I was surfing the internet and I found a “statement” about intelligence by so-called “mainstream scientists.”
Among other things, they say:
“Intelligence, so defined, can be measured, and intelligence tests measure it well. They are among the most accurate (in technical terms, reliable and valid) of all psychological tests and assessments.”
“Intelligence tests are not culturally biased against American blacks or other native-born, English-speaking peoples in the U.S.”
“The spread of people along the IQ continuum, from low to high, can be represented well by the BELL CURVE”
“The BELL CURVE for whites is centered roughly around IQ 100; the BELL CURVE for American blacks roughly around 85”
“Racial-ethnic differences are somewhat smaller but still substantial for individuals from the same socioeconomic backgrounds. To illustrate, black students from prosperous families tend to score higher in IQ than blacks from poor families, but they score no higher, on average, than whites from poor families.”
It’s outrageous that a bunch of racist fucks should try to pass themselves off as “mainstream.” And it’s equally outrageous that anyone funds these jerks. Go back to your KKK meeting and leave us alone.
Yeah. I’d be curious as to who has assigned them the label “mainstream”? Anyone can throw up a web site.
A google search for “mainstream” and “intelligence” turned up the following link:
http://www.mugu.com/cgi-bin/Upstream/Issues/bell-curve/support-bell-curve.html
Apparently it appeared in the Wall Street Journal.
Hopefully, the folks who signed it have had their tenure revoked by now :rolleyes:
(Although I do note that one of the signers is our old friend Rushton, who clearly has an agenda, to say the least)
1994?
It would be interesting to discover how many of those people besides Jensen and Rushton would be willing to sign the same document, now that The Bell Curve has actually been subjected to peer review (and found wanting in a number of areas).
sjgouldrocks , if that was your reference, I wouldn’t get too worked up about it unless you found a much more recent statement.
Raymond Cattell, eugenicist and cultural evaluator:
From the basic proposition above, that variation and natural selection act upon societies, we must now move on to examine the next proposition: that natural selection has to act upon a combination of genetic and cultural characters. In so doing we also recognize that success or failure of a group does not weigh its morality alone, but responds to the primary efficiency and intelligence of the cultural habits and the adaptiveness of the genetic mutations which it has accumulated by acts of nature. However, as eugenists have long argued, man is not helpless in the latter area: he can to some extent control mutation rates and he can be alert to fostering mutations which reduce the culturo-genetic lag i.e. the disparity between what a successful culture demands and what an otherwise haphazard supply of births provides.
From this site.
Here is our good friend Rushton, also from the above site on this page:
Despite the vast body of evidence now accumulating for important genetic and behavioral differences among the three great macro-races, there is much reluctance to accept that the differences in crime are deeply rooted. Perhaps one must sympathize with fears aroused by race research. But all theories of human nature can be used to generate abusive policies. And a rejection of the genetic basis for racial variation in behavior is not only poor scholarship, it may be injurious to unique individuals and to complexly structured societies. Moreover, it should be emphasized that probably no more than about 50 percent of the variance among races is genetic, with the remaining 50 percent due to the environment. Even genetic effects are necessarily mediated by neuroendocrine and psychosocial mechanisms, thus allowing opportunity for benign intervention and the alleviation of suffering.
Talk about your agenda type scientists.
Here’s what scientists and persons without an agenda have to say
http://more.abcnews.go.com/sections/living/tests1106/index.html
“There is no compelling evidence supporting the hypothesis that a dysgenic (negative) trend is at work undermining Americans’ intellectual capital,” write Wendy M. Williams and Stephen J. Ceci of Cornell University in the latest issue of the scholary journal American Psychologist.
Their conclusion—based on analysis of national tests for such things as vocabulary, science, mathematics, writing and spatial reasoning—disputes the findings outlined in the incendiary The Bell Curve, published in 1994 by R.J. Herrnstein and Charles Murray.
http://vector.cshl.org/eugenics/
See the “Flaws in Research” page. It seems these guys have taken flaws 2, 3 and 4 as their personal mantra.
From Frontline on The Black-White Test Score Gap
Whether or not a parent follows the middle-class parenting practices that are most likely to increase a child’s chances of doing well in school–having books at home, reading to the child, taking her on a trip to the museum, for example–depends on how the parent was raised. Even when black and white parents have the same test scores, educational attainment, income, wealth and number of children, black parents are more likely to have grown up in less-advantaged households. So part of the explanation for the gap may lay in the widespread discrimination in housing, education and employment that African American children’s grandparents faced.
From here at the University of Wiscons-Madison on our other friend Richard Lynn.
By analyzing changes in Black-White differences in the GSS vocabulary test across survey years, rather than birth cohorts, Lynn overlooks both the duration and the significance of the Black-White convergence. We extend our earlier intercohort analysis of GSS data through 1998 and confirm our previous finding of a very significant, long-term Black-White convergence, which is attributable to improvements in socioeconomic background and schooling among African-Americans. Even in an analysis of aggregate changes in the Black-White test score gap across survey years, when data are weighted properly to represent the U.S. population on the individual level, we find that the Black-White test score gap narrowed significantly over the period from 1974 to 1998.
I can go on and on. Perhaps when I get home from work I will.
Biggirl . . . all I can say is wow!