All off topic discussions go here. Everything from the funny thing your cat did to your favorite tv shows. Non-programming computer questions are ok too.
Muazzam wrote:I'd be happy to be proven wrong. After all, I'd not like to imagine the people of my country suffering for eternity. If I'm proven right, there's still a hope in "race mixing" and technologies like genome editing.
Personally, I don't believe in race mixing as a solution. It is a quick way to lose what makes you unique as a people.
There are, however, better alternatives. First of all, make sure that the environment favours evolution in the right direction. If there are conflicts with other ethnic groups, they may often try to institute dysgenic processes that exert a pressure in the opposite direction, to make your descendants weak and easy to subdue, as an ethnic cleansing tactic. An example would be persecution of intellectuals. Armed conflict itself is another - during war, able bodied men tend to die on the field while those unfit for fighting stay at home. Those mechanisms are what you need to be on the lookout for, and dismantle. Arranged or forced marriages may be a dysgenic factor too, even if originally intended to be eugenic. When people choose their own partners, they do so based on instincts that have stood the test of time, with a 100% success rate in reproducing. Those are instincts I would listen very well to.
In short - those who are strong, intelligent and able need to have more children, on average, or there is something horribly wrong going on.
Edit: Contraceptives also need to be mentioned here. Despite aiming for the same number of children, well-educated people tend to have fewer children than those with no education, due to a systematic correlation between education level and contraceptive use. This is a dangerous trend that has lowered the average IQ of Europeans by quite a few points since its invention. Every country needs to be very careful to take into account this effect when forming their policies.
Muazzam wrote:I'd be happy to be proven wrong. After all, I'd not like to imagine the people of my country suffering for eternity. If I'm proven right, there's still a hope in "race mixing" and technologies like genome editing.
Personally, I don't believe in race mixing as a solution. It is a quick way to lose what makes you unique as a people.
Keeping peoples separate and "unique" can have HORRIBLE consequences. You can almost be sure that after, say, 100 million years, these separated groups will end up becoming separate SPECIES--with some of them inevitably being stronger and smarter than others. The less smarter species will be dominated by stronger species and will have to depend on them. There'll always be, you know, a sense of inferiority among the less stronger ones.
We're still the same species and are perfectly capable of reproducing with different races. Now is the time for race mixing.
There are, however, better alternatives. First of all, make sure that the environment favours evolution in the right direction. If there are conflicts with other ethnic groups, they may often try to institute dysgenic processes that exert a pressure in the opposite direction, to make your descendants weak and easy to subdue, as an ethnic cleansing tactic. An example would be persecution of intellectuals. Armed conflict itself is another - during war, able bodied men tend to die on the field while those unfit for fighting stay at home. Those mechanisms are what you need to be on the lookout for, and dismantle. Arranged or forced marriages may be a dysgenic factor too, even if originally intended to be eugenic. When people choose their own partners, they do so based on instincts that have stood the test of time, with a 100% success rate in reproducing. Those are instincts I would listen very well to.
In short - those who are strong, intelligent and able need to have more children, on average, or there is something horribly wrong going on.
Edit: Contraceptives also need to be mentioned here. Despite aiming for the same number of children, well-educated people tend to have fewer children than those with no education, due to a systematic correlation between education level and contraceptive use. This is a dangerous trend that has lowered the average IQ of Europeans by quite a few points since its invention. Every country needs to be very careful to take into account this effect when forming their policies.
Gigasoft wrote:Anyway, I find many of your scientific claims dubious. How about giving references so that we can examine the evidence in more detail?
I doubt that will help (even if you restrict "race" to "differences in DNA only" and ignore all cultural differences), because the conclusion (that variations in DNA caused by race are dwarfed by differences in DNA from other factors, and therefore race (and racism) doesn't exist) is laughably idiotic, regardless of whether you accept or reject the scientific claims.
Note: The conclusion is based on the idea that all pieces of DNA have the same importance (e.g. that "with/without multiple sclerosis" is as important as "with/without blue eyes"). It's like saying that, based on the idea that all bits have the same importance, there's almost no difference between "268435461 people in a room" and "5 people in a room" (because in binary there's only 1 bit that is different).
