Comment by pingou
8 hours ago
I don't think many people dispute the fact that the environment plays a role in intelligence. Not even many people dispute that there is some heritability to intelligence. What is in dispute is whether that heritability means that some races are on average genetically more intelligent than others (and another problem is how to define intelligence).
How do you define races? As I said in another comment definitions shift and they are different in different countries. I have an encyclopedia from the 1950s that defines South Asians as "Caucasoid". Some East Africans were also defined as "Caucasoid" historically.If we define races on the basis of genetic similarity then almost everyone whose ancestry is from Eurasia is the same "race", but people whose ancestry is African belong to multiple races.
Race was only ever a stand in before we had an accurate understanding of genetics.
It's a bit like the old adage that we should not judge a book by its cover. The outside often does not provide any clues into the content or worse, it could bias an observer's opinions about what they would find inside if they chose to engage with the material.
Its akin to judging a man by the color of his skin instead of by the content of his character.
Thanks for your comment that clarifies how genetics provides a much more granular window into an individual than any physical characteristic taken by itself can provide.
If we define intelligence as IQ then the evidence is overwhelming that the average differs among races. Even in Singapore, which has a very high standard of living, nutrition etc., we still see Chinese Singaporeans perform significantly better than Malay Singaporeans on various measures of intelligence, with Indian Singaporeans somewhere in the middle. The same pattern is seen among Chinese, Indians and native Malaysians in Malaysia, and globally when we compare the mean IQ scores of China, India and Malaysia.
That could also be explained by cultural differences, I don't think the evidence is overwhelming.
Or it could be discrimination. There are studies that show that black and white mixed races children did not score any higher than children with two black parents, while white people score higher than black people on average, which may point to some discrimination impacting IQ.
Discrimination against whites in favor of blacks doesn't lower white IQ.
There are significant cultural and economic differences between those communities. These will be similar between Singapore and Malaysia. The Chinese and Indians are sufficiently recent immigrants for their culture to still have a lot in common (they speak the same language, follow the same religions, have inherited attitudes) with the places their ancestors came from.
I don't understand how the precedents could lead to any question regarding the disputed conclusion