<p>Perhaps different races have different natural intelligence levels(on average)? I mean, it's a fact that some races are on average taller or stronger than others right? Then is it so unreasonable to believe that some races might also be naturally more intelligent? Here's an example. The IQ bell curve says Ashkenazi or East European Jews are the most intelligent ethnic group.These people make up a TINY percent of the world population but they've won a incredibly disproportionate number of Nobel Prizes(either 20 or 40 percent) as well as other math, science, engineering awards and are prevalent at the highest levels in the fields of technology, business, and academia. They've done this while facing constant discrimination in America and abroad(Holocaust anyone?), so don't say they've had better opportunities. How do you explain this? </p>
<p>BTW, don't call me a racist. I just wanted to introduce another possible side of this argument that others might be a little too nervous to bring up.</p>
<p>^This is interesting. I don't know about Jews, but I think this is true of recent Asian immigrants to the United States (recent as in within the last 20-25 yr). This can be attributed to the fact that only the smartest and most diligent students were able to test into the United States, and thus, the children of the Asian recent-immigration population in the United States may be slightly more intelligent and have stronger family values regarding school</p>
<p>The Jew thing works a little better because it's not just immigrants to America, but Ashkenazi Jews everywhere who have been academically outstanding at vastly disproportionate rates -- including in the Former Soviet Union, where there has been vicious antisemitism until very recently (and which is still not gone at all, really).</p>
<p>"but you are confusing repair and whitewash. Affirmative action is whitewash -- let's get a decent percentage by whatever means."</p>
<p>I am saying nothing of the kind. You assume because I use the term AA I agree with the current system. Actually to correct prior imbalance in all aspects of our society I believe we need a combination of ethnic and socioeconomic models to get, in time, to where we need to be. Will there be unfair outcomes during this time? Sure. Is this a fair price to pay to help correct historical biases? I think so. It is wonderful to take the idealized view that by ignoring racial, gender and socioeconomic situations we will magically correct all of histories biases. I just don't think it will happen.</p>
<p>On the other point, I would be foolish to believe there are no differences between sub groups of people on our planet. But to imply gross discrepancies in balance are due to genetic makeup is a reach I for one don't buy.</p>
<p>The idea that private institutions such as universities, which have specific purposes and goals, should be required to attain certain "representative levels of diversity" based on the population at large does not have merit. In the way that many people promote it, the idea simply places an artificial moral imperative on the concept of "diversity" without backing it up with any evidence or reasoning. The discussion here seems to be centered on an assumption that somehow, the level of intelligent, qualified students who should be entering X university (where X is one of the upper-echelon schools in the country) is going to be divided up proportionately based on race/ethnicity/class; or, that if it seems that one group has more qualified students than another, this is assumed to be because of a general lack of opportunity. But if this is not the case, the assumption immediately becomes that some group has genetic predispositions towards the desired qualities.</p>
<p>I think it's been grossly overlooked that all of these supposed correlations are meaningless until true causality is proved, and I haven't seen any hard statistical analysis to indicate that that any of these assumptions correctly model how reality actually works, beyond that economic class does in some cases lead to a lack of opportunity to prove excellence.</p>
<p>That was very reasonable -- you state your points cogently. Pragmatically speaking, I'm willing to buy that unfairness may be necessary before we get to the point where we can do things the right way. But the flip side needs a solid defense, too. And the example of Ashkenazi Jews (and other high-achieving but historically repressed groups) suggests that there is a lot more complexity to the reasons for imbalance than we might be tempted to think at first.</p>
<p>And one thing that's truly very good is that having these conversations inevitably results in talking honestly about costs and benefits, which there isn't enough of when it comes to touchy issues like this.</p>
<p>To be honest, I don't necessarily think repression and discrimination are the full story. I think disparities in the drive to obtain education are reflective of cultural values -- Jewish and Asian groups have traditionally embraced education as a means to better social and economic standing. Ergo, they pursue higher education and technical education.</p>
<p>That drive to obtain education is what affirmative action tries to repair, not socioeconomic inequality per se.</p>
<p>I will, in my role as the biologist, remind everybody again that human beings are not particularly genetically diverse -- that there's more genetic diversity among two chimps in a single tribe than there is among any two humans on the planet. In class a few weeks ago, one of my professors mentioned that there are only about 20 different haplotype</a> blocks in the human population for any given chromosomal region. So given that race isn't a genetically sensible construct, and that there's not much genetic diversity in the human race to begin with, my opinion on the odds of significant genetic diversity between races is somewhat dim.</p>
<p>^The drive to obtain education is, however, deeply embedded within a culture. For example, the Asian prioritization on academics has evolved through thousands of years from their origins in Confucius and Lao Ze. I don't think affirmative action can fix that.</p>
<p>Edit: maybe it can, since America is still relatively young, and people here have pretty much lost their native cultural values</p>
<p>and I'm no expert in biology, but since humans can have unlike physical features (i.e. populations have different hair and skin color, some West African populations are actually better suited (biologically for long-distance running, etc), why can't they have slightly different intelligence levels?</p>
<p>"To be honest, I don't necessarily think repression and discrimination are the full story. I think disparities in the drive to obtain education are reflective of cultural values -- Jewish and Asian groups have traditionally embraced education as a means to better social and economic standing. Ergo, they pursue higher education and technical education.</p>
<p>That drive to obtain education is what affirmative action tries to repair, not socioeconomic inequality per se."</p>
<p>Then why should middle-class/upper class minorities benefit(i've heard they're the ones who get in predominantly coz of AA)? Their parents probably had to work their asses off to get where they are so naturally they'd push their children to study and work hard, right?</p>
and I'm no expert in biology, but since humans can have unlike physical features (i.e. populations have different hair and skin color, some West African populations are actually better suited (biologically for long-distance running, etc), why can't they have slightly different intelligence levels?
