Re: Race, Intelligence, and Public Policy
I feel all the more strongly about it, Blue, now that I have checked out this Dr. Richard Lynn and the company he travels in, or at least the company that would like to travel with him.
Dr. Lynn is the Director of the "Ulster Institute for Social Research," in Northern Ireland. the University of Ulster. From his initial studies of "Pacific Rim Orientals" (or "Mongoloids"), Dr. Lynn has moved on to all the "other" races, from Caucasoids to Negroids to Negroid-Caucasoid Hybrids (!!!) to South Asians to Amerindians. Here is his 1991 study, "Race Differences in Intelligence: A Global Perspective," which I found on....David Duke's site.
duke.org
More recently, in 1996, Dr. Lynn published a book entitled "Dysgenics," arguing that we are "deteriorating" genetically, and offering prescriptions to "solve" the "problem." Here is a review (from a sympathizer):
eugenics.net
Lynn is closely associated with a number of other researchers, whom I will lump together as the "race=intelligence school." They include J. Philippe Rushdon, Michael Levin ("Why Race Matters"), the "Bell Curve" folks (Herrnstein and Murray), and Arthur Jensen (the original "black is stupid" man).
Their admirers like to picture them as True Scientists, whose dispassionately reached results are under constant attack from a horde of PC-obsessed second-raters -- like Stephen Jay Gould. (I should be so second-rate! <g>)
What is the matter with this picture?
Of course, the fight over race & intelligence is more political than it is scientific. But:
1) It is hardly one-sided. The race=intelligence folks have a clear-cut political agenda themselves, which tends to appeal to the far-right political fringe.
2) These folks are either "social scientists" or "educators" or "educational psychologists" -- in other words, they are not scientists! They may use "scientific" tools, like statistics, but the data they use them on are not necessarily "scientifically accurate" or even appropriate.
Let us take IQ tests. Not even the people who administer them would argue that they are good all-round measures of "intelligence," per se, even though they have SOME predictive value where performance in school is concerned (and very little where career success is concerned, incidentally). IQ tests, for example, do not measure "intuition" -- i.e., the ability to see connections that are not obvious -- which is in turn related to that non-measurable (or at least non-measured) faculty, "creative ability."
Yet the people noted above rely on IQ tests to rank the "races." Jensen has tried to get around the IQ test problem by inventing something he calls "the <g> factor" (<g> standing for "general intelligence"), but it too is derived from the same tests, and so it can't measure those mental abilities that they do not measure.
An awful lot of charlatanry has been peddled under the name of "science." And so I think it behooves us to be as wary as possible, especially when the "science" is tied so closely to a particular political agenda.
Joan |
