National IQ and National Productivity: The Hive Mind Across Asia Options

[richasiankid]

I thought I posted this but for some reason it didn't appear

Abstract:

A recent line of research demonstrates that cognitive skills—intelligence
quotient scores, math skills, and the like—have only a modest influence on
individual wages, but are strongly correlated with national outcomes. Is this
largely due to human capital spillovers? This paper argues that the answer is
yes. It presents four different channels through which intelligence may matter
more for nations than for individuals: (i) intelligence is associated with
patience and hence higher savings rates; (ii) intelligence causes cooperation;
(iii) higher group intelligence opens the door to using fragile, high-value
production technologies; and (iv) intelligence is associated with supporting
market-oriented policies. Abundant evidence from across ADB member
countries demonstrates that environmental improvements can raise cognitive
skills is reviewed.

I note one even "cruder" aspect, i.e. how Asian vs black communities are not identical in the US: for every 3 Asians (and don't forget that includes South Asians and Pacific Islanders) who are above avg IQ (>110) there is only 1 below average (<90). Yet for every 3 blacks above average, there'll be an equivalent of 36. And that may, just may, perhaps be one (not whole, not all) reason why some communities may fly while others tank - and why some gratuitously graduate from professional schools while others end up as drop-outs?

This post has been edited by richasiankid: Oct 4 2011, 06:56 PM

[AnybodyKiller]

I thought I posted this but for some reason it didn't appear

Abstract:

A recent line of research demonstrates that cognitive skills—intelligence
quotient scores, math skills, and the like—have only a modest influence on
individual wages, but are strongly correlated with national outcomes. Is this
largely due to human capital spillovers? This paper argues that the answer is
yes. It presents four different channels through which intelligence may matter
more for nations than for individuals: (i) intelligence is associated with
patience and hence higher savings rates; (ii) intelligence causes cooperation;
(iii) higher group intelligence opens the door to using fragile, high-value
production technologies; and (iv) intelligence is associated with supporting
market-oriented policies. Abundant evidence from across ADB member
countries demonstrates that environmental improvements can raise cognitive
skills is reviewed.

I note one even "cruder" aspect, i.e. how Asian vs black communities are not identical in the US: for every 3 Asians (and don't forget that includes South Asians and Pacific Islanders) who are above avg IQ (>110) there is only 1 below average (<90). Yet for every 3 blacks above average, there'll be an equivalent of 36. And that may, just may, perhaps be one (not whole, not all) reason why some communities may fly while others tank - and why some gratuitously graduate from professional schools while others end up as drop-outs?

The idea that IQ is a fair, unbiased and/or accurate measure of innate intelligence is laughable. We both know this issue is still hotly debated by experts in the field and that both sides have good arguments.

http://www.asiafinest.com/forum/index.php?...296802&st=0

Are we bringing the discussion here?

This post has been edited by AnybodyKiller: Oct 4 2011, 11:31 PM

[AnybodyKiller]

A related question is if chain-migration were to ensue, how will Filipinos in general do? Will they merge seamlessly into society? This is a difficult question to answer as no one can predict the future; but back in the 60s people used to say that Philippines(with its Spanish/US 'heritage' and more importantly its rich natural resources) will be destined to economic stardom, while South Korea by contrast will be destined to eternal poverty. People have forgotten about the role of human capital. Thus based on Lynn's estimates, Hong Kong's average IQ is 108, while Philippines' is 86. None of these numbers are carved in stone, but a 22-point gap is larger than, say, a black-white gap in the US of 15. If one were to narrow the sample by restricting to overseas Filipinos and Chinese in California (it has to be California as other states have too small a sample to split the "Asian" category) you see the following - Filipinos perform way below the NE Asian average (Chinese/Korean/Japanese) on end-of-course science subject performance (based on 2008 California standardized test results).



I should add that none of the above is meant to slight Filipinos. Many of those overseas (vs the countrymen left behind) are hardworking, and often seem to have a pleasant predisposition. They get along fine with many. And in countless ways I see them as more desirable than having some of the third worlders from South Central America. But facts are facts; diversity comes with a cost; and good intentions may not always be enough.

[AnybodyKiller]

IQ


GDP (Darker the blue, Higher the GDP)


It's because The Philippines is a third world country. They don't have the same education, health care, literacy rates, nutrition etc. as a lot of the more developed countries. IQ tests are infamous for being culturally biased. A tool in an insidious caste system to make those on top can have a clear conscience about why they have so much more than the "stupid darkies". It cracks me up, people complain night and day about "Whitey" and then use a test designed to prove White Supremacy to spout racism as facts about other Asians. A lot of people sound like white supremacists on a tangent about racial hygiene

IQ is rooted in American Eugenics

Race and Intelligence OR Class and Intelligence?
Did you know Jews scored low in the early 1900's? They score the highest now @ 113 average.. Did they somehow increase their innate intelligence in just 100 years by 20 points? They either climbed the social ladder or ate a whole lot of brain food.
Both points can be debated for days and days, it's really which side you choose to believe.

Facts are Facts.. Science can't be racist right.


That's a fair depiction if I've ever seen one.

[AnybodyKiller]

There are a few inconvenient facts however and I ask posters not jump at reflex conclusions:

1. Is it conceivable that "a test designed to prove White Supremacy to spout racism" could end up with North East Asians (Chinese/Koreans/Japanese) consistently at the top? Even so called "white nationalists" are forced to admit this (a recent conference in September 2011 in Washington touches on this point [read first two paragraphs of this review from a leftist perspective]).

2. Is IQ merely a test? It correlates with a whole slew of biological variables, one being brain size. And brain sizes are not identical between various population groups.

3. Importantly, people chant, oh, it's poverty that drives low IQ. Well, why not the other way round? Low human capital may also drive poverty, poorer health care, lower literacy rates, malnutrition etc etc. as mentioned.

So how do we untangle this mess? Easy. Look at cross-sections. In the context of East Asia, look at China versus Japan. On a per capita basis, China is still much poorer than Japan. And though mainland Chinese may not be happy to hear this, a most recent study demonstrates that an average Japanese is about 70 times as wealthy as an average mainland Chinese. And yet, Chinese IQ and Japanese IQs are commensurate with each other (see below). That is a very astonishing thing. Likewise, Hong Kong (commensurate with Japan in per capita economic prowess) in spite of being much richer than mainland China does not have a significant IQ advantage over its mainland Chinese counterparts.

4. And then, look at trends. Why is it that North East Asia never had a 70 IQ to begin with, when in the 1960s and 70s China and other parts of East Asia were in even more dire straits than some African countries?





No, IQs have been remarkably consistent across time in spite of interim economic growth.

5. Back to the original question of population IQ differences:



Looking at the above, I ask a much simpler question ("Occam's razor") and if not in irony: should we even be surprised about population inequality in the first place? Why the fuss by white liberals? Why the hysteria from blacks?

If the data is so wrong, quite simply, where is evidence to suggest equality in the first place?

[AnybodyKiller]

Like I said, we can do this for days, though this will be my last post on it because this is not what the debate is about and I've already done way too many of these.. There's plenty of evidence on both sides, it's really about which side you believe.. Also nothing you posted is anything that I haven't discussed with others with your same viewpoint, the only difference is I was debating with white supremacists.

1. Jews actually have the Highest IQ at 113 average. Yeah, and whites also say Chinese manipulate the test results and that you are actually either the same or lower intelligence on Stormfront and such sites. "It would be easy to report that a test was conducted a certain way, when in reality it was executed in a totally biased fashion, especially in a Communist country. In order to believe the validity of a study, you have to trust the people conducting it" (heard the like from eurocentrists on many an occasion to justify why Asians are "smarter".)

2. Nutrition, Healthcare, Education, Cultural values definitely do factor in to IQ.. It's undeniable. IQ studies done in China often do not factor in rural or slum areas. (I can't read Chinese, but I'd really be interested to read some if someone could direct me to one in English.). Also as someone else pointed out, your sources say a lot, It's what I expected.

3. Exactly the viewpoint I'm talking about it my first post "Why are the darkies so poor? Because they're mentally inferior". I have a feeling you didn't grow up in a diverse environment. I assure you that there are African-Americans and Australoids who are smarter than you or I. (India's IQ average is 81!!! I know we all know some smart Indians)
IQ and the Wealth of Nations

4. The average IQ used to be 80.. Did everyone just get that much smarter or did we just get better at taking tests?

5. The evidence to me is being from a multicultural environment and seeing the "Caste System" first hand. I remember seeing black kids being treated like dumb niggas, and moderately intelligent whites being praised. I remember the teachers disapproving, begrudging eyes giving me a high score on my tests. Teachers trying to say Asians aren't creative and the like. Also, Blacks IQ is climbing as they are being more socially accepted in the US over the past 10 years. Coincidence? I think not.

I'm done with this though, believe what you want. One day us "darkies" might surprise you however. IQ measurements are needed to produce a self fulfilling prophecy mechanism in the lower classes... basically "See you N*ggas are dumb, don't even try. We're genetically better than you, it's scientific fact. " I've seen this play out first hand in the US public school system. It's real.

History of Race and Intelligence
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_racism

more to take into account

[AnybodyKiller]

The most obvious and simplest answer which cuts thru all the red tape is once again this one: if the data of inequality presented is so wrong, where is counter-data of parity -- across all population groups and countries? All the bells & whistles won't cut it.

Furthermore, there are close to 200 countries. Never mind info and data presented above, a priori, what are the odds that all 200 countries around the world have identical or close to identical human capital?

That eliminates a lot of the side-tracks above, but which I will answer in a minute.

