Evolutionary Logic

         Recently, a gentleman conceded that black men might be physically superior, but when it came to cognitive intelligence, white men were evidently superior. I usually do not like to get entangled into pointless racial ambiguities; nevertheless, this is a little different. I want to explore this statement purely from a logical or analytical perspective.

            Starting with the caveman, white, blue, or black, we know with a degree of certainty that he couldn’t fly to the moon and nor could he do any space exploration. On the other hand, today’s forthwith man has everything but wings to explore the universe. Therefore, we can safely infer that there is no genetic predisposition to a man’s cognitive capabilities. If it were so, the caveman would have been able to decode the human genome himself. Instead, it took a few millennia for us to get to the cutting edge of innovation and creativity; this suggests that man and his brain have evolved over time. The more inventive we have gotten, the more complex our thought process has become. Subsequent generations are usually more evolved than their predecessors; however, this is possible because the older generations create the blueprints for the next leaps into the future. This is not rocket science, but I feel like it’s necessary to drive this argument home.

Now let’s put the black man under the microscope. Like the caveman, I do not believe that there are any genetic predispositions that explain any physical superiority of African American men. For centuries, the only practical use the world had for them was physically inclined. Hence, it is not surprising that generations of them were born into a life of hardship. Evolutionary logic tells us that such a life would eventually give birth to a physically able people. In addition, Darwin argued that the environment alters the genetic make-up of certain animals, which as a result gives birth to a new species, slightly different for the original ones. If such logic is true, we must therefore conclude that slavery contributed to the physical alteration of black men like the environment to the woodpecker or the giraffe. Since the civil right movement is still in its infancy, fairness and equity are still elusive to the minority. Hence, black men have yet to acquire the developmental maturities deemed necessary to build robust knowledge structures. Afforded equal access to education and social conditioning, I have no doubt that the colored cognition will become increasingly sharper. It will take some time for the colored brain to further develop and his psychographics remapped.

            I must admit that this school of thought did not originate with me. It is from care ethics, a feminist argument that is based on the Aristotelian notion of virtue ethics. Some feminists argued that since women were only allowed to be in the home and were denied any formal training, they have yet to develop their full cognitive potentiality. White men, on the contrary, have been developing his cognition for millennia since he was the only one who could acquire formal education. Almost all-historical scholarly literature have always emphasized rich white men’s developmental abilities. Everyone else was deemed inferior and incapable of acquiring any skills. Nevertheless, we now know that this was yet another ploy to claim superiority, thus maintaining an advantage. Evidently, this feminist argument is right because we are witnessing a revolution. Women have exploded on every level. Not too long ago, women were said to be incapable of doing any real thinking, yet look how close Hilary Clinton and Sarah Palin came to ruling the world. Denying a people the right to education is the worse form of imprisonment there is. Since time does not stop for anyone, people have to move at the speed of life. Therefore, a people will always be cognitively underdeveloped when its developmental maturity is held captive.

            Granted, by arguing this point, I understand that some may feel that I’m blaming slavery for African American’s social economic problems, or even conceding that they’re cognitively incompetent. Far from blaming slavery, I think this argument credits it for the mental and physical strength that are so often attributed to black people. It is evolution at work, but most importantly, this argument put all races on equal footing arguing that given equitable opportunities everyone will inevitably evolve.

            The horizon is loaded with exciting promises. Rather than focusing on superiority and inferiority, we must frame the argument in terms of fairness and equity. We must ensure that our contemporaries get proper and equitable conditioning. Eventually, the truth will be known. There will no longer be a privileged few that actually makes it; the ratio will be more proportionally distributed. Only then, will we be able to change that inherent fallacy which claims that some people are inferior while others aren’t.


Rapadoo