Jeg er blitt gjort oppmerksom på en meget interessant artikkelserie på nettstedet The
Daily Beast (som eies og/eller drives av Newsweek). Her er noen kjappe utdrag fra en artikkel skrevet av kommentatoren Andrew Sullivan nå nylig (30.11.2011):
Thanks for all the emails. And the surprisingly civil debate on our Facebook page. I've reached out to some
academic pros in the intelligence field, and the feedback I get is that the exploration of IQ and race is effectively toxic as a subject. But the rest of the research area is more complex than my
first post suggested. An academic writes:
Quote:
Within some subfields of psychology, there is a small degree of pushback against studying intelligence, but this is not true of psychology as a whole--there are thriving societies and journals,
and reports of intelligence measures are not uncommon in mainstream journal articles. Nor is it unusual for researchers to document the degree of heritability of IQ (once again, within races). The
study of racial differences in intelligence, however, particularly when it comes to assessing the possibility of genetic contributions, is still radioactive. Few researchers other than
Jensen and Rushton are willing to go there, while marginal phenomena such as "stereotype threat" that superficially seem to suggest that the race difference is 100% environmental are avidly
pursued.
And there are distortions in the larger hot zone around the race-IQ Ground Zero, such as the provably false claims that race is entirely a social construction, that general intelligence is an
artifact of IQ tests, that the tests are worthless, that IQ was the basis of immigration restrictions and the Holocaust, and so on. Fortunately these are not as common (particularly within
psychology) as they were in the 1970s and 1980s.
Unquote.
So there is some veiling of the truth here - or a decision just not to go there. Notice that there is also a great deal of research attempting to disprove any genetic component to
intelligence. It's worth noting here that Murray and Herrnstein, despite the relentless smear campaign against them, never stated that genetics was responsible for all the racial gaps. They
were merely debating the balance between genes and environment, and conceded that there was no firm way to calculate the balance. So we know that environment affects IQ - malnutrition depresses it in
the developing world. But since IQ is proven to be inheritable, the notion that genes play no role whatever - that we remain the "blank slate" some left-liberals want us to be - is a reach. Razib
Khan, a genetics expert, adds the following:
Quote:
The problem here is the word "race." It has a whole lot of baggage. So many biologists prudently shift to "population" or "ethnic group." I don’t much care either way. Let’s just put the semantic
sugar to the side. I contend that:
1) Human populations can be easily separated into plausible clusters using a random set of genetic markers
2) The differences between human populations are not trivial
You can say that both positions apply to human races. Or, you can say that race does not exist as a biological concept, and that both positions apply to human populations. Call it what you will,
style is secondary to substance. Just as half-siblings and full-siblings are clearly genetically distinct, and those distinctions matter in terms of their traits, so French and Chinese are
genetically distinct, and those distinctions matter in terms of their traits.
Unquote.
That's helpful. Whatever we call it, "race" has a biological component that can be genetically mapped. When you apply robust intelligence tests based on general intelligence (g) to this map, there
are non-trivial differences between races that are strikingly resilient across the world. Quite why is unclear. My position is simply a) that the notion that genes are not involved in this area is
highly unlikely; and b) that, as Razib says [...]
Les denne artikkelen i sin helhet hos The Daily Beast. Her finnes også et meget interessant intervju med en dansk vitenskapsjournalist (ca 9 minutter), samt lenker til flere tidligere
artikler i samme serie av Sullivan.