First though, you'd be happy (or not) to know that I used to take your position. I recall in a heated argument with an Indian from India back in grade 10 high school. I was very vociferously arguing the point that population groups are all more or less equal, that IQ is nonsense, that we're all the same etc etc etc, you know, with all the swallowed liberal cliches. He kept saying, no no no, East Asians are the smartest save Ashkenazi Jews (he did say that yes), followed by whites, followed at some distance by browns, and then by blacks. He didn't cite charts and data, but neither did nor could I. In fact I said practically everything you noted above. And it took at least couple years to shed this inculcated illusion of equality. My biology teacher helped (he said Darwin absolutely does NOT apply to human groups, but he was being "open-minded" given religious nuts around and who are merely afraid of the truth and Darwin should not be off limits). And his fav author? Steven J Gould. He couldn't see past his blinders that he was merely another religious nut spewing forth another variation of orthodoxy.

But no, ultimately when I looked deeper I saw the light; it's the equivalent of seeing depth for the first time in renaissance painting after you're thru the Middle Ages; or appreciating polyphony in Baroque music after enduring Gregorian chants. It's seeing just how shallow the white liberal world is with hackneyed slogans and worn-out cliches of "equality" which consists of negating (often angrily) rather than seeing: for once you see the world is round, you'll never go back to flat-earth theory again. Once the illusion (and hence the now necessary dogmatic assertion) of equality is shattered, you'll never look at the world the same again. Once you have tasted a dose of reality, you'll never be content with Alice-in-wonderland fantasy. Your eyes will be opened forever. To the past. And to the future.

But to return and to answer some of your questions: first, on Jewish IQ. Indeed, Ashkenazi Jews (but note carefully not Sephardics) seem to have highest IQ of any group. But that cements just how important IQ is doesn't it? Look at America. Just how over-represented are Ash Jews in universities, academe, politics, the Forbes 400 etc? You can just go on and on and on and they are often the top. White nationalists from Stormfront probably will have problems accepting this fact; I don't. In fact I'm sort of secretly happy that they do not have lower IQs than Asians or whites - else that would deal a blow on the predictability of IQ. That is, if Ash Jews are low IQ and yet are so successful, IQ as a measure for groups would become less predictive.

On the question of bias which is the reason behind high Asian IQ in Asia, wrong. Many of the studies are actually done or at least spearheaded by Western researchers. Yes, local researchers participated, but it's conducted by the West, often by whites. And as aside when Rushton went to South Africa to look at IQs of different groups, he quite specifically recruited black researchers to ensure that this alleged 'bias' was minimized if not weeded out based on your concerns above.

On the environmental factor of IQ, there can be no doubt. Depending on the research, it's probably 20-50%. But - and here's the kicker - most importantly, it's not 100%. Why is this important? Because as environments are equalized, more and more of the residual will come from the biological or genetic component. If biology + environment = outcome, and when you equalize environment, more and more of the differences in outcome will be attributed to biology. And guess what, America is equalizing or attempting to equalize environments every day. Public ed and affirmative action to name but two. The residuals of "inequality" are actually "selected" if you will for inherent if not innate predispositions consciously or not, deliberately or not.

And so in that context now look at SAT scores (which correlate highly with IQ at ~ 0.90). You'll find that Asians (being a heterogeneous group with pacific islanders, SE Asians etc.) consistently outscore whites, which consistently outscore Hispanics, which consistently outscore blacks.



And here's the thing: a decade later, blacks with parents who make over $100K actually score lower than whites with parents who make less than $10K. I quote:



Now, that's just scandal.

10x the parental income can't equalize offspring outcome?

Well.

I think environment can only do so much.

Ultimately you (like me before) will have to ask and question no one other than yourself this whole concocted notion of "equality". I did and unblinded myself. You should go through the same process and ask yourself whether what you see and hear or parrot is true or false first and foremost - not whether it fits with your or some others' preconceived worldview, however tempting and appealing they might be. For ultimately I think knowledge is better than ignorance - let alone wilful deceit.

I just wish more would - or could - agree.

Cheers,

[AnybodyKiller]

I would first like to point out that while I know I said I wouldn't post on this topic again, I changed my mind because you offered up some interesting points with that last one that I would like to address. I would also like for you to realize it is hard for me not to get upset when you are basically saying you believe that your race is inherently superior to mine on average. I would still like to apologize for my 'knee jerk' reaction. "Intelligence Quotient" is an unfortunate remainder of the era in which its standard testing methodology was devised. The average Joe assumes that IQ is treated as a comprehensive, innate label of the inner workings of your brain and that's just not how it's treated today. Also, I don't invalidate the idea that certain groups of people may be smarter than others, I just don't think it's the cause of inequality or as pronounced as some would like us to believe. No offense, but I'm glad most Chinese people I've met don't think like you.. At least on the surface anyway. Thinking like this leads to genocide.



To which I will quote one of your own arguments
Many of the studies are actually done or at least spearheaded by Western researchers. Yes, local researchers participated, but it's conducted by the West, often by whites. And as aside when Rushton went to South Africa to look at IQs of different groups, he quite specifically recruited black researchers to ensure that this alleged 'bias' was minimized if not weeded out based on your concerns above.

1....And reiterate how biased eurocentric science can be. When has the data research ever been "led and submitted" by an African? Again a study is only as trustworthy as the people who submit the data. To address your question on what motivation a eurocentric test would have to promote "Asians being the 2nd smartest", would be to cause Asians to fight among each other. Which is what's happening in this thread. It has also made me realize my anger was misguided. Another reason is it would be too obvious if white tests pronounced whites the smartest.
In a paper for the International Journal of Selection and Assessment in 2006, Steven Cronshaw and colleagues wrote that psychologists need to critically examine the science used by Rushton in his "race-realist" research. Their re-analysis of the validity criteria for test bias, using data reported in the Rushton et al. paper, led them to conclude that the testing methods were biased against Black Africans. They disagree with other aspects of Rushton's methodology, such as his use of non-equivalent groups in test samples.[60] 

The study "IQ and the Wealth of Nations" is supposedly one of the more recent and grand undertakings of a world wide "fair and unbiased measure of intelligence". Here are some glaring highlights of incompetence and/or bias

There were actual tests for IQ in 81 nations. In 104 of the world's nations there were no IQ studies at all and IQ was estimated based on IQ in surrounding nations.[2]

The number of participants in some studies were limited. A test of 108 9-15-year olds in Barbados, of 50 13–16-year olds in Colombia, of 104 5–17-year olds in Ecuador, of 129 6–12-year olds in Egypt, of 48 10–14-year olds in Equatorial Guinea, and so on, all were taken as measures of 'national IQ

Their scheme is to take the British Ravens IQ in 1979 as 100, and simply add or subtract 2 or 3 to the scores from other countries for each decade that the relevant date of test departs from that year. The assumptions of size, linearity and universal applicability of this correction across all countries are, of course, hugely questionable if not breathtaking. Flynn's original results were from only 14 (recently extended to twenty) industrialised nations, and even those gains varied substantially with test and country and were not linear.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IQ_and_the_We...ore_adjustments (plenty more where that came from)


2. How do you explain the rise of Black IQ while they are simultaneously climbing the socioeconomic ladder in the United states?

Bottom line: Black children have gained 5-6 IQ’s over Whites in the Black-White gap over a 30 yr period.
http://robertlindsay.wordpress.com/2009/07...k-white-iq-gap/

3. Even IQ researchers believe that health and nutrition could be a much bigger factor than race.
Health can affect intelligence in various ways. This is one of the most important factors in understanding the origins of human group differences in IQ test scores and other measures of cognitive ability.Several factors can lead to significant cognitive impairment, particularly if they occur during pregnancy and childhood when the brain is growing and the blood-brain barrier is less effective. Such impairment may sometimes be permanent, sometimes be partially or wholly compensated for by later growth.



4. How can you explain that the average United States IQ just 70 years ago was 80?
Using the IQ values of today the average IQ of the US in 1932, according to the first Stanford-Binet standardization sample, was 80. How can you explain that Jews used to score below whites which was at the time 80, and now score higher than anyone in the world? Is it because people are inherently smarter now? Or is it because we have better education and healthcare now. (From Jay Gould's "The Mismeasure of Man")



5. An actual IQ test will have a balance between spelling, general knowledge, memory, matrix reasoning and math. Much of which can be practiced for.
"you can also opt for the home study material provided by Mensa which has been found to increase Mensa IQ score by 10-25 points."
http://www.iqtestexperts.com/mensa-iq-test.php
There are many guides online that will increase your IQ score(some claiming up to 30 points). My dad took an IQ test and he said that you could definitely do better if you knew what was going to be on it and studied for it.

Who do you think is more likely to worry enough to practice for an IQ test? An urban jew with nothing to worry about but studying? or a starving African?


No one was 'attacking' the source. It was just like these afrocentrists who post stuff about how black people created China and then post from some Nation of Islam pseudo science website, we merely meant it was a dubious source. The source and it's reliability can say a lot about your argument. Attacks on a person can be desperation, but nothing about what that poster said sounded desperate to me, he probably just didn't like what you had to say.


I actually used to think the way you do. I used to think that being Asian made me inherently smarter than other races because they would even say it to me. For instance, a black student would ask me what I got on the test, and when he found out I had a good grade would say "Oh it's cause you're Asian, asians are smart".. I would be expected by my parents to do well, etc. People I've met have led me to believe differently which brings me to my next point.

