Racial differences largely genetic?

[George-ananda]

I think that it is fairly ordinary. An added bonus for African Americans, when it comes to certain sports, is that those sports (and certain genres of music) represent occupations that have been opened up to them. They have a harder time in those which present greater social barriers to them, but they still manage to break ground in new areas from time to time. (Go, Tiger!) One tends to devote more time and effort to pursuing occupations that promise the most opportunities for wealth and advancement.

Are you saying the reason for disproportionate African American success in certain sports is 100% environmental and 0% genetics?

 

[Copernicus]

Are you saying the reason for disproportionate African American success in certain sports is 100% environmental and 0% genetics?

I wasn't really attaching percentages. I was just explaining why they tend to dominate some sports and music genres, and not others. There are a lot of examples of ethnic groups that excel in occupations that are open to them or that are encouraged by family and peers, but not those where they face higher barriers. Do you think that Cubans are genetically predisposed to make good baseball players and Jews to make good doctors and lawyers? There is a reason why the call them "racial stereotypes". Expectations can become self-fulfilling prophecies.

 

[George-ananda]

I wasn't really attaching percentages. I was just explaining why they tend to dominate some sports and music genres, and not others. There are a lot of examples of ethnic groups that excel in occupations that are open to them or that are encouraged by family and peers, but not those where they face higher barriers. Do you think that Cubans are genetically predisposed to make good baseball players and Jews to make good doctors and lawyers? There is a reason why the call them "racial stereotypes". Expectations can become self-fulfilling prophecies.

You dodged the intent of my question.

No point in pursing it further (too controversial). Like our last debate on spiritual things, we see different worlds while looking at the same world.

 

[Copernicus]

You dodged the intent of my question.

No point in pursing it further (too controversial). Like our last debate on spiritual things, we see different worlds while looking at the same world.

Your question was an obvious attempt to change the subject to something else--the question of whether or not there are broad demographic differences between races. Nobody disputes that. African Americans are prone to sickle cell anemia, but whites are more prone to skin cancer. However, the question about sports invited me to agree with familiar racial stereotypes, and I genuinely do not believe that African Americans are genetically predisposed to excel in sports that stereotypes lead us to think--boxing, basketball, baseball, football, etc. I do believe that greater numbers of African Americans strive to excel in those sports precisely because those sports have been opened to them earlier than others. They have been encouraged to strive to excel in those sports, and there is even a positive bias--an expectation--that they will excel because of their race. The same effect is true with other ethnic groups--e.g. the stereotype that Asians are racially more predisposed to excel in math and science subjects. I also noticed that you did not answer my question about Jews and Cubans precisely because you saw the absurd path that that kind of reasoning could take us down on. We were talking about race and IQ, not sports or professions. If you want me to address questions, ask some that are relevant to the comments I actually made.

 

[LegionOnomaMoi]

Fallingblood is correct. This controversy started back in the 1960s, when the US was struggling with its apartheid problem.

It didn't. First, eugenics (duh). Second, military intelligence testing in WWI. 3rd,
"The problem of whether there is a genetic contribution to race differences in intelligence has been debated for well over a century. Much but by no means all of this debate has been concerned with the difference between African Americans and Europeans in the United States. Those who have argued that a significant genetic effect is present include Gobineau (1853), Galton (1869), Garrett (1945, 1961), McGurk (1953a, 1953b), Shuey (1966), Shockley (1968), Jensen (1969,1980,1998), Vernon (1969,1979), Eysenck (1971), Baker (1974), Loehlin, Lindzey, and Spuhler (1976), Rushton (1988, 2000), Rushton and Jensen, (2005), Lynn (1991, 1991b, 1997), Waldman, Weinberg, and Scarr (1994, p. 38), Scarr (1995), Levin (1997), and Gottfredson (2005). Those who have argued that there is no significant genetic determination of race differences include Flynn (1980), Brody (1992, 2003), Neisser (1996), Nisbett (1998), Mackintosh (1998), Jencks and Phillips (1998), and Fish (2002). Whole books have been devoted to this question, and Jensen (1998) in his book The g Factor devotes a chapter to it that runs to 113 pages, which is almost a book in itself; even this deals almost exclusively with the difference between blacks and whites in the United States"
Lynn, R. (2006). Race differences in intelligence: An evolutionary analysis. Washington Summit Publishers.