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But hair color and skin color are controlled by relatively few genes, which are polymorphic for easily definable reasons (it's better to have dark skin in sunny parts of the world to protect you from UV radiation, but it's better to have light skin in cold parts of the world so you can make enough vitamin D).</p>
<p>Intelligence, to the extent that it is controlled by genes at all, is certainly controlled by many genes; there's also no reason for one population to be smarter than another. You need a big brain to navigate the social world as much on one continent as another.</p>
<p>There was a much</a> written-about study on a related topic. Apparently, systemic prejudice (land ownership restrictions, mostly) in medieval Europe basically required Ashkenazi Jews to enter skilled trades and professional occupations to avoid dying, and that led to rapid selection for intelligence and also lots of genetic diseases. It's an interesting subject.</p>
<p>More generally, it's not evidently true that all groups need the same amount of intelligence to survive. It seems some environments/societies are, for whatever reason, much more complex than others. Think agricultural society in northern Europe vs. warm Pacific Island with plentiful natural fruit. For one thing, one environment requires you to learn to domesticate animals if you're going to survive for more than a week, and the other has animals that let you walk up to them and eat them.</p>
<p>I'm not even remotely expert on any of this, but it seems from my casual acquaintance with the scholarship that there is still a lot of disagreement among serious scholars (that is to say, not Bell Curve hacks) on systemic differences in intellect.</p>
<p>But, as a policy matter, I'd agree with Mollie and akdaddy that the wise thing to do is to assume there are no genetically driven differences unless we find blindingly good evidence to the contrary. It's too easy to perpetuate bigotry if you don't have that policy.</p>
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animals that let you walk up to them and eat them.
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<p>yeah, those huge indigenous polynesian land mammals that were so famously hunted. Wait, what? You mean there weren't any?</p>
<p>The pigs and dogs the Polynesians consumed were domesticated. What? Polynesians had domestication? Those primitive natives, whose environment didn't sufficiently point them towards intelligence?</p>
<p>!. My limited acquaintance with this comes from Guns, Germs and Steel, by the fairly well-respected socio-anthro-bio-geographer (teehee) at UCLA, Jared Diamond. He says, at least in the Pacific islands surrounding Australia, there are no large indigenous land animals anymore (which there were prior to the arrival of humans) because the humans quickly ate them all when the humans arrived. But I didn't know Polynesians domesticated animals.</p>
<p>I think the theory that cold makes you smarter has also been pretty roundly discredited. Diamond thinks it's having to run a big agricultural society with domesticated animals that makes you smarter. I think scientifically it's an open and interesting question -- I just wanted to point out that it's not entirely obvious that all environments are isomorphic when it comes to complexity.</p>
<p>But one of Diamond's important points was really that Europeans happened to fall into an environment with a lot of easily domesticatable crops and animals, unlike groups on other continents which were relatively domesticatable crop-poor or domesticatable animal-poor. </p>
<p>I didn't get the message from Guns, Germs, and Steel that European society was more complex, ergo Europeans were smarter; I got that Europeans were lucky, ergo were the ones with the resources to go conquer less lucky societies.</p>
<p>Well, Europeans' vastly superior technology was not a natural resource -- their geographic luck helped them develop skills to develop superior technology. So there is a sense in which we might call that society "smarter", at least operationally.</p>
<p>But we are agreed on the larger issue -- I don't find this story particularly compelling, and I'm not going to assume big genetic differences in intelligence unless there's very, very strong evidence.</p>
<p>Additionally, the Polynesian triangle falls short of Australia, to include New Zealand but not that larger continent.</p>
<p>When Diamond discussed the "islands surrounding Australia", I took him to mean those north and west of Australia which would seem be natural stepping stones for habitation from Asia, i.e., Papua New Guinea, Indonesia, etc.</p>
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