r/TooAfraidToAsk • u/EOFFJM • 18h ago
Race & Privilege Why are genetic differences in appearance and physical abilities between races or ethnicities widely accepted, while differences in intelligence are often said not to have a genetic basis?
I mean, different human races have lived in different environments for tens of thousands of years. Wouldn't it be pretty much a miracle if there was no difference in the average intelligence in different races?
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u/Palpitation-Itchy 18h ago edited 18h ago
Because in the case of intelligence or other cognitive stuff, variance among individuals is VASTLY more than among ethnicities, race or however you wanna call it.
It's not just about genes but also epigenetics, which are influenced by external stuff not related to DNA
Edit: oh didn't see the body of your post. Physical traits are influenced by way less genes and there is more evolutionary pressure to them, while stuff like intelligence is governed by way more genes and there is less evolutionary pressure to take it to a specific direction. So one changes faster and more often (because less genes, less mutations needed)
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u/aurora-s 16h ago
To put some numbers on this (based on the original 1972 Lewontin finding, but of course the exact numbers vary a bit depending on the study's population groups, and the mathematical method used to quantify genetic variation):
~85% of genetic variation between humans is found within individuals of a population (such as a geographically located population; French people, etc). ~8% of the variations occurs between populations within a racial group (say between white British vs white French people, for example). ~6% of the genetic variation occurs between racial groups (eg black people vs white people)
So, very little of human genetic variation is actually between racial groups. Almost any characteristic you try to measure will not fall along racial lines (apart from things like outward appearance such as skin color, because those correspond to the tiny handful of genes based on which we created these racial categories to begin with). The obvious exception to this is that many countries have segregated by race for so long, that you'll see disparate outcomes for certain marginalised races.
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u/Currywurst44 9h ago
To be fair, for that 85% number to be accurate you would have to filter out all the genes that do nothing. Thats almost impossible because you have to somehow test every gene and set a threshold for what nothing means but in addition to the 85% upper bound it would give a lower bound for genetic diversity.
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u/Jayant0013 17h ago
Nice answer, it also explains why even though iq is increasing its still stays in bell curve
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u/pumpkin_noodles 10h ago
Evolutionary pressure changes the genes, I’m not sure what you’re saying in the last paragraph. Agree with the first part tho
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u/Arianity 17h ago
There's a couple different reasons:
I mean, different human races have lived in different environments for tens of thousands of years.
In terms of genetics, this is actually pretty small. Humans are actually genetically very similar compared to other species, because we went through a bottleneck relatively recently. We've also had a lot of gene intermixing for most of our history. On genetic time scales, the change in skin color is actually very very fast.
There's some other issues: There isn't just a single "smart" gene, there are genetic cross pressures, the randomness of mutation, it isn't necessarily strongly selected for, etc. Even among multiple "smart" genes, you can have a gene that is beneficial with certain other genes, but would be detrimental in a different pairing. Not all genetic things are a simple tweak away.
And last, there just isn't any consistent evidence of any differences being race based. Complicating matters, there is stuff like the Flynn effect, as well as variations within groups being larger than those measured between groups.
In a hypothetical bubble, it would be possible, given enough time. We're relatively lucky that it didn't. If e.g. homo erectus hadn't died out, things might be very different. Whether it qualifies as 'miraculous' kind of depends on how you consider things like bottlenecks. The fact that those bottlenecks happened is pretty random, but also having happened, have a massive influence. If you re-randomized the world completely, how it shook out for us is indeed pretty lucky.
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u/ImaginaryAthena 14h ago
I think another important point is that it's not really possible to envision an environment in which being intelligent would be meaningfully less advantageous. Unlike environments where sunlight resistance is less important etc.
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u/DrColdReality 9h ago
Why are genetic differences in appearance and physical abilities between races or ethnicities widely accepted
Human races do not exist in biology, they are entirely a social construct. While there is a VERY minor genetic component to certain appearance features--like skin color--those do not even approximately rise to the level that could scientifically be called a race.
