First, “Gentleman’s C” is a term I first saw used in reference to Bush II’s education; not the 50s. And even taking your comment as true at face value it just underlines my point; the 50s wasn’t long ago at all in terms of human generations.
And America is a very class ridden society and has been getting more so not less over time.
The vast majority of people who get a good college education would not qualify for a “Gentleman’s C”, even if it did exist today. You were the one who interjected that into a discussion about genetics. So, even if that phenomenon existed, it would be insignificant in terms of genetics.
And your post was written in the present tense, not the past tense.
However, that matter aside, I think academic performance is correlated (somewhat) to social class. Richer people are healthier, and missing school from illness can bring down the GPA. Richer people have a more educational home environment – more books, more vacations, more visits to zoos or wilderness areas, etc. Rich neighborhoods have better schools: lower student-teacher ratios, better libraries, and so on. Heck, richer people simply live in less fear on a day-to-day basis, and fear is crippling to education.
Is environment a greater factor in academic success than intelligence? I don’t know; I don’t even know how to figure it, given how debatable so many of the concepts are. The effects of environment, at least, are relatively easy to test scientifically.
Only if other people click on them and listen to them. I usually don’t click on unexplained links. So no, it’s not speaking for you; it’s just a meaningless link, not a contribution to the debate.
True, but unless that leads them to having more children, it’s not something that is going to be selected for. If there are any specific genes leading to wealth in the first place, which is highly dubious.
Exactly; which is why I (jokingly) called it Lamarckism.
(Now, of course, being wealthy is very much selected for in terms of sexual selection…)
Look at the institutionalization of various breeding strategies. Why is Catholicism so against condoms and abortion? Because they’ve adopted the breeding strategy of quantity over quality. So they can save more souls and whatnot.
Nah. The Catholic objection to birth control predates serious, effective methods of birth control. I am not sure where the notion that the RCC wants more people on Earth to “save” originated, but it was not from within the church and has never been a part of Catholic theology. (My guess is that as the fears of world overpopulation first arose, a few people looked at the existing Catholic opposition to birth control and invented a reason for it–perhaps even in jest–and the idea was picked up and spread by uninformed people who did not understand theological history sufficiently to recognize that the claim was an invention.)
I don’t think it’s a r vs. k reproductive strategy situation at all. I’m pretty sure that large poor families would spend just as much on their kids as smaller, wealthier families.
Instead, what we have is a situation where for some reason, poor people tend to have larger families. I don’t think it’s in hope that a few will survive to adulthood, but rather because it’s what they do in a cultural sense, and there’s not the perception that having fewer kids will materially impact someone’s wealth (or lack thereof).
It’s easy to look at a particular population and see them doing things which appear stupid to a more wealthy segment of the population, but I’m sure that works in reverse; for example, I’ll bet a lot of poor people think I’m a total moron for taking my car into the shop to get my brakes done, or hiring someone to build a fence, etc… when it’s something I can do myself.
The pitfall comes in assuming that what we perceive as “stupid” is something inherited. To beat a somewhat dead horse, my great-grandfather was pretty much uneducated- he’d run away from home as a boy, and worked as a laborer in Galveston in the early 1900s, and ended up a longshoreman. I’m pretty sure he couldn’t read well- like could write his name, and maybe puzzle out a newspaper article, from what I’ve read. There were probably plenty of people looking at him having 3-4 kids and thinking “What an idiot. That guy shouldn’t be allowed to reproduce.”
However, one of his sons was a bank vice president, one of his sons went to college, and was a finance person for the 4th largest city in the country, one of his granddaughters was a teacher and counselor, and is now on her local school board.
One of his great grandsons is a IT guy with 2 master’s degrees, another is a finance person working in clean energy, and another is a teacher and coach. One of his great-granddaughters is a hospital administrator.
Hardly a “stupid” family- if anything we inherited smarts, not stupidity, but if you were to have judged us by my great-grandfather, you might have assumed we would be.
WAG. A relative lack of recreational opportunities outside the bedroom? Aloha
It most certainly exists today, at least in another form. The “Athlete’s C”. 
Good athlete? Dumber than a box of rocks? Don’t do any actual classwork? You still pass.
Anyone who has to learn from a book that people act stupidly is a product of a flawed educational system. Funny, eh? Then
can hardly be understood as anything but a metaphor. To begin to make any literal sense at all, you would have to assume that the under-educated and the educated are two different species AND that they locked in some zero sum game in which numbers will prevail. Our little excursion into class warfare indicated to me that money will prevail.
Then,
It’s quite adaptive to the 1% to limit good education and the ability to think critically to their own and keep the 99% dumbed down and reproducing to provide personnel for domestic and military service.
And Bob’s your uncle. Aloha
:dubious: Are you actually quoting and arguing with yourself?
The U.S. has had free public education since 1870, and public high schools since1910. 34% of the population has a college degree.
The 1% must be doing an awful job with the various evil schemes you accuse them of pursuing.
To be fair they’ve certainly tried; the Right has opposed public schools for as long as I can remember. And has strong anti-intellectual tendencies.
At some schools. And at some schools, like Stanford, it doesn’t. But even so, that represents a tiny minority of students. And most college athletes don’t end up as pros, so there is an even smaller subset that gets a leg up on the wealth generating machine of pro sports.
Yes. I’m an authority on my reasoning which some here have suggested is deficient. IMO, they need some education… And, btw, the class warfare angle was originally your contibution. :dubious: Aloha
Even there, you’ll find test scores and high school GPAs are measurably lower than among the general student population. At Rice, we have/had reviews of athletics roughly every 10 years, and it does happen to be the case that even at elite academic schools, athletes are “gently encouraged” to take easier courses/majors and that admissions standards aren’t exactly the same for them (though the average Rice athlete still has to pass a higher minimum standard than say a Texas A&M athlete).
On the plus side, because admissions standards are higher, it’s less the case of a gentleman’s B and more that the students are, on average, better prepared for college level work.
That said, grade inflation does occur and is measurable.
Actually, the problem at Stanford is that the lowest grade anyone can get is an A-. Grade inflation there is a joke.
But the 1% and the Right are in no way the same thing. See this Gallup study, which found that the 1% were slightly more Republican, but no more conservative, than the 99%.