Because he suggested that women might, on the average, have less mathematical and scientific aptitude than men Lawrence Summers was forced to step down from his position as the president of Harvard.

The overwhelming evidence, of course, is that what Dr. Summers said is true. Unfortunately those on the faculty of Harvard who could have testified in Summers' favor lacked the courage to do so.

I think it is shameful that this kind of intellectual persecution exists. The fact that a man of Summers' stature suffers like this certainly interferes with a scientific and public inquiry into the relationship between genes, intelligence, sex, race, and behavior.

In my e-mail communication with the authors of The 10,000 Year Explosion both told me it was difficult to get the book published. Several college professors told them that while they agreed with the book, giving a positive review of it would be damaging if not lethal to their academic careers.

I have been told that when Charles Murray spoke at Harvard the entire sociology department walked out. I am sure that many in the sociology department agreed with Murray, but they were afraid to say so.

When Richard Herrnstein anticipated the findings in The Bell Curve in an essay that appeared in The Atlantic Monthly in 1971 the new left group The Students for a Democratic Society had a convention at Harvard to try to get Professor Herrnstein fired. Fortunately, SDS failed, but the fact that this kind of persecution exists inhibits this kind of research.

Liberals claim to be in favor of free expression but it seems that they are only in favor of the free expression of their opinions on genetic determination, as well as obscenity and blasphemy.

Conservatives do not try to suppress those who believe, as I do, in the greenhouse effect.

 

The example of exceptional blacks does not disprove that average differences exist.

 

lmao Does anyone know how silly it looks that no one has read the documents pertaining to the subject that is being debated?:laughing:

 

I am registered on Stormfront, some would understand my reasons, being a history buff, and liking to keep tabs on extremists. 88! As for The Bell Curve, Kimi once posted that she `doesn't have problems with the study', and its supposedly verifiable facts, but the way some people, (DL implied, or named) use them. This can be seen as patronizing by some, in as we are not `mature' enough to come to our own conclusions based on this BC thingy. I see nothing intrinsically `wrong' with it.

 

If IQ was as changeable as these studies suggest it would be easier to raise academic performance than it is. School administrators and politicians are desperate to prove that because of changes they introduced academic performance has improved, but it has not to any great degree, despite the fact that quite a bit more money is spent per student now than in the past.

It is well known that there is little correlation between the cost of a public school system and the results.


__________________

 

How do I misuse The Bell Curve?

I do not favor the repeal of civil rights laws.

I may have lied to deidre79 about my age.

Nevertheless, when I was a child I supported the civil rights laws before they were passed. I grew up in the South. I learned to debate by advocating the integration of the segregated elementary school I attended.

I should have learned how to fight before that advocacy.

 

These are not rational rebuttals; they are insults.

I am The Master of Facts. You are The Master of Invective.

 

DL, I need you to understand something. The genetic endowment in regards to psychology is easier explained in the sense of another psychologist Vygotsky, the Russian psychologist developed the theory called the Social Development Theory. And there are 3 major themes in this theory, but the one I will focus on is the third one called The Zone of Proximal Development. And this is actually one of the most used examples to support how genes are in relation to intelligence.

Vygotsky believed that everyone is born with a range of intelligence, and in that range the person had their highest and their lowest point of potential to attain intelligence. But that the person no matter what they did, would never fall above their highest range, and they would never fall below their lowest range. And the main cause for the person to attain the level of intelligence on that determined range, was based on environmental factors.

So genes can set a person's intelligence in regards to their preset range, but it is up to the person's environment to achieve the level of intelligence that he/she chooses. So it is not completely up to genetics, but it also has to do with the environment that the person is in and interacts with.

I hope that you understand this point, and do not stick with it mostly being genetics. Because if you look at the bell curve information, the difference between the races in described order; and you put them next to each other in multiple bell curves, the difference is only 5 to 10 points of IQ to the next race.

And this is why doing a prenatal genetic based test, would be pointless, because it would not be able to accurately tell you the intelligence that the person would have growing up. You would not allow the child to mature and allow environment to either improve or detriment the potential in which level the child would fall into.

Now, I should also mention that when it comes to intelligence, there is no gene that will tell you how intelligent you are. The genetic endowment just means that your potential to be more intelligent is higher or lower than others. The reason why there is intelligence testing, is because it cannot be concluded genetically, how intelligent you will be; unless you are talking about abnormal genes which would make the person be diagnosed to have mental retardation. But you have to understand that IQ is very unstable prior to the age of 7 years of age; due to the brain only being 90% formed. The brain does not completely finish forming until puberty. Now, with that being said, it should be noted that after age 4, it is reliable to predict the child's adult IQ. Hope this helps clears things up.

 

I have read many documents about intelligence differences. I am sure you have too, because you studied psychology at Stanford.

Thank you for going back on my Friends's List, BTW.

When you left you hurt my feelings rather badly.

 

The Bell Curve says that IQ is determined 60 percent by genes, and 40 percent by environment. Other estimates I have read place it as 80 percent by genes and 20 percent by environment.