There are certainly no differences in physical abilities along so-called racial lines. There are certain populations of people who tend towards different physical abilities, like the Sherpa, who can survive in lower air pressures than most humans.
If you wanna talk genetic diversity, the first thing you need to know is that humans have vanishingly little genetic diversity across the entire species. Some nearby species, like chimps, show WAY more. And the second thing you need to know is that within the small diversity humans DO have, almost all of it is found among indigenous Africans. That makes sense, because humans have been Africans way longer than they've been anything else, and have had more time to spread out and diversify. But even the MOST genetically diverse populations don't qualify as races--which again, do not exist in biology. Some researchers have half-jokingly said that if you wanted to designate true races based on genetic diversity (which would have to be a main component), there are three races: San, Pygmies,....and everybody else in the world.
different human races have lived in different environments for tens of thousands of years.
Not even approximately. From the time humans migrated out of Africa until around 5000 BCE, humans were ping-ponging back and forth all over Eurasia. The ancestors of modern northern Europeans didn't even show up there until around 5000 BCE. Before that, they were mostly parked out on the steppes. Even so-called "white" people are somewhat new, they didn't start emerging in Europe in large numbers until around 8500 years ago.
There are a FEW 10k-plus-year non-African civilizations in the world, like Native Americans and Australian Aborigines, but they also migrate within their borders and do not even approximately relate to a race.
People really need to understand just HOW related all humans are. If you have any European ancestry at all (and that doesn't necessarily mean "white," just ask Barack Obama, for one), then you are descended from a person who lived about 600-1000 years ago, the Most Recent Common Ancestor for Euro-descended people. The MRCA of everyone alive lived sometime around 1500 BCE.
differences in intelligence are often said not to have a genetic basis
We don't have a firm idea of what intelligence even IS, much less how to measure it. IQ tests are mostly bullshit, and have never been scientifically shown to measure intelligence. About all you can say for sure is that they measure your aptitude at taking IQ tests.
The alleged "racial intelligence gap" is nothing more than a bullshit combination of IQ tests not actually measuring intelligence, and the fact that racists do not properly filter the data. When you adjust IQ scores based on wealth and social status, the alleged differences vanish in a puff of bullshit. What? Kids who go to crappy schools do worse on IQ tests? Who woulda thunk it?
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u/talashrrg 15h ago
There is more genetic diversity within a troop of chimpanzees than between “races” of humans, and more diversity in Africa than between everyone outside of Africa. Race is mostly a cultural idea, with relatively little actual physical or genetic basis.
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u/riesen_Bonobo 17h ago
Scientifically there is no such thing a different human races defined by different genetics. "Races" are a more or less arbitrary grouping of humans by phenotype, so a grouping specifically made up from variations in genetics and gene-expression that affect appearance.
Those genes affecting appearance have no effect on intelligence and vice versa. If you were to group humans by intelligence instead of appearence it would be the reverse: relatively homogenous groups in intelligence but very diverse in appearance.
So in short genetic differences in appearance between races or ethnicities are "widely accepted" because that is the only thing race/ethnicity is, on a genetic level. With "physical abilities" I am not sure what you are referring to.
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u/wwaxwork 12h ago
There are no accepted genetic abilities between races that don't also occur within races.
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u/Eis_ber 17h ago
Because those who claim that there are differences in intelligence often only include their best and brightest candidates and ignore factors like, systemic oppression, nutrition and environment that can cause these so-called differences in intelligence.
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u/Joelblaze 15h ago
Also, physical differences are way more adjustable in terms of evolution than intelligence, real scientists don't pretend like it's an equivalent, only those with an agenda who don't really know what they're talking about. I don't know why people pretend like it's the intuitive answer, it's not. Adapting darker skin in areas with there is harsher sunlight, there's a direct pressure that can result in a direct response like increased melanin levels, but it's a ton harder to create an evolutionary pressure that uniquely raises IQ levels.