Cheers,
Brendan
For all things; perfection is, and will always remain, impossible to achieve in practice. However; by striving for perfection we create things that are as perfect as practically possible. Let the pursuit of perfection be our guide.
Kevin wrote:You're ignoring that the discussion isn't about multiple sclerosis or blue eyes, but very specifically about intelligence.
It is also being assumed in this discussion that there is any agreed objective measure of 'intelligence', which is probably a much harder concept to get any agreement on than the relatively simple issue of race.
I remember aged 7 we were all given an intelligence test at school. My mother (who taught in the same school) was horrified that my result was dismal compared with that of S..L.. (well, you never know, he might be known to someone here) whose mother also taught in the school.
One of the questions was something like this (culturally updated and I imagine not nearly so difficult):
Rearrange these letters to find the odd one out: FDOR , SSNIAN, HNDOA, TYTOOA, MCFTIORSO
The answer, of course, is the last, but I stood no chance being more interested in stamp collecting than playing with cars.
Probably also explains why at the time some thought boys were, on average, cleverer than girls.
Had I been asked if a particular postage stamp was from Japan or China that would have been a doddle*
*Chinese stamps always used to have a stylised crysanthemum on them. [Not that I knew this from self-study: my dad told me].
OK, so it was a daft test and they're usually far better than that, but the problem is that any test that says one race is more intelligent than another might equally have the alternative explanation that the test is itself culturally biased. [such things as greater reliance on sound patterns rather than visual patterns, for example].
Gigasoft wrote:I find many of your scientific claims dubious. How about giving references so that we can examine the evidence in more detail?
Can you be more specific? I really don't want to continue this argument - my whole point was to end it, not start it back up - but I would like to know which statements you thought were questionable.
I can provide basic links on a few items of note (yes, they are from Wicked-Pedo, so treat them as a starting point for deeper research where you want to rather than taking them as given):
Last edited by Schol-R-LEA on Mon Oct 31, 2016 12:35 pm, edited 3 times in total.
Rev. First Speaker Schol-R-LEA;2 LCF ELF JAM POEE KoR KCO PPWMTF Ordo OS Project
Lisp programmers tend to seem very odd to outsiders, just like anyone else who has had a religious experience they can't quite explain to others.
Percieved intelligence level differences in human "races" are the result of disparity in wealth, culture and education, not genetics.
Asians perform better in school because they are taught at a young age that they have to work hard to support the previous generation and familly as a whole. Blacks perform better in sport because for most of them it's the easiest or only way to better their position in society due to institutionalized discriminations.
This can also happen in an homegenized society. In my province, Quebec, historically the french were under represented in liberal profession and way over represented in manufacturing and farm works. This was the result of the british conquest and of the catholic church who controlled the education system for the french. We were taught to be servile and not ask for anything better. This lasted up until the 60's and the tranquil revolution and the advent of the nationalist movement.
As an example, my father worked in ship repair (Vickers) in montreal. The highest position a french quebecer could achieve was what they called a leadin, which is a team leader but still under the supervision of a foreman who were all anglophone. This lasted until the mid 60's.
Now the french weren't dummer than the anglos here. Our realisation in just about every technical field since the 70's have proven that, but we needed a change in culture and education to achieve our full potential. Same goes with every other "race" that are underperforming presently. To use eugenics to get rid of them would be to waste so much potential.
I want to respond to a number of issues with the aim of helping to shut them down, although I don't think the main issue has been resolved - we must wait for better evidence.
(1) It's not appropriate to suggest that Muazzam is a racist - he's talking his own race down, and that's the opposite of what racists do. It's still something we want to talk him out of, but no condemnation is required.
(2) Race is a real thing and the current fashion in science for denying it is a mistake, although counterintuitively it could become correct in the future, so they've merely jumped the gun [if you're not a native English speaker, that's an idiomatic expression meaning they've done something too soon]. The differences between different races are generally trivial and superficial, but they are none the less real: those trivial, superficial differences are what race is mostly about, but crucially you also have to have large groups of people who share the same codings in order for it to be classed as a race. If we were to mix all the world's people together such that nothing distinguishes different populations from each other any more and extreme differences have practically disappeared (we'd likely have to arrange random marriages for them all for many generations to get there), a white or black person could still emerge from time to time by chance with DNA which could not distinguish them from the black or white people of today, and yet it would no longer be correct to label them as being of a different race due to the lack of numbers of other people with the same codings existing as a community - they would merely be isolated oddities.
