Until science threatens political correctness. Research into human dna…
… is slipping out of the laboratory and into everyday life, carrying with it the inescapable message that people of different races have different DNA. Ancestry tests tell customers what percent of their genes are from Asia, Europe, Africa and the Americas. The heart-disease drug BiDil is marketed exclusively to African Americans, who seem genetically predisposed to respond to it. Jews are offered prenatal tests for genetic disorders rarely found in other ethnic groups.
Such developments are providing some of the first tangible benefits of the genetic revolution. Yet some social critics fear they may also be giving long-discredited racial prejudices a new potency. The notion that race is more than skin-deep, they fear, could undermine principles of equal treatment and opportunity that have relied on the presumption that we are all created equal.
There isn’t an experienced domestic animal breeder on the planet who doesn’t acknowledge the profound influence of genetics on intelligence and behavior. Traits such as trainability, aggression, prey drive, docility, bite inhibition are highly heritable and difficult to modify. The realization that behavior could be selected for and fixed within a population is how breeds evolve out of species, and how identifiable family lines evolve out of breeds. It’s why retrievers retrieve, pointers point, border collies herd, and basenjis steal from the fridge. It’s why some family lines in Dobermans like to carry shoes in their mouths, generation after generation – and others don’t.
Yet, despite thousands of years of practical knowledge gained in the field of agriculture, despite mountains of published research generated in the lab, the very scientific community that accepts that animal sub-populations can be significantly distinct from one another is reflexively resistant to the possibility that that such differences may exist between sub-populations of humans.
And when the science finally forces them to face the evidence?
Although few of the bits of human genetic code that vary between individuals have yet been tied to physical or behavioral traits, scientists have found that roughly 10 percent of them are more common in certain continental groups, and can be used to distinguish people of different races. They say that studying the differences, which arose during the tens of thousands of years human populations evolved on separate continents following their ancestors’ dispersal from humanity’s birthplace in East Africa is crucial to mapping the genetic basis for disease.
Many geneticists are loath to discuss the social implications of their findings. Still, some acknowledge that as their data and methods are extended to non-medical traits, the field is at what one leading researcher recently called “a very delicate time and a dangerous time.”
“There are clear differences between people of different continental ancestries,” said Marcus Feldman, a professor of biological sciences at Stanford University. “It’s not there yet for things like IQ, but I can see it coming. And it has the potential to spark a new era of racism if we do not start explaining it better.” Feldman said any finding on intelligence was likely to be exceedingly hard to pin down. But given that some may emerge, he wants to create “ready response teams” of geneticists to put such socially fraught discoveries in perspective.
They should consider augmenting such teams with a dog breeder or two. We seem to have figured out how to identify and exploit genetic strengths and weaknesses “beneath the skin” without assigning global superiority to any one breed. We might be able to teach them something.
You’ve been given every opportunity to present a single shred of evidence for your positions, ET, and you have FAILED. FAILED.
Now, please let the scientifically minded among us have a grown up conversation featuring data and peer-reviewed studies, thanks.
I find it amusing that some people can’t form an opinion unless “science” offers some “proof” or failing that, a “concensus”.
Anyone who knows a little history and can read\watch the news realizes that different races display different strengths\weaknesses that transcend even social and cultural differences.
Mankind has evolved it’s physiology to it’s environment over millenia in order to survive and thrive. Different strategies for different environments.
In our modern era our melting pot societies have thrown these differences into stark relief.
Here we go with the sock puppets *groan*. I’d like to invite the baby boomers to the 21st century, please check your deprecated Trotskyism at the door.
@Andrew, 11.27am
“But Tenny, Lynn, 2000, shows that IQ strongly (0.82) correlates to GDP. I’d say that make IQ a superb indicator of competence…”
Nope. It correlates the mean statistical measure of a sampled set with the economic output of the entire parent group. Not quite the same thing. One needs to ask: competence at what? Our culture values money, and to a lesser extent, productivity. Hence the statist concern for the metric: By paying attention to IQ, we give cultural validity to the notion that the range of economic opportunity either needs to be tailored to the IQ distribution, or that subgroups need compensation/special treatment when there is conflict between the two.
