Race and the complexity of human diversity

There is a tendency in the discussion of human racial diversity to focus on unidimensional statistics such as IQ, prison incarceration rate, or a few other measures that tend to reinforce the notion of a human ladder of evolutionary advancement.

In the American context, this usually places blacks at the bottom, hispanics next, then whites, Asians and, at the tippy top, America's six or eight million Jews whose names are so prominent on the Forbes rich list, on Wall Street, at the head of many top law firms and among faculty and students of the Ivy league universities. Quite where the Amerindians stand in the hierachy is unclear, although most often they are simply forgotten.

There’s no question that humans are diverse — with the exception of monozygotic twins, we are all genetically unique. Human diversity, however, is usually much greater within populations than between populations, especially if environmental effects on development are accounted for.

There are exceptions to this generalization but they usually reflect population differences in rather trivial single-gene or linked-gene traits. For example, skin color, proportion of fast muscle, eye-shape, etc. When one considers traits with a complex genetic base, e.g., intelligence, racial characterization can be highly misleading. Thus, as Ron Unz explains in his article Myth of American Meritocracy,

 Over the years, claims have been widely circulated that [in America] the mean Jewish IQ is a full standard deviation—15 points—above the white average of 100, but this seems to have little basis in reality. Richard Lynn, one of the world’s foremost IQ experts, has performed an exhaustive literature review and located some 32 IQ samples of American Jews, taken from 1920 to 2008. For the first 14 studies conducted during the years 1920–1937, the Jewish IQ came out very close to the white American mean, and it was only in later decades that the average figure rose to the approximate range of 107–111.. … [and] Jewish academic achievement has apparently plummeted in recent decades…

I have no axe to grind concerning Jewish claims to intellectual accomplishment, although having been Christened in the Anglican, aka Episcopalian, church, I was amused by Unz’s statement that: “An analysis of the data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth found that Americans raised in the Episcopal Church actually exceeded Jews in mean IQ.”

But because they are not necessarily different when compared on some arbitrary and questionable measure of intellectual ability, it does not mean that Jews and, say, Episcopalians are intellectually or otherwise indistinguishable, or that any differences between them are unimportant or best eliminated. We simply don’t know much about those differences or how much they matter in particular circumstances. In any case,  Jews have surely accomplished enough to deserve a continued lease on life as a distinct ethnic — which is to say racial and cultural — group, as for that matter have the English, Episcopalian or otherwise.

Thus before the globalists destroy every nation and mix every race, we should take a break of a hundred years to considered what is involved in the drive for global miscegenation. And even then we should ensure every race a homeland where those who wish to go on being Viking or Jew, Malian or Chinese can maintain their national genetic and cultural identity.

For North Americans, however, the idea of racial separation is problematic. While resisting the inclusion of blacks, most Americans have long seen their country as a racial melting pot. Canadians mostly abandoned the idea that theirs is a country of two nations, English and French, following the loss of Quebec's 1980 independence referendum, although by that time English Canada was mostly anything but English. Integration, homogenization and miscegenation to produce what become identifiable as American and Canadian races is thus the probably outcome for North America's populations.

The loss of racial and cultural differentiation within North America is no reason, however, for the destruction of the races and nations from which the North American (and Australian) nations have sprung, including the indigenous nations of North America.

Chinese kindergarten. Image source

Certainly, maintaining human genetic and cultural diversity must, in any sane society, be more important than preserving the existence of the snail darter, the marbled murrelet, the purple toadflax and other non-human forms of biodiversity, about which concern is so often publicly expressed. But then there is nothing racist about seeking to preserve an endangered species, whereas to oppose the genocide of one's own people, their race and nation, is now generally condemned by the witless liberals who dominate the media as tantamount to Nazism and Holocaust denial.

See also:

The Unassimilated Indian
Race and IQ: Are Comparisons Intelligent 
Race and IQ in America