Nowadays there is (growing ?) dogmatism and censorship in the Western world, extending even into the domain of science itself. In an attempt to establish the utopian and irrealistic ideals of human brotherhood and equality, many facts have been hidden, many scientists have been harassed, many truths have been distorted. Political correctness is now an enemy of any science that explores human nature. [Neo-Lysenkoism, IQ, and the press, Kings of Men: A Special issue of the journal INTELLIGENCE about Arthur Jensen, Conway Zirkle and the Persistence of "Marxian Biology" in the Western Social Sciences, Ethnicity and Ideology, Ideology and Censorship in Behavior Genetics, Raymond B. Cattell and the Fourth Inquisition, Foreword to David Duke's book "My Awakening: A Path to Racial Understanding", The New Enemies of Evolutionary Science]
IQ, heredity, race... they are taboo subjects in which the public opinion differs substantially from scientific opinion. The public is given the impression(through the medias) that IQ does not mean anything, that intelligence is determined by how good your socio-economic background is, that the races are genetically precisely geometrically identical and equal, that the racial differences in ability are only the results of environmental causes such as racism. However, the facts and scientific opinion are far from this. IQ does have a practical significance, IQ is not distributed equally among individuals and groups, intelligence is importantly determined by heredity, IQ tests are not biased against minorities, etc.
IQ correlates significantly with many practical social variables, such as educational achievement, financial status, general success in life, job performance, crime(inverse correlation) [IQ Will Put You in Place, Mainstream Science on Intelligence,The Consequences of Variable Intelligence, Intelligence and Social Policy: A Special Issue of the Multidisciplinary Journal INTELLIGENCE, About IQ and the 'g' factor - an excerpt from David Duke's book "My Awakening: A Path to Racial Understanding, The G Factor: The Book and the Controversy], so as to suggest that IQ really is a good measure of intelligence as it is generally understood, or at least that whatever it is that is measured by IQ tests, it has a lot of practical significance in social life. For example, lawyers, engineers, and chemists virtually never have IQs below 100. Moreover, the various types of mental ability tests correlate significantly with each other. This further suggests that there really is such as thing as intelligence, and that it appears not to be made up of several independant mechanisms(or if it so, they happen to mysteriously correlate). This correlation of all the different cognitive abilities is called the 'g' factor[Kings of Men: a Special Issue of the journal INTELLIGENCE about Arthur Jensen, A Critique of Gould by Jensen].
IQ , the 'g' factor, or intelligence, is highly heritable. Indeed, the estimates of the heritability of IQ range from 0.4 to 0.8, with 0.7 probably being the most common estimate. Also, the 'g' factor correlates only weakly with parental socioeconomic status(refuting the theory that intelligence is essentially "environmental") - an estimated correlation of 0.22(and it is quite probable that a significant part of that correlation is caused by the fact that a high intelligence correlates with socioeconomic status, and that the children are likely to have an IQ closer to that of their parents, at least statistically speaking - in other words, the reason why socioeconomic status correlates with the intelligence of children is not exclusively that a good socioeconomic environment has a positive environmental effect on intelligence, but also that good socioeconomic status may in part have been caused by high intelligence, which in turn is likely to have been passed onto the children in question, at least to some extent). The 'g' factor appears to be even more heritable than IQ. [Mainstream Science on Intelligence, The Limited Plasticity of Human Intelligence, The Consequences of Variable Intelligence, Intelligence and Social Policy: A Special Issue of the Multidisciplinary Journal INTELLIGENCE, The G Factor: The Book and the Controversy, A Substantial Inheritance,Sources of Human Psychological Differences, The Role of Inheritance in Behavior].
Individuals and populations(including the different races of mankind) differ in intelligence, which is exactly what was to be expected from the observation that intelligence is substantially determined by genetic factors. Within a group, the intelligence is distributed following a bell curve. That is, most people have an average intelligence, with a few individuals on the left part of the curve with a lower IQ than the average, and a few individuals on the right part of the curve, with an IQ above the average[IQ Will Put You in Place, About IQ and the 'g' Factor - an excerpt from David Duke's book "My Awakening: A Path to Racial Understanding", Intelligence and Social Policy: A Special Issue of the Multidisciplinary Journal Intelligence, The Consequences of Variable Intelligence, Kings of Men: a Special Issue of the journal INTELLIGENCE about Arthur Jensen]. Between the races, there is also an average difference in intelligence. Sub-Saharan Africans have an average IQ of 70 to 75, all Negroids: 80 to 85, Caucasians: 100 to 103, East Asians: about 103 to 106, Jews: about 117. The IQ distribution is also "narrower" in some races, such as the East Asians who have a smaller standard deviation than the Caucasians.[Kings of Men: a Special Issue of the journal INTELLIGENCE about Arthur Jensen, Professor Shockley's Experiment, Race Differences in Intelligence: a Global Perspective, Why Race Matters: a Review and Extension, Chapter 12 of the book The 'g' Factor, About Racial Differences: an Excerpt from David Duke's Book "My Awakening: A Path to Racial Understanding", Intelligence and Social Policy: a Special Issue of the Multidisciplinary Journal Intelligence, The G Factor: The Book and the Controversy]
However, it should be understood that the human races are not platonic classifications or mutually exclusive groups. There is much overlap between the groups, and it is a good guess that the largest genetic difference is within a group, not between groups. Thus, although African-Americans have an average IQ of about 85, and East Asians of about 106, this does not mean that it is impossible to find African-Americans with an IQ above 106, or East Asians with an IQ below 85. It only means that some races have more individuals with a high IQ than other races. It must always be kept in mind that racial differences are simply statistical differences in gene frequencies(except perhaps for some genes, which can be found in one race and are virtually inexistant in another - but none of the important behavioral genes appear to be distributed that way), which has led some scientists to doubt the validity of race in the biological sense.
