Conquer Club

http://news.independent.co.uk/sci_tech/ ... 067222.ece

HE claims it so it must be true ? ... only time will tell in the end.
i really respected him until this claim, even if it is true he should have better thought of consequences what this theory could bring...

i say it doesn't matter in the end. we're all human...

The most entertaining and crackpot bits are in this paragraph:

Independant wrote:In 1997, he told a British newspaper that a woman should have the right to abort her unborn child if tests could determine it would be homosexual. He later insisted he was talking about a "hypothetical" choice which could never be applied. He has also suggested a link between skin colour and sex drive, positing the theory that black people have higher libidos, and argued in favour of genetic screening and engineering on the basis that " stupidity" could one day be cured. He has claimed that beauty could be genetically manufactured, saying: "People say it would be terrible if we made all girls pretty. I think it would great."

regardless of this particular issue, i think it does raise important points about our over-sensitive political correctness and the potential that has to inhibit genuine medical or social progress.

neoni wrote:regardless of this particular issue, i think it does raise important points about our over-sensitive political correctness and the potential that has to inhibit genuine medical or social progress.

Why? I think if he'd have published any kind of detailed scientific study then the scientific community, at least, wouldn't have reacted in the way it did. He allowed to make those kind of statements in Britain today, we have freedom of speech, but he can't claim them to be scientific fact with no evidence.

If he wants to submit a paper to a respected peer-review journal no-one is going to stop him, and indeed his theories will be questioned and analysed, but making silly polemic dawkins-esque statements is no way to encourage genuine debate.

I have to say i did not get to the end of the article but i think if there is proved to any basis to African people being 'measured' as less intelligent that other races it may be due in the main to the measurements used.

They will by definition be biased against people less educated in what they are testing for. Culturally weighted IQ tests are doomed to failure.

This is very rocky ground to attempt to traverse without leaving the perception of racism. How can we discuss one race as different from others without discriminating it from the others?.. we can not.

however i do feel that due to the separation in evolution in humankind that there is a strong probability that much of the African peoples are more distant to the rest of the world.

Anthropologists have long hypothesised that all of the worlds humans originated in Africa. there is little debate on this matter.

Geneticists have surmised, from initial data, that the entire world population outside of Africa may have been peopled by as few as 7 females; they hypothesise that in the last ice-age a small band of early humans crossed a vast expanse of ice in a time of its retreat. they were then blocked off from Africa for many thousands of years to evolve in isolation from the bulk of humanity in Africa.

Scientists have found that the genetic diversity in many small African villages is more exaggerated than that of the whole rest of the world outside of Africa.

So what is the point.... ? i am not really sure what it is and this sounds like it could be fruit to a new breed of eugenicists... Certainly I perceive all humans to be equal!

But it could be that it is impossible to measure African levels of intelligence with any real meaning as due to their genetic diversity there may be 'cultural' bias between a selection of even 1000 African participants.

Guiscard wrote:

neoni wrote:regardless of this particular issue, i think it does raise important points about our over-sensitive political correctness and the potential that has to inhibit genuine medical or social progress.

Why? I think if he'd have published any kind of detailed scientific study then the scientific community, at least, wouldn't have reacted in the way it did. He allowed to make those kind of statements in Britain today, we have freedom of speech, but he can't claim them to be scientific fact with no evidence.

If he wants to submit a paper to a respected peer-review journal no-one is going to stop him, and indeed his theories will be questioned and analysed, but making silly polemic dawkins-esque statements is no way to encourage genuine debate.

hadn't read the article and just assumed he had at least something behind it, my bad - disregard my comment

Simonov wrote:http://news.independent.co.uk/sci_tech/article3067222.ece

HE claims it so it must be true ? ... only time will tell in the end.
i really respected him until this claim, even if it is true he should have better thought of consequences what this theory could bring...

i say it doesn't matter in the end. we're all human...

Watson is a racist old fart...he used that big brain of his so much, that now he is suffering from a tinge of dementia. Truth be known, that I have met many intelligent people of color, I even knew a black man who always beat the computer at chess! Such comments can only serve to hurt. I refuse to believe in anything Dr. Watson has to say.

