User:Wobble/useful links

Countering fascism edit

"there remain only two ways the psychometric syllogism can be deemed acceptable-either: (a) one has little or no knowledge of the broad areas of scientific method, statistical reasoning, population studies, quantitative genetics, developmental physiology, neurophysiology, environmental toxicology, sociology, educational psychology, economics, and history required to adequately comprehend the issues involved; or (b) one has no desire to examine the facts of this problem objectively. For the vast majority of the American public, a combination of both approaches is most likely the case, across all levels of economic status and educational achievement. Thus, it is highly possible, as President Lawrence's error testifies, that many professional people fall into both of these categories of error concerning genes, race, and intelligence. In the case of the professional psychometricians, however, it is highly suspect that many ascribe to these views precisely because they wish to mislead the general public through the tactic of applying a "scientific" face to overt racism and political ideology."
"the study of intelligence within the human species has followed two traditions: the scientific and the pseudoscientific. The scientific tradition recognizes the complexity of the behavioral repertoires called "intelligence" (e.g., Khalfa, 1994; Wechsler, 1958). It further recognizes that intelligence cannot be reduced to a simple metric or number such as IQ. The pseudoscientific tradition, on the other hand, is typified by a simple-minded attempt to reduce intelligence to a single rank ordering (e.g., Burt, 1961; Herrnstein, 1971; Jensen, 1973, 1985; Terman, 1961)."
"Taken alone, correlational analysis can never determine causality. Science recognizes this fact and demands the implementation of experimental techniques to establish causal relationships. Pseudoscience, on the other hand, is content with the bald assertion that, given a correlation, a causal relationship must exist."
"Purves (1994) documents abundant data showing how neural development can be profoundly influenced by experience and stimulation in mammals, particularly humans. Moreover, Moffet, Moffet, and Schauf (1993) conclude that the early life environmentfrom the fetal to the neonatal, infant, and early childhood stages-has tremendous impact on cognitive ability, and that these periods are all extremely sensitive to negative influences. Language proficiency, for example, is controlled by the Brocca and Wernicke's areas of the brain, and it is determined by early cognitive stimulation. Moffet et al. have further shown that the lack of adequate early stimulation leads to permanent, irreversible problems in verbal reasoning. Additionally, M. C. Diamond's (1988) classic studies of environmental influences on cerebral cortex development in rats showed that rats with enriched environments developed larger neurons with greater dendritic connections, while those with poor environments had smaller cells and fewer connections. Such research undermines simplistic notions of innate ability by hinting at the exceedingly complex "gene x environment" interactions so crucial to developing intellect. Even in highly controlled fruit fly experiments, such interactions are extremely difficult to measure (Graves & Rose,1989; Scheiner,1993), but they are not measured at all in the psychometric research program, primarily because the environments of the different racial groups they study cannot be equalized in their research designs. Thus, as Bronfenbrenner (1975), Feldman and Lewontin (1974), Graves and Place (1995), Kempthorne (1978), Layzer (1974), Lewontin (1975), and Paul (1985) attest, psychometricians either ignore or fabricate the effects of gene x environment interactions. G is to the psychometricians what Huygens's "ether" was to early physicists: a nonentity taken as an article of faith instead of one in need of verification by real data (Casper & Noer, 1972)."
"The psychometricians argue that these results represent the fundamental genetic inferiority of African Americans in innate cognitive ability (Graves, 1993, 1994; Graves & Place, 1995). More correctly, however, these performance differences represent the only expected outcome of the twisted environmental, social, and political circumstances African Americans have been forced to endure in the United States."
"To modern population geneticists the idea that races differ consistently for any trait is nonsense. For example, there is more genetic variation among the people of the African continent than there is among all the rest of the human species combined (J. Diamond, 1994), and there is absolutely no reason to suppose that this variation excludes alleles that impact intelligence. Moreover, as Dobzhansky and Montagu (1975) so eloquently point out, natural selection for mental ability is overwhelmingly uniform throughout the world."