I'd hazard that there are many different types of "math" and some people are good at some kinds and not so good at others. This is just anecdotal evidence, but it seems like most people have limits. I'd also say that math, like most skills, is mostly learned and partly innate. I think, with enough effort and training, most people can handle enough math to score pretty well on the assessment tests, and most can get by on the SAT.
The cultural bias, if anything, is racism. In the work force, racism limits your options. One of the options left open for immigrants and third world people is science, where being white is less of an advantage than, say, going into management. Another option is self employment, where there's no glass ceiling (just a glass floor:). Both of these avenues involve studying math, so parents and peers could influence a community to valorize math skills.
Math, language, hitting a ball, and any other number of skills are not the expression of genes, especially when you average it out over a population. The numbers are the result of differences in effort.
There's this other idea going around that math is the pinnacle of higher order thought. It's not. It's just a skill that's in short supply because of modernization, which, today, requires a large number of people to perform mathematical labor. The math required isn't even that difficult. It all seems like a crisis because the need for analytical math skills grows faster than the nation (US's) willingness to plan ahead and provide for more math training. (Or our unwillingness to forgo the products of math labor.)
>Not sure if you're buying this or not, but you shouldn't, I think, because
>this pattern for the is found in (I'd hazard a guess) all language families,
>e.g. Spanish "31, 32..." "treinta y uno, treinta y dos...", including African
>and American Indian languages
>(my linguistics books are in storage or I'd come up with some better
>examples, for 11 and 12 as well...). It doesn't explain why countries or
>groups speaking similar languages don't excell at math, nor why there is a
>difference in the level of excellence in a linguistic group at different
>times in history (e.g. why the Arab world produced a lot of world-class
>mathematicians during a certain historical period, but no longer does,
>apparently.)
>
>In a message dated 00-12-01 21:53:44 EST, you write:
>
><< Interesting study in the Journal of Ed psych a few years
> back, don't have the reference handy: from an early age,
> Chinese kids outperform U. S. kids in math, even after
> controlling for obvious confounds like SES and parents'
> math skills. The researchers speculated that the
> difference in math skills was due to language--
> apparently the Chinese words for numbers like eleven
> and twelve translate into English as "ten and one",
> "ten and two", and so on. Thus learning how to say
> numbers in Chinese encourages kids to think in terms
> of addition. The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis strikes again!
>
> Miles
> >>
--
-------------------------------------- John Kawakami johnk at cyberjava.com, johnk at firstlook.com