I really don't understand how 'white' people can say that 'black' people are inferior, since white people are just a mutation of the standard black genetic gene. Technically, the white people should be inferior for being a mutant. (this is of course saying that only if one race has to be inferior, which i don't personally believe)

jiminski wrote:But it could be that it is impossible to measure African levels of intelligence with any real meaning as due to their genetic diversity there may be 'cultural' bias between a selection of even 1000 African participants.

This is certainly a major issue in the whole 'racial/cultural intellegence' debate. I think its been a fairly big bugbear in the scientific community for decades. Every couple of years something like this pops up, but every time it happens I read more measured responses along the lines of your post - that the traditional western 'IQ test' intellegence is perhaps too narrow a criteria. Indeed, even if we take this as a benchmark, white people are generally inferior in intellegence to most asian people. From what Watson was saying - that employers should treat people as less intelligent as a result of their race - would leave white people in middle management working under Asian bosses with Black people delivering the mail. I strongly doubt that the sections in our society who will get most comfort from the supposed intellectual superiority of whites over blacks will accept Asian dominance so warmly.

DaGip wrote:I even knew a black man who always beat the computer at chess!

I really don't intend to be a racist but such comments are foolish and as unrepresentative (if not more) as any study which shows one race to be smarter than another based on samples.

All black people might be able to beat the computer at chess due to superior intellect. Alternatively, all of them might act like they were born with a lobotomy except for this one guy. Who's to say?

I have a friend who is pretty damn smart (though he's still a twit )but I also know people who are black who are as dense as metamorphic rocks. And I wouldn't say any examples that I or anyone can produce prove or disprove this theory, crackpot though it probably is.

Dunno about 'inferior', but different - yes, undoubtedly. How come so many black people do well in the 100m, for example? Surely if there were no differences, you'd get people from all different races getting to the final 8 or so - but invariably it's made up largely of black folk.

Evolution innit. If yer ancestors have spent thousands of years surviving in a tropical jungle then of course you're going to have different physical/mental attributes to someone whose ancestors have been in a temperate area. Survival of the best adapted.

s.xkitten wrote:I really don't understand how 'white' people can say that 'black' people are inferior, since white people are just a mutation of the standard black genetic gene. Technically, the white people should be inferior for being a mutant. (this is of course saying that only if one race has to be inferior, which i don't personally believe)

He's referring to the genes which determine race as an indication of IQ. If he could do a wide enough study with a acceptably representative number of subjects which showed that those with 'black' genes constantly perform worse in IQ tests than those with 'white' genes then he's be proved right, to an extent (the problems which Jiminski's post was referring to are the biggest factor).

He's not just making a racial judgment on 'inferior' and 'superior' races.

AlgyTaylor wrote:Dunno about 'inferior', but different - yes, undoubtedly. How come so many black people do well in the 100m, for example? Surely if there were no differences, you'd get people from all different races getting to the final 8 or so - but invariably it's made up largely of black folk.

Evolution innit. If yer ancestors have spent thousands of years surviving in a tropical jungle then of course you're going to have different physical/mental attributes to someone whose ancestors have been in a temperate area. Survival of the best adapted.

You racist pig....so is that the only positive attribute you can think of for an entire race? Go back to hitler youth, griffin, you racial slurs aren't welcome here.

I think its impossible to distinguish the difference between internal intelligence and education. yes, perhaps the average African person is not as smart as the average British person, but honestly I think this has more to do with the amount of education a British Person gets in comparison to education.

Obviously there are outliers in this theory: every major philosopher, mathamaticians, and major inventors, are people who were born with 'more' intelligence than the norm. But in the scheme of things, these people are really rare(and my math teacher tells me to ignore Outliers)

As opposed to white people?

Go on, think of a positive attribute for them. I'm thinking bloodymindedness.

Norse wrote:

AlgyTaylor wrote:Dunno about 'inferior', but different - yes, undoubtedly. How come so many black people do well in the 100m, for example? Surely if there were no differences, you'd get people from all different races getting to the final 8 or so - but invariably it's made up largely of black folk.

Evolution innit. If yer ancestors have spent thousands of years surviving in a tropical jungle then of course you're going to have different physical/mental attributes to someone whose ancestors have been in a temperate area. Survival of the best adapted.

You racist pig....so is that the only positive attribute you can think of for an entire race? Go back to hitler youth, griffin, you racial slurs aren't welcome here.

You better shut the f*ck up. He never claimed thats the only positive attribute of black people. It was just an example, you stupid shit.

