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  • Ethnic IQ The big picture

    Ethnic IQ and The Case for Diversity Most of the posters to this topic on Slate and in The Fray still don’t seem to get the big picture. They don’t seem to have enough knowledge of history and anthropology to put the theories under discussion to the test of time. They still don’t seem to understand the implications of the science of large numbers ...
    Posted to The Dilettante by brerlou on December 10, 2007

  • Re: Bait and switch?

    Gregor_Samsa: Most experts believe that environment is important in pushing the bell curves apart, but that genetics could be involved too. Interesting that the agnosticism of this “consensus statement” stands in sharp contrast to the genetic view that some of its signers, like Rushton, Jensen and Gottfredson have confidently and doggedly ...
    Posted to The Dilettante by wumhenry on December 6, 2007

  • Re: Blacks are genetically superior in...

    Your sports analogy completely blows up when you look at a sport that controls for both heredity and environment -- soccer. In that sport, the world's top athletes come from a wide variety of ethnic, socio-economic and geographic backgrounds. The world's current best player, Kaka, is an upper-middle class white Brazilian with obvious European ...
    Posted to The Dilettante by jfurf on December 4, 2007

  • Re: Why?

    I'd suggest ''Guns, Germs, and Steel'' by Jared Diamond. As he explains, many of the diseases that tend to be the worst killers are those with a non-human reservoir host, because even if an outbreak burns itself out by killing nearly everyone exposed, the pathogens remain in the host species, ready to cross the species barrier later on. He also ...
    Posted to The Dilettante by RWC on December 4, 2007

  • Race does not exist

    Metcalfe's article is very good so far as it goes, but unfortunately it doesn't go far enough. The key point is that 'race', in the sense used by Saletan, is nonsense. The genetics and history are fairly simple. Black and white Americans are the product of several hundred years of population mixing. The way it goes is that some of the genetic ...
    Posted to The Dilettante by anarch on December 4, 2007

  • "the within-group heritability of IQ scores is irrelevant"

    The APA report asks: ''Are the environmental and cultural situations of American Blacks and Whites also substantially and consistently different—different enough to make this a good analogy? If so, the within-group heritability of IQ scores is irrelevant to the issue.'' Is it? The debate seems to revolve around two issues: Is intelligence an ...
    Posted to The Dilettante by Rand on December 4, 2007