All human behavior occur because certain mechanical processes in our brains make it occur. If we can one day match every pattern of mechanical occurances/algorithms with a certain behavior, and then somehow use electrodes or what-have-you to follow every brain process, we can predict the exact behavioral outcome in the organism at large.
Of course, we can actually predict behaviors without this. Not perfect predictions, but if we know the personality types of an individual, we can make statistical probabilities of the behavioral outcomes.
Rebuttal of the Flynn effect: http://home.comcast.net/~neoeugenics/TRC.htm Even the American Psychological Association says the Flynn Effect is not valid. I consider the APA a credible source.
Regarding crime, I’ve read differently: when you compare the trend over the last 100 years, there is an overall increase. The data can be wrong of course, I am not saying all my ideas are correct, but rather at the moment I believe they are current, but certainly subceptible to refutation.
Regarding lowering SAT scores, I just heard this on the local news channel I think, or was it the internet? I think it was PBS. Oh well.
Well, since research shows that IQ is 80% heritable, that SES is strongly correlated to IQ, and that those with the lowest SES have a higher fertility rate than those with higher SES, the conclusion is made by scientists that genetic potential for intelligence is decreasing. I tend to agree with these scientists.
I am now going to stop, at least for the time being, I have so much to do. If I don’t answer someone, please don’t take it as an admittance that I am necessarily wrong, but rather simply that there are so many posts here and I don’t have time to answer everything. My apologies. But, I have posted pretty much every link/source I use for my ideas, so if you are interested, you can look them up and find anything I would have posted here anyway in response.
shrugs Have it your way. You still have yet to refute an argument, other than by changing the subject and ignoring the issue, but if you choose to “debate” in this manner, then that is your choice. You can not expect to start a debate with a generalization like, “The poor are dumb, the rich are smart, therefore the poor should be sterilized so we can have a superior race. My evidence is that poor countries have lower educational standards that - oh crap, that refutes my statement.” Like many “high IQ” logical thinkers, you completely ignore the challenges in establishing such a system in any functional society, much the the balances that it takes to RUN such a society, and create an image of a rich utopia where everyone is super-intelligent and no one suffers, without actually providing any evidence and ignoring your own definition of “intelligence” that states that the skills necessary to run such a society are not among the statistics measured by the IQ scores. You expect anyone to actually believe that Albert Einstein, intelligent as he was with physics, would be able to pull off the same kind of thing that Cesar Chavez did? You had the absolutely GENIUS idea last night that the Constitution was irrelevant and no one cared about it, and it should be burned, for fuck’s sake. You think that logic has ANY capability of leading a society?
You, by some stroke of luck, managed to find the oh-so-difficult to find correlation between lack of education and intelligence without even CONSIDERING the possibility that intelligence is a product of education, and education is the product of wealth.
You make the broad statement that all poor people are criminals, despite ignoring a) which laws were being broken, b) the state of law enforcement, c) the length of internment for crimes, and d) the fact that crime has been going down for the past 20 years.
You assume that the world would be a better place, citing, above anything else, the uber-race of the Jews. Are you farking serious? Israel is a country that doesn’t have a national identity, is struggling with concepts as difficult as whether or not to allow gambling, and is involved in a 50 year long war with its own people. These are your ROLE MODELS? Every country you listed as being “superior” intellectually has a farking screwed up society. Do you know why?
Your point is that the wealthy are better than everyone else, because they are smarter. Oh? Why is it that companies need to be bailed out as frequently as the poor? Why is it that the government has to tax the poor to subsidize an industry, in the same manner it has to go to the terrible extent of offering a free health clinic to people who can’t afford insurance? Or are is your genius-race not smart enough to handle its own business?
I won’t even bring up that stupid 12 indisputable facts thread.
And you call YOUR position accurate?