Not to mention, I would imagine black people would be proud to know that they're known as a strong, fast race. Its not a slur, you just percieve it as one you stupid asshole.

riggable wrote:

Norse wrote:

AlgyTaylor wrote:Dunno about 'inferior', but different - yes, undoubtedly. How come so many black people do well in the 100m, for example? Surely if there were no differences, you'd get people from all different races getting to the final 8 or so - but invariably it's made up largely of black folk.

Evolution innit. If yer ancestors have spent thousands of years surviving in a tropical jungle then of course you're going to have different physical/mental attributes to someone whose ancestors have been in a temperate area. Survival of the best adapted.

You racist pig....so is that the only positive attribute you can think of for an entire race? Go back to hitler youth, griffin, you racial slurs aren't welcome here.

You better shut the f*ck up. He never claimed thats the only positive attribute of black people. It was just an example, you stupid shit.

Not to mention, I would imagine black people would be proud to know that they're known as a strong, fast race. Its not a slur, you just percieve it as one you stupid asshole.

You racist nazi lord!

Go back to hitler youth with your bum-buddy hitler!

Godwin's law. You lose.

Norse wrote:You racist pig....so is that the only positive attribute you can think of for an entire race? Go back to hitler youth, griffin, you racial slurs aren't welcome here.

heh. No, just an example - loads of good stuff has been contributed by black folk; that's just the most strikingly obvious one.

Now where's ma swastika?

AlgyTaylor wrote:Dunno about 'inferior', but different - yes, undoubtedly. How come so many black people do well in the 100m, for example? Surely if there were no differences, you'd get people from all different races getting to the final 8 or so - but invariably it's made up largely of black folk.

Evolution ...yes but also the 'selection' of slavery meant that if you were not strong and fit you died .. if not in the ship on the way over then in hard labour.

The Polynesians for example are disproportionately massive. This is attributed to their Island-hopping heritage. Due to the often vast oceanic journeys and the relatively small craft they had a better chance at survival if they could store food in their body. The massive fittest ones survived to populate the islands.

AlgyTaylor wrote:

Norse wrote:You racist pig....so is that the only positive attribute you can think of for an entire race? Go back to hitler youth, griffin, you racial slurs aren't welcome here.

heh. No, just an example - loads of good stuff has been contributed by black folk; that's just the most strikingly obvious one.

Now where's ma swastika?

Thats just the most strikingly obvious one

Like, their other acheivements never figured before that? so a black man is only to be proud of being strong, fast and having a 3 foot wanger?

You people make me sick!

I think the problem is this: If we simply define 'intellegence' as an IQ score, then African people may not score as well (although the studies aren't very extensive nor very conclusive). They may well, however, hold other attributes which fall under the category of 'intelligent' but aren't picked up by a simple IQ test (for example, creative thinking, good social skills, 'thinking outside the box' problem solving).

No-one is really saying there can be no genetic difference between races. What people ARE saying is that statements like 'employers should take race into account because black people have a naturally inferior intellegence' is patently absurd. Each person should be judged on his or her own merits.

It isn't a slur on people of African descent that they are perhaps not as genetically inclined to be 'intelligent' in the western sense, just as I don't feel inferior in my 'whiteness' because East Asians are genetically inclined to outperform me!

Norse wrote:

AlgyTaylor wrote:

Norse wrote:You racist pig....so is that the only positive attribute you can think of for an entire race? Go back to hitler youth, griffin, you racial slurs aren't welcome here.

heh. No, just an example - loads of good stuff has been contributed by black folk; that's just the most strikingly obvious one.

Now where's ma swastika?

Thats just the most strikingly obvious one

Like, their other acheivements never figured before that? so a black man is only to be proud of being strong, fast and having a 3 foot wanger?

You people make me sick!

Actually, on average they only have about 2 foot wangs. Check your facts.

EDIT: reply to jimski

Yeah totally, all sorts of things affect people. Culture, ancestry, education, ... there's loads. Don't see it as racist to suggest that one race might, as a generalisation, be more adept at doing one task than another. Only if you suggest that one race in some way superior to another because of that.


And before anyone says it, I have absolutely no doubt that there are thousands, millions or even billions of black people who are more intelligent and/or less fit than I am!

Wow. 8 votes say yes, black people ARE inferior!

I am genuinely surprised.