Such as?
Such as?
I’m not going to start another thread just to tell you that this is provably, absolutely not true.
Discussion of the topic is pointless absent a definition. You introduced the term. What did you mean?
Evolution and AGW are both plain facts disputed only by the ignorant and by scam artists preying on the ignorant.
The third question is gibberish since “race” is a social and political construct, not a biological one, and since even “IQ” is not exactly a strongly established standard.
No, if you’re going to ask a question you have to define your terms, otherwise your question is not addressable.
Your third question, as posed, is not a question about a “scientific topic” because the word “race” has no scientific/biological meaning. It’s a sociological construct, not a biological one.
I think evolution is pretty solid and easily proven, both in a “look at how these bird species evolved in this isolated place over a couple of million years” and by what we can manage with crop domestication and animal breeding. The only people I know of who argue with it are trying very hard to believe that God created this entire Universe a short time ago and for some strange reason decided to construct a Universe that +appeared+ to be billions of years old, but really isn’t.
I think people get confused on the global warming thing because we Humans have been extremely fortunate in that our recorded Human history has taken place during a period of unusual stability in sea levels and temperature. The Earth is prone to much more violent swings than we have ever experienced. That being said, I believe that we humans are affecting the environment more than we want to admit, in warming, pollution and extinctions. The problem is that we as yet are unable to determine how much we are affecting the Earth versus how much is a potentially natural Earth cycle.
As for racial IQ stuff, I think culture plays far more of a part than we want to admit. A culture of resentment and rejection of science and education is naturally going to result in individuals that test lower than one that values learning and thinking skills. The only way we could thoroughly debunk this crap once and for all would be a massive test where we subject children of different “racial” groups to different upbringings in a laboratory environment to see the end results. Of course, that is never going to happen.
Evolution: not even in dispute in this thread.
AGW: I tend to accept it, since scientists are pretty conservative (in the radical idea sense, not the political sense.) We can argue about models all we want, but it seems the models are under-predicting the effects if anything, which is scary. The most successful evidence against seems to be the existence of snarky e-mails, which says it all.
Race and Intelligence: I accept that there is a major genetic component of intelligence - but not 100%. Consider things like fetal alcohol syndrome and the effect of malnutrition on development, for instance.
Race is just one type of clustering. I do some data mining for pay, and clusters are defined with a measure of association. Traditionally we have used visually obvious traits, like skin color, for this. But you can cluster, and compare mean IQ scores, for lots of measures of association, some of which are probably a lot more valid than race. You can compare mean scores for any metric across various clusters, but in this case there is so much overlap that there is no way you can pick two individuals from two clusters and make any reasonable comparison. So the whole concept is fundamentally flawed, even before we get into the problems of measuring intelligence.
I subscribe to the mainstream view on all three, in the following order of certainty (greatest first): evolution, global warming, race/IQ.
It should be noted that any disagreement on the last stems from my belief in the premise that IQ can generally be predicted by parentage, but not by membership in any grouping as loosely and arbitrarily defined as race.
- Evolution - solid evidence
- Global Warming - very good evidence, ongoing research
- Race and IQ - No convincing evidence to reject the null hypothesis.
That said, Rand thinks that I’m a Science Snob*, favoring the hard sciences over the soft sciences. He’s probably right to some degree. I think that good scientist in the soft sciences are better than hard scientists. It’s also damned easy to get fooled in the softer sciences. For instance, in my opinion, ecologists are better at experimental design than physicists, because they have to be. It takes zillions of experiments to prove anything in ecology because you have to laboriously exclude all of the other explanations.
As a I generally require a higher level of experimental design and proof from softer sciences, especially on a topic as convoluted as race. (Skald, for example, is apparently a labradoodle - who knew?)
I would have to see a lot of stellar science all pointing in the same direction before I would reject the null hypothesis that IQ is not related to race, especially since race is tough to define, IQ tests are inherently limited in their objectivity, the thing that is being measured is elusive, and it is difficult to control for sociological, environmental and historical factors.
*among other things
You can tell by the hip dysplasia.
