Some are born great? No, with the right start in life we all have the same chance to succeed

Five-year-old Isaac Brook adores football, supports Tottenham Hotspur and loves playing with his brother. He has just started school in rural Oxfordshire and is eagerly learning to read. “He’s taken to school like a duck to water. He loves it. He’s very sociable and good at making friends,” says his mother, Lydia. In other words, he is a very normal, happy little boy.

Yet there is something remarkable about Isaac. His early progress through life has helped to set the standard for other children across the world. Isaac is one of more than 1,300 children in five countries – Brazil, India, Italy, Kenya and the UK – whose growth and neurodevelopment has been tracked and compared from the earliest days in the womb until the age of two.

Led by a team at the University of Oxford, the INTERGROWTH-21st Project is set to have a profound impact on the way we view, feed and educate our children. It has shown for the first time that children are born physically and intellectually equal, regardless of their race or ethnicity. Given good living conditions, good food and education, babies thrive, wherever they live and whatever the colour of their skin.

Such is the power of the data gathered, the researchers hope it will be used alongside the World Health Organisation’s growth charts worldwide, including its Red Book in the UK. It should finally put to bed outdated notions of racial or class-based superiority.
The research tracks both physical and intellectual development to age two. A child’s first 1,000 days of life (from conception to 24 months) is the most crucial because that is when the brain grows fastest, accounting for roughly two-thirds of its adult weight.

“At every single stage we’ve shown that healthy mothers have healthy babies, and that healthy babies all grow at exactly the same rate,” says Prof Stephen Kennedy, the co-director of the Oxford Maternal and Perinatal Health Institute and co-leader of the INTERGROWTH-21st Project (with José Villar, a professor of perinatal medicine). “It doesn’t matter where you are living, it doesn’t matter what the colour of your skin is, it doesn’t matter what your race and ethnicity is, receiving decent medical care and nutrition is the key.”

The assertion that healthy mothers have healthy babies – regardless of where they come from – sounds obvious but demonstrating it in terms of growth and developmental milestones is a first.

Until now, it was a commonly held view that some babies were naturally smaller than others due to genetic predisposition: a healthy baby born to a Kenyan mother, say, would be smaller than a counterpart born to a British mother. America’s National Institutes for Health even produced differing foetal growth charts for babies of white, black, and Asian origin.

Assumptions have also – though more controversially – been made about the intellectual ability of different races. Only last week the Cold Spring Harbour Laboratory in the US cut its ties with James Watson, the Nobel Prize-winning geneticist who, with Maurice Wilkins and Francis Crick, first proposed the double helix structure of DNA, citing his “unsubstantiated and reckless” remarks about race and intelligence. Watson, the laboratory’s former chancellor, has repeatedly suggested that genes cause a disparity in average scores in IQ tests between blacks and whites.

“There’s still a substantial body of opinion out there in both the scientific and lay communities who genuinely believe that intelligence is predominantly determined by genes and the environment that you’re living in and that your parents and grandparents were living in and their nutritional and health status are not relevant,” says Prof Kennedy. “Well, that’s clearly not the case.”

The Oxford study took seven years to complete and involved nearly 60,000 mothers and babies in two stages of research, first tracking growth in the womb, before following more than 1,300 of those babies to age two. Its results show that not only physical growth but behaviour and neurodevelopmental milestones occur at the same rate among babies of differing ethnic origin. The findings echo the assertion by Craig Venter, the scientist who led the first draft of the sequencing of the human genome, that “there is no basis in scientific fact or in the human genetic code or the notion that skin colour will be a predictive of intelligence”.


https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2019/01/23/born-great-no-right-start-life-have-chance-succeed/

Plenty more to read on the link

It won't put to bed any notions of race or class-based superiority. The sort of people who want to feel superior to others on the basis of race or class will ignore this and invent their own "facts," as seen with the "scientific racism" being peddled more and more.

Welll what this shows also is that we have to do better to improve the living and health standards for future generations and those living today. This backs up what many of us have already been saying in regards to the notion of race. Its simple the fact that humans are one biological race and that the defintions we use. Are social constructs.

Its time we did away with the racial social constructs and simple have people defined by nationality and ethnicity.

>THE Ben Reilly< wrote:It won't put to bed any notions of race or class-based superiority. The sort of people who want to feel superior to others on the basis of race or class will ignore this and invent their own "facts," as seen with the "scientific racism" being peddled more and more.

They can ignore all they like Ben. What is important is future generations undertsand this through education. That people have better access to health and living standards, which will then finally put this mainly to bed. This misconcieved racist notion.

Thus in time, I believe it will truely be a thing of the past, such a warped hateful concept. We have seen many views and peceptions change with history. Education is the key going forward and if all learn this through schooling, it will help bring about change

We maybe not be able to change the ignorance of some today, but we certainly can help bring about change for the future.

So stop being so negative and look positively at this mate