this post was submitted on 13 Aug 2023
44 points (87.9% liked)

Asklemmy

44151 readers
1436 users here now

A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions

Search asklemmy 🔍

If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!

  1. Open-ended question
  2. Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
  3. Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
  4. Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
  5. An actual topic of discussion

Looking for support?

Looking for a community?

~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_[email protected]~

founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 16 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

Intelligence has a genetic component. Every single test we have that attempts to measure intelligence that we've checked for heritability shows that intelligence likely has a generic component. Furthermore, we know that some species are more intelligent than others. Given the demonstrable existence of Darwinian evolution, this implies that some populations of a species are more or less intelligent than another because that's a requirement for a speciation event that results in a species that's more intelligent than its cousin species.

Anyone who says otherwise is likely allowing their ideology to cloud their judgement.

[–] FMT99 25 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Conversely be on guard against people that say this proves any particular population, especially based on specific phenotypes, is inherently more or less intelligent than any other. They most likely also have an ideological axe to grind.

That besides the fact that, as another commenter mentioned "intelligence" is a pretty nebulous term to begin with.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 year ago

This exactly. Intelligence being heritable does not imply that any one particular population is more intelligent on average than another.

“intelligence” is a pretty nebulous term to begin with

This is also accurate, but I'm glossing over that because it's late and that fact is only tangentially relevant to the question.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

Does that apply to intelligence as a whole or does it vary for different skills (i.e. logical reasoning like math vs more creative skills like reading/writing.