So now I’m left wondering… If certain sub-types of cows produce better meat than others (gotta love that marbled Angus!), do certain human sub-types also taste better than others as well? Or do they all taste like chicken? Is it politically incorrect to declare a preference for dining on one particular race?
Things that make you go “hmmmm”.
Tenny, your reply would have been better served had you included a link or a scholarly article or a data point of any kind.
And to answer your question “what does it matter”, incorrect assumptions on these matters lead to hundreds of billions of dollars wasted on social programs worldwide that could be better allocated if we – you – accepted the true nature of man, rather than the Rube Goldberg alternative you offer.
andrew – I don’t need to back up my capacity to think, with references from wikipedia. My capacity to think, is a basic property of myself.
Now – google sociolinguistics; and Bernstein and Whorf. Check for the arguments discrediting that 1930s theory. Do the same for the ‘culture makes the man’ ideologies of such as Ruth Benedict, Mary Douglas and Margaret Mead. Check how they are discredited.
Again, your wikipedia-based nonsense about IQ being correlated to GDP is – well, it’s nonsense. Think, Andrew. Don’t rely on wiki-statements. Think for yourself. Ask yourself: how can a biological property be correlated with a non-biological property? Can there be any correlation between the two, or, is it just a researcher’s act of linking the two?
Think, andrew. Don’t rely on others to tell you what is real and what is not real. Try to think for yourself.
robert – no, I don’t see the ‘different races’ theme as having any validity. You are ignoring that ‘race’ is an unclear variable and also ignoring that key causal factors of the social result – namely – the realities of the envt. Did you know that you can’t grow wheat in the arctic, and so, not becoming an agricultural society isn’t due to ‘race’ but to reality. The reality of the ecology.
Different ecologies require different adaptive modes – and I wonder if you would really suggest plough agriculture in the Kalahari desert. Nothing to do with ‘race’.
“Think, andrew. Don’t rely on others to tell you what is real and what is not real. Try to think for yourself.”
According to metric pantloads of data fewer than one in 800 women on the North American continent have an IQ as high or higher than I do, and I doubt very much you’d be that anomaly, ET. So allow me a moment, my dear, to reflect upon the appropriateness of your analysis of my cognitive capabilities 🙂 I recommend that you post data points and links to scholarly articles instead of blurting out any further nonsense.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_and_intelligence
Sean,
There is a difference. Some consumers of human flesh prefer it well-marbled – which means that when they go to their local grocer or butcher and choose a tender cut – they will expect the human to have been raised on Big Macs and Fries. But other consumers – into a heathier lifestyle – will choose cuts based on whether the human was free range human and fed organically.
That why it is so important nowadays for cannibals to read the labels before they buy. With globalization you just don’t know what your getting. I’ve even heard horror stories where beef (real beef) is being mixed in with human flesh and passed off as human.
“That’s mechanical communication; it’s called ‘Indexical’ communication, where the physical Sign refers directly to a meaning or cause. Smoke is a ‘Sign’ of fire.”
I think that’s hair-splitting. The fact that many dogs (and other species) are capable of learning hand signals, interpreting human language (toy, cookie, truck ride, outside, walk) is evidence that their brains are capable of translating abstract visual cues or sounds into concrete meaning.
But that’s straying somewhat from the topic at hand – the fact – FACT – that gene frequencies vary between identifiable human subpopulations. The FACT that many behaviors and cognitive traits are heritable and sometimes difficult to modify environmentally. (To argue otherwise is to deny the existence of OCD, autism, and mutations that cause mental retardation.)
Given those facts, it is impossible to ignore the possibility that some human populations may have higher frequencies of more subtle genetic traits underlying intelligence, cognition, or behavior than other populations.
I used dogs as an example because they demonstrate the phenomenon so profoundly and predictably – not to get side-tracked into a debate over human vs animal intellectual capacities.
