Talk:Race and intelligence/Archive 15

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Archive This is an archive of past discussions. Do not edit the contents of this page. If you wish to start a new discussion or revive an old one, please do so on the current talk page.

Contents

Crux of NPOV issue

I've been trying to figure out what sorts of edits it would take to end the NPOV dispute. Here is a key phrase from Jokestress that I believe crystallizes the issue:

This research is based on two sets of disputed terminologies, so any attempt to separate the research from the dispute is POV-pushing.

My response is, roughly:

These minority positions are acknowledged at length. Efforts to entangle such positions with consensus research constitute POV-pushing.

That said, I'm willing to entertain Jokestresses' mandate. What's not clear to me are its operational consequences. Must we simply have a phrase at the beginning of each page that says, "Some researchers maintain that neither race nor intelligence can be scientifically defined or studied, making all related research invalid (see <link to detailed discussion of this POV>)"? I could get comfortable with that. --DAD T 00:45, 22 July 2005 (UTC)

I think Rikurzhen's idea, above, is the right approach. If we've really identified the misapprehensions that can spark unnecessary controversy and head them off, then we will do readers a favor and also reduce attacks here on positions that aren't actually held. P0M 03:43, 22 July 2005 (UTC)

My suggestion above will only help after we've solved this particular issue. As I see it, the question is how do we achieve an NPOV presentation of this issue? My greatest concern is that (1) the research results (i.e. the scientific majority view) should not be entangled (good word) with the views of outside critics (i.e. the minority view) to the extent that they obfuscate the description of the main views. My other concerns are that (2) we not commit the sin of trying to give equal validity to the many single-shot criticisms of this research in the main article where the major research results have been summarized down to 6 paragraphs; my solution is to use summary style w/ the race and intelligence controversy article. Another concern (3) is that we need to be able to make some controversial assumptions in the sub-articles that detail research results w/ brief, unobtrusive pointer to race and intelligence controversy (as described below). --Rikurzhen 16:24, July 22, 2005 (UTC)
I know it must seem sometimes that I am on the side of entangling or obfuscating, but actually I think the content and intent of the article is not problematical. The problem is how to write accurately for a non-specialist readership and not get them mixed up in the process. The essential thing is not to fail to make clear to those readers the things that everybody in the field takes for granted, having been exposed to them. Another thing that can be very helpful is to make clear the distinction between the data and the interpretations of the data. Then the job is to describe the work done by researchers who are trying to dope out the connections between intelligence test results and memberships in demographic groups. It's fair to point out that this group or that group has criticisms, but it seems to me that if there is an alternative take on the same data, or an alternative assemblage of data that competes somehow with this assemblage of data, then that would require a different article. P0M 19:25, 22 July 2005 (UTC)

Jokestress, this is where we need to focus our discussion. --Rikurzhen 23:25, July 22, 2005 (UTC)

I think this is on the right track, though I liked where P0M was going earlier with the 5 points. What I feel is missing is the view from within the scientific community that this sort of research is scientifically misconceived and politically suspect. Further, if a poll of scholars (Snyderman) found that 55% did not opine that Black-White difference in I.Q. is a product of both genetic and environmental variation, that is a significant dispute. The thing that's really missing is insufficient data and not qualified. Many feel the data presented are tendentious at best, considering the conclusions being inferred. Jokestress 17:25, 23 July 2005 (UTC)
I think you're missing the point of the experts' dispute. The data is not in dispute, nor is the conclusion that average IQ differences exist between races. (So, for example, the data in figure 1 is uncontroversial among experts). What's disputed is whether the cause is partly-genetic or entirely not-genetic. This dispute is not a reflection of doubt about the basic IQ data, but rather a very understandable problem of not having enough direct (behavioral genetics) data to convince everyone one way or the other. (Also note the survey was performed in 1984, so the level of uncertainty may have diminished in the last 20 years). --Rikurzhen 17:35, July 23, 2005 (UTC)

Rikurzhen: relevant material copied from NPOV policy -- discuss above

about minority views:

  • represent the majority (scientific) view as the majority view and the minority ... view as the minority view
  • [minority views] should not obfuscate the description of the main views, and any mention should be proportional to the rest of the article.
  • Please be clear on one thing: the Wikipedia neutrality policy certainly does not state, or imply, that we must "give equal validity" to minority views.

making necessary assumptions:

What about the case where, in order to write any of a long series of articles on some general subject, we must make some controversial assumptions? That's the case, e.g., in writing about evolution. Surely we won't have to hash out the evolution-vs.-creationism debate on every such page?

No, surely not. There are virtually no topics that could proceed without making some assumptions that someone would find controversial. This is true not only in evolutionary biology, but also philosophy, history, physics, etc.

It is difficult to draw up general principles on which to rule in specific cases, but the following might help: there is probably not a good reason to discuss some assumption on a given page, if an assumption is best discussed in depth on some other page. Some brief, unobtrusive pointer might be apropos, however. E.g., in an article about the evolutionary development of horses, we might have one brief sentence to the effect that some creationists do not believe that horses (or any other animals) underwent any evolution, and point the reader to the relevant article. If there is much specific argument over some particular point, it might be placed on a special page of its own.

Reification of intelligence, again

Sorry, once again I'm at the wrong computer. Last time there were no extra spaces, but I still don't know what is going on.

I think the discussion has drifted from what I see as a much bigger problem than the one that Rikurzhen is trying to fix. The current language still leads the reader to reify intelligence:

Hypothetically, a genetic cause could include genes linked to neuron structure or function, brain size, or brain metabolism, that vary with ancestral background.

Even though it is phrased in terms of a hypothesis, the reader can understand the hypothesis to be that genes determine "neuron structure of function, brain size, or brain metabolism." If you have purple genes you will have a poor brain, and we know that because purple people have poor intelligence. I doubt that such a formulation reflects current thought.

How about:

Hypothetically, a genetic contribution to intelligence could include genes linked to neuron structure or function, brain size, or brain metabolism, that vary with ancestral background.

That formulation would leave open the possibility that green people are greater in intelligence than others because their genotypes make them able to get by on smaller amounts of dietary or environmental element X. It doesn't create the implication that if pink people have always averaged an IQ of 90 in every study ever made then they will necessarily continue to score that way regardless of environmental changes that may occur in the future. P0M 05:26, 23 July 2005 (UTC)

That suggestion sounds fine to me, but probably because I don't quite see how it differs from the previous version. Maybe someone else sees something I'm missing? --Rikurzhen 05:39, July 23, 2005 (UTC)
Rikurzhen, I think the main difference is using contribution instead of cause. contribution allows for the possibility of genes and environment interacting. --Aaron McDaid 21:18, 13 September 2005 (UTC)
I see... I think determine would be the word I would use for a complete cause where simply cause (or constrain or contribute) would not suggest a single causal factor to me. --Rikurzhen 06:36, 14 September 2005 (UTC)

I have a number of issues with the article, but I think I may start here. The genetic thinking here is wooly at best. Of course any genetic influance will vary with ancestral background. Mutations apart (and the rate is so low as to be discounted on this sort of statistical inference), saying that genes vary by ancestry is tautological as that is exactly where they come from. What is being postulated is that the genes that may or may not control these aspects are close to the genes that cause people to exhibit markers of race. If they happen to be close then it is possible that there is a statistical correlation, if not then the statistical correletaion is unlikely. I don't want to but in here and edit a disputed article without doing a lot more reading of it and the dispute, but it seems to me that a text closer to the following would be more reasonable:

A genetic contribution for intelligence, possibly related to neuron structure or function, brain size, or brain metabolism, would be close to genes that provide racial markers, or even the same genes that provide the racial marker.

