Channel 4 is facing a race controversy after deciding to give a platform to scientists who claim that white people are more intelligent than those who are black. A documentary, fronted by former BBC News correspondent Rageh Omaar, will interview professors who claim brain power is linked to racial grouping. It will include claims that the most intelligent people in the world are North-East Asians from parts of China, Japan and North and South Korea.SOURCE
The Australian Aborigines will be said to have the lowest average IQ.
The broadcaster has decided to air the comments, which will be abhorrent to many of its viewers, as part of a series of programmes about race and science, aimed at busting 'science's last taboo'.
Bosses at the channel claim the season will strongly challenge these opinions and 'explode' the myth that science can support ideas of racial superiority.
But the decision to air the issue at all could prove incendiary and is in danger of throwing the channel into another race row. The broadcaster was inundated with complaints in 2007 after it aired the alleged racist bullying of Shilpa Shetty on Celebrity Big Brother.
To promote the series, Channel 4 has altered photos of Baroness Thatcher, The Beatles, England's 1966 World Cup winning football team and U.S. President Barack Obama to change their racial appearances.
In Race and Intelligence: Science's Last Taboo, Omaar talks to academics who believe that aspects of the human brain are linked to race.
He interviews Richard Lynn, emeritus professor at the University of Ulster, who has amassed data which he believes shows there is a global league table of intelligence between the races. He is seen claiming that 'the top rate' are North-East Asians who have an average IQ of 105, followed by North and Central Europeans with a score of 100.
He claims American Indians have an IQ of 87, and that sub-Saharan Africans 'pretty well on either side of the equator' have IQs of around 70. He says Aborigines have the lowest scores of around 65. He says: 'When sub-Saharan Africans come and live - and even several generations of them come to live - in European or North American countries, their IQs increase because of course their environment is improved, their schooling is better and their nutrition is better. 'But their IQs don't rise up to the same level as Europeans.'
British-born J Philippe Rushton, a psychology professor at the University of Western Ontario in Canada, is also interviewed. Professor Rushton claims the differences between black and white and East Asian brains is due to general intelligence. He says black people have smaller-sized brains than white people and are not as intelligent as white people.
In the programme a range of academics line up to criticise the views of the two men.
Oona King, Channel 4's head of diversity, said the programme will show conclusively 'that you cannot link race to IQ'. Miss King, a former Labour MP, added: 'Even people who know the race agenda inside out will learn a lot from these programmes.' She called for a 'heated debate' about race, saying: 'This series will change the terms of the debate.'
Dr Watson sparked controversy in 2007 after claiming in a newspaper interview that black people were less intelligent. His views prompted London's Science Museum to scrap a planned talk by him, saying the opinions went 'beyond the point of acceptable debate'. The 79-year-old American geneticist - who does not appear in the show - said he was 'inherently gloomy about the prospect of Africa' because 'all our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours - whereas all the testing says not really'. He added that he hoped that everyone was equal, but then alleged that 'people who have to deal with black employees find this not true'. In the interview he claimed genes responsible for creating differences in human intelligence could be found within a decade.
Dr Watson was hailed as achieving one of the greatest single scientific breakthroughs of the 20th century when he worked at Cambridge in the 1950s and 1960s, forming part of the team which discovered the structure of DNA. He has been director of the Cold Spring Harbour Laboratory on Long Island, in the U.S., a world leader in research into cancer and genetics, for 50 years.
Dr Watson has been at the heart of several scientific furores over the years. He once reportedly said that a woman should have the right to abort her unborn child if tests could determine it would be homosexual. He has suggested a link between skin colour and sex drive, proposing a theory that black people have higher libidos. And he also claimed that beauty could be genetically manufactured, saying: 'People say it would be terrible if we made all girls pretty. I think it would be great.'
In his book, Avoid Boring People: Lessons from a Life in Science, he writes that 'there is no firm reason to anticipate that the intellectual capacities of peoples geographically separated in their evolution should prove to have evolved identically. 'Our wanting to reserve equal powers of reason as some universal heritage of humanity will not be enough to make it so'.
Omaar also said in a clip of the show that views society found offensive 'are not defeated by being ignored'.
(For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, DISSECTING LEFTISM, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, EYE ON BRITAIN and Paralipomena . List of backup or "mirror" sites here or here -- for readers in China or for everyone when blogspot is "down" or failing to update. My Home Pages are here or here or here. Email me (John Ray) here.)
RELIAPUNDIT ADDS:
Most studies show that races do differently on the IQ tests. This is all the more reason NOT to use race for screening purposes or for quotas of ANY sort; PEOPLE SHOULD BE JUDGED WITHOUT ANY REGARD FOR THEIR RACE OR CREED, BUT BASED ON THEIR INDIVIDUAL QUALITIES - AS MARTIN LUTHER KING JR SAID, "BASED ON THE CONTENT OF THEIR CHARACTER".
Additionally, it is important to note that MANY leftists have high IQ, so high IQ is no guarantee for clear or even good thinking.
ALSO: many valuable and important skills and talents are not measurable or measured by IQ: music skills; art skills; geo-spatial skills, courage, and so on.
Louis Armstrong was most certainly a genius, as was Ellington and Mingus to name just 3 musical geniuses who were black.
A world without all types of talents andall kinds of geniuses would be less rich and human history and humanity's cultures have been enriched by people with a huge variety of abilities and skills and different types of geniuses.
High IQ people have not solved all our problems - and many have contributed greatly to them.
BOTTOM-LINE: IT TAKES ALL KINDS - AND WE SHOULD JUDGE EACH OTHER BASED ON INDIVIDUAL ABILITIES AND NOT MEMBERSHIP IN A RACE OR PARTY - OR ON IQ ALONE.
NOTE FROM JR: Reliapundit is of course completely correct in his comments above. The facts are compatible with a wide range of policy positions. It is important to know what the facts are, however. A policy based on a misapprehension of the facts will not work.
Eppur si muove, as Galileo said
No comments:
Post a Comment