Africans Are Less Intelligent Than Westerners

[Golliwog]

Rubbish. I say, rubbish!
No degree of supposed erudition,
No authoritative standing in an academic discipline,
Can justify or authenticate such asinine balderdash! Stupidy abounds.! "Where ignorance abounds, 'tis folly to be wise."

 

[LarsVenice]

Intelligence tests are intrinsically flawed. All they do is measure how good someone is at taking a test. I should know because I score extremely high on these tests. Also, these tests may have cultural biases, favoring one culture over another. Measuring common sense is a different matter altogether, and no scientists seem to be particularly preoccupied with doing that.

 

[star-warrior]

Recently, there was a program on tv in the UK called Young Beautiful Minds, about those young people who had a gift for mathematics at a young age.

One young man was Cong, an ethnically Chinese person with that aptitude. However, he openly expressed his utter disgust for his own race, and would like to see them dispatched with acid. I don't care that he's a maths prodigy, but his self hate was utterly insane. He fell by the wayside in the competitions.

The other guy Jos who was completely bereft of any emotion was the young man with Asperger's Syndrome. He had it in the worse anti-social way possible.

Another person who had Asperger's diagnosed in the programme had found a Chinese girlfriend and loved everything about China and the Chinese. He learned to speak Mandarin in 3 months out there, and in the end this guy Daniel Lightwing married his Chinese girlfriend with his fellow competitors as guests at the wedding.

For the others who had their abilities and their problems, they got on together quite well.

http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/tv/2007/10/the_weekends_tv_beautiful_youn.html

 

[sparky95]

I'm betting that if Watson was dropped into a traditional African village in,say, Nigeria and was expected to survive, he would look pretty stupid compared to the locals!

 

[jackoroe]

Some people want to believe in Algore's global warming theories. Some people want to believe that some groups are smarter than others. I read the Bell Curve about 10 years back. Interesting theory. But so what? Who cares who has a higher IQ? Does it really amount to more than a hill of beans?

 

[LaloGS]

But its interesting that public opinion is so heavily loaded against him now.
A few centuries ago he would have actually had people sagely nodding in agreement if not actually applauding.....

A few Centuries ago????? Look around, Neruda, the Religious Right and the Republican neocons still are applauding these kinds of false gods.

 

[duncann]

Recently, there was a program on tv in the UK called Young Beautiful Minds, about those young people who had a gift for mathematics at a young age.

One young man was Cong, an ethnically Chinese person with that aptitude. However, he openly expressed his utter disgust for his own race, and would like to see them dispatched with acid. I don't care that he's a maths prodigy, but his self hate was utterly insane. He fell by the wayside in the competitions.

The other guy Jos who was completely bereft of any emotion was the young man with Asperger's Syndrome. He had it in the worse anti-social way possible.

Another person who had Asperger's diagnosed in the programme had found a Chinese girlfriend and loved everything about China and the Chinese. He learned to speak Mandarin in 3 months out there, and in the end this guy Daniel Lightwing married his Chinese girlfriend with his fellow competitors as guests at the wedding.

For the others who had their abilities and their problems, they got on together quite well.

http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/tv/2007/10
/the_weekends_tv_beautiful_youn.html

I watched that, one of the finest docs for years. I thought the point about Cong was that he was also borderline autistic, the team leader said that nearly all of them were like that and had serious social problems. The lovely Daniel who you mentioned was so socially compromised he could not receive any of his medals at the ceremonies but had to remain hidden in the crowd, in his case a very appealing characteristic. I assumed Cong was borderline, the scene where he made a chess set out of glasses of liquids seemed to reveal him to be over-focussed and obsessive and as you say his comments were inane and sort of genocidal.

The Chinese are generally openly racist - I've been there and they say things in chat (about white and black people, Europeans and Americans etc) that we in Britain would have said 100 years ago about black Africans but would be horrified by now - so he may have picked up on that and was just playing it back to them. The Chinese team which won gold medals and nothing else were scathing about the other races who won 'only' silver.

Racism is global but permission to express it is cultural. Our embarrassment about overt racism is very recent and is not yet evident in some other mono-racial cultures which remain overtly racist about us and other cultures and races.

 

[greaves]

From the London "Times" today:

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/science/article2687364.ece

 

[greaves]

My thoughts? You seem to enjoy quoting controversial things written by other people and asking for our "thoughts".

Lex

greaves does enjoy posting such threads as he is curious about other JUBbers' opinions/ideas/experiences etc.