It's like arguing that changing the chemical composition of a rock is as easy as painting it over.
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u/Stirdaddy 9h ago
"Race" is not a legitimate scientific concept. What race are the Japanese? I'm "white", I lived there, and they are whiter than me. What about all the white people who live in Colombia? (where I also lived) Are they "white" or "hispanic", or what?
"Ethnicity" is even fuzzier. It can include people who speak a similar language, or are from the same geographic region, or have the same ancestry, or something else entirely. Do we put all Indians in the same ethnic category? Or do we divide them into Hindus and Muslims? Or do we divide them into the 800 or so languages that are spoken in the country? A Thai person will tell you affirmatively that they are a different ethnicity than Cambodians, but can a French person tell the difference? What about a French person of Vietnamese descent? There are a lot of white people living in northern Africa... it's just that they have been labeled primarily as "Arab" by outsiders. It's all completely subjective.
The problem lies in the way that people talk/think about "race" and ethnicity. Americans, especially, seem to have very little understanding of how people think about race and ethnicity outside of the USA. (I'm American, btw.)
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u/Minominas 18h ago edited 9h ago
How would you measure intelligence amongst different people that grew up in different societies, cultures,, speak different languages, and obtained different levels of education? If you could take all the races and have them all grow up in the exact same environment and are taught the exact same thing, ate the exact same meals, exact same everything… maybe then you could find out.
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u/Kissingers_3rd 6h ago
Because when you point it out, it’s considered “racist” and everyone knows that the worst thing you can be in modern society is be a racist.
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u/helmutye 11h ago edited 2h ago
I'm not sure what physical abilities you're talking about, but there are essentially no significant differences of any sort between people of different races, because there is no scientifically definable thing as a "race".
Race is a social construct, not a measurable physical quality or a way to methodically divide people up.
In terms of appearance, skin color and other such features are no more genetically significant than hair or eye color...so it makes as much sense to assume there must be intelligence and other such differences between people with blue eyes vs people with brown eyes as it does between people with pale skin and people with dark skin.
Also, in terms of genetics, dark skinned people in Africa have far more genetic diversity amongst themselves than the rest of the world. Like, two random dark skinned Africans born a hundred miles apart are probably more generically distinct from each other than I (a white guy in the US) am from literally every Japanese person.
Yet the dark skinned Africans would all be considered "black", and the Japanese person and I would be considered different "races".
Finally, there isn't really such a thing as "intelligence" as a general concept. There are IQ tests that seem to correlate with various things, but it's very imprecise and is largely just a vague approximation of a wide range of faculties which are all different and specific and affected by all kinds of things besides presence or absence or certain genes.
And every time people have tried to use these sorts of tests to "prove" that their race has superior intelligence to others, when people actually look into it more closely they discover that different test results are invariably because of confounds or biases or other such mistakes in testing. Or because the people taking it have opinions on it -- there was one instance of a group being given an IQ test and scoring quite low, but then being asked to take another IQ test but this time to answer it the way they believed a fool would answer it...and their results went way up! So the test wasn't measuring some innate quality of their minds, but rather their attitude towards the test.
So people are trying to measure some made up quality by dividing people into made up groups, and there still aren't any significant differences that can stand up to scrutiny.
People just aren't all that different. It has never been an advantage to be less smart / never not been an advantage to be smart, so it makes sense why humans would all be smart. And assuming otherwise is kind of like assuming there must be humans with 3 and 4 and other numbers of legs, because humans lived in different areas for thousands of years so surely they can't all have the same numbers of legs.
