At 8:30 PM 12/13/1996, Timothy C. May wrote:
(For the curious, I am persuaded that there are minimal differences in "intelligence" between the several or many races, but that cultural and sociological factors strongly affect upbringing, learning, interest in doing well in school, ability on standardized tests, success in business matters, and so on.)
The question is certainly interesting scientifically. Some Africans exhibit skills which are not found elsewhere. For example, in some African societies, I am told, there are people who can do things like play a drum with the left hand to 13 beats a measure and do something like 17 beats a measure with the right hand. Those who aren't amazed by this should try doing three beats on the left hand with two on the right. Call me when you master it. ;-) If you lived in a society where this skill was considered an important component of social success, most of us would appear to be retarded. (Consider, for example, the ancient Chinese civilization. Appointment into the imperial bureaucracy occured only after the applicants passed elaborate tests regarding their knowledge and interpretation of poetry. That was the entire qualification.) It has been claimed that African societies have never been "civilized" in the sense of developing large bureaucracies and cities. When many people make this claim there is an implication that the more with it peoples did this. But is that so reasonable? Read reports of life in European cities in the 18th century, before running water and before sewage systems. Give me the country any day! Many of the readers of this list are anarchistically inclined. When we hear that African societies have tended to be anarchistic, we should applaud their wisdom and insight. Perhaps these people could teach the rest of us a few things. (And maybe teach Hilary Clinton a few things. Is there a history of welfare states in Africa, or did they practice voluntary anarchistic communal charity on the level of villages?) It is not out of the question that once the human genome is decoded and its relationship with human intelligence understood that we will find that Africans beat out everyone else. (Incidentally, I question the claim that African societies never developed cities and bureacracies. The Egyptians are the most prominent example. Mathematically adept and literate they prospered for a couple thousand years. A better run than the Romans managed! We tend to think of Egyptians as being sort of like Europeans. I believe this is because Europeans invented Egyptology. Excuse me for pointing out the obvious, but Egypt is in Africa. What is more, if you study Egyptian statuary, you will find many examples of distinctly African looking royalty. Also, I know that cities like Timbuktoo were centers of Muslim learning and were large enough to have streets and houses. We may know little about them because Europeans were not allowed to visit, and also for racist reasons.) Scientific questions aside, it isn't clear why the racial link to intelligence matters. What are we going to do differently if it turns out that, on average, for genetic reasons, Albanians are less quick on the uptake than other people? The link between intelligence and success is not at all clear. We generally consider mathematicians and computer programmers to be smart, but in terms of total life competence, large numbers of these people live less than ideally. There are many instances in which I prefer to hire somebody who is less intelligent, but better equipped to play on the team, better organized, or just less of a primadonna. The eugenicists propose murder. This doesn't make any sense at all. We all have friends who are both smarter and dumber than ourselves, yet we don't plot their murder. Intelligence is just an excuse for what these people really want to do. If God came down and told us that there was no genetic basis for intelligence, next week there would be some other reason for the same policy. On the flip side are those who want to help the unfortunate with the time and labor of others. A racial link to intelligence will not increase my sympathy for such schemes. The upshot is: If you respect the rights of others, it doesn't matter. Now for some entertainment. Oliver Wendell Holmes, when he was a judge in Virginia, ordered the forcible sterilization of several young women. The state would wait until they became ill and then when they were admitted to a hospital, they were sterilized under the guise of giving them some other operation. Holmes claimed that the grandmothers of the women were imbeciles, their mothers were imbeciles, and that they were imbeciles. His great line was "Three generations of imbeciles are enough!" Curiously, it turns out that the word "imbecile" was a euphemism for "illegitimate". Know your doctor! Red Rackham