US Prez Election 2012 Thread - Social Darwinism derail

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Re: US Prez Election 2012 Thread - Opinions and Discussions

Post by FBM » Mon Jun 11, 2012 2:16 am

You want leading research? Try this:
Of the studies that control for home environment, all indicate strong environmental effects. One of these studies is consistent with moderate African genetic superiority and one is consistent with substantial European genetic superiority. Thus, the most relevant studies provide no evidence for genetic superiority for one race or the other while providing strong evidence for a substantial environmental contribution to the B/W IQ gap. Almost equally important, rigorous
15
interventions effect IQ and cognitive skills at every stage of the life course, and the evidence on convergence clearly shows that the B/W IQ gap has narrowed in recent decades.3

The question "What portion of the 15 point IQ difference between blacks and whites is genetic?" simply makes no sense. To begin with, the empirical gap is currently substantially less than that. Moreover, with the exception of Herrnstein and Murray, few investigators have ever suggested that the entire gap might be genetic in nature. Jensen, one of the best-known proponents of the view of European genetic superiority, estimates that the genetic gap is about seven points [ref.]. As Block (1995) has suggested, the reference point should not be a gap of 15 points or any other specific figure. Rather, it makes more sense to ask how far, and in what direction, the genetically-based difference between the races differs from zero.
If in fact it makes sense to ask the genetic question at all. All evidence points to two extraordinarily important conclusions. First, if there are genetically-determined differences between the races in IQ, they are not sufficiently large to show up with any regularity in studies with a wide range of methodologies. Second, interventions designed to reduce the difference between blacks and whites are effective at every age level. Surely research efforts are best directed at improving these interventions rather than trying to wring blood from a genetic turnip.
http://www-personal.umich.edu/~nisbett/racegen.pdf
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Re: US Prez Election 2012 Thread - Opinions and Discussions

Post by Robert_S » Mon Jun 11, 2012 2:32 am

As much as I love to rip on Ayn Rand, I think I'll quote her at one of her better moments...

http://www.aynrandmyths.com/#14 wrote:She wrote "Racism is the lowest, most crudely primitive form of collectivism. It is the notion of ascribing moral, social or political significance to a man’s genetic lineage—the notion that a man’s intellectual and characterological traits are produced and transmitted by his internal body chemistry. Which means, in practice, that a man is to be judged, not by his own character and actions, but by the characters and actions of a collective of ancestors.
"Racism claims that the content of a man’s mind (not his cognitive apparatus, but its content) is inherited; that a man’s convictions, values and character are determined before he is born, by physical factors beyond his control. This is the caveman’s version of the doctrine of innate ideas—or of inherited knowledge—which has been thoroughly refuted by philosophy and science. Racism is a doctrine of, by and for brutes. It is a barnyard or stock-farm version of collectivism, appropriate to a mentality that differentiates between various breeds of animals, but not between animals and men.
"Like every form of determinism, racism invalidates the specific attribute which distinguishes man from all other living species: his rational faculty. Racism negates two aspects of man’s life: reason and choice, or mind and morality, replacing them with chemical predestination.
“Racism,” The Virtue of Selfishness, 126.
and:
Like every other form of collectivism, racism is a quest for the unearned. It is a quest for automatic knowledge—for an automatic evaluation of men’s characters that bypasses the responsibility of exercising rational or moral judgment—and, above all, a quest for an automatic self-esteem (or pseudo-self-esteem)."
“Racism,” The Virtue of Selfishness, 126.
What I've found with a few discussions I've had lately is this self-satisfaction that people express with their proffessed open mindedness. In realty it ammounts to wilful ignorance and intellectual cowardice as they are choosing to not form any sort of opinion on a particular topic. Basically "I don't know and I'm not going to look at any evidence because I'm quite happy on this fence."
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Re: US Prez Election 2012 Thread - Opinions and Discussions

Post by Drewish » Mon Jun 11, 2012 2:51 am

So now I'm a white supremacist? Can I just post my position without people labeling me with outlandish claims?
Nobody expects me...

