re: #46 kerFuFFler

Frankly, I tend to assume that there may be some fairly minor, slight shifts in the bell curve for differing racial groups just because the likelihood that the evolutionary outcomes would come out identical after tens of thousands of years of relative genetic isolation is small. Many physiological differences are observable between races——why should the nervous system be immune to such variation?

That said, such shifts in population outcomes are meaningless when you are making any kind of decision regarding an individual———that person could fall anywhere in the range, from idiot to super-genius regardless of race, so the fact that there might be minor overall differences when populations are studied is irrelevant in almost every context. Additionally, the slight shifts between groups are negligible compared to the wide range of intelligences we see between individuals.

This reminds me of one of the better anti Bell Curve arguments —- So What.

The correct thing to do when faced with people of varying capacities is to evaluate each of them as individuals. Knowledge (real or imaginary) of a statistical correlation between IQ and race is of no use in such evaluation.