It's one of the reasons I log on to JUB virtually every day.

 

[pnfan]

IQ has long been debunked. In fact its inventors never even intended for it to be a measure of fixed intelligence, if such a thing even exists. Read "The Mismeasure of Man" by Stephen Jay Gould.

 

[LarsVenice]

Lars, is it possible that intelligence is both inherited and learned? The example of William Siddell is recalled.

The measure of intelligence varies from culture to culture, as someone else state obliquely. People adapt to their environment, and the skills required to survive in Mongolia or Tibet are very different from those required in New York. The potential for intelligence is different from the intelligence that is actually developed. The potential is inherited, but what one does with it determines how intelligent one will be.

 

[pnfan]

Colonialisation, exploitation and bad climate?

Well the first two are correct.

The colonial powers, especially the Brits, built schools, hospitals, roads and railroads which were functioning well when they left, and they left a legacy of a pretty good administrative structure. Most of those things are now in ruins. Zimbabwe was a net exporter of agricultural products and now the people are starving.

This is a joke, right? Are you talking about the same British who massacred 300,000 Kikuyu people in the 1950s? The people who bombarded Somali civilians with ariel assaults in order to bring the Horn of Africa under its domination? The same ones who had a monopoly on black slavery?

What about how the Germans murdered 65,000 Herereo people in Namibia? Or what about how about the Belgians hacked their way though the Congolese:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/international/story/0,3604,754499,00.html

"10 million Congolese were either murdered or worked to death by Leopold's private army, that women were systematically raped, that locals' hands were cut off and that the local populace endured kidnapping, looting and village burnings, have never been the subject of serious debate in Belgium, let alone an apology."

The only railroad the Belgians built in the Congo was to bring minerals back and forth from the hinterland to the coast.

Europe's intentions towards Africa were/are as benevolent as the KKK's intentions towards African-Americans.

Billions of dollars in aid have been poured into Africa, and conditions are now worse than they were 60 years ago.

Conditions are not worse than they were 60 years ago however you can keep your aid if that is what concerns you. Africa does not need it, it needs the multinational exploiters to leave.

 

[Appleseedpie]

He said there was a natural desire that all human beings should be equal but "people who have to deal with black employees find this not true".

Oooooh so scientific.

I think the state of Africa and some of the social problems of some blacks in north America is what "inspires" that type of garbage. Somewhere out there someone must have thought" Why so much problems in the black community? omg they are all the same must be genetics!!"

I think it's social issue, not a genetics related one.

 

[greaves]

From today's London "Times" an apology:

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/science/article2687364.ece

Some interesting opinions expressed in this thread. Some JUBbers still confusing education with intelligence.

However much first-class education an unintelligent person receives, they remain unintelligent.

An intelligent person is an intelligent person, whether educated or not.

 

[kallipolis]

A wise old man said that the intelligent person is always recognised by his or her silence, in the face of all that appears as a superior intelligence.

Ignorance can sometimes gob stop many of us to where our silent patience rewards us with the thought that mindless words can reveal more than an intelligent person should reveal.

 

[duncann]

The colonial powers, especially the Brits, built schools, hospitals, roads and railroads which were functioning well when they left, and they left a legacy of a pretty good administrative structure. Most of those things are now in ruins. Zimbabwe was a net exporter of agricultural products and now the people are starving. Billions of dollars in aid have been poured into Africa, and conditions are now worse than they were 60 years ago.

Spot on. Most European colonies were handed over with quite healthy functioning economies, honest civil services, modern transport as could be engineered at that time, schools and universities and one person one vote democracies.

Zimbabwe, the very last to go, was the second richest country on the continent, the bread basket of Africa, with wonderful transport links and the prospect of being one of the world's great tourist destinations. Within one generation and still under the same despot it's the basket case, the people are starving, life expectancy has fallen from the 60s to the mid 30s, AIDS is rampant, children go uneducated, the political regime is the most corrupt on the planet - look at Mugabe's nauseating last birthday celebrations at a time of national crisis. Immigration into South Africa is in the hundreds of thousands, the black middle class has left, the white middle class went years ago, stripped of its land and murdered if it did not abandon the country first. Britain is quite simply not responsible for this, one man and his cronies are, Robert Mugabe.

