Race, Gender and Intelligence

Black Swan wrote: »

I would exercise caution when referring to IQ tests as THE MEASURE of intelligence. Depending upon how intelligence is defined, as well as how the IQ test was constructed and administered, there may be many important and substantial factors missed that may serve to confound what differences may exist between women and men; i.e., I am suggesting that we should exercise caution when interpreting the validity and reliability of such tests.

Sure, but in the absence of the perfect intelligence measuring test IQ tests will have to suffice as a measure of a particular kind of intelligence and mental processing and these tests show time after time that the difference between the genders around the average is tiny if present at all, but that overall more men are to be found at the bottom of the heap and at the top of the heap.

The Corinthian wrote: »

Back to grown up conversation... Race and intelligence; correlation, yes - as I mooted already, physical and medical differences exist between races and the Bell Curve noted IQ differences based on ethnic background. However, causation is another matter; those same statistics showed that certain races were more likely to have better levels of education, especially in early childhood, and so environmental reasons need to be considered as the true reasons for such deviations.

True environment is a huge factor. However I do recall when the stats included those who were adopted into a different ethnic background there were still some differences. Still een there environment would have a part to play. The perception of one "race" in the wider societal mind would affect outcomes. One interesting bit of research I read showed that African Americans vocabulary went noticeably up if they thought they were writing a letter to a European American and dropped when they thought they were writing to another African American. That shít is subtle.

That said it is pretty much a given and not just a perception that African Americans(and Caribbean folks) produce more athletes than the surrounding populations. That holds even when you take out culture and access to facilities. They also have a much higher rate of diabetes than surrounding populations or indeed their ancestral populations in Africa. One theory being that slavery caused a major artificial selection pressure on the populations which favoured strength and endurance(and diabetes came along for the ride). For someone just to survive the trip on a slave ship was an achievement. A sickening amount of people died and more died from the privations of slavery. It makes sense that the folks who were left would be stronger.

Could intelligence also be affected by such selection pressures? I don't doubt that it could, however it would be just as likely that intelligence would go up as a survival trait.

Same on a macro level. It cannot have escaped people's notice that any of sub-Saharan Africa barely made it as far as the iron age, and much of it didn't get that far. Aboriginal Australia never made it out of the stone age.

Could this be due to inherent trends in intellect due to race? Maybe. On the other hand, climate, scarcity and so on are also important - necessity is the mother of invention, so if you don't need, why should you bother to invent?

Very true. The selection pressures for inventiveness might be low. At least the selection pressures for a particular type of intelligence might be low, while others might be higher. Native Australians score low in IQ testing, one of the lowest of any population, however they score extremely high on pattern memory tests, much higher than other populations. It seems the environment selected more for one than the other.

Environmental stability is a big selection pressure too. It tends to bring cultural stability along with it. Which sounds great in theory, but not so much in practice. Look at Egypt. A giant of early civilisation based on the like clockwork flooding of the Nile. The same culture changed remarkably little over the thousands of years of it's existence. SubSaharan Africa would have had a similar predictable environment. Australia would have initially been similar, but climate change(likely manmade) made it much harsher over time, so the pressure would have been aimed at basic survival. That takes brains of a different sort. In Europe it tended to go from one extreme to another and less predictably so that would select for a different type of "brain". Then again something else is going on here. Neandertals lived in Europe for 200,000+ years and through many ices ages and warm periods and major changes in environment and yet their inventiveness was minimal by comparison to ours. You could drop a Neandertal into any period within that time frame and he would likely find little to surprise him regarding the technology involved.

Modern humans were different. For whatever reason our brains and minds were extremely plastic and adaptive over time. This plasticity is the mark of us and that apparent intelligence and cultural achievement can go up or down over time within our species. We can observe this throughout history. Go back three thousand years and the Greeks were giants of achievement. Throw a stone in an Athenian town square and you'd be likely to hit someone who would forever change the world in some field or other. At the same time the Jews were just another bunch of middle eastern farmers by comparison. Today the Nobel prize list is stuffed with Jewish folks, but precious few Greeks.