User:Kevin Murray/R&I/bainer
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{{Cleanup|date=October 2007}} The study of race and intelligence is the controversial study of how human intellectual capacities may vary among the different population groups commonly known as races. This study seeks to identify and explain the differences in manifestations of intelligence (e.g. IQ testing results), as well as the underlying causes of such variance.
Theories about the possibility of a relationship between race and intelligence have been the subject of speculation and debate since the 16th century.[1][2] The contemporary debate focuses on the nature, causes, and importance, or lack of importance, of ethnic differences in intelligence test scores and other measures of cognitive ability, and whether "race" is a meaningful biological construct with significance other than its correlation to membership of particular ethnic groups. Thus, the question of the relative roles of nature and nurture in causing individual and group differences in cognitive ability is seen as fundamental to understanding the debate.[3]
The modern controversy surrounding intelligence and race focuses on the results of IQ studies conducted during the second half of the 20th century in the United States, Western Europe, and other industrialized nations.[4]