Liberal Creationism, or: Yippee, It’s Bell-Curve Time Again!

Strucstar

Wild Horses
intelligence

There has been a recent proliferation of evidence from brain scientists suggesting that 'women', have a sum intelligence, superior to that of 'men'.

Now, does the acceptance and application of this knowledge, result in a degenerative / oppressive power relation. And would this relation necessarily be inefficient?

These queries always undermine the taxonomic principles upon which they are constructed. Are 'men' and 'women' irreducible ontologies? The answer is, no, and it is the same situation that we have with race.

Lets explore the current epistemological reality with the crude analogy of the job interview;

Candidate a) is understood by the interviewer to be a 'caucasian'. Candidate b) is understood to be a 'arab'. The interviewer has knowledge that arabs are more intelligent than caucasians. Candidate b)' subsequently gets the job.

It is possible that candidate a)'s intelligence was more suited to the tasks required by the employer. This would suggest that the system of racial signification is inefficient. But my point is that there is a imperative of efficiency that thrives in late capitalism. It would therefore be paradoxically inefficient to conduct a more objective, thorough screening process of every individual if the dominant knowledge indicated a greater probability of finding 'intelligence' amongst 'arabs'.

Ya get me?:slanted:
 
N

nomadologist

Guest
Well...

I've worked for neurologists, plenty of them, and I've never heard of these "studies" that prove that women have a "sum intelligence" (what does this mean? what are the metrics for this?) greater than that of men. Could you cite some of these studies?

Women/girls are certainly exceeding boys in the application of their intelligence, across the board, in schools in America and many western countries--i.e., they behave better in school and get better grades, score overall higher on standardized testing, etc. The vast preponderance of neurologists (if this is what you mean by "brain scientists"), psychologists, and social scientists see this as most likely a function of the sort of teaching methods employed by schools. It is considered a serious social problem that boys are being "left behind." Research indicates, far from being a matter of hardwired "intelligence", this is a matter of social attitudes, employment opportunities, and the changing dynamics of the family structure and family finances since women entered the workforce over a hundred years ago during early industrialization.

Anyway, I do agree that "taxonomically" race is insufficient at best.
 

zhao

there are no accidents
maybe like Ellington said about music, there are really only 2 kinds of humans: crap, and not so crap. :D
 

zhao

there are no accidents
but everyone is/are capable of behaving in crappy and not so crappy manners. so i suppose when it comes down to it, there really is only one kind of human: human.
 

Strucstar

Wild Horses
Im unsure about the validity of the evidence im referring to, so i probably shouldnt of made those outlandish claims. But thats sort of beside the point, because they were essentially rhetorical. What im saying is that no catagories of correlation; women correlates to greater intelligence, or african genetics to athletic ability, are sufficient because we can undermine the principles upon which these claims are made.

:p
 

Guybrush

Dittohead
What im saying is that no catagories of correlation; women correlates to greater intelligence, or african genetics to athletic ability, are sufficient because we can undermine the principles upon which these claims are made.

And how would you go about doing that? Presumably by questioning ...

... the taxonomic principles upon which they are constructed. Are 'men' and 'women' irreducible ontologies? The answer is, no, and it is the same situation that we have with race.

Sounds like sophomoric deconstructionism to me. You may want to have another peek at that spread diagram.

Well, skin colour is not necessarily the important variable.

From the GNXP article:

I. Genetic variation in humans forms clusters that correspond to geography

The fact that one can cluster humans together by geography based solely on their genetic information was most convincingly demonstrated in two papers (the second one is open access) by a group out of Stanford. These studies looked at several hundred variable places in the genome in 52 populations scattered across the globe. The hypothesis was as follows-- on applying a clustering algorithm to these data, individuals from similar geographic regions would end up together. I've put a representation on the right [actually reproduced below], where colors represent poplations-- on top is a pattern of variation that would lead to no clustering (the colors all blend one into the next) while on the bottom is a pattern of variation that would lead to clustering (there are subtle but noticable jumps from yellow to green, for example, though there is much variation within each color). Note that the lack of clustering would not mean that all populations are genetically the same (in the top figure, yellow and orange are not "the same" even though you couldn't find a fixed boundry between them). But indeed, the researchers found the situation corresponding to the bottom figure-- the individuals formed five clusters which represented, in the authors' words, "Africa, Eurasia (Europe, Middle East, and Central/South Asia), East Asia, Oceania, and the Americas". Some populations were exceptions, of course (there are always exceptions in biology)-- they seemed to be a mix between two clusters, or could even form their own cluster in certain models.

