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From: cl@lgc.com (Cameron Laird)
Newsgroups: sci.bio
Subject: Re: Environment vs. Genetics (was:  Evolution vs Genes )
Message-ID: <1991Jun24.230416.27903@lgc.com>
Date: 24 Jun 91 23:04:16 GMT
References: <3494.28656C72@ofa123.fidonet.org> <1991Jun24.182627.595@ccu.umanitoba.ca>
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In article <1991Jun24.182627.595@ccu.umanitoba.ca> frist@ccu.umanitoba.ca writes:
>In article <3494.28656C72@ofa123.fidonet.org> Kirk.Reeves@f450.n101.z1.fidonet.org (Kirk Reeves) writes:
>>Recently on the Donuhue show, I saw this bioliogist claim Orietinal are smarter 
>>than whites, whites are smarter then blacks, but Black have a bigger sex drive.  
			.
			.
			.
>The take-home lesson here is that quantitative genetics is very hard to do,
>and even harder to do so well that you can get results that are worth
>anything. Put another way, it's easy to plug some numbers into a computer
>program. It's hard to design and execute a well thought out experiment.
			.
			.
			.
... moreover, the capacity to do that hard work seems
to correlate negatively with the propensity to appear
on the Donahue show.  Public persons who make silly
claims such as "Orientals are smarter ..." are cheating
the listeners, of course, in propagating factual errors,
but their biggest lie is that Science is just a corpus
of data, all of them equally valid, and all available
only through the intercession of Authorities and the
Elect.

I rant, a bit.  My excuse is the hope that sci.bio
readers will re-double our efforts to communicate to
students that biology is a humanistic, *critical*
endeavor.
--

Cameron Laird				+1 713-579-4613
cl@lgc.com (cl%lgc.com@uunet.uu.net)	+1 713-996-8546