Is your destiny determined by your race?

I want to push back on the chain-of-logic that contends

1. IQ is predetermined at birth and does not change
2. Race determines IQ
3. Since IQ is destiny, then race IS destiny 

IQ is predetermined at birth and does not change

It is my personal belief that the human brain is very plastic. It rewires to optimize itself for changing environments.

A quick "proof": If I read off or showed 3, seven-digit numbers to a Boomer and a Gen Z, I am confident that the Boomer will almost always be able to repeat back the numbers five minutes later with greater fidelity than the Gen Z person.

The reason is that Boomers remembered the land-line numbers of their friends and family. I can still tell you the land-line number of my grandparents and the home number where I grew up. Phone numbers, back in the day, were seven digits long. Our brains rewired to optimize the retrieval of seven-digit strings of numbers.

Second piece of evidence: There as a very large, longitudinal health study in Britain. One of the pieces of data they tracked was I.Q.

A group of people who shared one attribute scored significantly higher than the group of people who did NOT share that attribute. More interesting, the gap in test scores steadily increased over the years. It did not stay constant.

The attribute? The group that scored higher on the IQ tests were readers. Educators tell us that the single best predictor of whether a child will be a reader is if the family demonstrates the culture of readers. There are books and magazines in the home. The parents read. The parents read to the children.

How many of you who insist that IQ is entirely genetic would actually expect Ben Carson's mother to score within 5 IQ points as Ben? His mother, Sonya Carson, was functionally illiterate.

Third piece of evidence: Trauma rewires brains.

Post-traumatic Stress Disorder is just "twitchy feelings". It has been widely recognized since the the year 2000 that "Neuroimaglng studies in post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) have revealed changes in brain structure and function..."

People who are in combat are focused on second-to-second survival and "appropriately discounting the long term costs of behaviors" is a distraction that can get you killed. Ergo, many soldiers take up smoking while down-range.

Fourth piece of evidence: Drugs change brains

Smoking weed kills one's give-a-golly. Since the mid-twenty-teens the literature is full of peer reviewed studies with conclusions like "...regular cannabis use is associated with gray matter volume reduction in the medial temporal cortex, temporal pole, parahippcampal gyrus, insula and orbitofrontal cortex..."

Those areas are critical for longterm memory and processing emotions. 

Harder drugs kill every desire that gets in the way of the next fix.

Fifth piece of evidence: Elites from the Caribbean and Africa

Mrs ERJ's uncle was a chaplain at Southern University. SU is a traditionally-Black University in Baton Rouge, Louisiana.

According to him, the US born students HATED the students from the Caribbean and Africa who had been schooled using the traditional, legacy UK system.

The professors graded on a curve. The Caribbean and African students invariably earned 100% on their tests. They mastered all of the assigned material. A single student from either of those place was enough to "spike" the curve and turn it into straight-scale.

The irony is that most of the Caribbean and African students were much darker than the US born students. 

The "Race" to "IQ" link is highly confounded

The "Black Culture" that is enabled by WOKE Progressives sabotages most Black students on every count mentioned above.

Demographically, Blacks are younger than white people.

Pro-union, WOKE cities insist that education is the province of the education industry and unionized teachers. 

Culturally, Black people are exposed to more random, capricious violence and WOKE jurisdictions do nothing to suppress that violence.

Culturally, Black people are more likely to be heavy users of cannabis in their adolescence and as young adults than every other ethnic group other than Native American. That is the period when brains are developing.

WOKE culture enables mediocre performance from Black people. It is the soft racism of low expectations. 

ERGO, it is nearly impossible to untangle cultural and genetic factors.

A high IQ is like a powerful motor

A high IQ is like a powerful motor. But to be a useful truck or a fast race car, that engine needs appropriate tires and a transmission and a suspension and operator controls to be useful. It needs a road. It needs an operator to work the steering wheel, brakes and throttle.

People WANT IQ to mean more than it does. Just because you desperately want something to be true does not make it so. 

I don't expect this post to change anybody's mind. I just want to go on-record for where I stand on the topic.