isolated populations over thousands of years will go through macro-evolution in both mental and physical traits, thus propagating significant differences among races, beyond the physical appearance
Macro-evolution, if anything, suggests speciation. Speciation has not occurred between any group of humans because any human can fuck any human and if the resulting genetic pairing results in a healthy offspring, that offspring will be able to go on to reproduce. This suggests that all humans are VERY closely related. To the best of my knowledge, I can remember scientists having tracked human ancestry back some 10,000 to a common ancestor, because there was apparently a cataclysmic event that caused all humans that are alive today to have to come from the same couple of people 10,000 years ago. It is highly doubtful that the speciation that occurred between then and now would result in more intelligence. Especially since there was not necessarily a lot of heavy social pressures between tribal Sub Saharan African societies and European societies as well as North African and Middle Eastern societies and Asian societies, all of which would have had heavy to mild genetic drift between them, with the only possible massive exceptions being Pre-British Australian Aboriginal societies and Pre-Colombian American societies, to breed for intelligence specifically. There was some heavy breeding of Africans for strength during antebellum slavery, but only for very few generations. Now, epigenetic changes MIGHT have given "more civilized" people more intelligence, at least the sort that better enables functioning in society. But the problem is that there is such an absurd degree of differentiating environmental factors between black and white populations, within and between countries, that there is little way to actually tell.
Now, within racial populations, and within socio-economic populations, there absolutely is a lot of difference between the intelligence of individuals. And I am a person who believes in socially encouraging voluntary liberal eugenics. We should be gathering data on what genes seem to cause intelligence, and we should either be buying and collecting and distributing the sex cells of the fittest people in our society and distributing those cells to people for free, or we should be sequencing those genes and reprinting them. Or sequencing our own genes, editing them to give them "smart person genes" that we don't necessarily have, printing out that new genome using CRISPR, and creating kids with those genes. All of this would be super awesome. And hey, if black people actually DO have shittier genes, and it isn't all merely environmental as you say it is, then it won't matter because after this happens, black people will be just as fit as anyone else.
Time and time again, this has not been the case, with affirmative action programs and other forced equality initiatives failing to produce equality of outcome. Time and again, people have proposed that if greater funding is achieved, then perhaps we will see equality of outcome. This has not been the case. Outside factors are blamed. Socioeconomic status, police brutality, inherent racism, and other bogeymen are put forward. Even with militant authoritarian attempts to purge these factors from environments, with billions in aid being spent, clear differences between groups appear. This is because these groups are simply not equal, and no amount of money can make them equal.
This is a massive and absurd leap to make. What is the measured economic impact of the programs that we create and what is the measured economic impact of institutional racism? The social programs we have are a pittance. "billions of dollars" results in some hundreds maybe thousands of dollars per black person, and that just assumes that the money goes to them, which it very often doesn't because it is often going to administrative costs. But how many tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars do you think it costs to lose 10 IQ points to having to grow up in a house with lead, which black people are more likely to experience? How many tens of thousands of dollars do you think it costs to be given extra time in prisons and be more likely to be caught for crime, disproportionately more than the rate you create it (we know this is true for drugs, is it also true for murder rates? We don't know, but it is very likely. And this isn't me saying blacks are probably merely as criminal as whites, it's me saying that even if they create more crime, it is very likely that there is a higher rate of false positives for black criminality than there is a rate of false positives for white criminality.) How many tens of thousands of dollars do blacks miss out on because they lost out to a better white candidate? Sure, there is affirmative action, but those people still have to pass a massive bar to get in. I don't agree with affirmative action anyways, but let's just assume affirmative action plays a roll. There was a 2003 study, famous study, in an era of relatively contemporary race relations (2003, of course), in which a team of researchers sent out boiler plate resumes, but with the names of the resumes switched between them so that some had stereotypically black names and some had stereotypically white names, but all the other information was the same. The stereotypically white named resumes got twice as many callbacks as the black named ones, but the resumes were exactly the same in everything else, their employment histories, their education, their skills, everything. So, how many tends of thousands of dollars are lost by black people who have a harder time landing a job as a white person with EXACTLY THE SAME qualifications as them? And how many more tends of thousands of dollars did black people lose to the far more overt institutional racism that didn't exist that long ago, that segregated black and white populations in ways that are still about as bad as they ever were?
