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Suggesting there are differences in intelligence between races can be misunderstood as racism, rather than a misunderstanding of intelligence. It is also a gross misunderstanding of what "race" is or means.

First to tackle the concept of "race." Nobody really knows what race, as it applies to humans, means. We do know that certain people look different, come from different cultures, and that the differences in humanity are closely tied to which part of the world their ancestors came from. People with pale skin and eyes, thinner hair, and less excitable temperaments tend to come from colder climates. All of their features, and much of their temperament, are adaptations to environment for the purposes of survival. People with ancestry closer to the equator, where the sun is stronger and stays in the sky for a longer duration, tend to have darker skin and eyes, hair that is more dense and wiry to protect their scalp from the sun, and broader noses that do not need to warm the air before it reaches their lungs. These are just two examples of how race may be defined. They're also two of the most common groupings of physical characteristics that we're familiar with in our contemporary word. But do these characteristics define race? According to the experts, those whose knowledge and research is extensive, the answer is, "No." Why? Because race based on physical characteristics is a modern concept. It has only been during the past few hundred years that "race" has moved from being defined through wealth, power, and status to physical characteristics. If something is possible of changing its meaning, then it has no intrinsic meaning and cannot be absolutely defined by modern, and often arbitrary, criteria.

Race may not exist as an absolute, but our modern culture has established criteria for defining race, and we do place value on the different races. One of those value systems is intelligence. And here we go again with a Big Question: What is intelligence? Ask 50 experts what intelligence is, then brace yourself for a mind-numbing, theory-clashing, hot-headed debate on what it actually is. Experts achieve the crown of Expert by researching what already exists, and then putting it together in a way new enough to attract attention. If any two "experts" agreed on anything, one of them would be redundant. We can't rely on any one definition of intelligence.

However, we can, and do, adopt certain definitions of intelligence in our school

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