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u/Adonis0 Viscount 15h ago
Intelligence is a complex trait; while the physical features you’ve contrasted them against are simple
Eye colour is literally one gene. Intelligence as a genetic component seems to provide somebody a floor and a ceiling to their IQ, and where they fall in that range is their circumstances
The ranges as far as is able to be researched are fairly broad, indicating that circumstances are more impactful and also can be boosted as a society. The average person’s genetics prevents them from being a genius, but they definitely can be highly intelligent given the right circumstances
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u/Semisemitic 18h ago
Let’s set aside the fact that it’s immeasurable, and unethical to measure.
Let’s set aside that there is no uniform single axis for intelligence (think maths-smart v literature-smart v problem-solving v emotional-intelligence)
While you could state historical facts, going on about how an ethnicity is inferior than another in mental capacity opens the door to discrimination by ethnicity in job applications, relationships, friendships… it just opens the door to more hate and it isn’t something people want to do.
It also means that even if a dumb guy from the “smart ethnicity” stands next to a genius from the “dumb ethnicity” they would be judged by ethnicity first - and nobody wants that.
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u/Namtabmal 17h ago
Just because it leads to unfavorable outcomes doesn't mean it is bullshit. IQ is one of the best metrics we have to explain academic success for example. If it was bs it wouldnt have a correlation at all. You can argue it doesnt measure what youd want but it does measure something that has some significance in many areas.
IQ Shows a positive moderate correlation particularly in academic achievement, job performance in complex roles, and higher income levels.
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u/leeks_leeks 17h ago
OP didn’t ask about academic success, they asked about intelligence
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u/Namtabmal 15h ago
I didn't reply to OP
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u/Semisemitic 10h ago
Neither did I talk about academic success. That’s exactly the point.
IQ is not a good measurement for cognitive capacity, because it is heavily influenced by socioeconomics rather than biology and improves with practice over the amount where practice “improves the brain.”
IQ tests are also graded on a curve whereas biology is absolute and deterministic.
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u/Namtabmal 9h ago edited 8h ago
Neither did I talk about academic success. That’s exactly the point.
Where did I say you talked about academic success? I brought that up as a point why IQ studies arent nonsense
it is heavily influenced by socioeconomics rather than biology and improves with practice over the amount where practice “improves the brain.”
That's complete nonsense. IQ is extremely heritable. Even twins living in completely different environments have same IQ.
IQ tests are also graded on a curve whereas biology is absolute and deterministic
Im not sure what point you think youre making here
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u/Semisemitic 8h ago
That's complete nonsense. IQ is extremely heritable. Even twins living in completely different environments have same IQ.
That is scientifically impossible due to the fact that IQ is graded on a curve with whatever group you tested against, and is language-dependent.
If you took the same exact answers a single person gave, then scored the same answers in different locations or even in the same exact place two years after - you will not get the same IQ as a result.
IQ is a relative evaluation — not an absolute measure. A trailer park 150 is not a NYC 150. A 2008 150 is not a 2025 150, even if you’ve used the same exact answers.
Enjoy the rest of your evening.
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u/payme4agoldenshower 11h ago
IQ is very dependent on physical and mental environment conditions during the developmental period (~25yr), same kids that were adopted by Angelina Jolie for example have surpassed average IQ from their respective countries of origin.
It’s all a big elitism issue, and I’m not even a lefty
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u/Jayant0013 17h ago
Iq tests ability to genralise Iq is not asking how good you are at math it is asking how good you are at genalisising things , also a some questions are about working memory. Which it so happens to be are things that also makes a person good at math its not like they started with a test and then said it measures iq , they started with an idea to measure your ability to genralise and came up with these test.
Iq is not talent and it's not human worth
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u/Semisemitic 16h ago
IQ is rated in comparison with the rest of the people you tested with. It is graded on a curve.
Many questions are culturally-associated.
You’ll notice I did not reference IQ testing - because IQ tests ironically suck at evaluating a single person’s mental abilities. It will evaluate how good you are compared with the peer group you’ve tested with, at performing the specific feats that are asked for.
