"Michal Kulczycki" <88802@dawid.uni.wroc.pl> wrote:
> Don't quit follow. Do you mean that there are no genetical
> differences between Japanese and Pole? It is not a _false_
> concept. I really don't know why is this matter so emotional.
There are differences. This no one denies. However, I think that moving
from this to concluding that "races" may be more or less intelligent than
other races is a huge leap... we all possess roughly the same brain, after
all. In evolutionary terms, races just are not separated enough from each
other to have made a significant difference. And to finally settle the
issue, I will quote Deborah Blum:
"There's about a 15 percent genetic variation between any two
individuals," according to science writer Deborah Blum. "Less than
half of that, about 6 percent, is accounted for by known racial
groupings... A randomly selected white person, therefore, can easily
be genetically closer to an African than another white."
-- "Race: many biologists argue for discarding the whole concept,"
Deborah Blum, The Sacramento Bee, October 18, 1995, p. A12.
> It is not directly about races but rather heritability of abilities.
I'm very suspicious about this. Smacks a little of Lamarckism, me thinks.
> I am not speaking about very close realtions. I think about
> subltle similiarities. These one which cause Mongoloids (and
> Jews) to achieve about 15 IQ pt. (one SD!) higher scores.
Was the experiment done in such a way that all other factors which affect
intelligence (e.g. education, exposure to literature, etc.) were
controlled? I doubt it. My bet is that the results reflect the
epidemiology of memes, not that of genes.
> One more thing. I am not stuborn and rascist. I even do not want
> to force stricte racial concept. I just suspect (not only suspect)
> that there are complexes of genes that determine more abstract
> way of thinging, which of course do vary in such population
> according to Gaussian curve.
You are almost certainly right that the structures of our brains affect how
we think. However, let us not forget that how we think in our childhood
also has a profound effect on the way our brains develop. Nature only
takes one so far -- about as far as a cave man, I believe -- after that,
all the rest of the development is due to nurture. If one race has (say)
better spatial perception than another, that tells us that the culture he
lives in values (eg trains for) that quality/ability more.
To confirm my thesis, one need only point to adopted children -- as a
class, do they show the aptitudes of their *biological* parents, or their
*sociological* parents? My money is on the later.
ERiC