So 'Whites' are inherently significantly mentally INFERIOR to Asians and 'Blacks' are significantly inferior to 'whites', eh?
And, (despite what your previous chosen study concluded!), WEALTH, environment, nutrition, and education have but insignificant effects on mental development, eh? And 'IQ' tests are uniformly transmissible across all human cultures?
LOL!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Also... you maintain that intra-racial genetic variation means nothing (despite the established fact of genetics that there exists GREATER genetic variation on the African continent then - on average - between any African resident picked at random and any other person on the rest of the planet also picked at random? (A well-established fact of genetics used to argue, I believe successfully, for the origin of man on the African continent....)
WHAT 'genetic theory' was that editorial expressing?
Where is it written in a testable form?
Where is the PEER REVIEW? (I see that you conveniently ignored all of that.... :-)
You introduced a badly written and mostly incoherent (skipping from factoid to factoid largely without ever bothering to establish any confirmed relevance between any of those disparate categories) editorial relating to the 'James Watson affair' for God's sake, but not containing much of actual science in it! Ah, those wishy-washy Social Scientists <GGG>)
I hardly think that "studies from the 1840s" (mentioned down in the body of the editorial) count for much when it comes to the modern science of genetics, LOL!
Furthermore, WHAT THE HELL does "sociability" or "marital stability" or "permissive attitudes" or "self esteem" or "size of genitals" (other categories listed in the editorial's table <GGG>) have to do with ANYTHING about the possibility of determining an inheritable genetic factor related to human intelligence? Geeze....
Are folks with stable marriages SMARTER or DUMBER than the average Joe? Are liberals with "permissive attitudes" SMARTER or DUMBER than the average 'non-permissive' conservative? (Hell... didn't we see some research recently about supposedly non-permissive conservatives and average intelligence? Lordie....)
And "sociability"... are sociable folks smarter or dumber than a box or rice in China?
(And could they *possibly* throw more completely irrelevant crap at the wall in the hopes that some of it might 'stick' with the non-scientists who might read it???????)
Talk about an amazing mountain of slop and irrelevant scatter-shot 'facts' paraded out amidst endlessly confounding (inadequately controlled for) independent variables!
What an amazing mis-mash of irrelevant data points (many seriously in error) that editorial was... most of which have no bearing whatsoever on the question of human INTELLIGENCE.....
(Not that there is anything wrong with asking any question that one might want to in science, or coming up with any hypothesis at all... it's just that this one was so amazingly lamely presented and argued!)
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Replying to the Rushton/Jenson schock editorial:
Author's Response
I have responded to all of the Rushton and Jensen claims about the causes of Black/White differences in IQ in my book Intelligence and How to Get It: Why Schools and Cultures Count.
With regard specifically to the finding that Blacks and Whites differ in brain size:
a) It is not always found that Blacks have smaller brains than Whites;
b) brain size differences between Blacks and Whites, when they are found, may have environmental causes;
c) It is far from clear that the relation between brain size and IQ is causal — siblings in a given family who have larger brain sizes are not more intelligent than those with smaller brain sizes;
d) Men and women differ more in brain size than anything claimed by Rushton yet have approximately equal IQ;
e) There are people in a community in Ecuador with head sizes several standard deviations below average yet these people do better in school than normal individuals;
f) The direction of brain size over the last few thousand years is down; and
g) Einstein had a smaller brain than the average found by Rushton for Blacks!
Richard E. Nisbett
University of Michigan
Association for Psychological Sciences
psychologicalscience.org
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In a commentary in the same issue as the survey paper, the cognitive psychologist Richard Nisbett wrote that Rushton and Jensen:[53]
ignore or misinterpret most of the evidence of greatest relevance to the question of heritability of the Black–White IQ gap. A dispassionate reading of the evidence on the association of IQ with degree of European ancestry for members of Black populations, convergence of Black and White IQ in recent years, alterability of Black IQ by intervention programs, and adoption studies lend no support to a hereditarian interpretation of the Black–White IQ gap. On the contrary, the evidence most relevant to the question indicates that the genetic contribution to the Black–White IQ gap is nil.