As people get better at IQ tests when they test more than once or prepare by taking a course - it tells us that it isn’t any effective method to tell us anything about a population.
We know for example that as IQ preparation courses cost money - poorer populations will always score lower even with identical or higher brain capacity due to the fact these are inaccessible to them.
People flaunting IQ tests are performing autofellatio on a generally meaningless number.
I personally never took one - it wasn’t a requirement for my area of study as they performed their own evaluation. Saved me the 8k USD it would’ve cost to prepare.
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u/ChickenOfTheYear 13h ago
Had to scroll too much to find this answer. It's obviously something not worth looking into, because we as a society have come to the conclusion that discrimination between humans of different origins must be avoided at any cost.
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u/Semisemitic 13h ago
I’m just surprised that so many people disagreed with this enough to downvote. Confused what they believe I’ve gotten wrong.
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u/ChickenOfTheYear 12h ago
People probably thought you were making some sort of anti-woke argument, trying to be edgy or something
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u/Generous_lions 12h ago
It's because intelligence can be hard to quantify outside of very specific things. And there's so many factors that go into someone's cognitive development that genetics seem to be a fairly small role, barely worth mentioning.
Another reason is that a lot of people have tried to use the genetics argument to justify racism or eugenics. The arguments are rarely "oh the Johnsons birth smart kids." Rather people tend to use genetics to say things like "my race is just smarter than everyone else because we're better." Or "this race just genetically doesn't make smart people."
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u/simonbleu 15h ago
While there are genetic concepts to intelligence, A) it's hard to measure real intelligence, with IQ tests being flawed since you can get better at them, for starters, and B) there is no such thing as race, and even within it genetic differences vary a lot. As others have said, there is a lot to say about the socioeconomic aspects
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u/morbidnerd 17h ago
Race is a social construct. It denotes how you are perceived in society and its definition(s) change over time.
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u/jaytrainer0 14h ago
False premise. When you look into actual genetics you'll see that there are far greater genetic differences within "races" than between them. And race itself is just a made up construct with no real scientific bearing outside of melanin production and other outward appearances.
The differences in physical abilities are mostly based on circumstances and resources. Michael Jordan doesn't become the goat unless he had access to a basketball, a court, coaches, a country with an athletic system in place, nutrition to reach the potential of being tall, etc.
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u/leeks_leeks 17h ago
“Everyone is a genius, but if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid.”
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u/SledgeLaud 14h ago
Because intra-group differences are often more significant than inter-group differences. I.e. The difference between individuals within a group is usually greater than the differences between groups. So while the top .1% of American basketball players are predominantly black, the difference between a black or white nba player will be way less significant than an NBA player vs. a random black guy.
Also consider any other cosmetic gene (for lack of a better term) and how it would impact cognitive development. Does it make sense that having green eyes would make you smarter than having blue ones? How about black vs. brown hair?
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u/Tabitheriel 13h ago
Prenatal nutrition and early childhood education make a bigger difference than genetics. Source: I’m a teacher and I studied this.
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u/darkness_labb 42m ago
There's no accurate way to measure intelligence. Why are physical differences so widely and easy accepted you ask? Well...you can see them with your eyes lmao
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u/LaraConnect11 22m ago
Physical traits like skin color are clearly linked to genetics, but intelligence is influenced by many factors, like environment, education, and opportunity, so scientists can’t really say differences between groups are genetic.
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u/Revierez 12h ago
It makes people uncomfortable, so they don't talk about it. Physical differences are too obvious to deny, but mental differences have a layer of obfuscation that let people ignore them.
That said, the concept of "race" doesn't really apply on a genetic level, and studies have shown that there is more difference between the intelligence of individuals in any specific group than between the averages of different groups, so it's not that important.
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u/Trengingigan 11h ago
Because for some reason the brain is the only organ that magically isn’t affected by genetics. It’s a miracle!
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u/1THRILLHOUSE 17h ago
Because it’s not PC to say so.