6. How environment can effect "Intelligence Quotient Tests"

A story a friend once told me:
Did you know that there are tribes in Africa that when exposed to pictures with a 3-D field of view they cannot discern what is "behind" something. If there is a man depicted in front of an elephant who is far in the distance, they would ask "why is the elephant so small?" It's not because they're intellectually inferior, it's because they've never been exposed to this form of art. Now, ask this person to take an IQ test and you can see how this might effect the outcome.

Why is the elephant so much smaller than the other? And why is it in the air?


7. Definition of Intelligence
The definition of intelligence is also hotly debated, so if scientists can't even agree on what intelligence is, how can we measure it? Same with race. Also the definition of intelligence would have to vary from culture to culture seeing as in different settings (say a hunter-gatherer society and a first world country) it may take a different form of intelligence to survive.

[AnybodyKiller]

I see that I’ve been warned here (33%) on the board not by you but by others, alleged for consecutive posting (really?). Hence I guess I’ll just have to behave and be short and combine posts into a succinct response. Sorry to others.

On your points above as I'm told to be : I peg them in order to make things easy.

12 points:

1. It is obvious racial hierarchy (as well as identity) seems very important to you. No one can blame you. This, of course, counters the white liberal assumption (or pretense) of equality for all. Which, I hope, you at least agree.
2. If you hate labels or nefarious connotations of IQ, call it cognitive skills. Call it human capital. Yet not everyone can be a neuroscientist no matter how congenial the environment, no matter how hard they try. Period. Semantics? It’s as ridiculous as forever exchanging terms like “Negro” or “black” or “African American” or “melanin-enriched”. You are one of the non-women (I presume) so caught up with semantics actually (also see next post)
3. Asians are less poisoned by fantasy notions of egalitarianism or liberalism (unless, in the context of this thread, where and if they live in Hong Kong)
4. When you (or political scientists [sic]) can’t counter the data, “deconstruct” the data!! Shift the debate from facts to this disprovable moral realm and perhaps even start imputing motives and name-calling. That’s the crusading (but not necessarily herd) white liberal method. The whole hippy cultural Marxist thing in university arts departments is based on this deconstructionist anarchist impulse if you think about it. I'm almost sure I'm wrong, but you seem to be a sympathetic practitioner of sorts?
5. BTW since it seems it’s only Ash Jews are smartest but not all Jews (and never mind their low #) i.e making references to a select group within a small group I can make a claim that Shanghai is actually smartest based on PISA results translates into IQ 112 vs Ash Jews 110 (also see next post) (Hey if IQ has no meaning, why care who's smartest?)
6. Classic black white gap counter
7. Malnutrition can stunt height; that does not therefore mean with equal nutrition or surfeit nutrition all groups will achieve the same. That is one of the biggest make-believe blind spots ever perpetuated, sometimes often deliberately.
8. What causes poverty in the first place? Another variation of a whole list of litany of excuses of exploitation?
9. I wouldn’t care much if blacks say they created China. IQ, on the other hand, hits a nerve because deep down even its detractors at some subliminal level probably recognize its importance. And no, poster [foi2] was very reasonable. My reply should have read, and I apologize too: “I think we should ultimately ask whether data is true or not, and not whether it's 'hate' or 'love'. It's easy to throw words and adjectives around to smear, but that's variant of standard ad hominem "arguments" even first year students understand: when some can't counter an argument, just attack the person (or the website) etc. It's desperation."
10. Too bad the rest of the black population in America don’t do as well as you do. Exceptions, however, don't prove the rule.
11. No one denies environment plays a role. Read point 7 again.
12. Define “equality”. In the first place. Please!

This post has been edited by AnybodyKiller: Oct 4 2011, 11:41 PM

[AnybodyKiller]

Let's do this point for point in the future to save time yeah? I address your points in the order given and you address mine in the order given please? =]

1. Yes, I do agree that there are races. We agree on this much, I just don't think IQ scores are a valid measure of intelligence as proven by the flawed practices and data manipulation occurring in every study. BTW, why do Whites get to decide what the standardized intelligence test is?

2. This had nothing to do with my 2nd point at all, but regarding your "classic Black & White counter" in your sixth point, There are plenty of studies that prove the opposite. Other than that this wasn't really an argument but implying that I'm womanly maybe? ><
http://www.brookings.edu/views/papers/d...20060619_IQ.pdf

like I keep saying it's which paper do you believe.

3. Why are they "liberal poisoned " if they point out shoddy science? Really just anti-liberal statement, more than an argument here. "What are ye? Sum kinda nigra lovin liberal hippy?"

4. Well if it's bad data it's hard not to!
The execution of the test is terribly flawed and there is huge amounts of data manipulation. Of course if it's bad we're going to let people know it's bad. And it's the white conservative method to label those against them as "degenerate radicals" :P. It's also the white fascist method to twist science to promote their racial superiority.

"look at these recordings of human skull shapes and monkey skull shapes, it is scientific proof that us whites are the most evolved race, and the negro is actually a monkey." 50-100 years ago this was what science taught. Of course people back then would call bull$hit on this, just like people are starting to do with IQ tests.



5. Maybe people from Shanghai test higher, You're right it doesn't matter because IQ tests aren't a valid way to measure intellect anyways. The problem I see with it is too many people see it as the measure of your innate cognitive abilities, when this is far from the truth. It's dangerous for people to think that they are so superior to others because of this test.

6. See point 2

7. Yeah, they wouldn't be the same.. But the gaps would definitely narrow. Like I said, I do believe that there is such a thing as race, and intelligence probably is slightly higher on average in some races. I Still hold that these tests are absurdly out dated and geared towards getting certain results.

Think of Basketball, American Blacks have had a monopoly on the sport for a long time. People used to say "Blacks are inherently just better than all other races at the game, they have an extra muscle in their leg" But nowadays the gap is closing (fast I might add) because more countries are taking basketball seriously. I honestly think Blacks have a disposition towards being fast due to their typical body type, but it's not like there aren't great White or Asian players either. Same with intelligence, some races might have a disposition towards being gifted cognitively, but that doesn't mean any race can't produce genius.

That's why this low innate intellect stero-typing is so dangerous. Imagine If a "realist conservative" decides- why bother training Chinese basketball players they'll never be as good as blacks. Or, why bother educating Blacks, they'll never be as smart as Chinese.

8. There are plenty of variables that cause poverty. IQ isn't one. You can take practice tests for these things you know?
http://www.iqtestexperts.com/mensa-iq-test.php
http://www.soyouwanna.com/soyouwanna-score...-1620-full.html
I'll bet you an inherently stupid person can practice this a whole bunch and get a *gasp* genius IQ. Any form of "intelligence" can be practiced IMO.

Just like an average man who plays basketball 6-8 hours a day will be a better player than an athletically gifted player who plays once or twice a month.

9. Well let me get some sources from the Afrocentric or neo-nazi websites then that say that the Jews are controlling all the data we are allowed access to so everything you've posted is invalid except the afrocentric sites. But you can't "attack my source out of desperation"

10. Yeah, this one Black dude I went to class with spelled "ABACADABA" over and over when he found out a standardized test didn't affect his grade.

11. Glad we agree on that.

12. I'll say this, Races are different but should be given Equal respect and treatment.

Your quote about getting "Low IQ Filipinos" to stir up social change is interesting, though Filipino-Americans are pretty conservative as a whole. I don't think most people care about IQ in the states, most people I know see it as a ruse to begin with. I think IQ does however measure how acclimated you are in a society. I still think the IQ tests are biased to equate light skin with innate intellect, look at the IQ scores of nations and then look at a map, how can you not notice the high correlation of Dark Skin : Low IQ and not think something is amiss.

EDIT: I think richasiankid wanted to move this discussion because we were really off-topic in the thread in the Chinese Forum "Philippine Maid wins suit in Hong Kong" (or whatever it was called)

Also India has an IQ of 81 and is one of the leaders in productivity if I'm not mistaken.

This post has been edited by AnybodyKiller: Oct 4 2011, 11:54 PM

[Creme Femme]

I think intelligence is genetic and as such, is probably varied by race and ethnicity.

[Creme Femme]

I'm glad Vietnamese Americans did so well on that 2008 California Standardized Test Results graphic.

[XigonCongchua]

I saw several topics about this in Chinese Chat and Filipino Chat.

Do you know what ironic? Those who boast about racial IQs are probably the sillest of all here. They should go back to school. I bet my black friend is smarter than them all

They all have been mistaking correlation for causation.

Correlation does not imply causation

There's no proved causal relationship between one's race and one's IQ.

All those things you guys have been talking about all over this board - Race, ethnic, GDP, IQ scores, SAT scores, income, national wealth, yadaa yadaa - are all correlations caused by confounding factors of socioeconomic circumstances and cultural values. Biological "race" isn't the cause.

Only losers would talk about such thing to consolidate their sense of self-worthiness.


P/S: Just so you know. Race isn't concept in neither biology nor anthropology. So is "race" biological? Biologists and real modern anthropologists speak nothing of race, only AFers do.

[AnybodyKiller]

I saw several topics about this in Chinese Chat and Filipino Chat.

Do you know what ironic? Those who boast about racial IQs are probably the sillest of all here. They should go back to school. I bet my black friend is smarter than them all

They all have been mistaking correlation for causation.

Correlation does not imply causation

There's no proved causal relationship between one's race and one's IQ.

All those things you guys have been talking about all over this board - Race, ethnic, GDP, IQ scores, SAT scores, income, national wealth, yadaa yadaa - are all correlations caused by confounding factors of socioeconomic circumstances and cultural values. Biological "race" isn't the cause.

Only losers would talk about such thing to consolidate their sense of self-worthiness.