Jenson, mentioned in the quote above, was one of the authors of the study in question (not the article, the study the article discusses). Shuey, also mentioned, deals in the work cited (The Testing of Negro Intelligence) with the history of racial intelligence testing from WWI onward.

The 60s is over a century after Morton's (racist) study on the racial superiority of Europeans. An entire field of "science" (which disappeared after the holocaust) was devoted to the ways, including intelligence, that non-European races were inferior. The 60s had nothing on the pre-WWII institutes, chairs, departments, programs (both academic and governmental), etc., devoted to "research" on racial disparities and the "pollution" of the gene pool by "inferior" races. The work done especially from WWI onwards dominated or perhaps determined the framework of the debate that resurged in the 60s & 70s and continues today.

The only reason it even gets debated is the subtext of racial animosities

Which doesn't explain why there have been plenty of rebuttals of every single "study" published in support of genetic differences underlying racial differences in intelligence, but virtually none on those arguing that conservatives and/or religious people are generally less intelligent. Even two BBC employees with no scientific background at all (one of them was Colin Firth) can co-author a study (published in Current Biology) on the deficiencies of conservatives. People who rage and rage against the problematic assumptions in racial studies of intelligence suddenly shut the **** up when it comes to conservative/right-leaning political orientation and unpopular (in academia) ideological positions (or worse, the cite they very same authors, like Jenson, whom they would criticize and despise as racist bigots; see e.g., "Why Liberals and Atheists Are More Intelligent"). The truth is by the standard methodologies used in studies on differences between groups regarding intelligence outside of race, we could demonstrate conclusively some of the same ill-founded, completely biased and unsupportable racist crap that dominated eugenics research. But we don't find that. In fact, publishing in support of a genetic basis for racial differences in intelligence testing is a great way to get yourself blackballed from being published in any mainstream journals in social psychology, neuroscience, evolutionary psychology, cognitive psychology, and other similar fields. It is certain that you will find yourself attacked if you manage to get published.

It's not that racial differences are some backdoor racist blather in recent decades. It's that intelligence testing and cognitive science have seen tremendous research in all areas of group differences, predictors, neural correlates, genetics, etc. And for the most part, scientists in fields from biology to sociology have had no problem publishing studies on intelligence differences, the one general exception being racial distinctions other than those determined to be the result of things like general economic conditions and pervasive racism.

It is a "safe" way to fan those flames, because we are talking about "objective" studies here--hard evidence, not prejudice.

Right. That's why The Bell Curve was treated as uncontroversial as any book on intelligence. It's not like the outpouring of criticism was so great the APA commissioned an entire task force to repudiate the "findings" of the component of the book that dealt with genetic bases for the differences in intelligence between races. Google scholar gives us over 6,000 citations for the book here. You tell me how many of these you find supporting the conclusions. Then do some research on intelligence testing and intelligence in general (you can start with the journal Intelligence), and how many times people heavily criticized in journals with focuses ranging from medicine & neuroscience to economics & sociology are subtly cited in those same journals over and over by people who wish to show that people who hold positions similar to those common amongst academics vs. those who don't are more intelligent and why they are.

 

[Copernicus]

Legion, it's not that I'm ungrateful for all of the cavils and nitpicks. You are definitely well-read and intelligent. But I don't think that I misrepresented anything at all in my post. I do believe that the IQ controversy really didn't take on as much heat until the 1960s and 1970s, when the country was in the midst of a desegregation controversy. At that point, white supremacists were using this research to resist social change, particularly school desegregation. Many white parents were concerned about mixing their kids into classes with inferior classmates. We seem to have very different perspectives on the value of IQ tests, although I confess that I got a little lost in the massive outpouring of scholarly references. Not quite sure what you wanted me to conclude, but I'm guessing you admired The Bell Curve. You would be correct to conclude that I didn't. I have not weighed the reams of commentary on each side of the debate over it to determine who should be declared the winner. Sorry. Short remaining lifespan and all that.

BTW, in the spirit of one-upsmanship, you might want to remember not to spell Jensen's name as "Jenson". I believe that he's of Danish extraction, not Swedish.

 

[LegionOnomaMoi]

I do believe that the IQ controversy really didn't take on as much heat until the 1960s and 1970s

Then research eugenics.

Not quite sure what you wanted me to conclude, but I'm guessing you admired The Bell Curve.

I'm not impressed by poor research methods that utilize largely unsupportable definitions and models no matter who applies them and no matter to whom they are applied. So no.