# ^ Nisbett, Richard E. (2005). "Heredity, environment, and race differences in IQ: A commentary on Rushton and Jensen (2005).". Psychology, Public Policy, and Law 11: 302–310. doi:10.1037/1076-8971.11.2.302. defiant.ssc.uwo.ca
defiant.ssc.uwo.ca
...In his 2008 book Where have all the liberals gone?, the political scientist James R. Flynn summarised his views on research into the black-white IQ gap as follows:[54]
What do we know? First, we know that the black-white IQ gap disappeared in Germany. But the numbers are scant, there are unknowns that could have biased the results, and one study should not convince anyone. Second, that the g pattern disappeared in Germany. This shows that the German environment at least addressed the root causes of the IQ gap insofar as it is environmental, something America does not seem to have done to date....
...Dickens (2005) states that "Although the direct evidence on the role of environment is not definitive, it mostly suggests that genetic differences are not necessary to explain racial differences. Advocates of the hereditarian position have therefore turned to indirect evidence ... The indirect evidence on the role of genes in explaining the Black-White gap does not tell us how much of the gap genes explain and may be of no value at all in deciding whether genes do play a role. Because the direct evidence on ancestry, adoption, and cross-fostering is most consistent with little or no role for genes, it is unlikely that the Black-White gap has a large genetic component."
^ Genetic Differences and School Readiness Dickens, William T. The Future of Children – Volume 15, Number 1, Spring 2005, pp. 55–69 ( futureofchildren.org )
etc.
en.wikipedia.org
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Race and IQ: A sorry tale of shoddy science | Science | guardian.co.uk
Nov 13, 2009 ... The Mismeasure of Man by Stephen Jay Gould exposes the shameful history of research into race and intelligence....
guardian.co.uk;
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Race and intelligence: separating science from myth - Google Books Result
Jefferson M. Fish - 2002 - Education - 436 pages
Now, the distinguished authors of this book offer powerful new illumination....
books.google.com;
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Commenting on Dr Watson’s current views about race, Steven Rose, a professor of biological sciences at the Open University, said: “This is Watson at his most scandalous. He has said similar things about women before but I have never heard him get into this racist terrain.
He added: “If he knew the literature in the subject he would know he was out of his depth scientifically, quite apart from socially and politically.”
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...Commentators have also argued that hereditarian psychologists have tacitly adopted folk definitions of race and heredity. Other common criticisms have centered on the problems that intelligence is poorly measured and that race is a social construct, not a biologically defined attribute.[24][25] According to this view, intelligence is ill-defined and multi-dimensional, or has definitions that vary between cultures. This would make contrasting the intelligence of groups of people, especially groups that came from different cultures, dependent mainly on which culture’s definition of intelligence is being used. Moreover, this view asserts that even if intelligence were as simple to measure as height, racial differences in intelligence would still be meaningless since race exists only as a social construct, with no basis in biology....
Test scores
Most of the evidence of intelligence differences between racial groups is based on studies of IQ test scores, almost always using self-reported racial data. Self-reports have been shown to be reliable indicators of genetic race to the extent that they match up with genetic clusters derived from mathematical clustering techniques, but these techniques do not determine whether these clusters themselves have any relation to intelligence.[22] According to psychologist David Rowe, self-report is the preferred method for racial classification in studies of racial differences because classification based on genetic markers alone ignore the "cultural, behavioral, sociological, psychological, and epidemiological variables" that distinguish racial groups.[29]....
International comparisons
The validity and reliability IQ scores obtained from outside of the United States and Europe have been questioned, in part because of the inherent difficulty of comparing IQ scores between cultures.[37][38] Several researchers have argued that cultural differences limit the appropriateness of standard IQ tests in non-industrialized communities.[39][40] In the mid-1970s, for example, the Soviet psychologist Alexander Luria concluded that it was impossible to devise an IQ test to assess peasant communities in Russia because taxonomy was alien to their way of reasoning.[41]
Nevertheless, some researchers have attempted to measure IQ variation in a global context. According to Richard Lynn, racial differences in IQ scores are observed around the world.[42][43] With several colleagues, Lynn collated IQ data from more than a hundred countries and, using various estimation techniques, reported mean IQ scores for 192 nations. Adopting the ten-category classification scheme of human genetic variation introduced in The History and Geography of Human Genes by Luigi Cavalli-Sforza and colleagues, Lynn argues that mean IQ varies by genetic cluster, or "race"....
