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

Thanks wolfgang. I'm a little disappointed that there has been some confusion regarding the resolution of this debate but hopefully my discussions with my opponent in the comments section have cleared that up. In his first round post, my opponent seems to think that he has affirmed the resolution by providing scientific references stating that IQ test results are somewhat heritable. This of course comes nowhere near proving the resolution as heritability covers a lot more than just racial classification. The terms race and genetics are not synonymous, as my opponent seems to suggest. http://www.google.co.uk... http://www.google.co.uk... I can find nothing in the article my opponent sourced that goes any way to confirming the resolution. I respectfully ask my opponent once again to make a case in support of the resolution of debate. ============ 1) In my introduction I briefly looked at the history of the issue of race and intelligence. I think this was entirely relevant to give background and context to the debate. I think the accusation that I have committed a "guilt by association" fallacy is entirely inaccurate. To practice such a fallacy in this context I think I would have to be condemning a particular scientist due to their association or similar views to another. To make the statement that most of the "scientists" I have heard expressing a view similar to the resolution are easily discredited is not such a fallacy. If my opponent refers to a "scientist" that I feel I can discredit, then I will do so on the individual merits of his research, not his association with others. 2) I am glad we agree on these points. 3) I am glad my opponent accepts the reality that stereotype threat and other environmental consequences of low status "may play a large part in IQ test results". >>Pro: "CON's statement that IQ is not heritable and can be wholly attributed to "non-genetic factors" flies in the face of all evidence." This is a complete straw man as I made no such statement. IQ is indeed partly heritable. I have never denied this and made it very clear when originally discussing this debate with my opponent. http://www.debate.org... It is the race gap rather than individual test results that I believe can be "wholly attributed to non-genetic factors". Pro's source here is therefore entirely irrelevant and my points stand unrefuted. 4) My opponent skates over the issue of just how fuzzy and unclear the implications of IQ results are. Yes they provide an indicator for what we commonly refer to as intelligence but this in no way makes them anything approaching an exact science. As I said previously: "Many theories exist to explain [the Flynn] effect but there is no significant consensus." My opponents suggested possible causes are among the most unlikely. I would love to see data suggesting that changes in nutrition could effect anything like 21 IQ points in 30 years as seen in Holland. If this were true it would identify nutrition as the best individual predictor of IQ by a long shot. As for evolution, significant evolutionary changes in the gene pool within a single generation would be literally impossible. Evolution is generally only observable over hundreds or even thousands of years unless there is catastrophic environmental change. My opponent is entirely correct in his observation that the race gap has only been observed to shrink in societies where the minority group has made significant strides in improving their status in recent history, most notably in the case of black people in the USA who finally had their "equal" status legitimately granted by the Civil Rights act. I think this is a far greater argument against the resolution than in favour of it. 5) i) I am happy to see that my opponent concedes that the resolution can not be proved on a molecular genetic level, since " No gene has YET been conclusively linked to intelligence". This illustrates how unclear the science is in these fields and how much of what is spoken about intelligence is pure conjecture. ii) My opponent has raised some good points here but he has ignored the detail of my own argument so I'll reiterate the crux of them first. "race is a social construction with no scientific definition." If my opponent disputes this, I would like him to supply a scientific definition of race and explain how it applies to specific human "racial" groupings. >>Pro: "why is it that when given a skeleton a coroner is able to tell the race of the deceased using things such as bone density, skull size or hip width?" To say that our labels of race are not a scientific classification does not imply that there aren't obvious genetic markers that can help distinguish geographical ancestry and fit an individual into one of the socially defined groups. This link may be informative: http://interact.stltoday.com... "Researchers speak in terms of "clines," or the continuum of observed human features. Skin color might be a cline, for example, ranging from dark to pale. Sampling the genetic code from an individual's blood might tell something about a person's skin color — and where a person is from geographically. Researchers might be able to do the same with other adaptive characteristics — hair color and texture, eye color, perhaps even the thickness of one's lips... Sussman said: There's not necessarily a correlation between one "cline" and another. "You don't necessarily find thicker lips in the same places you find darker skin," he said. That, again, makes it impossible to define "race" in the sense we usually discuss it." The fact is that modern humans all evolved far too recently from common ancestors in Africa and have since migrated and interbred to such an extent that the biological meaning of race http://en.wikipedia.org... simply can't be accurately ascribed to us. The Stanford genetic cluster study again only provides evidence for ancestral origins that help to furnish the social concept of race, not a scientific classification of race itself. As Wikipedia notes "the authors of the study do not equate the clusters with race" http://en.wikipedia.org... A more detailed analysis of the implications of these types of study is here: http://www.nature.com... " it might be tempting to conclude that genetic data verify traditional concepts about races. But the individuals used in these analyses originated in three geographically discontinuous regions ... each individual within a cluster shares most, but not all, of his or her ancestry with other members of the cluster (e.g., a member of the European cluster might have a posterior probability of 90% for assignment to that cluster, with 5% probability of assignment into each of the other two clusters in Fig. 3a). Ancestry, then, is a more subtle and complex description of an individual's genetic makeup than is race... human genetic variation tends to be distributed in a continuous fashion and seldom has marked geographic discontinuities. Thus, populations are never 'pure' in a genetic sense, and definite boundaries between individuals or populations (e.g., 'races') will be necessarily somewhat inaccurate and arbitrary." ______ I await my opponent's response to my own points, as well as an attempt to argue his own case as Pro for the resolution. Con.