But in general, the second model in the figure is a good fit for human variation based on the spots in the genome used by these researchers-- continents correspond to clusters, and geographic barriers like the Himalayas or an ocean correspond to those areas where a "jump" from one cluster to the next occurrs.​

color_spectrum-767177.jpg
 

Strucstar

Wild Horses
Yes, questioning sounds great.

If my approach seems a little too simplistic / sophomoronic for your liking, please offer if you will, a more sophisticated / mature method of getting at the truth.

Yeah, im aware of these studies, they're very convincing but im not sure that they undermine my argument... could you explain?

Cheers boss.
 
Last edited:
N

nomadologist

Guest
And how would you go about doing that? Presumably by questioning ...



Sounds like sophomoric deconstructionism to me. You may want to have another peek at that spread diagram.

Guybrush, you yourself linked to articles written as part of the very strong reaction scientists and others had to Saletan's article. He was called out, disgraced, and basically outed as an unwitting racist.

And you're still trying to push this dead idea that because there were a few strains of "population" that seemed to be geographically-based "groups" at one time that "races" actually exist?
 

Guybrush

Dittohead
Guybrush, you yourself linked to articles written as part of the very strong reaction scientists and others had to Saletan's article. He was called out, disgraced, and basically outed as an unwitting racist.

And you're still trying to push this dead idea that because there were a few strains of "population" that seemed to be geographically-based "groups" at one time that "races" actually exist?

Thanks for the loving response! I’ve been trying to get my head around this ethnicity vs. race thing of late. I think of ethnicity as the squemish man’s “race”. Didn’t we outline three possible definitions sometime earlier in this thread? From what I recall they looked something like this:

Race Mk1 = Race in the traditional, Darwinian sense.
Race Mk2 = Race as a term to delineate a sociocultural group.
Race Mk3 = Race as a term to lump together people of similiar genetical makeup.

The difference between (1) and (3), it seems to me, is slight but substantial. With (1) the difference between different “races” is assumed to be great and unbridgeable, whereas with (3) the difference is thought to be observable, but not necessarily significant and certainly not unbridgeable. I don’t see any reason why we should resuscitate the word “race” from the dustbin of history, so let us call (3) “ethnicity”.

Which leads me to this quotation ...

... the sentence you highlight (we observed a pattern of ancestral allele frequency distributions that reflects variation in population dynamics among geographic regions) describes ethnicity rather than "race"--race and geography have little to do with one another in any scientifically precise or accurate way, whereas ethnicity and geography are very specifically linked and can be properly accounted for with recourse to genome mapping.

... which given my thoughts above pretty much sums up my position. Unless, of course, I misrepresent your position, in which case I apologize.

Yes, questioning sounds great.

If my approach seems a little too simplistic / sophomoronic for your liking, please offer if you will, a more sophisticated / mature method of getting at the truth.

Yeah, im aware of these studies, they're very convincing but im not sure that they undermine my argument... could you explain?

Cheers boss.

I’LL GET TO YOU LATER STRUCSTAR! (Kidding. :rolleyes:) In all seriousness though, you deserve a thorough answer, and I’m way too sleepy to give you one, so it’ll have to wait.

Clarification: I tentatively espouse definition (3) above and henceforth call it “ethnicity”.
 
Last edited:
N

nomadologist

Guest
Race in a "Darwinian" sense?

No, ethnicity is not the "squeamish man's" anything, it's simply a word that more closely matches the sort of population mapping the one passage that you cited in the post above describes. Ethnicity is not some sort of euphemism for race, it's a different word that is only marginally more precise in its account of how *national* origin pertains to observed (not truly scientifically or biologically based traits) presumably "genetic" traits (these are still indeterminate, of course). It is likewise insufficient in providing any proper biological account of how genetics and population trends are related, but I find it slightly more interesting to discuss given the fact that it encompasses national/geographic origin, and the fact that it doesn't have anything to do with race per se.
 

mixed_biscuits

_________________________
More:

http://media-newswire.com/release_1065208.html

ANN ARBOR, Mich.-Brain-training efforts designed to improve working memory can also boost scores in general problem-solving ability and improve fluid intelligence, according to new University of Michigan research. "Considering the fundamental importance of fluid intelligence in everyday life and its predictive power for a large variety of intellectual tasks and professional success, we believe that our findings may be highly relevant to applications in education," U-M psychology researchers Susanne Jaeggi and Martin Buschkuehl concluded.

(Media-Newswire.com) - ANN ARBOR, Mich.—Brain-training efforts designed to improve working memory can also boost scores in general problem-solving ability and improve fluid intelligence, according to new University of Michigan research.

"Considering the fundamental importance of fluid intelligence in everyday life and its predictive power for a large variety of intellectual tasks and professional success, we believe that our findings may be highly relevant to applications in education," U-M psychology researchers Susanne Jaeggi and Martin Buschkuehl concluded.