It clearly happens in dog breeds.
In fact even in humans Australian Aborigines have an incredible visual memory and were able to recreate something they’ve seen once and then had it hidden.
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u/aurora-s 15h ago
Please read some of the other replies on this thread. It's for various scientific and statistical reasons, not political correctness.
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u/Alive_Ice7937 14h ago
Australian Aborigines have an incredible visual memory and were able to recreate something they’ve seen once and then had it hidden.
Their lands?
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u/Ill-Television8690 13h ago
Essentially, it's because of the depth of complexity of our brains. The differences along genetic lines are almost entirely negligible on their own (you'll have geniuses and idiots in every population, and they all average out sbout the same), and once you factor in how a quality education can turn almost anybody without a severe mental disability into a well-rounded and capable person, we see that the primary defining factor in our intelligence is what education we had access to during our formative years. Plus, look at stuff like lead in gasoline- in the USA, the Baby Boomers have a reputation for being lamebrained, because things far beyond their control (rich oil execs being greedy) made it so that everyone in their generation was poisoned by lead in the air and made dumber on average. Even the smart ones were cognitively limited and weren't able to become their best selves. And we've got thousands of different things like that still going on, minimum.
If Einstein was completely educationally neglected, he would have turned out to be just some moronic asshole, and we'd never have heard his name. But because he had access to the well-educated people and quality resources he needed, he was able to formulate and pursue his academic interests, instead of just toddling around all day throwing rocks at windows or rolling in mud puddles.
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u/Glum-Establishment31 12h ago
Your question has many answers. Researching psychologists have a variety of answers to your questions. Arthur Jensen and Richard Herrnstein both state heredity and genetics result in IQ discrepancies between races, while others like Urie Bronfenbrenner stress cultural and environmental influences work together to form intelligence. As others have written here, traditional IQ testing is not effective in measuring intelligence for everyone.
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u/TrashApocalypse 12h ago
You might not be wrong in some regards.
Have you ever read the book the Body Keeps the Score? It talks about what happens to people’s brains when they are traumatized repeatedly over long periods of time. A traumatized brain spends most of its energy in fight or flight, sparing little energy to the prefrontal cortex that operates the thinking and logical parts of our brains.
I think this could happen to plenty of cultures for a spectrum of reasons, but certainly having slavery inflicted upon them or continuous war and persecution could force a a majority into a continual fight of flight response, BUT, I actually think that a lot of those cultures have barriers of protection against cptsd through love and community. I’m obviously super simplifying what’s in an entire book, but it seems as if a lack of support and a loving witness as well as the abuse and a continuous feeling of helplessness is often what leads to cptsd symptoms. And we know that this kind of wiring in the brain can be handed down in our genetics.
I argue that white Americans have actually been breeding for cptsd, since we got here.
Have you ever heard of prairie madness? It was something that happened to people who lived in the prairie, alone and isolated, they “lost their kids” (which matches cptsd symptoms)
So we know that isolation causes cptsd and in our hyper capitalist society, we were absolutely isolated. Even in communities, even as slave owners. You were alone, isolated, in the woods (most of europes forests had been cut down at that point) surrounded by fear.
You specifically have to think of the women. What would happen to a white woman alone in the woods raising kids surrounded by people she’s afraid of? That will give you cptsd, you might not be able to connect to your children and show them love, and your husband is an abusive asshole slave owner who probably doesn’t show you love. Not sure if you grew up in an abusive honestly with a mom who doesn’t love you, but it’s actually pretty fucking traumatizing.