Hume – cause and effect. Johnson’s refutation of Berkeley…
Festus’ comment to Paul, before Agrippa…
The juxtaposition was sufficiently cryptic as to amuse me…one of my besetting sins.
No, kate, I don’t think that differing between ‘indexical’ and ‘symbolic’ sign production and usage is hair-splitting. It’s a profound difference. No dog or non-human species develops a symbolic communication system, although almost all biological species (including plants!) use indexical communication systems.
The fact that the word you use to the dog is ‘abstract’ to you is irrelevant to the dog’s indexical use of it; to the dog, it is no longer abstract but a physical sound.
The tremendous ability that symbolic sign usage gives to the human species -alone of all species – cannot be underestimated.
Certainly, physiological traits in the human species are genetically based – and behavioural or psychological traits can also be genetically based. BUT, even these are sub-sub-species and familial; that is, they are components of a small subgroup, not a ‘race’ or ‘ethnic group’. The genetic link is direct.
BUT – there hasn’t been any proof that cognitive capacity is correlated with any familial group or sub-species. The cause(s) of OCD are unclear; certainly there seems to be a chemical imbalance but whether this is inherited or due to an infection is unclear. Same with autism and other variables. BUT – the point is, the defective gene isn’t a value of an entire large population sub-species but of a small set, a family.
I don’t think that there is any evidence that a familial or isolate small-group hereditary component becomes the property of a whole population, an ethnic or cultural group. Genetics doesn’t operate within such a rigid and finite closure of its mutation-capacities. If it did, then there wouldn’t be any cases of more humans becoming allergic to peanuts, or bacteria becoming immune to antibiotics, etc…
Andrew – I asked “why bother?” not “what does it matter?”
The questions are different. I set the question properly in its context. You merely don’t pay attention. Your 12.17pm comment is a non sequitur.
Go bother ET…
Given those facts, it is impossible to ignore the possibility that some human populations may have higher frequencies of more subtle genetic traits underlying intelligence, cognition, or behavior than other populations.
To go back to the dog example, each breed has the innate skills to do the job they were intended to do. Same with humans.
ET says: “I don’t think that there is any evidence that a familial or isolate small-group hereditary component becomes the property of a whole population, an ethnic or cultural group.”
False, false, false, and I can prove it 6 ways till Sunday. To name one of many examples, the 4336 tRNA nucleotide position variant in haplogroup H has been shown to be associated with late-onset Alzheimer’s disease:
http://www.familytreedna.com/pdf/Mishmar2003.pdf
“The high mutation rate of mtDNA and the central role of
mitochondrial proteins in cellular energetics make the mtDNA an ideal system for permitting rapid human and animal adaptation
to new climate and dietary conditions.
…
Evidence has already accumulated that different human mtDNA lineages are functionally different. Haplogroup T is
associated with reduced sperm motility in European males (30), and the tRNAGln nucleotide position 4336 variant in haplogroup
H is associated with late-onset Alzheimer’s disease (31). Moreover, Europeans harboring the mild ND6 nucleotide position
14484 and ND4L nucleotide position 10663 Leber’s hereditary optic neuropathy missense mutations are more prone to blindness
if they also harbor the mtDNA haplogroup J (32, 33), and
haplogroup J is associated with increased European longevity
(34).
32. Brown, M. D., Sun, F. & Wallace, D. C. (1997) Am. J. Hum. Genet. 60, 381–387.
33. Brown, M. D., Zhadanov, S., Allen, J. C., Hosseini, S., Newman, N. J.,
Atamonov, V. V., Mikhailovskaya, I. E., Sukernik, R. I.&Wallace, D. C. (2001)
Hum. Genet. 109, 33–39.
34. Rose, G., Passarino, G., Carrieri, G., Altomare, K., Greco, V., Bertolini, S.,
Bonafe, M., Franceschi, C. & De Benedictis, G. (2001) Eur. J. Hum. Genet. 9,
701–707.