There are other factors (racism most obvious amongst them, but culture also a real possibility) that may provide an environmental reason for different races having differing IQ, but I think the above fairly summs up the genetic possibility. I suspect that much of the dispute on the page is the possibility that some believe that the genes for IQ are the same as those for the racial markers and others believe that this is not the case. But I guess that nobody wants to say it "out loud" — KayEss | talk 18:03, 2 August 2005 (UTC)

No time right now but ... What is being postulated is that the genes that may or may not control these aspects are close to the genes that cause people to exhibit markers of race. is incorrect. That's called genetic linkage, but that's not what is being postulated. The population of Ireland has a greater proportion of red hair and fair skin because of linkage. But malaria resitance and dark skin are also correlated, but not because of linkage. More later... --Rikurzhen 18:11, August 2, 2005 (UTC)

Hmm. I don't see how the data rules out the possibility of genetic linkage, but I don't think that's the point either. I was thinking of keeping this high level as it was something from the introduction of the article. My understanding is that skin colour is controlled by a huge number of genes and that a main method for malaria resistance is afforded by a single gene (which when doubled leads to Sickle Cell Anemia), but I'm sure there are many others. At best this is comparing many genes to many genes which I suppose is what we would expect from any race markers and intelligence.
The article is talking about reasons for a correlation between race and IQ. If such a correlation exists then it can be explained in many ways, and one of those postulated is genetic. If it is genetic then I can't see any other mechanism other than that the genes that control IQ are linked to those for race markers or that they are the same. Is there some other mechanism that I'm missing? If such is the case then please re-word what I've written to include it, but in any case I hope that we both agree that removing an un-necessary tautology is a good thing. — KayEss | talk 18:49, 2 August 2005 (UTC)
There seems to be confusion over what linkage means. I don't even know myself, but I'm guessing that linkage is more specific that simply the fact that those who have one gene often have another gene? Would I be right in saying that linkage would often mean the pair of genes being on the same chromosome, whereas non-linked genes would probably be on different chromosomes? If so, is there another more accurate term to replace incorrect use of linkage? --Aaron McDaid 21:29, 13 September 2005 (UTC)
Re: genetic linkage... You are correct. Linkage is a function of proximity on a chromosome, such that two genes on the same chromosome could be linked, but genes on different chromosomes cannot. But you can also use the term such that you have linkage of a phenotype to a region of a chromosome. This would be the case with red hair and MC1R, where in fact variation in MC1R is the cause of red hair (but it could have been a gene near MC1R). The speculation by KayEss seemed to be that IQ would have to be linked (i.e. genetic linkage) to skin color genes in order for there to be an association between race and IQ, but this is not the case. The reason is the matter of human population structure we're still discussing in sections below. --Rikurzhen 06:36, 14 September 2005 (UTC)

If it is genetic then I can't see any other mechanism other than that the genes that control IQ are linked to those for race markers or that they are the same. Is there some other mechanism that I'm missing? Yes. A few pieces of background:

  • Self-identified race/ethnicity (SIRE) is not identical to skin color, although there is an obvious association.
  • Mating between individuals of different SIRE is relatively rare.
  • SIRE (in the U.S.) is strongly associated to ancestry.
  • SIRE is associated with variation in allele frequencies at neutral loci across the genome, but particularly in the correlation structure of allele frequencies
  • IQ is a polygenic and multifactorial quantitative trait.
  • Like skin color, some variation in IQ is associated with variation in SIRE.

So if neutral markers across the genome vary between SIRE populations, and SIRE populations vary phenotypically in a polygenic trait (IQ), then it is possible that the frequency of functionally significant alleles vary between SIRE populations. Ancestry (and the relatively degree of inbreeding within SIRE populations) would thus be responsible for the functional variation, which would merely be co-inherited with variation in SIRE marker traits like skin color. The low level of interbreeding between SIRE groups maintains these associations, rather than the force of linkage disequilibrium. --Rikurzhen 22:24, August 2, 2005 (UTC)

Is the discussion really about this sort of mixing of terms? Clearly if you use self-identified race/ethnicity rather than genetic markers for race/enthnicity then there need not be any correlation between SIRE and any genes. This is an obvious and self-evident result. Immediatly before the sentence we are discussing the article says "The primary focus of the scientific debate is whether group IQ differences also reflect a genetic component." If you are going to use SIRE rather than genetic race/ethnicity markers then there must be a discussion of whether or not SIRE is able to imply any systematic genetic variation at all let alone any possible genetic variation in IQ. — KayEss | talk 04:44, 3 August 2005 (UTC)
Geographical populations vary in alleles across the genome. According to most studies, including most recently Tang et al (2005), grouping individuals on the basis of genotype alone reconstitues SIRE groups. Tang et al (2005) had a disconcordance rate of genotype and SIRE of 0.14%. --Rikurzhen 05:05, August 3, 2005 (UTC)
You said I was missing something. Clearly I am again. You are saying that SIRE is as good as genetic markers, but you also say that I am missing something by saying that genetic markers necessarily come from genetic background. I can't work out how you can, on the one hand, say that any genes that may affect a phenotypic expression that is correlated with genes that act as reliable race markers don't also very across SIRE if the genetic correlation is so good. — KayEss | talk 05:36, 3 August 2005 (UTC)
"genes that act as reliable race markers" are a much larger set of loci (not necessarily near genes) than "the genes that cause people to exhibit [visible] markers of race". you can reliably predict SIRE (in the U.S. population) from the pattern of variation at random locations across the genome. "the genes that cause people to exhibit markers of race", such as genes for skin color, are relatively few and may or may not be sufficient to predict SIRE.
in fact, I would not be surprised if so-called visible makers of race were not sufficient to predict SIRE very accurately. another short-coming of "race" is that while the this SIRE assocation is true of the emigrant populations of the U.S., but if you take samples from equal geographic distributions the division between races would appear arbitrary. the story is a little bit more blurry for people sampled randomly from the entire world population because of population density (e.g. 1/3 of the samples would be from India or China).
sorry I'm having such a hard time explaining this. I think the race article has a better explanation. --Rikurzhen 06:18, August 3, 2005 (UTC)
I think we've been talking about a subtle difference. I was saying that if you can find a set of genetic markers that reliably indicates SIRE (and I guess I meant all genes, but say as much) and if there is a genetic component to intelligence then any difference between SIRE groups in intelligence is necessarily included in those genes. I think you are saying that if you take the genes that are known to contribute to, say, skin colour (or in fact any other sub-set of the full set of genetic markers) then clearly any other genes that may control intelligence are not necessarily linked. — KayEss | talk 08:24, 5 August 2005 (UTC)
Oh! yes!!! In fact, the method of mapping by admixture linkage disequilibrium could be used to identify genes that cause IQ differences between whites and African Americans if such genes do exist by looking for linkage of IQ differences to ancestry informative markers. [1] --Rikurzhen 08:33, August 5, 2005 (UTC)

I assume that KayEss deleted my posting accidentally. I will recopy it here:

I will try to clarify a bit what is meant by genes being "close to" other genes. Chromosomes are extremely long and in the sequence of all the things that need to happen for sexual reproduction to take place the two long strings of DNA that link together like a zipper come unzippered so they can go their separate ways. Your mother's strip ordinarily will go one way and your father's strip ordinarily will go the other way. But sometimes the two strips twist around each other and the "tail" of one is swapped with the "tail" of another. So what was schematically ffffffffffffffffffffffff and mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm ends up being ffffffffmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm and mmmmmmmmffffffffffffffff. It is easy to get the first f and the last m together on a new string because wherever the switchover occurs they will still end up togehter. But it is much less likely to get the first f hooked up with the second m and its string. It still happens, but the break has to occur just at the right point. In short, things that are close together tend to stay together and things that are far apart don't tend quite so strongly to stay together. P0M 18:57, 2 August 2005 (UTC)
Because of this cross-over phenomenon, which many people don't know about, it is possible to inherit characteristics from all four of your grandparents. That's another hitch in the thinking about the [racial] inheritance of characteristics. "Great grandfather was Ainu, but I don't have any of his genes, thank God." Well, maybe you don't and maybe you do.

