"All our social policies are based on their intelligence being the same as ours, whereas all the testing says not really."

Truth being suppressed.

What he said: "[I am] inherently gloomy about the prospect of Africa [because] all our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours—whereas all the testing says not really."

He was mostly wrong then and now he is completely wrong.

First the different races have the same intelligence, there is only an average difference in the number of people with the same intelligence and it is unknown what causes it. Also you can check the "millennium cohort study" in the UK. They have closed a massive amount of the gap between Africans and Europeans, some of it is completely gone. Also check GCSEs here: http://samfreedman1.blogspo...

Thats in Maths and English.

So again he is wrong. Period. Also Watson knows very little of how genes work. He only co-discovered how it looks.

"First the different races have the same intelligence..."

What causes this sameness, this equality? Is it some cosmic coincidence, an angel or a god?

Its literally because of the evidence Watson speaks of and also the genetic evidence that he simply did not know about.

Since you are too foolish to realize, I'll explain it to you real simple like.

Watson with a lot of help discovered the double helix structure of DNA that is found in pretty much all living organisms NOT race differences in genes. "All" the testing he mentioned(Which he had nothing to do with) did not show that races had a different intelligence, it only showed an average difference in the same scores of certain tests like IQ and education, black people and white people still scored the same on the tests but there was just a different number of people who did so on average per group.

They did not check the genes relating to said scores in tests because they didn't know how to and to this day don't know how much of said AVERAGE difference is caused by genes... However since data from the country Watson comes from now show those average gaps closing big time, its highly unlikely that even said average has much genetic influence.

He was stupid because what he said was literally incorrect and also dangerous.

Understand?

He didn't say he was incorrect.
"All our social policies are based on their intelligence being the same as ours, whereas all the testing says not really."

Nope, you didn't answer the question.

Everything that can be measured differs among populations (or races, subspecies, whatever name you may assign to it):

- body height
- body weight
- BMI
- bone density
- disease adaptations
- [the list can go on forever]

That is also the reason why the olympic winner of the 100m dash is always ethnically West African while the marathon winner is always ethnically East African and the weight-lifting champion is always White, etc. etc.

If there are differences in EVERYTHING that can be reliably measured, why should there be no difference in intelligence, morality and character? What supernatural force should cause this equality just in these areas while allowing the diversity in everything else?

So even if we were to pretend that intelligence cannot be measured (for the sake of argument) your worldview is substantiated by nothing. There is nothing that points towards equality among human groups anywhere.

P.S.: Ad-hominem attacks work for many people, but not for me. On the contrary, they give me the opportunity to repeat and clarify my point. That is also the reason why they usually ban all comments on such topics: Too much thinking going on - and the ad-hominems have become blunted and are no longer working.

Everyone knows what he said is the truth...the corollary is in America's poverty statistics for everyone to see.

When Galileo claimed Earth Rotated around the Sun, his eyes were en-nucleated...
Just to realize it later...
Watson knows much more than rest of the world regarding genetics... What it he is right...

Yes, love lies are so much better!

His opinion is pretty stupid though. He based his opinion on something he did no know about aka how genes cause IQ or how much of this average gap is genetic(Nobody knows to this day).

Are you people too stupid to understand this? He deserved to get shunned. You are the people too politically motivated not to want to accept evidence.

"His opinion is pretty stupid.."
"Are you people too stupid.."

That is basically the "argument" of the left.

It is all they have got. They never need to give reasons, never need to argue coherently, never need to discuss in an intelligent manner.

All they have is insults. And unfortunately it is working - and working very well.

People don't like being insulted so they prefer to shut up.

Soon Einstein will be shown to be racist and sexist, and then his notions too will be dismissed, as will Newton. People are really a shilling short of a pound when it comes to logical, reason, and science. They prefer emotion.

With IQ and many other traits, the social science research shows there's more variation within racial groups than across them - that is, every racial group has its outliers (look at the deep south of the US to understand this point). Perhaps the misfortune in Watsons case is his biological background biasing him towards explanations that emphasize biology at the expense social factors - such as the legacy of inequality brought on by colonialism. I'm not going to argue that genes don't influence intelligence, but they're not the full picture, and the picture of average IQs I africa being low is a far more nuanced debate than just genetics.