At the dawn of time, if adaptation skills for survival were what theoretically made some races of what is perceived as “more advanced” than others today, then why are these same races heading towards extinction? (Read Mark Stern)
Should all highly educated progressive liberals be rounded up in concentration camps…The “final solution”? 😉 (Dark humour)
IMO: Education is a foundation…Wisdom from experience become building blocks.
Show your respect: Thank a veteran or a grandparent tomorrow.
Raging Ranter said: “When E.O Wilson released his book Sociobiology in 1975, students began organizing protests and boycotting his appearances. Some of those protests turned into near-riots. They did the same thing to Richard Dawkings the following year when he released The Selfish Gene.”
Oh yes they did. I was in university at that time studying Anthropology, researched E.O. Wilson’s ideas quite thoroughly. Collectivists can’t stand the idea that different populations have different genetic traits, it just makes them crazy.
Reading through the thread here there are a lot of great posts. My two cents worth is that it is very important to remember when discussing genetic differences that “intelligence” is a theoretical construct.
Intelligence isn’t like an enzyme that expresses differently in the black population, leading to the need for a different heart drug. More of an idea, like “information”. Its a made up thing, and it isn’t very old. That doesn’t mean it isn’t real, it just means you have to be careful when you’re talking about it.
You begin to see the limitations of the concept when you start talking about artificial intelligence. Can a computer program be intelligent? How about cognizant? How about conscious? Take a look at a “hard” AI theorist like Marvin Minsky, see if his ideas map onto what we know about dogs and bugs. For my money, nuh uh.
Bottom line,taking Kathy Shaidle’s post for an example, using an IQ test and measuring a 15 point difference between two “racial groups” (another questionable concept) doesn’t really tell you -anything at all- of a predictive nature about individual members of the racial group. Meaning that the US Army wasted a whole bunch ‘a money on all that testing. Social policy made on the basis of IQ testing, well lets just be charitable and say its CRAP.
On the other hand, take a quick look at the Olympics and you can see how the different human populations shake out in the different events. Example, all the top sprinters are Black and have have ancestors from one little area in Kenya. They have more fast-twitch muscle than usual, which makes them faster. Asians do well in gymnastics, Whites in weight lifting, etc. etc.
When looking at dog breeds and the different behaviors that can be bread for, the examples given are the kinds of things that can be traced directly to differences in neural circuitry. Physical differences in brain structure that are genetically coded. Some of these structures are big enough to map on an MRI or a PET scan.
Is there such a difference between gays and straights? Well, it doesn’t seem to breed true, does it? Research in the area hasn’t turned up much that I’ve heard of, and you can be sure that if some guy turned up a “gay neuron” the MSM vultures would be on it.
How about male vs. female? Yes, there are known and mapped differences that seem to be statistically significant. Which is no surprise, given the well known (and obvious to anyone but a Lefty) differences in male vs. female behavior.
Kate’s comment about young men and cars is a fine example. Boys are all about racing. Always. You take an Eskimo, a Pygmy and a Scotsman and stick them on a desert island, they will racing coconuts, rats, or each other. Yes, there are girls who like to race, yes they can be as good as the boys. Shirley Muldowney, Ashley Force, there’s some pretty fast women out there. One or two per decade, I figure. Girls who like racing are two standard deviations off the middle of the girly bell curve, boys who like racing are the whole middle of the boy curve. Girls who like to watch boys race, THAT’S the middle of the girl curve.
Are boys smarter than girls? You can see how that is not a meaningful question when looked at from this behavioral/genetic viewpoint.
Sooo, that’s why I take everything that shows up in the behavioral “sciences” with a big grain of salt. There’s more crappy research done in psych, sociology, anthropology and etc. than in climatology. Caveat freakin’ emptor, baby.
tenebris – ah, I see what you are talking about with Hume. But I’m a realist; I’m a fan of Aristotle and Charles Peirce. I think that the objective world is real, and its actions on other realities are also real, and are not dependent on my perceptions of it. So, I’m not a fan of Hume.
Or Berkeley…
And no, I’m not mad, though I know very well what marking midterms can do to the mind (and soul). Actually, I was fortunate, particularly with my elective courses – the people who took them, wanted to explore and learn – and we had some great, really great times.
