The same argument can be levied at racism. If you go back to the year 1000AD, it's obvious that Europeans are of vastly inferior stock. The Chinese and the Arabs were doing optics and stuff while the Europeans were basically playing in the dirt.
By the year 1000 AD the Europeans had already built the most grandiose of structures that rival today’s standards, had the most extensive networks and cities, filled entire libraries with books on all manners of philosophy and science, explored all corners of the world, and so on and on.
And it wasn't until about the 1900s (about 1920-1960), when the Western World (that primarily consisted of those same groups of people) exported its knowledge and technology (via a combination of globalism/capitalism + sharing + altruism) - that started to change the subsistence living conditions for everyone else to at least something higher.
If something was not invented by the Europeans, it sure as hell was revised and improved to such a degree that you can't equate the two in any meaningful way.
I hate to break it to you, but by 1000 the Roman Empire was well and truly gone. As much as I am fond of the medieval period, I wouldn't hold up 1000 as a bright and shining year for "The West".
Hell, at that point, even the Eastern Roman Empire was struggling.
The point was they accomplished things that no one else had by that time.
And eventually the doom and gloom that came afterwards was overcome fully with new civilizations, countries, etc... And by the 1800s the Western world and the European countries were so far ahead of anyone else that it's silly to even compare them to the rest of the world at that point in history in regards to reason, law, economy flow, technology, science/math, music, theater, culture, ideas, etc.
By your logic I could point out that China before the mid-point of last century was a 99% peasant-class country full of hardship and misery, and make the argument that you are using - wiping out all their previous culture and accomplishments.
We have to look at this from the totality point-of-view.
...which is what the person you were responding to was arguing. The idea that there is a fixed, deterministic "Best", or even a certain distribution, is an absurd concept when talking about humans. That ball has been passed around in history a great deal.
My understanding was that it was only during the Renaissance period and after that the Europeans had names attached to things. (I'd appreciate Book/source suggestions for my reading?)
In the U.S. whites score about one standard deviation above blacks on IQ tests such as WISC and Stanford-Binet, and in adoption studies that try to control for environment, this difference does not go away. Race is more than skin deep.
I've seen studies demonstrating the reverse: controlled for poverty, school, and whether a student has one or two parents, white and black American schoolchildren tested the same. (Standard deviation of 0.06: http://www.nber.org/papers/w12066)
EDIT: Sorry, wrong paper. Looking for the right one.
Even the fact that you point out "in the US" should be an indicator of the racism. I've never heard any other modern countries seriously complain about the allegedly inferior intellects of their black populace. Are American blacks different?...
These differences are mirrored by PISA and IQ scores between nations, SAT scores within nations, and etc. It's not hard to find corroborating evidence, but most people don't want to.
Ugh. That map is terrible. I'll just quote wikipedia on this one:
For 104 of the 185 nations, no studies were available. In those cases, the authors have used an estimated value by taking averages of the IQs of neighboring or comparable nations. For example, the authors arrived at a figure of 84 for El Salvador by averaging their calculations of 79 for Guatemala and 88 for Colombia. Including those estimated IQs, the correlation of IQ and GDP is 0.62.
It's not hard to find corroborating evidence, you can just make it up!
More importantly it didn't even support the argument presented.
I guess what they intended was "African Americans have low IQ and so do Africans, ergo IQ is race-related". Yet African Americans have higher IQ than Africans, because they live in a more prosperous region, with less disease, more opportunities etc. so what does that tell us about IQ and race, and racial differences within countries? That maybe it's not all about race (and generally be on the lookout for stats that don't correct for factors like age/wealth/education/sex etc. I regularly see the "headline" figure being given uncorrected.)
African Americans are closer to European IQ levels than Africans, probably for several environmental and genetic reasons (better nutrition and schooling, ~25% European ancestry, etc)
That's true, that a gap remains when you adjust for a some obvious confounding factors, which makes it all the stranger that people are so determined to use the non-adjusted figure, it's as if the bigger number somehow resonates more with what they want to believe, than the more scientifically valid one. Maybe they're scared a that a smaller gap could be bridged by simply examining a few more variables.
I'm reluctant to get involved in the politically incorrect side of this argument, but FWIW, that stat comes from "Intelligence: Knowns and Unknowns", which was a paper published in the mid-90s by the American Psychological Association (in response to the controversial book "The Bell Curve").
From the paper:
"The differential between the mean intelligence test scores of Blacks and Whites (about one standard deviation, although it may be diminishing) does not result from any obvious biases in test construction and administration, nor does it simply reflect differences in socio-economic status. Explanations based on factors of caste and culture may be appropriate, but so far have little direct empirical support. There is certainly no such support for a genetic interpretation. At present, no one knows what causes this differential."
I don't think anyone is arguing that males and females are identical. The problem is when the current social state of things (e.g. few women in CS) is used to make unwarranted extrapolations about what those differences are without strong biological supporting evidence. It's a weak argument since social effects have not been excluded at all from your model.
There could be great variance in intelligence, physical strength and aggressiveness between different races of the same species. For example Chihuahua, Doberman and Gray Wolf are races of the same species (Canis Lupus).
Of course humans were not a subject to strictly controlled selective breading like dogs, which means we have much fewer and less diverse races. Still, this is not something that should be completely ignored when trying to understand human behavior, both social and genetic traits matter.
You're talking about the Great Divergence, the historical curiosity starting in 1400 or so when the development of Europe left the rest of the world behind:
The same argument can be levied at racism. If you go back to the year 1000AD, it's obvious that Europeans are of vastly inferior stock. The Chinese and the Arabs were doing optics and stuff while the Europeans were basically playing in the dirt.