Agahnim
Posts: 205
Joined: 2/27/2008
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quote:
Intelligence simply isn't like height or eye color, nor is it simply a product of 'synapse speed'; those are all ways we measure intelligence based on what we consider to be important at this place in this time.
Intelligence has to do with how we interact with the environment, and a theoretical physicist may thought of as highly intelligent in one environment, and not so much in another. And I would challenge that there could be any certain ascertation of 'intelligence' in an adopted child that one one could boil down to mere race; while I have looked at one study in detail (Minnesota Transracial Adoption Study) I would predict that for every attribution of a 'race' connection, their are also other factors which have been played down, such as when those adoptions took place (I am willing to predict that in most cases it wasn't immediately after the child was born).
Indeed, I do know that such adoptions often show a marked improvement over racial peers; so that would indicate their is more to intelligence than genetics.
I don’t doubt that there’s more to it than genetics; nowhere have I claimed that intelligence is 100% genetic. There have been a number of studies to determine specifically what portion of a person’s intelligence is genetic; some of them are described in Wikipedia’s article about the Heritability of IQ. In young children, IQ is around half the result of genetics and half the result of environment, and the percentage of it which is genetic gradually rises over time until it reaches around 80% in adults.
I also recommend reading the article about g, since this is the type of intelligence which IQ tests measure. G is not a type of intelligence that’s useful in any particular environment; instead it’s the common factor to all types of intelligence. Since all types of intelligence correlate positively with one another, it’s possible to determine a person’s g through factor analysis. The results of some types of tests correlate much more strongly with g than others—this is known as being “g-loaded”—and in the case of synapse speed, this correlation is nearly 100%.
I think the best demonstration of what percentage of the IQ difference between races is genetic, and what percentage is cultural, is the following chart: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/a/a6/TBC-BW-IQ-SES-withDiff.png/800px-TBC-BW-IQ-SES-withDiff.png . (SES stands for Socio-Economic Status.) As you can see, socio-economic conditions certainly make a difference, but an IQ difference of around 15 points exists even when those conditions are equal.
quote:
I think I have said everything that your points warrant.
Considering my “points” were nothing but asking you to support your claims that it’s racist for anyone to think genes are one of the contributing factors in this IQ difference, and that somehow the theory of evolution is responsible for the idea that this difference exists at all, “everything my points warrant” apparently doesn’t include supporting your own claims. Since you apparently think that these two claims of yours don’t warrant support, and you’ve stopped attempting to support them, does this mean you’ve abandoned them?
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"I like your Christ. I do not like your Christians. Your Christians are so unlike your Christ." --Mahatma Gandhi
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