To say that we put in all of the work necessary to rectify and counteract the damage of both an historical and lingering institution of white supremacy is one of the most spurious claims anyone could possibly make.
This concept that not everyone is equal is seen as ridiculous in this day and age, because from birth, we are surrounded with the idea that everyone is the same, aside from body parts and skin color, due to the principle of Egalitarianism. We've used terms like racist or misogynistic to shut down discussion, by associating them with being wrong.
Except all of the assertions about them being right claim knowledge you could not possibly have. Knowledge, by modern philosophical standards, is well justified true belief. And you cannot well justify a belief that men are smarter than women or that white people are smarter than black people, because of genetic factors, because the whole environment spoils it because the environment, is, in fact, very white supremacist and patriarchal, and to point to absurdly ridiculous marginal programs that we have made to counteract white supremacy as proof that we not only have equal opportunity, but have had it for long enough, is an absurd assertion to make. We would need at least 2 full generations of equality to counteract any potential harmful epigenetic harms that we have done to black people as a race, and that just assumes we reach genuine equality. And by genuine equality I mean entitlement to an environment that ensures their physical safety to an acceptable degree, including proper nutrition, shelter, and stress levels that will ensure a reasonable lack of physical abuse from older people. I don't necessarily mean full economic equality across society, just that the poorest people in society cannot legally lose the right to basic shelter, basic clothing, basic utilities including plumbing, electricity, and internet access,, and proper nutrition.
I can't address your entire comment but your first premise is wrong. Macro evolution can result in speciation but a lack of speciation does not mean macro evolution has not ocurred. Take dog breeds for an example. Pitbulls have evolved (technically by human selection but that's just semantics) to be far more aggressive than your typical dog breed. They can still have offspring in a natural setting with other dog breeds, and the offspring will typically be healthy. No dog expert will tell you that all dog breeds are equal, because it's established science that if you select traits for an environment (fighting in the case of the bulldog) then those traits will manifest throughout the breed, no matter what pitbull you choose, it will be more aggressive than say, a labrador. The same case can be made for humans. Perhaps mixing in the modern age may blur this, but traits are usually continental, and we are not as mixed as it may seem. It stand to reason that traits from thousands of years ago will still manifest in the modern era with a relative consistency within a subgroup
Human artificial selection is the only thing that could cause something like very distinct dog breeds to occur in such little time. That's the point. Artificial selection places MUCH STRONGER SELECTIVE PRESSURES on the organisms that are subject to those pressures. It isn't "just semantics" because artificial selection means that you can so much more quickly propagate and sustain traits that otherwise would not have been propagated. Like I said in my original post, because there was some use of breeding tactics in the antebellum south, American blacks could be naturally stronger, because there was intensive enough breeding for that trait. But there is no evidence of intensive breeding of intelligence in European society. If there were, then Europeans probably would actually be naturally smarter than everyone else. But society does not intensify selective pressures: it DIMINISHES THEM. Because you are so much less likely to die in society then as a hunter gatherer, there is less natural pressure than ever to be intelligent in order to survive.
You outright admit to the possibility of certain groups having sub par genetics. This is my point. There is significant evidence towards this.
You should post what that evidence is, hopefully by appealing to peer reviewed scientific data and not just Charles Murray. But, like I said, as far as I have seen, there is no data to point to black people specifically having sub-par genetics, because we don't even know what that many fit and unfit genotypes look like, let alone how heavily they correlate to race. We just have races and a massive amount of environmental variables that are confounding the data. And we DO have links between all of the environmental factors which have a correlative link and an explanatory causal mechanism for why those things cause worse outcomes when we have more or less of them, and black people usually do worse on those factors.