Lady, I can almost hope that one day you suffer a tragic misfortune (something crazy like getting pregnant and needing to support a family as a single mother), so people can spit on you with the same disdain you show for anyone below your priviledged social position - but unfortunately, I give a damn about people, and I can’t even wish that on you. In fact, the next time I’m walking around Berkeley and I see a homeless black man who lost his legs, I’m going to buy him the biggest fucking dinner he’s ever had, just to make up for your crappy karma. Just because that guy was not fortunate enough to get into college like a pampered middle class kid and avoid the mother f*ing draft in the '70s, and got sent to Vietnam by your god damned genius race of wealthy white guys, and lost his legs, came back to a country that hated him, and couldn’t find work because he’s a damn cripple, does not give you the right to piss all over him. He is still an individual who has as many rights to exist as you do, whether you like it or not, and you can kiss my poor brown ass if your statistics disagree - and if you don’t like me blowing my emotional load, I’ve got another load for you.
Here’s an excerpt from that neoeugenics site’s mission statement:
*First, Jews are one of the few identifiable groups (actually, the Ashkenazi Jews specifically) who have practiced eugenics with tenacious success that has raised their intelligence to a remarkably high level, along with increasing group cohesiveness leading to extreme ethnocentrism or xenophobia. Several issues arise from this achievement. Because of the form of their genetic selection process, they have primarily developed their verbal skills, making them uniquely adept at manipulation, deception, propaganda, academics, the media, etc. This would not normally be a problem, except that they have managed with this verbal skill to control politics and national policy, while those with other skills have built the technological foundations of great nations in Europe and America. That is, the Jewish contribution may not have been very great or even negative, as their accumulation of far greater wealth than any other ethnic group has to do with their abilities in manipulation of other people through the power of words rather than through constructing or building industry. Skilled craftsmen and technicians are as important as lawyers, politicians, academics or journalists; but the rewards have gone to the elite who have the power of the word over the skill of the craftsmen.
Second, Jews have been at the forefront of promoting multiculturalism, diversity, globalism, etc., while trying to block nationalism of others, while embracing Zionism themselves. This faction of Jews have maintained their presence in academics, the media and politics and are the primary stumbling block to other ethnic groups trying to form their own cohesive nationhood based on their genetic similarity, just like the Jews have done in Israel. My objection to Jewish influence in America therefore is strictly political and aimed at the Jewish Left, not the empirical Jewish right, and there are many of them who reject multiculturalism and genetic assimilation. These Jews I embrace, those that are on the side of eugenics and human advancement.*
I had a comment to make, but on second reading it just doesn’t seem necessary.
The Jews stuck together through thick and thin, and, in many places were regulated to, generally, professions that were despised and spat upon by other groups, such as banking, physician, entertainment and legal professions. Those professions were once akin to what burger flipping is today.
If a government were to implement nation-wide programs to improve the intelligence levels of children born to all of its citizens, I.Q. levels would remain the same. Do you understand why?
If citizens of differing countries were given exactly the same I.Q. tests, differences in cultures could account for differences in scores. If they were not given the same I.Q. tests, then scores cannot scientifically be compared. Do you understand why?
If each country gives its own I.Q. test and compares the scores of its citizens, the average I.Q. is the same from country to country. Do you understand why?
Are you aware that your DNA may more closely match someone of another “race” than of your own?
Richard Lynn publishes mostly in a journal which makes no bones about being pro-Nazi. It has included works by even Joseph Mengele’s mentor. Richard Lynn is an associate editor – or at least he was as of the mid-1990’s.
Lynn’s comments about African’s lower I.Q.'s was based on a study of results of a Junior aptitude test administered 15 years ago to 1,000 sixteen year olds. Lynn did not do the study himself. The person who did do the study specified explicitly that the results were a reflection of the horrors of apartheid – not of any biological inferiority of African blacks.
Lynn’s claims were discredited years and years ago.
I believe that I have some understanding of your purpose and background. So this will be my last post to you.
Where did you get the idea that Freddie Prinze, Jr. is Jewish? His mother, Kathleen Cochrane, is Irish Catholic; his father Freddie Sr., a self-styled “Hungarican”, was the son of a Hungarian Jew father and a Puerto Rican Catholic mother.
The fact that you cite Rushton clearly identifies your agenda. J. Philippe Rushton is a white supremicist who uses poorly executed studies to “prove” his views. He coins such cute terms as “Negroid”, “Mongoloid” and “Caucasoid” to refer to Blacks, Asians and Whites. His papers have been published but even a first year psychology major (like you?) learns to punch holes in them. His sampling is a joke and so is all his “evidence” which depends entirely on correlation. They did teach you that correlation != causation right?
