http://www.bradford-delong.com/2018/07/monday-smackdown-who-wants-charles-murray-to-speak-and-why.html
I have a question for Stanford's Michael @McFaul ...
We know that "If the heritability of IQ were 0.5 and the degree of assortation in mating, m, were 0.2 (both reasonable, if only ballpark estimates), and if the genetic inheritance of IQ were the only mechanism accounting for intergenerational income transmission, then the intergenerational correlation of lifetime incomes would be 0.01..." (see Bowles and Giants (2002)). That is only two percent the observed intergenerational correlation—49/50 of the intergenerational transmission of status in America comes from other causes.
Why, then, is it important to invite to your campus to speak someone whose big thing is the intergenerational transmission of intelligence through genes, and racial differences thereof? And if one were going to invite to your campus to speak someone, etc., why would you pick somebody who likes to burn crosses? Wouldn't a healthier approach be to regard such a person—who focuses on the intergenerational transmission of intelligence through genes, harps on genetic roots of differences between "races", and likes to burn crosses—as we regard those who know a little too much about the muzzle velocities of the main cannon of the various models of the Nazi Armored Battlewagon Version 4?: Jonathan Marks: Who wants Charles Murray to speak, and why?: "The Bell Curve cited literature from Mankind Quarterly, which no mainstream scholar cites, because it is an unscholarly racist journal... http://anthropomics2.blogspot.com/2017/04/who-wants-charles-murray-to-speak-and.html
...supported by the Pioneer Fund, that wacko right-wing philanthropy that has thrown money at wacko eugenicists, racists, segregationists, and hereditarians of all stripes since its inception in 1937 under the aegis of the wacko eugenicist Harry Laughlin. The Bell Curve also cited the work of that racist wacko psychologist Philippe Rushton–who believed that the mean IQ of Africans is genetically set at 70, and that Africans had been r-selected for high reproductive rate and low intelligence–and then pre-emptively defended his wacko racist ideas in an appendix. Even the wacko evolutionary psychologists distanced themselves from Rushton, appreciating the toxicity of his ideas: "Bad science and virulent racial prejudice drip like pus from nearly every page of this despicable book," wrote David Barash in the journal Animal Behaviour. But Charles Murray wasn't smart enough to see it. He couldn't see the virulent racial prejudice in the work he was defending. Or else he was blinded by his own prejudices. It's age-old bind: ideologue or idiot?....
Nearly all contemporary geneticists seem to think that the old lefty J.B.S. Haldane more or less got it right when he said, "The average degree of resemblance between father and son is too small to justify the waste of human potentialities which an hereditary aristocratic system entails." Let me translate: You inherit a lot of stuff, and some of that stuff is genetic. But a lot of the most important stuff... is not. And it is a big mistake to confuse the two categories. Consequently, if you are committed to the proposition that genetic properties are more important than everything else, that is a moral proposition not supported by genetics itself, you smug bastard. Class advantages are very real, but they aren't genetic. Doesn't everybody know that?
I think it's kind of weird that political scientists would be willing to entertain ostensibly scientific ideas–in this case about human genetics–that the relevant scientists themselves do not take seriously. But Charles Murray isn't a geneticist. He is a genetics fanboy. Imagine that you were a professional magician, with a three-year-old child trying to convince you, and everyone else around, that everything important in life is caused by magic...
#mondaysmackdown-- via my feedly newsfeed
No comments:
Post a Comment