RACE AND INTELLIGENCE: SCIENCE’S LAST TABOO
In 2007, Nobel Prize-winning US scientist James Watson was quoted referring to research suggested that black people were less intelligent than other races. His comments caused a storm of controversy, and Watson was condemned. But are IQ tests biased? Is race really a scientific category at all? In this documentary, the first in a new season, Race: Science’s Last Taboo , Rageh Omaar sets out to find out the truth, meeting scientists who believe the research supports the view that races can be differentiated as well as those who vehemently oppose this view.
Monday 26 October 2009
9:00pm, Channel 4
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The programme was dangerously misleading by stating that there is some weight in “numbers of genes”. The differences between races may be few (few genes) but the impact of these differences is tremendous. It is no coincidence that hardly anything at all in terms of science and engineering has come out of sub-saharan Africa in the past 10000 years or so! and the difference between the intelligence of races has not to do with IQ test or exams or professional success! that is a given and why is he bringing that up? For example Galois failed the entrance exam to the university of Paris yet he produced the most astounding mathematical theory of his century and coined the expression “a superior candidate is failed by an inferior examiner”. The truth is that the Asians and the Europeans are descended from one African tribe and evolved critical differences required for survival in their long and arduous planetary journey!
I want to clarify my earlier comment. If grouping “A” is on average more intelligent than grouping “B” there is no shame in being a member of “B”. Intelligence is not everything and sometimes it is not the most important thing to ensure survival of a person. In fact, success at school and in profession and business success is only loosely connected to intelligence. And so, just like some white marathon runner may be frustrated that he cannot run faster than some African marathon runner because or genetic differences, we should not pay much heed to the differences in intelligence for they are important but not the most essential trait for success in our modern and now interconnected world!
I found the programme to be thought provoking. Initially I was wondering where it was going and started to cringe somewhat. I found that the presenter did his best to remain impartial, I mean this guy is not only a journalist but a black man. I loved the balance and feel that the show was put together well.
What I do know is that regardless of the information which was available in this documentary, it will not change the views of many, cest la vie.
My personal views are that the implications of slavery and colonialism have a lot to do with the reinforcement of such stereotypes and as such we can always find some of evidence to support our hypothesis.
I am a firm believer that all men and women were created equal in the eyes of God, but unfortunately. I do not believe that all men and women are treated equally and this is regardless of “race”.
There is the following difference here and worth pointing out. Professor Watson pointed to a failure in policy regarding how we help the subsaharan continent. I believe that he is right. The Europeans and the Asians come from a small number of black mothers and fathers that left Africa, and these people on their journey experienced intense inter-breeding. Almost all men in Finland have the same Y chromosome, and the diversity of skin colour reveals that harsh environmental conditions wiped out a lot of people and led to the establishment of these races. It is reasonable to assume that the intelligence of these European, Asians, Arabs and Amerindians is “superior” to that of sub-saharan africans and it is no coincidence that nothing of any lasting value in terms of science or engineering has come from that continent. So although Watson made some deeply offensive comments, his comments are quite possibly right and the impact of his comments may be significant. Maybe policy needs to change to help that continent. I understand how offensive this is to people. But the TV programme with its pseudo science and political correctness was misleading and divisive. We are alone and we compete with other people for mates, for survival and so on. Each one of us is not aware of “race” as such but of our problems. On top of that brain power is not the single factor ensuring success. It is important but so are other factors. The guys running everything are NOT the most creative and intelligent. So why was this TV programme made? as a reaction to Watson’s comments. It was made for emotion rather than for reason.
ERRATA: I meant “inbreeding” not inter-breeding.
‘The institution of racism is the omnipresent progeny of the nineteenth and twentieth century manifestations of slavery and its bedfellow, race.’
Jessica I’m not to sure if I have read your contribution in the right context, so I need some clarification. You stated that “it is no coincidence that nothing of any lasting value in terms of science or engineering has come from that continent”.
I’m a very simple man but when I read this my mind went back to a philosopher by the name of David Hume http://www.africanphilosophy.com/vol1.1/morton.html as he said something in very similar vein. So let me not make any assumptions as I have been guilty of reading into things which are not so.
One thing that needs to recognised is that slavery and colonialism has played a major part in the global supremacy for many of the “first world” countries especially in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
I mean how can we justify one hand equality and freedom, the rights for all, yet systematically declare those from the African continent et al as being a lower species and use science to justify this argument.
This is not a overnight phenomena but has been constructed over a period of four hundred years. I doubt that opinions which have been ingrained into the psyche of Europeans/Americans is going to disappear overnight.
As a wise man once wrote: ‘There is nothing new under the sun’
Personally speaking… I really enjoyed the program and felt it was relevant. There is a PINK ELEPHANT in the room and nobody wants to address it. My “opinion” is one in 6 billion.
