Was a Bill Maher who said (and this was many years ago), I'm paraphrasing - "black people, you know those morons who invented jazz!"?

As a musician, I've gotta say got that from swing to cool jazz to bebop to fusion...I have quite a few black heroes and role models and it takes my kind of genius to come up with that stuff. I suspect perceived deficiencies one might see in black people have to do with economic conditions, possible nutritional deficiencies, generations of poverty and oppression and lack of opportunity rather than a lack of brain power.

It seems like where ever and whenever black people have been "allowed" to compete (in the USA, basing this only on my observations) and when they were given the means to do so they've done just fine if not excelled. These opportunities start at a young age though, and too many disappointments and frustrations might lead to a life of depression and affect later expectations in life. That would affect a person of any race.

There have been many biased geneticists which very questionable methodology and intent who came before this guy.

Professor Dimond? Please.

I would say all academics in the area TOTALLY disagree with his views.

He never brings up irrefutable facts such as brain volume being positivey correlated with intelligence.

Blacks -> 1250-1350 cubic centermers (cc)
Whites -> 1350-1400cc
Orientals-> 1400-1450cc


Mountains of studies has confirmed this. Cancelling out health, socio-economic factors and so on, blacks are overall less genetically predispositioned to be intelligent and whites compared with orientals. Go lookup r-K strategy.


politcally correct is all it is, not correct in any correct sense.

[edit on 14/3/09 by cheeser]

What the hell is so surprising about this claim when:
A) all the black people I've ever known to study hard have been accused by their peers of playing the White man's game.
b) all the black people I've ever known have always chosen to attend a sporting event over a chance to advance themselves and getting a good education.
Damned if you do and don't.

They obviously have the ability, but the priorities are not quite there because of peer pressure.

In a continent that has been raped and pillaged for centuries for its natural resources, where poverty is abundent I cannot see that anyone could expect a peoples to be anything but less educated. That is not to say that Africans are not as intelligent as the rest of the globe, just the majority are ill informed and uneducated.
As for Dr Watson he claimed genes responsible for creating differences in human intelligence could be found within a decade. So he hasn't found this gene yet he just reckons by the time he is 89 it will have been located. Fair play to him I will be more inclined to listen to the old bigot when he has something of substance to say rather than the mumblings of a pensioner who doesn't appear to have much evidence.
By the way if in ten years he can still find his bus pass and tie his own shoes without stopping trice to ask "where are we going today?" I will be impressed yet further still!

i wonder if James Watson ever heard of Neil deGrasse Tyson... Sorry to say, but a geneticist has nothing on an astrophysicist

but in all seriousness, there is no correlation between race and intelligence, you can take an Ethiopian child and put him in a better environment that can give him/her the opportunities that most of us take for granted such as an education and career, and he will be as successful as anyone else. It's ridiculous how there are soo many people who still think skin color means anything other than a human body's way to adapt to the attitude they live on to ensure higher chances of survival. it just blows my mind

If one were to place an average (!) white person in the midst of indigenous tribes in South America or Africa or Australia or Haiti or Siberia, I wonder how the intelligence game would play out or would the white man's mind gbe boggled?

I recall reading an article about a white journalist who participated in a certain indigenous vine ingesting ritual to find himself with his loin cloth askew confronting a jaguar!

How intelligent was it for white dominated cultures:

to grow so obese that they cannot reach the ground to grow their food
when the SHTF?

to release the nuclear genie

to allow genetically modified food to contaminate the gene pool

to take photos of you sunbathing in your yard from a satellite?

and invent surveillance technology that can play voices in one's head?

(put voice to skull technology in your browser - the January 14, 2007 Washington Post
Magazine 5000 word article, Mind Games, by Sharon Weinberger is a good starter)

Dancing, singing, drumming, chanting, sharing sacrament and creating force fields that DO influence nature and feasting, the elements of SOUL, are too often missing in middle class white cultures dominated by spectator sports and video games.

Just what is intelligence anyway if we have not learned how to keep our homes, own
our energy systems and control our food futures?

Just how intelligent is it to shop at WalMart when 25-50% of items bought there end up being broke or discarded within a year of purchase - yet WalMart will probably be a survivor when more business giants collapse?