“Are boys smarter than girls? You can see how that is not a meaningful question when looked at from this behavioral/genetic viewpoint.”
From a university admissions viewpoint of a human resources viewpoint it is exceedingly meaningful in the context of employment equity and affirmative action, which are based on the scientifically false premise that girls are as smart as boys and have the same intelligence distribution as boys. Even worse is the gender income gap explanation that since women are as economically productive as men (suuuuuper false) the wage gap must be explained by discrimination.
There’s two good examples right there on how bad baby boomer voodoo science hurts western civilization to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars a year.
“Social policy made on the basis of IQ testing, well lets just be charitable and say its CRAP.”
You know what that thinking leads to? Black only schools in Toronto, because they believe that since black kids are exactly as smart as white kids, the only explanation for their suboptimal performance is discrimination. There, that’s three examples of how bad baby boomer science hurts Canada.
The difference between animal breeding and human breeding is that animals will not go and create domestic or foreign policy based such ideas and few animal breeders go into politics. As long as these differences are understood for what they actually mean and not used for Hitlerian solutions there’s not a problem but the danger perceived is a repeat of the past. Can genetics overcome human stupidiy which despite IQ never seems to change?
QOTW, by The Phantom at 1:43 PM
“Is there such a difference between gays and straights? Well, it doesn’t seem to breed true, does it?”
All bow before the master!
“As long as these differences are understood for what they actually mean and not used for Hitlerian solutions there’s not a problem but the danger perceived is a repeat of the past”
I would argue that today’s affirmative action policies are comparable to the Nuremburg Laws and thus the onus is on the anti-science faction like ET, Phantom, Vitruvius, Jay Currie, and others to explain why they are actively persecuting white heterosexual males, today, with their junk science. There is no onus on us in the scientific community to answer speculative hypotheticals about how we might do bad stuff when bad stuff is being done to us as we speak.
This paradigm of course conveniently places me and my white heterosexual male comrades as the “New Jews”, and makes any criticism of my commentary anti-semetic 🙂
Yes Andrew, from the viewpoint of any bureaucracy, individual variation in ability is inconvenient. The problem in that case rests with the bureaucracy, not the individuals. Left to their own devices (meaning freedom of speech, movement and association)people sort themselves out by ability and inclination, but this process is too messy for a centrally controlled organization like an army or a corporation. They want something they can control. This is why the larger an organization gets the less competitive it becomes, and the more of a pain in the ass it is to work for.
IQ tests sort for the ability to do IQ tests, they do not predict the ability of the individual tested to adapt to and overcome problems in school, work, war or whatever.
You, my dear child, are confusing correlation with causation. As usual. I can find a strong correlation between ice cream sales and violent crime, but the reality is ice cream does not lead to crime. Nor the reverse.
I would also like to point out that the measures you are using, such as productivity, are useful only in a central control/central planning situation.
Productivity is for cows, not humans.
Phantom says: “IQ tests sort for the ability to do IQ tests, they do not predict the ability of the individual tested to adapt to and overcome problems in school, work, war or whatever.”
Wrong on all three counts, as usual, and I can prove it, as usual:
School performance
The American Psychological Association’s report Intelligence: Knowns and Unknowns (1995)[10] Wherever it has been studied, children with high scores on tests of intelligence tend to learn more of what is taught in school than their lower-scoring peers. The correlation between IQ scores and grades is about .50.
Correlations between IQ scores and total years of education are about .55, implying that differences in psychometric intelligence account for about 30% of the outcome variance. Many occupations can only be entered through professional schools which base their admissions at least partly on test scores: the MCAT, the GMAT, the GRE, the DAT, the LSAT, etc. Individual scores on admission-related tests such as these are certainly correlated with scores on tests of intelligence. It is partly because intelligence test scores predict years of education that they also predict occupational status, and income to a smaller extent.
