The unwelcome return of race science

(Mar 4, 2018 11:25 PM)Magical Realist Wrote:

(Mar 4, 2018 10:37 PM)Syne Wrote: IQ scores by demographic are facts. Inferring from them that it is an inherently ethnic issue is an interpretation.

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/20...133334.htm

https://retractionwatch.com/2014/04/14/a...new-paper/
https://www.researchgate.net/publication...ew_process

(Mar 5, 2018 01:05 AM)Syne Wrote:

(Mar 4, 2018 11:25 PM)Magical Realist Wrote:

(Mar 4, 2018 10:37 PM)Syne Wrote: IQ scores by demographic are facts. Inferring from them that it is an inherently ethnic issue is an interpretation.

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/20...133334.htm

https://retractionwatch.com/2014/04/14/a...new-paper/
https://www.researchgate.net/publication...ew_process

Sounds like rightwing bitching to me. The study stands on its own merits.

Easy to say when you obviously don't understand its merits nor the critique.
You just have to fall back on partisan paranoia. Lemme guess. It's all a vast right-wing conspiracy, right? LOL!

(Mar 5, 2018 02:28 AM)Syne Wrote: Easy to say when you obviously don't understand its merits nor the critique.
You just have to fall back on partisan paranoia. Lemme guess. It's all a vast right-wing conspiracy, right? LOL!

No...just rightwing bitching. No conspiracy required.

Yet you aren't able to address the critique nor demonstrate the politics of those who wrote it.

(Mar 5, 2018 02:56 AM)Syne Wrote: Yet you aren't able to address the critique nor demonstrate the politics of those who wrote it.

Yeah..I don't address rightwing bitching..Let me know when they find real problems with the study.

(Mar 4, 2018 10:37 PM)Syne Wrote: IQ scores by demographic are facts. Inferring from them that it is an inherently ethnic issue is an interpretation.

I agree. The facts call out for explanation, but what we get instead is political/moral posturing.

I'm sure that it wasn't what CC meant when she started this rather trollish thread, but it does illustrate "junk science" when entire lines of inquiry are ruled out of consideration a-priori, for moral reasons. (Because if certain kinds of answers were true, that would be "bad".)

(Mar 4, 2018 11:25 PM)Magical Realist Wrote: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/20...133334.htm

That paper is basically making the same point that I made in my first post. What we call 'intelligence' appears to be an amalgam of a variety of cognitive skills that typically aren't present in everyone to the same degree. Some people might be very good at A, but poor at B. Other people might be the reverse.

The authors ask: "Can the entire distribution of human intelligence be accounted for by just one general factor? Is intelligence supported by a single neural system?" And they (tentatively) conclude "We propose that intelligence is an emergent property of anatomically distinct cognitive systems, each of which has its own capacity."

That's not particularly controversial. I think that it's what most people already suspected.

http://www.cell.com/neuron/fulltext/S089...12)00584-3

Here's a recent headline about a now suspended middle school teacher who secretly ran a podcast on white supremacism. She is quoted as saying that some races' IQs are higher than others. Such lie the dangers of this rightwing pseudoscience..

https://www.theroot.com/florida-middle-s...1823497416

That's the problem of denying findings. People will, in the explanatory vacuum, make up their own causation.
While IQ distribution is correlated to race, race is not the cause of the distribution. But pretending there is no race correlation at all opens the door to people using that pseudoscience to support their own.

(Mar 5, 2018 04:28 AM)Yazata Wrote: I'm sure that it wasn't what CC meant when she started this rather trollish thread, but it does illustrate "junk science" when entire lines of inquiry are ruled out of consideration a-priori, for moral reasons. (Because if certain kinds of answers were true, that would be "bad".)

What say you, C C?  Where do you stand?

(Mar 4, 2018 10:52 PM)Yazata Wrote: I think that I'm extraordinarily intelligent, but my talent in mathematics is average at best. I'm best at manipulating concepts.

Yeah, you’ve mentioned that more than once.  

History of the Race and Intelligence Controversy (wikipedia.org)

(Feb 13, 2018 06:09 AM)Syne Wrote: Race would seem to qualify as subspecies, even if no one will admit it. The clearest characteristics that we use to define races did originate from the same geographic/reproductive isolation that we use to define subspecies. Phenotypes (observable characteristics) can differ where the genotype (genetics) does not, through different expressions of the same genes.

Your #1 fan thinks that there’s enough regional variation to constitute a human subspecies, do you agree?

Do your views align with George W. Gills'?

Does Race Exist?

Quote:Those who believe that the concept of race is valid do not discredit the notion of clines, however. Yet those with the clinal perspective who believe that races are not real do try to discredit the evidence of skeletal biology. Why this bias from the "race denial" faction? This bias seems to stem largely from socio-political motivation and not science at all. For the time being at least, the people in "race denial" are in "reality denial" as well. Their motivation (a positive one) is that they have come to believe that the race concept is socially dangerous. In other words, they have convinced themselves that race promotes racism. Therefore, they have pushed the politically correct agenda that human races are not biologically real, no matter what the evidence.

The politically correct "race denial" perspective in society as a whole suppresses dialogue, allowing ignorance to replace knowledge and suspicion to replace familiarity. This encourages ethnocentrism and racism more than it discourages it.

If genetics plays a part in determining intelligence, would the environment play an equal or stronger role?