I sort of missed this story -- chalk it up to tandem viruses. (Actually, I didn't really miss it -- I just came at it from a different direction.) It's a prime example of the tendency of certain pundits to pontificate on the basis of complete ignorance.
Here's a lengthy rebuttal of the William Saletan/J. Phillippe Rushton "blacks are dumb" arguments by Daniel Koffler at Jewcy. Saletan's essays at Slate are ludicrous. (Andrew Sullian gives the whole thing way too much credibility, but then he's no rocket scientist, either.) Stephen Metcalf took Saletan's remarks apart quite nicely.
Long story short, Saletan based his entire arguments on the work of J. Phillipe Rushton, who has strong ties to white supremacists. Rushton's paper is based on studies of skull size as it reflects brain size. I really thought that was totally debunked about 1904. There's no scientific support for that at all.
Any first-year neurophysiology student will tell you that brain size is no indicator of intelligence. It's all about structure and organization. Any developmental psychologist will tell you that standardized tests only reliably measure cultural adaptation. Any any human geneticist will tell you that genetic racial differences are too small to measure.
It's actually been sort of entertaining watching the outraged reactions from the left, and Saletan's defensiveness when his essential -- and completely thoughtless -- bigotry is revealed, but mostly it's a minor tempest of the sort that occupies people who can't deal with real issues. Actually, the entertainment value wore thin pretty quickly.
Next teapot.
No comments:
Post a Comment