I think KayEss is probably correct as far as characterizing the incorrect thinking that fuels lots of interest in the subject. I don't mind saying that very loudly, but doing so doesn't help much. What needs to happen is the kind of education that makes members of the public "intelligent consumers" of science and pseudo-science assertions. Unfortunately the trend all over the world is to grant to authority figures the right to tell us members of the masses what we must conclude. Some of them tie their assertions back to interpretations of some kind of holy writ, and some of them establish themselves as the mouthpiece of one "spirit" or another. Authoritarianism is on the rise. Erich Fromm discussed the psychology behind this movement years ago, and he seems to have described what was in his future as well as he described what was in his past. One function of a good article can be to demonstrate with Microcornucopia precision and grace and clarity what is really going on. P0M 18:30, 2 August 2005 (UTC)

There are cases where the controlling genes for two characteristics are not even on the same chromosome and yet they are very frequently found together. People therefore may assume that, e.g., Chinese people can't have curly or wavy hair. The evidence for [race] and [intelligence] indicates that when you define the word "race" a certain way, and when you define the word "intelligence" a certain way, then you get different average [intelligences] for different [races]. Why that correlation occurs is still up in the air for serious students of the sciences but may be a firmly established matter of faith for people with certain ideological axes to grind. P0M 19:15, 2 August 2005 (UTC)

Summary style - Race and intelligence controversy

The Race and intelligence controversy article is now large enough (although not nearly complete) that we should try to a summary style transition on that section of the main article. Ideally, we're looking for three paragraphs to summarize the major points (major ideas, concepts, etc.) with the minimum level of detail necessary. At the same time, we should try to get the Race and intelligence controversy article up to a higher standard. For me, this task seems harder than the research oriented summary sections because the topic is much more open ended. Suggestions? Anyone going to give it a try? --Rikurzhen 20:47, July 30, 2005 (UTC)

It's still not clear to me how the controversy can be separated from the research-- many experts in one or both fields argue that the research itself IS the controversy. While I agree that explaining the controversy will require a full article, I would argue that the research is in fact the ancillary article. It certainly is if you compare the number of articles containing primary data to the number of articles discussing and analyzing the controversy. Jokestress 22:48, 30 July 2005 (UTC)
I think there is a problem of definitions here. A while ago, the editors voted to adopt Wikipedia:Summary style for this topic. "The idea is to summarize and distribute information across related articles in a way that can serve readers who want varying amounts of detail. Thus giving readers the ability to zoom to the level of detail they need and not exhausting those who need a primer on a whole topic. This is more helpful to the reader than a very long article that just keeps growing, eventually reaching book-length." [At the time we really were approaching a book length article.) "Summary style is accomplished by not overwhelming the reader with too much text up front by summarizing main points and going into more detail on particular points (sub-topics) in separate articles." The language "main article" and "sub-article" relates to "main points" and "sub-topics", respectively. Also, by "article", I mean a Wikipedia article, not outside publications. The article size limits I mentioned relates to this: "Articles longer than 12 to 15 printed pages (more than 30 to 35 KB of readable text) take longer to read than the upper limit of the average adult's attention span - 20 minutes." The public controversy section alone is approaching that size. The "research oriented summary sections" I metioned are Race and intelligence (Average gaps among races) and Race and intelligence (Culture-only or partially-genetic explanation). When you write a summary section it should be at most 3 paragraphs. That's why the corresponding sub-sections of the Race and intelligence article are only 3 paragraphs long. So when I say we should do summary style on the public controversy section, I mean we should move the current text to Race and intelligence controversy (I've already done that) and replace the text in this article with a 3 paragraph summary. So, the term "main article" is not a value judgement about the relative worth of "race and intelligence" versus "race and intelligence controversy", but rather a statement about which article contains the summary section w/ {{main}} tag and which is being summarized. In theory, two articles could both be main and sub-articles to one another. IQ and intelligence (trait) are moving in that direction. --Rikurzhen 02:08, July 31, 2005 (UTC)
I say "main article" because there is one that is straight up "race and intelligence," and the "subarticles" as it stands have a parenthetical after them. The parentheticals themselves are totally POV right now. That's one of several POV issues I have with how this whole topic is being organized. A specific POV is promulgated through the article titles themselves. I don't have a completely forumulated answer on how to resolve this, but I am hoping we can figure out a NPOV way of organizing this. I have been looking at other "__ and __" articles here to see what the precedent is, but it seems like we are setting a lot of interesting precedents in this series of articles (like Arbor's supercool footnoting system). I agree that the direction of intelligence and IQ are very good, but this is a little different because of the double controversy. Jokestress 02:33, 31 July 2005 (UTC)
So... you're on-board with trying to write a 3 paragraph summary style section for the controversy material? If not, this is something we need work out -- it goes to the "crux of the npov" issue stuff we never quite resolved. If you'd like to discuss the other things you mentioned, let's do that in a separate thread if possible. --Rikurzhen 02:39, July 31, 2005 (UTC)
Summaries are a good exercise. If things change around, we can always use the three-paragraph summary at the top of the "main" article. Jokestress 02:43, 31 July 2005 (UTC)
Jokestress: That's one of several POV issues I have with how this whole topic is being organized. If it makes you happy, note that Race and intelligence is an article in the category Category:Race and intelligence controversy. By the way, I hope by now we have convinced you that most of the editors are doing a thorough job at presenting a complex issue in way that follows both WP:NOR and WP:NPOV. Many, many other editors have pointed to our little endeavour as exemplary work, especially in the NPOV department. So there is clearly a large group of people who think what we do is very, very NPOV, and there is no reason to assume that these people are lying or malicious. In that light, might I suggest you try to mellow you statements like "totally POV"? Clearly not everybody agrees (for example, I think its among the 10 most NPOV articles I've seen on WP), and only the Sith deal in absolutes, so maybe—just for politeness' sake—you could try to acknowledge the hard work that is going on here by using a more conciliatory tone when you describe your views on the NPOVness of this article and related material? As I said, I think it's the very model of NPOV (but I don't smear it in your face all the time). Arbor 09:04, 31 July 2005 (UTC)
This article is a long way from NPOV, and like the WSJ, the POV is built into the very structure of the presentation, from the titles down. I have ackowledged all the good work going on here, but the editors who created this have done so without much input from people who see this article as systematically structured to favor a specific POV. At least two editors have suggested that they think critical disputes about this topic are "settled" issues. Just about every sentence and every visual representation is weighted to favor a POV interpretation of the data. Criticisms are met with extensive countercriticisms. This is set up with the false dichotomy as if the debate is environment only or partially genetic, when many experts believe either the question itself is bogus, or that no meaningful interpretation can be made based on the available evidence.
I don't think anyone is lying or malicious. I also don't care who is "right" in this matter. My main reason for getting involved is that I am aware of the ways in which materials like this are subject to confirmation bias. I am most concerned that what is being presented as scientific consensus is in fact consensus science. These are pervasive and insidious problems throughout this entire series of articles. One need only look at the references pages to see how deeply off-balance this series of articles is. I assume good faith with the editors who have gotten this to this point, but these articles suffer from systemic bias. The titles are totally POV. There's really no other way to say it. That is not supposed to be a personal affront to you or the other editors, but as someone well-versed in the use of language to make a persuasive argument, I know when I am reading something POV. As I said, at the rate we are going, I anticipate taking about 5 or 6 months minimum to get this to NPOV. Jokestress 17:23, 31 July 2005 (UTC)
See, the charge of "systemic bias" I completely understand, and I would never counter such a charge. This article very much is an example of systemic bias. As is the Evolution article, for that matter. That charge is warranted. However, "systemic bias" is very much a result of WP's NPOV policy. It suffers from "systemic bias" because it is NPOV. Just like the Evolution article. But you cannot criticise an article on WP for conforming to one of WP's pillars of foundation. You can criticise WP's foundation, or you can join the noble efforts of the Countering Systemic Bias movement. But you cannot call an article POV just because it is an example of systemic bias. (Neither do I believe it is a valid vote against Featured standard, even though one of the editors used that argument.) Systemic bias is an observed and well known feature of WP's policies. It is not a valid reason for opposing an individual article. By the way, if you want an article whose "titles are totally POV", why not start with Scientific racism, at least smack an NPOV label on it? (I jest, of course. It's a good article. I like the systemic bias of WP, because it gives me good, readable, trustworthy articles like Race and intelligence, Evolution, or Scientific racism.) Arbor 17:54, 31 July 2005 (UTC)
Perhaps the point is better made if I say this article suffers from cognitive bias and confirmation bias that make it non-NPOV. This article is readable, but it is certainly not trustworthy in relationship to NPOV. Jokestress 18:18, 31 July 2005 (UTC)

Could we move the controversy section from the Race and intelligence to Race and intelligence controversy and then remove it from here? (Instead, we will just have a one-line link.) Currently we have more or less the same text in two places, and edits are made to the same paragraphs but not coördinated. If and when Race and intelligence controversy stabilises we can write a three paragraph summary for Race and intelligence. Arbor 06:57, 3 August 2005 (UTC)

Crap, that's my fault. I didn't realize people were bothering with Race and intelligence controversy yet. Okay, let's move the material there. --Rikurzhen 07:04, August 3, 2005 (UTC)
I move stuff over and tried to reconcile the version differences. Still more to do on that front. --Rikurzhen 07:53, August 3, 2005 (UTC)

list of interpretations

From my reading of it, the third item in this list doesn't fit with the way the list is introduced:

The contemporary scholarly debate about race and intelligence involves both the relatively uncontroversial experimental results that indicate that average IQ test scores vary among racial groups, and the relatively more controversial interpretations of these IQ differences. In general, contemporary interpretations of the "IQ gap" can be divided into three broad categories:

  1. "culture-only" or "environment-only" interpretations that posit only non-genetic causes (e.g., socioeconomic inequality or minority culture membership) that differentially affect racial groups; and
  2. "partly genetic" interpretations that posit an IQ gap between racial groups caused by approximately the same matrix of genetic and environmental forces that cause IQ differences among individuals of the same race.
  3. "insufficient data": no meaningful interpretation can be made based on available evidence.

