Neocons like David Frum have ruined the Republican Party. A neocon is a liberal who likes war, at least if the war is deemed to be beneficial to Israel. On domestic policy neocons are indistinguishable from Democrats. Like the Democrats they favor big spending government programs — such as Bush’s No Child Left Behind law, which greatly expanded the role of the federal government in our local schools, and Bush’s unfunded, budget busting Medicare prescription drug program. Neocons are totally unconcerned about monster deficits. Like Democrats they favor the anti-white discrimination known as affirmative action. Like Democrats they favor open borders. Neocons believe that we must not only have legal immigration well in excess of one million people a year but must not enforce immigration law at all, and instead let 20 million illegal aliens stay here forever. Of course they do not object to Israel’s Jew-0nly immigration policy. Neocons have no respect for our Constitution. The Patriot Act was written before the 9/11 attacks, it was waiting in the wings for just such an event. Congress passed it in the panic following the attacks, and as usual few of them bothered to read the bill. The Patriot Act shreds the Bill of Rights, and only non-neocon conservatives like Ron Paul seem to care.

If recognizing average differences among races is racist, then acknowledging reality is racist. So we have two choices: Lie in public or be called a racist. Most people take the easy way out and take the first choice. But look where they choose to live and where they send their children to be educated and you will find that most people who swear up and down that all races are the same really believe otherwise. The Clintons could have saved a lot of money on their house had they moved into diverse Mount Vernon or Hempstead, New York. Instead they paid an outrageous sum to live in lily white Chappaqua. The Clintons are Democrats, but neocons do the same.

As a whole the American electorate now has a higher percentage of voters than tend toward feeling versus thinking. That might not be wussification: what word would feel right to you?

Should have read, Does the average IQ of a country correlate very strongly with GDP?

Control for IQ and blacks to nearly or just as well as whites on many socio-economic variables. Now that’s strange, isn’t it? Whites with IQ’s of 85 do awful in life compared to someone with an IQ of 100. But… but… *scratches head*

Ask yourself, Does the average IQ of a country correlate very strongly with IQ? If so, should that matter as far as immigration policy is concerned?

Hoste strikes me as anti-free trade, anti-american and probably an anti-Semite. However, there is no question that he is correct, as are the posters Galtonian and M Pearle, on the issue of racial group differences. You don’t have to look into the literature and science very hard to find out how robust and significant the differences are, and how the environmental explanations fail time and time again. Calling people “racist” for being minimally acquainted with this knowledge is absurd. However, as a political matter, it’s wise to shut-up about it publicly while supporting the correct policies.

Second, even were it true (and I assert this only as a mental exercise–I do not believe it is), the proposition that there are real heritable differences in mental ability between different groups of individuals would have zero applicability in the real world. The most unabashed proponent of the theory would find it nearly impossible to assert with a straight face that exceptional ability may NOT be found in individuals of any given group. So if we were to somehow discover that people of Irish descent were slightly more likely, on average, to test poorly, what would that actually mean in policy terms? Would high testing Irish-descended people like me be somehow penalized therefore? If so, why? If we are trying to find the smartest “race” on the planet (even realizing that the laws of statistics require it will necessarily contain a large number of dolts), what will we do once we find it? Put them in charge? Because they somehow need the help? Of course, the same question of applicability could be raised if we were to try to establish the least-gifted “race,” assuming one existed. Given that we don’t come even close to educating children to the limits of their ability now, it is surely unnecessary to worry that we may be educating some of them past their limits.

Once upon a time, it was a “progressive” view to subscribe to eugenics. The conservatives of the day were right to oppose it. It would be more than a shame if some few conservatives revived the fallacies that underlay that movement.

Individuals within a population vary. The point is that groups have different averages, which leads to considerable differences at the upper levels. For instance, the difference between the tallest man and the shortest man is greater than the average difference between the heights of men and women. However, if you’re looking at people above 6 feet tall a greater proportion will be men.

Similarly, with differences in iq group averages you see differences in the proportion from respective groups at certain levels. An example is Ashkenazi Jews. Psychologists and educational researchers have pegged their average IQ at 107.5 to 115. That’s only modestly higher than the overall European average of 100, but the gap is large enough to produce a huge difference in the proportion of at the top end. When a group’s average IQ is 100, the percentage of people above 140 is 0.4%; when the average is 110, the rate is 2.3%. So you get a higher proportion in academia or the professions.

A common issue is complaints about a lack of non asian minorities in certain professions or being hired at colleges. But if groups have different averages, then you would expect unequal proportions at the higher end. This can be parsimoniously explained by average group differences due to different evolutionary paths over the past 50,000 years (ie. what James Watson noted in his book ‘Avoid Boring People’).

sinz54 ,

This is the Lewontin Fallacy, explained by the Cambridge geneticist AWF Edwards in 2003. It is discussed here by Steve Hsu:

“Further technical comment: you may have read the misleading statistic, spread by the intellectually dishonest Lewontin, that 85% percent of all human genetic variation occurs within groups and only 15% between groups. The statistic is true, but what is often falsely claimed is that this breakup of variances (larger within group than between group) prevents any meaningful genetic classification of populations. This false conclusion neglects the correlations in the genetic data that are revealed in a cluster analysis. See here for a simple example which shows that there can be dramatic group differences in phenotypes even if every version of every gene is found in two groups — as long as the frequency or probability distributions are distinct.”

Geneticists such as as Neil Risch and Hua Tang have shown that groups consistently fall into clusters that reflect the traditional ethnic groups:

” Numerous recent studies using a variety of genetic markers have shown that, for example, individuals sampled worldwide fall into clusters that roughly correspond to continental lines, as well as to the commonly used self-identifying racial groups: Africans, European/West Asians, East Asians, Pacific Islanders, and Native Americans (Bowcock et al. 1994; Calafell et al. 1998; Rosenberg et al. 2002)…

Subjects identified themselves as belonging to one of four major racial/ethnic groups (white, African American, East Asian, and Hispanic) and were recruited from 15 different geographic locales within the United States and Taiwan. Genetic cluster analysis of the microsatellite markers produced four major clusters, which showed near-perfect correspondence with the four self-reported race/ethnicity categories.”

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1196372/

As Hsu discusses:

“There is no strong evidence yet for specific gene variants (alleles) that lead to group differences (differences between clusters) in behavior or intelligence, but progress on the genomic side of this question will be rapid in coming years, as the price to sequence a genome is dropping at an exponential rate.

What seems to be true (from preliminary studies) is that the gene variants that were under strong selection (reached fixation) over the last 10k years are different in different clusters. That is, the way that modern people in each cluster differ, due to natural selection, from their own ancestors 10k years ago is not the same in each cluster — we have been, at least at the genetic level, experiencing divergent evolution.

In fact, recent research suggests that 7% or more of all our genes are mutant versions that replaced earlier variants through natural selection over the last tens of thousands of years. There was little gene flow between continental clusters (“races”) during that period, so there is circumstantial evidence for group differences beyond the already established ones (superficial appearance, disease resistance). ”

http://infoproc.blogspot.com/2008/01/no-scientific-basis-for-race.html