P/S: Just so you know. Race isn't concept in neither biology nor anthropology. So is "race" biological? Biologists and real modern anthropologists speak nothing of race, only AFers do.

I do think certain populations have dispositions towards certain traits (For instance descendants of certain African countries tend to develop sickle cell anemia). I think these differences are negligible however and many studies do prove that there aren't different "breeds" of us like there are in dogs. I think it will hard for many my age and older to accept this because it is not what we were taught in school. Anyways take a look at the conclusion of the study posted

In largely nontechnical terms, the paper surveyed the psychometric
evidence showing that IQ tests measure something substantial; that mainstream
psychologists believe IQ persistently differs across economies; and that public
health research indicates that IQ can be increased in the world’s poorest
economies. The paper provided four channels, rooted in economic theory,
through which intelligence could matter more for nations than for individuals.
These are: (i) capital channel, (ii) cooperation channel, (iii) complementarity
channel, and (iv) Caplan channel. Of course, for each of these channels, non-IQ
factors may be important for explaining cross-country differences in productivity
and institutions; the paper never claims otherwise. The paper claims that
economists have almost entirely overlooked the evidence that persistent
differences in national cognitive skills are likely to have impacts on the economy
through these four channels.
As noted in the introduction, even if only one of the four channels of the
Hive Mind is quantitatively important, this topic deserves additional attention
from economists. Future work documenting whether IQ is robustly associated
with patience within and across countries; and how the variance and kurtosis of
mental skills impact political, social, and firm-level productivity, would be of substantial value for determining which channels are most important in which
countries. And finally, it is time for international institutions to begin a Penn
World Table-level effort to carefully document differences in general cognitive
skill across countries and across time.
One can only hope that if intelligence spillovers are as important as this
paper claims, then researchers across the disciplines will find practical ways to
raise the intelligence of nations."

Even here it backslides a lot talking about "Health could be just as big of a factor" etc.

This post has been edited by AnybodyKiller: Oct 5 2011, 11:24 AM

[fireplant]

if race doesn't cause IQ, does XG think IQ causes race?

XG you're not in high school anymore. Time to sharpen your analytically skills, not just soak up superficial soundbites. Everyone know what is "race" when they see it. Race has enormous practical implications throughout history and time. Trying to argue that race doesn't exist based on some technicality is a big fail. You can be sure the problem is in your technical analysis, not in people's perception about themselves. The anthropologist that argues this has forgotten her spirit of inquiry, and she is only driven by a spirit of dogma.

It makes me kind of sick!

This post has been edited by fireplant: Oct 5 2011, 03:51 PM

[XigonCongchua]

IQ causes race? What did I say? Those who boast about IQs are usually the silliest of all, right? How could IQ cause race when I said there's no causal relationship between the two, only mere correlation?

Race is a biological myth.

Race is a cultural creation

Race is a human invention...

...to categorize people around them.


Culture is a very powerful thing. It shapes how you view the world, it shapes your way of thinking, it shapes how you receive and interpret information from your surrounding. Growing up in a culture, that culture is so ingrained into people's brain that they don't even realize it, they think of it as common sense.

The power of culture lies in its ability to naturalize human products, human creations, human inventions. Culture is so powerful that it makes people think the ideas are natural. Stereotypes of male and female are example of human creation turned natural by culture. Since when should baby girls play with dolls and baby boys play with robots? Since when is kitchen associated with women and office associated with men? These are not natural, not biological, they're cultural creation but culture is so powerful that it makes people think they're natural.

Race is a cultural creation. There's no biological basis for it. There's nothing such as a biological race. But culture is so ingrained into our brains, from the dawn of history to modern time, that we don't realize it, we think it's natural.

I do think certain populations have dispositions towards certain traits (For instance descendants of certain African countries tend to develop sickle cell anemia). I think these differences are negligible however and many studies do prove that there aren't different "breeds" of us like there are in dogs. I think it will hard for many my age and older to accept this because it is not what we were taught in school. Anyways take a look at the conclusion of the study posted

Human variations are real. But those variations are too complexed to be classified into discrete categories such as race. Where does one race end and another begin? What traits should we use to classify race? Skin colors, eyes, nose, hair, blood type, skull shape...? These traits don't vary together. Some form clines along the latitudes whereas others from clines along the longitudes while some other show no discernable pattern of geographic distribution at all. Furthermore, observable physical traits that people often associate with "race" are superficial and often have nothing to do with the biological functions of the body. Also variations within one population is much greater than variation between populations which doesn't accomodate the discrete categories of race.


If you want anthropologists' stance on race
http://physanth.org/association/position-s...aspects-of-race

From American Association of Physical (Biological) Anthropologists

PREAMBLE
As scientists who study human evolution and variation, we believe that we have an obligation to share with other scientists and the general public our current understanding of the structure of human variation from a biological perspective. Popular conceptualizations of race are derived from 19th and early 20th century scientific formulations. These old racial categories were based on externally visible traits, primarily skin color, features of the face, and the shape and size of the head and body, and the underlying skeleton. They were often imbued with nonbiological attributes, based on social constructions of race. These categories of race are rooted in the scientific traditions of the 19th century, and in even earlier philosophical traditions which presumed that immutable visible traits can predict the measure of all other traits in an individual or a population. Such notions have often been used to support racist doctrines. Yet old racial concepts persist as social conventions that foster institutional discrimination. The expression of prejudice may or may not undermine material well-being, but it does involve the mistreatment of people and thus it often is psychologically distressing and socially damaging. Scientists should try to keep the results of their research from being used in a biased way that would serve discriminatory ends.

POSITION

We offer the following points as revisions of the 1964 UNESCO statement on race:

1. All humans living today belong to a single species, Homo sapiens, and share a common descent. Although there are differences of opinion regarding how and where different human groups diverged or fused to form new ones from a common ancestral group, all living populations in each of the earth's geographic areas have evolved from that ancestral group over the same amount of time. Much of the biological variation among populations involves modest degrees of variation in the frequency of shared traits. Human populations have at times been isolated, but have never genetically diverged enough to produce any biological barriers to mating between members of different populations.

2. Biological differences between human beings reflect both hereditary factors and the influence of natural and social environments. In most cases, these differences are due to the interaction of both. The degree to which environment or heredity affects any particular trait varies greatly.

3. There is great genetic diversity within all human populations. Pure races, in the sense of genetically homogenous populations, do not exist in the human species today, nor is there any evidence that they have ever existed in the past.

4. There are obvious physical differences between populations living in different geographic areas of the world. Some of these differences are strongly inherited and others, such as body size and shape, are strongly influenced by nutrition, way of life, and other aspects of the environment. Genetic differences between populations commonly consist of differences in the frequencies of all inherited traits, including those that are environmentally malleable.

5. For centuries, scholars have sought to comprehend patterns in nature by classifying living things. The only living species in the human family, Homo sapiens, has become a highly diversified global array of populations. The geographic pattern of genetic variation within this array is complex, and presents no major discontinuity. Humanity cannot be classified into discrete geographic categories with absolute boundaries. Furthermore, the complexities of human history make it difficult to determine the position of certain groups in classifications. Multiplying subcategories cannot correct the inadequacies of these classifications.

Generally, the traits used to characterize a population are either independently inherited or show only varying degrees of association with one another within each population. Therefore, the combination of these traits in an individual very commonly deviates from the average combination in the population. This fact renders untenable the idea of discrete races made up chiefly of typical representatives.

6. In humankind as well as in other animals, the genetic composition of each population is subject over time to the modifying influence of diverse factors. These include natural selection, promoting adaptation of the population to the environment; mutations, involving modifications in genetic material; admixture, leading to genetic exchange between local populations, and randomly changing frequencies of genetic characteristics from one generation to another. The human features which have universal biological value for the survival of the species are not known to occur more frequently in one population than in any other. Therefore it is meaningless from the biological point of view to attribute a general inferiority or superiority to this or to that race.

7. The human species has a past rich in migration, in territorial expansions, and in contractions. As a consequence, we are adapted to many of the earth's environments in general, but to none in particular. For many millennia, human progress in any field has been based on culture and not on genetic improvement.

Mating between members of different human groups tends to diminish differences between groups, and has played a very important role in human history. Wherever different human populations have come in contact, such matings have taken place. Obstacles to such interaction have been social and cultural, not biological. The global process of urbanization, coupled with intercontinental migrations, has the potential to reduce the differences among all human populations.

8. Partly as a result of gene flow, the hereditary characteristics of human populations are in a state of perpetual flux. Distinctive local populations are continually coming into and passing out of existence. Such populations do not correspond to breeds of domestic animals, which have been produced by artificial selection over many generations for specific human purposes.

9. The biological consequences of mating depend only on the individual genetic makeup of the couple, and not on their racial classifications. Therefore, no biological justification exists for restricting intermarriage between persons of different racial classifications.

10. There is no necessary concordance between biological characteristics and culturally defined groups. On every continent, there are diverse populations that differ in language, economy, and culture. There is no national, religious, linguistic or cultural group or economic class that constitutes a race. However, human beings who speak the same language and share the same culture frequently select each other as mates, with the result that there is often some degree of correspondence between the distribution of physical traits on the one hand and that of linguistic and cultural traits on the other. But there is no causal linkage between these physical and behavioral traits, and therefore it is not justifiable to attribute cultural characteristics to genetic inheritance.

