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

[Guybrush]

Need I remind you that the only people who can adopt Asian children in the U.S. are generally successful and wealthy?

And who cares about IQ test results? They are not results that can be mapped onto "real world success" in any significant or mathematical manner.

The third study is from Belgium (about which they write, “neither the social class of the adopting parents nor the number of years the child spent in the adopted family had any effect on the child’s IQ”). How about adoptions of black people in the U.S.? Are these also predominantly made by well off people?

 

[nomadologist]

The third study is from Belgium (about which they write, “neither the social class of the adopting parents nor the number of years the child spent in the adopted family had any effect on the child’s IQ”). How about adoptions of black people in the U.S.? Are these also predominantly made by well off people?

Yes. You have to pass vigorous screenings to even get a "pass" from the state in order to adopt, and these include assessments of your financial well-being, your married/single status, and even your sexual orientation in certain states. Some states do pretty extensive "background" checks.

It's no wonder then that only the upper upper middle class can even begin to think about adopting here. It's basically a leisure class activity.

 

[Guybrush]

Yes. You have to pass vigorous screenings to even get a "pass" from the state in order to adopt, and these include assessments of your financial well-being, your married/single status, and even your sexual orientation in certain states. Some states do pretty extensive "background" checks.

It's no wonder then that only the upper upper middle class can even begin to think about adopting here. It's basically a leisure class activity.

Ok, thanks. My next question, then, is if there is any reason to believe that the U.S. citizens who adopt East Asian children are more well off than those who adopt ‘White’ children?

 

[nomadologist]

Ok, thanks. My next question, then, is if there is any reason to believe that the U.S. citizens who adopt East Asian children are more well off than those who adopt ‘White’ children?

I wouldn't be surprised--it costs a shitload to adopt from China and other EA countries, it's a complete racket as well.

 

[Guybrush]

I wouldn't be surprised--it costs a shitload to adopt from China and other EA countries, it's a complete racket as well.

Ok. So what we need to know is: a) if the socio-economic status of those who adopt white, East Asian, and black children differ; b) if adopted children in general tend to score better than their respective group’s mean average; c) if cultural factors burden the adopted children at all (hypothesis: if each child’s IQ correlates with the mean IQ of his or her’s native country such can be partly ruled out).

 

[nomadologist]

Ok. So what we need to know is: a) if the socio-economic status of those who adopt white, East Asian, and black children differ; b) if adopted children in general tend to score better than their respective group’s mean average; c) if cultural factors burden the adopted children at all (hypothesis: if each child’s IQ correlates with the mean IQ of his or her’s native country such can be partly ruled out).

And then what would you have? A bunch of meaningless figures.

 

[dHarry]

OK, so there are going to be cases where genetic differences are masked or 'faked' by environmental/social factors, but there are still things like sickle-cell disease which occur far more often in people of certain 'racial' origins than others.

Or that occur in people with common ancestors.

yes, and:

There has been criticism of associating disorders with race. For example, in the United States sickle cell is typically associated with black people, but this trait is also found in people of Mediterranean, Middle Eastern or Indian ancestry.[26] The sickle cell trait offers some resistance to malaria. In regions where malaria is present sickle cell has been positively selected and consequently the proportion of people with it is greater. Therefore, it has been argued that sickle cell should not be associated with a particular race, but rather with having ancestors who lived in a malaria-prone region. Africans living in areas where there is no malaria, such as the East African highlands, have prevalence of sickle cell as low as parts of Northern Europe.

Is the main objection to "race" its historical use to justify prejudice/racism, rather than the mere fact that it's a socio-cultural construct? If we agreed to say "broad population trends based on common ancestry" or something more accurate instead, could "race" not be a shorthand for that, or is it just too tainted as a concept, or is it just too meaningless scientifically?

 

[Guybrush]

Here are the results for the Minnesota Transracial Adoption Study, mentioned in the APA report:

Adopting parents tested when children were 7 and 17: 120*, 115**
Nonadopted, with two White biological parents: 117*, 109**
Adopted, with two White biological parents: 112*, 106**
Adopted, with one White and one Black biological parent: 109*, 99**
Adopted, with two Black biological parents: 97*, 89**

* Score at IQ test conducted at the age of 7
** Score at IQ test conducted at the age of 17
(The two tests were different and were also differently weighted.)

