Human Stupidity: Irrationality, Self Deception

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About East Asians. Even in the case of the ones who came from working class and poor families that went on to excel and crowd Universities you have to consider culture. Northeast Asian cultures were inspired by the philosophies of Confucius to study hard in order to succeed in life and this is reflected in the study habits of Asian-American students as well as the high education standards of countries like China, Korea and Japan.

African-American communities do not have that cultural legacy of valuing education as a foundation. In fact in many urban areas Black students who focus on their education and practice good study habits are seeing as “acting White” by some of their peers as Whiteness is associated with a strong educational value. Tremendous psychological damage has been done to Black Americans by institutional racism that has damaged Black self-esteem and created negative social attitudes as a reaction to racist stereotypes. Although Asian-Americans has experienced racism it wasn’t at the same level as anti-Black racism and they have that cultural foundation which by the way isn’t unique. It can be seen in Ashkenazi Jews and African immigrants.

Now here is something no racialist has been able to explain to me. If there is a racial basis to intelligence and a racial hierarchical order that sees East Asians at the top why are so many Southeast Asian countries poor? Why do Native American and Hispanic communities suffer from social pathologies and have lower average IQ than Whites if they are from the same Mongoloid racial stock as Northeast Asians? Noone has EVER given me a sensible answer and I have come to the conclusion that this is one of the most notable contradictions in the current racialist theory about the cause of IQ variation in continental populations. Rushton as far as I know provides no explanation in fact his research is focused on a 3 race model that does not include every human population out there and his placing of Orientals at the top of the hierarchy is only in reference to Northeast Asians.

With his evolutionary model based on a discredited theory and his Life History variables based on misinterpretations of anthropometric data as well as dubious social science research Rushton’s racial theory fails when you further take into account this glaring contradiction in his own racial model.

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There are alot of problems with your argument. First of all you are being dismissive of Graves authority as an evolutionary biologist (not an anthropologist). This is illogical. Graves is an expert on evolutionary theory and biology so he is more qualified to speak on this subject than Rushton. The article is very long but if you take the time to read you should realize that Graves does not go off on tangents he goes into detail on why r/K selection theory is inapplicable to humans (a consensus among evolutionary biologists), how Rushton got the theory backwards and why it appears that Rushton does not even understand life history theory in general. I’m not saying that Graves is right and Rushton is wrong because Graves is an expert and Rushton is not, I did give you a summary of the arguments Graves makes.

The logic of Rushton’s theory of racial hierarchies is not consistent. I gave you a simply example with Native Americans and East Asians of how the theory of race determining IQ doesn’t work. IQ score averages don’t even remain consistent among the traditional race models that Rushton uses. It only appears to work if you select certain groups that fit the pattern and leave out others. Also if we’re are talking about the anthropometric data as I said, both Lieberman and Graves debunked it.

You shouldn’t judge a book entirely by its title (and by your logic I should dismiss Rushton’s research as nothing more than the work of an agenda driven ideologue because he made a book titled Race, Evolution and Behavior). I don’t think you’ve taken the time to actually understand the arguments against biological races. I have provided a summary in an earlier post but I’ll repeat the general argument again. It isn’t that there is no genetic variation between human populations it’s the fact that human populations themselves do not meet the taxonomic criteria for classification as subspecies. That’s the basis for saying there are no races. Of course there are phenotypes which we can distinguish with are own eyes as well as with forensic analysis but those phenotypes do not reflect a distinct evolutionary lineage.

Kittles and Long (2003) provide a summary of the reasons why racial classifications do not fit human genetic variation: (1) There are no agreed upon criteria for when to assign formal names to groups that might more appropriately be considered aggregates of local populations. (2) Race classifications fail for phenotypically intermediate populations. (3) They fail for individuals who trace their ancestry to two or more named races. (4) They are defied by sets of characters that show independent geographic trends. (5) It has been difficult to relate many human populations as distinct evolutionary lineages.

