“The heart of race realism is recognizing this lie for what it is. Research on differences between the behavior of whites and blacks has decisively refuted the environmentalist view.”
The culture of the age that we live in is founded on a lie: racial egalitarianism. It is an article of faith in the West that all racial differences in abilities and personality stem from environmental, rather than biological, factors.
This dogma has been conventional wisdom among the Western elites since 1950, when the United Nations published its “Statement on Race,” which declared: “There is no proof that the groups of mankind differ in their intelligence or temperament. The scientific evidence indicates that the range of mental capacities in all ethnic groups is the same…. Genetic differences are not of importance in determining the social and cultural differences between different groups of Homo sapiens.” http://unesdoc.unesco.org/images/0007/000733/073351eo.pdf, expressed a view that is more or less entirely unchallenged today in the media and most of the academy: race is a myth constructed by whites to justify colonialism and slavery. The documentary urged viewers to take an environmentalist view of racial differences:
“Try a paradigm shift. Every time the mind gropes toward the seemingly evident—that, say, black people are better at sports, or Asians at math and music—deconstruct it. Look for the social reasons, the economic reasons, the cultural reasons why these stereotypes only seem to hold true.”1
So crucial is this lie to our society, and so weak the empirical support for it, that Western universities must silence those who contradict it. Two cases of such silencing have occurred over the last two years. After Frank Ellis, a lecturer in Russian and Slavonic studies at Leeds University in Britain, stated his belief in the reality of racial differences in the student newspaper, the university and local political elite immediately began calling for his dismissal. One local politician http://education.guardian.co.uk/higher/news/story/0,,1723806,00.html after he declared his race realist views.
The heart of race realism is recognizing this lie for what it is. Research on differences between the behavior of whites and blacks has decisively refuted the environmentalist view. Indeed, at least a large school, and perhaps even a majority, of specialists in the study of intelligence believe that the black-white gap in IQ is rooted in biology. There is also powerful evidence that blacks and whites differ innately in other respects, including sexual behavior and ability to defer gratification.
This article focuses on differences between whites and blacks because these differences have received the greatest amount of attention from scholars, not because they are the only, or even necessarily the most important, racial differences. Black-white differences are thus the best test of the validity of the innatist and environmentalist perspectives. Given the dominant role that genes play in determining behavior, it is likely that many of the differences among the cultures of the world have biological roots.
The Power of Genes
There is no denying that racial populations differ in their behavior. All the statistics on high-school graduation rates, out-of-wedlock births, crime rates, and other behaviors regularly reveal substantial differences between blacks and whites. The environmentalist view depends on the premise that genetic makeup does not play a major role in the formation of these differences. Rather, environmentalists attribute black behavior to social factors like poverty, inferior schooling, and racial discrimination2. For more on the environmentalist interpretation of racial differences, see “http://inverted-world.com/index.php/articles/articles/the_lesson_of_race_denial/”.
This view, however, contradicts the known facts. The science of behavior genetics, or the study of the genetic basis of differences among human beings, has revealed the power of heredity in shaping our personalities. Given the strong influence of genes, it is highly unlikely that racial differences have no genetic component.
The primary means of sorting out the influence of genes and environment on behavior is twin studies. Scientists can measure the contributions of the two factors by comparing the similarities among identical twins, who have the same genes, to those among fraternal twins, who share only half of their genes, to those among children reared together in the same household, who are not genetically related. Additionally, scientists can compare twins who were raised apart to those who were raised together.
Not only do twin studies enable scientists to assess to what extent people’s personalities are due to genes and environment, but also the nature of the environmental influence. By comparing the similarities between twins reared together to those between twins reared apart, scientists can calculate to what extent twins’ personalities are influenced by the circumstances of their upbringing, which scientists call their “shared environment.”
This research has concluded that shared environment has a negligible effect on how people turn out, and genes a major one. Adult identical twins are highly similar across the whole range of behaviors and abilities. Astonishingly, identical twins who are separated at birth and reared apart are almost as similar to each other as twins reared together3. However, children who are unrelated but raised in the same household are no more similar to each other after they have reached adulthood than any two random strangers would be4. The general rule is that about forty to fifty percent of the variation in behavior and abilities among individuals is determined by heredity, half by non-shared environment—experiences that are unique to an individual—, and zero to 10 percent by shared environment5.
Intelligence is one of the personality traits most strongly influenced by genes. Although genes have a weaker influence in childhood, a full 80 percent of the variation among adults in intelligence is due to heredity6. The IQs of identical twins have a correlation of 0.86, whereas those of fraternal twins have a much weaker correlation of 0.6. However, after they have grown to be adults, there is no correlation at all between the IQs of unrelated children who are reared in the same household7.
This research makes the environmentalist view of racial differences highly implausible. The social factors to which environmentalists attribute racial differences, such as poverty and inferior schooling, are part of blacks’ shared environment, as they affect the black population as a whole. However, shared environment has no effect on IQ and little effect on other personality attributes.
The power of genes to affect behavior is evident not merely from the scientific results of twin studies, but from psychologists’ accounts of the similarities in behavior among identical twins separated at birth who have never met each other before. For example, among the subjects of the largest study of twins reared apart were 39-year-old twins who both had worked part-time as sheriffs, both smoked Salem cigarettes, drank Miller Lite Beer, bit their fingernails, and enjoyed scattering love notes to their wives around the house8. Another pair had long made it their practice never to express any opinions on controversial issues. Two were helpless gigglers, even though both described their parents as serious. Other pairs each had the habit of wearing seven rings on their hands, or obsessively counted things, or had each been married five times, or were fashion designers, and so forth9.
If genes shape our personalities down to the smallest details, it is very likely that substantial and constant behavioral differences among races have some genetic component.
http://inverted-world.com/index.php/feature/feature/the_reality_of_racial_differences/