Indeed, some race skeptics argue that it has no meaning, at least in Homo Sapiens, because the differences are gradual and not "exclusive", in the sense that most traits vary only in terms of frequency, and that there is much individual overlap between the races. The classifications are not platonic - and therefore - the classifications are arbitrary - is their reasoning. Race skeptic Jared Diamond, for example, has made a particularly clever demonstration of his point: he re-formulated "new races" by classifying people according to his own arbitrary traits. Using anti-malarial genes, lactose tolerance, or fingerprint patterns, for example, he placed the Swedes in the same category as the Xhosa and Fulani of Africa, and the Ainu of Japan. His argument is, therefore, that population classifications are arbitrary because the classifications change according to the trait(s) you choose.
However, his classifications are arbitrary and nonsensical, because they have little to no predictive value beyond the initial classifications(and I would add: they take only into account a few traits). That is, the "traditional" racial classifications predict many differences between the groups - IQ, r/K strategy, physical traits, etc., whereas Jared Diamond's classifications are not as useful. The Swedes and the Africans, which he places in the same category, do not have the same average IQ, nor the same skin color, hair color, eye color, for example. In fact, it is possible, using an entirely objective statistical technique - principal component analysis - to measure the genetic distance(which does not mean "genetic difference", because in measures of genetic distance only "neutral" genes are used - nothing relating to behavioral differences, to skin color, to intelligence, etc. - in order to measure the time of evolutionary separation of the populations, not their actual difference) of populations, and thus to make the various gene frequency correlations "stand out". Thus, the various groups with more average genetic similarity stand out, and you get various populations, which confirm the racial classifications(and relate to physical racial differences). It can be argued that if non-neutral genes influenced by natural selection, and genes related to physical racial differences were used, the genetic difference would be even greater.
A race is a variety or a sub-division of a species - a sub-species - a group that has evolved in a relatively isolated situation, geographically and genetically. A race has its own history and "geography", which in turn predicts its genetic differences - a race is first of all a specific "geo-historical" population that can be predicted to be genetically different because of its relatively separate evolution. Thus, because of Natural Selection, Artificial Selection, and/or Genetic Drift, coupled with a bit of luck, they evolve unique, recognizable adaptations (such as skin color). It has been observed that the various races of mankind differ substantially in various traits(intelligence, behavioral traits, etc.), not limited to physical traits. J. Philippe Rushton's book Race, Evolution and Behavior is an excellent example of the validity, usefulness and predictive value of the concept of race.[Race as a Biological Concept, On the Biological Meaning of Race, Tracing the Genetic History of Modern Man: a Review of "The History and Geography of Human Genes"]
More than that: Race is a significant concept because of human innate mechanisms of kin recognition. Altruism is a concept that, at first, what hard to grasph for Darwinists. Two theories, not mutually exclusive, have been proposed for explaining cooperation. The first one is the "reciprocal altruism" theory, which proposes that individuals who are altruist actually have more survival value because, basically, union is strength. The other one, Genetic Similarity Theory, proposes that individuals are more altruist toward individuals they are genetically closer to. This may provide a biological basis for ethnocentrism, xenophobia, nepotism, and racism. The detection of genetically similar individuals is done via both a recognition based on similarity to the parents' phenotype - a psychological mechanism - and via more direct detection of genetic similarity from various cues, including visual and behavioral ones. Thus, the kin recognition and assortative mating based on physical and behavioral similarity is a probable basis for racial discrimination. This tribal-altruist instinct probably has played an important role in humanity's past evolution, because it allowed group selection, an extremely efficient source of selection, and a fundamental cause of human diversity. [Virtue in "Racism" ?, Whither Judaism and the West ?, The Evolutionary Function of Prejudice, Evolution, Altruism and Genetic Similarity Theory, Wright and Wrong]
Sometimes the kin recognition is based on more cultural, less physically obvious traits. This is the case of Judaism, one of the most successful group evolutionary strategies there is. Judaism can not only be conceptualized as an evolutionary "strategy", but as a eugenistic strategy as well. For more information on Judaism as a group evolutionary strategy, seeWhither Judaism and the West ?, Chapter Five of Separation And Its Discontents, Volume II of the Judaism as a Group Evolutionary Strategy series, Indoctrination and Group Evolutionary strategies: The Case of Judaism, Judaism as an Evolutionary Strategy - A Review of Kevin MacDonald's Judaism as a Group Evolutionary Strategy series, and Studies of Jewish Genetics and the Racial Double Standard: Is There a Hidden Agenda ? You can also visit Kevin MacDonald's webpage.
Various intellectuals, scientists, and pseudo-scientists of all kinds argue against many of the above concepts, in most cases for political, or "ethno-political" reasons(it is indeed interesting to observe that those skeptics are predominantly Jewish - to the extent that Jews may have played an essential role in the anti-hereditarian movement - whereas in the "hereditarian" and "race realist" side the Jewish presence is much less predominant). Most of their objections, however, have a more philosophical, nihilistic nature than a scientific one, and they do not provide alternatives, or at least none that is provable. They destroy, but do not build. Whereas the work of hereditarians has produced results, and engendered research, the essential skeptical objective of race skeptics and anti-hereditarians has not produced much. Their arguments, and refutations thereof, can be read in the following articles:
Reflections on Stephen Jay Gould's "The Mismeasure of Man"
The Errors and Omissions of the Revised Edition of Gould's "The Mismeasure of Man"
The Bell Curve and its Critics
Brain Size matters - A reply to Peters
Tracing the Genetic History of Modern Man, a Review of "The History and Geography of Human Genes"
On the similarities of American blacks and whites - a reply to Rushton
