From: Lee Corbin (lcorbin@tsoft.com)
Date: Thu Aug 09 2001 - 21:01:14 MDT
Party of Citizen writes
>[John K Clark wrote]
>> Extropians hold some controversial views and are not shy about
>> talking about them, so if we thought the white "race"... was
>> superior to other humans we would say so in a loud clear voice.
>> The reason you have not heard us say such a thing is that we
>> don't think it's true.
> Will the Extropian application of scientific method tell you
> if it is true or not? How?
I can hardly speak for all Extropians of course, but here is how
I would try. The unqualified term "superior to" has to be taken
as meaning "superior to in all important ways", in the context
above, e.g., we may say that human beings are superior to monkeys.
(It's not coincidental, by the way, that monkeys and human beings
are different species.)
Now the reason that nothing as large as a human racial group can be
"superior to other human racial groups in all important ways" is
that there has not been enough time, evolutionarily speaking, for
such large differences to develop.
A second reason is that all tests, whether of intelligence, running
speed, swimming ability, emotional stability, etc., show a tremendous
overlap. That is, each of these abilities is approximately normally
distributed, and the means and standard deviations of all human
racial groups are close. But if you were to compare, for example,
throwing ability, you would learn that the difference between humans
and chimpanzees is vastly, vastly larger. No normal human being (that
is, one not obviously suffering from an unusual impairment) will throw
worse than the most skilled chimpanzee. But there has been no trait
that I know of---much less an important one---where there is anything
like this kind of difference between human races.
Lee Corbin
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