The research is detailed in this week's Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences ( PNAS ).

Many psychologists believe general intelligence can be separated into "fluid" and "crystalline" components. Fluid intelligence—considered one of the most important factors in learning—applies to all problems while crystallized intelligence consists of skills useful for specific tasks.

"Working memory and fluid intelligence both seem to rely on similar neural networks,'' Jaeggi said. "Our study does not permit us to know how long the training-gain persists. Longitudinal studies will be required to address that issue."

Previously, many psychologists believed the only way to increase fluid intelligence was through direct practice of the tests themselves, rather than by training. But the new findings show that multiple efforts designed to improve memory skills similarly improve fluid intelligence.

After initially giving subjects a standard test for fluid intelligence, the researchers gave subjects a series of training exercises designed to improve their working memory.

The training was given to four groups, who repeated the exercises for eight, 12, 17, or 19 days. After the training, the researchers re-tested the subjects' fluid intelligence.

Although the performance of untrained controls improved slightly, the trained subjects showed a significant performance improvement, which increased with time spent training.

"The more training, the more improvement in fluid intelligence," Jaeggi said.

The researchers suggest that the training exercises strengthened multiple "executive processes" in the brain that function in problem-solving, noting that fluid intelligence is usually seen as "robust against influences of education and socialization, and it is commonly seen as having a strong hereditary component."
 

Guybrush

Dittohead
Part 5 (or is it 6? w/e ;)): Not Black and White

Bottom line: he’s repentant despite not wanting to disavow his previous assertions. That’s my man Saletan: always hedging his bets! :cool:

The question I set out to explore last fall was how to be an egalitarian in an age of genetic differences. That's still an important project. We're going to find many more genetic and trait differences among populations. You can't meaningfully denounce every such finding or theory as racist. Racism has to mean something else. I think it should mean looking and settling for racial analysis when some other combination of categories—economics, culture, genetics—more accurately fits the data. It's easy to group people by race and compare averages. But it's pernicious.

In the age of genetics, egalitarianism doesn't mean you have to deny differences in racial averages. It means you have to beware the injustice this kind of grouping and averaging does to individuals. That warning goes for the left as well as the right. Last week, Rev. Jeremiah Wright told the NAACP that "European and European-American children have a left-brained, cognitive, object-oriented learning style" whereas "African and African-American children … are right-brained, subject-oriented in their learning style." Before making such generalizations, ask yourself whether you want even four little children to live in a nation where their brains will be judged by the color of their skin.

[...]
 

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
Je ne comprend pas:

Racism has to mean something else. I think it should mean looking and settling for racial analysis when some other combination of categories—economics, culture, genetics—more accurately fits the data.

Surely this guy, of all people, thinks race has a genetic basis, i.e. that racial differences are genetic differences?

In the age of genetics, egalitarianism doesn't mean you have to deny differences in racial averages. It means you have to beware the injustice this kind of grouping and averaging does to individuals. That warning goes for the left as well as the right. Last week, Rev. Jeremiah Wright told the NAACP that "European and European-American children have a left-brained, cognitive, object-oriented learning style" whereas "African and African-American children …
...display an inherent preference for C, FORTRAN and Pascal. :cool:
 
Last edited:

Guybrush

Dittohead
Surely this guy, of all people, thinks race has a genetic basis, i.e. that racial differences are genetic differences?

Yes, that’s quite a gaffe. Still, his argument is solid and one that some were making here earlier. That being that a modern racist, perhaps, is a person who stubbornly clings :)p) to racial/genetical explanations where sociocultural ones would seem vastly more appropriate, and not simply one who acknowledges the existence of genetical difference/correlation, in whatever shape or form it may assume.

God, does it feel like we’ve rinsed this topic or what ...
 

luka

Well-known member
surely it's pretty obvious from watching any international sports or athletics competition that people of different (here we go, hold tight) race - or colour, ethnic origin, whatever you want to call it - are inherently suited to different kinds of events? I mean, when was the last time there was a heavyweight boxing champion who wasn't of west African origin?

Just found this quote from Mr tea.
Mr tea meet https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Klitschko_brothers
 

luka

Well-known member
. I mean, I'm sure there are plenty of white boxers who'd give their right arm to be world heavyweight champion, but the fact is they're just not as good at it as black guys
.
Lool
 

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
Lol, OK you got me, obviously I know fuck all about boxing. Nonetheless, an awful lot of the very successful boxers are black, aren't they? Maybe it's just got more to do with growing up in rough areas and having to look after yourself from a young age, I dunno.
 
Last edited:
Top