So, how do you explain Indo-China? And why do some sub-Saharan Africans (who are poor and uneducated) manage to score high in IQ-tests? Surely they have been equally brutalised, and are equally at sea, culturally? Why did some of my students from the squatter-camps have greater intelligence than others?

Because its an average difference you fool. It does not mean every single person is effected, it does not mean there are no exceptions, it does not mean that poor people cant be intelligent. Then again teachers are not so smart here.

Also China has a much nicer environment than Africa. Africa has very high parasite load. Literally has diseases that attack the brains of people.

You seem to think that all Nobel prize winners are these perfect geniuses who know everything and cant be wrong.

I'll tell you what it is: Lazy, ignorant, apologist bullsh1t!!

I think the mistake Watson made is confusing intelligence with extelligence. Biologically we are all one race (separated geographically in a relatively short time-scale so as to make our genetic differences negligible), with only minor differences in physique and skin pigmentation, as such all our 7billion IQs such be plottable on a standard distribution or bell curve. This curve will however reflect application of (and hence access to) retrieved knowledge not IQ.

However access to stored information of previous generations (extelligence) is massively different (at least historically) but this is changing rapidly. How do we measure IQ? We ask difficult questions based on our stored information - societies excluded from our stored information are ignorant but not unintelligent. Ignorance is fixable. It can be reasonably expected that with sufficient access to extelligence from the rest of the developed world that even the most rare of indigenous tribes would over time perform equally as well in our flawed IQ tests.

"separated geographically in a relatively short time-scale so as to make our genetic differences negligible"

Are you serious?

So we have genetic differences in appearance, body size, adaptations to disease and in EVERYTHING that can be measured, which includes IQ.

In fact there is absolutely nothing that can be measured that is the same across populations. Not. one. thing.

Social sciences offer simpler explanations with more evidence than biology does when it comes to the disparity of education among race groups that could relate directly to race. (i.e. a lack of access to education is the issue, not some unknown combination of genes that apparently also happen to affect race)

Social sciences is not science. For a humorous debunking have a look at http://www.dailymotion.com/video/xp0vbf_hjernevask-brainwashing-english-part-2-the-parental-effect_news.

He wants to sell the prize cause he needs the money yet wants to buy a painting? Maybe someone should check his IQ.

Your IQ is not enough to understand why he wants the painting, so go back to facebook and chat.

To a hammer every problem looks like a nail. And here to a biologist IQ looks like it's caused by biology...why am I not surprised?

I google "IQ map" and Wikipedia shows up.
I guess Wikipedia is racist.

I was heartened that the British (excluding the Scots) are more intelligent than the French !

http://jaymans.wordpress.co...

The most recent research on genetic diversity concludes that African people are simply the most genetically variable people on the planet. The success of dirt poor, inner city black youths from Harlem and Philadelphia in chess lends credence to the fact that African IQ, like African athleticism, height, weight and susceptibility to disease, falls along this same continuum of human diversity, not the false paradigm that Watson and others here seem to want to claim, with Africans being more likely to be found at the extremes by dint of having much greater variability.

It was a Yale molecular biologist, Kenneth Kidd, who more than 15 years ago studied genetic markers from blood samples taken from 56 racial and ethnic groups around the world and concluded that as a result of humanity starting in Africa and a small subset of African humanity leaving and populating the rest of the world, there could be found in one African village or neighborhood more genetic variability at most markers, with the exception of very few, than in all the rest of non African humanity combined.

What African people may lack in academic achievement are the same things that they(we) lack in things like tennis, swimming, rugby and chess - which is access, rigor and culture. If we lack a culture, access and rigorous programs of endeavor in these fields, it only makes sense that we'll be less represented.

A few years ago, I came across an article about the Harlem middle school chess team that won city, state and national championships one year after the program began. The school went on to win national titles 3 years on the trot, 4 in 5 years. I looked a little further and found an even more impressive case of the Vaux School in Philadelphia producing junior High school teams that won national championships 7 years in a row in the 70's, 8 in 9 years - that despite poverty, that despite for the most part not having chess playing parents, that despite not having access to additional private chess tutors that more affluent children had had access to.

