Anart said:
Are you now telling us that you do not believe what you have previously written? Perhaps we're all misunderstanding your posts? If so, please make that clear, because up to this point it seems as if you are quite certain that Africans are less intelligent than other races.
Erna said:
Have you seen this srticle on SOTT recently? It was in the 'Science & Technology' section:
http://www.sott.net/articles/show/141881-Fury-at-DNA-pioneer-s-theory-Africans-are-less-intelligent-than-Westerners
Below is the text that Erna referred to. I tried to look for a discussion of this text but could not find any, which may be my fault. At the time of writing 26 had voted for the text, but I could not see any comments. First the text then a few comments.
Fury at DNA pioneer's theory: Africans are less intelligent than Westerners
Cahal Milmo
The Independent
Wed, 17 Oct 2007 13:00 EDT
Celebrated scientist attacked for race comments: "All our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours - whereas all the testing says not really".
One of the world's most eminent scientists was embroiled in an extraordinary row last night after he claimed that black people were less intelligent than white people and the idea that "equal powers of reason" were shared across racial groups was a delusion.
James Watson, a Nobel Prize winner for his part in the unravelling of DNA who now runs one of America's leading scientific research institutions, drew widespread condemnation for comments he made ahead of his arrival in Britain today for a speaking tour at venues including the Science Museum in London.
The 79-year-old geneticist reopened the explosive debate about race and science in a newspaper interview in which he said Western policies towards African countries were wrongly based on an assumption that black people were as clever as their white counterparts when "testing" suggested the contrary. He claimed genes responsible for creating differences in human intelligence could be found within a decade.
The newly formed Equality and Human Rights Commission, successor to the Commission for Racial Equality, said it was studying Dr Watson's remarks " in full". Dr Watson told The Sunday Times that he was "inherently gloomy about the prospect of Africa" because "all our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours - whereas all the testing says not really". He said there was a natural desire that all human beings should be equal but "people who have to deal with black employees find this not true".
His views are also reflected in a book published next week, in which he writes: "There is no firm reason to anticipate that the intellectual capacities of peoples geographically separated in their evolution should prove to have evolved identically. Our wanting to reserve equal powers of reason as some universal heritage of humanity will not be enough to make it so."
The furore echoes the controversy created in the 1990s by The Bell Curve, a book co-authored by the American political scientist Charles Murray, which suggested differences in IQ were genetic and discussed the implications of a racial divide in intelligence. The work was heavily criticised across the world, in particular by leading scientists who described it as a work of " scientific racism".
Dr Watson arrives in Britain today for a speaking tour to publicise his latest book, Avoid Boring People: Lessons from a Life in Science. Among his first engagements is a speech to an audience at the Science Museum organised by the Dana Centre, which held a discussion last night on the history of scientific racism.
Critics of Dr Watson said there should be a robust response to his views across the spheres of politics and science. Keith Vaz, the Labour chairman of the Home Affairs Select Committee, said: "It is sad to see a scientist of such achievement making such baseless, unscientific and extremely offensive comments. I am sure the scientific community will roundly reject what appear to be Dr Watson's personal prejudices.
"These comments serve as a reminder of the attitudes which can still exists at the highest professional levels."
The American scientist earned a place in the history of great scientific breakthroughs of the 20th century when he worked at the University of Cambridge in the 1950s and 1960s and formed part of the team which discovered the structure of DNA. He shared the 1962 Nobel Prize for medicine with his British colleague Francis Crick and New Zealand-born Maurice Wilkins.
But despite serving for 50 years as a director of the Cold Spring Harbour Laboratory on Long Island, considered a world leader in research into cancer and genetics, Dr Watson has frequently courted controversy with some of his views on politics, sexuality and race. The respected journal Science wrote in 1990: "To many in the scientific community, Watson has long been something of a wild man, and his colleagues tend to hold their collective breath whenever he veers from the script."
In 1997, he told a British newspaper that a woman should have the right to abort her unborn child if tests could determine it would be homosexual. He later insisted he was talking about a "hypothetical" choice which could never be applied. He has also suggested a link between skin colour and sex drive, positing the theory that black people have higher libidos, and argued in favour of genetic screening and engineering on the basis that " stupidity" could one day be cured. He has claimed that beauty could be genetically manufactured, saying: "People say it would be terrible if we made all girls pretty. I think it would great."
The Cold Spring Harbour Laboratory said yesterday that Dr Watson could not be contacted to comment on his remarks.
Steven Rose, a professor of biological sciences at the Open University and a founder member of the Society for Social Responsibility in Science, said: " This is Watson at his most scandalous. He has said similar things about women before but I have never heard him get into this racist terrain. If he knew the literature in the subject he would know he was out of his depth scientifically, quite apart from socially and politically."
