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Soundwave on 14 August 2014
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Radej said:

There is a 15-18 point gap between white and black Americans on IQ tests, with white Americans averaging around 103 and black Americans around 85, and sub-Saharan Africans average in the mid 60's. While IQ isn't perfect, it is the single best test for predicting future success in life, through education rates, incarceration, income levels, exc exc.

How terrible the United States compares with the rest of the world in education is cited constantly, it's actually black Americans that bring our scores down. The international test is called PISA, the Program for International Student Assessment, and it's broken down by race. White Americans are behind Shanghai, Hong-Kong, Korea, Finland, and Asian Americans, while Black Americans are ranked 50th, behind Serbia. It's a fact that there is a pretty substantial achievement gap between white and black Americans in education, and every single intelligence test has demonstrated that gap, the only question is what causes it. Most people on here will blame poverty, but that flies out the window when you compare white and black children from similar household income levels. White children coming from families making less then 20,000 dollars per year do BETTER on the SAT then black children coming from families making 70,000+ per year, and that same result happens with graduate level tests aswell.

It's naive to think genetics don't play some level in intelligence. You cannot possible believe in evolution and then think that a species separated by tens of thousands of years across tens of thousands of miles throughout every single climate on earth won't develop evolutionary differences to suit those environments, There is a tribe, one single tribe in Kenya caled the Kalenjin, that produces the best runners in the world.

"There are 17 American men in history who have run under 2:10 in the marathon," Epstein says. "There were 32 Kalenjin who did it in October of 2011."

Something about their bone structure, their muscles, their brains, whatever, they are better runners then everyone else in the world. Some groups are predisposed to certain illnesses, there are very clearly differences between eye, hair, and skin color, and bone structure of different racial groups, because of different genetics. There are ABSOLUTELY brilliant black people in this world, but Why is it such a stretch to say a group is predisposed to lower or higher levels of intelligence?

I don't think "intelligence" as we classify it in this thread is really all that relevant to "evolution" though ... modern "intelligence" or "book smarts" as we classify it ... that being the ability to read well, write well, perform well in subjects like mathematics have only really been inherint in most cultures for the last 300-400 years. 

That simply isn't enough time for there to be "evolutionary" changes to the human brain to allow one ethnic/racial group to be better than others. 

It also doesn't even make sense, Asian and Indian kids tend to score higher than their Caucasian counterparts in grades/"intelligence" yet they are also seperated into different regions. To me this represents cultural differences more than anything. Indian and Asian kids are pushed much harder in their studies than Cauasian kids are due to culture. 

Beyond that I honestly don't think the human brain gives enough of a sh*t about "intelligence", lol, its job primarily is to allow you to surive and reproduce ... those are the main functions of the brain; the fact that it can do much more is just a nice bonus, but the human brain really has not evolved that much over the last several thousand years.