As far as race and medicine is concerned Graves also wrote articles on race and its relevance to biomedical research. Because there is genetic variation between human populations and because there are heritable diseases and genetic predispositions to certain health risks there is need to study genetic variation and ascertain whether or not medication needs to be assigned to specific people based on ancestry. However this principle can be better described as gene-based medicine not race-based medicine because biological categories based on phenotype are invalid for humans.

You can have a medication that works for some people but doesn’t work for other people who have a similar phenotype given the tremendous genetic variability within continental populations. So there may be a medication that percentage wise is more helpful to people of Irish descent than Germans even though according to traditional racial classifications those people are the same race. There may be medications that are more effective for Africans on average than for Europeans but that doesn’t validate racial categories. Genetic variation should be considered by medical professionals but there are cases where assigning medicine by race can be detrimental for patients. You also have to consider environmental factors that may be relevant to the health of demographic groups and geographic populations that don’t have a genetic basis. I’ll provide Graves articles on this subject for the benefit of you and other readers:

http://www.megaupload.com/?d=1X1KEXO5

http://www.megaupload.com/?d=TCKGFSUR

As for your last sentence I repeat again that controversy surrounding Rushton’s research doesn’t make it any more credible. I can argue just as easily that Rushton’s research is biased because it supports racists as you can that Graves is biased because his research favors the views of Egalitarians. We should look at the arguments and evidence of both.

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I recommend watching a documentary titled Race and Intelligence: Science’s Last Taboo. It features a journalist investigating theories about the cause of the Black-White IQ gap by interviewing several scholars. Among the interviewees are Richard Lynn, J Philippe Rushton, Richard Nisbett and James Flynn. I’ve uploaded it to Youtube under the name EgalitarianJay. Someone else has it uploaded on Dailymotion.

The main point I want to make here is that there is such a thing as bias in scientific research. It’s been demonstrated by several scholars that much of the theories on racial differences in intelligence throughout history were pseudoscientific and conducted during eras where the objective of proving such a theory was to justify racist social policies.

I do not believe that research like Rushton’s should be censored. It should be subjected to rigorous scientific critique which has been done. I am not a scientist myself however I do believe my reading level is high enough and my grasp of the Scientific method good enough to understand the research that has been put fourth by these scientists (I did get A’s in Biology, Psychology and Medical Science in college).

The reason I am so skeptical of Rushton’s research is because he ignores evidence that undermines his position. His bias in favor of genetic determinism is obvious. The basic premise of his research is to find scientific justifications for racial stereotypes such as Black people being stupid and over-sexed.

If you read the beginning of his book Race, Evolution and Behavior he provides a considerably biased interpretation of African history and his sources have been revealed as racist. When you hear him argue about the existence of different races he does not discuss social and biological definitions nor any sort of objective criteria but rather tries to prove empirically that there are biological differences between humans (something no reputable scientist challenges) then uses that evidence as proof that there are human races while choosing only to study the classical 3 race model (Caucasoids, Negroids, Mongoloids) excluding several human populations in the process. In reality he is studying demographic groups and nations (not distinct biological entities) and calling them races.

C Loring Brace describes the research in Rushton’s book as “Bad Biology and Inexcusable Anthropology”.

I agree with that assessment. I’m not here to convince anyone of my position only to discuss the claims put forward.

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Whites have always been considered generally more intelligent than all other races on earth as evidenced by their high achievement that span centuries. On the other hand, according to four recent independent university studies performed in different countries, it was scientifically and statistically proven that South Koreans had the highest average IQ of 106-107 (ranked 1st worldwide), while Jews had average IQ scores of 91 (ranked 33rd worldwide). What was interesting was that gentile Whites from Europe and America had average IQ’s that were slightly lower than that of South Korea’s people, but had significantly higher intelligence quotient scores than the Jews. What does this all mean? Who knows? But if South Korea’s rapid economic growth and technological advancement within only a few decades after the Korean War is any indication of it’s peoples intelligence, then one can say that research supports the contention that the smarter the race the more technologically advanced and economically prosperous the country will be even within a short span of time.