Having read about Kidd's work, this made sense. In fact, it made as much sense as African or black success in basketball or track and field. We have access, some rigor and a developing culture of playing chess at those two schools. We likely have, like in athletics where at one extreme we are too obese and diabetic to do well in sports and representation at the highest levels at the other extreme, individuals with a great facility with chess and individuals at the other extreme for whom no amount of chess tutoring will have them play at a decent level. I believe the 2 youngest individuals to pass A level math in England, breaking the record set by their older sister, were two 7 year old African twins of Nigerian parentage. I don't know for sure, but I'd imagine that their parents developed access, structure and some sort of rigor above and beyond most black urban children in London. I'd argue that Black or African people are just like everyone else, only more so.

Also, not only is there not an even playing field, but there are a multitude of vectors created that represent real impediments in the way of African American families. To examine just one singular vector of the many that exist, do a youtube search around the topic of 'the Real Rick Ross' and examine the demonic Hip Hop to Jail private prison industrial complex. And as much of an encumbrance that systm is to well being and survival(a worry about IQ being a luxury to many in this condition), Africa has it far worse!

You can't compare black DNA in the US to Africa. Black is not the accurate term, because black skin colour tends to dominate when there is miscegenation. For instance, American blacks are likely to have some Neandertal DNA, which is absent from African blacks. If Obama's daughters procreate with black men, their children will have black skin, but not exclusively sub-Saharan genes. What you are saying, in effect, is that somebody like Barak Obama, who is half-black, is identical genetically with sub-Saharan Africans. This is simply untrue.

As you know, and everybody else does too, but simply doesn't wish to acknowledge it, statistics does not describe individuals. There are always individuals who break the pattern set by the majority. Statistics deals with large populations, and blacks tend to score along certain lines STATISTICALLY, as an AVERAGE. That does not mean that every, single, individual black person scores exactly the same, nor does every, single white person, or Chinese, or any group. Citing individual deviation from the norm does not disprove the norm. Most people who contract pancreatic cancer will die from it; that does not mean that EVERY person who contracts pancreatic cancer will die from it.

I don't really understand why people always respond to this in an emotional manner, trying to deny what we know to be the case.

You can't compare black DNA in the US to Africa. Black is not the accurate term, because black skin colour tends to dominate when there is miscegenation.

- I wasn't comparing, actually - I was using the terms interchangeably. We're all an approximation of something. Pure races do not exist anymore, if they did at all, and we utilize descriptive terms - black, white, asian - to usefully describe groupings of people. Heck, they even found that 1/16 of Watson's own genetic heritage is from Sub Saharan Africa. I read Rogers' Sex and Race and I know a little bit about African admixture into many white groups - perhaps the U.S. and South Africa foremost among them. Are these people then not 'white'?
I can't say that I'm completely sure where you're going with this, but that strikes me as similar to a line of reasoning described by the psychologist Amos Wilson, in the Developmental Psychology of the Black Child, written more than 30 years ago. He described how white testers went at length to try to isolate, compare and find a greater intelligence in black children with greater European admixture, always though to their frustration.
That book is also interesting in that it showed how supposedly disinterested, science professionals cook figures, hide results, while bringing into light convenient facts and findings in isolation of other relevant facts. According to Wilson, this obsession with measuring skull circumference, height, length, volume and other such nonsense had gone on for a while to somehow justify ills of the last 3 or 4 centuries. I believe it because it continues in one form or the other today. Interestingly, in one study, white testers were happy to report the advantage black young children seemed to have in motor skills, but never seemed to want to report even greater advantages in spacial and intellectual tasks. He found that testers were more forthcoming with scores when children matured and the results of greater home, school, cultural and social advantages kicked in and were reflected in advantages to white children. It's sort of like when local news in New York were all over a Harlem little league baseball team reaching the semi final of the national tournament, but gave very scant coverage of the black Harlem school that won 3 national chess tournaments back to back, 4 in 5 years, despite their disadvantages. If their European admixture were the reason for their success, why or how did this European 'advantage' not help more advantaged, more European white teams in these tournaments?
"What you are saying, in effect, is that somebody like Barack Obama, who is half-black, is identical genetically with sub-Saharan Africans. This is simply untrue."
- I never said that. That's just not accurate. African Americans are not on average fifty percent European.
"As you know, and everybody else does too, but simply doesn't wish to acknowledge it, statistics does not describe individuals."
- I'm not trying to hide anything. I simply and clearly stated, as did Yale molecular biologist Kenneth Kidd, that Africans have a wider and greater distribution of genetic traits by means of being the founder population of all humanity. Black Americans share in that genetic heritage brilliantly. It may largely explain Ella Fitzgerald, the dulcet tones of Nat King Cole, Michael Jordan, Carl Lewis and, against all odds, the chess programs in Harlem and at Vaux. Am I saying that these extremes are necessarily an accurate depiction of the middle? Of course not.
"I don't really understand why people always respond to this in an emotional manner, trying to deny what we know to be the case."
- I wasn't being emotional. I was just dispelling some of the laughably ignorant stuff I've read here, in the comments section.

