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Sub-scholarship from a fifth-rate academic.
If there's a last place in American academia reserved for pseudo-scientists, it belongs to left-wing Harvard paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould. After re-reading his "The Mismeasure of Man" for the third time, I concluded that Gould's intention when writing this book was not to refute the legitimacy of hereditarianism, but to keep a firm grip on fantasy. A quarter of the work Gould cites in this book was carried out in the late 19th century (craniometry), and the the rest was carried out in the early 20th century (psychometry). Thus, Gould's cranky rebuke of "racist science" is targeted at "dotty Victorian eccentrics" like Sir Francis Galton, and the anachronistic technology they used to validate their theories. Anyone expecting critiques of the current research being conducted in the fields of behavioral genetics, differential psychology, and psychometrics is setting themselves up for a letdown of the Y2K Bug kind. First of all, IQ may not be a perfect predictor of one's future success in life or an accurate appraisal of one's intelligence, but it does measure "something" in intelligence, or races wouldn't consistently differ with respect to it. American Indians, on average, enjoy the poorest living conditions and the lowest yearly income in the US, but they constantly outperform American blacks on IQ and SAT tests. University of Ulster psychologist Richard Lynn has found that the IQ scores of whites, blacks, and Asians is the same regardless of which country they're taken in, with whites achieving IQ scores of 100-105, blacks 70-85, and Asians 103-110. Moreover, Lynn and Glayde Whitney have found (based on Interpol data) that the crime levels of these groups are the same regardless of where they reside in the world, with Asians being the most criminally restrained, whites somewhere in the middle, and blacks coming in last (or first, depending on how one ranks it; either way they're going to come in at either ends of a scale or graph of crime data) as the most criminally unrestrained. (Egalitarians counter these plain statistical facts, explaing how the disproportionate amount of crimes that blacks commit are committed because "most people expect them to be criminals." If true, this begs an obvious question--namely, why people would expect that.) Most people accept that women are less prone to crime and violent behavior than men, which is most likely to be explained by testosterone levels. This suggests that not only are IQ tests are a reliable predictor of intelligence and criminal behavior, but that "race" is more than just "skin deep." Before all the hullabaloo surrounding IQ tests surfaced, the US Department of Labor used them to tell how high one needed to score on one to determine if the profession they sought to enter was compatible with the score they attained. The IQ data Gould uses to support his argument that "it measures nothing," is culled from the primitive tests distributed to the US army in 1917. Gould's crude reasoning here is that "if the IQ tests given to the US army in 1917 produced wayward results, then all subsequent IQ tests must do the same." This is a non sequitur and Gould knows it. Gould and his environmentalist lackeys at Harvard and abroad think that there's no such thing as "race." Race to them is just a fiction born of sinister racist ideology, "dotty Victorian eccentrics" and IQ tests. The response to this objection is simple: race is simply defined by place of ancestry--some people's ancestors came from Eurasia, N.E. Asia, and sub-Saharan Africa. If one objects to this definition of race still, by virute of the interbreeding that has taken place between them, fine. Don't call them "races." Call them A, B, and C; call them Moe, Larry, and Curly--call them whatever you want. The question still lingers: are there hereditary differences between those whose "ancestors" came from Europe, Asia, and Africa? Gould says no, common sense says an unhesitating "Yes." Contrary to what Gould asserts, race is not skin deep. For example, if you discovered bones from a human skeleton in your backyard and alerted the authorities, they would have a forensic anthropologist come in and determine what the race of the skeleton was, based on the structure of its bones. Recent research in the field of neurology has shown that the brains of intelligent people metabolize glucose slower. Also, recent discoveries using MRI (Magnetic Resonance Imaging), which displays a three-dimensional image of the human brain, has shown a close correlation (.44) between brain size and IQ (J. Philippe Rushton & Ankney, 1996). All of which is "recent" data, meaning that Gould avoids it like the truth. Gould thinks that everybody is "already" the same, except that some people were "lucky" enough to have been born "by chance" into wealthy families (in effect, claiming that wealth just "happens," totally disregarding human ingenuity). This is clearly false. If you want to read what the "other side" has to say about this mega-taboo subject, don't get "The Bell Curve." Get J. Philippe Rushton's "Race, Evolution, and Behavior."
November 2000 · Books
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The Mismeasure of Man
4.6★ · 483 ratings, as of 2023
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