BTW, in the spirit of one-upsmanship, you might want to remember not to spell Jensen's name as "Jenson". I believe that he's of Danish extraction, not Swedish.

Noted. Thank you.

 

[LegionOnomaMoi]

On intelligence research:

The issue is whether or not the study controlled for such things... And having started that process, we might realize that in this particular study, of the 63 analyzed studies about a 3rd were conducted in this century. About 1/6 were conducted before 1960, and most were conducted before 1980.

But the fun doesn't stop there! Because not all studies were equal. This is true in many ways, but a rather fundamental one is number of subjects. Most had between ~100 & ~200. But 3 studies had over a 10,000. What were they?

Deptula, D. P., Henry, D. B., Shoeny, M. E., & Slavick, J. T. (2006). Adolescent sexual behavior and attitudes: a costs and benefits approach. Journal of Adolescent Health, 38(1), 35-43.

[this one was great. They asked a bunch of kids ~15 years old about sex, and then for some controls threw in a 1-4 "how religious are you" question and administered one cognitive test. What was the most statistically significant indicator of intelligence? Age. Remarkably, scientists determined that being young is correlated with things like acting like idiots...]

Sherkat, D. E. (2010). Religion and verbal ability. Social Science Research, 39(1), 2-13.

[this one was even better. 90% of the sample were religious. Why? Because the study was really testing whether or not more fundamentalists attitudes towards the bible predicted verbal ability, and thus wanted more Christians. I can take that data and show that being Jewish or Episcopalian is a better predictor of intelligence than being non-religious.]

Then there are the studies that I still can't figure out how they managed to work into their results, such as
Corey, S. M. (1940). Changes in the opinions of female students after one year at a university. The Journal of Social Psychology, 11(2), 341-351.

Many of the studies didn't focus on or actually include measures of intelligence and/or religiousity.

...

Intelligence is an important thing to study, although I think far too many studies have concentrated on using education (along with other variables) to predict intelligence rather than look into what the quality of education one receives can predict.


Because this is not by any means the most studied relationship between intelligence and something else:

"A Black–White group difference on intelligence test scores has persisted in the literature for over 90 years. Currently, the group IQ mean for Blacks (85) remains about one-standard deviation below the group IQ mean for Whites (100; see, e.g., Neisser et al., 1996, Lynn, 2006 and Rushton and Jensen, 2006). Though the difference exists, no consensus as to its cause is likely forthcoming. Some argue that research here is flawed because race-based classifications are invalid (see e.g., Sternberg et al., 2005 and Tate and Audette, 2001), or because a single, global IQ score cannot adequately represent human intelligence (see, e.g., Gardner 1983). Others argue that Black–White differences are real—due neither to cultural, nor test bias—and at least partly driven by genes (see, e.g., Herrnstein and Murray, 1994, Rushton and Jensen, 2005 and Gottfredson, 2005a)." (emphases added)

Pesta, B. J., & Poznanski, P. J. (2008). Black–White differences on IQ and grades: The mediating role of elementary cognitive tasks. Intelligence, 36(4), 323-329.



A glad as I am that at the very least there are innumerable and much more obvious reasons for the racial disparity (and nobody is citing The Bell Curve as reliable literature), I do find it curious that when religiousity or political conservatism are used to predict intelligence, we never find the argument that the entire approach to intelligence testing is flawed as there are simply to many factors for "a single, global IQ score" to "adequately represent human intelligence".

my favorite was gettting a bunch of people drunk and them asking the questions about politics

The study Political Orientations Are Correlated with Brain Structure in Young Adults has become my new favorite study on religion/politics and brains. It doesn't relate to intelligence, but we all know that conservatives have a slew of problems, and as we are looking at why personality & cognitive trait studies in general are bad, this one is the best bad study around.

First, how did they determine political orientation? Well, they had a bunch of MRI scans on hand, tracked down the people who were scanned, and asked them "to indicate their political orientation on a five-point scale of very liberal (1), liberal (2), middle-of-the-road (3), conservative (4), and very conservative (5)."

That's where they ran into their first problem. Nobody answered "very conservative". So after they had all the scores, they just changed the interval from 1-5 to 1-4. That's a problem. First, since Likert and the heavy use of "very X" to "very Y", studies have shown that people, if somewhat uncertain, tend to favor the middle. Second, they've now biased the results.

Imagine that the number of values for political views corresponding to 1, 2, 3, & 4 were all 25. We've asked 100 people to rate their views on a scale that ranges from very liberal to very conservative with 5 possible answers. We didn't get any results for the 5th, so we just pretend it isn't there.