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Re: US Prez Election 2012 Thread - Opinions and Discussions

Post by FBM » Mon Jun 11, 2012 2:58 am

On the fallacy of genetic determinism and why it's a losing concept: http://www.councilforresponsiblegenetic ... ojectId=11

(abstract only)
Eve is from Adam's Rib, the Earth is Flat, and Races Come from Genes

By Jacqueline Stevens

Published on: Jun 07, 2006
http://raceandgenomics.ssrc.org/Stevens/
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Re: US Prez Election 2012 Thread - Opinions and Discussions

Post by Ian » Mon Jun 11, 2012 2:59 am

Drewish wrote:So now I'm a white supremacist? Can I just post my position without people labeling me with outlandish claims?
If you don't want people labeling you with outlandish claims, maybe you shouldn't post outlandish, insular tripe like this:
http://rationalia.com/forum/viewtopic.p ... 5#p1196428

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Re: US Prez Election 2012 Thread - Opinions and Discussions

Post by FBM » Mon Jun 11, 2012 3:06 am

What's the difference between posting a position that strongly suggests black inferiority and posting one that suggests white supremacy?

And it's different matter altogether to back up such claims with research data. Read up about social darwinism and why it failed. Read up on what geneticists say about genetic determinism and the fallacious link between race and intelligence. This isn't the sort of thing that one can just go with intuition and preferences about. If you make controversial statements, you should be prepared to defend them with scholarship, not just rhetoric. I'm saying this to anyone who's proposing racist concepts and failing to defend them with scholarly research. Skeptics shouldn't be expected to buy into rhetoric, though many do. There are enough skeptics around here that you're bound to run into at least one who will call you to task about any metaphysical claim that isn't based on empirical data and necessary inference.

So...where's your (plural) scholarly data that supports genetically determined racial intellectual inferiority?
"A philosopher is a blind man in a dark room looking for a black cat that isn't there. A theologian is the man who finds it." ~ H. L. Mencken

"We ain't a sharp species. We kill each other over arguments about what happens when you die, then fail to see the fucking irony in that."

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Re: US Prez Election 2012 Thread - Opinions and Discussions

Post by Hermit » Mon Jun 11, 2012 3:38 am

Tyrannical wrote:
drewish wrote:So don't use IQ. Go find me ANY standardized test that you want and we'll use that. The disagreement is NOT over whether people of African decent are well behind others in regards to intelligence, but rather why. I want the truth, political correctness be damned!
It's genetic.
Some of the earliest IQ studies where of Blacks of varying admixture (pure through quadroons) going to an all black school, living in an all black neighborhood. The more white admixture, the closer they were to the white average. The Minnesota trans-racial adoption study should have put the question to rest.

If there was some "magic" social change that could make a difference it would have been found by now after all the money spent and research done.
I don't think so. Not even the authors of the study agree with you. "Scarr & Weinberg (1976) interpreted the results from age 7 suggesting that racial group differences in IQ are inconclusive due to confounding of the study." Moreover, they explicitly noted that the environment affected IQ results: "the study indicated that cross-racial adoptive had a positive effect on black adopted children."
I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops. - Stephen J. Gould

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Re: US Prez Election 2012 Thread - Opinions and Discussions

Post by Warren Dew » Mon Jun 11, 2012 3:56 am

Tyrannical wrote:
Warren Dew wrote:
Tyrannical wrote:It's genetic.
Some of the earliest IQ studies where of Blacks of varying admixture (pure through quadroons) going to an all black school, living in an all black neighborhood. The more white admixture, the closer they were to the white average. The Minnesota trans-racial adoption study should have put the question to rest.
That fails to explain the German children of American GIs study that showed that children of black American GIs in the postwar period had the same average IQ as children of white American GIs. To me, when you combine that result with the Minnesota twins study, the conclusion has to be that it's cultural expectations that are driving the IQ differences.

Not that that changes drewish's concerns. The fact that people on welfare have more children than people who work to support themselves is still a problem. Of course, that problem has an easy fix: change the welfare system so it doesn't inentivize having frequent children, and change the tax system so it doesn't penalize children in working households.
Well, I'd like to see that study. I assume they have IQ results for the parents? The military in the US has long done competency testing, so this result may be just the result of eliminating the low IQ blacks.
It's a study by Eyfurth, as analyzed by Flynn in Race, IQ, and Jensen, pp. 84-102. They don't have specific measured IQs for the American fathers, since the children were illegitimate, but Flynn does account for IQ effects of military testing: it raised the mean phenotypic IQ of the black GIs in question to no more than 91.5 from the overall black population average of 85. That still preserved a nearly 10 point phenotypic IQ gap, which if genetic, should have resulted in a 5 point gap in the illegitimate children. In fact, the children of white fathers scored 97.2 on average, and of black fathers 96.5 on average, a gap of only 0.7 points - and that despite prejudice against black in Germany at the time. Even if one assumes that prejudice had no effect, the conclusion is that the genetic portion of the black/white IQ gap is only a couple of IQ points at most, which is pretty much within the error band from 0.