...Lynn's methods and conclusions have been contested. For example, Wicherts and colleagues reviewed IQ data from sub-Saharan Africa, arguing that the mean score in the region is about 80. Furthermore, they suggest that the Flynn effect is yet to take hold in Africa.[47][48] Several researchers, including Denny Borsboom, have criticized Lynn for failing to test his data for possible measurement bias.[49] Richardson has argued that Lynn has the causal connection backwards, suggesting that "the average IQ of a population is simply an index of the size of its middle class, both of which are results of industrial development".[38] Mackintosh has criticized Lynn for manipulation of data, and raised doubts about the reliability of his findings.[50][51]....
Views on research
In an article on possible ethical guidelines for research on group differences in intelligence, Hunt and Carlson,[22] while arguing that such research is "scientifically valid and socially important", identify four contemporary positions on the topic of racial differences in intelligence:
1. "There are differences in intelligence between races that are due in substantial part to genetically determined differences in brain structure and/or function" (Rushton (1995); Rushton & Jensen (2005)) <<< Your posted editorial >>>
2. "Differences in cognitive competencies between races exist and are of social origin" (Ogbu (2002) ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_and_intelligence#CITEREFOgbu2002 ), Sowell (2005) ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_and_intelligence#CITEREFSowell2005 ))
3. "Differences in test scores that are used to argue for differences in intelligence between races represent the inappropriate use of tests in different groups" (Ogbu (2002))
4. "There is no such thing as race; it is a term motivated by social concerns and not a scientific concept " (Fish (2004) ( en.wikipedia.org ); Smedley & Smedley (2005) ( en.wikipedia.org ); Sternberg, Grigorenko & Kidd (2005) ( en.wikipedia.org ))
Sternberg, Grigorenko & Kidd (2005) have criticized research into race and intelligence, arguing that:[25]
* "the overwhelming portion of the literature on intelligence, race, and genetics is based on folk taxonomies rather than scientific analysis"
* "because theorists of intelligence disagree as to what it is, any consideration of its relationships to other constructs must be tentative at best"
* "race is a social construction with no scientific definition" so that "studies of the relationship between race and other constructs may serve social ends but cannot serve scientific ends"
* "no gene has yet been conclusively linked to intelligence, so attempts to provide a compelling genetic link of race to intelligence are not feasible at this time"
* "heritability, a behavior-genetic concept, is inadequate in regard to providing such a link"
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...Watson's folly
Top of page
Abstract
Debate about sensitive scientific issues needs to be forthright but not crass.
So 'Honest Jim' Watson has finally fallen victim to his notorious propensity for making outrageous statements — forced to cancel a UK lecture tour and suspended from his leadership role at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in New York after being quoted in a British newspaper as claiming that black people are less intelligent and employable than whites (see page 960).
Watson certainly has a track record in making distasteful remarks. He has on many previous occasions voiced unpalatable views tinged with racism and sexism, ranging from a desire to see a world full of genetically engineered pretty girls to his belief that sex drive is related to skin colour. He has been largely indulged over the years, mostly in light of his towering achievement of 54 years ago in helping to deduce the structure of DNA, his ensuing Nobel prize, and his role in founding the Human Genome Project.
His latest outburst marks the point at which his views have finally been deemed beyond the pale. And rightly so — for one of the world's most high-profile scientists to state such views demonstrates a sheer unacceptable offensiveness. Watson has apologized and retracted the outburst, claiming to have been "mortified" at the outcome of the interview although he did not deny its contents. He acknowledged that there is no evidence for what he claimed about racial differences in intelligence. But the damage has been done, lending succour and comfort to racists around the globe....
nature.com
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From The Sunday Times
December 9, 2007
DNA pioneer James Watson is blacker than he thought
Jonathan Leake, Science Editor
JAMES WATSON, the DNA pioneer who claimed Africans are less intelligent than whites, has been found to have 16 times more genes of black origin than the average white European.
An analysis of his genome shows that 16% of his genes are likely to have come from a black ancestor of African descent. By contrast, most people of European descent would have no more than 1%.