But even if we assume that we can just translate words into numbers so simply, we still have a problem. What would the questions be on this 1-4 scale? "Very liberal to conservative"? Nobody uses that kind of scale. "Liberal to conservative"? Sure! But we didn't ask people this and thus 25 of the answers now correspond to an answer we didn't get.

Basically, by pretending the option "very conservative" doesn't exist, we've biased the results in favor of liberals. Recall the ordered list and how lots of values can mean nothing compared to only a few. Essentially, that's what's happening here. Because there are 3 ways not to be a conservative, and only one way to be counted as one, we've ensured that the correlation between the responses to the scale and correlations between conservatives and the brain scan results will be biased. That's because we've shifted the entire scale down, making all measure of central tendency correspond to ratings never asked. There are way to many ways not to be a conservative, but the numbers we used for these don't correspond to questions we asked and we have no idea what we'd get using a 1-4 scale.

Going back to 25 for each (100 total), we see how this works. There are 75 ways not to be conservative, leaving 25 scans correlated with "conservative". Just about any brain scan, test, or behavioral experiment should show that conservatives were not "average", because if they were it would mean either that there is no difference whatsoever between people with different worldviews, or (worse) that our experiment didn't measure anything.

But what did the researchers do with these ratings? What did they correlate them with and how? First, the scans were MRI scans, not fMRI scans. MRI scans show structural changes like lesions or extensive brain damage. So the researchers took MRI scans and tried to turn them into fMRI scans mathematically. Let's pretend that's possible.

The first problem is that now we have only gray matter and no white matter. The topic is one of the emotional regulatory system, which is a sort of interface or interaction between brain structures like the amygdala and certain cortical regions like the ACC or PFC. White matter is basically the connective system. The gray matter is neural bodies, while the white matter is the connective tissues or fibers which carry neural signals. That's the simple version, anyway.

It is usually impossible to tell how even structural differences in the brain relate to personality or cognitive traits. Learning, both consciously and subconsciously (e.g., the way people can subconsciously "learn" to stay calm under duress or react with greater anxiety/stress simply through experience) involves changes in the brain. Most of this is in white matter, expressed in the well-known rhyme psychology students learn "neurons which fire together, wire together". Basically, this means that "learning" involves strengthening connections between certain neurons and perhaps lessening those among others.

The "learning" this study focused on involved one of the least understood neural systems (the cortical-amygdala interaction), and one which is known to be involved an incredibly diverse number of cognitive and emotional processes. Also, this is a connective cortical system, meaning that the regulatory part (the part the researchers were interested in) is mostly about connections (white matter) between the cortex and other they amygdala.


But the researchers didn't look at the gray matter of this system. They looked at a small part of it. They ignored various areas involved in "fear responses" and emotional regulation in addition to all white matter. A single neuron (gray matter) can connect to ten thousand other neurons (white matter). The number of neurons is nothing compared to the number of connections between them. Yet these were ignored.

 

[George-ananda]

Your question was an obvious attempt to change the subject to something else--the question of whether or not there are broad demographic differences between races. Nobody disputes that. African Americans are prone to sickle cell anemia, but whites are more prone to skin cancer. However, the question about sports invited me to agree with familiar racial stereotypes, and I genuinely do not believe that African Americans are genetically predisposed to excel in sports that stereotypes lead us to think--boxing, basketball, baseball, football, etc. I do believe that greater numbers of African Americans strive to excel in those sports precisely because those sports have been opened to them earlier than others. They have been encouraged to strive to excel in those sports, and there is even a positive bias--an expectation--that they will excel because of their race. The same effect is true with other ethnic groups--e.g. the stereotype that Asians are racially more predisposed to excel in math and science subjects. I also noticed that you did not answer my question about Jews and Cubans precisely because you saw the absurd path that that kind of reasoning could take us down on. We were talking about race and IQ, not sports or professions. If you want me to address questions, ask some that are relevant to the comments I actually made.

Despite what I said in my previous post ‘No point in pursuing it further (too controversial)’, you managed to raise my blood-pressure with the above post to the point I will ignore my better judgement and reply.

Let me start by saying that my spiritual faith is based on the premise that we all are One and should live together in brotherly love. That does not require that all physical bodies are the same in traits and ability. If you cannot physically see differences between let’s say African-American and Asian-American typical body types in muscle mass, thigh and buttock muscle distribution, bone size, height, weight then I don’t know what to say to you. And to think this has no effect on the likelihood of success in certain athletic endeavors is not in my mind a reasonable position to take.