Job performance
According to Schmidt and Hunter, “for hiring employees without previous experience in the job the most valid predictor of future performance is general mental ability.”[56] The validity depends on the type of job and varies across different studies, ranging from 0.2 to 0.6 [57]. However IQ mostly correlates with cognitive ability only if IQ scores are below average and this rule has many (about 30 %) exceptions for people with average and higher IQ scores [58]. Also, IQ is related to the “academic tasks” (auditory and linguistic measures, memory tasks, academic achievement levels) and much less related to tasks where even precise hand work (“motor functions”) are required [59]
A meta-analysis (Hunter and Hunter, 1984)[57] which pooled validity results across many studies encompassing thousands of workers (32,124 for cognitive ability), reports that the validity of cognitive ability for entry-level jobs is 0.54, larger than any other measure including job try-out (0.44), experience (0.18), interview (0.14), age (−0.01), education (0.10), and biographical inventory (0.37). This implies that, across a wide range of occupations, intelligence test performance accounts for some 29% of the variance in job performance.
According to Marley Watkins and colleagues, IQ is a causal influence on future academic achievement, whereas academic achievement does not substantially influence future IQ scores.[60] Treena Eileen Rohde and Lee Anne Thompson write that general cognitive ability but not specific ability scores predict academic achievement, with the exception that processing speed and spatial ability predict performance on the SAT math beyond the effect of general cognitive ability.[61]
Income
Some researchers claim that “in economic terms it appears that the IQ score measures something with decreasing marginal value. It is important to have enough of it, but having lots and lots does not buy you that much.”[62][63]
Other studies show that ability and performance for jobs are linearly related, such that at all IQ levels, an increase in IQ translates into a concomitant increase in performance [64]. Charles Murray, coauthor of The Bell Curve, found that IQ has a substantial effect on income independently of family background [65].
The American Psychological Association’s report Intelligence: Knowns and Unknowns (1995)[10] states that IQ scores account for about one-fourth of the social status variance and one-sixth of the income variance. Statistical controls for parental SES eliminate about a quarter of this predictive power. Psychometric intelligence appears as only one of a great many factors that influence social outcomes.[10]
One reason why some studies claim that IQ only accounts for a sixth of the variation in income is because many studies are based on young adults (many of whom have not yet completed their education). On pg 568 of The g factor, Arthur Jensen claims that although the correlation between IQ and income averages a moderate 0.4 (one sixth or 16% of the variance), the relationship increases with age, and peaks at middle age when people have reached their maximum career potential. In the book, a Question of Intelligence, Danial Seligman cites an IQ income correlation of 0.5 (25% of the variance).
…
There is a correlation of -.19 between IQ scores and number of juvenile offences in a large Danish sample; with social class controlled, the correlation dropped to -. 17.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IQ
See Andrew, this is what ET and Tenebris mean when they tell you that you don’t think.
Repeat after me, correlation does NOT equal causation.
No, I’m not going to link to Wiki for you.
Phantom, the quality of your commentary would be greatly improved if you were to include a data point or link to a scholarly study, as I have done repeatedly. Alternatively, keep setting a Canadian blogsphere record for getting dominated with data. Either or.
“there hasn’t been any proof that cognitive capacity is correlated with any familial group or sub-species.”
ET – did you even read the link provided?
The very basis of the article is how geneticists plan to deal with the societal implications of identifying genetic differences between racial groups – including those that relate to intelligence.
Actually, Andrew knows that correlation and causation are not the same. He’s just having a hard time accepting that (1) IQ as a metric derives from an ill-posed problem, and (2) that there is no ethical means of employing the information.
Well, that and he thinks he’s smart. Grad school might cure him of that, but it depends on the school and the advisor.
Consider that bait, Andrew.
@ Andrew, 2.48pm
“Wrong on all three counts, as usual, and I can prove it, as usual:”
You’re missing the point(s), Andrew.
(1) Equating the individual with the group is, well, stupid.
(2) There is no way to use IQ data in a societally safe fashion.
Too late, Tenny, you’ve been exposed as a radically unionized careerist academic who would rather commit hari-kiri than say anything politically incorrect that might harm your precious pension.