Anti-racism campaigners called for Dr Watson's remarks to be looked at in the context of racial hatred laws. A spokesman for the 1990 Trust, a black human rights group, said: "It is astonishing that a man of such distinction should make comments that seem to perpetuate racism in this way. It amounts to fuelling bigotry and we would like it to be looked at for grounds of legal complaint."
Comments
1.
He claimed genes responsible for creating differences in human intelligence could be found within a decade.
a). The scientist thinks they will be found within ten years, but the fact is they have not yet been found. And even if they are found one will have to ask if it is not well possible that those who had more intellectual ability were killed in greater numbers during the time of suppression in Africa or when they came to America as slaves? However one should not leave out the possibility of that internal wars could, have the same effect? For a parallel in the present time and in another group, why are so many Iraqi intellectuals killed and what could the possible consequences be for the future of that group?
b). _http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_and_intelligence_(test_data)
‘IQ scores vary greatly among different nations for related groups.’
[…]
Vinko Buj, Personal. & Individual Differences, Vol. 2, 1981 , pp. 168 to 169 (variances modern Europe) Average IQ
Dutch (Amsterdam) 109.4
Belgium (Brussels) 99.7
France (Paris) 96.1
Question to the above: Suppose related groups have similar genes, how come the IQ’s vary?
2.
Dr Watson told The Sunday Times that he was "inherently gloomy about the prospect of Africa" because "all our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours - whereas all the testing says not really". He said there was a natural desire that all human beings should be equal but "people who have to deal with black employees find this not true".
Below follow some points one could raise in this regard:
a). _http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flynn_effect
IQ tests are re-normalized periodically, such that the average score is reset to 100. The revised versions are standardized on new samples and scored with respect to those samples alone, so the only way to compare the difficulty of two versions of a test is to conduct a separate study in which the same subjects take both versions.[1]
The average rate of rise seems to be around three IQ points per decade. Because children attend school longer now and have become much more familiar with the testing of school-related material, one might expect the greatest gains to occur on such school content-related tests as vocabulary, arithmetic or general information. Just the opposite is the case: abilities such as these have experienced relatively small gains and even occasional declines over the years. The largest Flynn effects appear instead on culture reduced highly general intelligence factor loaded (g-loaded) tests such as Raven's Progressive Matrices. For example, Dutch conscripts gained 21 points in only 30 years, or 7 points per decade, between 1952 and 1982.[1]
Some studies focusing on the distribution of scores have found the Flynn effect to be primarily a phenomenon in the lower end of the distribution. Teasdale and Owen (1987), for example, found the effect primarily reduced the number of low-end scores, resulting in a pile up of moderately high scores, with no increase in very high scores.[2] However, Raven (2000) found that, as Flynn suggested, data reported by many previous researchers that had previously been interpreted as showing a decrease in many abilities with increasing age must be re-interpreted as showing that there has been a dramatic increase in these abilities with date of birth. On many tests this occurs at all levels of ability.[3] Two large samples of Spanish children were assessed with a 30-year gap. Comparison of the IQ distributions indicated that
the mean IQ had increased by 9.7 points (the Flynn effect),
the gains were concentrated in the lower half of the distribution and negligible in the top half, and
the gains gradually decreased from low to high IQ.[4]
Taken at face value, these changes are considered large by some. Ulric Neisser, who in 1995 headed an American Psychological Association task force writing a consensus statement on the state of intelligence research, estimates that if American children of 1932 could take an IQ test normed in 1997 their average IQ would have been only about 80.[1] In other words, half of the children in 1932 would be classified as having borderline mental retardation or worse in 1997.
b.
In 2004, Jon Martin Sundet of the University of Oslo and colleagues published an article documenting scores on intelligence tests given to Norwegian conscripts between the 1950s and 2002, showing that the increase in scores of general intelligence stopped after the mid-1990s and in numerical reasoning subtests, declined.[24]
Some have claimed that the Flynn effect was masking a dysgenic decline in human reproduction and that in developed countries the only direction that IQ scores will now move is downwards. However, even if there is a decline, then this may have other causes than dysgenics. Genetic changes usually happen relatively slowly. For example, the Flynn effect has been too rapid for a genetic explanation.[25] Researchers have warned that constantly greater exposure to industrial chemicals shown to damage the nervous system, especially in children, in industrialized nations may be responsible for a "silent pandemic" of brain development disorders.[2]
Also, if the Flynn effect has ended for the majority, it may still continue for minorities, especially for groups like immigrants where many may have received poor nutrition during early childhood.[citation needed] For example, William T. Dickens and James R. Flynn write in their 2006 paper that Black Americans reduce the racial IQ gap: Evidence from standardization samples that blacks have gained 5 or 6 IQ points on non-Hispanic whites between 1972 and 2002. Gains have been fairly uniform across the entire range of black cognitive ability.[26]
c. _http://www.thepsychometricscentre.co.uk/publications/BeyondTheFlynnEffect.asp
Professor James Flynn said:
I also wish to underline that if we want to write the cognitive history of the 20th century, rising IQ is at most half the story. There are other intellectual qualities, namely, critical acumen and wisdom, that IQ tests were not designed to measure and do not measure and these are equally worthy of attention. Our obsession with IQ is one indication that rising wisdom has not characterized our time.