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Re: US Prez Election 2012 Thread - Opinions and Discussions

Post by Warren Dew » Mon Jun 11, 2012 4:24 am

FBM wrote:
Warren Dew wrote:
FBM wrote:It might be helpful to distinguish between evolution, a very, very slow process, and social darwinism, which is much closer to what certain racist philosophies describe: http://www.allaboutscience.org/what-is- ... sm-faq.htm
Evolution can be fast when the selection pressure is high. In those areas of the world where completed fertility is in the range of 6, people who are genetically predisposed to stick to 2 kids per couple are going to be selected out in a couple of decades.

Quite possibly this has already happened to a significant extent within the past century in some places.
If so, geneticists should easily be able to uncover some evidence for it. I haven't seen any such evidence, and until I do I don't see any reason to consider such talk as anachronistic expressions of social darwinism by people who haven't yet heard that it's a failed theory.
You overestimate how much the geneticists know. They haven't yet figured out the genetic basis for our differences with neanderthals - which by the way also includes greater fecundity on our part - let alone for the much smaller differences with people a few decades ago.

There is other scientific data for selection for fertility. For example, the decline in age at menarche in the U.S. since 1970, after institution of Johnson's great society welfare measures, is exactly the type of thing that would be predicted from an evolutionary reaction to welfare policies favoring high fertility. The fact that that decline in age at menarche has been much stronger among blacks, who are more likely to be poor and thus more strongly affected by selection pressures from the welfare system.

Declines in age at menarche are also well documented for India, where fertility has been high over the past half century or so.
Last edited by Warren Dew on Mon Jun 11, 2012 4:53 am, edited 2 times in total.

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Re: US Prez Election 2012 Thread - Opinions and Discussions

Post by hadespussercats » Mon Jun 11, 2012 5:01 am

Warren Dew wrote:
FBM wrote:
Warren Dew wrote:
FBM wrote:It might be helpful to distinguish between evolution, a very, very slow process, and social darwinism, which is much closer to what certain racist philosophies describe: http://www.allaboutscience.org/what-is- ... sm-faq.htm
Evolution can be fast when the selection pressure is high. In those areas of the world where completed fertility is in the range of 6, people who are genetically predisposed to stick to 2 kids per couple are going to be selected out in a couple of decades.

Quite possibly this has already happened to a significant extent within the past century in some places.
If so, geneticists should easily be able to uncover some evidence for it. I haven't seen any such evidence, and until I do I don't see any reason to consider such talk as anachronistic expressions of social darwinism by people who haven't yet heard that it's a failed theory.
You overestimate how much the geneticists know. They haven't yet figured out the genetic basis for our differences with neanderthals - which by the way also includes greater fecundity on our part - let alone for the much smaller differences with people a few decades ago.

There is other scientific data for selection for fertility. For example, the decline in age at menarche in the U.S. since 1970, after institution of Johnson's great society welfare measures, is exactly the type of thing that would be predicted from an evolutionary reaction to welfare policies favoring high fertility. The fact that that decline in age at menarche has been much stronger among blacks, who are more likely to be poor and thus more strongly affected by selection pressures from the welfare system.

Declines in age at menarche are also well documented for India, where fertility has been high over the past half century or so.
There's a lot going on in this thread that I'd like to comment on, but I think I'll start small--

My understanding is that girls are reaching menarche earlier largely because of reactions to environmental factors and changes in the food supply, like growth hormones in milk.

The economic factor may still apply, in that wealthier families by and large are choosing milk sold without growth hormones, which is often also marketed as 'organic' (read: more expensive.)
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Re: US Prez Election 2012 Thread - Opinions and Discussions

Post by Warren Dew » Mon Jun 11, 2012 5:26 am

hadespussercats wrote:My understanding is that girls are reaching menarche earlier largely because of reactions to environmental factors and changes in the food supply, like growth hormones in milk.
There may indeed be environmental factors for earlier menarche as well, or instead. That's why I cite it as "data for" selection rather than "proof of" selection. There are lots of theories about why age at menarche is decreasing, and no proven causal connection.

However, it goes back a lot further than I had previously realized. Here's a graph covering 1850-1960 in Europe and the U.S., which, perhaps not coincidentally, is our period of high family size during the industrial transition:

Image

Growth hormones can't explain that period. Possibly changes in nutrition could, but has nutrition really changed so smoothly as that graph implies, and can it really account for the entire range from menarche at 17 to today's menarche at 12?