Thank you for your explanation.

My experience is in a much more racially separate context, which is Africa. The US is much more complex, because people who are white there have more sub-Saharan black in them, and people who are black have more white in them. Race in the US is a much hazier and complex notion.

In Africa, for instance, apart from the Arabs and Berbers and others in the north, there is no evidence of Neandertal involvement. There are very many clear DNA strands missing from the "pure" sub-Saharan Africans (by "pure" I mean prior to Homo Heidelbergensis, so prior to differentiation occurring between hominids who migrated away from Africa) compared with homo sapiens from Europe, or those who are miscegenated.

In Africa, it is quite apparent that sub-Saharan Africans have superior motor-skills (as you say) but there is little evidence of any superior intellectual development. We found that IQ scores were highly correlated with race: blacks were highly clustered around 70, coloureds (mixed-race) around 85, and whites around 100 (you will note this relationship is 170/2) . In the 1960s, it was also discovered that Afrikaners (who in an earlier time procreated with Africans when engaged in their "Great Trek" into the interior) scored lower in IQ-tests than English-speaking whites, who were much less miscegenated.

This differentiation appeared to continue in spite of increasing affluence among blacks.

As I say, the American results are potentially misleading.

You're welcome, Richard.

"My experience is in a much more racially separate context, which is Africa. The US is much more complex, because people who are white there have more sub-Saharan black in them, and people who are black have more white in them. Race in the US is a much hazier and complex notion."
This isn't rocket science, Richard. It appears that you and your colleagues seem to have your feet firmly planted in another age. People who try to ascribe everything beautiful or positive in another group around the infusion, no matter how small, of their own genes in that group are considered racist nowadays and a bit weird, and rightly so. This subject is made more complex and hazy only by those wishing to 'argue away' inconvenient facts - the domination in chess, a game often described as the touchstone of intelligence, for years by two poor and disadvantaged black junior/middle schools in a multitude of generally more affluent and privileged white teams is something that just shouldn't happen if your racial determinism is correct. Chess IQ tests along with general IQ tests could have been set up among unmotivated, culturally averse young black students to provide biased white administrators the 'desired' results. What would that have proven?
As tiny a minority as they are among black people in the U.S., Africans often equal or out number African Americans in the highest academic institutions in some academic years - at Yale, Harvard and Princeton. That's not supposed to happen according to your theory of advantage bestowed upon African Americans via European admixture.
Heaven knows how a 'pure' African girl of Sierra Leonean parentage won a couple of national chess tournaments for her age group in England in a nation so predominantly white and gifted.
How in the world could the IQ studies by Europeans cited in that same book by Wilson find young African children average anywhere from 109 - 116 , if memory serves me correctly, while the Irish and white Americans averaged between 98 and something like 103 for the same test at the same age.? That just shouldn't happen.
How could it be that all black New Orleans elementary or middle school chess team featured on public television about 30 years ago become national champions and represent the United States. It's so long ago and can't even remember if they were from a poor district(I imagine they might well have been), but under no circumstances should this sort of thing happen if your archaic ideas about race are correct.
"In Africa, it is quite apparent that sub-Saharan Africans have superior motor-skills (as you say) but there is little evidence of any superior intellectual development. We found that IQ scores were highly correlated with race: blacks were highly clustered around 70, coloreds (mixed-race) around 85, and whites around 100 (you will note this relationship is 170/2) . This differentiation appeared to continue in spite of increasing affluence among blacks."
My cousin married a mixed-race South African girl, and she and her sister described to my own ears clear and obvious advantages enjoyed by them over non mixed African groups. I really doubt white South Africans were and are not any less biased than the whites administering IQ tests in the 60's and 70's USA. And something tells me that poor, shanty town residents, up until recently suffering the horrors of Apartheid have not managed to switch completely from having to worry on some levels about daily survival, getting a job and raising a family to having the luxury of being imbued with the culture of higher academic attainment in such a short time. Is the same emphasis on intellectual development being made by poor black South African mothers as it is in the historically more advantaged groups? Are they already wishing for their children to do a year abroad at Harvard or Oxbridge to the same degree as others? I doubt it.