The problem seems to be that #3 isn't an interpretation, but rather the lack of an interpretation or the inability to empirically distinguish between alternatives #1 and #2. I've been brainstorming for a simple fix, but I can't think of one. The best alternative I can think of is to remove #3 from the list and add a follow up sentence saying something like "a large minority think there is insufficient data and no meaningful interpretation can be made based on available evidence". This isn't as nice because more experts chose #3 than #1 in the S&R survey. --Rikurzhen 02:54, July 31, 2005 (UTC)

Removing #3 sets up the false dichotomy that's the problem with this whole series. One of the major arguments is that the argument about whether it's #1 or #2 is based on too many tendentious assumptions to be considered science. Rather than removing the second most common answer, perhaps it's better to resturcture the summary and series to present that POV for what it is: a significant POV, more common than the straw man of environment only. Jokestress 17:32, 31 July 2005 (UTC)

I don't think we want to remove #3. (Adding that was a good edit, by the way.) The problem is that "no interpretation" is not an interpretation (just like "no preference" isn't a favourite colour), and the first paragraph claims that it lists the main interpretations. How about this much shorter suggestion

The contemporary scholarly debate about race and intelligence is concerned with how the intelligence gap should be interpreted:

  1. blabla

Of course, "is concerned with" is clumsy. All you native speakers can do better: "focusses on", or just "asks"? Arbor 18:15, 31 July 2005 (UTC)

Yes, that was the concern I was getting at. Something like that is what I was looking for, but getting it phrased just right has eluded me. --Rikurzhen 19:39, July 31, 2005 (UTC)
How about this:
The contemporary scholarly debate about race and intelligence elicits several viewpoints about experimental results that indicate that average IQ test scores vary among racial and ethnic groups, and how those results can be interpreted. The three most prominent viewpoints are:
  1. "culture-only" or "environment-only" interpretations that posit only non-genetic causes (e.g., socioeconomic inequality or minority culture membership) that differentially affect racial groups; and
  2. "partly genetic" interpretations that posit an IQ gap between racial groups caused by approximately the same matrix of genetic and environmental forces that cause IQ differences among individuals of the same race.
  3. "insufficient data": no meaningful interpretation can be made based on available evidence.
Once we get that figured out, let's get the red link out of #1. Jokestress 19:56, 31 July 2005 (UTC)

"Partly genetic" should probably be listed before "culture-only," reflecting its status as the interpretation favoured by the majority of experts. --Nectarflowed T 04:52, 3 August 2005 (UTC)

This still doesn't quite solve the problem b/c the list itself still isn't written with parallelism. That's the main problem. We've got X interpreations, Y interpretations, and insufficent data, which is not an interpretation. How can we fix this for parallelism? --Rikurzhen 06:53, August 8, 2005 (UTC)

false dichotomy

Jokestress, you have made an argument above that I think needs to be tackled. Seemingly talking about the question of the role of genes in causing between group differences in mean IQ, you charge that: This is set up with the false dichotomy as if the debate is environment only or partially genetic. Later you claim that it's the false dichotomy that's the problem with this whole series. You claim that many experts believe either [1] the question itself is bogus, or [2] that no meaningful interpretation can be made based on the available evidence. I understand where [2] comes from: the S&R(1987) survey data shows that 24%/86%=28% of respondents claimed that "The data are insufficient to support any reasonable opinion". However, [1] was not an option for that question. It is not obvious to me that any appreciable number of experts believe that the question itself is bogus. Can you support this claim with citations? Related to this. You claim that One of the major arguments is that the argument about whether it's #1 or #2 is based on too many tendentious assumptions to be considered science. This sound like a specific form of the question itself is bogus. The part about assumptions (rather than data or interpretations) seems especially foreign to me: I don't believe this is a signficiant (in numbers) view. Again, can you show citations that this is a major argument? You also say, environment only is a straw man. That implies that environment only is a position that people don't really take. Genetics only really is a straw man used against the partly genetic view, but environment only is a serious view seemingly endorsed by many prominent writers on this topic. Lastly, I'd like some clarification on what you mean by these claims:

  • At least two editors have suggested that they think critical disputes about this topic are "settled" issues.
  • Just about every sentence and every visual representation is weighted to favor a POV interpretation of the data.
  • Criticisms are met with extensive countercriticisms.

--Rikurzhen 20:02, July 31, 2005 (UTC)