So what usually goes wrong? It is the same as in other countries from Northern Ireland to Pakistan - tribalism and clanism are age-old and endemic. Generally, for whomever wins the first election it is payback time. They punish those from another group or groups for some ancient historical reason. Read the history of modern Africa, this goes on in almost half the countries, developing from time to time into genocide like in Darfur. Everything is seized for one side. Elections become corrupt if held at all. Repression, corruption, terror and anarchy become the modus operandi. Almost no sitting president (usually established only as prime ministers) in most of Africa has lost an election. The only way to survive under their regime is through corruption. The only way to change who is in charge is through a coup.

One solution, which is being tried in Iraq (unsuccessfully) and in South Africa and Northern Ireland (successfully) is not to have one person one vote democracy but to create parliaments made up of every group fairly represented. Sometimes it does work.

 

[kallipolis]

duncann and calamus99,

Thanks for the commonsense and not the predictable politically led agendas that infest our right to view reality as it really it is and not as some people prefer to see it.

 

[star-warrior]

Update: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/7052416.stm

Lab suspends DNA pioneer Watson

His comments led event organisers to cancel his appearances

The Nobel Prize-winning DNA pioneer James Watson has been suspended by his research institution in the US. Dr Watson has drawn severe criticism over remarks he made in a British newspaper at the weekend.
In the interview, he was quoted as saying Africans were less intelligent than Europeans.
The Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory had already distanced itself from the scientist's comments but its trustee board has now suspended him.
A statement from the Long Island, New York, institution said the action was being taken "pending further deliberation by the board".
Unreserved apology
Dr Watson was due to give a lecture at the Science Museum in London on Friday as part of a book tour. But the museum cancelled the event, saying the scientist had gone beyond the point of acceptable debate.
The Bristol Festival of Ideas has also cancelled an appearance by Dr Watson.
And further critical comment of Dr Watson's views has come from Dr Craig Venter, the scientist/businessman who led the private effort to decode the human genome, and who, by coincidence, is also visiting the UK to promote a book.
"Skin colour as a surrogate for race is a social concept not a scientific one," Dr Venter said. "There is no basis in scientific fact or in the human genetic code for the notion that skin colour will be predictive of intelligence."

Dr Watson helped unravel the structure of DNA

Profile: Dr James Watson

In his Sunday Times interview, Dr Watson was quoted as saying he was "inherently gloomy about the prospect of Africa" because "all our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours - whereas all the testing says not really".
He was further quoted as saying that his hope was that everyone was equal but that "people who have to deal with black employees find this is not true".
The scientist has since said that the way the words were presented did not reflect properly his position.
"I can certainly understand why people, reading those words, have reacted in the ways they have," he said.
"To all those who have drawn the inference from my words that Africa, as a continent, is somehow genetically inferior, I can only apologise unreservedly.
"That is not what I meant. More importantly from my point of view, there is no scientific basis for such a belief."
Scientific endeavour
And in comments published in The Independent newspaper on Friday, Dr Watson tries to clarify his position.
"We do not yet adequately understand the way in which the different environments in the world have selected over time the genes which determine our capacity to do different things," he is quoted as saying. "The overwhelming desire of society today is to assume that equal powers of reason are a universal heritage of humanity.
"It may well be. But simply wanting this to be the case is not enough. This is not science. To question this is not to give in to racism. This is not a discussion about superiority or inferiority, it is about seeking to understand differences, about why some of us are great musicians and others great engineers."
Dr Watson was a joint winner in 1962 of the Nobel Prize for discovering the structure of DNA, the molecule that lies at the heart of heredity in living organisms.
When, some 40 years later, Dr Venter and colleagues were finally able to read all of the DNA in our cells, they concluded the concept of race could not easily be described by our genetics.
Venter and his team pointed to the fact that people from different racial groups could be more genetically similar than individuals within the same group. Genetic studies show that there is more variability in the gene pool in Africa, than outside.

 

[LarsVenice]

Climate is suprisingly important. There are many issues such as whether you are able to domesticate animals and have regular crop cycles.

Living in a colder climate may force you to develop more survival skills.

Or simply different skills.

To measure intelligence, one has to do so within the context of the native culture that one was born into. For many centuries, the Chinese thought that the Europeans were inferior and backward. To judge Africans by European standards already supposes that Africans are inferior because their standards are not respected.

I agree that climate has a lot to do with how society is organized, but this has nothing to do with inherent intelligence. Intelligence also seems to be unrelated to beneficence, which is a much more desirable quality to possess.

 

[dr_beat]

Does anyone have a better explanation for the mess in sub-Saharan Africa?

Proof that things around here are getting better. We actually made it through 41 responses before a racist graced us with his opinion.