Thus, the mean IQ for seven-year-old adopted children with two White biological parents was 117 (the tests being conducted in 1975).

By comparison, in the APA report, the mean IQ in the first test (conducted in the late 70s/early 80s on four-year-olds) was 120; in the second test (conducted in the mid-70s on ten-year-olds) it was 112 (for the ‘adequately nourished’ group); in the third test (conducted on Belgian ten-year-olds in the mid-to-late 80s) the mean average was 119.

All in all, it does seem like there is very little difference (117 vs 120, 112 and 119). I find it astonishing that the APA researchers compared the adopted East Asian kids to average White kids rather than adopted White kids.

 

[mistersloane]

Wait a minute here. The first problem with this report is that recent findings seem to completely debunk the idea that we "all originated in africa", and that, in fact, there seems to be evidence of homo sapiens evolving in parallels at the same time around the earliest signs of human life we can find in Africa.

Do they? Have you got links to any of that? Last stuff I read we we had still come out of there but just a bit quicker than we'd thought previous

http://www.newscientist.com/channel...ng-global-how-humans-conquered-the-world.html

 

[mistersloane]

I find it astonishing that the APA researchers compared the adopted East Asian kids to average White kids rather than adopted White kids.

Don't be! My sisters were adopted in the 60s and were sold as sisters, a package, because they both came from (different) but similarly mixed-race backgrounds. We've come along way in 30 years with regard to the way 'race' is seen.

I used to know a guy who was one of the head guys in Edinburgh Uni who compiled IQ tests - I argued with him til I was in tears -and I'm afraid - fascinating though this thread is - I just can't go there with them, or even with statistics to a large extent.

 

[nomadologist]

This is what I had in mind in particular:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/6518527.stm

But there have been plenty of finds in Australia and elsewhere that challenge the "Out of Africa" hypothesis. Looking around the internet, though, looks like in more recent months DNA mapping has cleared up the inconsistencies to a certain extent.

 

[nomadologist]

yes, and:

Is the main objection to "race" its historical use to justify prejudice/racism, rather than the mere fact that it's a socio-cultural construct? If we agreed to say "broad population trends based on common ancestry" or something more accurate instead, could "race" not be a shorthand for that, or is it just too tainted as a concept, or is it just too meaningless scientifically?

The latter, I would say.

 

[hundredmillionlifetimes]

This last post by Mr. Tea struggles to get halfway to where your average biologist already has been conceptually.

If "racial" difference is predicated upon how people look, then it ignores most of the much more important gene markers and is biologically meaningless.

I have never met a biologist who believes in race as a biological fact, btw.

Yes, it's as if the many racist posters on this thread (particularly Vim, all of whose posts on politics on this forum are fundamentally racist) can simply deny their racism while impotently continuing to believe, hysterically continuing to insist on 'race,' clueless to the fact that it is such a belief that constitutes racism at its purest, not a biological fact but a psychosocial pathology. This appalling thread has nothing whatsoever to do with IQ (itself a culturally-determined and applied arbitrary ideological construct) or heredity (genetic variability being a foundational axiom of evolutionary theory, something these racist 'studies' completely ignore) but everything to do with the perpetuation of a racist agenda. It would make you believe their own genes are so mutated as to include a dominant racist one Alas, no, as we know from the findings of psychoanalytic theory. More on this anon ...

 

[zhao]

ive recently heard that a recent historical study shows that merely 500 years ago europeans were much darker than now. that it was some fluke of a mutation which made their pigment as pale as it is today. anyone know more about this?

 

[zhao]

not having read what has been said in this thread (i will, it interests me how people here have reacted to this topic - but something tells me not too many surprises lie in store), i just want to say that the entire project is based on a very limited scope of what constitutes "intelligence". this scope is limited to the values of our current economic and political system, which people who are living in it seem all but incapable of recognizing as a very recent, and will prove to be very brief, way of life for humans.

having said that, i do think the authors down-play of social, cultural, and "environmental" factors and his focus on "genetic" reasons for inequality betray the most absurd, not to mention vile, kind of reactionary racism.

i would have liked to see a similar test of "average IQ among groups" 500 years ago, when the wealthy in Europe sent their kids to the African ruled, Islamist Spain to be educated. at a time when europeans were the savages blacks of wealth, taste, and higher learning pitied and made fun of -- a race of filthy half-wits who shat in the street and tortured each other.