OK, last one today. AAA is representative of the POV that this research is scientifically misoncieved and politically suspect. Environment only is the third most popular position people take according to a document frequently cited here. A straw man argument sidesteps the real issue to fight a less important issue that's easier to attack (environment only). Look back through this voluminous talk page for the word "settled" to find editors trying to rush this along by claiming this or that is settled. We will go through every sentence and every visual representation over the next few months to hash out what are POV issues in each case. Probably each word at the rate we are going. Any view critical of the POV expressed in the article gets counterclaims covered extensively, but those were often followed with rejoinders, too. The article reflects what happens on this talk page, where I bring up a point and have to do four times as much writing just to keep up with the other editors' objections. But that's OK, I have patience. Jokestress 20:25, 31 July 2005 (UTC)
On the main point : SJ Gould's MMoM is representative of the view that "this research is scientifically misoncieved and politically suspect". Analogously, a June editorial in the WSJ [2] is representative of the view that "the scientific case ... [human caused global warming] ... looks weaker all the time". However, that doesn't make it the case than many experts believe this way. The AAA statement and Gould's writings have no more claim to be expert (or representative of expert views) than I would if I wrote a newspaper editorial on this subject. Having a PhD or even being a world famous evolutionary scientist doesn't (on its own) make you an expert on topics outside of your field. This kind of discrimination between expert and non-expert views is crucial to WP:NPOV as evidenced by the considerable time discussing how to handle cases where these views differ (evolution is the case study in the NPOV page).
On environment only and straw men : claiming "that no meaningful interpretation can be made based on the available evidence" is not a position that is widely published on (negative results and negative interpretations are often not published) and so the available literature necessarily focuses on the two prominent hypotheses (being undecided is not a hypothesis): partly-genetic or environment-only. You seem to be the source of the claim that environment only is a straw man, and for that reason alone we cannot act on that claim. Additionally, I think it's a ridicuous claim given the number of public intellectuals who have claimed to hold this view (e.g. in the last few years John Ogbu, Thernstrom and Thernstrom, etc.).
"settled" : If you think the central role of g in the contemporary expert understanding of intelligence isn't settled, or that the issue of test bias isn't settled, I'd like to see references to support that claim.
Any view critical of the POV expressed in the article gets counterclaims covered extensively, but those were often followed with rejoinders, too. - I don't follow. If you mean claims like Arthur Jensen has the same goals as Hitler, then you can understand that some rejoinder is needed for balance. (BTW, in that case I wrote both the claim and the rejoinder.) If you have specific examples you want to address in the future, of course we'll talk about it.
--Rikurzhen 20:56, July 31, 2005 (UTC)
Rikurzhen sez: Having a PhD or even being a world famous evolutionary scientist doesn't (on its own) make you an expert on topics outside of your field. Then I guess we'd better dismiss The Bell Curve. It is not a scientific work. It was not written by experts, and it has a specific political agenda. Scientists first publish their research in peer-reviewed scientific journals, not in books written for the general reader who may not have the technical background needed to detect flaws in data and misinterpretations of data analyses. It is inappropriate for a scientist to do otherwise. I am slowly adding references to this, to intelligence, and to race until this more accurately reflects expert opinion. "Expert" doesn't just mean the experts who agree with one POV. It means all the experts in all the fields. That is what NPOV means. Jokestress 10:21, 1 August 2005 (UTC)
Richard Herrnstein, psychologist, wrote for decades on IQ. It would be inapporpriate to call anyone with a PhD who cares to write about anything an expert on that topic. That's not how the survey of expert opinion chose experts to survey. We must distinguish between the views of people whose work would give them knowledge of this subject and those who comment on it from outside. --Rikurzhen 11:56, August 1, 2005 (UTC)
Who are these alleged outsiders who are commenting? Can you name a few? Anthropologists? Evolutionary biologists? People from gnxp? Anyone with expert knowledge of "race," and anyone with expert knowledge of "intelligence" has something valuable to say. Further, anyone who has expertise on the history and philosophy of science has something valuable to say. This is a multidisciplinary issue. Your attempt to make an inside/outside distinction seems tenuous at best. Can you elaborate on who is "expert" and who is "outside" according to your assertion? Names or a list of disciplines would be ideal. Jokestress 17:15, 1 August 2005 (UTC)
Like any definition there are boundary issues. The relatively strict criteria S&R(1987) used to select experts to poll worked to significantly enrich for people who felt knowledgable enough to answer their survey questions. You're request for a quantum level distinction is avoiding my point. My point was that people who work with IQ and publish on these issues are the kind of experts whose opinions can be trusted to be informed. The brief position statement from the AAA does not warrant the unqualified label "expert" in the same context as the APA's concensus statement; failing to draw a distinction between them is inappropriate. Likewise, the opinions of SJ Gould cannot be regarded as "expert" on this topic, even though he was an expert on many things. The AAA and Gould do/did not do research on the question of a genetic contribution to group differences in IQ in any appreciable sense. They're opinions may be valuable, they may be insightful, they may be 100% correct, but they are not "expert" in the normal sense of the word. If you'd like an operational definition, consider the question: if the NSF or AAAS were to convene a task force to write a new concensus statement, what kind of person would they select, what organizations would be represented? The AAA would not be an obvious pick. --Rikurzhen 17:57, August 1, 2005 (UTC)
These "boundary issues" get to the crux of the NPOV issue. This article in its current iteration seems to make an arbitrary heirarchical distinction between science and non-science, when this is a multidsciplinary issue. The AAAS or NSF aren't more legitimate than the AAA in this field. That's just scientism, and that is most definitely POV. Jokestress 18:55, 1 August 2005 (UTC)
I am trying to interpret your comment charitably, but I can't figure it out. AAA (American Anthropological Association), AAAS (American Association for the Advancement of Science), NSF (National Science Foundation), APA (American Psychological Association), etc are all organizations of scientists. SJ Gould was a scientist. I'm saying that you need to be careful with who you call an "expert" because it matters as to what they're an expert in. My common sense understanding of the term is someone who has working knowledge of a subject at a deep level (i.e. a subject-area expert). But let's get back on point. My main concern was about the notion of a "false dichotomy" and that "many experts believe either the question itself is bogus". I don't see the literature supporting those claims. Thus, we shouldn't edit the article on that basis. --Rikurzhen 19:11, August 1, 2005 (UTC)
I don't see the literature supporting those claims. The literature on "race" is full of these claims. The literature on "intelligence" is full of these claims. I will be adding them to those articles as we go. This article attempts to set all that aside, when making those assumptions is a major issue in this controversy. There is a significant body of work saying race is biologically meaningless, a significant body of work saying "intelligence" cannot be measured with available psychometrics or even consistently defined, and a significant body of work exposing the problems of creating knowledge based on assumptions about "race" and "intelligence." While the most succinct, the AAA collective statement is anything but an outlier. They are experts in this area, like it or not. As I have said, one POV has jumped way out front on this. I am methodically laying the groundwork for all the revision that needs to be done to make this NPOV. Just today I added folkbiology and ethnobiology because there weren't even WP entries yet. That's how out of balance this topic is.
I suggest we hold off on "expert" until we resolve this "consensus" issue. I am still recommending "collective" as the best word to describe AAA, APA and WSJ most accurately. Jokestress 19:47, 1 August 2005 (UTC)
Those are the claims you were making. What literature supports your claim about a false dichotomy? What literature supports the claim that many experts on R&I believe the question is bogus? Certainly there is a tremendous literature from public intellectuals who are not themselves experts in this field making claims that the research is bogus. But that's not what you were claiming. What, for example, did you mean by One of the major arguments is that the argument about whether it's #1 or #2 is based on too many tendentious assumptions to be considered science? Who can we attribute that belief to? If you think I misunderstand you or you think that you were imprecise, then let's clear up exactly what you mean. --Rikurzhen 21:45, August 1, 2005 (UTC)
The very definition of a false dichotomy is to present the argument as "culture only" or "partially genetic." I don't think I need to show a source. It's a fact. Those are not the only two interpretive possibilities, and they are not even the two most widely held views. This entire article is structured around a fallacy of an excluded middle if we don't acknowledge this significant POV that the knowledge produced cannot answer the questions posed. As I said, I am going to add lots of stuff to race and intelligence to help readers understand that the foundations for all these findings and assertions are rather shaky and subject to interpretation. Those articles are fairly NPOV (not bad enough to warrant a tag), but this one has a number or serious issues. It's just going to take time. I might even make a Venn diagram tomorrow to explain if you think it will help. Personally, I'd rather deal with these point-by-point matters in the body of the text than cite sources for my talk page comments. If you feel like something is introduced into the article without a source, that's another matter. If you want to do quantum level, then you can answer my question posed earlier about who you consider "experts." Or better yet, you can cite a published source for "consensus." Jokestress 00:41, 2 August 2005 (UTC)
Definitions are not facts. Definitions are synthetic propositions that depend on social convention to give them meaning. For example, "A cow is a blurgh" has no basis in social convention and is thus, in some sense, false. But if some people start using the word "Blurgh" to talk about cows, you're starting to get linguistic agreement. The point here is that for you to say that "X means Y" is not enough. If you want to make a claim that one word means something else you need to either admit that you're restricting this definition to a particular context for the sake of discussion, or you have to show some basis is linguistic convention, which needs a source. --malathion talk 02:00, 2 August 2005 (UTC)
Jokestress, I think I might understand what you're trying to say. Let me see if I can summarize. You are claiming that in the "Culture-only or partially genetic explanation?" section, which discusses causal theories for group differences in g, it is inappropriate examine only the environment only and partly genetic hypotheses because this ignores what you consider to be two other views: [1] the question itself is bogus, or [2] that no meaningful interpretation can be made based on the available evidence. You would cite as examples of (2) the "The data are insufficient to support any reasonable opinion" response in the S&R(1987) survey and you would cite as evidence of (1) the AAA statement. Is that what you are saying? The short answer is that would be inappropriate. The long answer... First, the opinion that all race and intelligence research is bogus should be in this article. It has been since the beginning, and when I found the Sternberg (2005) paper, I added it prominently. Second, experts: Broadly, psychologists, sociologists, cognitive scientists, behavior geneticists, and education-specialists are the people likely to have expertise in this subject area. This is not to say that individuals in other fields might not also be experts. Sternberg is clearly a subject area expert. The members of the AAA do not obviously have comparable expertise. Not to say that the AAA statement should not be in this article, but rather that it should not be represented as "expert" and equally authoritative as the APA and WSJ statements. Consider a hypothetical example: if the AAA released a statement denouncing medical research that includes race, it would be noteworthy in a race and medicine article but it would be wrong to call them "experts" on par with a statement from the AMA. Third, NPOV makes it very clear that (the text of) articles should discriminate between majority and minority views and that when a topic leads to expansive articles or a series of article it is appropriate to make necessary assumptions. The point about discriminating between views means that the controversy section should make it clear who believes what. This includes discriminating between the views of subject area experts versus those of other intellectuals. The use of article structure to partition specific subtopics is also a necessary part of that discrimination. The point about making necessary assumptions follows from there. We should discuss the claim that the research is bogus as much as needed to describe views on that topic. But when we move on to discussing other sub-topics, it is not necessary to mention the "bogus" view again each time. The bogus versus non-bogus question must be discriminated from the other questions encompassed by this topic. One of those questions is, of course, the cause of group differences. The majority and minority hypotheses are that the cause is partly-genetic or environment only. (Entirely genetic is a fringe view with no prominent scholarly adherents.) The "data is insufficient" view is not a hypothesis, but the inability to choose between these two hypotheses. If we could find a prominent published adherent of this view, we could mention him/her, but I know of none. (Obviously, being undecided is an alternative to any scientific question and we have documentation that some are undecided on this question despite feeling as if they are informed.) But "bogus" is not an alternative to this question. It is an answer to a much broader question. Once we discuss that question, we can make the necessary assumption that the research isn't bogus so that we can discuss the views of those who think it isn't bogus on the various sub-topics found in this article. Sorry for going so long, I hope I was clear. --Rikurzhen 02:35, August 2, 2005 (UTC)


That is the gist of the point I am making. It comes down to a couple of things. The majority of experts on "race" believe it is biologically meaningless. Taking your analogy that the AMA is more "expert" on race and medicine is another expression of the same problem. The "intelligence" people are not more "expert" than the "race" people. This is a multidisciplinary issue which requires the sorts of synthesis of disciplines happening in academia today. This article takes the tone that "intelligence" is more important than "race" in this discussion. That reflects the bias of the editors.


