Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!wasatch!cs.utexas.edu!uunet!mcvax!ukc!etive!epistemi!edai!cam From: cam@edai.ed.ac.uk (Chris Malcolm cam@uk.ac.ed.edai 031 667 1011 x2550) Newsgroups: comp.ai Subject: Inheritance of IQ Message-ID: <458@edai.ed.ac.uk> Date: 13 Jul 89 19:05:49 GMT References: <5453@pt.cs.cmu.edu> <2061@cbnewsh.ATT.COM> <5480@pt.cs.cmu.edu> Reply-To: cam@edai (Chris Malcolm) Organization: University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh Lines: 96 In article <5480@pt.cs.cmu.edu> jps@cat.cmu.edu (James Salsman) writes: >In article <2061@cbnewsh.ATT.COM> mbb@cbnewsh.ATT.COM (martin.b.brilliant) writes: >> From article <5453@pt.cs.cmu.edu>, by jps@cat.cmu.edu (James Salsman): >> > In article <2037@cbnewsh.ATT.COM> mbb@cbnewsh.ATT.COM (martin.b.brilliant) writes: >> > >> > > IQ runs in my family. >> > >> > Please do not interpolate that idea: if you do, then >> > you will be running the risk of >> > >> > racism ... 1. The notion that one's own ethnic stock is superior. >> >> I don't know what to make of that. I think it was sent in anger, >> because it doesn't make sense. And it looks like an attempt at a >> public insult. I hope it is not. > >Goodness, I was certainly not trying to be offensive in any way, >but the logical extention of one's family is one's race, and >if any person makes that *interpolation* of the concept, they >are racist. Men are, on average, bigger and stronger than women. Whether that statement is true or not is a question of scientific fact that can be established by making appropriate measurements. To suggest that men are - on average - stronger than women is not sexist. It is a question of fact which can be settled one way or another. People from the north of Europe are on average taller and paler-skinned than people from the south of Europe. Once again this is a question of scientific fact, that can be established (or refuted) by measurement. To suggest, for example, that Germans tend to be bigger and paler than Portuguese is not racist. It is a question of fact which can be settled one way or another. It is also true that bigness and paleness tends to run in families, i.e., there is an inherited component. Since just about every quality which varies between individual people also varies on average between races, sexes, occupational groups, etc., it would be remarkable co-incidence if IQ - or any other parameter of mental performance - did not. It is of course racist to suggest that just _because_ someone comes from Anglo-Saxon stock, that she is therefore stupider than a Chinese, just as it is sexist to suggest that _because_ she is a woman, that she is therefore muscularly weaker than a man. These are racist and sexist suggestions because the individual variations of intelligence and strength are larger than the average differences between these groups. Even if it does turn out to be a scientific fact that Chinese inherit - on average - smarter brains than Anglo-Saxons, being "superior" is a very general, complicated, and context-dependent question, that certainly doesn't follow from slight genetic variations in this or that quality. It also has nothing to do with whether all citizens should receive equal educational opportunities, equal access to health care, voting rights, and so on. It's true that racists like to suggest that their prejudices are substantiated by science, and that their own racial stock is better in lots of ways than the rest; but this does _not_ mean that assessing the inherited component to various human qualities (under certain defined degrees of enviromental variation), and assessing the average variations of these qualities across various groups, is necessarily a racist (or sexist) thing to do. On the face of it, suggesting that Chinese and Anglo-Saxons inherit exactly the same quality and type of brains (for example) seems as silly as suggesting that they inherit exactly the same physique, skin, and digestions. Awareness of the widespread nature of sexist bias does mean that there is an unusually large proportion of women among the scientists investigating differences between the sexes - it's politically safer for women to do such research. For the same kind of reasons, investigating the differences in mental powers between the races is probably best left to those of the sillier races, such as the Anglo-Saxons (from what I remember of such research as has been done on this question, Anglo-Saxons come pretty low in the racial IQ league tables). Now, if you'll just wait a moment while I put on my best Anglo-Saxon asbestos attitude... -- Chris Malcolm cam@uk.ac.ed.edai 031 667 1011 x2550 Department of Artificial Intelligence, Edinburgh University 5 Forrest Hill, Edinburgh, EH1 2QL, UK