Naming the paradoxes
(1) The factor analysis paradox: Factor analysis shows a first principal component called "g" or general intelligence that seems to bind performance on the various WISC subtests together. However, IQ gains over time show score gains on the WISC subtests occurring independently of one another. How can intelligence be both one and many?
(2) The intelligence paradox: If huge IQ gains are intelligence gains, why are we not stuck by the extraordinary subtlety of our children's conversation? Why do we not have to make allowances for the limitations of our parents? A difference of some 18 points in the average IQ over two generations ought to be highly visible.
(3) The MR paradox: In 1900, the average IQ scored against current norms was somewhere between 50 and 70. If IQ gains are in any sense real, we are driven to the absurd conclusion that a majority of our ancestors were mentally retarded.
(4) The identical twins paradox: Twin studies show that genes dominate individual differences in IQ and that environmental effects are feeble. IQ gains are so great as to signal the existence of environmental factors of enormous potency. How can environment be both so feeble and so potent?
The solutions in shorthand
(1) The WISC subtests measure a variety of cognitive skills that are functionally independent and responsive to changes in social priorities over time. The inter-correlations that engender "g" are binding only when comparing individuals within a static social context.
(2) Asking whether IQ gains are intelligence gains is the wrong question because it implies all or nothing cognitive progress. The 20th century has seen some cognitive skills make great gains, while others have been in the doldrums. To assess cognitive trends, we must dissect "intelligence" into solving mathematical problems, interpreting the great works of literature, finding on-the-spot solutions, assimilating the scientific world view, critical acumen, and wisdom.
(3) Our ancestors in 1900 were not mentally retarded. Their intelligence was anchored in everyday reality. We differ from them in that we can use abstractions and logic and the hypothetical to attack the formal problems that arise when science liberates thought from concrete referents. Since 1950, we have become more ingenious in going beyond previously learned rules to solve problems on the spot.
(4) At a given time, genetic differences between individuals (within a cohort) are dominant but only because they have hitched powerful environmental factors to their star. Trends over time (between cohorts) liberate environmental factors from the sway of genes and once unleashed, they can have a powerful cumulative effect.
The above is what I would say, maybe others have better suggestions.
Edit 20080509: An interesting study:
Brain-training To Improve Memory Boosts Fluid Intelligence
Mrs. Tigersoap said:
You post under Travelogues, then talk about politics, crime, poverty and corruption and then focus heavily on these subjects. I've personaly never been to SA, and I must say that your post does not invite to visit. If your intention was to show what a beautiful country it is, it was somewhat obscured by the heavy focus on the supposedly bad sides of SA.
[…]
So, I don't understand what your intention was by posting about SA.
What people see when they travel depends on who they are. Beautiful beaches, nice hotels, expensive restaurants, fancy discos, souvenir markets, fishing trips, wild animals, sight seeing do not interest me much, no matter where I am.
However you can go to South Africa and see all that very easily and comfortably. And if not in person you can browse some sites and watch. Erna already gave a link further up. It is also mentioned on one of the following sites:
_http://www.sa-venues.com/tourist_attractions_south_africa.htm
_http://www.southafrica.com/
_http://www.south-africa-tourism.com/
_http://www.southafrica.net/satourism/
Or if you do not like to go there, but would like to buy a book about South Africa:
_http://www.exclusivebooks.com/
Mrs. Tigersoap said:
But there are always newcomers, tourists or immigrants who come to Belgium and know exactly what's wrong, what we should do, why we're in such a state. They've been here 5 minutes but already, look with contempt at how badly Belgians run their affairs.
I think the only real idea I had was to think in terms of Political Ponerology when viewing the corruption and all, but that is the case anywhere on the planet. Besides to talk about that to people I still need to practice. Also to judge someone as a psychopath is not yet an easy task. People and circumstances are so different.
Note: Soon, I do not yet know when, I shall leave the rapid access to the net, so if there is a question or comment that requires a response, please have patience, if it does not come quickly.
thorbiorn
Edit 20080719:
More recent thread about Africa with relevant points: http://www.cassiopaea.org/forum/index.php?topic=8351
referred to by Anart in http://www.cassiopaea.org/forum/index.php?topic=9230.msg66148#msg66148