As I have said, there are always outliers. Statistical distributions deal with large population samples. Individual exceptions do not disprove the rule. There is an expression in medical science in particular, that the median is the message. If you contract pancreatic cancer, the chances are overwhelming that you will die from it. Some people don't but they are the exception. Obviously intervention will occur to try to skew the chances of your survival, but if you are realistic about your prospects, you look at the statistical averages, and understand that you are likely to fit into the "most" section, though there is a small chance that you won't.

There are many intelligent sub-Saharan blacks, but they are far fewer than their population size compared with, say, Ashkenazi Jews, or Koreans. But in large populations, it still throws up substantial numbers of people. For instance, in order to qualify for MENSA, you have to score in the top 2% of the white population (using the indigenous British population as your model, since MENSA originated in the UK). That means that 2% of 50 million people (I think that is the number of indigenous white British people in the UK) is one million. This is two standard deviations above the norm. Now, the average sub-Saharan African scores about two standard deviations below this 100 score, meaning they score 70. If you take the top 2% of the sub-Saharan African population (which then puts them at having an IQ of about 100), you have, of a total population of about 1.8 million people in Africa who score at the UK average. But how many of them could join MENSA? Well, they would need to be four standard deviations above their norm, which is a 130 score. That means there are 1/15,787 sub-Saharan Africans who could join MENSA, or about 57,000, compared to one million UK people.

Next, take my IQ-score which is at the 99.7th percentile. This means there are slightly fewer than three people per thousand who share my score, or one in 370, or about 135,000 in total in Britain. This is three standard deviations above the norm. Now, in sub-Saharan Africa, to be three standard deviations above the norm is an IQ of 115, and to match my IQ level of four standard deviations (or six standard deviations above the sub-Saharan African score) there are 1/5,079,346 Africans, or 177 across the continent. Now if half of those people emigrate to the West, they will become very prominent. If 25,000 of the MENSA-potential sub-Saharan African emigrate to the West, they will also be quite visible. But as a proportion of their populations, they are still a minute part. Perhaps Left-leaning people will take them as the norm for Africans, or say that with proper education and nutrition, this is how all Africans can be. Note they don't say that with proper nutrition and education whites can suddenly jump two or three standard deviations higher in IQ.

But you seem intelligent, I am sure you understand this situation. You simply cannot extrapolate from individuals to the whole population.

It is important to realise that I do not attempt to attribute anything to anything de novo. Science does not work in that way. One observes, and notes correlations, and then creates theories to fit what one observes. Not liking what one observes (say in the cancer example above) does not present any reason to say it is invalid. What we note about IQ scores fits entirely with academic success, and social and economic development to a great degree.

Your point about African admixtures in the American non-black population: genetic testing can determine whether you have an African admixture or not. When I say "white" I use it in a specific way, to mean not having a recent African admixture. Obviously we all do, from our probable ancient African origins, but it is possible to determine whether there has been a recent addition. For the purposes of argumentation, sub-Saharan black means not having any other admixture, and no Neandertal mutations.

Where I am going with this is that intelligence is largely genetic, and should be seen like any other hereditary attribute, such as athleticism, height, aggression, propensity to diseases, eye-colour, etc.

