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Revision as of 04:47, 1 August 2006

Here are some complaints I have about this section. Since I am being censored and wikipedia is giving an incredibly biased picture under a concerted assault by fanatics, I am forced to post in the talk page:

1. Framing/Context

They describe the issue in terms of differences in intelligence between "races," which creates an inacurate pattern in the mind of the reader. The pattern is a pattern of consistent group differences between large population groups, this makes a genetic basis for differences in IQ between various groups appear genetic.

The reality is that groups that are very closely related genetically can differ greatly in IQ. For example Japanese and Koreans living in Japan. Koreans living in Japan have far lower IQ's then the Japanese, yet when they move to america they perform about as well as the Japanese. These differences are seen throughout the world, Catholics vs. Protestants in North Ireland, Castes in India, etc. By framing it in terms of Africans vs. everyone else they make a genetic hypothesis seem far more feasible then it is.

2. Inaccuracies:

a) Rushtons bogus craniometry is sited as established fact, it is not. Differences in brain size established as uncontroversial fact, they are not.

b) Claims that they are persecuted for being "politically incorrect," simply false. In the US not a single one of them has ever been fired that I am aware of, Arthur Jensen kept his job at Berkley for atleast 2 decades after claiming blacks were inferior to whites.

c) Treatment of "Occidental Quarterly," and "Journal of Mankind" as scholarly works. Absolutely false, they are not academic research periodicals. They are the creations of Eugenicsts and Racists for advocacy purposes.

3. Sins of ommiting:

a) They completely ommit the closest thing we have to direct evidence either way. Studies conducted in the 1970's reveal that there is no relationship between percentage of african ancestory and IQ. The children of American GI's and German women, where the children were raised in Germany as Germans, show no difference in IQ between biracial children and white children. There is a whole slew of studies that I won't bore you with. Suffice is to say, ALL the direct evidence contradicts the hereditarian hypothesis.

b) Presents the issue from a very narrow prospective and ignores the vast number of viewpoints that disagree with them. They focus on the disagreement between hereditarian "G" theorists and a few critics, and completely ignore the rich array of literature on the issue from other prospectives. They focus entirely on "g" psychometry and ignore other theories and measures of intelligence within psychology (Piaget, multiple intelligences, information processing, etc.).

They also completely ignore all the sociological, linguistic, and anthropological view points that contradict their view. They present a question that is sociological, etc., in terms of a narrow psychological theory and it's opponents.

c) They ommit the highly questionable underpinnings in "g" theory. Essentially IQ tests are graded on a curve where there is a fixed percentage of 100's, 101's, 102's, etc. Frequently a 5 point difference will involve getting one answer right or wrong. There are deep methodological errors in the psychometric approach, these are well documented and are a major source of criticism.

I have many, many more complaints with the article and how it is tilted, but that is all I can fit in for now.

More on head measuring

They uncritically post craniometric data as fact, data that was the work of J. Philippe Rushton and other scientefic racists. My objection to this is two-fold, this data is most certainly fraudulent, it is certainly misleading and innacurate. The main correlation with brains size is hight/size, because of this the average Black/White brain is allmost certainly much larger then the average asian brain (not proportionaly, but in absolute terms). But they list Rushtons finding that the black brain is much smaller then the white brain and the asian brain as slightly larger then the white brain.

If scientists wanted to see if there was a link between IQ and brain size, but they had to first adjust for hieght, because hieght is correlated with IQ. That doesn't preclude the possibility that tall people have bigger brains and therefore higher IQ scores, it just controls for sociological factors. The problem of course is that, I am fairly sure of this, the head varies less in size then the rest of the body. In other words very short people will appear to have larger brains if measured proportionally to there total size, but this doesn't mean larger brains in absolute terms. There are other problems such as how body size would impact brainsize, it might not be simply hieght but also bulk.

Stephen Jay Gould in fact points out a large number of problems, problems that would make it impossible to conduct such studies. Factors such as age, nutrition, health, drug use, etc. can radically alter the size and wieght of the brain. He also recalculated Mortons data from the 19th century and uncovered a huge number of mistakes in Mortons figures, mistakes that indicated a systematic bias. Morton is widely cited in textbooks as an example of how personal bias will lead to the sort of mistakes made (they were all made in Mortons favor).

To make a long story short there is allmost no way to adjust for all the factors(age, size, etc.) that could sway the figures in one direction or the other. At anyrate brain size is a terrible means for measuring intelligence, Neandrethals (who were very closely related to Humans, but went extinct) had signifigantly larger brains IIRC, and yet are usually seen as less intelligent.

The truth about Race and Intelligence: No correlation

There is a movement to establish a connection between Race and Intelligence, they use differences in IQ test scores between ethnic groups within the united states to prove this. They do not do research that could disprove their thesis, rather they publish there work in small eugenicist magazines where they are not subject to peer review.

Others who do not hold their views have conducted research that disproves their conclusions, this research difinitively proves there is no link between race and intelligence (among blacks and whites). The cause of the gap in the United States has been firmly established as not genetic:

A Philidelphia study examined 3000 African Americans and found no link between the degree of white ancestory and IQ.*

A study conducted in the 1970's examined two samples of African Americans and found no correlation between degree of white ancestory and IQ. In fact in one study the correlation went in the "wrong" direction (ie. the more african ancestory the higher IQ).**

In a study involving Carribean children showed that there was no genetic basis for the IQ gap between blacks and whites, rather it showed the black children to be considerably more intelligent. The IQ of the children at the Orphanage was: Blacks 108, Mixed 106, White 103.***

In a study comparing the offspring of American GI's and German women, where the children where raised in Germany as Germans there was no correlation found between IQ and Race. Both the Biracial and German childredn had average IQ's of 97.****

Many "G" theorists mantian that the gap in white and Black IQ scores in the US (they claim it to be 15 points) reflects differences in innate cognitive ability, scientists who are not "g" theorists (the vast majority) contest this. The hereditarians have never conducted any serious research to prove their case.

• Scarr., S., Pakstis, S. Katz, H and Barker. (1977) "The abscense of a relationship between degree of white ancestory and intellectual skills within the Black population," Human Genetics, 39:69-86

• • Loehlin, J.D., Vandenberg, SG and Osbourne, R.T (1973) "Blood-group genes and Negro-White ability differences" Behavioral Genetics 3: 263-77

• • • Tizard, B., Cooperman, A and Tizard, J. (1972) "Enviromental effects on langauge development a study of young children in longstay residential nurseries." Child Development, 43: 342-3

• • • • Flynn, JR, (1980) "Race, IQ, and Jensen." London Routledge and Kegan Paul.

POV

The problem with this page is that the title is "Race and intelligence controversy". If there is a controversy then there are at least two sides to this controversy. Please propose subcategories for these categories or this will be Afd.--Tstrobaugh 20:07, 31 July 2006 (UTC)

I'm not sure I understand what the concern is. The two sides of the controversy are covered in the race and intelligence article. Examples in this category are James R. Flynn and Arthur Jensen. Categories are not required to have subcategories in order to avoid WP:CFD, and it doesn't seem necessary to partition topics into categories like Category:The partly genetic hypothesis of racial differences in intelligence.--Nectar 04:47, 1 August 2006 (UTC)