 

[IdleRich]

"Yes, it's as if the many racist posters on this thread"

Unfortunately being "identified" as racist by HMLT no longer has any meaning whatsoever. It's a shame to rob such an important word of its power but there you are.

 

[hundredmillionlifetimes]

Unfortunately being "identified" as racist by HMLT no longer has any meaning whatsoever. It's a shame to rob such an important word of its power but there you are.

Robbing it of meaning, depoliticizing it, is precisely what the racist posters are doing here, Idlerich. Look, I've already explained and repeated in many posts here why the belief in 'race' is the very definition of racism; its simple to comprehend, but - for racists - impossible to acknowledge.

And you're utterly deluded in this, idlerich, for pathetically trying to reverse what's actually going on in this thread (to make disturbingly racist ideas acceptable and reasonable and 'neutral'). That finally tells me all I want to know about you, another seemingly racist apologist.

Racism is, and always has been, a displacement, a deflection of social antagonisms (like class conflict), which is why the extreme Right always need the figure of the Racial Other for their ideology to function. What we are dealing with is an imaginary cartography, which projects onto the real landscape of human populations its own shadowy ideological antagonisms, in the same way that the hysterical subject projects onto the physical body the map of another, imaginary anatomy (as the Nazi's imagined the Jew). Much of this projection is racist, one which ultimately views whole societies, like those in Africa, Afghanistan and Iraq as terminal cases, as merely lingering on, still alive, yet already written off, treated as a kind of political Aids patient, stigmatised as a mad place where lesser people kill each other for the sheer pleasure of doing it.

"This new racism of the developed world is in a way much more brutal than the previous one: Its implicit legitimization is neither naturalist (the "natural" superiority of the developed West) nor culturalist (we in the West also want to preserve our cultural identity). Rather, it's an unabashed economic egotism - the fundamental divide is the one between those included into the sphere of (relative) economic prosperity and those excluded from it."---Zizek.

 

[IdleRich]

"And you're utterly deluded in this, idlerich, for pathetically trying to reverse what's actually going on in this thread (to make disturbingly racist ideas acceptable and reasonable and 'neutral'). That finally tells me all I want to know about you, another seemingly racist apologist."

That's what you said about me before - when I pointed out that you had got the relationship between tax and incentive the wrong way round.
I then point out that indiscriminately throwing around accusations of racism just because someone disagrees with you devalues the term - and you call me a racist again. Brilliant.

 

[vimothy]

not having read what has been said in this thread (i will, it interests me how people here have reacted to this topic - but something tells me not too many surprises lie in store), i just want to say that the entire project is based on a very limited scope of what constitutes "intelligence". this scope is limited to the values of our current economic and political system, which people who are living in it seem all but incapable of recognizing as a very recent, and will prove to be very brief, way of life for humans.

That being the case, I don't understand why you go on to say,

having said that, i do think the authors down-play of social, cultural, and "environmental" factors and his focus on "genetic" reasons for inequality betray the most absurd, not to mention vile, kind of reactionary racism.

given you think that IQ tests only measure ability to take IQ tests.

i would have liked to see a similar test of "average IQ among groups" 500 years ago, when the wealthy in Europe sent their kids to the African ruled, Islamist Spain to be educated. at a time when europeans were the savages blacks of wealth, taste, and higher learning pitied and made fun of -- a race of filthy half-wits who shat in the street and tortured each other.

Firstly, Islamist Spain is way off -- it might have been Muslim Spain, it might have been Islamic Spain, but it certainly wasn't Islamist.

Secondly, are you really suggesting that today blacks are "savages", & "a race of filthy half-wits who shat in the street and tortured each other"? WTF are you going on about?

 

[Mr. Tea]

ive recently heard that a recent historical study shows that merely 500 years ago europeans were much darker than now. that it was some fluke of a mutation which made their pigment as pale as it is today. anyone know more about this?

500 years ago most Europeans were agricultural labourers, so of course they were bound to be darker-skinned than modern Europeans.