If
I were to
set my heart on bench pressing more than 120 lbs, I would
have to work long and hard. A lot of time, effort and dedication will have to go into this achievment, seeing as
I am only little and not very strong at all.
I would have to have help deciding on a workout program, which will need to be comprehensive, working on the muscles in my back and shoulders separately, to counterbalance the muscle development in my chest and arms from the bench presses.
I would have to have the right equipment - a bench, a set of weights, a back belt, some dumb bells possibly. I would either need to be able to afford to buy those or to afford a gym membership.
So, before we even start arguing about whether or not my very thin wrist bones can take 120 lbs of weight, we know we need time, effort, guidance and money to even have a go at it.
Some people are like that with their bodies, some people are like that with their heads. If you supress the examination of one's mind's "fitness", you will never be able to give the little, not very strong ones the right tools to reach their highest potential (which is, and will always be, finite).
I don't like the thought of Race A being genetically smarter or better or whatever than Race B. As a Jew, the mere thought strikes terror into my paranoid little heart. But the kids who are struggling in school and not receiving an appropriate and supportive education because their teachers and councillors live in fear of being branded a racist and losing their jobs deserve better than that, ne?
whimsy: The question is not one of which prevails - nature or nurture. The question is how we can improve nurture for specialized cases of nature. This is not a revolutionary concept - there are dedicated education systems for deaf, autistic and otherwise different children. The standard education system has also in the last couple of decades been modified to accomodate children with more subtle learning disabilities and dislexia, giving them a chance to excel where one would have been completely denied them in the past.
Mr. Option: Why, then, not allow the validity of reasearch which could expand the boundaries of what we know about how different brains work differently? Because of what we might discover vis-a-vis race? Surely fearing the discovery that non-white races are less "intelligent" than the white race is a more racist supposition than just going with the flow and seeing what thruths there are to be discovered? After all, we might, fifty years from now, all "know" with unshakeable certainty that the most intellignt race is the Australian aboriginals, closely followed by the Indian sub-continent and the African races, and that white people are floundering in third place with asians and native Americans. We don't know, and we won't be able to transcend our fears of what we might dicover by suppressing scientific research.