Thread: Overpopulation

You will have to do most of the work yourself and make up your mind. The Wikipedia article is a good source of information. The problem is that whenever there's a study into this there is a whole shitstorm of hysterical criticism. Many scientists say that even doing the studies is immoral, which I totally disagree with, because basically you end up saying that your moral system rests upon a denial of reality. The truth can never be a bad thing; people just need to be confident enough to deal with it. And what you end up doing by taking issue with the studies is implicitly saying that low IQ is a bad thing... so you end up being the one making the dodgy moral judgements. Another criticism that is made is that the concept of race doesn't even exist, but I don't really think that's true either, and again it's probably harmful to feel compelled to take that stance. Obviously there is an objective distinction between Asians and native Americans for instance; race can be taken to mean whatever the basis of that distinction is. Of course the categories are blurred at the edges, but that doesn't make them wrong any more than it makes the concept of colours wrong. The criticism rarely actually seems to deal with the methodology; it doesn't seem to suggest that the mean IQs of the sampled populations is wrong. To me it just seems like a lot of political waffle and spin, which shouldn't belong in science. Just look at the second paragraph of that Wikipedia article: those statements are just politically correct platitudes, and don't address whether average IQ actually does vary between races. 'You can't determine somebody's intelligence by race'; that is not an answer to the question, obviously averages aren't about individuals. 'Humans have equal ability to assimilate culture, and racism is unjustified'; again, not an answer to the question.