[edit on 14-3-2009 by EarthShine]

Originally posted by Daedalus24
i wonder if James Watson ever heard of Neil deGrasse Tyson... Sorry to say, but a geneticist has nothing on an astrophysicist

but in all seriousness, there is no correlation between race and intelligence, you can take an Ethiopian child and put him in a better environment that can give him/her the opportunities that most of us take for granted such as an education and career, and he will be as successful as anyone else. It's ridiculous how there are soo many people who still think skin color means anything other than a human body's way to adapt to the attitude they live on to ensure higher chances of survival. it just blows my mind

You are completely incorrect, have you even researched the issue? or is this just your opinion? please provide a scientific reference that supports your claim of "there is no correlation between race and intelligence".

Life in temperate and cold climate in Asia and Europe is harder to survive than that in tropical and subtropical climate in Africa, where humans lived most of their evolutionary history. Food is scarcer, and shelter and clothing more difficult to construct properly, in colder than in warmer climate. Cognitive demands placed by the need to survive harsh winters in cold climate select for higher intelligence, and thus general intelligence is expected to evolve and become higher in colder climates. In this view, the colder the climate, the higher general intelligence evolves.

Satoshi Kanazawa, 2007 'Temperature and evolutionary novelty as forces behind the evolution of general intelligence'

You are WRONG, do some research.

Wow, nature vs nurture again, if these unintelligent Africans had a proper schooling system the results of this guys tests would be much different.

Here is a list of types of people I have met that are more intelligent than me.
Black, White, Asian.

And a list of people I've met that I was more intelligent than
Black, White, Asain.

Some people are just plain stupid, some have expensive schooling, I think the differences in the genes that control intelligence between the races are so tiny that they can be easily be bridged by a good education.

Originally posted by spitefulgod
Wow, nature vs nurture again, if these unintelligent Africans had a proper schooling system the results of this guys tests would be much different.

Here is a list of types of people I have met that are more intelligent than me.
Black, White, Asian.

And a list of people I've met that I was more intelligent than
Black, White, Asain.

Some people are just plain stupid, some have expensive schooling, I think the differences in the genes that control intelligence between the races are so tiny that they can be easily be bridged by a good education.

There is no need to state the obvious, intelligence is normally distributed as the graph below demonstrates.

White peoples have a normally distributed intelligence that has a mean, or peak at 100, where orientals are slightly higher (105) and blacks are lower than 100.




You will have blacks, whites and orientals with IQ's over 140. however as a percentile of the population, blacks will have the least and orientals will have the most.

You will have blacks, whites and orientals with IQ's under 60. however as a percentile of the each race, blacks will have the most and orientals will have the least.

This is taking out socioeconomic, education, health and any other "nurture".

Look my above post of the average cranial capacities of difference races, look it up yourself on wikipedia, its not speculation but fact.

[edit on 14/3/09 by cheeser]

I watched a Documentary on Eugenics ( I will try and relocate it, think it was on tv links)and found the part that dealt with America to be very interesting.

They were conducting tests to see if there was a real difference between races in relation to intelligence. They had to suppress some of their findings about black people because guess what... the black children being tested were scoring higher than white children in intelligence tests. They could not let that information out because it ridiculed their plans of making the white race the most intelligent.

I think that intelligence has a genetic relation but I also think that the nurture side is of great importance.

In response to the details posted about brain size, was Einsteins brain not smaller than normal? and do females not have smaller brains than males? ( I think girls are very smart on the average).

I have an above normal IQ and can you tell what race I am?

I think that why some people think like this is because of the Ignorance of other races not just African, South American etc. But all civilizations have testaments to their intelligence, Inca, Maya, Zulu, Indian, Chinese, Japanese, European to be very general about it.

I think the question of intelligence should be aimed at the Empire builders of yesterday and today that destroy knowledge and culture different from their own. Mathematics, Astronomy and numerous other sciences were invented and propagated by non white races.

There are more similarities between the races as opposed to differences, like superficial skin color.

I don't know if this has anything to do with race, skin color. I think there are equally exceptional, as well as inept people, to be found within all races.

More than likely this may have to do with the environment. I mean, less intelligent people may find it more easy to survive and breed and pass on their genetics within areas where climate is more hospitable, whereas those that live within inhospitable areas where, for example winters are harsh and require more smarts to survive, tend to weed out the less capable genes.

