Droopy wrote:You engage, now and then, in bald mendacity the likes of which I still, for some reason, don't expect from you. Too bad.
Stating that genes and environment both add something to the mix of racial differences in IQ scores does not contradict the assertion that genetics are a significant contributor to the racial differences in IQ scores. If anything,
confirms it*. Do you know what the word "significant" means in social science? That Murray and Hernstein were making the argument I attribute to them, and you if anything confirm with your quote, is not normally in dispute by anyone. It's one of the theses advanced in the book, after all, and the chief basis for stirring up
a media controversy and response. Yet you write this post. Awesome.
That's why this APA taskforce document:
http://www.unc.edu/~nielsen/soci850/odocs/apa_01.htmtakes some time contradicting that assertion. The central fallacy of their argument, incidentally, is that it confuses within-group comparisons with out-group comparisons. The document I link above points this out. IU's critique puts it this way:
http://www.indiana.edu/~intell/bellcurv ... criticismsHerrnstein and Murray's second claim, the lightning rod for most commentary, extends the argument for innate cognitive stratification to a claim that racial differences in IQ are mostly determined by genetic causes small differences for Asian superiority over Caucasian, but large for Caucasians over people of African descent. This argument is as old as the study of race, and is almost surely fallacious. The last generation's discussion centered on Arthur Jensen's 1980 book Bias in Mental Testing (far more elaborate and varied than anything presented in The Bell Curve, and therefore still a better source for grasping the argument and its problems), and on the cranky advocacy of William Shockley, a Nobel Prize-winning physicist. The central fallacy in using the substantial heritability of within-group IQ (among whites, for example) as an explanation of average differences between groups (whites versus blacks, for example) is now well known and acknowledged by all, including Herrnstein and Murray, but deserves a restatement by example. Take a trait that is far more heritable than anyone has ever claimed IQ to be but is politically uncontroversial body height. Suppose that I measure the heights of adult males in a poor Indian village beset with nutritional deprivation, and suppose the average height of adult males is five feet six inches. Heritability within the village is high, which is to say that tall fathers (they may average five feet eight inches) tend to have tall sons, while short fathers (five feet four inches on average) tend to have short sons. But this high heritability within the village does not mean that better nutrition might not raise average height to five feet ten inches in a few generations. Similarly, the well-documented fifteen-point average difference in IQ between blacks and whites in America, with substantial heritability of IQ in family lines within each group, permits no automatic conclusion that truly equal opportunity might not raise the black average enough to equal or surpass the white mean. (p. 5)
Of course, you're denying that this argument is occurring at all, which makes me sincerely doubt you've read the book or understand it. Then again, you also state, in this thread no less,
"Unsurprisingly, I side with Sowell on this, and think that Murray and others within traditional academic sociology place exaggerated emphasis of genetic/biological factors. Murray himself has been clear that genetics, psychology, and environment (nature/nurture) play complex, interpenetrating roles in generating the general cognitive patterns that are measured in IQ tests, but believes that genetics is dominant." So you acknowledge what I asserted while at the same time decrying it as a mendacious misrepresentation. It's like you are blacking out inbetween posts.