Selection, Competition and Survival
Every creature who is hatched or born on planet earth faces a series of
tests to find out if he or she has the right stuff to survive. Nature is not
kind to individuals who do not make the grade. Animal populations consist of
healthy, smart members because everyone else died or was eaten. Humans have an
unusual ability to protect their young, sick and disabled members so that
strong, healthy members increasingly devote more of their time, money and energy
helping the less fortunate. This altruistic option in human groups, however,
does not alter the tough and persistent competition among humans for resources,
mates, money, prestige and security.
In every aspect of human life, there is a selection process operating. The
selection of members for special status or privilege involves tests to find out
who has the right stuff. Humans are constantly evaluating each other, constantly
noticing differences in appearance and behavior, automatically sorting the
people they meet into convenient categories. Humans respond strongly to physical
characteristics and react negatively to humans who differ in appearance, size,
shape sex or color. Humans are built to respond differently to different
characteristics. This discriminatory tendency is innate, not a matter of choice
or learning. The details may be learned but the tendency is innate and is not
going to disappear.
The fantasy of egalitarian democracy is out of step with nature and the
reality of human behavior. Every human society is a little prototype of
evolution. Every group, large or small, invents selection processes to sort
humans by age, gender, appearance, ancestry, intelligence, aptitudes, skills,
accomplishment and other variables. You can invent rules against sorting, but
sorting will continue because it is natural and important. In every human life,
everyday, a selection process is at work. There is an odd discrepancy between
the realities of rigorous, persistent selection processes in nature and the
pretense that everyone has the same ability and should have the same opportunity
to succeed at any endeavor they fancy. The Miss America pageant is not
egalitarian and only one young beauty is selected from thousands of beautiful
young woman who enter beauty contests in their own states. The selection of one
from many is basic to human society. Many-to-one is the rule of hierarchy and
every society generates a hierarchal distribution of rights and privileges, even
societies based on the principle of equal opportunity for all. We would like to
believe that selection processes employed in business and education are fair and
not discriminatory. There is an important distinction between discrimination
before the fact of performance and after the fact of performance. If an
individual is judged before he or she has a chance to take the test - that is
unfair. If discrimination occurs after the tests based on performance
measurements, then that is fair and necessary for a society to operate. The
third possibility is that the test is unfair. Many debates arise when the
fairness and appropriateness of tests is questioned. Schools generally have
established tests and standards that sort students by intelligence, aptitude and
accomplishment. IQ tests sort student by sampling their mental skills, which
means sampling aspects of their brain function with specific tests of cognitive
ability. Well-educated humans know about the distribution of qualities,
characteristics, goods and privileges in human populations.
The main idea is that all human characteristics are distributed and, no
matter what human feature you are considering, you will find some individuals
with more and some with less. In medicine, two standard deviations from the mean
on a test result is described as "normal" on the assumption that 98% of the
population cannot be abnormal. This assumption is often reasonable but may be
misleading if the distribution of a characteristic is skewed in a given
population. For example, two thirds of adult Puma Indians in the southern states
are obese and develop adult onset diabetes. If you limited your data collection
to the Puma Indians, you might consider obesity to be normal. However, if you
compare the Pumas with Harvard faculty, the Pumas have greater number of
diabetics and you conclude that Puma normal is abnormal in Boston. No one gets
upset if a scientist reports more diabetes in Pumas, but some get upset if a
scientist reports a lower average IQ in groups of US blacks compared with
whites. The black and white classification of humans is, of course, inherently
misleading. The simple fact is that humans have a range of IQ, skills and
aptitudes. "Equal opportunity" does not mean equal ability or equal
accomplishment.
Despite the assertion in the US Declaration of Independence, not all men are
“created equal.”Some men, for example, are women. The task for a humanitarian
society is to treat all men and women equally despite obvious differences in
shape, size, appearance, gender, color, mental abilities, aptitudes, beliefs and
habits. This is a task for idealists and cannot be achieved except in an
approximate manner with strict and relentless application of non-discrimination
rules. Sorting, selection, discrimination, social stratification, economic
differentials are as natural and inevitable as differences in gender, size,
weight, blood pressure and lifespan. If the topic is IQ distribution, some get
upset about population and individual differences based on genetic differences.
