From: Robert J. Bradbury (bradbury@aeiveos.com)
Date: Mon Sep 30 2002 - 08:35:29 MDT
On Mon, 30 Sep 2002 Dehede011@aol.com wrote:
> But you personally have never read The Bell Curve and have no idea of your
> own knowledge if it discusses race or not? And you especially don't know
> the context in which race was discussed assuming the subject was raised at
> all?
At this time all of my comments regarding TBC are based on second hand
information from sources I consider to be reasonably reliable. My
primary interest was not in TBC per se but with (a) getting into
heated discussions when the evidence, if valid, is only correlative;
and (b) the lack of specificity of the term "race".
A quick look at the Amazon reviews:
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/stores/detail/-/books/0684824299/customer-reviews/qid=1033396065/
shows they are all over the place (1-5 stars). So there certainly
isn't much agreement on whether it is a "good" book.
It would seem to be a better use of the time of the people involved
to actually go look through the genome and PubMed (there *are* online
after all) to try to find linkages between racial trait genes and
intelligence genes. [Of course it isn't very polticially correct
to suggest this.] If one found a close linkage between such genes
then at least one would have a testable hypothesis. Hurling more
or better correlative evidence at each other and spending time
debating why someone is or isn't a troll seems pretty unproductive.
But of course that is just my opinion.
Robert
P.S. Also of note is that TBC was controversial enough to produce
two additional books on the topic:
Intelligence, Genes, and Success: Scientists Respond to The Bell Curve,
Bernie Devlin (Editor)
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0387949860
The Bell Curve Wars: Race, Intelligence, and the Future of America,
Steve Fraser (Editor)
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0465006930
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