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@Admin:

The scholar who gave the presentation on race and human evolution is Todd Disotell a professor of Anthropology from New York University. I am interested in feedback on this video. It is interesting to hear the different perspectives on this issue.

Now about your impressions of the discussion….

First of all I got the impression that the audience was giggling at the visual imagery of the question (100s of men together in a shower). Disotell acknowledges phenotype and that obviously we can distinguish between people with different external anatomical characteristics. However he argues that these traits themselves do not belie distinct evolutionary lineages.
Genetic variation between geographic populations does not reach a threshold that would warrant taxonomic classification as a sub-species. There is human biological variation it simply isn’t structured into phylogenetically distinct breeding populations but rather discordant clines across diverse populations.

Now as far as Graves response to Rushton about the Transracial adoption study he did cite research which indicates that stereotype threat is a relevant factor so that sort of study does not meet his criteria for controlling for an environment where the cultural setting is equal.

In video 9 I have to say that Graves arguments were far more compelling to me. He makes notable points about gene x environment interaction which Rushton doesn’t consider. His retort about different views on racial temperament was easy to understand and his slide about intrinsic rate of increase and IQ contradicts Rushton’s argument about intelligence and reproductive strategy being correlated.

Graves goes on to refute the idea that there is evidence that European genes make Blacks smarter. Meanwhile Rushton can’t decide whether Native Americans belong to the Mongoloid race or a 4th race and can’t explain why Native Americans if they experienced the same selection pressures for higher intelligence in harsh winters as their Northeast Asian cousins have lower IQs than Whites (Lynn estimates Native American IQ average at 87). The Native American issue is clearly a conundrum for Rushton who admittedly omits them from study in his race research. Graves has the clear advantage on the subject as the IQ scores support his view that environment has profound effects on ethnic IQ disparities to the extent that genetic causation looks like an unlikely factor.

Finally at the very end of the video in Part 11 Rushton appears to self-destruct when answering the last question which dealt with European barbarism and historical atrocities. According to Rushton the brutality of Whites towards their fellow man is simply an example of human nature and no race is more savage than another. No race is more savage yet races differ in temperament which leads to disparities in crime rates.

So let me get this straight Dr. Rushton…when Whites produce a culture that tolerates horrific crimes against humanity it is simply human nature. But when individual Blacks commit violent crimes, though they make up a minority of the Black population it’s because they are Black.

Is it any wonder that the crowd laughed at him for that blatant contradiction?

I would have loved to hear Dr. Graves reply to that which he unfortunately wasn’t able to make. I think I will email him about that and post his reply here.

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Don’t you think that a REAL skeptic would read as much as he could about this topic before making broad claims about it? The Bell Curve has serious problems and Rushton’s work has enormous methodological issues.

At the veyr least, if you are a true skeptic, you should read some of Rushton’s main opponents. Read Stephen Gould, just for starters. It’s easy to be convinced when you only look at the scientific evidence for one side of a debate and rely on your media-fed prejudices to supply the other.

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@ Lailoken

“For example, since there are relatively so few South African Blacks with IQs over about 115″

According to whom? Where’s the data? Who conducted this study? Provide a link.

“or about one SD over the White norm,”

The white norm was failure a few generations ago when Irish, Polish, Russians and even Jews routinely scored very low on standardized IQ tests. In fact these low IQ scores were used to keep away immigrants from those countries and even to deport those that were already in the U.S. How do you think we got Polish jokes? Because Poles were perceived to be imbeciles in light of their very low IQ scores.

“modern industrial society largely cannot be maintained under the ANC.”

Ridiculous gibberish. I’ve flown planes driven by black pilots, taking off and landing at airports with air traffic control staffed and maintained by black people. Throughout Africa blacks maintain what you describe as modern industrial societies.

South Africa is doing better than a host of Eastern European countries in terms of GDP per capita and other quality of life indices. And they are improving daily. So you thought it was going to be a shangrila overnight, huh? Yet no white country undergoing similar titanic changes or revolution ever became functional overnight, but you racists expect blacks to snap their fingers and magically and immediately transform when whites in similar circumstances took decades to get their shit together.

