On Nov 20, 2007, at 11:21 AM, Dwayne Monroe wrote:
> This confused cry from the heart, which, echoing and technically
> refining earlier European maladies, combines supremacism,
> humanitarianism and a genetic engineering version of the White Man's
> Burden all into one, terrible package offers a glimpse of the sorts of
> horrors the 21st century may have in store.
Yeah. Just when I was experiencing a glimmer of political optimism, this shit surfaced. Now I'm back in the slough of despond again.
I thought this crap died with The Bell Curve. After it appeared, it was widely factchecked and refuted. If people harbored genetic prejudices in the backs of their heads, they kept them under wraps, except in the precincts where Gilder and Murray are revered. Now it's back, with the eminently respectable Slate in the lead. Do we have to go through this all over again?
Saletan isn't a very reliable narrator.
Saletan: "Studies of African-American kids are less clear. One looked at children adopted into white upper-middle class families in Minnesota. The new environment apparently helped: On average, the kids exceeded the IQ norms for their respective populations. However, it didn't wipe out racial differences." The last phrase links to a paper by the disreputable Philippe Rushton and Arthur Jensen. The first part of the quote links to a paper by Richard Nisbett which says the Rushton-Jensen paper is a load of crap, and specifically explores the problems with the adoption studies. Saletan should have noted that, but he didn't, suggesting the whole "this is so hard to admit but it really seems to be true" stance is an empty pose.
Saletan in the next paragraph: "In Germany, a study of kids fathered by foreign soldiers and raised by German women found that kids with white biological dads scored the same as kids with biological dads of "African" origin. Hereditarians (scholars who advocate genetic explanations) complain that the sample was skewed because at least 20 percent of the "African" dads were white North Africans. I find that complaint pretty interesting, since it implies that North Africans are a lot smarter than other "whites." Their better critique is that the pool of blacks in the U.S. military had already been filtered by IQ tests. Even environmentalists (scholars who advocate nongenetic explanations) concede that this filter radically distorted the numbers."
Here's what Nisbett had to say about all that: "20% to 25% of the "Black" fathers were North African. But one would have to assume preposterously high IQ scores on the part of the North African portion of the Black population to make up for the substantial difference between offspring of Blacks and Whites predicted by their hereditarian theory. Second, Rushton and Jensen assume that Black soldiers were more rigorously selected than Whites and so might have had IQs nearly as high as those of the White soldiers. Blacks in the military did indeed have higher IQs than did Blacks in the general population, but the same was true of White soldiers compared with the general White population. Flynn (1980) has argued that the evidence indicates that the gap in IQ between Black and White soldiers was the same as that in the U.S. population at large."
So for Saletan, notorious quacks like Jensen and Rushton are the equal of the sort of studies that Nisbett reviews. Why is Slate distributing this junk?
Doug