the culture. That is, naturally quiet people will raise their children to be quiet and be inclined to value courtesy. The nurturist can then say, "Aha! Just as I thought. Socially ingrained." Maybe. Maybe not.

A shift in the intellectual climate seems to be in the offing. Increasingly we see a clash between the compulsory view that we are all identical at birth, which would happily allow the eradication of various inequalities and of crime; and the quietly held but growing recognition that if we are inherently different, as seems to be the case, we will unavoidably have different results.

The question cannot easily be studied. The nurturists are politically in the saddle, and so research into racial differences is verboten. One may ask, of course: Why do the correct fear investigation, unless they know, or suspect, that they are wrong? It is assuredly true that, in the past, theories of racial superiority have often emanated from virulent nationalists who have sought to place their own stock at the top of the heap. The inevitable comparison is with Hitler, a dark squatty little thing convinced of the superiority of blonde Aryan supermen.

In Rushton's case we are dealing with something else. A white Canadian who believes in yellow supremacy is hardly aggrandizing himself. I am myself a purebred Euro-mongrel without known trace of Asian or Jewish ancestry. I'd like to regard Scots/English/Huguenot cocktails as the pinnacle of civilization, and those in cowboy hats as the better of the best. I don't see the evidence. Rushton's gradient accords with my observations whether I like it or not. Perhaps we had better get used to Chinese mathematicians.

*Amazon has it.

Okay, so IQ may be genetic, or raced based. The relevant question then becomes, SO WHAT?

I am myself a purebred Euro-mongrel without known trace of Asian or Jewish ancestry.

The human genographic project has proven most Europeans have Asian ancestry, most Asians have European ancestry, and most Native Americans have Asian and European ancestry, and all have Kenyan ancestry. People migrated across the Asian continent from the Far west to the Far east, to Australia, Americas, etc. We ALL (without any exceptions) descend from the same two Kenyans who lived in the Rift Valley, 60,000 years ago.

Fred Reed Piece On This wrote:

" If East Asians are by nature less aggressive than whites, perhaps because of lower levels of testosterone....."

Yeah, east asians like the Japanese were reaaaaal unaggressive during much of their history, including as recently as world war 2.

And as far as this whole inherent IQ thing goes, remember: one's IQ can be influenced quite a bit by the nutrition of his/her mother during pregnancy, and the nutrition one receives during the first years of life (for instance, breast-feeding[ideal] vs poor nutrition). So if you have a group if rich white women who eat an ideal diet during pregnancy and then breastfeed and give an ideal diet to their child for its first few years of life, compared to a group of black women who are are poorly nourished during pregnancy and who do not breastfeed their children and give them a poor diet, OF COURSE there will be a large IQ difference between the 2 groups of children. But this difference was not necessarily genetically determined. If the fertilized eggs (in theory) were transplanted between mothers, and then these fetuses, and later children, were subjected to the opposite nutritional environments from conception to 2 years of age, you would certainly see a very different result.

Instead of just saying: this group is just naturally dumber than this other group, therefore group 1 is less deserving of material success, why not try to resolve some of the education and wealth deficiency of the first group in order to allow that group a chance to produce offspring up to their full potential? Probably because their potential might be much higher than those who proclaimed them naturally dumb would want to admit, and would bring them competition they would rather not face.

YOUareTooVerbose wrote:

Okay, so IQ may be genetic, or raced based. The relevant question then becomes, SO WHAT?

Exactly. You have to ponder the policy implications of what we do now, and wonder what we should do in the future. If you know for example, that affirmative action will lead to more dead patients as a result of less intelligent & qualified blacks becoming doctors instead of more intelligent & qualified Asians, the question becomes "is this what we want?"

You're wrong. This was of course the subject of Arthur Jensen's 1969 paper "How Much Can We Boost I.Q. and Scholastic Achievement?" and oodles of other studies and papers since then. Of course breast feeding, avoidance of lead chips in childhood, etc. is helpful for IQ and general health. Environment is a big part of why blacks in the US have mean IQs in the 80s while those in Africa have IQs in the 70s and lower. Yet getting anywhere near parity with whites & Asians is simply not possible. Consider this: the same environment that produces US blacks who are taller and faster than US whites, with higher levels of testosterone, also produces markedly less intelligent blacks who commit vastly more crime per capita.

The good news for you, is that in this country you will never be forced to retain a black doctor to examine your sorry racist *ss.

YOUareTooVerbose wrote:

The good news for you, is that in this country you will never be forced to retain a black doctor to examine your sorry racist *ss.

I make a factual, true statement. You call me a racist. Interesting.

this has been studied to death wrote:Consider this: the same environment that produces US blacks who are taller and faster than US whites, with higher levels of testosterone, also produces markedly less intelligent blacks who commit vastly more crime per capita.

Actually, the AVERAGE height/speed of European descendants is taller/faster than African descendants. The genetic diversity of blacks is more than for whites. The fastest blacks are faster than the faster whites, but when you're talking about averages the opposite is true.

the kids movie Wall-E, shows us what's in store for this world if we keep going this way.

It is apparent to me that some people on this thread don't understand statistics. There are two questions being raised here:

1. Are there differences in the intelligence between the means of certain racial/ethnic groups, and

2. If there are differences, how should this shape policy?

Regarding the first question, this is not a settled issue for several reasons, not the least of which is the rather soft definition of what constitutes "race". I suggest a read of Stephen J. Gould's "The Mismeasure of Man" to get some perspective on this.

Regarding the second question, it pretty much ignores what a "mean" is. Even if you could prove that group A has a mean "intelligence" (however you define that) 10% greater than group B, it would be idiotic to then disbar members of group B from holding certain jobs such as an MD. Why? Because given typical distributions there will be many members of group B who actually have higher "intelligence" than those of group A. There is simply no need to do these sorts of things as highly specialized and demanding fields have a built-in form of selection (you can't become a doctor or an engineer or whatever if you flunk out, no matter which group you belong to).

Each individual comes into this world with a set of characteristics that will help or hinder their success in any given endeavor. Some of those will be genetic (Geb never had a chance as an Olympic wrestler), some of those will be environmental (like it or not, millionaire parents are a plus). It is clear that each of us are not equal to anyone else in terms of these sets of characteristics, but we are equal in terms of our political and social rights; our right of self-determination, and that's a key distinction that we must never forget.