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u/gbd_628 · 1 pointr/SlaughteredByScience

Haven't you ever wondered why the scientific consensus is the opposite of your claims?

For starters, IQ isn't a great all-around measure of intelligence. It does accurately predict social outcomes and is highly correlated with many intellectual and academic accomplishments, but it has severe flaws. Take for example the Flynn Effect: previous generations had much lower IQ scores than today, when normalized to be on the same scale. The rapid increase of IQ globally (Great Britain saw an increase of 15 points in 70 years) cannot be explained by any plausible genetic explanation—the increase has simply been too fast. Genetic effects couldn't have spread throughout the entire population. There is also no plausible argument that general intelligence has improved by that much. If it had, 40% of the British population a century ago would be mentally damaged by today's standards.

The reasons for the Flynn Effect are unclear. A rise in standardized testing and formal schooling appears to be at least part of it. What is clear is that when comparing people from wildly different environments, IQ is a poor measure of general intelligence. (When comparing people from similar environments, it does remarkably well. The reasons for this are still being studied.)

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Even if IQ were a good measure of intelligence (which it isn't), that doesn't mean IQ score differences are genetic. Indeed, we know for a fact that they aren't.

Take the Burakumin of Japan. They are an ostracized class and have been for centuries; due to complex religious/spiritual/social reasons, if you have an ancestor who engaged in an "unclean" profession (e.g., a prostitute, a butcher, an actor, etc.), you too are unclean and are socially inferior. The important thing is that the class is genetically identical to the rest of the Japanese population. You can't tell the difference by looking, which is why the Burakumin were forced to get tattoos, and why corporations started keeping lists of who was Burakumin so they knew who not to hire. Today, while those lists are banned, they are still socially stigmatized, and the group forms the ranks of the Japanese mafia, with the tattoos becoming a source of pride.

Anyway, the average have an IQ of the Burakumin is 10-15 points lower than the average Japanese person. See here. This is the same as the gap between white Americans and black Americans. Importantly, both gaps have been shrinking. Most interestingly, the Japanese gap completely disappears among immigrants to the United States—the people here don't know that they're supposed to discriminate against one of the groups.

Similar stories of vanishing IQ gaps appear all over the field. Adopting someone at three years old from Sub-Saharan Africa into a European family cuts the IQ gap by 15 points., cutting the IQ gap in half. The remaining gap, to reiterate, is the same sized that is known to be caused by discrimination. And note further that this is without any improved pre-natal care, which is known to be extremely important to a child's health.

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Finally, this is all assuming that "race" is a thing, scientifically speaking, which it isn't. To draw an analogy, it's like constellations. Yes, some stars are closer to others. But the physical differences have little connection with how they appear in the sky, any anyways are not clustered into distinct groups. The stars and the distances between them exist; the pictures only exist in your head. I mean, the idea of "whiteness" isn't even self-consistent and varies across time. Are Poles white? Are Russians? Are Italians? Are Southern-Europeans? Are North-Africans and Middle-Easterners? Are Indians? Are Jews? Are Spaniards? Are Mexicans? Are Chileans? (The last few are the most hilarious currently—the jumps required to assert that South Americans are genetically inferior to "us", but "us" includes the Spanish and Portuguese, are hilarious.)

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Race doesn't exist the way you think it does. Intelligence might, based on the g-factor (scores in completely different aptitude tests are correlated, suggesting a legitimate "general intelligence"), but IQ is not a good measure of it cross-populations. Intelligence is not a metric of moral standing; the Jews aren't naturally the superiors of everyone else just because they have higher IQ. And IQ differences are entirely explainable by environmental factors.