God Bless
Darren,
The church tried to stop the truth of science arguing similar things to what you seem to be saying. The truth is important and if the truth is what Watson says then no politics should stop the truth from emerging. Even when the truth is offensive or shocking we should hear it out. In any case, one could say the same about genetic testing or nuclear power. All of these things can be used in positive or in negative ways. Imagine if Watson is right, then we may help subsaharan africa in a better way. I am not arrogant to think that I am so clever, I know that there are others who are cleverer. I want a cleverer boss because dumb bosses are so annoying and upsetting for me. I want to work with people who are more clever than I. That is not to say everyone is the same. The chicks in my neighbourhood want to go out with David Beckham not with a top brain from the university. You have to understand that this programme was aired by the PC to counteract the rising popularity of the BNP in these times of recession. I do not hold any political views but I am not sufficiently ignorant not to see this connection. The TV programme is more divisive than it is liberating. You see we are already in disagreement and wasting time writing here.
Hey Jessica.
I believe that truth liberates and doesn’t bind/tie you up, as a very wise man once said… ‘You shall know the truth and it shall make you free’. If we were living in a idyllic world then the classification of “races” would be a non-issue but my point is simply this… History is a good teacher and serves a a mirror. Hence my quote: ‘There is nothing new under the sun’ SLAVERY & COLONIALISM… Is the PINK ELEPHANT in the room of discussion.
For every hypothesis put forward, it is open to scrutiny and such is the case with Watson et al. In regards to the popularity of the BNP, there is a saying… ‘what is in the dark must come to the light’. This is not a surprise as history will show that this is nothing new when it comes to the UK and will continue to a major issue.
Jessica, please don’t get me wrong I find your entries stimulating and thought provoking… I have to recognise that just as I can put information on this forum, we live in a “democratic” society and therefore are able to voice our opinions/thoughts with a freedom which I appreciate.
Thanks for your final thoughts. About the BNP and such things. The PC climate we are in is a way to diminish freedoms. In a sense my freedom starts where yours ends and I find that in the UK we have too many freedoms. For example, we have nuisance neighbours and no practical way to stop them infringing on our freedoms. We have the PC climate that is trying to hide the truth about differences between cultures and races. Somewhere we have lost the thread. The Far East economies with their more ordered and dictatorial regimes (relative to our bland PC politicians) are the modern day Greeks that we aspire to be. We instead chase the God of money and this twisted form of capitalism with the people in priviledged professions as the biggest fans of our system which is a Roman Empire type of system in decline. I would rather have less freedom and more order but I do admit that that is a fine balance. In any system there will be those who are more aggressive and intent on dominating it. Let us not kid ourselves. The left wing media responsible for the making of this programme is one such entity.
The problem is there is no balance to be struck. There is not enough genetic difference to speak of races in modern humans. Dr. Richard Lewontin proved as much using blood types back in the 1970s, and the Human Genome Project just made it official. The greatest amount of genetic divergence among classical ‘races’ (Black, White and Yellow), is 8% within the African ‘race’ and 6% between the ‘races’. This does not add up to the arbitrary but objective 20% to 25% required before we can speak of races or sub-species in biology.
That makes any ‘examination of race’ moot. You might as well examine little green men from mars. However, to compound this basic error and then try and find a correlation between ‘race’ and ‘intelligence’, only delivers you to the race scientists of old, the likes Richard Lynn, J. Philippe Rushton, Eugen Fischer, etc.
What is real, is that for the last 400 years, racism has been used as a rationalisation for the crimes of the slave trade, then slavery, colonialism, and personal identity. As a result, there is an entire body of knowledge that has been debunked by science, but are held dearly by those who see ‘race’ as part of their identity, and do not want to give up on racism, partly because it defines them.
Now Jessica has implied that the inferiority of the Black race is evidenced of ‘nothing’ coming out of ‘Sub-Saharan Africa’ (itself an artificial classification). I could point out the irony that the very letters we use to write these e-mails are based on Egyptian hieroglyph (handed down from Egypt to Phoenicia, to Greece, to Rome). She would inevitably argue that even though Egypt is ‘in Africa’, it is not part of ‘Sub-Saharan Africa’, and ‘therefore’ does not belong to ‘the black race’.
I could talk at length about the Bantu expansion, the numerous food crops that find their origin in Africa (like sorghum, watermelons, etc.), or the special selection of slaves from the Gambia for their ability to grow rice.
I could however also point out that she herself came out of ‘Sub-Saharan Africa’ according to the latest science, as it is the place of origin of all modern humans. Or that the oldest known proof of mathematics comes from africa, through the
However, none of this goes to proof the existence of race, let alone the superiority of one race over another, which is why it is so important to start out with a proper understanding of the variables we are talking about – like what the definition of race is, and whether it exists at all.
