Is it now a proven fact that heredity plays a more important role than environment in determining individual human personality, psychological characteristics, and mental abilities? Because that’s what John Derbyshire is saying in this National Review article referenced in the OP of this Pit thread. The interesting thing is, though, he’s not saying it like a climate-change skeptic would stake out his position, defensively and acknowledging the majority of the scientific community supports the contrary position; rather, he is speaking of it as a fact which is well-established and noncontroversial among scientists in the relevant fields, but otherwise is not widely known purely because the extrascientific media and social-political environment discourage attention. Is that so, or is dude living on another planet from the rest of us?
Everything I’ve been reading says that nature and nurture are so intertwined and interdependent that you can’t decide for one or the other. (This would mainly be books written for the layperson to explain complicated science stuff like the study of genetics.) So I might be totally wrong, not being a geneticist or anything, but it sounds suspect to me.
BTW, in case I didn’t make it clear: This is mainly about race. Same subject as this old thread.
I don’t know the answer to your question, but I do know that the answer to the nature/nurture question is not some number which is etched in stone like the gravitational constant. e.g. “it’s 60% nature, 40% nurtrure.”
As more and more efforts are made to prevent children from growing up in a lousy environment, one can expect that the percentage of differences due to nature will increase. If it was 40/60 100 years ago, it might be 60/40 the other way today. On the other hand, if you believe that inequality has increased over time, then the proportions may have changed in the other direction.
In that case, I think it will be difficult for you to find out if there is any scientific consensus and if so, what that consensus is. In case you haven’t noticed, there is a bit of a taboo against hypothesizing or arguing that natural mental abilities are not distributed evenly among races or ethnic groups.
Well, there’s obviously intense political pressure to conform to liberal orthodoxy in racial matters, and liberal dogma insists that there is no important genetic difference between the races. When James Watson offered a dissenting view on race and genetics, there was a firestorm which resulted in his resignation from his position at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory.
Here is what Watson said:
(from the Wikipedia article on Watson.)
Reasonable people would not have reacted so vehemently. If a scientist of Watson’s prestige can be punished for deviating from political correctness, what hope do the rest of us have? Clearly there are many in the scholarly and scientific community who want the subject to be taboo.
“Race” as a meaningful concept genetically is mostly debunked. Fairly little travels in any significantly correlated way with the superficial and cultural characteristics that get defined as “race.” Genetically that is.
So if this has to do with race, then, no.
If this has to do with broader nature-nurture, damn, we’ve had how many of these GDs before? Many many many twin studies (mainly comparing similarities and differences between identical and fraternal twinships) document that most of the variation between individuals is genetic in nature. Pinker’s Blank Slate is a good review.
The crowd in the discussion thread linked to Derbyshire’s article ain’t got that memo.
There is “a bit of a taboo,” I’m sure, regarding the flat-Earth theory and creationism, but that does not imply either is worthy of more attention than it gets.
That’s because those questions have been settled. The problem of nature vs. nurture is still very much up in the air.
Even WRT innate, hereditary IQ differentials between races?
Well your op did specify among the serious scientific community.
Yes, pretty much. Myself, I take no position on that subject, as the arguments on neither side satisfy me.
But you think serious scientific research on the matter is stifled by a “taboo”? What do you base that on?
Ok I had to read the article before commenting, but according to the article:
Come on now. Close association with Ayers? Obama doesn’t have a lcose association with Ayers, serving on a board with him doesn’t make him a conjoined twin.
However, as for the OP - The new cultural paradigm in nature/nurture research is looking beyond the biology of human development to a more transpersonal approach, looking at human development in a more spherical light, not soley concentrating on the body but integrating all human dimensions (body, instincts,heart, mind, and consciousness) into a fully embodied model of development. This makes sense because we are not simply products of our western educations, we are products of genetics, spirituality, cultural influences, societal influences etc…etc… Ken Wilber looks at the more Integral Approach to human development, a sort of revisioning of what we thought we knew into a more contemporary picture of human development.
Well, I gave the example of James Watson’s dismissal from Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. In the article you cited, Derbyshire offers the following incidents:
I would add as well the incident in which the president of Harvard was driven to resign because he suggested in an address to the faculty that there might be significant, biologically determined differences in the behavior of men and women, and the vehement reaction to The Bell Curve. Obviously there are many people in the academic world who want the subject to be off-limits.
To respond directly to Derbyshire’s assertion, I will quote what he says in that NR article:
So genetics accounts for “about half” of observed variation, eh? Yes, Mr. Derbyshire, I do say that is only a half victory. What people used to think 40 years ago is totally irrelevant.
The most recent book I read on the matter, The Blank Slate by Pinker, indicated that it was suprisingly (to me) 50-50 on the genes/environment front. What Pinker thought people would find surprising was that parental influence was not found to be a direct significant factor in the “environment” sense. That seems kind of obvious to me, but then I’m not a parent with a vested interest in my own sense of importance.
In any case… race? How would environment affect race? Are you asking whether the environment or genetics is what is responsible for superficial variation in human appearance? I don’t understand how the nature-nurture debate has anything to do with “race.”
As noted at length in this thread that was posted at the time, the “violent” reaction was not really within the scientific community; the separate (and not really vehement) negative reaction within the scientific community is based on the fact that he has participated in zero studies of the issue andin this case made some fairly stupid off-hand remarks just before he addressed an audience at a museum. He is also (despite is reputation in the popular (not the scientific) press), not highly regarded within the scientific community.
J. Phillippe Rushton (who, unlike Watson), actually does “investigate” the issue of race still gets published regularly. No one is really shutting down examinations of “racial” issues; the evidence simply does not support any of the pro-racial speculation.
As noted at length in this thread that was posted at the time, the “violent” reaction was not really within the scientific community; the separate (and not really vehement) negative reaction within the scientific community is based on the fact that he has participated in zero studies of the issue andin this case made some fairly stupid off-hand remarks just before he addressed an audience at a museum. He is also (despite is reputation in the popular (not the scientific) press), not highly regarded within the scientific community.
J. Phillippe Rushton (who, unlike Watson), actually does “investigate” the issue of race still gets published regularly. No one is really shutting down examinations of “racial” issues; the evidence simply does not support any of the pro-racial speculation.
No, the issue is whether there might actually be something to scientific racism, i.e., the idea that the differential in IQ bell curves observed between white and black Americans (and the differential is there, that’s well-established and not at all controversial) is partly or primarily due to hereditary differences in mental ability between the races. See Race and intelligence.
The public-policy implication, of course, is that public money spent to help African-Americans fully develop their minds and overcome their environmental handicaps through improved education, nutrition and health care is wasted, because their mental potential is ineluctably limited by heredity. That was strongly implied in The Bell Curve. Which is probably the reason RWs keep coming back to all this like a dog to its vomit.