article.nationalreview.com— Which might be forthcoming in the event of an Obama victory. The younger generation of human-sciences enthusiasts trend conservative/libertarian, and Obama has them worried.
Oct 7, 2008View in Crawl 4
I'm not digging this because I agree. I'm digging because I know a little bit about this stuff, I've read the Bell Curve*, this article us utter horses**t, and I want the world to see it and laugh in amazement. Did people who believed all human ability and attributes were governed by nurture go way too far and make mistakes? Yes. Is "the nurturist dam" really about the burst, setting free a flood of science proving genetics govern (as Derbyshire claims) that about half of everything is genetic? No, and I'll tell you why: it's way more complicated than some sort of binary stuck-in-the-sixties us-vs-them Nixon bulls**t. Look into epigenetics- it turns out that the way you're raised (diet, environment, etc) can change how and if genes are expressed...and those changes can be passed on to your descendants! (!!!) The single most important advance in this debate in the last, what, 10-20 years? Derbyshire doesn't even mention it. Because it doesn't prove that people he doesn't like are born that way and neener-neener, he's betterer. So, aside from the fact that the subtext of this article is that President Darkie will wipe out science in order to keep the world from finding out how inferior his people are, it's also obvious that the writer's more interested in grinding culture war axes than the advance of human knowledge. Sort of like McCain.*As an example of how scientific the Bell Curve is, it only claims nature governs intelligence as measured by IQ results that fall below the average Caucasian student. Asian students, says Murray, just study harder and come from an environment where learning is prized. Why does he have to be so inconsistent? Because otherwise he'd have to say the Caucasian race was not the peak of human perfection, and he wouldn't sell ten million books to white people who want to believe they're just plain better than everyone else. Susan Jacoby addressed "The Bell Curve" in "The Age of American Unreason" with good reason- it's not exactly creationism, but it sure as hell isn't science.
jimbecileOct 9, 2008
I'm not digging this because I agree. I'm digging because I know a little bit about this stuff, I've read the Bell Curve*, this article us utter horses**t, and I want the world to see it and laugh in amazement. Did people who believed all human ability and attributes were governed by nurture go way too far and make mistakes? Yes. Is "the nurturist dam" really about the burst, setting free a flood of science proving genetics govern (as Derbyshire claims) that about half of everything is genetic? No, and I'll tell you why: it's way more complicated than some sort of binary stuck-in-the-sixties us-vs-them Nixon bulls**t. Look into epigenetics- it turns out that the way you're raised (diet, environment, etc) can change how and if genes are expressed...and those changes can be passed on to your descendants! (!!!) The single most important advance in this debate in the last, what, 10-20 years? Derbyshire doesn't even mention it. Because it doesn't prove that people he doesn't like are born that way and neener-neener, he's betterer. So, aside from the fact that the subtext of this article is that President Darkie will wipe out science in order to keep the world from finding out how inferior his people are, it's also obvious that the writer's more interested in grinding culture war axes than the advance of human knowledge. Sort of like McCain.*As an example of how scientific the Bell Curve is, it only claims nature governs intelligence as measured by IQ results that fall below the average Caucasian student. Asian students, says Murray, just study harder and come from an environment where learning is prized. Why does he have to be so inconsistent? Because otherwise he'd have to say the Caucasian race was not the peak of human perfection, and he wouldn't sell ten million books to white people who want to believe they're just plain better than everyone else. Susan Jacoby addressed "The Bell Curve" in "The Age of American Unreason" with good reason- it's not exactly creationism, but it sure as hell isn't science.