I hope you like the taste of cat food, friend, because after the last of my generation’s white heterosexual males flees Canada with our capital, education, and high IQs (this is already happening in at least one similar country: NZ) that’s what you’ll be living on.
I plan to be a burden on my hypothetical sons-in-law.
You have education? In the process thereof? Do confess, which field have you blessed with your abilities?
good heavens, old hoss – ‘each breed has the innate skills to do the job they were intended to do”. Heck – who set the intentions? And I didn’t know that the human species had different agendas..according to what criteria? Set by whom?
tenebris – thanks for sloughing off andrew on to me; I have no intention of answering his mindless blather. Why would I discuss anything with a parrot who just repeats printed documents without analyzing whether they have any validity?
Yes, kate, I read the article. I’ve always accepted that there are genetic physiological differences, but these are, I maintain, confined to sub-sub groups. That is, you can’t say that ‘all blacks are susceptible to X-disease’ or ‘all European Jews are prone to Y-disease’, but you can say that blacks from a certain region in Africa…etc, etc.
And the article doesn’t say that there is a genetically defined group-based cognitive capacity. It speculates that ‘there might be’, but such speculation has been around for generations and hasn’t led anywhere.
Cognitive capacity is not the same as physiological – and ‘being smart’ requires several capacities: the capacity to reason or be logical; a large memory; and, imagination.
And, phantom, that’s why I have my doubts about a computer program ‘being intelligent’. The computer can certainly outdo humans on the first and second points (logic, memory). It lacks imagination – and that’s absolutely vital for intelligence.
I don’t do “form”, Tenny, as it’s not all about me. Do you have any on topic data points or references to scholarly works that you wish to share? Because that would be cool.
Would ,nt be nice if you could tracy your ancestroy back to a famous person i saw one of someone who traced his ancestory back to WILLIIAM(BRAVEHEART)WALLACE
good heavens, old hoss – ‘each breed has the innate skills to do the job they were intended to do”. Heck – who set the intentions? And I didn’t know that the human species had different agendas..according to what criteria? Set by whom?
I wouldn’t have expected a Gaia worshipper to ask that.
http://www.yale.edu/scan/GT_2004_NRN.pdf
http://www.apa.org/journals/releases/amp60171.pdf
Go find the book “Backdoor to eugenics” by Troy Duster
Enjoy yourself Andrew…
Andrew, water is wet. Should I include a linky for you, or d’ya think you could handle running your finger under the tap to see if I’m on the level?
Kate’s point in posting the bloody thing in the first place, with which I am agreeing really, REALLY hard, is that geneticists should not be let near public policy.
WTF are you doing? Other than revealing your ignorance? Public policy SHOULD be based on IQ testing? There’s a name for that, its called Social Darwinism. Adolph Hitler was all over that, its been decided it was a bad idea.
Stop pretending to be a Conservative eh? You’re embarrassing yourself.
“(2) There is no way to use IQ data in a societally safe fashion.”
Jesus expletive Christ that is the most Trotskyist, anti-western civilization thing I have ever read in my entire life. And you have the nerve to post this at a conservative site! I’m going to invoke the “mercy” rule at this point and stop embarrassing you inferiorities with my dominant deluge of data. Enjoy wanking with your wholly invalidated opinions, wankers.
PS Tenny: I read your first link; it is dated (2005) and has been superceded by new data such as that I provided. It also makes a bizarre arguement against Bayes theorum as the basis of scientific inquiry as opposed to a tabula rasa approach, which makes me physically ill. The author, Richard Cooper, is “a physician epidemiologist with an interest in cardiovascular disease”; not exactly his field, is it?
The second link is even older, 2004, quite obscure, and actually agrees with me:
“It is now widely accepted that genes and environment both have crucial roles in the transmission and expression of disorders. Genetic relationships also influence cognitive skills in normal, healthy individuals75”
Hey Phantom! I’m getting this deja vu thingy. Time to ignore Andrew lest we tempt the wrath of Kate (it cost me my beer money last time).