The study was made possible when he allowed his genome - the map of all his genes - to be published on the internet in the interests of science.
“This level is what you would expect in someone who had a great-grandparent who was African,” said Kari Stefansson of deCODE Genetics, whose company carried out the analysis. “It was very surprising to get this result for Jim.”
Watson won the Nobel prize, with Francis Crick and Maurice Wilkins, after working out the structure of DNA in 1953. However, he provoked an outcry earlier this year when he suggested black people were genetically less intelligent than whites.
This weekend his critics savoured the wry twist of fate. Sir John Sulston, the Nobel laureate who helped lead the consortium that decoded the human genome, said the discovery was ironic in view of Watson’s opinions on race. “I never did agree with Watson’s remarks,” he said. “We do not understand enough about intelligence to generalise about race.”
The backlash against Watson forced him to step down as chancellor of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, New York state, after 39 years at the helm. He had said he was “inherently gloomy about the prospects for Africa” because “all our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours - whereas all the testing says not really”.
The analysis by deCODE Genetics, an Icelandic company, also shows a further 9% of Watson’s genes are likely to have come from an ancestor of Asian descent. Watson was not available for comment....
timesonline.co.uk
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James Watson's 16 Percent
What does it mean to say that he's one-sixth African?
By Chris Wilson
Posted Friday, Dec. 14, 2007, at 6:08 PM ET
slate.com
James Watson, the co-discoverer of DNA who claimed in October that black Africans are less intelligent than whites, is himself 16 percent African. That claim comes from an Icelandic genomics company, which analyzed Watson's genome (publicly available online). But aren't we all of African descent? How can you tell that someone is exactly 16 percent of one origin?
Check his code for single nucleotide polymorphisms. Watson's genome consists of 6 billion nucleotides, the DNA building blocks. The vast majority of this sequence—99.5 percent—is identical from person to person, no matter who you are or where your ancestors came from. But every now and then, a single nucleotide will vary. These differences—called SNPs—are peppered throughout our genome, and result from the subtle evolution that took place as different populations of humans stumbled out of Africa. In most cases, SNPs fall in the vast stretches of DNA that do not code for traits, though some are associated with physical appearance. By scanning a representative sample of the SNPs in a given genome, researchers can begin to piece together the different fractions of a person's ancestry.
Researchers have identified more than 3 million SNPs, often arranged in groups (known as "haplotypes") of those that happen to be close to one another in the genome sequence. Many of these groups tend to show up in people from a particular place; for example, a certain pattern in a certain location might be most commonly observed in African populations. By scanning hundreds of thousands of SNPs, analysts build a model for the most likely heritage of a person based on which populations have genomes most similar to his. In Watson's case, 16 percent of his genome fits the statistical model of a person of modern African descent. From that, we can conclude about one-sixth of his ancestors came from Africa within the last few hundred generations or so.
Such tests are surrounded in controversy. These ancestral percentages are easily confused with cultural definitions of race and ethnicity. (For example, "African ancestry" does not equal "black.") The accuracy of the tests is also debatable. Some critics charge that the sample populations used to determine which SNPs are associated with which ancestries are too narrow. Sequencing technology continues to improve, but even a small percentage of mistakes can lead to a large number of misread bases when scanning tens of billions of nucleotides. (A genome must be read several times for accuracy.) The company that did the sequencing claims that each base was read an average of 7.4 times, but Kari Stefansson, whose company assessed Watson's heritage, says he found enough errors in the public genome to have doubts about whether the 16 percent figure will hold up. For example, he says there are places where it appears that Watson has two X chromosomes, which would make him a woman.
Got a question about today's news? Ask the Explainer
Explainer thanks Lisa Brooks of the National Institutes of Health, Michael Egholm of 454 Life Sciences, Arthur Holden of the SNP Consortium, and Kari Stefansson of deCODE.
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...Though Watson would tell me during our recent interview that he had a rather low IQ, as proof that IQ tests aren't really that important, he enrolled at the University of Chicago when he was merely 15 and earned his B.S. in zoology there in 1947 at the age of 19 and a Ph.D. in zoology from Indiana University at age 22. He was 34 when he won the Nobel Prize. Not too shabby for a guy with a "low" IQ.
theroot.com
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