However, this comes on the back of centuries of literature exhalting the superiority of the white race, and the denigration of the very humanity of the black race. This is what the notion of Africans being incapable not only of intelligence, but of culture itself comes from. This started with Hegel, who claimed that African have ‘no culture’. This itself lead to tortured attempts to explain away all African expressions of culture, such as calling languages ‘dialects’, denying the cultural meaning of art, sculpture, music, etc., even as they were enthusiastically copying it (Picasso and Cubism, Jazz, etc.).
Then, there is the issue of ‘intelligence’ itself. The old race scientists and biological determinists depended on the “Factor G” or “general intelligence”, a fixed entitiy that could be quantified in a single number, like an IQ score. The problem is, that this is not our understanding of intelligence anymore. In fact our understanding of the brain and intelligence is much more interesting and exciting today than in days of old (see Howard E. Gardner). IQ tests test a limited set of skills, and are much more of a test of what social class you belong to and the quality of the education you have enjoyed, than any measure of unchanging intelligence. This is why IQ scores have been rising over the decades – not because genes have changed, but because access to education has changed.
We have had this discussion before – back in 1994 (15 years ago), when Murray and Herrnstein came out with The Bell Curve. They were trying to sell their snake oil on the back of the racial politics of the Reagan/Bush era (also known as the Southern Strategy pioneered by Lee Atwater) which exploited resentment and ignorance, to avoid talking about the Republican party’s economic agenda – what we are now paying for. And then there was George W. Bush, forever shattering the myth of white intellectual superiority, in my opinion. How ironic, that he would be followed by a half Kenyan (Luo) president, who also happens to be a genius.
Literature:
The Mismeasure Of Man, by Stephen Jay Gould
Multiple Intelligences: New horizons in theory and practice, by Howard E. Gardner
Online:
The Bellcurve Flattened, by Nicholas Lehmann, in Slate Magazine
Race – The power of an illusion, by PBS
Interview with Richard Lewontin, on PBS
The Ishango Bone, which could be the first evidence of multiplication and division, was found in the DRC/Zaire, and is estimated to be 20,000 years old. (Now ask yourself – if you didn’t know this, how do you know that “hardly anything at all in terms of science and engineering has come out of sub-saharan Africa in the past 10000 years or so”?)
And who was going to say differently? The colonists who coveted Africa’s land? The capitalists like Cecil Rhodes who coveted Africa’s mines? The slavers who coveted their labour? Or the clergy who coveted their souls?
Lastly, the belief in great genetic difference is based on the multiregional theory of human evolution. This is what for instance the writings of J. Philippe Rushton and Milford Wolpoff are based on. Not only has the Multiregional Theory been completely displaced by the Out Of Africa theory of a very recent common ancestry in Africa for all living humans, but the recent common origin Out Of Africa theory is now supported by archaeology, and the Human Genome Project. The Multiregional theory has been debunked by the lack of previos homonid genes – even Neanderthal DNA.
It would be interesting to have an examination of race science (and biological determinism in general), and the degree to which it has influenced public opinion, public policy, including policy at the BBC during the 1960s and 1970s (and maybe even today, in for instance the depictions of interracial couples).
I cannot emphasize enough how much thinking about human races is tied to the multiregional theory of human evolution. Scientific racism depends on it.
On the now debunked Multi-Regional theory of evolution:
Human Evolution, by Milford H. Wolpoff
MrK makes a strong effort at expounding his/her case.
However, let me repeat what I stated but in a difference way to see if you will finally understand it.
When a Computer Scientist rather than a Biologists looks at genetics he or she will not see a “linear” model but a “non-linear” one. The problem is that we have no idea what is the threshold of complexity in Biological systems to make the kind of statements that MrK makes such as:
“This does not add up to the arbitrary but objective 20% to 25% required before we can speak of races or sub-species in biology. ”
A computer scientists will tell you that it is more likely than not that small genetic changes can have a very big effect while other small genetic changes may not. That is the point.
Obviously the races are rather different particularly after heavy localized inbreeding. They are not different species although by a stretch of the definition of species (individuals who could mate with one another but choose not to do so) one may even argue that some people belong to different species not simply different races. I am exaggerating here to point out how MrK is playing with semantics.
Also, we are talking about people today. Although we all came from Africa, at that time we were all black. We are talking about people who are white, yellow, brown and red as well as the black subsaharans. Surely you cannot deny that the races did develop for if you argued that as you appear to do (that there are no races) then you are the ultimate racial denier, and you are blind in sight and in touch and in sound.
I do share your view that people are people and that we are mostly oblivious to colour. Still it gives you no right to deny reality. You see no differences, it is commendable, but the differences are real enough.