As to your Jews and Cubans question you pointed out that I didn’t respond to. I believe Jews for genetic (maybe 70%) and environment (maybe 30%) are on average stronger at the mental abilities required for law and medicine. Cubans are a nationality (melting pot of multiple and mixed ethnic groups) not a historic ethnic group (pre 1500’s major world mixing period) so a discussion of ‘Cubans’ would become more complicated.

Basically, I think your well-intentioned liberal attitude goes to far; to the point of being a reality-denier. I take the facts as they are; nature is not as equal-handed as we think fair in a number of areas.

 

[Copernicus]

Then research eugenics.

Why stop there? Why not go back to rivalries between tribes in ancient scripture? I made clear the context of my remark--the Civil Rights movement and the role of the IQ debates that took place in the 60s and 70s. This is primarily the afterglow of that big bang.

I'm not impressed by poor research methods that utilize largely unsupportable definitions and models no matter who applies them and no matter to whom they are applied.

Good for you. I approve of solid academic research. You may not have noticed that this is neither a professional forum nor a suitable venue for that type of discussion. I have. Let's not get into a internet slapfest over a fairly tangential issue in this discussion--exactly when the IQ debate started. :149:

Despite what I said in my previous post ‘No point in pursuing it further (too controversial)’, you managed to raise my blood-pressure with the above post to the point I will ignore my better judgement and reply.

If meditation doesn't help, there's always drugs.

Let me start by saying that my spiritual faith is based on the premise that we all are One and should live together in brotherly love. That does not require that all physical bodies are the same in traits and ability. If you cannot physically see differences between let’s say African-American and Asian-American typical body types in muscle mass, thigh and buttock muscle distribution, bone size, height, weight then I don’t know what to say to you. And to think this has no effect on the likelihood of success in certain athletic endeavors is not in my mind a reasonable position to take.

Please reread the quote that you are responding to. Maybe this time you will see that I also explicitly rejected that position. Please don't keep attributing it to me. I hope that you don't feel I was attacking your religion or religious beliefs. The debate was really over claims made about the IQ of racial groups--whether it is a genetic trait. I have taken the position that standard IQ tests do not really measure intelligence. They largely measure the development of learned behaviors, such as mastery of standard English vocabulary. They do not seem to work very well as cross-cultural assessments, and therein lies the problem. There is little evidence to suggest that their results reflect an inherited ability, but it is easy to look at superficial correlations and jump to that conclusion.

As to your Jews and Cubans question you pointed out that I didn’t respond to. I believe Jews for genetic (maybe 70%) and environment (maybe 30%) are on average stronger at the mental abilities required for law and medicine. Cubans are a nationality (melting pot of multiple and mixed ethnic groups) not a historic ethnic group (pre 1500’s major world mixing period) so a discussion of ‘Cubans’ would become more complicated.

Forgive me. I had jumped to the conclusion that you would see how absurd it would be to try to attach percentages. It is a completely meaningless and fruitless exercise, IMO, because we have nothing to base those numbers on other than prejudice. African Americans, believe it or not, are every bit as diverse (melting pot of multiple and mixed ethnic groups) as Cubans or whites. There is nothing to suggest that Jews or Cubans are genetically predisposed to the occupations that we stereotype them with. The same is true of IQ tests, IMO. They do not obviously reflect a genetic disposition. IQ tests, despite their name, do not really test "intelligence" in its broader sense.

Basically, I think your well-intentioned liberal attitude goes to far; to the point of being a reality-denier. I take the facts as they are; nature is not as equal-handed as we think fair in a number of areas.

Noted. It is true that I am a liberal. I consider myself no more a reality-denier than you are--maybe even less of one. We are both entitled to our opinions on who is the greater reality denier, although I see little value in expressing them to each other.

 

[Father Heathen]

Are you saying the reason for disproportionate African American success in certain sports is 100% environmental and 0% genetics?

Yes. It's all environmental, sociological, economic, cultural, etc.

 

[Penumbra]

It seems a lot of people are saying for sure that, like, "it is x and not y" or "it is y and not x", when probably, it takes a lot of controlled experiments to isolate what it is, and what it is not.