This would be no different than a socialist society vs. a non-socialist society. In a socialist society where the inept are feed and kept alive to continue to breed more of their kind, within a non-socialist society the inept tend to do a lot less better and die off.

All of this seems to be environmental to me, not race or skin color. I'm sure you'll find equally smart and inept people within all races and cultures, and any differences in their overall numbers and percentages simply have to do with how easy it is for the less smarter genes to survive within their environment. I mean, the dumb will freeze and starve to death in the far north where winters are harsh, whereas they may prosper and multiply in the more tropical environments where you can run around naked your whole life and there is always food to be found growing on year round plants. The same with socialist societies vs. non-socialist societies.

First thing we need to figure out what is a race


What is considered a Black person

Nubian, Ethiopian, Ndebele, M'Baka, Hadendoa etc.

So this person is telling me the measured the brains of everylast ethnic group within Africa please.

What is considered a White person

Germanic People, Celts, Basque, Welsh, Arabs, Mediterranean people etc have all had there brains measured.

Less than a hundred years ago Arabs and people from the Mediterranean were not considered white. They were added when populations got low

The Basque people of Spain and France were never the same as the other Europeans they live around they look nothing alike.


What is considered Asian
Oriental, Indian, Polynesian, Afghani, Mongol etc.



Where do Native Americans, Inuits, Aborigines, Pacific Islanders fall within this.


Then you have things like Caucasian which Whites, Indians and Iranians all fall into but if you ask most people what is Caucasian they will say white.

What about people of mixed backgrounds where would they fall along these lines if said argument is true people of mixed background would be more or less intelligent.


Can we prove that the intelligence of the people whos brains were used were not interracial or are of just one race because that could be looked upon as having something to do with it.


Plus we need to have some blind test done where the person looking at the brain knows nothing about the person, people will be bias against people who are not in the same ethnic group, profession field, culture etc. can we determine none of these have taken place.


Has this person seen the brain from two unrelated people of every ethnic group around the group if yes I'll accept the results if not then it is a not a proven fact on who are the most intelligent. Brain size may have something to do with it but that is not everything. The effects of the environment your health, your surroundings etc all have there place in the problem also.



Then you have to ask what makes a person/race intelligent. Every group of people do not desire the same thing. Some of the inventions that were invented could be looked at as useless by the others because of the fact we don't need it or why over make things complicated.


If we are going on a European definition of intelligence that may not fit with what is considered intelligent in others areas around earth.


The same way you can look at the Amish they live today but they don't need to use the inventions that are used today does that make them less intelligent.



Just because you don't do something does not mean you don't know it. I know things I would never do or tell anyone I know how to do but does that mean I'm dumb about it no.



The only to really find out would be to get together people that are urbanized and live how humans do in cities around the world, plus people that live in tribes and villages and get opinions on what makes a person smart.


You can say anyone is dumb because the lack the knowledge that someone else knows but does that make it true no because they may know things you don't also.


For example the different herbs and plants that can be used to heal different sicknesses what do you think are the racial borders on that I guarantee I could pull the average person that is white and the average person out of a isolated tribe in the middle of the jungle in South America, Africa and Asia and they all will know more than the white person when it comes to this.


Because they all have been around said plant herb and somewhere down the line someone may have used it touched it etc and figured out what happens when you use it.


Some people maybe more intelligent at

using nature (plants, herbs, vegetables, etc)
some at building things based on products of nature.





The whole thing is that this is not a one side fits all category, the same thing could be said for other body parts as well which aide the functions of humans.


Different groups are adapted for different things however they all can be a forms of intelligence so no one group is more intelligent as a whole but some are just more intelligent at certain things

You can have people look at any group other than theirs and say the other is dumb does that make it so no.

Intelligence is a perception of what one thinks is the correct way of whatever, something can be dumb to one people because they do not know what is going on but not to another.

Intelligence is what aides a person in doing anything something may not be intelligent to you but that does not make it so to others.




[edit on 14-3-2009 by jatsc]

...irrefutable facts such as brain volume being positivey correlated with intelligence.

Blacks -> 1250-1350 cubic centermers (cc)
Whites -> 1350-1400cc
Orientals-> 1400-1450cc

Mountains of studies has confirmed this.

Then, the title of this thread is inaccurate. To be accurate it would be:

White and Black people 'less intelligent' scientist claims.

But, would that be as controversial?