The old common argument

[mercu]

Hello everybody. I am new here. I am not in science field, i have no scientific knowledge at all. So my questions are for getting more knowledge and not to be ironice or to pretend to be a smart person.

 

Well, my question is the classical black race intelligent question. I do not care about what white people say, i do not care about what black people say. I care only about what scientists say.

 

Of course, i know that black people do not have the same opportunities to success. Whites are more possible to access higher knowledge. Furthermore, success does not always goes with high IQ.

The only thing i want to know is about the cold scientific liable results.

 

 

 

P.S. Notice that i am white and probably with lower IQ than a many and many black people and other white people.

[pwagen]

Of course, i know that black people do not have the same opportunities to success.

Not quite true. A white person in a third world country would have a lesser chance of succes than a black person in a developed country. It's more about outer conditions than skin colour. In fact, I'd say it's got very very little to do with skin colour, if at all.

 

Coincidence has it that Africa has a lot of underdeveloped countries, while also having a mostly black population. But don't make the mistake to think that they are worse off because of skin colour rather than other reasons.

[mercu]

Hi pwagen. Thanks for your reply. When i wrote "that black people do not have the same opportunities to success." , i meant that because of they live in undeveloped countries, poverty, totalitarian regimes, civil wars, they dont find open doors to prove their abilities. So , i didnt wrote about the blacks in America or EU.

Success is not related to skin colour. Success is not related exclusively to intelligence.

In essence, my question is : Suppose you have 1000 whites and 1000 blacks. All raised in the same environment and have similar levels of knowledge. Are the result going to show that whites have higher IQ?

[pwagen]

It's a tricky question, and it seems hard to find a conclusive answer either way.

 

This answer, although from Yahoo Answers, has a lot of information to check out.

http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20090406131730AAQoZEt

 

However, it seems there has not been any studies that investigates your question properly. The results seem to be skewed in one way or another. Even if you pick 1000 whites and as many blacks from a country such as the US, there's still the question of cultural influence. It doesn't take into account any differences in living standards between people. I can't find any sources right now, but I would guess the majority of poor people in the US are not white. And since poor people have a harder time succeeding in school, for instance (it might be a choice between paying for tuition and paying bills), the likelihood of them performing well in surveys such as these are slimmer.

 

Disregarding all this, no matter the general intelligence level of any race, it seems they all have a chance of producing geniuses.

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

http://asianhistory.about.com/od/profilesofasianleaders/tp/nobelprizewinners.htm

 

However, it seems the biggest "race" (if you can count them as a specific race at all, which I'm not too sure of), would be the Jews.

http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Judaism/nobels.html

 

So all in all, my guess, for whatever it's worth, is that skin colour has no impact on intelligence. Ridding a similar sized population of whites, blacks and Asians, with the same upbringing, environment etc, we would most likely see similar intelligence levels across the board.

[CharonY]

This question has essentially two components (if we disregard social issues for now) a) how much of intelligence is inheritable and b) does it correlate with skin color.

 

The problem to a) is that we do not really know. Studies vary quiet a lot, which to me is an indicator that there is a lot of plasticity there. And it makes a lot of sense, if one thinks about it. Even if a child has the perfect genes (which we do not know) to make it a genius, it will certainly under perform in about any tests if we keep it isolated and deprived of sensory inputs.

 

Regarding b) black is a poor indicator of race. The highest genetic diversity is found on the African continent (small wonder since the whole species originated there). So "black" covers an incredibly wide range of genetic diversity (not to mention the problems of classifying anything below the species level).