SirPuzzle
Kaltros
Suicidesoldier#1
What you perceive as being important, isn't necessarily important, it's all about perception, from which standpoint you determine it. Thus, all people are equal, even if you find an attribute more desirable in another.
So you think your mind has the power to change reality, just by thinking? You consider yourself a kind of sorcerer?
I think what he's trying to say is that our judgment of what is significant versus what is not is a matter of subjective opinion.
Which he's correct on.
The thing is though is, well yeah, significance is based upon a judgment call and that judgment call depends on context.
He cited the fact that humans are 99.9% similar to each other. The problem though is he then goes on to assume that that .1% can only account for "minor differences". But at the same time he's saying importance/significance is subjective.
Who's to say that that 0.1% difference cannot account for very significant differences in the way people interact in a modern world? Furthermore another problem with this "Humans are 99.9% identical" is that humans are 99.9% similar in genotype, that doesn't mean that they are 99.9% identical in terms of phenotype traits. Genes/alleles do not have a linear impact on people's characteristics. Some genes/alleles have little to no noticeable impact on the characteristics of a person (or animal), some genes/alleles will create a noticeable trait in a person/animal.
So for example speaking of racial IQ differences, who's to say that that 0.1% difference cannot account for the differences in average IQ we observe in the races? Now of course people can argue over whether IQ is "intelligence" or not, but I think people are deluding themselves if they argue that what IQ does measure is not significant in our modern economy. How competent people are in reading comprehension, abstract reasoning, spacial reasoning, math ability, etc, etc is very important in how well they end up doing in a modern 1st world country.
Also notice how none of these arguments are at all connected to whether race is socially constructed or not, that is a red herring to the discussion. Even if race is a totally socially constructed concept that is not biologically useful, that doesn't mean that therefore there cannot be differences in average intelligence that correlate with people's skin color.
I personally have no horse in the race over whether race is a social construct or not, because as I've explained race being socially constructed does not necessarily have an impact on whether observed racial IQ differences are 100% due to environment or partially due to genetic differences in population groups. However I'm not on board with the "Race is a social construct" argument because I'm not a scientist, and there's a lot of political pressure for population geneticists to say race is made up.
Furthermore there's already information out there that is suggesting that race may actually be a biologically useful concept. I'm not saying that there's proof or anything close to that level of evidence, all I'm saying is there is data (statistical clustering of people based upon their alleles) that is to an extent pointing towards that.
Bottom line is though I'm not a population geneticist, so I'm not going to talk as if I am one and pretend that I know that race is a useful concept or it isn't. Maybe it is, maybe it isn't. I don't know, I'm going to wait and see when population geneticists gather more information/data over the years and see what they have to say. However I'm not going to listen to the ideologues who obviously are partaking in motivated reasoning to conclude that race is socially constructed.
Race *is* socially constructed. Skin color and I.Q. are not correlated, for obvious reasons, because 2 genes are responsible for skin color; in fact, if we were going to say, say, Africans had an average lower I.Q. due to genetics, if an African person breed with say, a European, and then the offspring got the intelligence traits but kept the skin color, then it would be an example of skin color being irrelevant.
Race has no scientific definition. Subspecies, maybe, different genes present in humans, sure. But race is literally non-existent in the first place. If you choose to define race to be 2 genes, that is what determines pigment levels in skin, so be it, but realize that also doesn't include things like intelligence.
As far as it goes, there's not really anything in that .1% to make a considerable difference; starfish and sea sponges lack brains, insect brains are far less complex than human brains. But because humans are so similar, and the differences are so minor in and in areas that are nigh irrelevant, other than common mutations which take millions of years to develop, which are random in any case and not associated with any particular group of people, to try to connect an entire group of people to that is nothing more than a logical fallacy.
There may one day be a human that's more intelligent, say a bigger heart which pumps more blood to the brain, a body accustomed to the rich diets of industrialized words. Perhaps even bigger brains. But it is not today. There aren't even Neanderthals around anymore, cromagnum man. Donkey's and horses can breed, zebras and various other steer, but humans cannot breed with any other species, or subspecies. We are the only one of our kinds, and all extremely similar. The human population went from 3 million to 7 billion in just 10,000 years. Our similarities are staggering; in fact, there's evidence to suggest that we all have ancestors to 10,000 people, just around
70,000 years ago. Whether it's true or not, we are
that similar genetically, all of us.
As for differences in I.Q. among races, they are minor, at
best. Furthermore, family structures tend to be geographically located in similar areas (since people tend to stay where they were born, for various reasons, including physical) so, it could be entirely environmental reasons as to why particular groups of people have higher or lower I.Q.'s. If you were never taught math, how well would you be at it; if you were never taught it at a young age, who says it will be ingrained into you? So on and so forth.
Particularly among the "The Bell Curve", these claims have been widely disproven by American Anthropological Association and the American Psychological Association (APA).