1. Evolution.
I believe that the earth is -4.5 billion years old, that all life forms are descendants of one original single-celled life form. &c… On the question of whether every new feature of life emerged from a truly random mutation or whether an intelligent designer was involved, I regard that as an open question where more research is required. I freely admit to having read very little technical literature and basing my opinion mainly on books and articles for a popular audience. I’ve found that opponents are ready to attack intelligent design with a long list of flaws in various organisms, but much less ready to offer explanations for how complex biological mechanisms involving scores or hundreds of proteins could arise from random mutations.
2. Anthropogenic global warming.
I believe it. I’m not a technical specialist but my reasons are these. First, all of the supposed science raised against the mainstream view is funded by the Exxon-Mobil Corporation. Second, a huge number of scientific organizations have issued statements in support of it. The list of such organizations is so long that the last time I posted it a moderator deleted it. Third, the persistent argument that scientists are relying on questionable models is so lame. What are they supposed to do, build a duplicate planet earth so that we can run a controlled experiment? By all means when the first few models showed reason to fear global warming there was grounds for caution, but that time is past. The consequences of global warming that are occurring right now are already severe in many parts of the world. It just happens, mostly, to not be the parts inhabited by rich and powerful people.
3. Race/IQ studies.
Maybe a person’s genes have no effect on their intelligence. Maybe they have a small effect. I don’t know, nor do I particularly care. What I’m certain is that a person’s intelligence is not determined at the moment of conception, nor in the womb, nor in infancy. That’s why we have schools: to make people smarter when they leave than when they enter.
Historically speaking, any number of races have managed to jump from being supposedly inferior to supposedly superior in one lifetime. Studies on IQ scores from the early 20th century supposedly showed that the Chinese, Japanese, Italians, and Irish were all genetically doomed to have low IQs. Now they no longer are. But that conclusion results from the same genes–and in some cases the same individuals–as were around for the early studies. What happened? The only plausible explanation I see is that the studies were bogus to begin with.
So, in a sense, you believe in an incompetent intelligent designer.
1. Evolution: No question, the evidence is overwhelming that organic evolution has occurred and does occur. The Theory of Evolution (note the capital “T”, it’s not just a theory, it’s a Theory), like the Theory of Gravity, is subject to minor revision as new facts are learned, but is substantially verified.
Evolution: settled long ago. Fact.
Global Warming: Any skepticism is only useful for me to determine if your brain cells are connected properly. The scientific consensus is there, the “climategate scandal” is insignificant, and the opposition “research” funding dwarfs the consensus research funding. What I am not at all sure of is that it can be reversed or even slowed.
Race and IQ: Neither race nor intelligence are clearly enough defined, let alone a relationship between the two.
If you’ve found this in opponents then you haven’t been talking to many knowledgeable opponents.
You also don’t understand the basics of evolutionary theory if you think it’s all about “random mutations.”
ID does not even merit “attack” at all since it has never been formulated as a coherent theory. It doesn’t make any falsifiable or testable claims and it fails to explain a single thing better than natural selection (which is the real driving force behind evolution, not just mutation).
I meant “race” as defined in the race/IQ studies (recognizing that there can be minor variations among them).
What specific studies? Cite the specific definitions. I’d be surprised if you were able to since those definitions don’t exist biologically or anthropologically.
I wonder if these studies take into account the fact that “white” Europeans probably have some genes from Genghis Khan.
What do you mean that “those definitions don’t exist”? There are certainly ways to categorize people into different groups based on genetic traits, and some of those groups can be called “races” if one cares to.
I mean that “race” has no biological meaning or definition. It just doesn’t. There is more genetic difference between some black African populations, for instance than there is between black and white Americans. There is no unifying, genetic commonality which can be used to segregate populations by anything correlated to popular conceptions of “race,” which as I keep saying, are purely sociological constructs, not biological ones.
Any grouping or delineation you’re going to do is going to be arbitrary, and probably self-identified, making it scientifically useless.
Most studies of race and IQ use self identification. See, for example, the discussion in this review article:
http://pps.sagepub.com/content/2/2/194.full
There is substantial reason to believe that there is meaningful correspondence between self identification and genetic variation across racial groups. One example:
“Subjects identified themselves as belonging to one of four major racial/ethnic groups (white, African American, East Asian, and Hispanic) and were recruited from 15 different geographic locales within the United States and Taiwan. Genetic cluster analysis of the microsatellite markers produced four major clusters, which showed near-perfect correspondence with the four self-reported race/ethnicity categories”