'Intelligence' and Race (was Re: Invention of the white race // Rakesh on eugenics)

[C. Petersen]

> >  But on these grounds his argument is shaky. As Clark Glymour puts it,
> > "Gould claims that factor analysis produces conjectures about the existence
> > of unobserved properties solely because the properties, if they existed,
> > would explain features of data; in his phrasing factor analysis 'reifies'
> > unobserved quantities, and he thinks 'reification' is a Big Mistake. I
> > wonder whether he thinks atoms and molecules and their weights are Big
> > Mistakes as well, and if not, why not." (Scientists Respond the Bell Curve,
> > p. 259)
> For once Clark has dropped the ball. Gould has no objection to
> unobservable properties that explain observed data. His point is that
> there's no more explanatory reason to draw the vectors towards g than to
> lots of other points that exqually "explain" the data in the statistical
> sense, i.e., account for the variance. The reason to doubt the ezxistence
> of g is that it's arbitrary, not that it's an unobservable. It's hard for
> me to believe that Clark, of all people, missed this point.

In his book, Arthur Jensen said that he found that myopia of the eye, and
headsize are both 'g-loaded' factors, and are correlated with increased
intelligence.