Depends on what you mean by “equal” in the above sentence, but it takes a certain ignorance to think people all over the world are the same. I mean, difference in skin tone are observable…
Where I begin to dissent is when we try to categorize people into races based on very high level generalities. Like color, for example. I can’t think of a worse measure for categorization.
I also think, and I believe you mentioned this, these similarities we see in people, such as bone density, are generally seen within specific geographies. What happens when they’re moved or freely more to a different geography? How long does it take for changes to manifest? 100 years. 1,000 years? 100,000 years? At what point are they no longer a part of the grouping?
These questions and many others is why I think it’s challenging, to put it simply, to categorize people into groups let alone what we call race.
That is certainly interesting if accurate. They are obviously very different.
My fault we’re sort of mixing related topics here. I brought up neurological sex differences, a tangent to this. IMO, Damore talking about how to make IT more appealing to women, or to maybe explain some of the reasons fewer women choose IT, was well meaning. Unfortunately, a lot of people have been brought up with this idea that men and women are the same, and any differences are entirely cultural the result of environment. Almost a religious devotion to that worldview. His bringing up more recent research on that had people calling him a misogynist, sexist, etc… His words got taken out of context, and he was pilloried in the press.
We’re a lot closer to thinking that there are meaningful biological differences between men and women. Increased spatial ability in men, or increased interest in things over people as good examples. Even that’s pretty controversial, because there are feminists who will take that out of context or create a strawman to say “we’re back to the 1950s and saying women can’t be engineers” if we want to research such things. Or for the feminists, if we acknowledge some of these differences, maybe having parity, equal numbers of men and women in all careers is an unrealistic goal.
This is the review I was thinking of, and you’ll see links to a couple of followup articles there if you’re interested.
Yes, but the history is pretty ugly in this regard so people have good reason to be cautious.
I was practicing school psychology in the early 1990s when IQ and race became a huge issue, litigated in the courts in CA. The pendulum has swung back a bit since then, which is another story.
There are good reasons to be very cautious about the conclusions we make based on these tests, and my field and others, have historically underestimated the impacts of inadequate education, healthcare, and other factors.
I went in to this history in great detail here once before, but some of the biggest names in psychology studying the science of intelligence ended up being called racists by later researchers, which was unfair and wrong. Researchers from that time to the present have also had the terrible experience of having some of their data used out of context to justify white supremacy. No wonder people are very cautious, and concerned. Rightly so.
So, I believe we entered a period of years where our previously inaccurate assumptions about race or sex made these topics taboo in some ways. That leds to the conclusion that if you’re even interested in group differences, you must be trying to justify racism or sexism. Nothing good can come from knowing this. Or this idea that the science is settled and there are no meaningful differences to be found.
That’s not how science works, so people who want to stake themselves to that claim are very rapidly going to find themselves defending a world view or political stance.
If we have a universal idea for human rights, that is based on seeing people as individuals, that’s the only way forward.
Regardless of differences among DNA/ethnic groups or the sexes, we see people as individuals first. There’s far more that we have in common than ways we’re different, but we’re also not threatened by the idea that the sexes or different human groups have evolved to create differences.
Epigenetics and neuroscience are both just going to explode in our lifetimes. We can be excited about that.
I’ve mentioned this before but there are towns in my state where 30-50% of the students are special ed. In my opinion this should be seen as a crisis that needs to be addressed because it has to be a sign that there is something wrong somewhere. But it seems like the people in charge view this as a victory or a sign that the system is working. What I mean by that is, they think it’s a good thing that kids get diagnosed as special ed because it means that they will get the services they need. It’s as though asking the real question, why the hell are all of these kids special ed, is something they fear. Because either it will be a question of genetics or of environment, two things no one has the courage to examine. Meanwhile, they are creating a whole new underclass of people.
Yeah, that’s a train wreck on multiple levels. The number of kids with a learning disability should be somewhere around 8-12%.