ET said: “The computer can certainly outdo humans on the first and second points (logic, memory). It lacks imagination – and that’s absolutely vital for intelligence.”
Gotcha ET! Hee hee! You can emulate imagination with a really big if/then program that correlates unrelated things, or some kind of “survival of the fittest” modeling program. If you do it fast enough it will look like imagination from the outside. Rules Based Intelligence is what they call it, I think.
Really the AI question comes down to one thing. Can consciousness, problem solving, self awareness etc., what we mean when we say intelligence, be encompassed by a mathematical algorithm? Because that’s what a computer program is, a set of algorithms running REAL fast on an electronic computer.
Read it out another way, is the mammalian brain a Turing machine running a program? Marvin Minsky thinks yes.
I think no, because I’m at heart a mystic and I just don’t believe it can be that simple. I didn’t believe it ‘way back with E.O. Wilson’s Sociobiology, I didn’t believe Dawkins with his Selfish Gene, and I still don’t. Doesn’t smell right. I can’t disprove it though.
Roger Penrose is MUCH cleverer than I am, he says no because there are some things the human mind can do that a Turing machine can’t do, and he lists them. The human mind -cannot- be a genetically determined Turing machine running an algorithm, QED.
What it might be instead he’s less sure on, some of that micro-tubule quantum computing stuff in his book is pretty dodgy.
Still, I GOTCHA! I’m such a devil. ~:D
Andrew, Tenebris? What is this “Andrew” of which you speak? ~:D
ol hoss – I’m not a gaia worshipper, so, I don’t understand your point. How about answering my question!
As Peirce wrote, we ‘think’ within a ‘community of scholars’. Our knowledge base, alone among all species, is primarily learned. As such, it is based upon the content of both many generations and also diversity of thought. It rests, as Popper insisted, upon a critical openness to testing and change. It requires an acceptance of contradiction of the old and a requirement that the new hypothesis can better explain reality than did the old.
As a process, I think it rests on a triad of abilities: logic, memory and imagination. How does one separate one’s individual actions in this process from the ‘community of scholars’?
My own view is that cognition, themeans by which we develop our knowledge base is common to our species. There are no sub-group differences although there are many, many individual differences.
“There are no sub-group differences ”
Kate, I don’t ask much, I don’t complain when I get my comments deleted, but exactly how many times does ET have to be proven wrong before you ban her ass for deliberately posting Marxist disinformation on your website even after it has been proven wrong by the entire scientific community?
If I had a website and a Marxist persistently posted wholly invalidated Marxist theory while grownups tried to have a conversation, I’d just ban them.
ET, we are in agreement. Human cognition has to be extremely robust because it survives all manner of major brain injuries intact.
I’ve seen case studies of people diagnosed in adulthood with hydrocephaly, they were to all appearances normal but they were missing literally half their brain due to the CSF pressure.
I’ve had patients with serious brain injury that suffered diverse motor control,memory and sensory issues but retained their intelligence, humor, conscience, all of it. Then again some don’t, showing that this is some pretty complicated business.
If its that plastic to accommodate injury, I’m thinking a couple structural variations aren’t going to amount to much.
ol hoss – I’m not a gaia worshipper, so, I don’t understand your point.
Of course you are.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/sites/entrez?db=pubmed&uid=12079529&cmd=showdetailview&indexed=google
And to the 9,996 ostensibly right wing SDA readers who sat on their hands, again, while Marxists attempted to take over this site with their Marxism, again, every single one of you is fair game and therefore subject to the full weight of my commentary from this point in. No mercy, none.
ol hoss – something that requires ‘worship’ is unscientific – and I’m not into worshipping anything.
I also reject a cybernetic analysis of the earth (too mechanical), and the notion of homeostasis (I think things are getting more complex); and I don’t see the planet as ‘one organism’. A CAS can’t be reduced to ‘one’.
But, I do strongly support the universe as a CAS.
Now, now, hoss – stop baiting ET. She’s still kicking against the goads.
Heh, those smart perfessers sometimes outsmart themselves.