Rather than deal with reverts and edit wars in this section, I am going to spend some time on race and intelligence base articles for a bit as groundwork for the major POV reworking this article needs. I have a few dozen references to add. In the meantime, maybe we can figure out how we are handling additional information at the bottom of the R&I page. Jokestress 06:58, 2 August 2005 (UTC)
When you say "yes", are you saying that you understand my point about NPOV: discrimination of sub-topics and making necessary assumptions? If you are, then are you also agreeing that this dissolves the "false dichotomy"? Because then I am left not know what "the major POV reworking this article needs". If I understood it, and we agreed on what the problem was, I could help you fix it.
To the second issue: what is an anthropologist and what do they really say? Anthropologists and/or evolutionary biologists are experts on race in the sense of questions like "what is race?" The "biologically meaningless" bit is frequently misinterpreted. They are saying that race as a taxonomic category (like species) does not apply to humans. They are not saying that self-identified race has no biological or genetic correlates. Indeed, researchers of this view are saying that what does exist are breeding populations. Another concept along this vein is the idea that variation is clinal -- this goes to the question of race as taxonomy. However, none of this has anything to do with what's meant by "race" in contemporary research on "intelligence". All agree that self-identified races are not distinct, but are in fact arbitrary in their number, and are laden with social/cultural values, and yet the properties that Westerners use to distinguish "races" are largely phenotypic, and heritable and thus have a genetic underpinning. For example, traits like skin color. But also a long list of other physical and biochemical traits. All agree that individuals labeled by self-identified race (i.e. populations) statistically cluster at the level of genotype (e.g. Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza's work and Tang et al 2005) because self-identifed race is consonant with ancestry: people of the same self-identified race share more recent ancestors than two people of different self-identified races; hence "breeding populations". The point where some fuss is made is the assertion by R&I researchers that the brain is just as susceptible to the historical emergence of variation between groups as the physcial and metabolic traits that all parties recognize. (Half of all human genes are expressed in the brain, and so the idea that evolution left these genes untouched is implausible.) If there's any point where real contention is sometimes made, it is there. But that concept, the genes+environment -> brain -> behavior model, is outside the purvue of anthropology and clearly a matter of psychology and behavior genetics. The AAA may have put up a fuss, but they were attacking a straw man; no R&I research claims that "races" are distinct taxon, nor is it even obvious that it would matter for their research either way.
maybe we can figure out how we are handling additional information at the bottom of the R&I page. hmm? --Rikurzhen 07:48, August 2, 2005 (UTC)
See "Further reading" below. Jokestress 00:04, 3 August 2005 (UTC)

Outdenting, merely for typographical reasons...Jokestress,

  1. about inserting additional references: please don't do that. Instead, read them and present their viewpoints in the article body text. If you think a point of view is mis- or underrepresented, then please fix it. Don't just provide pointers. You ought to trust us that we have indeed read a fair amount of the work you are alluding to. (Remember that my second message to you on your talk page is such a reading list along those lines, which I encouraged you digest and summarise for these articles.) Also please believe us that we are doing an honest job of trying to present those viewpoints. As you obviously think we failed in doing so, please do better: read, digest, write (from your other contributions I can see that you have a talent for this—you could help the R&I article immensely if you applied you skills to improving the presentation of the viewpoint that you feel are begin short-changed here). But don't just presume to educate us by giving us expanded reading lists. Wikipedia is not a list of references, and it has no mechanisms to arbitrate "further reading" suggestions. I fear you are wasting valuable energy.
  2. Personally, I disagree with your denunciation of expertise, but I can see that it is compatible with NPOV. By analogy, biologists are no more experts on the origin of species then are theologians, so if we present issues where these two groups of academics disagree, we shouldn't call one of them experts. (As I said, I disagree. But WP uses NPOV, not "Natural science POV", so this particular medium seems to favour your position (assuming I understand it)). I naïvely hope that we can avoid the term, so instead of saying "experts think X' we will say "psychologists think X". I don't know if that will work, but we can try to keep the suggestion in mind. Arbor 09:11, 2 August 2005 (UTC)
Arbor, Maybe I'm not being clear. It's not a problem to call anthropologists "experts" on the topic of "what is race?", but it is a problem to write the public controversy section the way it is currently written where there is no discrimination between what kind of "expert" (i.e. what subject area) is saying what. Thus, I repeated the claim that the view of the AAA is perfect for the article. The best way to solve this is to first differentiate down to questions where contrasting opinions can be demonstrated. Two questions are currently co-mingled in the public controversy lead: (1) "is R&I bogus?" and (2) "what is the cause of group differences in IQ?" Anthropologists can comment on (1) in terms of "what is race?", but not (2) because that's a debate that they don't engage in. The need for making these kinds of distinctions is all but spelled out in WP:NPOV#Giving_.22equal_validity.22. --Rikurzhen 16:52, August 2, 2005 (UTC)
Let me give a historical example. For centuries, scientists argued over whether "nymphomania" was congenital or environmental. At some point, a lot of "non-experts" or "outsiders" (according to Rikurzhen's definition) started pointing out that this nature/nurture argument was moot, because the diagnosis was bogus. That's what is going on here. The scientists who busy themselves with producing knowledge based on several assumptions carry on despite the considerable number of scholars who point out that this entire endeavor may be a cultural artifact. Every new technology that comes along gets put in use to reify "race" or measure "intelligence." Those who look at the history of science and philosophy of science see a familiar pattern in the current iteration of this R&I debate. They see this as pathological science or some less loaded term.
This article as it stands implies that the scientific debate is legitimate, when it in fact might be (according to people who study this sort of thing) yet another example of science gone awry. Despite a nod toward the "fundamentally flawed" POV, this article forges ahead as if this POV is a minor concern. Jokestress 00:23, 3 August 2005 (UTC)
"expert" vs "outsider" - an example of this distinction applied to this topic can be found in Samelson (1982) "Intelligence and some of its testers" Science 215: 656-657.
historical example - of course this is not apt as an analogy -- the practical importance of IQ and the social significance of race are not in question -- I personally understand the idea that a research question can be "bogus" or "fundamentally flawed" and as I tried to make clear with repetition on the talk page, this POV certainly should be described.
here's an equally loaded example - it would not be acceptable to write the global warming article and say that experts disagree and then give quotations from Exxon next to a statement from the IPCC
this article forges ahead as if this POV is a minor concern - we should say as much as needed on this question, but we should not purposefully confound answers to that question with answers to the questions that "experts" are asking. the fact that the majority of people with specific knowledge of this subject don't think it is bogus should be reason enough for doing so.
I'll try to work on the controversy section to demonstrate disambiguation. --Rikurzhen 03:35, August 3, 2005 (UTC)
Global warming is indeed an excellent example. I have seen it brought up many times here. Follow the money, as they say. The scientists funded by ExxonMobil produce knowledge much in the way the scientists funded by Pioneer Fund produce knowledge. In both cases, their research results miraculously match up with the political aims of their benefactors. Jokestress 04:50, 3 August 2005 (UTC)
I would personally love to see evidence to support such a claim. But of course the most robust data sets (for intelligence and global warming) come from government-funded research. --Rikurzhen 05:07, August 3, 2005 (UTC)

I would actually like to read Sternberg et al. (2005), because that seems like a potentially good source for counterbalancing this article. I just checked with the library, but they're still on holiday, and I'm not in the Psychology Department (I don't even know where it is...). Anybody here who has that paper? Arbor 08:27, 1 August 2005 (UTC)

Footnotecruft

I think "my" system of giving references to an external shared reference page now works. Thanks for feedback so far.

There is a trivial editing task ahead, which would encompass giving all the footnotes another check-up. I have started that, but again have become somewhat frustrated by the Wikipedia:Footnote3 system. (Mind you, it's very good within the confines of Wikimedia software, and even my convoluted brain finds no way to improve it.) What annoys me especially are the footnotes that consist of nothing else than a single further reference, i.e., footnotes whose contents is of the form

16. Snyderstein and Goldfarb (1845)

These are now just an annoying extra click.

Could we adopt a mixed system?

