Crazy Eddie, you seem to be sending a lot of mixed messages about race. Maybe you can just tell me straight: how do you make sense of race biologically, and how do humans fit into the pattern, in your opinion?
For starters, macroscopic traits unique to certain populations evolve slowly over time (on the order of tens of thousands of years). Natural selection and all that: people living sub-saharan Africa develop physical traits better adapted to that environment, traits which will be different from people living in Siberia or Northern Canada. This is, as you've said, a form of microevolution and the beginnings of speciation; if you completely isolated Africa from North America for ten million years, for example, the aggregate of changes over time would probably produce two completely distinct species of humans.
On the one hand, inasmuch as those populations are isolated from one another, distinct racial groups can be identified. So, for that matter, can distinct sub-groups WITHIN those populations that are likewise isolated for whatever reason. Although geography and climate alone can account for a lot of the traits they have in common, the fact that they don't all evolve from the same set of mutations actually leads to a bit of phenotypical convergence: two or more "races" exist in slightly different regions that have similar traits but aren't actually all that related (e.g. Somalis vs. Aboriginal Australians).
If it was just a matter of taxonomy, that would be one thing. Evolutionary biologists have produced thousands of papers analyzing the origins of various ethnic groups around the world, both in attempts to trace the genetic history of humanity and to find ways to classify those groups in ways that make sense. The problem is,
racial politics doesn't care about scientific truth and is more concerned with establishing a social order that people -- particularly, racist people -- can understand and accept. We thus see the persistence of the "one drop rule" in America; a black person cannot convincingly claim to be white just because he has has a white parent or grandparents, but a white man can claim to be black because he has a black parent or grandparent.
It gets worse when you consider that sub-saharan Africa is actually populated by SEVERAL distinct racial groups that all fall under the same umbrella in western studies. Most of them are not merely "tribes" with arbitrary political lines between them. For example, I've seen studies that suggest the overwhelming majority of Africans imported to North America during the slave trade came from the Mande, Wolof and Nyabwa clades with an occasional (and to slave traders, extremely valuable) Bantu speaker (Zulu or Xhosa). There's good reason for using language groups as distinct sub-groups in natural history:
people who can't talk to each other rarely breed together. And there are already distinct phenotypical differences between some groups among the same language family (see Hutus vs. Tutsis).
You are right that proving races exist does NOT prove that races genetically vary in intelligence.
Then we're pretty much on the same page here.
The main reason that there was a political movement to deny race among American anthropologists was to fight the idea that there are genetic differences among the races.
I am vaguely aware of that (never much bothered to research it because I don't agree with that premise) but my understanding is that movement has ALSO fallen out of favor and no longer enjoys broad support among researchers.
I do have arguments that make more probable the conclusion that races genetically vary in intelligence--transracial adoption study, mixed race studies, brain size correlation, skin color correlation, and the transnational pattern of the intelligence hierarchy. But, those points have effect only after the background knowledge is established, namely races are biological, intelligence variations are largely genetic, and the races vary in intelligence scores. Without the background knowledge, the direct arguments are ineffective.
So herein is the basic problem: "Intelligence variations are largely genetic" is a premise with EXTREMELY weak support. The weakness of that premise is the "largely" part. Educators and researchers have both known for years -- decades, perhaps -- that a person's inborn gifts only affect their POTENTIALS, not their actual outcomes. You could think of these as a set of mental talents: a person can be born with a talent for memorization, or for abstract thinking, or for visual-spatial reasoning, or for emotional empathy, or for social processing, or any one of a dozen other mental talents.
A person with a talent for memorization will be able to retain knowledge longer and in more detail and will probably do very well on standardized tests.
A person with a talent for abstract thinking will be able to grasp mathematical concepts more easily (or may become an illustrator if he ALSO has a talent for hand-eye coordination)
A person with a talent for visual-spatial reasoning will be able to grasp geometric concepts more easily (or may become an athlete if he ALSO has a lot of muscle memory and body-spatial awareness).
A person with a talent for emotional empathy will have an easier time grasping moral, philosophical and religious concepts (and may become a minister if he also has a talent for public speaking).
A person with a talent for social processing will have an easier time grasping the nuances of social situations and human behavior (and might become a business manager if he also has a talent for time management).
You'll note that only a handful of these characteristics -- particularly, memorization -- would correlate strongly with what you would call "intelligence." That is, someone who is able to memorize the entire SAT study guide will get a much higher score than someone who has to read it two or three times before he remembers any of it. And yet memorization, also, is a skill that has to be developed over time; it's just alot EASIER to acquire that skill if you have talent for it.
This is where the notion of "
mostly due to genetics" breaks down: it isn't always the case that a person with a talent for memorization has been given the opportunity to master that skill. It isn't always the case that a person with a talent for social processing has been given the opportunity to master the intricacies of human behavior. It isn't always the case that a person with a talent for number crunching and abstract reasoning has had access to a high-level math and science program that would help him fully develop those talents into useful skills. And this before you consider the disparity in access to education that still exists among racial groups for economic, historical and yes even political reasons.
The most you could say is that there is a wider distribution of certain innate abilities -- talents, really-- in some racial groups than others. This could very well be the case, and it would be interesting to see what the actual distribution of innate mental attributes was between different racial groups.
But to equate that with general intelligence is premature at best, and it will require ALOT more data on both the genetic mix of those races and the nature of intelligence before you will be anywhere close to claiming it's an established fact.
