Anti Hereditarian writes:
As it appears to me, Robert Lindsay is not convinced by the equality of races. He does not exclude environmental causes in racial differences, but he does not either believe that races have equal genetic potential for achievment. That’s my humble opinion.
This is immaculate. Of course the races are not equal. They are not equal on all sorts of variables, talents, achievements, commendable behaviors, pathologies and failures. That’s just observational fact.
Now the question is are these differences written in stone by our genes. I say no, but I also say that races are born with inborn genetic tendencies towards talents, achievements, personality styles, commendable behaviors, pathologies and failures. And in many cases, the races will simply more or less express their genetic roots in a deterministic fashion.
However, I would argue that serious improvements in environment could improve some races with lower genetic potential simply because outcome is predicate don genes + environment, not just genes. So environment can maybe make up for a lower genetic potential with the end result being races that are much less equal.
However, I would describe this as a “super-environment.” Perhaps something like the modern UK, which is sort of the ultimate PC country, could create the super-environment needed to raise Blacks above their genetic set-points to where they substantially close gaps with higher performing races and possibly even to where Blacks nearly match Whites, Indians, etc. on some important variables like intelligence. So in that case, environment would create some races than are not genetically equal at all but are performing near equal with the end result being racial equality of outcome on some variables such as intelligence.
The races seem to differ in the environment that they need.
The NE Asians seem to flourish even amidst some very nasty poverty. Their genetic set-point is so high that it enables them to rise above and transcend whatever obstacles that lousy environment throws in their way. Poor and non-poor UK Chinese score exactly the same on the GCSE.
Whites have lower genetic potential than NE Asians, so Whites placed in poverty will underperform non-poor Whites. In other words, poverty will hit Whites and set them back. But I think it will set them back less than some other races such as Indians and Blacks.
Indians seem to have a somewhat lower genetic potential than Whites but new Indian “subraces” seem to be developing in the West that are made up of very high performing Indians who dramatically outperform those at home. A souped up environment can conceivably boost Indians so high to where they are matching Whites on intelligence.
The Indians are a conundrum as we do not know how selective immigration to the West was. In the case of Pakistanis to the UK, apparently it was not selective at all. Indian IQ in South Asia appears lower than Western Black IQ on the surface probably because of the horrific environment over there dramatically stunts Indians brain-wise. However, I believe that true Indian genetic IQ set-point is higher than Blacks. Also I would argue that poverty will hit Indians harder than Whites but less hard than it hits Blacks.
Of NE Asians, Whites, Indians and Blacks (African and Caribbean origin), the Blacks seem to have the lowest IQ set-point. However, I am willing to consider that with a dramatically souped up environment, Blacks could go quite a bit beyond their genetic potential to where they approach or even match Whites on IQ. But Blacks are going to need a Hell of a lot more help to approach equality with say, Whites and Indians.
The problem is that creating these dramatically souped up environments is not easy, and political, economic and cultural realities limit the creation of these super-environments in most nations, the result being that Blacks often fall back more towards genetic set-points in most nations.
I suppose that is some sort of “modified HBD,” as I allow a quite powerful role for environment, but I ay that such a powerful environment is going to be hard for humans to create in most places. Hence groups in most cases are going to crash back down towards their genetic set-points on personality, criminality, intelligence, etc.
Environment then is a very powerful tool, but it is very hard to operate such that most of the time it doesn’t even work very well, and it doesn’t have dramatic effects on outcome. But that’s not probably always going to be the case as some places are going to be so advanced that they can finally figure out how to wield this difficult to use tool in such a way as to let it do its magic.