“On the other hand, in Cote d’Ivoire the infrastructure has been much better maintained or the most part due to the heavy presence of French advisers.”

More nonsense. You have no proof that those French advisers are more intelligent than the Africans they’re advising. The correlations you’re trying to make are unfounded. The advisers could be complete nincompoops in comparison to some of the people they’re advising. And, no, don’t trot out your IQ scores either, which I’ve already delegitimized above. Do you know how many well-educated, supposedly high IQ whites get out-smarted and get their clocks cleaned in various business ventures with Africans?

How do you want to measure intelligence? You want to favor someone who answers culturally biased questions correctly or one who demonstrates smarts on the street and in the real world? I’ll take native intelligence over scoring high on acculturation tests.

“Compared to Whites or Orientals, very few Black Africans are cognitively capable of doing advanced statistics. Consider yourself blessed.”

It’s all about acculturation, you imbecile. An African could identify a whole host of things that whites and orientals would be incapable of doing. But immerse those whites and Asians in the African culture and they would excel. Similarly, Africans and their children in the West excel at advanced statistics and every other academic discipline. In fact African immigrants and their American-born children GROSSLY out-perform whites scholastically.

“This is irrelevant. Een if it were true that on the average, men are better at most sports than women, does this hold true in every case? No, but men still tend to be better at most sports than women.”

Well, big strong men are better at certain sports than short small men. That doesn’t make them more intelligent. Terrible analogy. We’re talking about the human brain.

“No. It’s this kind of sloppy thinking which helped turn South Africa into a nightmarish place where most high schoolers can’t read but most women do get raped (real rape, none of this getting breathed on too hard like in Sweden) by the time they are 18. That includes the Black women.”

You mean the same South Africa where they recently held the World Cup? The eyes of the world was on it and the Armageddon you racists keep talking about certainly was nowhere to be seen. On the contrary, South Africa is remarkable for its progress since the fall of Apartheid. It is a model to be emulated by future generations of humans.

Your laughable exaggerations about South Africa notwithstanding, last I checked crime and mafiasm are running rampant in Russia and Eastern Europe. But of course, you racists will make all kinds of excuses for white countries, you’ll say they’re coming off the heals of repressive communism and such dislocation and fragmentation are to be expected. But you won’t make the same allowances for black countries. You’re a pitiful joke.

And look here, white Eastern European criminals are taking their show on the road. In Britain alone Eastern Europeans immigrants account for 1/10 of the crime:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-413985/Eastern-European-immigrants-carry-tenth-crime.html

Is crime something peculiar to the European genome?

Eastern Europeans definitely do not constitute 10% of British society, not even 1/10 of 1%. So you see, the numbers are stunning, and Britain is just one small example outside of crime-infested and dysfunctional Russia and Eastern Europe. It’s sort of like in this country with its white street criminals and gangsters terrorizing the population a few generations ago. I wonder if it’s something in the genes.

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EgalitarianJay,

“He then attempts to claim this is not true given that several non-African people do not have genes for “black” skin (providing no source)”

This is called selection pressure. Read chapter 16 and 17. And you should also read Chapter 14, Section 5, Genetic Determinants of Race Differences in Intelligence. The IQ of mixed-race is always intermediate between the two races. Coïncidence ? Maybe…

See also, chapter 7, Out of Africa :
http://www.charlesdarwinresearch.org/Race_Evolution_Behavior.pdf

– Africa is warmer than the northern continents, but it is a less stable habitat. Droughts, storms, and diseases from viruses, bacteria, and parasites cause high death rates, even today. Without modern medical care, insuring survival in Africa means having many young (r-strategy). In the more stable environments of Europe and Asia, survival is insured from having fewer young, but caring for them very well (K-strategy).
The environment of Eurasia produced physical differences between the races. Northern Europe’s cloudiness meant less sunshine. This decreased the intake of vitamin D, so lighter skin and hair were needed to let more sunlight get in. As a result, Europeans born with lighter skin and hair were healthier. They had more chance of having children who would survive and reproduce.
East Asia was even colder than North Europe, but with less cloud cover and more sunlight. There a thicker layer of fat helped to insulate against the cold. This gives many Orientals a so-called “yellow” complexion because it reduces the visibility of red blood vessels close to the skin. Meanwhile in Africa melanin gives the skin a black color to protect it from the scorching rays of the sun.

