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From: draughn@iitmax.UUCP (Mark T. Draughn)
Newsgroups: sci.bio,soc.men,soc.women
Subject: Re: Rape: a genetic catastrophe
Message-ID: <427@iitmax.UUCP>
Date: 4 Feb 88 07:19:06 GMT
References: <517@gtx.com> <5129@cit-vax.Caltech.Edu> <2201@bloom-beacon.MIT.EDU> <1966@bsu-cs.UUCP> <373@rruxa.UUCP> <4090@sigi.Colorado.ED
Reply-To: draughn@iitmax.UUCP (Mark T. Draughn)
Organization: Illinois Institute of Technology, Chicago
Lines: 35
Summary: Skewing of research results for political conformity.

In article <4090@sigi.Colorado.EDU> pell@boulder.Colorado.EDU (Anthony Pelletier) writes:
>Yes, knowlege can be missused.  It is potentially true that Asian Americans
>could missuse the fact that they have higher I.Q.s than whites on average.
>They could use this to foster "all whites are genetically inferior" views
>and oppress whites.  Other groups (mostly "whites") have missused similar
>information before.  But, that the Asian-American population could missuse
>the facts does not make them false.

Uh, well, actually...

The problem with studies that show racial group differences in I.Q. is not
a flaw in the tests, but a flaw in the theory behind them.  Just because
they are called "Intelligence" tests doesn't mean they really test anything
that may be called intelligence.  So someone is good at analogies and
sequence completion and cube counting?  How do we know that this means he/she
will be intelligent by any real meaning of the word?

Intelligence is a hard-to-define concept.  If it can't be defined, it can't
be measured.  Only if you define it as "the ability to do well on
intelligence tests" do I.Q. tests really work.

Even if we had good tests for intelligence (whatever that means) we would
have to show that it can be inherited biologically and not environmentally.

For a very good discussion on this point of view see:
Gould, Stephen Jay.
The Mismeasure of Man.
W. W. Norton & Company, New York, NY, 1981.

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Mark Draughn				UUCP: ...ihnp4!iitmax!draughn
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