I'm a musician and music teacher, so I work in a field that is very often at the centre of the "nature/nurture" debate. People who show exceptional early talent at music often seem like the kind of exceptional mathematicians you mention - so far beyond normal human capacity that the difference MUST come down to some innate quality.FedUpWithFaith wrote:There are roughly about 1 billion black people in the world, roughly 40 million in the US alone, albeit most may be of mixed racial heritage. But for purposes of argument I'll just refer to them all as black which is ironic in that the are more genetic differences between particular groups of blacks originating in Africa than between blacks and all other races combined. Depending on how race is defined, one could consider that there are actually separate black races. I mention this because it should be acknowledged. I have already argued that environment is a huge factor in determining intelligence and I would be the first to concede, and have normally always argued, that prejudice and poverty and cultural forces all work against blacks meeting their full genetic potential for intelligence, as they would work against any person or race.
However, not all 1 billion blacks live in terrible poverty, face terrible local discrimination, or listen to a sub-culture that derides being smart and educated as acting "too white". America has an enormous black middle class, many affluent blacks, many poor blacks who value education, and there are many blacks smarter than me who raise their kids to aspire to intelligent endeavors. And the US is not the only country where blacks have the means to become great mathematicians if they want to bad enough. At least several Indian untouchables can be counted among the greatest mathematicians I've met or are aware of for their work in the last 50 years. Poverty and discrimination alone simply can't explain the discrepancy in my view. If it's not genetics I have to assume that it's some form of cultural predilection. Blacks simply don't want to be mathematicians or physicists.
This is where "the calling" comes in. For all the best mathematicians (and math-oriented physicists) I've known they all had a mathematical brain and spacial puzzle-solving skills from a very early age. This includes the best black mathematicians I know. If you've ever met people like this, you'd know they're almost like a separate breed far more easily distinguishable than any race is. They go into the field even despite enduring the scorn of their peers and their own observation that math can be an obsessive occupation with mental casualties higher than other sciences (yes, i know, I'm not supporting any of this with references - I'm too lazy - tough shit).
Anyway, over my years now in academic and corporate science as well as my own studies I have known, met, read the work of, engaged, or hired about 10-15 of what i deem outstanding mathematicians who were black out of the 300-500 best mathematicians/physicists of any race I've similarly engaged. And none I'm aware of would qualify for the top 100 and frankly, that's very conservative. The disparity based on race adjusted for population is enormous and I believe is difficult to account for purely by environment alone, though I hope I'm wrong. I admit this is all opinion and anecdotal and definitely biased by my experience. I'm also willing to acknwledge that as much as i hope otherwise, a significant amount of that bias could be subconscious and self-selecting. That's why I don't give my belief here anything more than hunch status.
And also similarly to your own field, there are widely acknowledged racial differences. In particular, children from East Asia, or children of East Asin background living in the west, seem to have a capacity for excelling in the first, technical-based stages of learning instruments that is far beyond that of other races. There is a pretty ubiquitous cliche of the 8-year-old piano prodigy giving his first performance of some Chopin concerto, who is inevitably Asian, and parallels are often drawn with the ability these races have to learn advanced maths at an early age, and their generally high scoring (higher than whites, I understand) in IQ tests. (Although strangely, this disparity doesn't seem to filter through to the profession itself, where the number of working Asian performers, composers, conductors etc doesn't seem any greater than their general representation in the population. Not sure what happens to all those child prodigies.)
What's interesting though, is that there's another, parallel area in which musical excellence seems to be closely correlated with race - the fact that the vast majority of great and successful jazz musicians are black. But whereas the apparently "natural" ability of Chinese and Japanese children to learn piano and violin concertos is taken as evidence of their superior intelligence, the equally "natural" ability of Charlie Parker or Wynton Marsalis to capture the complex essence of their own musical tradition in a way that most white musicians can only dream of, is often seen as evidence that black people are more "physical" or "closer to nature" - ie animalistic and UNintelligent. This despite the fact that it takes far more real musical intelligence to play jazz than to slavishly reproduce the notes of a classical score.
I suppose what I'm saying is that there's a world of difference between pointing out that more members of one race than another appear to be naturally good at a specific activity, and correlating that activity with "intelligence". It all comes back to the fact that that concept has never been very well defined, as you yourself have agreed. I actually have some aympathy with your viewpoint, and I think it's actually LIKELY that there are innate differences in brain structure between races. Given that there are innate differences in most other physical characteristics between them, it would seem odd if the brain is the one organ that somehow ended up miraculously uniform.
But you've said yourself that you've met excellent black scientists, engineers etc. IF it is a fact that there are relatively fewer black people who are world beaters at abstract maths, that could just as easily be taken to mean that there is something in the nature of their intelligence that is less abstract, more dependent on concrete practical application, as a difference in the degree of "intelligence" itself - whatever that may mean.
I think such innate differences of type - if indeed they do exist - are well worth investigating. We shouldn't underestimate however, just how beguiling is the temptation to base meaningless generalisations upon them.
