From: Chris Hibbert (chris@pancrit.org)
Date: Mon Sep 30 2002 - 22:11:19 MDT
Thank you Robert for reminding me of something that I've believed for a
long while and which pretty much invalidates everything The Bell Curve
has to say about race. My review of the book
(http://discuss.foresight.org/~hibbert/Books.html#bellcurve) misses
this point completely, and I'll have to revise it shortly.
The point that Robert reminded us of is that the concept of race, as
informally and formally treated in the US is complete nonsense. Les
Earnest wrote about this convincingly in CACM in February 1989. It's
also at
http://www.anatomy.usyd.edu.au/danny/anthropology/sci.anthropology/archive/october-1995/0093.html
Any studies done in the US that try to correlate anything with Race are
nonsense. People give a race for themselves that is based more on
social mores from 70 years ago than on anything related to genes. If
being 1/4 or 1/16 Negro makes someone black, the statistics are
thoroughly polluted. I don't remember anything in the book that
discussed correcting for that effect.
This doesn't mean that what The Bell Curve has to say about
intelligence is also vacuous. As I said in my review, that part of the
book is far more important than the single chapter that discusses race.
Nearly all of the reviews I've seen that dismiss TBC do it on the
basis of the critics views on race and what they thought TBC probably
said. If anyone has anything to say about intelligence in the context
of the book, separate from what it says about race, I'll be interested
to read it.
Chris
--
Currently reading: Joseph Ledoux, The Emotional Brain
Judea Pearl, Probabilistic Reasoning in Intelligent Systems;
Iain Banks, Consider Phlebas
Chris Hibbert
hibbert@mydruthers.com
http://discuss.foresight.org/~hibbert
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