– Fossil records, archaeology, and genetic DNA studies of the living races support Charles Darwin’s insight that we evolved in Africa. Humans then spread to the Middle East, Europe, Asia, Australia, and then to the Americas. As humans left Africa, their bodies, brains and behavior changed. To deal with the colder winters and scarcer food supply of Europe and Northeast Asia, the Oriental and White races moved away from an r-strategy toward the K-strategy. This meant more parenting and social organization, which required a larger brain size and a higher IQ.

“(not true Khoisan have epicanthic folds)”

True. Khoisan people look curiously asian. I cannot provide you an explanation here, but this does not dismiss his argument : east-asian eyelid is due to Siberian conditions, and nothing more. And Khoisans are africans. Asians have short legs and flattened nose.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khoisan

– They have moderately long legs and longer abdominal muscles, traits that sharply distinguish them from surrounding Pygmy and Bantu populations having muscles with short bellies and long tendons (Coon 1965). In past ethnography, the Khoisan have been referred to as the Capoid race because they can be visually distinguished from the Congoid Africans of Bantu origin.[3]

http://www.forumbiodiversity.com/showthread.php?t=2300

– The point is that the Khoi-San (formerly known as Bushmen) are a different race than the Bantues (Niger-Congo ethnic group), as different from them as Bantues are from Ethiopians and other groups.

The Khoi-San were the original group of most of the Southern part of Africa, before they were invaded by the Bantues in the famous Bantu expansion. Jared Diamond explain it quite well in his book “Gun, Germs and Steel”, in the chapter “How Africa become Black”. Because before being Black, Africa was Bushman and Pigmy.

Even more, by the time the Boers colonized South Africa, the Bantues still hadn’t reached the Southern part of the continent, which was Bushmen territory.

“I found it interesting that Lynn studied Native American IQs and concludes that genetics plays a role in their lower average IQs but at the same time claims that they evolved bigger brains when their ancestors lived in East Asia. He doesn’t explain why they don’t have comparable IQs to East Asians if that is the case.”

Have you really read the book ?

Chapter 12. Native Americans
9. Genotypic Intelligence of Native Americans

– First, only between 20 and 30 percent of Native Americans in South and Central America have nutritional deficiencies that could explain their low IQs. Second, the intelligence of Native Americans in the United States and Canada has shown no improvement relative to that of Europeans since the 1920s, despite great improvements in their living standards and environments. Third, the intelligence of Native American-European hybrids is related to the amount of European ancestry, shown in Section 5. Fourth, Hispanics are largely Native American-European hybrids, and their intelligence is intermediate between the two parent races. Fifth, a study by Cundick, Gottfredson, and Willson (1974) showed that 84 Native American children placed in white middle-class foster homes for a period of six years made no gains in intelligence. This shows that the various environmental advantages associated with being reared in a white middle class family have no beneficial effect on the intelligence of Native Americans and suggests that their IQ is to some degree genetically determined.

Sometimes, brain size (in terms of ability) is not entirely reflected in IQ tests, because of evolutionary pressure :

Chapter 17. The Evolution of Race Differences in Intelligence
9. Arctic Peoples

– The Arctic Peoples did, however, evolve a larger brain size, approximately the same as that of the East Asians, so it is curious that they do not have the same intelligence. A possible explanation for this is that the Arctic Peoples have evolved strong visual memory that would have been needed when they went out on long hunting expeditions and needed to remember landmarks in order to get home in largely featureless environments of snow and ice. An increase of this ability would have required an increase in brain size but is not measured in intelligence tests.

P.S. I download it. I will read the document later.

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Why all these lenghty discussions? Name one thing that has ever been invented in Sub-Saharan Africa. Enough said!