(3) Let's get back to today though with race still being a reality. The differences are caused by tiny coding differences, but the differences can be significant, such as radical colour differences, bone density differences (black people tend to have heavier bones which make them less competitive when swimming, but that doesn't mean there can't be a black person at the top in swimming - it merely makes it less likely), muscle tissue differences (some races of black people have exceptionally high levels of fast-twitch muscle which make them dominate sprints), oxygen-carrying capacity differences (Tibetans are better able to survive life at high altitude - we can match part of that ability by taking EPO, but at the risk of circulation shut-down and death during sleep, as happened with dozens of racing cyclists, and that doesn't happen to Tibetans), etc.
We generally accept that there are such differences between races, but don't like it when anyone tries to extend it to intelligence, just as people don't get particularly upset at being called slow in relation to their athletic performance but become angry if someone calls them dim - one is not regarded as an insult, but the other most certainly is, even though both may be statements of fact. Fortunately though, we haven't managed to measure any definite differences in overall intelligence between races.
(4) Are there any intelligence differences between races at all? The best evidence I've heard of is with Australian Aborigines where they outperform other races at a task which I can't quite remember the details of, but it was something to do with looking at a set of objects and remembering them all. This difference seemed to exist even when Aborigine children had been brought up in a different cultural setting from the natural communities they would have been living in if my tribe hadn't invaded their land to abuse them and destroy their way of life. That is just one particular mental skill, and it's not one that most of us care about being inferior at, but it's possible that many other such differences occur between races. It is unlikely in the extreme though that any such differences would add up to the point where any one race could be measured as being more intelligent than another.
(5) IQ tests are often highly flawed with a significant number of the questions depending on knowledge rather than intelligence, but there can be bigger factors in play than that: a large part of the improvement in IQ test scores over time in some countries has now been identified as being caused by older generations not liking to guess an answer when they don't know it (because that was considered to be a bad thing to do in the culture of that time), so they left many questions unanswered. Later generations were advised to guess whenever they didn't know the answer, and that automatically led to improved scores, not just by random chance giving them a fifth or quarter of right answers to the questions they couldn't solve, but better than that because many of the wrong answers can be eliminated easily, pushing the odds further in their favour. It is also possible to train people to do better in IQ tests by exposing them to the kind of questions that are used in IQ tests and showing them how to solve them - this can easily make a difference of 20 points. A lot of education can accidentally train children to do better in IQ tests.
(6) IQ tests only measure a narrow range of shallow skills, and they normally do so as a race against the clock, which means that a slow thinker who could score higher than most people if there's no time limit could look like one of the worst performers when forced to rush. The tests do have a real value though as they relate fairly well to people's performance in actual jobs. However, there is much more to intelligence, and people with IQs approaching 200 aren't always the best problem solvers (although some of them are right up there) because the skills involved are not all measured by IQ tests - IQ tests fail to measure deep logical thinking, and that appears to be something that no one is even trying to measure.
(7) Most importantly for this discussion though, when we look at the performance of people of different races where they've been brought up together in the same culture, it's hard to see any difference in intelligence between them, although it is difficult to remove cultural differences. In Britain, black children tend to perform less well than white ones, although there are communities in which white children perform just as badly for the same social reasons (deprivation). Asians, including people of Muazzam's race, generally perform better than whites because they are driven harder - their parents push them because they know that they'll have to overcome racism when they apply for jobs, so they need to be better than the rest. The culture with black people hasn't caught up with this and we don't know how well they would do if they were systematically pushed as hard.
We also see top thinkers coming out of all races, but if there are fewer of them from some races than others, it is most likely that there are cultural reasons behind this with some kinds of academic learning being disliked for religious reasons. There was a time when Religions seemed compatible with science, so scientific knowledge was pursued vigorously in an attempt to understand God's creation, but there are now problems where scientific findings don't fit so well with what people wanted to find, and that's put the brakes on in some cultures which were previously leaders.
