Where's my abacus at? I got some intelligence quotients to calculate

Some horses, though they seem to have been beaten to death, still stubbornly get up no matter how repetitively they are whipped and kicked. It brings a tear to the eye, watching those beleaguered beasts manage to stand once again on their wobbly legs. Today, tears filled my own eyes when I read that the old issue of ethnicity and IQ's is once again raising its obsolete corpse out from its well-deserved grave.

The monumental anniversary of both Charles Darwin's most famous book and the tenacious naturalist's own birthday have spurred countless thoughts to find their ways into books, articles and blogs. It's as it should be. But one issue I could have lived into my withered old age without ever noticing again is the one which wonders about the color of one's skin and the potential in one's head. Ethnicity, or "race" in the old-timey jargon, and intelligence was a favorite subject of the luminous pioneers of our scientific culture. Everybody had an opinion, and most, indeed the vast majority of the great enlightened thinkers of the nineteenth century, were convinced beyond doubt that it was mostly white people who were smart, the other kinds of people sadly lacking in whatever traits were necessary to make their boats fast and guns deadly. When the Portuguese took their super lithe boats and powerful canons up into the Indian ocean 500-some years ago, though of short stature and long noses, they laughed at the ease with which they took over the busy shipping ports. Centuries of trade in textiles and foodstuffs were almost immediately taken over and dominated by the super smart Europeans. The Indians and Chinese (The backwardness of Arabs and Africans went without saying, they said) just couldn't keep up.

Thus inaugurated western Europe's steady, seemingly inevitable rise to dominance in all things scientific, technical and economic. By the nineteenth century, Europe's hegemony was decked out in the pompiest pomp and circumstanciest circumstance. Her military and merchant captains tended to their proud mustaches with only the finest waxes. And her naturalists were scratching their heads about the best way to categorize and place into a logically satisfying gradation of quality all the races newly discovered. "Just how do we rank the inferiors?" they wondered. Many methods lost to time and a few dusty books came and went. If the heathen primitive be female, then her carnal offerings might be sampled, and a child left here and there to try at the life of a half breed. But more often than not those cunning natives would hide their women and children away, and it was only the proud warrior or duplicitous trader who represented their peoples. Almost at once these industrious naturalists set about sketching their faces, measuring their skull circumferences and mapping out the various rooms of their obviously limited cranial capacities. Anyway you looked at it, the savage, though noble, had less intelligence, less capacity for understanding, indeed, a lesser ability to grasp and savour the bounty that mortal existence seemed to intend for the enlightened European only.

Then came the mighty Darwin. The evolution of species was not a new idea, but the precise mechanism which effected the many transitions in the life of a species was not known. Surely there were environmental pressures, - an animal's access to food, shelter and safety from predators - but might there be something within the animals themselves, their blood or spirit, which also accounted for a species fitting just so in the niche it did? Many opinions were offered to explain this curious fact - that the world's species seemed to uncannily occupy their specific domains as though designed for the job - and Darwin's theories of natural and sexual selection, though quickly accepted by those in the know, competed among several. In no time his profound ideas became the talk of intellectuals across Europe, and as quickly they were taken up by our previously mentioned savage naturalists to explain the simplicty and inferiority of the many non-white races around the world. Now they had it! Non-white races were inferior because their ancestors had followed a less demanding and exalting evolutionary trajectory! Their primitive societies met the meager needs of their meager understandings! Ha! Problem solved!

Now to come up with a test, might not we call it an intelligence test, by which we might rate the capabilities of people and accordingly fit them into their proper places? Darwin's eager cousin Francis Galton looked at the dismal conditions of much of the world and said, "Now I must do something to ease suffering. Quickly! To the laboratory! I must needs calculate the exact intelligence of this person, the outcome of which may require I prevent her from passing her feeble mindedness to her offspring." And the white Europeans did flock to this visionary thinker's ideas on mental faculty measurement, and they christened his ideas in waters of scientific absolution, naming the blessed child psychometrics. Soon, Monsieur Alfred Binet and Herr William Stern got to wondering about a standard test to gather into its bosom all that matters in human thinking, and their labors resulted in the earliest intelligence tests. Get out your pencils dullards!

But my tears fall today because people who call themselves scientists, enthralled to their statistics, modelling and inferences from tiny samples, have the gall and gonadal instincts to trot out the aged cliche that non-whites aren't smart, oh, except the Japanese. I don't respect their points of view enough to treat them seriously, but I will ask a question. Why can't white males produce a dancable beat? Though countless thousand white males seek out rock star glory, a tiny minority produce a sound that induces anything more sweat-producing than a toe tap (I live in the land of the rod-rigid sway dance) and even then, its because they've thieved the music of those other, feeble-minded, cultures. Where is the test which determines the root causes of the white race's bland music making? A good thing not much intelligence is required to produce most of the meaningful music produced today! Thank evolution for stupidity!