To me, the most scientifically interesting point in the article was the one that talked about statistical IQs of black children adopted by white families, and asian children adopted by white families. They claim the IQ difference persists, which if true is a decent argument against the "environment" portion of things, but it still doesn't rule it out entirely. I'd still be skeptical about those results.

Because people have some different physical attributes that helped them adjust to living in different parts of the world, I wouldn't be entirely surprised if there are different behavioral/intellectual attributes that helped them adjust to living in different parts of the world. Maybe some regions required certain types of thinking for survival, and other regions required different types of thinking. It would be hard to prove, and there doesn't seem to be much benefit in trying to find out.

That type of research has often been used as a reason to oppress a group, and many types of research can't really rule out researcher bias. Whatever ethnic differences may or may not exist (and I think it's wise to assume no difference unless somehow proven otherwise), it seems far more important to just treat people as individuals anyway.

 

[George-ananda]

Yes. It's all environmental, sociological, economic, cultural, etc.

Any difference between African Americans and Chinese Americans in height, weight, total muscularity, thigh and buttocks muscularity, vertical jump, sprint speeds, bone size, etc., etc. are all due only to factors you listed? Or are you saying the mean body types, size and proportions are exactly the same?



I think you're trying to deny reality for the greater good of society.

 

[George-ananda]

We are both entitled to our opinions on who is the greater reality denier, although I see little value in expressing them to each other.

At least I agree with that sentence.

 

[Copernicus]

It seems a lot of people are saying for sure that, like, "it is x and not y" or "it is y and not x", when probably, it takes a lot of controlled experiments to isolate what it is, and what it is not.

To me, the most scientifically interesting point in the article was the one that talked about statistical IQs of black children adopted by white families, and asian children adopted by white families. They claim the IQ difference persists, which if true is a decent argument against the "environment" portion of things, but it still doesn't rule it out entirely. I'd still be skeptical about those results.

Because people have some different physical attributes that helped them adjust to living in different parts of the world, I wouldn't be entirely surprised if there are different behavioral/intellectual attributes that helped them adjust to living in different parts of the world. Maybe some regions required certain types of thinking for survival, and other regions required different types of thinking. It would be hard to prove, and there doesn't seem to be much benefit in trying to find out.

That type of research has often been used as a reason to oppress a group, and many types of research can't really rule out researcher bias. Whatever ethnic differences may or may not exist (and I think it's wise to assume no difference unless somehow proven otherwise), it seems far more important to just treat people as individuals anyway.

I agree with most of what you say, Penumbra, especially your last paragraph. We can certainly find physical differences between different human phenotypes. There may be cognitive differences, but I consider IQ tests to be a rather crude means of measuring them, given the cultural biases inherent in those tests. Intelligence is a very vague and amorphous concept to quantify. It depends on a range of cognitive functions--memory recall, perception, reaction times, linguistic skill, mathematical competence, factual knowledge, and so forth.

In my area of expertise--linguistics--the standardized IQ measurements are woefully naive. They tend to measure things like the ability to name objects, but the sociolinguist, Bill Labov, showed that African American children can talk up a storm under relaxed circumstances. Anyone the least bit familiar with African languages knows that they are every much as complex as other major world languages. Jazz may have some of its roots in African tone languages, which gave rise to the ingenious method of communication via "jungle drums" over long distances. Anyone would be hard-pressed to argue that rap artists lack for linguistics skills. Nevertheless, if you go back to the psychological literature on IQ and race in the 60s and 70s, you find all sorts of nonsense about "verbal deficits" in African American children.

 

[Father Heathen]

Any difference between African Americans and Chinese Americans in height, weight, total muscularity, thigh and buttocks muscularity, vertical jump, sprint speeds, bone size, etc., etc. are all due only to factors you listed? Or are you saying the mean body types, size and proportions are exactly the same?



I think you're trying to deny reality for the greater good of society.

There are such differences between individuals. While those who share a genetic ancestry may share similar traits and characteristics, members of a "race" aren't clones of one another. Regardless of whatever proportions we may perceive, every "race" has examples in every corner of every spectrum. You have your Micheal Jordans and your Yao Mings, and then you have your Michio Kakus and Neil deGrasse Tysons.

 

[biased]

There are such differences between individuals. While those who share a genetic ancestry may share similar traits and characteristics, members of a "race" aren't clones of one another. Regardless of whatever proportions we may perceive, every "race" has examples in every corner of every spectrum. You have your Micheal Jordans and your Yao Mings, and then you have your Michio Kakus and Neil deGrasse Tysons.