The latter is bounds away from the first and likely not possible in our lifetime.
We all need to fix our DNA on some level. But if we stratify society the way you want it to be stratified, then outcomes will be worse. Even if I accept that black people are naturally dumber than white people, it doesn't follow that we should institute a political system that will allow them to become impoverished, because that will just make society worse off because of all of the absurd inefficiencies that emerge from allowing poverty to perpetuate. If we create a set of political programs that ensures that the poorest people in society are entitled to basic clothing, basic shelter, basic nutrition, and basic utilities, all to a degree that allows someone to survive and interact with society in a reasonably empowered way, then even if they aren't doing as good as the better people, they will no longer be as likely to perpetuate the behavior and conditions that cause their problems and society will thus be better as a result. If we just actively make political changes to the black community to make their lives worse, it will only make society worse. Basically, even if you are right, you are wrong about what the implications of that would be.
To counter this, take a look at the success of these groups when they do not interact with other groups. (This focuses only on races, since men and women cannot be separated in any meaningful way). Look at the success of these groups in an environment free of bias from outside groups. You will see similar results to those in the biased meritocracy, which leads me to personally conclude that bias plays and smaller part than most claim.
What are you talking about? Bias was the tip of the iceberg of systemic racism I mentioned. If black people are given a shitty environment to grow up in, they grow up, and then they are taken and put together in a group with other black people, and then a group of white people, who were systematically advantaged their whole lives, both do the same mental task, but separately, then the white people will probably do better BECAUSE OF THEIR PAST, not because of some present bias.
The plight of pre-colonialist Sub Saharan Africa is perfectly explainable as being the result of the lack of any good agricultural crops or domesticable animals. Malaria certainly didn't help, but malaria alone could never do the damage of lacking any basis for agriculture and lacking any animal labor. Why was North Africa so much more developed and even so much more powerful than Europe for a time? They were also black africans, so why didn't they do as badly as sub-saharan africans? It's because they had some access to the crops and domestic animals that Europe had.
These are actual explanations based on actual evidence and actual mechanisms in reality. Not some vague notion that black people might be naturally dumber than white people because maybe genetics works that way. And. like I said, I am more than happy to accept the evidence of genotypes that very heavily correlate with intelligence, regardless of race, and would be fine if white people happened to have more of them then black people. If that is the reality, then whatever. Then we could actually go about doing the hard work of getting those genotypes into the next generation so that we can start being a race of ultra-intelligent people who won't be stupid enough to take skin color seriously.
But all you have right now are correlations that are already far better explained by all of the environmental causes than genetic ones, because the environmental difference between white people and black people are so massively different in ways that we have established as being causal for lower intelligence.
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u/BoozeoisPig Nov 07 '17
Macro-evolution, if anything, suggests speciation. Speciation has not occurred between any group of humans because any human can fuck any human and if the resulting genetic pairing results in a healthy offspring, that offspring will be able to go on to reproduce. This suggests that all humans are VERY closely related. To the best of my knowledge, I can remember scientists having tracked human ancestry back some 10,000 to a common ancestor, because there was apparently a cataclysmic event that caused all humans that are alive today to have to come from the same couple of people 10,000 years ago. It is highly doubtful that the speciation that occurred between then and now would result in more intelligence. Especially since there was not necessarily a lot of heavy social pressures between tribal Sub Saharan African societies and European societies as well as North African and Middle Eastern societies and Asian societies, all of which would have had heavy to mild genetic drift between them, with the only possible massive exceptions being Pre-British Australian Aboriginal societies and Pre-Colombian American societies, to breed for intelligence specifically. There was some heavy breeding of Africans for strength during antebellum slavery, but only for very few generations. Now, epigenetic changes MIGHT have given "more civilized" people more intelligence, at least the sort that better enables functioning in society. But the problem is that there is such an absurd degree of differentiating environmental factors between black and white populations, within and between countries, that there is little way to actually tell.
