The global IQ map above suggests that the multiple overlapping IQ distributions in the US population may simply reflect the broader global differences in IQ scores between regions. Certainly if the average Subsaharan African scored 120 on an IQ test, there would be much greater skepticism as to the direction of the Black - White gap as measured in US and Canadian populations.
Why do social scientists such as Flynn and Nisbett go to such lengths to explain away the genetic basis of intelligence, when it should be clear to any well educated person that the best hopes for raising the intelligence of everyone is to get at the basis of human intelligence? There are no reputable intelligence researchers who claim that environment is not critically important in achieving optimal intelligence for all individuals. So why do so many researchers with leftist political sympathies keep trying to claim that the genes are not important in the laying down of every person's brain capacity?
Humanity is currently stuck in a quagmire of stupidity. The crisis is made much worse by political hucksters within academia, media, and government who appear determined to prevent science from understanding the core truths of human intellectual variability. If we allow political correctness to prevent us from learning how to improve everyone's intellectual capacity, we will have probably dealt a death blow to humanity's future. - Al Fin
Thursday, September 03, 2009
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Widespread ignorance of genetics and the evolutionary process is a common impediment to grasping the nature of this problem and its persistent misuse by racists in their pseudo-scientific mincing.
For example, there is a general belief that there are specific ‘genes for’ this or that structure or behaviour — even some usefully knowledgeable and capable practitioners of scientific art have been seduced by this drastically oversimplified myth.
Dumbasses with a rank political axe to grind, or an unexamined or hypocritical moral sensibility to salve - have been quick to seize on this pseudo-science because it comes presented in the shiny vestaments of scientific hieratic authority, i.e., scientist as high-priest willing to accept and to wield moral authority.
In fact of course, genes code for protein. Nothing more.
Structure and behaviour are emergent by-products that inevitably arise from the administration of that protein.
Culture is the key here, not genes. Always has been, and always will be.
If it were otherwise, billions of dollars and decades of effort would have been expended toward a vaccine to boost IQ, (can't really boost "intelligence" because nobody seems capable of defining that elusive quality) much as has been done toward the development of a family of vaccines to induce permanent allergy to aspects of the reproductive cycle accompanied by secondary desexualization.
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