There are vast numbers of dim people about in all societies, so it's easy to look around you and imagine the whole population is thick. You can see that reflected in the people they vote into power to run everything, but it's hard to point at any country and say that the people there appear to be more intelligent than the people of another country when both countries are run by monkeys. Some governments may appear to be substantially more intelligent for a time, but then they can do startlingly stupid things which suddenly reveal the truth about them. I don't know what the reality of it is, but I suspect the differences are almost entirely cultural ones where established wisdoms can either hold back a society or propel it forwards - some cultures have better sets of established wisdom in them than others which leads to better performance, but it would be a mistake to think that those people are more intelligent as it really comes down to luck. But I'm having to fall back on a lot of guesses because we simply don't have sufficient evidence to go on to give absolute answers.
In conclusion, it would be a mistake to rule out the possibility that some races are on average less intelligent than others when we don't have enough evidence to prove it, but it would also be a mistake to assume that some races are less intelligent without sufficient evidence. It is, so far as I can see, an unresolved issue, though the odds are that any significant differences that we can measure are caused overwhelmingly by culture, and that intelligence differences may well have no role whatsoever, but the science is incomplete and we cannot resolve the argument yet.
Trying to find which "race" is more intelligent than other by measuring individual is like trying to catalog the entire possible design of snowflake by examining those on the ground... At the nano level we are all alike. With a small subset (your personal concept of what is your own race) we can look alike but that doesn't mean that we are (different culture, the french don't have the same culture as the english for example, wealth and education). But at a larger scale, i.e. "race" we are all different since we don't have all the same life experience, culture, wealth, education and a myriad of other parameters.
iansjack wrote:I am firmly of the belief that arguing with racists gives credence to their views. They do not deserve rational argument and should just be ignored.
That is what being wrong generally does - it gives credence to the other party and takes away your own. One symptom of being wrong is being unable to construct rational arguments.
The problem with the claim that "mixing races" would somehow destroy something unique in the different groups is that the only group with anything genetically unique (that is, an expressed gene complex not found in at least one other haplogroup) is the allopatric groups in the Great Rift Valley. All the other groups came into existence because they lost genetic variation through repeated founder effect events. The novel genetic complexes in other groups are nearly all in the forms of genetic diseases, usually due to recent (fewer than ten generations in the past) mutations, and which eventually disappear again in a short period of time; the remainder of novel gene complexes are inactive genes which have changed because they were not expressed.
And, as I already said, the only case that we can clearly point to of specific phenotype being selected for adaptationally is in skin color, which - just to be absolutely clear about this - was a matter of differential survival of an existing set of gene complexes (ones which still exists in the native population of the allopatric range, but not expressed because all the genes in question are recessives), not of a novel mutation - and which, furthermore, has not been selected for in groups which didn't have a founder population favoring it in the first place (e.g., the difference in Inuit and Yakut groups from the Indo-European groups who were in similar climates was due to founder effect, not adaptation).
Why? Because 2500 generations isn't very long, and the differences in adaptation pressures has been negligible in those times. The physical abilities needed to survive in the Congo are actually mostly the same as those needed to survive in the Arctic, in the South Pacific, or in Northern Europe - there are behaviorial differences, but the amount of intellectual rigor needed is more or less the same. Human bodies haven't needed to adapt because human brains were already up to the task, which in turn was because the variety of behaviors needed put hominids in a position where evolving a more general reflective intellect became more likely than evolving specific adaptations to changing circumstances - in other words, we reached a point where a brain that could think up novel solutions was smaller than a brain that hardwired all the behaviors we needed to apply.
We think, because it got to the point that it was cheaper than not thinking. Once the process reached a certain point, there really wasn't much improvement to be made, and that point was probably reached in the early speciation of H. sapiens. The fossil record doesn't indicate a significant amount of change in modern humans pretty much since we first evolved.
Last edited by Schol-R-LEA on Tue Nov 01, 2016 10:50 am, edited 2 times in total.
Rev. First Speaker Schol-R-LEA;2 LCF ELF JAM POEE KoR KCO PPWMTF Ordo OS Project
Lisp programmers tend to seem very odd to outsiders, just like anyone else who has had a religious experience they can't quite explain to others.