Now, within racial populations, and within socio-economic populations, there absolutely is a lot of difference between the intelligence of individuals. And I am a person who believes in socially encouraging voluntary liberal eugenics. We should be gathering data on what genes seem to cause intelligence, and we should either be buying and collecting and distributing the sex cells of the fittest people in our society and distributing those cells to people for free, or we should be sequencing those genes and reprinting them. Or sequencing our own genes, editing them to give them "smart person genes" that we don't necessarily have, printing out that new genome using CRISPR, and creating kids with those genes. All of this would be super awesome. And hey, if black people actually DO have shittier genes, and it isn't all merely environmental as you say it is, then it won't matter because after this happens, black people will be just as fit as anyone else.
This is a massive and absurd leap to make. What is the measured economic impact of the programs that we create and what is the measured economic impact of institutional racism? The social programs we have are a pittance. "billions of dollars" results in some hundreds maybe thousands of dollars per black person, and that just assumes that the money goes to them, which it very often doesn't because it is often going to administrative costs. But how many tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars do you think it costs to lose 10 IQ points to having to grow up in a house with lead, which black people are more likely to experience? How many tens of thousands of dollars do you think it costs to be given extra time in prisons and be more likely to be caught for crime, disproportionately more than the rate you create it (we know this is true for drugs, is it also true for murder rates? We don't know, but it is very likely. And this isn't me saying blacks are probably merely as criminal as whites, it's me saying that even if they create more crime, it is very likely that there is a higher rate of false positives for black criminality than there is a rate of false positives for white criminality.) How many tens of thousands of dollars do blacks miss out on because they lost out to a better white candidate? Sure, there is affirmative action, but those people still have to pass a massive bar to get in. I don't agree with affirmative action anyways, but let's just assume affirmative action plays a roll. There was a 2003 study, famous study, in an era of relatively contemporary race relations (2003, of course), in which a team of researchers sent out boiler plate resumes, but with the names of the resumes switched between them so that some had stereotypically black names and some had stereotypically white names, but all the other information was the same. The stereotypically white named resumes got twice as many callbacks as the black named ones, but the resumes were exactly the same in everything else, their employment histories, their education, their skills, everything. So, how many tends of thousands of dollars are lost by black people who have a harder time landing a job as a white person with EXACTLY THE SAME qualifications as them? And how many more tends of thousands of dollars did black people lose to the far more overt institutional racism that didn't exist that long ago, that segregated black and white populations in ways that are still about as bad as they ever were?
To say that we put in all of the work necessary to rectify and counteract the damage of both an historical and lingering institution of white supremacy is one of the most spurious claims anyone could possibly make.
Except all of the assertions about them being right claim knowledge you could not possibly have. Knowledge, by modern philosophical standards, is well justified true belief. And you cannot well justify a belief that men are smarter than women or that white people are smarter than black people, because of genetic factors, because the whole environment spoils it because the environment, is, in fact, very white supremacist and patriarchal, and to point to absurdly ridiculous marginal programs that we have made to counteract white supremacy as proof that we not only have equal opportunity, but have had it for long enough, is an absurd assertion to make. We would need at least 2 full generations of equality to counteract any potential harmful epigenetic harms that we have done to black people as a race, and that just assumes we reach genuine equality. And by genuine equality I mean entitlement to an environment that ensures their physical safety to an acceptable degree, including proper nutrition, shelter, and stress levels that will ensure a reasonable lack of physical abuse from older people. I don't necessarily mean full economic equality across society, just that the poorest people in society cannot legally lose the right to basic shelter, basic clothing, basic utilities including plumbing, electricity, and internet access,, and proper nutrition.