The answer might be yes, but I don't think we can rule out genetic factors.

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Re: US Prez Election 2012 Thread - Opinions and Discussions

Post by hadespussercats » Mon Jun 11, 2012 5:40 am

Warren Dew wrote:
hadespussercats wrote:My understanding is that girls are reaching menarche earlier largely because of reactions to environmental factors and changes in the food supply, like growth hormones in milk.
There may indeed be environmental factors for earlier menarche as well, or instead. That's why I cite it as "data for" selection rather than "proof of" selection. There are lots of theories about why age at menarche is decreasing, and no proven causal connection.

However, it goes back a lot further than I had previously realized. Here's a graph covering 1850-1960 in Europe and the U.S., which, perhaps not coincidentally, is our period of high family size during the industrial transition:

Image

Growth hormones can't explain that period. Possibly changes in nutrition could, but has nutrition really changed so smoothly as that graph implies, and can it really account for the entire range from menarche at 17 to today's menarche at 12?

The answer might be yes, but I don't think we can rule out genetic factors.
Hm.

Well, I learned in one of my "history of private life"-type classes, back in the day, that upper-class families of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries would deliberately try to delay their daughters' menarches, because there was an idea that "country" girls were more wholesome, and they, on average, were older when they started menstruating. But the main difference was that the rural girls weren't as well nourished, generally. So the more urban, wealthy families would simply restrict their daughters' diets to hold off puberty.

I wouldn't be surprised to hear nutrition generally had changed quite a bit since 1850. But I'm speculating.
Out of the people that ever were, almost all of them are dead.
There are way more dead people, and you're all gonna die
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Like that's mostly what you're ever gonna be.
You're just dead people that didn't die yet.
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Re: US Prez Election 2012 Thread - Opinions and Discussions

Post by Warren Dew » Mon Jun 11, 2012 5:49 am

hadespussercats wrote:Well, I learned in one of my "history of private life"-type classes, back in the day, that upper-class families of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries would deliberately try to delay their daughters' menarches, because there was an idea that "country" girls were more wholesome, and they, on average, were older when they started menstruating. But the main difference was that the rural girls weren't as well nourished, generally. So the more urban, wealthy families would simply restrict their daughters' diets to hold off puberty.
Now you've got me thinking that kids might be more manageable as teens if they're prepubertal.

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Re: US Prez Election 2012 Thread - Opinions and Discussions

Post by Pappa » Mon Jun 11, 2012 8:28 am

Drewish wrote:
mistermack wrote:
Drewish wrote: I'm not claiming that the majority of the super wealthy got there by there through hard work, just that the majority of the poor got there by either being sickly or incompetent. Evolution works on a "good enough" standard anyways.
Nothing to do with the fact that the Capitalist system, as it is, keeps the poor poor?
Evolution doesn't come into it. If you are born with little chance of proper education, and inherit no capital, you will in all probability spend your life making someone else rich. Someone who inherited a good education and plenty of capital.

I'm not against capitalism. I'm against inheritance.
I think that on death, someone's fortune should go into a fund that pays for education for the poorest kids.
Give people an equal start, and then let capitalism rip.
Want me to cite IQ test score differences between races that exist even when you control for family income? I will. Want me to cites studies showing high correlation of IQ with inheritance even within racial groups? I will. Want me to cite studies showing correlation between IQ test score and lifetime earning? I will.

All people are not equal. Evolution is still acting on humanity. The poor have more children. The poor are more religious. The poor commit more violent crime. The problem is in fact not this supposedly evil 1%, but the violent, ever growing in number, ever demanding more free shit paid for by others, uneducated poor. You can try to educate them out of poverty, but the costs are huge and for every few you save many others have reproduced to more than replace the numbers of those lifted out of poverty. You can try to tell people to have fewer children, but it will be the educated and those who bother to plan their families that listen. Those who ignorantly plop out kids and then expect others to foot the bill, or subscribe to a religious world view where condoms are evil so some such nonsense, they will continue to have more and more children, and through them have more and more of a say in this one person one vote system.

You are sewing the seeds of your own destruction by supporting these wastes of human space. Fuck'm. Let the human trash die off as it should and we'll all be better off for it. Evolution is not only true, it is just and right.
I don't recall you having such unpleasant, repulsive views when you first joined the forum.

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Re: US Prez Election 2012 Thread - Opinions and Discussions

Post by Clinton Huxley » Mon Jun 11, 2012 8:59 am

Blimey, we are getting some silly people on the forum these days
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