11. Physical, cultural and social environments influence the behavioral differences among individuals in society. Although heredity influences the behavioral variability of individuals within a given population, it does not affect the ability of any such population to function in a given social setting. The genetic capacity for intellectual development is one of the biological traits of our species essential for its survival. This genetic capacity is known to differ among individuals. The peoples of the world today appear to possess equal biological potential for assimilating any human culture. Racist political doctrines find no foundation in scientific knowledge concerning modern or past human populations.

---

It's pretty much a general consensus of modern anthropologists, the real ones, not the phony ones. But sadly enough netizens often perpetuate pseudoscience as if it's real anthropology.


---


http://academic.udayton.edu/race/01race/race.htm

What is Race? When some people use the "race" they attach a biological meaning, still others use "race" as a socially constructed concept. It is clear that even though race does not have a biological meaning, it does have a social meaning which has been legally constructed.


Biological Construction

By . . ."biological race," I mean the view of race espoused by Judge Tucker, and still popular today, that there exist natural, physical divisions among humans that are hereditary, reflected in morphology, and roughly but correctly captured by terms like Black, White, and Asian (or Negroid, Caucasoid, and Mongoloid). Under this view, one's ancestors and epidermis ineluctably determine membership in a genetically defined racial group. The connection between human physiognomy and racial status is concrete; in Judge Tucker's words, every individual's race has been "stampt" by nature. . . .[D]espite the prevalent belief in biological races, overwhelming evidence proves that race is not biological. Biological races like Negroid and Caucasoid simply do not exist. [A]. . . newly popular [argument] among several scholars, [is] that races are wholly illusory, whether as a biological or social concept. Under this thinking, if there is no natural link between faces and races, then no connection exists.

There are no genetic characteristics possessed by all Blacks but not by non- Blacks; similarly, there is no gene or cluster of genes common to all Whites but not to non-Whites. One's race is not determined by a single gene or gene cluster, as is, for example, sickle cell anemia. Nor are races marked by important differences in gene frequencies, the rates of appearance of certain gene types. The data compiled by various scientists demonstrates, contrary to popular opinion, that intra-group differences exceed inter-group differences. That is, greater genetic variation exists within the populations typically labeled Black and White than between these populations. This finding refutes the supposition that racial divisions reflect fundamental genetic differences.

Notice this does not mean that individuals are genetically indistinguishable from each other, or even that small population groups cannot be genetically differentiated. Small populations, for example the Xhosa or the Basques, share similar gene frequencies. However, differentiation is a function of separation, usually geographic, and occurs in gradations rather than across fractures.. .. . . The notion that humankind can be divided along White, Black, and Yellow lines reveals the social rather than the scientific origin of race. The idea that there exist three races, and that these races are "Caucasoid," "Negroid," and "Mongoloid," is rooted in the European imagination of the Middle Ages, which encompassed only Europe, Africa, and the Near East.. . Nevertheless, the history of science has long been the history of failed efforts to justify these social beliefs. Along the way, various minds tried to fashion practical human typologies along the following physical axes: skin color, hair texture, facial angle, jaw size, cranial capacity, brain mass, frontal lobe mass, brain surface fissures and convolutions, and even body lice. As one scholar notes, "[t]he nineteenth century was a period of exhaustive and--as it turned out--futile search for criteria to define and describe race differences.". . . Attempts to define racial categories by physical attributes ultimately failed. By 1871, some leading intellectuals had recognized that even using the word "race" "was virtually a confession of ignorance or evil intent." The genetic studies of the last few decades have only added more nails to the coffin of biological race. Evidence shows that those features usually coded to race, for example, stature, skin color, hair texture, and facial structure, do not correlate strongly with genetic variation. . . The rejection of race in science is now almost complete. In the end, we should embrace historian Barbara Fields's succinct conclusion with respect to the plausibility of biological races: "Anyone who continues to believe in race as a physical attribute of individuals, despite the now commonplace disclaimers of biologists and geneticists, might as well also believe that Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny and the tooth fairy are real, and that the earth stands still while the sun moves."

. . . Unfortunately, few in this society seem prepared to fully relinquish their subscription to notions of biological race.. . .[including the] Congress and the Supreme Court. Congress' anachronistic understanding of race is exemplified by a 1988 statute that explains that "the term 'racial group' means a set of individuals whose identity as such is distinctive in terms of physical characteristics or biological descent." (1) The Supreme Court, although purporting to sever race from biology, also seems incapable of doing so. In Saint Francis College v. Al-Khazraji, (2) the Court determined that an Arab could recover damages for racial discrimination under 42 U.S.C. § 1981. . . Despite [a] seeming rejection of biological race, Justice White [stated]: "The Court of Appeals was thus quite right in holding that § 1981, 'at a minimum,' reaches discrimination against an individual 'because he or she is genetically part of an ethnically and physiognomically distinctive subgrouping of homo sapiens."' (8). . . By adopting the lower court's language of genetics and distinctive subgroupings, Justice White demonstrates the Court's continued reliance on blood as a metonym for race. . . .In Metrobroadcasting v. FCC, (6) Justice Scalia again reveals the Court's understanding of race as a matter of blood. During oral argument, Scalia attacked the argument that granting minorities broadcasting licenses would enhance diversity by blasting "the policy as a matter of 'blood,' at one point charging that the policy reduced to a question of 'blood . . . blood, not background and environment."' (5)



Social
Construction

. . . I define a "race" as a vast group of people loosely bound together by historically contingent, socially significant elements of their morphology and/or ancestry. I argue that race must be understood as a sui generis social phenomenon in which contested systems of meaning serve as the connections between physical features, races, and personal characteristics. In other words, social meanings connect our faces to our souls. Race is neither an essence nor an illusion, but rather an ongoing, contradictory, self-reinforcing process subject to the macro forces of social and political struggle and the micro effects of daily decisions. . . [R]eferents of terms like Black, White, Asian, and Latino are social groups, not genetically distinct branches of humankind. (3)

----

http://www.pbs.org/race/000_About/002_04-b...round-01-07.htm

How difficult is it to jettison the idea of race as biology?

To understand why the idea of race is a biological myth requires a major paradigm shift - an absolutely paradigm shift, a shift in perspective. And for me, it's like seeing what it must have been like to understand that the world isn't flat. The world looks flat to our eyes. And perhaps I can invite you to a mountaintop or to a plain, and you can look out the window at the horizon, and see, "Oh, what I thought was flat I can see a curve in now." And that race is not based on biology, but race is rather an idea that we ascribe to biology.

That's quite shocking to a lot of individuals. When you look and you think you see race, to be told that no, you don't see race, you just think you see race, you know, it's based on your cultural lens - that's extremely challenging.

What's heartening is that so many students love it. They feel liberated by beginning to understand that, in fact, whiteness is a cultural construction, that race is a cultural construction, that we really are fundamentally alike. It's our politics, it's political economy, it's an old ideology that tends to separate us out. It's institutions that have been born with the idea of race and racism that tend to separate us out.

Young children today, kids today, in my experience, love it that we can have some common humanity, that we can come together as one, that this idea of biological race is a myth that's separating us. They love the idea that there's really some wall that can be smashed down and help bring us together.

What's wrong with classifying by race as biology?

Scientists have actually been saying for quite a while that race, as biology, doesn't exist - that there's no biological basis for race. And that is in the facts of biology, the facts of non-concordance, the facts of continuous variation, the recentness of our evolution, the way that we all commingle and come together, how genes flow, and perhaps especially in the fact that most variation occurs within race versus between races or among races, suggesting that there's no generalizability to race. There is no center there; there is no there there in the center. It's fluid.

But many individuals will say, "Well, that's okay, at least it's an approximation. It at least gives us a way to classify. Hey, you know, our head size may be continuous and shoe size may be continuous, but we developed a way to classify people by hat size and shoe size. And it kind of works. Your shoe may be a little bit crunchy but you basically know to go in and start somewhere, So what's wrong with doing it for race?"

And I'll tell you, there's a couple things that are wrong with it, where that analogy really breaks down. We've developed a universal system for thinking about hat size that's measurable, for example. So you can go into Sao Paulo Brazil and the hat merchants there have the same scale that the hat merchants do in Cambridge, Massachusetts. And we can have universality because it's objective, it's measurable, we're just measuring the circumference around the head. It doesn't change culturally from one place to another.

But think about race and its universality or lack thereof. Where is your measurement device? There is no way to measure race first. We sometimes do it by skin color. Other people may do it by hair texture. Other people may have the dividing lines different in terms of skin color. What's black in the United States is not what's black in Brazil or what's black in South Africa. What was black in 1940 is different from what is black in 2000. Certainly, with the evolution of whiteness, what was white in 1920 - as a Jew I was not white then, but I'm white now, so white has changed tremendously.

There's no stability and constancy. That's life. That's fine as social ideas go, that we all have our individual classification systems and may use them, but for science, it's death. It does not work. Science is based on generalizability, it's based on consistency, it's based on reproducibility. If you have none of that, you have junk science.

What is non-concordance and what does that tell us about race?

For race to have meaning, for race to be more than skin-deep, for race to be more than a typology, one has to have concordance. In other words, skin color needs to reflect things that are deeper in the body, under the skin. But, in fact, human variation is rather non-concordant.

I'll give you an example of concordance. Height is actually quite concordant with weight. As we get taller, we gain weight, we have more weight. One aspect of size is concordant with another aspect of size.

But most of human variation is non-concordant. Skin color or eye color or hair color is not correlated with height or weight. And they're definitely not correlated with more complex traits like intelligence or athletic performance. Those things evolve and develop in entirely different ways. Just as skin color develops in a different way from size, intelligence, athletic performance, other traits develop in different and independent ways.