Michio Kaku and Neil deGrasse Tyson don't seem like "outliers" to you? They do to me but maybe I'm a crazy racist bigot who is going to the eternal hellfire or so the liberals say.

 

[George-ananda]

There are such differences between individuals. While those who share a genetic ancestry may share similar traits and characteristics, members of a "race" aren't clones of one another. Regardless of whatever proportions we may perceive, every "race" has examples in every corner of every spectrum. You have your Micheal Jordans and your Yao Mings, and then you have your Michio Kakus and Neil deGrasse Tysons.

I don't have a disagreement with any of that.

But what I'm saying is you have to look at the mean/average among the groups. There you will see differences that correspond with over-representation and under-representation in areas of society.

 

[Penumbra]

There are such differences between individuals. While those who share a genetic ancestry may share similar traits and characteristics, members of a "race" aren't clones of one another. Regardless of whatever proportions we may perceive, every "race" has examples in every corner of every spectrum. You have your Micheal Jordans and your Yao Mings, and then you have your Michio Kakus and Neil deGrasse Tysons.

Well, I don't think there are any pygmy hall of fame pro basketball players. For example, the average male height of the Efe people is 4'8", and the shortest male pro basketball player ever was 5'3", and the shortest male hall of fame pro basketball player was 5'9". There have only been nine people in the NBA under 5'8" in its entire history. So I'd say that, statistically, coming from a pygmy ethnicity gives one a serious statistical disadvantage with regards to becoming a top notch pro basketball player.

Being tall is an advantage in basketball for many aspects of the game. Smaller players have to be extraordinary in other ways in order to compete at that level, and so the average height of a given pro basketball team is way taller than the population average. So, since different ethnicities have different average heights, it would be the case that different ethnicities would produce different percentages of top basketball players, with some producing zero or close to zero. A person would have to be farther on the extreme of the bell curve in a short ethnicity to play pro basketball, or would have to have very extraordinary physical attributes that make up for height.

The same could be said for thinness and record marathon runners. Coming from a statistically thicker ethnicity would make it harder to run marathons near the record times, compared to people that are tall and thin by nature. Colder climates have generally produced thicker people, and hotter climates have generally produced thinner people.

So I do think ethnicities give large bonuses to different sports. Individuals have to be further on the extremes of bell curves of their ethnicity in various ways in order to compete at top levels, if their ethnic attributes aren't as aligned with the sport as other ethnic attributes are. And in extreme cases like pygmies, the ethnic attributes may be so far removed from what is needed for a sport, that you'd never see one play at the top level, or maybe one in fifty million.

 

[biased]

Well, I don't think there are any pygmy hall of fame pro basketball players. For example, the average male height of the Efe people is 4'8", and the shortest male pro basketball player ever was 5'3", and the shortest male hall of fame pro basketball player was 5'9". There have only been nine people in the NBA under 5'8" in its entire history. So I'd say that, statistically, coming from a pygmy ethnicity gives one a serious statistical disadvantage with regards to becoming a top notch pro basketball player.

Being tall is an advantage in basketball for many aspects of the game. Smaller players have to be extraordinary in other ways in order to compete at that level, and so the average height of a given pro basketball team is way taller than the population average. So, since different ethnicities have different average heights, it would be the case that different ethnicities would produce different percentages of top basketball players, with some producing zero or close to zero. A person would have to be farther on the extreme of the bell curve in a short ethnicity to play pro basketball, or would have to have very extraordinary physical attributes that make up for height.

The same could be said for thinness and record marathon runners. Coming from a statistically thicker ethnicity would make it harder to run marathons near the record times, compared to people that are tall and thin by nature. Colder climates have generally produced thicker people, and hotter climates have generally produced thinner people.

So I do think ethnicities give large bonuses to different sports. Individuals have to be further on the extremes of bell curves of their ethnicity in various ways in order to compete at top levels, if their ethnic attributes aren't as aligned with the sport as other ethnic attributes are. And in extreme cases like pygmies, the ethnic attributes may be so far removed from what is needed for a sport, that you'd never see one play at the top level, or maybe one in fifty million.

What do you make of the claim that most of the holders for world championship of lifting are Caucasian? What do you make of the claim that Europeans and the industrial revolution built the world we have now? This is where the alleged "White supremacist" tendencies stem from. I should know, I have a bunch of "white supremacist" (neo-Marxist buzzword) friends.