Racism or Correlations of Race with IQ / Physical Attributes

[Jake_Ellison]

While I'm not sure what David means, I think you'd also run into trouble when trying to draw clear and objective lines between the races.

You could draw the lines, the trouble is any reputable scientist would be crucified for doing so, by the PC police. Which is why no one ever tried it.

[FeatherFall]

What might those lines be?

[DavidOdden]

Are you meaning that the IQ tests are not accurate measures of intelligence in general?

On that front, the first thing you have to do is figure out what thing in reality you want to measure, which they haven't done, and then figure out a meaningful method of quantifying it, which they also haven't done. Instead, they equivocate over reality and substitute operational definitions.

However, the main problem pertains to race and sampling. There is a thing in the real world that vaguely connects to "race", namely historical ancestry, but for the most part information about that is pretty conjectural, if you look back at the time depth that the notion "the same race" implies. For example, one might make the claim that all blacks have a common (African) ancestry. [The claim is clearly false when taken to mean "people with black skin", since black skin also developed in totally non-African populations of southern India, the Andamans and Melanesia]. If that is true, it would only be true at an extreme level of pre-history, more than 20,000 years ago. Well, there are vast numbers of populations with significantly mixed ancestries, to the point that classifying Arabs as "of European ancestry" versus "of African ancestry" is factually meaningless and arbitrary. How the hell "Hispanic" became a racial term is beyond me.

Suppose we redefine "race" in an objective fashion -- one which is different from how "race" is actually used -- in terms of skin color mechanically measured on the buttocks. Since race is categorial, not continuous, you must also arbitrarily divide the objective continuous measurements so that everybody as a clearly-computable race. So draw some arbitrary lines. Now at this point, it should be clear that this is just arbitrary classification, not science based on a hypothesis regarding causation, so we're obviously not going to reach any meaningful conclusions. But let's mechanically proceed.

Suppose we adopt some specific measurement of "intelligence". Then we administer butt-color and intelligence tests, and check for correlations. A really big problem, now, is that you don't have a random sample of butt colors, with controls for other relevant factors. (Example: if all of your "white" subjects happen to have Downs syndrome, then whites will, by this test, appear to be stunningly stupid as a race). It is a prerequisite that you actually have to know what factors are relevant to performance on an intelligence test.

We might then test the theory that the "Khoisan race" of southern Africa has low intelligence, by administering the test to 200 randomly selected Khoisans, and comparing that with 200 randomly selected Afrikaaners and 200 randomly selected Scotsmen. One factor that causes poor performance on IQ tests is the inability to read or write, and there is an independent fact about Khoisans, Afrikaaners and Scotsmen that explains why the Khoisans do so poorly on the test (most of them don't speak English nor can they read). Therefore, you will never be able to determine whether these IQ test results are the result of this language fact, or the result of race. There are zillions of such factors, such as nutrition, education etc.