|
|
|
A few people still think it is worthwhile to describe social development based on the genetically inherited characterists of huge populations, such as race or nationality. This is to claim that "race matters" -- the title of one such published work. It is my opinion that it is instead the individual that matters. In the 1950s in places like Little Rock Arkansas we saw whites with animosity toward blacks who were brighter (and with more dignity) than they. The less educated and unaccomplished the white it seemed the more likely he was to consider a black American not as an individual but as a member of a race, and the more likely he was to oppose blacks having the opportunity of a good education and rightful place in the professions. These whites did not want to be on the bottom in the recognition of worthiness. Their way of considering people according to race rather than as individuals was useful: it put blacks at the bottom instead of them.
Today, blacks whose IQs are above the genius level, and blacks who have made it through universities and are now physicists, brain surgeons, and what have you, are not going to be easily convinced that judging people according to race has much significance in understanding sociological or historical realities. Those who believe in gauging differences in intelligence according to race or nationality are going to have difficulty explaining the significance of their approach to any of the many mothers in black Africa who are frustrated or struggling in their desire to send their children to school, or explaining it to responsible local leaders choosing policies to advance their society.
What remains important is not the average IQ or average anything of a huge population. What matters in the individual. As for understanding the relationship between the average and the individual belonging to different groups we have the so-called bdll-curve, which tells us about distributions within any large population. The vertical line represents average. The curved line represents the percentage of persons of the total population. It is called a "normal curve," zero at the bottom and the greatest number at the top. (This is my drawing. Normal curves are more pointed at the top.) From left to right along the curve you have achievement.
People
vary in intelligence, honesty and what have you, and
results of any measurement is likely to form a bell-curve.
In intelligence, the Japanese have been judged a couple
of points higher than whites in the United States. In putting
a bell- curve of Japanese intelligence on top of a bell-curve
of white intelligence, the vertical line
of the Japanese bell-curve would be slightly to the
right of the vertical line for the whites.
But there would be a lot of whites to the right of a
lot of Japanese and a lot of Japanese to the left of
a lot of whites.
To return to the usefulness of describing social development based on the genetically inherited characterists of huge populations such as race, a book published this year (2007) entitled Understanding Human History, by Michael H. Hart, claims to explain the whole of human history. It is in league with those who describe race-mixing as the cause of Spain's decline in the 17th century.
Copyright © 2007 Frank E. Smitha. All rights reserved.
address of this article: http://www.fsmitha.com/com/p-bell.htm