I’d be very curious to see know what percentage of these kids are being identified as special needs for behavioral problems.
This is only part of the situation.
Under new guidelines during Duncan’s years as US Secretary of Ed. (Obama Administration), to stop the school to prison pipeline, schools came under tremendous pressure to keep troubled Black kids in school because drop outs have a higher incidence of ending up in jail. Keep kids in school. Fewer young men in jail. Problem solved.
The thinking being that these violent and troubled youths somehow miraculously turn from great kids working hard at their studies, to young men shooting other young men at age 18. If the schools expel them at higher rates than other ethnic groups, the schools will be penalized and told that the staff is racist and needs to be trained in racial sensitivity. It often left frantic urban school staff with very few options to try to deal with these conduct disorders.
If they classified them as Severely Emotionally Disturbed or Behavior Disordered under Sp. Ed rules, they might at least be able to move them to some smaller classroom, maybe off site, or at another school, maybe with more adults per student so they could better manage them.
For the legit, perfectly nice learning disabled kids with special needs, or the regular kids who have to attend school with these violent youth, this is a nightmare. But we don’t care so much about them. When they are shot by a violent gang member, or harassed constantly in their classes, you won’t hear much about that in the news. No professional football players will take a knee for those kids.
I know that’s cynical, but that’s the truth.
In CA, the pendulum has swung back again about making it illegal to give Black children an IQ test because the test are assumed to be culturally or racially biased. That lead to some under identification of legit learning disabled kids, so you had Black parents fighting to get into special education for kids who need help.
And try telling some educated, middle class Black parents that you can’t give their kid an IQ test because it’s “racially biased.” One of my son’s best friends, an intellectually gifted young woman. Both of her parents are Black, and physicians. That becomes very offensive. Do you assume that these college educated Black parents don’t read to their kids? Have sub-average vocabularies? Picture yourself telling Denzel Washington this. He’s going to ask you what exactly is different about his culture and race that disadvantages his kids. Somehow people didn’t predict this question. There’s no good answer to that because the bias is more about poverty than race. Period.
I feel like I’ve talked about all of this before, so I’ll stop after this post.
Well thats just it. I was told growing up that the only differences was in pigmentation. The picture below is one that is very similar to what they used to show us in school. Obviously I don’t think you could make any conclusions on religion or sexual preference based on morphology but there are significant differences between different groups of people.
Well mass migrations of people is a very recent development in human history. For sure if it continues it will shape our collective genome. It likely already has. As for how long it would take for a population to change. I guess that is up to whatever pressures exist influencing mate selection.
It would be challenging to group people if there were not significant differences. I feel like many people have a social/moral hang up when it comes to race. Understandably so considering history.
Much of the issue lies with the distribution. Of the number of differences amongst humans that matter, which are clumped tightly enough to use in lieu of real work. Of those, which are even cost effective to know?
If you could affect your IQ by 20% that would be huge. Say you start at 100 and end up at 120? That’s a significant order of magnitude higher.
On the other side, about 4 days after I went through that wall, my IQ was probably half of what it is normally. I got my bell rung hard. But that was due to injury.
This does not necessarily answer the nature\ nurture answer and there may not be a way to tell what is nature and what is nurture. But this answers, some degree, how fluid IQ is. And it’s somewhat fluid, but not very much.
" Ronald Wilson presented the first clear and compelling evidence that the heritability of IQ increases with age. We propose to call the phenomenon ‘The Wilson Effect’ and we document the effect diagrammatically with key twin and adoption studies, including twins reared apart, that have been carried out at various ages and in a large number of different settings. The results show that the heritability of IQ reaches an asymptote at about 0.80 at 18-20 years of age and continuing at that level well into adulthood. In the aggregate, the studies also confirm that shared environmental influence decreases across age, approximating about 0.10 at 18-20 years of age and continuing at that level into adulthood. These conclusions apply to the Westernized industrial democracies in which most of the studies have been carried out"
