The race gap in IQ testing is caused, in part, by inherent genetic differences between races.

I am Con to the above resolution and my opponent has asked me to challenge him and make the opening arguments in this debate. It is difficult to know exactly how to set things off without an argument to respond to but I will do my best to set out my own position. However my opponent did previously begin another debate on basically the same subject (unfortunately his opponent backed out half way through) so I think I can infer some of the arguments he may make from there. http://www.debate.org... Thanks wolfgang for the opportunity to debate this emotionally loaded and controversial topic. I hope we can both stay civil and have a rational discussion despite our differing views. ________ The suggestion that certain races are more intelligent than others and especially that black people have lower intellectual capacity is not a new one. From when Western European anthropologists first wrote about Africans they were assumed to be sub-human and even after the abolition of slavery in America, psychologists were still characterising "the mental qualities of the Negro as: lacking in filial affection, strong migratory instincts and tendencies; little sense of veneration, integrity or honor; shiftless, indolent, untidy, improvident, extravagant, lazy, untruthful, lacking in persistence and initiative and unwilling to work continuously at details. Indeed, experience with the Negro in classrooms indicates that it is impossible to get the child to do anything with continued accuracy." Frank Bruner 1912 http://books.google.co.uk... Then as now these prejudiced opinions are associated with pseudo scientific methods and bigoted attitudes. There is no solid scientific backing for the claim made in the resolution and the inferences made from the shoddy data collected by racist "scientists" is generally easy to expose as misleading, inconclusive, downright fraudulent or a combination of the three. __________ I think myself, my opponent and anyone who takes time to investigate this subject at all can agree on the following facts: 1. IQ test results within mixed populations (most notably in the US) tend to show a slight trend for a better average performance among white people compared to black people and also among those of East Asian origin compared to either. 2. While an IQ test is by no means a precise tool for measuring a persons overall intellectual capacity or "smartness" it does provide some indication of popular notions of intelligence related to academic ability, reasoning etc. 3. While a parent's IQ results are good indicators of those of their offspring, environment has a massive impact on IQ results. _____________ I believe the race gap in IQ testing can be attributed wholly to the many non-genetic factors that influence the results of the tests. The resolution relies almost entirely on a basic fallacy of cause and effect. Social status, income, education, good nutrition, a stable family environment and countless other factors and variables have all been shown to have far more correlation with IQ than racial classification. It is hardly surprising that the groups most disadvantaged in all the above areas perform less well in IQ tests and the racial correlation presents no evidence of causality. "The experiences of low- caste groups around the world show that subordinate ethnic minorities do worse in schools and on school tests than do dominant groups, whatever the genetic differences or similarities between them. Whether it is Eastern European Jews in 1910 New York, the Irish in England, Koreans in Japan, or Afrikaaners in South Africa, being of lower caste or status makes people seem "dumb." The particular history of blacks and Mexicans in the United States fits the general pattern. It is not that low intelligence leads to inferior status; it is that inferior status leads to low intelligence test scores" Fischer etc. 1996 http://press.princeton.edu... Even just the psychological effect of being in a lower caste group (and in this case the expectation of lower intelligence from the ethnic group) can have a profound effect in the form of stereotype threat. It has been shown that when race is emphasised in testing procedures the race gap increases substantially. "in several experiments that Black college freshmen and sophomores performed more poorly on standardized tests than White students when their race was emphasized. When race was not emphasized, however, Black students performed better and equivalently with White students ... To date, over 300 experiments on stereotype threat have been published in peer-reviewed journals" http://www.reducingstereotypethreat.org... ____________ There are many factors about the variability of IQ scores which are still a long way from being understood. Perhaps the best known example of this is the phenomenon known as The Flynn Effect. http://en.wikipedia.org... Because IQ scoring is based around an average score of 100 for the subject population, tests need to be constantly re-calculated and adjusted within population groups. Bizarrely the average has been observed to rise substantially over time within almost all populations, so that some groups can become as much as 20 IQ points "more intelligent" within a single generation. "In the Netherlands, for example, all male 18-year-olds take a test of abstract-reasoning ability as part of a military-induction requirement. Because the same test is used every year, it is easy to see the mean score rising, in this case, at about seven points per decade. The cause of these enormous gains remains unknown." http://www.americanscientist.org... This means that technically black people today have roughly the same average IQ as white people from the 1940s. Many theories exist to explain this effect but there is no significant consensus. Another unexplained issue particularly relevant to this debate is that the race gap has actually shrunk over time. There are many strange things going on with the numbers on IQ test scores that nobody really understands, the race gap is only one of them and the theory that it's causes are inherently racial has no solid foundation. ________ From a molecular genetic perspective, the resolution fails on two fundamental levels. 1. There is no gene that has been established to have a direct link to intelligence. 2. Race is not a scientific classification, merely a folk taxonomy. "race is a social construction with no scientific definition. Thus, studies of the relationship between race and other constructs may serve social ends but cannot serve scientific ends. No gene has yet been conclusively linked to intelligence, so attempts to provide a compelling genetic link of race to intelligence are not feasible at this time." http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov... "Modern human genetic variation does not structure into phylogenetic subspecies (geographical 'races'), nor do the taxa from the most common racial classifications of classical anthropology qualify as 'races' ... it has not been demonstrated that any human breeding population is sufficiently divergent to be taxonomically recognized by the standards of modern molecular systematics." http://www.nature.com... __________ I look forward to my opponent's refutations and his presentation of his own Pro argument. Thank you.