It is also vitally important that we recognise the differences between people, and plan for that. Does it make sense to throw large resources in fallow ground? Should people be promoted simply by ethnicity? Should countries promote immigration where immigrants are likely to need social assistance? Does throwing aid money at people help, where they are not able to make best use of it?

People on the Left think that they are giving people equal dignity. In fact, by not recognising that some people are simply unable to compete with them on equal terms, they are being extremely cruel. My time in Africa has taught me that in spades.

Thanks for that lesson on statistical analysis, Richard, but I really didn't need it. As informative and 'scientific' all of that seems on its face, I am bright enough to realize that it's not really valid to compare hundreds of millions of Africans on one, two or three dollars a day, as millions of them are, with privileged white folks, say in Johannesburg or London, earning far more and having access to far superior and more varied nutrition and superior schools. Much of what you've written is reminiscent of 'the findings' of racists in German South West Africa a century ago.

Your fetish with racial admixtures is embarrassing in this day and age. You seem a throwback to a different era.
Anyhow, black teenagers in America score more poorly than Asians on standardized scholastic tests. This is a fact, sure enough. But what is the use of this fact if we fail to take into consideration the additional thousands of hours spent in evening and weekend cram schools that Asian parents send their children to in preparation for admissions to competitive academic schools, in contrast to many black children who are merely trying to keep off the streets and stay in school, and who are being inculcated by mega media giants with the idea that they have to be street hustlers, thuggish drug dealers, even? (Search 'Asian cram schools' on the NY Times website and you'll find articles gong back decades.)

You purport to scoring quite highly on IQ tests, Richard, but yet for all of your supposed high scores and fancy 'analysis', you fail to consider or make passing mention of glaring disparities and the simple fact that it's neither valid nor useful to compare IQ scores of far richer and comfortable white students who likely culturally value high academic attainment and have access to decent schools or even access to the trivium with indigent, poorly or malnourished African students who, though valuing education, still have enormous obstacles, perhaps for example having to walk miles to school under nourished. That's amazing in a way.

Wilson points out that dishonest white testers, like yourself, go at length to analyze scores in isolation of meaningful cultural, academic and economic advantages and disadvantages. He also states that the intellectual advantages that African children had in those studies were not maintained because of crippling poverty and malnutrition. But if you want to beat your chest and hang your hat on statistical IQ scores in isolation of these facts, I won't grudge you that, my friend.

If you want to go and find a poor, isolated group in a rain forest somewhere, test them and come up with schemes of analysis to justify some of your ingrained positions, go right ahead. But I'll tell you that that is as silly and dishonest as your analysis of African students on a meager existence, millions of whom without the luxuries you no doubt have had. Or is the computer that you're using the result of your savings from half a decade? Are you going to bed hungry tonight, Richard?

"It is also vitally important that we recognize the differences between people, and plan for that. Does it make sense to throw large resources in fallow ground? Should people be promoted simply by ethnicity .... Does throwing aid money at people help, where they are not able to make best use of it? "

-This is laughable, Richard. 'Aid' is not aid. Joseph Stiglitz, formerly chief economist at the World Bank turned whistle blower, and Jonathan Perkins, author of 'Confessions of An Economic Hitman', explained as insiders how toxic 'aid' schemes were created by the West to cheat Africa and much of the developing world of not hundreds of millions or billions, but trillions of dollars. Your whole notion of 'throwing aid money at people' is completely uninformed at best, and it does not square well with the realities these two have described at length.

You may create in your mind wishful scenarios of beneficent, well intentioned white people throwing good money, aid supposedly, after bad. You may conjure up bizarre, antiquated racial admixture 'analyses', even academic playing fields across continents (uneven in all reality), so on and so forth, but these things just do not square with reality and you simply come across as being bigoted, highly dishonest and as being an adherent to a dying, racist view of the world, .

Sticks and stones... I am used to opprobrium being poured on me, by the right in South Africa with death-threats, then from the Left in the West today.

If none of my squatter-camp students had performed, I might have agreed with you. But when they did, and did so consistently, despite circumstance, that changed how I perceived things a bit.

