> 2. I think Justin got Wojtek wrong. It's not only, as countless critics
> have underlined, the crying absence of proper precautions to ensure that
> race is not confounded with other factors or that the effects of racism
> have indeed been accounted for. Wojtek questioned the validity of the
> inference from the racial IQ gap which remains after SES-like variables
> have been (putatively) controlled for to the existence of heritable racial
> differences in cognitive ability.
If that's all he'd done it would have been fine. Instead he suggested that use of pencil and apper tests was irrelevant, in fact stupid, to determination of cognitive capacity.
That Murray and friends are borrowing
> authority by clothing man's most dangerous myth in pseudo-scientific
> discourse is proven by their refusal to simply look at any evidence not of
> the paper and pencil kind, in particular Lewontin's evindence of the
> underlying genetics through protein polymorphisms, which speaks for or
> against the liklihood of the existence of heritable deep racial differences
> in complex behavioral characteristics.
>
That's just fine. But you can't test for cognitive capacity without using
pencil and paper, whatever conclusions you draw from the results of the tests.
--jks