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Title: Intelligence, Genes, and Success: Scientists Respond to The Bell Curve by Bernie Devlin, Stephen E. Fienburg, Daniel Phillip Resnick, Kathryn Roeder ISBN: 0-387-94986-0 Publisher: Copernicus Books Pub. Date: August, 1997 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $33.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 3 (5 reviews)
Rating: 1
Summary: "race doesn't exist", ha! the emperor's naked!
Comment: if this book makes the claim that race doesn't exist, I hope that everybody can see right through that (although at least one fellow reviewer seems to accept everything he's told, as long as it fits with the egalitarian myth). Here's a little example that everyone ought to understand.
My aunt and uncle have a mixed-breed dog: a chihuahua crossed with a dachshund. This dog has a dachshund-like body and a chihuahua-like face, and is very nervous and skittish like a chihuahua. Does the fact that this dog is a mixed breed, keep us from concluding that there does in fact exist the breed "chihuahua" and the breed "dachshund", each of which has its own distinctive shape, coloring, and personality traits?
This is what people are claiming: that because there are lots of mixed-race people in America, then race doesn't exist. This has got to be the dumbest argument I've ever heard. And "no biological basis for race" -- so, I guess that melanin all comes from one's environment? These arguments are so dumb, it's no wonder that regular people never question them. It's a case of the Emperor's New Clothes.
Rating: 4
Summary: A second reading and a second review.
Comment: This book was written as a response to the 1994 book "The Bell Curve" by Herrnstein and Murray. But unlike several other books that condemned TBC without any empirical data, this book actually does expand the issue of racial differences intelligence and is well worth reading by any one interested in this ongoing debate. At least in this book, while still motivated by an egalitarian goal to deny racial differences in intelligence, the authors do give TBC credit for being essentially a very sound book empirically, while picking away at some of the issues at its periphery. But as they do this, they also make many fundamental errors and omissions. This is to be expected however because TBC is very hard to refute on empirical grounds alone.
As an example, the authors take TBC to task for using heritability in the broad sense rather in the narrow sense like breeders do, which reduces the heritability between races supposedly by about 20% or so. The problem is, as shown by Jensen in "The g Factor", heritability in the broad sense should be used in comparing group averages, while heritability in the narrow sense should be used in predicting the expected intelligence of one's children. TBC was not a book on how to have smart kids or breeding cows for higher butter fat production. So the argument was a feeble attempt at obfuscation.
Later in the book they admit that Blacks almost make as much money as Whites when wages are adjusted for the average difference in intelligence between the two groups. But they go on to say that "almost" is not good enough. The error here of course, as even they argue in this book, is that earnings are not just a matter of intelligence. It is the most important trait with regards to wages, but other traits are also important. Research has shown that conscientiousness is the second most important behavioral trait after intelligence in occupational success, and one would have to assume that conscientiousness would vary among racial groups as easily as intelligence due to evolutionary forces on selection under different ecological conditions. And Rushton has shown that many behavioral differences exist between Whites and Blacks on average, including conscientiousness.
So this book is a mixed bag on not denying that there are differences in the average intelligence between Blacks and Whites while trying at the same time to ameliorate the damage that recent research has produced showing that the differences are in fact real and persistent. But the funding for this book was such that the authors had no choice but to use some very fancy footwork to dance around the primary issue and try to diffuse its impact with regards to education and equality. Politics always comes into play, depending on who is paying the piper.
Rating: 5
Summary: A great book diclosing fallacy of race comparison
Comment: This book is fantastic for the layperson that was swayed by the misuse of psychometrics in science. These authors evince clearly that there is no biological concept of race. Any effort to compare races is simply false beacause even anthropolgists and biologists cannot decide the cutoff point in races.So why do psychologists put people in categories that do not even exist? Ideology.The authors of the Bell Curve have no way to define the boundaries of race- even so there is no such thing as racial purity. In America 20% of whites have black ancestry. Unless psychologists can clearly delineate where races end and begin, books like the Bell Curve have no scientific legitimacy.
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Title: The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life by Richard J. Herrnstein, Charles Murray ISBN: 0029146739 Publisher: Free Press Pub. Date: April, 1999 List Price(USD): $30.00 |
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Title: The Bell Curve Wars: Race, Intelligence, and the Future of America by Steve Fraser, Steven Fraser ISBN: 0465006930 Publisher: Basic Books Pub. Date: May, 1995 List Price(USD): $16.00 |
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Title: Measured Lies : The Bell Curve Examined by Joe L. Kincheloe, Aaron Gresson, Shirley R. Steinberg ISBN: 0312172281 Publisher: St. Martin's Press Pub. Date: 15 March, 1997 List Price(USD): $17.95 |
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Title: Inequality by Design by Claude S. Fischer, Michael Hout, Martin Sanchez Jankowski, Samuel R. Lucas, Ann Swidler, Kim Voss ISBN: 0691028982 Publisher: Princeton Univ Pr Pub. Date: 08 July, 1996 List Price(USD): $24.95 |
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Title: The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature by Steven Pinker ISBN: 0670031518 Publisher: Viking Press Pub. Date: 26 September, 2002 List Price(USD): $27.95 |
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