A map of skin color gradients looks sort of like the map of temperature. It gets lighter, as you go towards the poles and it's darker near the equator. But then take a map of, say, the distribution of blood type A. Looks entirely different. There's no relationship between the two maps. The distributions are non-concordant. Simply, one is not related to the other.

When we adopt a racial view, we have to see concordance. And perhaps if we don't see it, we make it up. Because if there's no concordance, there is no race. So, racist scientists, for example, have to see a concordance between skin color and IQ, otherwise there's no meaning there, there is no there there. There's nothing under the skin. Race stops at the color of your skin.

What's at risk? Quite a bit is at risk. It's how we see each other, how we respect each other. It's about understanding that somebody from one town in Poland, and somebody from the next town in Poland, could be more different from each other than a Pole and a person from South Africa.

It's about knowing that our assumptions about difference and who we're related to and who we're most alike may be entirely wrong. It's ultimately about a revolution in how we think about human difference and similarity.

How much human variation falls within any population, and how much between "races"?

Richard Lewontin did an amazing piece of work which he published in 1972, in a famous article called "The Apportionment of Human Variation." Literally what he tried to do was see how much genetic variation showed up at three different levels.

One level was the variation that showed up among or between purported races. And the conventional idea is that quite a bit of variation would show up at that level. And then he also explored two other levels at the same time. How much variation occurred within a race, but between or among sub-groups within that purported race.

So, for instance, in Europe, how much variation would there be between the Germans, the Finns and the Spanish? Or how much variation could we call local variation, occurring within an ethnicity such as the Navaho or Hopi or the Chatua.

And the amazing result was that, on average, about 85% of the variation occurred within any given group. The vast majority of that variation was found at a local level. In fact, groups like the Finns are not homogeneous - they actually contain, I guess one could literally say, 85% of the genetic diversity of the world.

Secondly, of that remaining 15%, about half of that, seven and a half percent or so, was found to be still within the continent, but just between local populations; between the Germans and the Finns and the Spanish. So, now we're over 90%, something like 93% of variation actually occurs within any given continental group. And only about 6-7% of that variation occurs between "races," leaving one to say that race actually explains very little of human variation.

You know, geography perhaps is the better way to explain that 15% more than race or anything else. For instance, there can be accumulations of genes in one place in the globe, and not another.

But, for the most part, you know that basic human plan is really a basic human plan, and is found almost anywhere in the world. Most variation is found locally within any group. Why don't we believe that? Because we happen to ascribe great significance to skin color, and a few other physical cues that tell us that that's not so. And, in fact though, these may happen to be a few of the things that do widely vary from place to place. But, that's not true under the skin. Rather, quite another story is told by looking at genes under the skin.

Are there boundaries dividing populations?

The idea of race, of course, assumes that there are set boundaries between the races, but we know that to be untrue. You know, there's no racial boundary that's ever been found. Any trait that one looks at, one tends to see gradual variation from one group to another. The facts of human variation are that it's continuous, it's not lumped into three or four or five racial groups.

One of the ways to begin to see a different paradigm, to see that the world really isn't divided into three or four or five types of individuals, is to really try to locate those individuals, to find them and to locate the racial boundaries between them. You could take any characteristic you want, but the most frequently used is skin color. We think that each type of person has a different skin color.

But do this as a thought experiment: start off in northern Scandinavian, say northern Finland, and take a walk in your mind through Scandinavia, perhaps into Germany, down through Germany into southern Europe, through the Mediterranean perhaps, circle around until you get to Algeria, into northern Africa, and continue on your way down towards the equator, and finally from the equator to South Africa.

The challenge would be to say where does one race begin, and where does another race end. Or even where does dark skin begin, and light skin end? Or, perhaps as you leave the equator, where does light skin begin to show up again? In fact, what you find is a rather subtle gradation in skin colors. This is called "clinal variation", and it's really quite like what you see in your weather maps of temperature in the back of USA Today, or your 11 o'clock weather forecast, where you can see how temperature grades change ever so slightly as you go from north to south. Well, skin color is actually quite the same thing. It varies clinally - continuously. There is no abrupt change from one skin color to the next.

How is human genetic difference - and similarity - traced to our history?

We basically are the same plan, and we don't need to alter our plan. In fact, one of the hallmarks of humans is that we're flexible. We are built with this very flexible brain and flexible structure that lets us go into a lot of new situations without needing to genetically adapt to it. We're kind of like the Swiss Army knife of species. We can apply culture and our ideas to conquer different environments. When we go into the cold we don't need to grow hair. We just need to find a buffalo skin to put on. Or better yet, we invent central heating.

As best we know, humans started in Africa. And they had a lot of time working out what they were going to be like in Africa. And through that time of working out what they were going to be like in Africa, they began to diverge and change slowly, ever so slowly.

Some of that change may have been due to selective pressures in different parts of Africa. And Africa is a very diverse place, with different climates, different eco-zones. There may have been some selection from that, and selection from diseases, with sickle cell being one concrete example of that, since sickle cell is a response to malaria. And malaria is not something that's a big problem throughout Africa, but is a huge problem, a huge selective force, in certain parts of Africa.

Adapting to different environments and circumstances is one way that we see change develop. However, it's probably not the major thing that makes us different clinally, geographically different. After all, we are a young species, and we're generalists.

Another way we change is more or less by random flow of genes. This is one of the big hallmarks of humans, that we tend to be very mobile. We've always been very mobile. And our genes are even more mobile. We may not move, but our genes may move because somebody we mated with, or the grandchild of somebody we've mated with, that person moves. And that person's great, great, great grandchild moves, and so our genes are constantly on the move and literally moving around the planet.

That was the story 100,000 years ago. It was the story 75,000 years ago. It's the story 50,000 years ago, and up to the present. We've had maybe 100,000 years of having genes move out and mix and re-assort in countless different ways.

Some of those movements may follow major migrations as agricultural people came into Europe, as people crossed the Bering Strait and came into the Americas. But, other movements are much more subtle. They're smaller groups of individuals that moved, or their genes moved from place to place, and time to time. We're constantly out-migrating and mating outside our group, responding to the urge to merge. And that happens all the time. And that is us. So, what you end up with, mathematically and in reality, are subtle gradations; one gene grading one way, another gene grading another way.

Are we all Africans?

Well, we all spent a lot of time in Africa. Our genes certainly spent a lot of time in Africa. If we are anything, we are African. I think my genes spent less time in Europe, and less time in Asia, than they spent as an African, being in Africa. So, yes, I'm African, except that my skin color changed perhaps when the lineage that led to me left Africa. So, yeah, we are all Africans under the skin.

But, that's an idea too. I think the more accurate idea, or the way to think about things, is that we're all mongrels. People moved around in Africa, they moved around when they came out of Africa, they constantly inter-bred with each other. So today we have this notion that, "Oh, you're multi-racial. Oh, you're this and that." Or, "Wow!" like that was a new concept, that all of a sudden the races are mixing together. Well, not so. We've always been mixing. We're always mongrels. Every single one of us is a mongrel.

We are constantly going across barriers, over barriers, under barriers. There's been no breeding isolation really that's occurred at all. So, the combination of ours being a young species, and there being no breeding isolation is what generates the fact that all you see is very little variation among peoples. That the variation is rather continuous, and localized.

How do diseases become racalized?

It used to be at the turn of the century that we would think of individual races as having very specific diseases. Well, that idea of race-specific diseases was soon shown to be not true. But, what we are ending up with is the idea that race is a risk factor, and osteoporosis is an interesting example of that.

For instance, if you look at any review article on osteoporosis, it may suggest race is a risk factor. But, when you try to interrogate that a little bit, it's not totally clear what they mean by race. Do they mean genetics? Do they mean something about life experience? It isn't quite clear.

And this is where, I think, some medical theory actually hits the marketplace and our day-to-day lives. That's the important intersection. How do ideas about race take on material reality?

A couple of ways this one takes on material reality is that doctors are trained to think that Black people are somewhat immune to osteoporosis because that's what their textbooks say. And that then reflects what they do in actual practice. And that's a point I'd like to get back to.

It also reflects the label on a Tums calcium bottle. The label on the back of the Tums bottles suggests that white, or sometimes Caucasian and Asian, women are more prone to osteoporosis. The label doesn't mention anything about the potential benefits of taking a calcium supplement for Black people.

So, the interesting point is where did that information come from? Well, here we have the Tums bottle that we can get off our drugstore shelf today. The information on the label comes from the Food and Drug Administration. Now, the Food and Drug Administration has to get their information from somewhere. And the one study that is cited most frequently was actually a 1962 study that was done comparing 40 cadavers of whites and 40 cadavers of Blacks. The individuals died and were basically made into cadavers because nobody claimed them. They were rather poor individuals in this particular circumstance who grew up around St. Louis.

So, the information that finds its way onto Tums labels is actually a study of the bones of 80 individuals. What did the study actually show? What did it do?

Well, one of the things it mostly showed is that we lose bone as we get older. It also showed that females have less bone than males, so they tend to lose it more quickly and are susceptible to fractures earlier than men are. And then it also showed a little bit of a lag between the loss of bones in Blacks and whites, perhaps about a three-to-five year gap. So the authors of this study actually don't conclude that Blacks don't lose bone, don't get osteoporosis. They just suggest that in certain bones it takes longer to reach a point where they would be susceptible to osteoporosis. But that's still based on those 80 bones.

But that study gets in the literature, it becomes commonly cited, and the FDA picks it up. And from the FDA it gets on the back of the Tums bottle, Total cereal, Maalox, all sorts of calcium supplements, about who is susceptible to osteoporosis. So, the racial ideology becomes built-in in a very subtle way. We read the label, we read the word "Caucasian", and that tells us there is such a thing on Caucasian. If not, how could it be on the back of a label?

