On Nov 20, 2007 12:27 PM, Doug Henwood <dhenwood at panix.com> wrote:
>
> 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
>
>
>
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