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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.



Indians were seen as a homogeneous group of savages despite the fact that individual groups varied extensively and had several well developed social systems. Black people were also portrayed as savage, uncivilized and having low intelligence. By creating these social constructs, expansion into North America was justified.
"What of the latest currents of thought? Are they likely to lead to, or at least encourage, further distortions of social policy? The indications are not all encouraging. Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray published a book in 1994 clearly directed at policy, just as Jensen and others had in the 1960s and 1970s. The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life (New York: Free Press, 1994) teamed a psychologist with a conservative policy advocate to try to prove that both the class structure and the racial divide in the United States result from genetically determined differences in intelligence and ability."
"Their general assertions about genes and IQ were not very controversial, but their speculations on race were something else again."
"Also in the 1990s, Phillipe Rushton has tried to couch racial differences in IQ in a theory drawn from evolutionary biology. This theory takes the concepts of r and K selection, crudely useful when applied to a vast range of living creatures considered on a continuum, and apply it to subtle differences in skull form, mental test results, and sexual behavior within our one species. This theory has no academic legitimacy and little relationship to real evolutionary theory, but it taints the whole Darwinian enterprise, strongly recalling the "scientific anthropology" of the era of slavery."
"The reality is quite different. As argued by George Armelagos in his Presidential Address to the American Association of Physical Anthropologists ("Race, Reason and Rationale," Evolutionary Anthropology 4, 1995, pp. 103–109) race itself is a dubious concept for the human species. Obviously it is sociologically meaningful, but even in the social realm it is a constantly moving target with little or no core biological legitimacy."The Tangled Wing Biological Constraints on the Human Spirit Times Books Pub: 2002 ISBN 0-7167-4602-6

Main article: Race and intelligence (References)