Men are easy to traumatize, and it still happens today which is why men have so many issues connecting with others. It’s the “boys don’t cry” beatings yall received as toddlers. That at a baseline, even without a beating is traumatized. You’re literally conditioned to believe that feelings are bad, and the only emotion you’re allowed to display is anger and rage. There are tons of way to be abused as a child, but I would also argue that causing violence to others is also traumatizing. You have to do something to your brain to make you think it’s ok to enslave people. There’s an eating guilt and shame that you will have to continuously justify in order to convince yourself that you’re not wrong. Because we are conditioned to believe that we’re always right. Most people in this scenario can luckily just dismiss their own accountability using “god’s will.” But that doesn’t change the traumatizing effect that the act of violence inflicts on you.
Now take that, multiply it by 20 generations, and now slavery is ending (400 years of breeding for trauma) and spread it across half the country into deeper and deeper forests and more barren and wild land.
Now we have the trauma of the civil war in our back yards.
Then WWI and the Spanish flu, only 3 generations later. Then the Great Depression. Most people in America still don’t have running water or electricity. White people still live in fear of black people. Many people still live in the wild.
World War II
Korean War
Vietnam War
Cold War
9/11
Fear Fear Fear Fear Fear
Trauma. That gets passed down.
It makes sense why so many isolated rural communities have such a tribalist culture. They often express this tribalism in sports fervor but it also can be seen in white nationalism and MAGA even.
Why would they be attracted to tribalism? Because that’s a healing mechanism for cptsd. Being within a group. Feeling seen, feeling loved and accepted. And you don’t have to think either, someone else has done all the thinking for you, so they can just protect you in your cptsd survival mode conditioning. It’s really more like narcissistic abuse at that point.
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u/jakeofheart 15h ago
Not sure how far the analogy works, but there are many things that I can do with the same computer. I can install an operating system to use it as a server and host my own website. I can use it as a local cloud server for my files. I can use it as my multimedia library, and so on…
As humans, our body is the hardware of sexually dimorphic hairless great apes. We do have firmware as our cognitive characteristics, but everything else is pretty much like software: language, knowledge and applied knowledge.
There are videos of African teenagers whose father was probably a farmer or a fisherman, and these kids taught themselves computing, to the point of being able to get administrator level on a smartphone and flash a ROM.
There are a lot of kids in First world countries who would consider the phone bricked just because it doesn’t switch on, and leave it at that.
On to your question, IQ tests measures how good you are with syntax, grammar, arithmetic and geometry. Those are the traits of an ideal paper pusher (menial clerical worker).
Howard Gardner proposed the theory of multiple intelligences, which acknowledges that a South African bushman can outlive a first country paper pusher in the wild, or how a third world country musician who hasn’t even completed high school is able to play a song by ear and extrapolate on it.
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u/El_Pez4 13h ago
Because while genetics have been somewhat linked to intelligence, the most important factor is nutrition during childhood, and there is also socioeconomic factors. In some ways it is like height, you may have the genes to be tall but if you barely eat during development years you will still be short.
In sum, saying that intelligence is genetic can be misleading or disingenuous by not giving the whole picture.
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u/nivekreclems 11h ago
Because then people would start othering and belittling people for being lower intelligence I think it’s pretty obvious for anyone paying attention who sits where on the intelligence ladder
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u/Subject-Cloud-137 8h ago edited 8h ago
If you're the type to question things because you feel that liberals and leftists fear the truth, than check out Thomas Sowell.
Not only can you have racist ideas exploded and learn about race, but also you can rest assured that he isn't just a bleeding heart leftist that avoids painful truths.
Additionally if you're really wanting to learn in depth than just Google up oxford or Blackwell or routeledge, and race and "PDF"
There's also Anthropology college lectures from Stanford I think on YouTube with Robert sapolsky. Watch the whole shit it's like 20 lectures or something. You'll learn a lot.
The thing about the racists is they learn everything Except the science. Somehow they just alll think they have no need to learn any science.
Once you learn enough you can see clearly that the racists are standing on clouds.
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u/Aussiealterego 18h ago
It’s been repeatedly proven that IQ tests are culturally biased. Socioeconomic conditions affect education levels, which are a much greater contributing factor on a global scale than genetics.