Seldon2639 said:
@cleverlymadeup:
You say things like "culture is more important" and "first and foremost parents are largely to blame and their lack of education and bad parenting skills", but you don't provide evidence for the relative importance of these, or the relative unimportance of heritability. It's impossible to post more than extracts from studies here, but I can send you evidence from UCLA Medical School, Yale Medical School, The European Journal of Human Genetics, and James Watson (nobel prize-winning scientist)
actually most of those studies, that yes i'm aware of, are dismissed by the scientific community as a whole. they say that yes there is something but not enough conclusive evidence to support it, basically it gets killed in the peer review part. it causes no end to arguement and yes you can name certain ppl of creed that are stupid but i can name you equally large amounts of the "smarter" creed than you can, cause it most theories asians are the smarted but at with several billion asians in the world, i'm betting there's more stupid ones than "smart" ones
oh and a quick look up of james watson and most of his work in intelligence and race is considered bad and racist and that's being nice
ok how parents play a roll is easy, most don't take a real active part in their kids lives, they grow up with them and do more stuff than they should for the kid, they don't discipline kids correctly, they don't allow their kids to fail or experience true failure, yes we need to fail at thing
now onto culture
take a plainsman in africa, are they "stupid"? probly not, sure they don't know about computers or how to drive a car but they don't need to know that, could you teach him about those things? yes you could, just because he doesn't know about something doesn't mean him or his people are stupid, it's a totally different culture and lifestyle than our's. however he can track things very well, show what plants are ok to eat, tell you how to find good prey and hunting, tell you without knowing the date when it's good to plant crops and many other things we don't know about.
now take a japanese kid, is he "smart"? yeah you'd probly say he is, probly can speak 2 langs, highly skilled at math, can drive a car, can play a ps3. however can he do the things that the plainsman can? no he can't but he could learn much like the plainsman could learn what the japanese kid could
see intellegence is a subjective thing. iq tests don't test intelligence accurately. they only test knowledge and your ability to regurgitate it back to the tester. but how can you test someone who can't speak? such as someone with severe autism. the modern iq test fails miserably at that.
like if i asked you to describe a table and a cup sitting on it, i'm betting you would have trouble doing that and think i'm stupid for even suggesting it's a test of intelligence but it is. or how about being able to read a map and then figure out how to get to a point with the map or even give simple directions.
intelligence is not a genetic trait, it's learned. the only issue is ppl won't, not can't, learn certain things, they refuse to open their mind to the possibility