And then look at how doctors and medical personnel take that information. They generally accept it. So individuals walking into their offices looking for potential care for osteoporosis may be shifted one place or the other, depending on how the doctors perceive their race. If they perceive them to be white or Asian, they will get more aggressive screening and treatment. And if they're not perceived as Asian or white, then they go in a different place.

In fact, a friend of mine went in for a bone screen, and the doctor said, "Oh, you don't need one." Why? "Because you're Black." But of course, Black women are breaking hips literally every day.

What is the false logic behind the racialization of disease?

If we look at race and diabetes we can see a double leap of faith. There are two leaps. Frequently, one finds that there may be something genetically involved in a trait - for instance, diabetes, where there may be a possibility that diabetes is partly genetic. And what that does is it casts the lens on looking for genetic differences, so that all those environmental things that may go into diabetes are sort of put aside for the moment as less controllable, perhaps less interesting.

So the Pima Indians, who have a 50% adult diabetes rate, don't think about their diabetes as related to the changes that have taken place in their lifestyle - from heavy activity to low activity, from diverse diets to junk food, fast food diets - that are consistent with the epidemic of diabetes. Rather, what they're told by the medical people who work on them is that it's in their genes, it's in their blood. And so they focus there. So, the first problem is thinking exclusively that a condition is due to genetics and not looking at environmental factors.

Then perhaps the second and greatest leap is to think that just because it's genetic it's racial, that genetics break down along racial lines, or that individuals on one side of a racial line had those genes and the individuals on the other don't. Of course, we now know that that's ludicrous, that in fact genes and race don't mix together.

But don't different groups have different rates of diseases?

Frequently studies are done that show that there are racial differences in all sorts of diseases. Blacks, for example, have twice the rate of infant mortality in the United States than whites. Native Americans, overall, have higher rates of diabetes. And so the question is, how do you interpret that?

First, that may mean to some people - oh, the differences between blacks and whites are really about prenatal nutrition. That's why there are differences in infant mortality. Other individuals may think that that has something to do with medical care. And other individuals may think it has to do with genetics - that there really is something about African-American genes.

So until we address that fundamental confusion about what race is, you know, we're going to be open to different actions and interpretations. And clearly, if you think it's genetics, it may lead to one medical intervention or maybe no medical intervention. If you think it's nutritional, it leads to another. If you think it's medical care, it leads to yet another potential medical intervention.

How did sickle cell originate and what does that reveal about the racial world view?

Sickle cell is a nice way to think about the difference between a racial world view and a world view in which you look at adaptation, change, adjustment to different environments. To the racial world view, sickle cell was seen as a disease of African-ness, a condition of African-ness, perhaps even a pathology of African-ness.

And so to find sickle cell was to find evidence of African-ness by definition. It was typological. If a person from Italy had sickle cell, it must be because they had some African blood - they must be polluted with African blood. And that was the end of the story. If you had sickle cell, you're African; if you're African, you might have sickle cell. And it's a rather pre-Darwinian and perhaps comforting story. But, it's also a very wrong story.

The right story - and I think the much more interesting story - emerged in the 1950s. And that was with a couple of discoveries. The first one was a discovery that sickle cell, which is a change in red blood cells that gives it a sickle shape, actually confers an advantage in fighting malaria. An individual who has one sickle cell allele, but not both - what we call sickle cell 'trait' - has a selective advantage in situations in which you have endemic malaria. Individuals who had sickle cell trait seemed to resist malaria better than other individuals. And malaria is, and has been, one of the greatest killers of humanity of all time. If ever there is a selective pressure, malaria is it. And so those individuals might actually survive and prosper, and then the number of subsequent individuals with sickle cell trait would increase in a population because that allele would be selected for.

Well, that's one thing. The other thing was to actually take a close look at where malaria actually arose and became endemic and severe. Then also to look at who has sickle cell. Frank Livingston did this, and lo and behold the two maps matched extremely well. Places in which malaria was endemic, and had been endemic for a long time, were exactly the places in which sickle cell was highest. Conversely, places where endemic malaria was rather low were places in which sickle cell was virtually non-existent.

He had more than a smoking gun there. He had a nice evolutionary story and a rather tight one about how, perhaps, 5,000 years ago, for instance, in West Africa, endemic malaria became a serious problem when people started cutting down forests in the origins of agriculture. And individuals who had sickle cell were selected for, and it expanded.

Sickle cell isn't an African disease. It is true that some Africans have sickle cell, particularly individuals who have ancestry around West Africa. That's one of the highest places of sickle cell. But, it's also true that East Africans hardly have any sickle cell. South Africans don't have any sickle cell. But, it's also a Middle Eastern disease, and it's also a Mediterranean disease. Individuals in Turkey and Greece and Italy, Sicily, have sickle cell; more than individuals do in South Africa, or in East Africa. So, sickle cell is not an African disease; it's a condition that developed in response to malaria.

What made Jesse Owens and other great black athletes great?

With the rise of the great Negro athletes in the 1930s, it became this question about where did they come from and that there must be a reason that they're great, and that that reason must reside in biology rather than in culture or history or circumstance. And one of the tie-ins here is that there's this shifting relationship between athleticism and intelligence. In the early part of the century, when blacks were considered to be less athletic, less robust, perhaps even a dying race because of their inability to deal with the stresses of civilization, there was an obvious belief that intelligence was associated with athleticism and Europeans have the best of both.

All of a sudden in the 1930s this begins to shift with Joe Louis and Jesse Owens in particular. And so now society has to decouple athletic performance from intelligence and go to the totally opposite view that you can either have one or the other as a race. You can either be intelligent or athletic. And so the hunt was on, looking for the biological seed of the great first black athletes. And Jesse Owens was picked apart. Did he have an extra bone in his leg, an elongated bone in his leg; what could possibly explain why he was so great?

And Montague Cobb was one of the people that finally put to rest this myth that there was something special or unusual about Jesse Owens. In fact, part of what he found was that Jesse Owens' bones looked just as much like the average white person's bones as they did a group of black individuals' bones. There was just nothing superior about his bone structure at all.

But obviously he was a great athlete. Where did his greatness came from? Was it determination, was it his muscle structure, was it his training, was it his desire, was it his circumstance? All of those things certainly came into play. Exactly what it was, we don't know. But I think that's an interesting story, that there isn't a simple answer. It wasn't located in one place, it was located in the complexities of his historical development in a culture with his biological basis, whatever he was born with, biologically, genetically, culturally, how it came that he was motivated in 1936. All of those things came into play. It's not a simple answer. What made Jesse Owens great? Many things made him great and unique.

Aren't great sprinters more genetically endowed with fast twitch muscles?

Let's take fast twitch muscles and go forward and back with them. Let's go back with them and try to understand, what are the genetics of fast twitch muscles. Well, three words - I don't know. I don't really know. I think nobody really knows what the genetics are behind something that's really quite complicated.

Let's go forward again. Is there a pure genetics to that? Is fast twitch, that phenotype, is it a straight expression of genotype? Most scientists would say no, that actually you can train your muscles, and the amount of fast twitch you have, changes over time. So, actually muscle use affects the amount of fast twitch and slow twitch muscle. Then let's go forward a little bit more.

Does fast twitch make you fast? Not so sure, it turns out. It may be just one factor in making you fast. Is it the primary factor, or is it just like looking for long bones in Jessie Owens' feet? You know, looking for that one answer to it.

My guess is it's trying to simplify something that's very, very complicated. To try to just explain the greatness of West African descended sprinters by fast twitch muscles involves many, many things we don't know - all assumptions.

How does Social Darwinism - and race - rationalize inequality?

Social Darwinism was really just an explanation for the order of things. We had to come up with an explanation for why certain Europeans had more access to power and were wealthier than others.

So we use nature as an explanation for what we saw, or seem to think we saw in nature: those who were more aggressive, or more intelligent, got things, and those who weren't got less. So that became the continuing justification for taking over lands, for slavery, for competition. That competition was good. And to the winners went the spoils. And there's no need to feel guilt or anxiety about that, because that's natural, it's a reflection of nature. And to the winner go the advantages of having been a winner.

I think there are many, many legacies of social Darwinism today. We don't see how uneven the playing field is, for one. We don't acknowledge that individuals grow up with less advantage and more advantage. We seem to think that in America we all are born with a blank slate and an equal ability to get ahead.

What about studies equating race with intelligence? (This is what you all are talking about )

Scientific work abetting the idea that race is real, typological, and hierarchically arranged is actually rather an old occupation, you know. In the mid-1840s we see Samuel Morton measuring crania to get at cranial capacity and then to try to rank the races on the amount of cranial capacity they have, and to equate that with racial differences and intelligence.

And really about every 20 years somebody else comes along, almost with a best-seller, perhaps with a new method for measuring intelligence, ultimately to show that there is a ranking in intelligence, usually with whites up top.

The most recent effort was The Bell Curve, which came out in 1994 and literally reached number two on the best-seller list in 1994, behind a book, by the way, written by Pope John Paul. The Bell Curve threw a couple spins into this. One is that it actually promoted Asians as being closer to the top, also broke down whites a little bit more. But fundamentally it was the same type of book as was written by Morton in 1850; you use the same basic methods and the same basic logic.