Why it is acceptable that so much is inherited biologically, and why it is that we understand the mechanism of evolution, yet refuse to extend that to humans, I shall never understand.

In any event, it doesn't seem that this is amenable to discussion, and seems to be degenerating into insults and tirades. But then, as I say, I am used to this from the Right and Left.

I hope you have an enjoyable "Winterval", and wish you all the best.

"I'd argue that Black or African people are just like everyone else, only more so."
All people are equal, but some are more equal than others.

And your proof is? Some people!

I think that in order to be an objective scientist, you need to recognize that racial differences in IQ are at least "plausible". A theoretical argument for why this might have happened can easily be constructed. For example, you might argue that in Africa, the selective pressure of predatory animals is prominent, while in northern regions, perhaps the selective pressure of adapting to the cold environment is more prevalent. Adaptation in response to these pressures could cause various differences between the "races". (I don't believe this example necessarily, just a thought experiment).

However, having said that, none of the existing evidence that I've seen is very convincing. The "bell curve" data has a lot of very obvious methodological flaws and straightforward confounding factors that make it totally irrelevant.

I will admit that this subject is perhaps under-studied because of social taboos, but that doesn't automatically mean that you can assume IQ differences must be racial. It just means it's not studied sufficiently to make a firm statement one way or the other.

File it under "undetermined, leaning towards very minimal difference"

I only got to this discussion because of Usmanov buying the medal, yet of all posts i am shocked to read that anyone could type the words " predatory animals is prominent ? " You are not suggesting that African intelligence has been effected literally by Lions eating people.. I almost fell of my chair with giggles at the thought. If you want to know as an objective scientist why African population may appear to be less intelligent than their White European counterparts, you need only look at the savage and brutal rape of the African continent for its resources of which the most important were its people. The extensive research on how genetics influences intelligence is a never ending field pioneered literally by Watson himself, modern analytic thought would suggest that genes are inherently responsible for academic success, academic success spurring social development and social development spurring economic success. The loss of 12 million people and their progeny from the overall gene pool is more likely to have had an effect than poor African hunters being run down and eaten by simba !

"brutal rape of the African continent for its resources of which the most important were its people"

Hardly an accurate description of the slave trade, whose abolition African rulers opposed, nor is it apparent that it was the brightest and best who were transported across the Atlantic

"King Gezo of Dahomey said in 1840s:

The slave trade is the ruling principle of my people. It is the source and the glory of their wealth ... the mother lulls the child to sleep with notes of triumph over an enemy reduced to slavery ...[69]

The British were the largest transporters of slaves across the Atlantic ocean during the 18th century.[70] In 1807, the UK Parliament passed The Slave Trade Act, which did not abolish slavery but prohibited the slave trade in the British Empire. The King of Bonny (now in Nigeria) was horrified at the conclusion of the practice:

We think this trade must go on. That is the verdict of our oracle and the priests. They say that your country, however great, can never stop a trade ordained by God himself.[71]

The enslaved people came from many different sources. About half came from the societies that sold them. These might be criminals, heretics, the mentally ill, the indebted and any others that had fallen out of favour with the rulers. Little is known about the details of these practices before the arrival of Europeans, and so it is difficult to tell if the number of people considered as undesirables was artificially increased to provide more slaves for export. It is believed that capital punishment in the region nearly disappeared since prisoners became far too valuable to dispose of in such a way.[72]

Read more: http://www.answers.com/topi...

The largest trans Atlantic slave trade was by the Portuguese and Spanish into South America not Britain.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wik...

However, if you look at a history of slavery it's clear a high proportion of African societies had high rates of slavery in some cases 50% of the population. For example Sierra Leone in the 19th century.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wik...

BS. Thank you for trying to write up Africa's story for her. Tell me a little about colonialism too, or is that too recent to re-write?
Kudo's to the rest of the brains here.

Could you elucidate?

Dog breeds and IQ hey.

Careful, Vinny, you don't want to be labeled a "breedist", do you?

The most interesting thing to note here is that the posts that spout Leftist ideology get the most up-votes, those that deal with the science get very many fewer. Shows you it's all emotion, very little reason.