  1. When a foonote (1) contains extra information, or (2) points many more than just one or two reference then we keep the current system
  2. When a footnote contains nothing more than an Author–Year citation (possibly with a page number) then we kill it, and move the reference back up into the body text.

Did I explain this well? So body text now has two forms. Either it looks like this:

A statement meant to "outline mainstream science on intelligence" [41] was issued the same year. ...

Notes
...
41. Gottfredson 2001. Of the 100 respondents, 52% signed, 7% indicated that elements of the statement do not represent the mainstream, and 11% did not know enough to say. An additional 14% declined to sign despite generally agreeing with the content, with 8% fearing the personal and professional consequences of signing, and 6% disagreeing with the mode of presentation. Another 4% disagreed with the concept of general intelligence itself, regarding it as “not a useful concept." 12% gave no explanation or did not want to sign "at this time." Thirty-one additional invitees did not respond before the deadline. See also pp. 32-34 in Bergstern 2005 and Chapter XII in Shrumpton–Møller 1451. ...

This got a footnote because the footnote itself is really long and contains several complicated references.

On this other hand, if we are just pointing to the literature, I propose the following style:

A statement meant to "outline mainstream science on intelligence" (Gottfredsson 2001) was issued the same year.

Granted, the body text becomes a bit longer (actually, the template would allow quite a number of fancy tricks with smaller fonts and superscripts and whatnot). But it (1) saves the annoying extra click, (2) is more informative, and (3) is much easier to maintain when the body text is moved around, as we are doing quite a lot.

I completely realise that this mixed approach to notes is not standard. But it is simpler and safer, and would increase the likelihood of us actually having the references in order. It a technologically induced constraint, but sometimes that's a good enough argument. Arbor 12:06, 1 August 2005 (UTC)

"Cruft"?

Your suggestion makes sense to me, and it is a way that is used in many publications. It gets to be very annoying to the compulsive footnote checker to try to read a page that is pockmarked with footnotes. One gets "yo-yo eyes" very quickly. The in-line notes style is much easier to deal with. If it is only a book title and a page number, then your eye glides over the reference. If it is something that needs to be explained but would distort the flow of the paragraph, then it goes into a footnote or an endnote. P0M 15:50, 1 August 2005 (UTC)

From Cruft: Words ending in -cruft (e.g. fancruft, schoolcruft, bandcruft), referring to detailed, generally trivial information relating to a particular subject, appears to be a neologism created on Wikipedia. Arbor 16:57, 1 August 2005 (UTC)

Further reading

Now that Arbor's excellent footnote system is fully implemented, I am going to start adding a bunch of texts to balance this thing out a little. The first order of business seems to be the "Further reading" section, which currently contains just one book. Shall we:

  • 1. expand that to include a selective bibliography (which will undoubtedly be some huge drawn-out discussion of what should be included/excluded)
  • 2. remove the section and send readers to the reference page
  • 3. (lest I create a false dichotomy) another option

Personally, I would like to see an annotated bibliography on this, as mentioned on the references Talk page. I would also like to see the external links organized in a way to help the reader better understand the controversy and find more on the topics/POVs they wish to explore. Jokestress 17:38, 1 August 2005 (UTC)

I cannot see a mechanism by which to select or maintain a further reading section. I vote to remove. Arbor 18:33, 1 August 2005 (UTC)
I don't think a further reading section is fundamentally unmanagable (e.g. consider external links), but if there is only one item in it, then we can substitute this for a external link to a book review or a see also link to a stub for the book. --Rikurzhen 03:38, August 3, 2005 (UTC)
Incidentally, I think that WP is very bad an managing external link sections as well. But that's another discussion. Arbor 11:20, 3 August 2005 (UTC)

what is the consensus here? --Rikurzhen 06:36, August 8, 2005 (UTC)

Accusations of systematic misrepresentations and the Pioneer Fund

Should obviously be in the main article. If there are systematic misrepresentations, it affects the whole field. Ultramarine 11:15, 3 August 2005 (UTC)