Their argument went something like this: there is something called intelligence that we can put our fingers on, that we can measure; intelligence is some sort of univariable; it's one-dimensional. That intelligence then is measurable by something called an intelligence test that actually measures intelligence. And then that intelligence is highly heritable; it's something we really do get in our chromosomes, in our genes; it comes to us that way, it is highly heritable. Then one has to say that there is such a thing as white, black, and Asian, or whatever groups you're comparing, that they are real, that they are measurable, that they are reproducible.

But then let's to back and look at the assumptions again. Is there a white group, a black group, an Asian group? Are these reproducible? Are they trained equally? Can we really measure a variable called intelligence? Is it really something that's not affected by environment, about how we're trained, how we grow up, what stimulation we have by children?

I'll give you an example. One test has shown that just a little bit of lead in the blood can affect intelligence - a little bit of lead in the blood, prenatal, can affect intelligence by easily eight points on an intelligence score. Are we to believe that those factors were unimportant in looking at the differences in IQ scores? Of course not.

The assumptions that go into believing that there are racial differences in intelligence are absurd ones. They're ones that we shouldn't even be coming close to as scientists. The chief one is that here's such a thing as race, that there are races, and that a score on a test, an average group score, has any meaning for an individual.

What was the significance of Franz Boas' skull experiments?

Franz Boaz was a very prominent public intellectual, and he taught at Columbia and gave birth to a brand of anthropology that was labeled "cultural relativism." Margaret Mead, Ruth Benedict and Zora Neal Hurston were among the followers.

But earlier he found himself in an unremarkable place and did remarkable things with it. He actually worked with the immigration office at Ellis Island, and had the opportunity to measure skulls of individuals in families - of which some of the siblings were born in Europe and some were born in the United States.

It was assumed that different groups of Europeans - Slavs, Jews, Italian, Irish - that they had distinct skull types and shapes, and that these wouldn't change with environmental circumstances; they were primordial. There was an Irish type, a Jewish type - all were types and races, and all unchanging. So if you knew that, you could then read into the skull certain characteristics such as intelligence.

But what Boaz noticed and wrote about in the early 1900s was that the skulls differed depending on whether the individuals were born overseas or here in the United States. In fact, as Eastern European immigrants' children were born in the United States, they began to look more like the Western Europeans that were already here in the United States. They became more Americanized, rounded in their skull shape.

His assumption, although he wasn't so sure of it then - the assumption now is the diet changed and the diet allowed for greater skull growth and allowed it to round out a little bit. So within the same family he saw changes in skull shape. And the bottom line of all this is that it really showed that skulls don't reflect something deep and genetic, or if they do, it's definitely hidden by the way the skull reflects even subtle changes in nutrition - changes that we didn't expect would have dramatic effects on the skull shape.

Boaz would not have done his experiment, would not have asked the question, "Do skull shapes change between boys who were born in the United States and those who were born in Europe?" if he had believed in a racial typology. If he had believed that race and culture were the same, that culture was a reflection of racial biology, he would not have asked the question, he would not have done the experiment.

And so that, I think, is the fascinating point. Somehow he had his suspicions and he went ahead and asked the question and did the experiment, and that was what I think his real contribution was.

Why is it important to overturn the idea of race as biology?

We live in racial smog. This is a world of racial smog. We can't help but breathe that smog. Everybody breathes it. But what's nice is that you can recognize that you are breathing that smog, and that's the first step.

We all live in a racialized society. And individuals of color are exposed to it more obviously, with more virulence, more force, than anybody is.

But what is important is that race is a very salient social and historical concept, a social and historical idea. It's shaped institutions, it's shaped our legal system, it shapes interactions in law offices and housing offices and in medical schools, in dentist's offices. It shapes that. And I think by stripping the biology from it, by stripping the idea that race is somehow based in biology, we show the emperor to have no clothes, we show race for what it is: it's an idea that's constantly being reinvented, and it's up to us about how we want to invent it and go ahead and reinvent it. But it's up to us to do it.

Racism rests in part on the idea that race is biology; it is based on biology. So, the biology becomes an excuse for social differences. The social differences become naturalized in biology. It's not that our institutions cause differences in mortality; it's that there really are biological differences between the races.

So, until we address that there is no race in biology, that race is an idea that we ascribe to biology, that there's no race there, there's a possibility that well-meaning and not-so-well meaning individuals will drag that up and will inevitably put that in our faces as the reasons why there are differences in life circumstances between different groups.

[AnybodyKiller]

Human variations are real. But those variations are too complexed to be classified into discrete categories such as race. Where does one race end and another begin? What traits should we use to classify race? Skin colors, eyes, nose, hair, blood type, skull shape...? These traits don't vary together. Some form clines along the latitudes whereas others from clines along the longitudes while some other show no discernable pattern of geographic distribution at all. Furthermore, observable physical traits that people often associate with "race" are superficial and often have nothing to do with the biological functions of the body. Also variations within one population is much greater than variation between populations which doesn't accomodate the discrete categories of race.

Exactly, there is no clear line.. Only what people perceive as a line. Usually this 'line' also comes with political/culutural implications too. For instance Sub Saharan Africans, North Africans, Middle Easterners, Sourthern Europeans.. They consider Sub Saharan Africans Black, North Africans and Middle Easterners 'brown' Caucasians and Southern Europeans White. There really is no clear line in terms of genetics more of a blend, but the lines are drawn based on cultural and political aspects.

Sickle cell isn't an African disease. It is true that some Africans have sickle cell, particularly individuals who have ancestry around West Africa. That's one of the highest places of sickle cell. But, it's also true that East Africans hardly have any sickle cell. South Africans don't have any sickle cell. But, it's also a Middle Eastern disease, and it's also a Mediterranean disease. Individuals in Turkey and Greece and Italy, Sicily, have sickle cell; more than individuals do in South Africa, or in East Africa. So, sickle cell is not an African disease; it's a condition that developed in response to malaria.

Yeah, this is why i used the word 'populations' as a more accurate term for what most call 'race'.

What about studies equating race with intelligence? (This is what you all are talking about )

Scientific work abetting the idea that race is real, typological, and hierarchically arranged is actually rather an old occupation, you know. In the mid-1840s we see Samuel Morton measuring crania to get at cranial capacity and then to try to rank the races on the amount of cranial capacity they have, and to equate that with racial differences and intelligence.

And really about every 20 years somebody else comes along, almost with a best-seller, perhaps with a new method for measuring intelligence, ultimately to show that there is a ranking in intelligence, usually with whites up top.

The most recent effort was The Bell Curve, which came out in 1994 and literally reached number two on the best-seller list in 1994, behind a book, by the way, written by Pope John Paul. The Bell Curve threw a couple spins into this. One is that it actually promoted Asians as being closer to the top, also broke down whites a little bit more. But fundamentally it was the same type of book as was written by Morton in 1850; you use the same basic methods and the same basic logic.

Their argument went something like this: there is something called intelligence that we can put our fingers on, that we can measure; intelligence is some sort of univariable; it's one-dimensional. That intelligence then is measurable by something called an intelligence test that actually measures intelligence. And then that intelligence is highly heritable; it's something we really do get in our chromosomes, in our genes; it comes to us that way, it is highly heritable. Then one has to say that there is such a thing as white, black, and Asian, or whatever groups you're comparing, that they are real, that they are measurable, that they are reproducible.

But then let's to back and look at the assumptions again. Is there a white group, a black group, an Asian group? Are these reproducible? Are they trained equally? Can we really measure a variable called intelligence? Is it really something that's not affected by environment, about how we're trained, how we grow up, what stimulation we have by children?

I'll give you an example. One test has shown that just a little bit of lead in the blood can affect intelligence - a little bit of lead in the blood, prenatal, can affect intelligence by easily eight points on an intelligence score. Are we to believe that those factors were unimportant in looking at the differences in IQ scores? Of course not.

The assumptions that go into believing that there are racial differences in intelligence are absurd ones. They're ones that we shouldn't even be coming close to as scientists. The chief one is that here's such a thing as race, that there are races, and that a score on a test, an average group score, has any meaning for an individual.

I know that most scientists think like this, but there are still some who cling onto turn of the century garbage like skull measuring and IQ testing etc. as immutable facts and these 'eugenicists' gain ground with a lot of racial elitists because they are telling them what they want to hear; That they are superior due to their heritage. I've done quite a few debates with a lot of these types of people and they are impossible to sway entirely, you can only open their eyes to the fact that there are other factors that contribute the success of "races".

This post has been edited by AnybodyKiller: Oct 5 2011, 10:28 PM

[fireplant]

Ideologues are so boring.

Most things in life have a continuous range: colors, size, weight, achievement, class, but we can still make meaningful distinctions about them. Those self delusions are typical white hypocrisy. It should make any independent thinking Asian person ... Looks like XG is doomed to a professional life of numbing hypocrisy. I'm sure one day you will wake up and admit you hate everything you're studying. When that days comes remember fireplant, he told you so!



This post has been edited by fireplant: Oct 5 2011, 11:06 PM

[AnybodyKiller]

Ideologues are so boring.

Most things in life have a continuous range: colors, size, weight, achievement, class, but we can still make meaningful distinctions about them. Those self delusions are typical white hypocrisy. It should make any independent thinking Asian person ... Looks like XG is doomed to a professional life of numbing hypocrisy. I'm sure one day you will wake up and admit you hate everything you're studying. When that days comes remember fireplant, he told you so!

You do know that this study in the original post is comparing Asians to insects right? "Hive Mind" is used in the US when talking about Cockroaches, Bees and Ants. It is not a complementary term, more of a backhanded compliment.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swarm_intelligence

[fireplant]

Actually, whenever anything happens all the Anglos from any country just gang up. It's like their brains get some broadcast message that normal humans just don't get!