 

Yes, according to Herrnstein and Murray, 70% of variance is due to heredity, and 30% of variance is due to environment. But if you read the APA's BSA findings on post 21, in regards to The Bell Curve, both genetic endowment and environmental factors are substantially contributors to differences in intelligence. Furthermore, here is an excerpt from the actual findings from the APA's BSA's paper entitled Intelligence: Knowns and Unknowns:

We focus here on the relative contributions of genes and environments to individual differences in particular traits. To avoid misunderstanding, it must be emphasized from the outset that gene action always involves an environment-at least a biochemical environment, and often an ecological one. (For humans, that ecology is usually interpersonal or cultural.) Thus all genetic effects on the development of observable traits are potentially modifiable
by environmental input, though the practicability of making such modifications may be another matter. Conversely, all environmental effects on trait development involve the genes or structures to which the genes have contributed. Thus there is always a genetic aspect to the effects of the environment (cf. Plomin & Bergeman, 199 1).

If you read the article from the APA's BSA, you will notice that they really do not use a percentage to define the weight of both the genetic and environmental factors, due to it truly is impossible to know the true relation of how the two cause intelligence.

 

you wil have to ask Kimi, or just review some posts, DL.

 

For the most part Kimiko has stayed out of this discussion. She knows that what I say is true, she just wishes I would not say it.

 

Thank you for that information, and for this thread.

Because it is dangerous for many to agree completely with The Bell Curve, I think many are circumspect in expressing agreement who agree more with it than they have the courage to say.

 

"Intelligence" is a quantity measured by specific tests

If you take different tests, you get different results. If it was agreed on that tests measuring basketball skill would be taken as a major component of intelligence, blacks might come out on top. I expect that blacks are probably in a reading-deprived atmosphere in childhood compared to whites. I don't trust the heredity hypothesis as explaining lower black intelligence. As for Asian intelligence being high, our medical people can hardly stand the oriental explanation for the efficacy of acupuncture, which uses common concepts to explain it. But look at their language. You have to learn one word per symbol. In English all we have to learn is 26 symbols and we have all the words. Anyway, I don't think heredity explains difference in average intelligence for various ethnic groups. Stated with a background as licensed psychologist spanning about 30 years.

 

The studies neither suggest nor imply that IQ is easy to change. They merely show that IQ is not static.

Of course IQ is difficult to change. To improve IQ requires behavioral modification, which (for most) is a daunting hurtle.

My point is that, in order to ascribe intelligence to 60% genetics and 40% environmental influence, one must presuppose that intrinsic cognitive ability is a fixed range throughout an individual's life. There is accumulating evidence that this premise is faulty. New studies show that cognitive ability is malleable to a degree that was scarcely imagined in the early 70's, when Murray and Herrnstein wrote their book.

 

True. And examples of exceptional Jews do not prove that average differences do exist.

As I've said above, I find this entire topic rather amusing and quaint. The notion that intrinsic cognitive ability varies with respect to race strikes me as the new phrenology (the Victorian-era attempts to measure cognitive ability in terms of cranium size, so as to defend the prejudice that women are less intelligent than men).

 

Have you be keeping up with your Wall Street guys like Jon Corzine?

You do know that 80% of the Fed's Board are Jews including Ben Shalom Bernanke.....

 

The Bell Curve was published in 1994.

 

Interesting remark about Chinese language.

In fact the Western cognitive alphabet is much larger than its symbology. Our phonemes and morphemes run into the dozens, which in turn are stored in our brains in hundreds (perhaps thousands) of semantical combinations. Our idiomatic phrases often run to the size of independent clauses, and each idiomatic phrase has atomistic semantical meaning, just like Chinese symbols.

"A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush." To our brains, that is a single "word."

Try this: H wh hstates s lst.

Or this: Dnt pt th crt bfr th hrs

Or this: Naw is the tame fer ahl geod min to cume ti th siavase f thir conhrtyry.

You can read those, right? The reason that you can read them is that our Western symbolic alphabet is loaded with built-in redundancy, due to the heterogeneity of its sources. The brain's internal symbolic alphabet is much larger. Thousands of times larger.

Across all cultures and epochs, the capacity of homo sapiens is roughly uniform: we, collectively, have a capacity of roughly 100,000 to 150,000 semantical elements each. People tend to fill their heads with that which interests them, and "experts" in any given discipline allocate their full capacity to that discipline. Multi-disciplinary experts are exceedingly rare, for this reason. There are few neurosurgeons who are also virtuoso violinists. Few world renowned poets are also mathematicians. It comes down to capacity.

Western children (and even the Chinese for that matter) typically learn their multiplication tables up to 12x12. Then they stop. Even though the multiplication tables up to 50x50 would arguably be useful. Why? Because they conserve capacity.

Ancient Babylonian children learned the multiplication tables up to 60 times 60!!!! I am serious! They really did. Why? Because the ancient Babylonians had a base-60 number system. (That is why, to this day, we have a twelve month year (a factor of 60), and a sixty minute hour, and a sixty second minute.

Were the ancient Babylonians nuts? Did they have too much time on their hands? Not at all. Base-60 is amazingly useful for many forms of basic arithmetic, because it contains so many short-cuts. (For instance, in our number system multiplying by 5's is remarkably easy. In base-60, there are many more short cuts.)

Did memorizing the times tables up to 60 x 60 make ancient Babylonian children smarter than contemporary children? Not at all. That was essentially the extent of their mathematics. They memorized their multiplication and division tables, learned how to apply them, and stopped right there. They had neither knowledge nor need of partial fractions, algebraic division, analytic geometry, calculus, and so forth.

Much of this business about "intrinsic intelligence" misses the point. Humans learn and assimilate that which is necessary. On some days I wish I could be a virtuoso violinist. In trade, I would gladly be dumb as lint. (Some say I already am.)