From: Mark Steven Heyman (markheyman@infoproconsulting.com)
Date: Fri Jun 18 2004 - 20:06:08 BST
Hi all,
Right on que, Platt mentions "The Bell Curve" as scientific evidence
in support of the idea that one "race" of humans is inferior to
another. I was wrong when I said no scientific evidence exists to
support this statement; I should have said no CREDIBLE scientific
evidence.
Platt is also impressed by an advertisement for the book which
appeared in The Wall Street Journal. As an old ad man himself, Platt
should know better. The ad is a statement signed by 52 "experts",
and is easy to find on the web, if one is interested.
If you look at the Pioneer Fund web site, you'll see that EVERY major
grantee, who happened to be alive at the time the ad was composed, is
listed among the "expert" signatories. Others of the signatories
have published papers in the fascist journal, Mankind, which is
maintained by Pioneer funds, or in other similar journals. Still
others are associated with studies paid for by the fund, such as
Bouchard's study of Identical Twins Reared Apart (all the University
of Minnesota people on the list).
One can almost see the wheels turning at the ad agency on how they
might show the credibility of the book's thinly disguised racist
conclusions Then the phone starts ringing over at the Pioneer Fund.
A much more useful list would be the one containing the thousands of
names of scientists who didn't sign the advertisement.
Although there is much in the ad that non-racist scientists would and
do agree with, the main source of contention would be that IQ test
results are determined primarily by genetic factors, and about the
significance of IQ tests in determining an individual's value to, and
success in, a given society. Here's Stephen J. Gould:
CURVEBALL
The New Yorker, November 28, 1994
http://www.dartmouth.edu/~chance/course/topics/curveball.html
"The Bell Curve," with its claims and supposed documentation that
race and class differences are largely caused by genetic factors and
are therefore essentially immutable, contains no new arguments and
presents no compelling data to support its anachronistic social
Darwinism, so I can only conclude that its success in winning
attention must reflect the depressing temper of our time -- a
historical moment of unprecedented ungenerosity, when a mood for
slashing social programs can be power-fully abetted by an argument
that beneficiaries cannot be helped, owing to inborn cognitive limits
expressed as low I.Q. scores."
...
[the book] "rests on two distinctly different but sequential
arguments, which together encompass the classic corpus of biological
determinism as a social philosophy. The first argument rehashes the
tenets of social Darwinism as it was originally constituted. "Social
Darwinism" has often been used as a general term for any evolutionary
argument about the biological basis of human differences, but the
initial nineteenth-century meaning referred to a specific theory of
class stratification within industrial societies, and particularly to
the idea that there was a permanently poor underclass consisting of
genetically inferior people who had precipitated down into their
inevitable fate. The theory arose from a paradox of egalitarianism:
as long as people remain on top of the social heap by accident of a
noble name or parental wealth, and as long as members of despised
castes cannot rise no matter what their talents, social
stratification will not reflect intellectual merit, and brilliance
will be distributed across all classes; but when true equality of
opportunity is attained smart people rise and the lower classes
become rigid, retaining only the intellectually incompetent."
msh continues:
I would strongly recommend this essay as a starting point for anyone
interested in discovering the weakness of the science in "The Bell
Curve." You might also find useful Gould's "The Mismeasure Of Man"
which was published in 1981 (I think) and which anticipates and
criticizes, by more than a decade, much of the science trotted out
for Murray's book. A much more recent edition of Gould's book is
available, and contains five new essays about "The Bell Curve."
Thanks to all,
Mark Steven Heyman (msh)
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