There have been dozens of papers published as refutations and rejoinders to Rushton’s 2-3 “studies”.
Give citations from peer-reviewed journals, not mere web sites or popular press books. I want to see original research articles. Talk the language of science, not the predigested pap of popularizers and political wonks.
While Rushton is certainly a poor excuse for a sceintist and his work is the worst sort of pseudoscientific claptrap, he certainly did not coin those terms.
IMO, natural selection started to lose it’s grip on us since we hitched our wagon to the industrial revolution. Now, a couple of centuries on, I wonder if natural selection plays any part at all in human evolution?
I’ve never understood why people thought this. Did natural selection lose its grip on beavers when they learned to build dams and lodges? Did natural selection lose its grip on bees when they learned to construct hives?
Natural selection works on humans just fine. We’re living creatures; we will always be subject to natural selection. That we protect the weak and create ways to make our lives easier is hardly unique; we’re social animals, and lots of other animals do similar things. Human ingenuity, including the Industrial Revolution, is not something that lies outside natural selection. It’s PART of natural selection - it’s part of what we are as a living species. A creature’s behaviour is just part of the package, like its horns or its teeth or its claws.
Science Girl, I’d like to echo dogface’s request that you provide some cites to primary sources. In another thread you claimed - I am quoting you as close to verbatim as I can - that “the psychological community has universally accepted that there are five personality types.” I spent quite some time looking, and cannot find any reference whatsoever to a commonly accepted range of five personality types. If the psychological community commonly accepted this, it should be rather easy to find. Where did you get this information, and where did you get the notion it was commonly accepted?
If your cites are not primary or can’t be traced to primary sources, or aren’t peer-reviewed, or preferably BOTH, there’s no particular reason to believe they’re valid.
I am fervently hoping you know what a primary source is.
I have already given you a site which rebutted the “80% heritable” claim, and you go on to make another claim about the so-called “Big 5 traits” being 50% heritable. Perhaps you should explain what, exactly, you think that means.
I know that this won’t help the OP, but there are plenty of lurkers out there who might have missed it. I want to again debunk the “heritability” idea.
The simplistic way of thinking about heritability is that it measures the amount of variation in a trait that can be explained by genetic factors. For instance, we could measure the heritability of height in a field of corn, and find, say, that the heritability of height was 95%. In other words, 95% of the differences in height between corn plants was explained by genetic differences, and 5% by environmental differences.
We might therefore be led to conclude that changes in environment would have a minimal effect on the height of corn plants, and that we would be better off ignoring changing the environment of the plants and instead concentrate on selecting the best breeds.
But this is a fallacy. Imagine one field where the plants average 1 meter, another field where the plants average 2 meters. And in both fields the heritability of height is 95%. So the plants in the different field must therefore be different genetically? No, of course not. I could have added fertillizer to all the plants in the second field, and none in the first field, and the plants could have been sprouted from the exact same bag of seeds. Plants with short parents invariably turned out short themselves, and plants with tall parents invariably turned out tall…but the difference between the two fields was not genetic but environmental.
Now, substitute height for score on an IQ test, and the different fields for different socioeconomic castes, or different countries, and we can replicate the same results. High IQ people from rich countries have high IQ children, and low IQ people from poor countries have low IQ children. But it doesn’t follow that the difference between the high IQ children and the low IQ children is a genetic difference. And when you take into account that we know for a fact that children in poor countries tend to have poorer diets, lower parental care, lower education, and lower familiarity with standardized test taking, it doesn’t seem far-fetched to imagine that a large fraction of the difference is due to different environments.
And this is true even though it is also true that we can measure the heritability of IQ score, and find it to be pretty high. High heritiability does NOT mean that a trait is unamenable to change via a changed environment.
What you have there is a “hypothesis”, specifically that natural selection has stopped acting upon humans. Please define your terms so that your hypothesis can be evaluated.
What is “natural selection”? How is it that humans are no longer part of “nature”? How is this definition of “nature” you use any better than a bunch of romantic nonsense?
Well, considering that biology and sociology are not my fields, yet I figured why the Jews are more or less ‘successful’ and neoeugenics guy did not even consider this analysis in his writings, then yes, I consider him a moron, or a blinder-wearing supremacist.