Ah. Well, I don't agree (this is a summary style article), but we can discuss it cordially here. I would suggest you work on the relevant subsection, and when we write the three-paragraph summary for section 2 you can lobby for its inclusion. (Remember that ideally the text of section on the main article will be three paragraphs of text, not only a one-line web llnk. But for editorial purposes it seemed wise to write that section before we summarise it.) Arbor 11:18, 3 August 2005 (UTC)
You have not answered my point. If there are systematic misrepresentations, it affects the whole field. This should not be included sometimes in the future, but now. Regarding the so called "Race and intelligence controversy" article, the name is pov since there are controversies in other articles in this area. Please change the title. Ultramarine 11:22, 3 August 2005 (UTC)
Look man, I am currently only doing the footnotes, and that won't work if you are duplicating sections (without moving the footnotes along as well). Cut me some slack. About renaming Race and intelligence controversy: I can see your point, especially after you removed several paragraphs on controversies that you didn't think belonged to that section. How about Race and intelligence (public controversy)? I would prefer that, since it gives more focus and allows us to debate the scientific controversies somewhere else, which seems to be concordant with your edits. Arbor 11:30, 3 August 2005 (UTC)
Again, you have not answered my point (see above). If the name is Race and intelligence (public controversy), then the systematic misrepresentations do not belong there. Ultramarine 11:34, 3 August 2005 (UTC)
I have no idea about your point. I am really only doing the footnotes right now; I hardly even read the sections I am cleaning up. Arbor 11:45, 3 August 2005 (UTC)
Then you should obviously not be doing the reverts. The one who removed the text about misrepresentations should speak out. Again, if there are systematic misrepresentations, it affects the whole field. This should not be included sometimes in the future, but now. Ultramarine 11:53, 3 August 2005 (UTC)
But it isn't removed, it is moved. I said so on your user talk page, and you can also find it in the preceding section. The old section 2.3 ("Systematic ... Pioneer Fund") has been moved, together with all of section 2, to Race and intelligence controversy, where you can find it in currently two (slightly differing) versions: the one from (the old) Race and intelligence and the one from (the old) Race and intelligence controversy. The reason for this is that we were starting to edit two versions of the same text on two different pages, which is maintenance hell. So all of section 2 is on a separate page (with the Pioneer fund subsection eagerly awaiting your attention). When section 2 is more or less finished (we seem to disagree over what should go into that section), we will write a 3 paragraph summary for Race and intelligence. Arbor 12:03, 3 August 2005 (UTC)
If there are systematic misrepresentations, it affects the whole field and should be mentioned in the main article. This should not be included sometimes in the future, but now. There is no reason we cannot edit the text on the main article. Another again, the name "Race and intelligence controversy" is both pov and factually incorrect. If the name should be "Race and intelligence (public controversy)", then the systematic misrepresentations do not belong there. Ultramarine 12:08, 3 August 2005 (UTC)
There is no reason we cannot edit the text on the main article. No. But there is a good reason for not editing the text on two articles at the same time, which was the case over the last few days. (Witness the slightly out of sync versions of several of the paragraphs.) Arbor 12:17, 3 August 2005 (UTC)
Who are arguing that we should discuss the Pioneer fund on several different pages? And again, see my above points. You are violating NPOV by excluding on the main page that the field may contain systematic misrepsentations. Ultramarine 12:21, 3 August 2005 (UTC)
Nobody is arguing that we should discuss the Pioneer fund on several different pages. On the contrary. However, until yesterday, we did. There was a section called "Accusations of systematic misrepresentations and the Pioneer fund" on two pages: Section 2.3 of Race and intelligence and Section 5.1 of Race and intelligence controversy. Both sections were being edited. That's a bad idea. So I proposed we kill the incarnation on the main page and implement the change to Wikepedia:Summary style that we have had in mind for some time, see #Summary style - Race and intelligence controversy). I am sorry that you take offence at what is supposed to be a heroic effort to coördinate our editing. As I said, currently there are two versions of the Pioneer fund section on Race and intelligence controversy, and I urge you to merge them or destroy either of them, so that there is only a single incarnation and we can move on discussing what it should say and what significance that should have. Arbor 12:32, 3 August 2005 (UTC)
If there are systematic misrepresentations, it affects the whole field and should be mentioned in the main article. This should not be included sometimes in the future, but now. You are violating NPOV by excluding on the main page that the field may contain systematic misrepsentations. There is no reason we cannot edit the text on the main article. The only editing on other pages have been done by those who oppose including systematic misrepresentations in the main article. Another again, the name "Race and intelligence controversy" is both pov and factually incorrect. If the name should be "Race and intelligence (public controversy)", then the systematic misrepresentations do not belong there. Ultramarine 12:40, 3 August 2005 (UTC)
Maybe you could suggest a different name? My suggestion for ... (public controversy) was based on (apart from consistency) the fact that you have removed several paragraphs from that subarticle that would belong under the scientific controversy (if I understand your motivation correctly), so I was assuming you wanted to separate the public debate from the scientific debate. (Obviously I was wrong.) In that case, the accusations about the research begin tainted by its funding (if that is the gist of the section) seemed to be to belong to the public debate (for example, the point is made in Shermer's book about pseudoscience if I remember correctly). However, I clearly misunderstood you. It would be more efficient if you proposed a new headline for section 2 and the associated subarticle, so that I understand what you think should be in there. Arbor 12:49, 3 August 2005 (UTC)
Something with (public controversy) may be ok. Again, then systematic misrepresentations of the field do not belong there. Ultramarine 12:54, 3 August 2005 (UTC)
Now I understand you strong reaction, after clicking though the article history. The Pioneer fund section used to be under the section Background information, for example around July 11 2005, when you were involved in it. After some reorganisation after the Featured Article nomination, it was moved under the new headline Public controversy, together with some other stuff in the second half of July. For example, when you edited the section yesterday, it was already under Public controversy, but I understand you don't agree with that, because you think it belongs under Background information. Did I get that right, at least in part? Arbor 13:12, 3 August 2005 (UTC)
Where the article may have been sorted previosuly is not important for where it should be. The strong possibility of systematic misrepresentations in the field should obviosuly be mentioned in the main article. Ultramarine 13:17, 3 August 2005 (UTC)
So you are ok with it being sorted under the headline Public controversy (as it was yesterday, when you edited it) as long as it is featured prominently on the main page? Arbor 13:23, 3 August 2005 (UTC)
No. Systematic misrepresentations is not only a public controversy. Ultramarine 13:41, 3 August 2005 (UTC)
(This is a bit exhausting. Maybe you could just tell me where the section should go?) Do you think the section belongs under Background information? (I just asked that, but I seem to have misunderstood your answer...) Arbor 13:50, 3 August 2005 (UTC)
Background information is fine. Ultramarine 13:53, 3 August 2005 (UTC)
Hm... in its current form, the section is question explains why the research is controversial, and it is used in the public debate. However, I suspect one could change it a bit (removing the implications), give it a historical perspective, and in some way merge it into the History section (chronicling how some of this research has been funded)? One could then mention that some people have attacked the hereditary position based on its funding in the Public controversy section without rehashing the funding history. I'm not convinced that would really work, but maybe you want to give it a shot? Using this trick you could get the Pioneer fund angle into two subsections. I also suspect that I don't quite understand the magnitude of your argument. At least the current form of the Pioneer fund section (which is just two paragraphs) doesn't seem to merit the central placement you want to give this material. Maybe you would want to expand on the section. Arbor 14:09, 3 August 2005 (UTC)
Again, systematic misrepresentations do not belong in "public controversy" at all. Background information may be a good place, probably with its own section called "Systematic misrepresentations?" Ultramarine 14:15, 3 August 2005 (UTC)
I fear that would be difficult without violating WP:NOR. But I really need to see the section you are thinking of before I can comment. I again urge you to flesh out those two paragraphs first. Arbor 14:19, 3 August 2005 (UTC)
Just use the 3 paragraphs that has been deleted from the main page. Ultramarine 14:22, 3 August 2005 (UTC)
These 3 paragraphs currently exist in 2 versions: Race and intelligence controversy#Accusations of systematic misrepresentations and the Pioneer Fund v1 and Race and intelligence controversy#Accusations of systematic misrepresentations and the Pioneer Fund v2. Please heed my repeated encouragements to merge the two or remove one of them. (See also Race and intelligence controversy#divergence of text, where the discrepancy is pointed out). I just want to get the number of incarnations of this argument down to 1. Afterwards we can discuss where it should go or what it should mean. (In its current form, I think it belongs where it is, but I am willing to reconsider that after we get it cleaned up so that we are all, as they say, on the same page.) Arbor 14:30, 3 August 2005 (UTC)
If there are systematic misrepresentations, it affects the whole field and should be mentioned in the main article. This should not be included sometimes in the future, but now. You are violating NPOV by excluding on the main page that the field may contain systematic misrepsentations. There is no reason we cannot edit the text on the main article. The 3 removed paragraph should probably have their own section in "Background information" using a title like "Systematic misinterpretations". Whatever other versions exists in other articles do not affect the above arguments. The only editing on other pages have been done by those who oppose including systematic misrepresentations in the main article. Another again, the name "Race and intelligence controversy" is both pov and factually incorrect. If the name should be "Race and intelligence (public controversy)", then the systematic misrepresentations do not belong there. Ultramarine 14:36, 3 August 2005 (UTC)
If I understand that response then you seem to be adverse to merging the two versions. Would you like me to do it instead? I seem to be the least qualified here, but I cannot see how we can constructively debate the epistemological significance of 3 paragraphs that we don't know which are. Arbor 14:41, 3 August 2005 (UTC)
Any merging and editing can be done on the main page. Stop violating NPOV. Ultramarine 14:44, 3 August 2005 (UTC)
Would you advocate moving section 6.3 of Race and intelligence controversy to become a new subsection 1.2 of Race and intelligence? Thereby it would exist under the Background information headline, and be placed on the main page? (I don't like that, but by all means lets try it.) Arbor 14:58, 3 August 2005 (UTC)
(Later:) Forget it. Somebody else has merged the sections. I am happy. Arbor 15:18, 3 August 2005 (UTC)
Fine. Then add back the deleted paragraphs. Ultramarine 15:27, 3 August 2005 (UTC)
As you can see, I have just advocated thinking about that. But first, the paragraphs need to be cleaned up. (They are really badly sourced.) You can help. Arbor 15:37, 3 August 2005 (UTC)
Unfortunately I had to use the Two-version template to stop the deletions. Now, lets discuss the facts. What are the objections to the facts presented in my version? Ultramarine 16:18, 3 August 2005 (UTC)
Thanks Ultramarine for making one of my primary points! The editors who have developed this series have decided among them what goes on the "main" page, when the main issue is in fact the controversy, not the results of the controversial testing. Jokestress 16:26, 3 August 2005 (UTC)
Um... I'm not sure that you two are actually in agreement, but I haven't quite figured out what Ultramarine is proposing. So for the sake of all, everyone try to figure out what they're really saying rather than just objecting. Try to reconcile (1) the need for summary style with (2) the demands for attention of this or that topic. Later... --Rikurzhen 16:32, August 3, 2005 (UTC)
Jokestress, I count a number of concrete proposals above (for example at 14:58) that I have made that would make the passage in question appear on the main page. I really have nothing against it. Please assume good faith. But please can we start editing that section? It is in terrible state.Arbor 16:40, 3 August 2005 (UTC)
I have nothing against editing using references, as long as there is not just deletions. I suggest that you present your proposed version here on the talk page. Ultramarine 16:57, 3 August 2005 (UTC)
Ultramarine's and my point is that this series is POV at the headline and article division level. It is a fundamental problem with the way the information is presented throughout the series. Two for two on edit conflicts, so I'll be back when this cools down. I am also making a talk page suggestion below. Jokestress 16:45, 3 August 2005 (UTC)
Incidentally, Rik and I suspect the two of you disagree on the proper name and focus of the controversy article. Rik and I are fine with its current name, but Ultramarine is arguing for Race and intelligence (public controversy) or something similar, so as to focus on the public debate as opposed to the scientific one (he has made very large cuts in that direction as well). From what you have said so far, I suspect you disagree with that. Could you meet us at the talk page of the Controversy article? Otherwise I guess we will rename it quickly, because Ultramarine seems to feel very strongly about it. I guess don't care much either way. Arbor 17:27, 3 August 2005 (UTC)
(Later:) Or wait! Maybe this is a blessing in disguise. Maybe if we have Race and intelligence (public controversy) then you can get the Race and intelligence controversy main article that I believe you want. That article could itself be a summary article that shares with Race and intelligence a number of subsections, but can impose whatever change in structure or tone you would prefer, and contain other subarticles (like, say, Scientific racism or whatever)? (Well, it's a wild idea: two summary articles sharing a sizeable intersection of subarticles. But this topic calls for clever solutions. Maybe I am just crazy and still completely misunderstand you. In that case ignore me.) Arbor 18:18, 3 August 2005 (UTC)

References

Phew. I moved stuff around, I hope Jokestress and Ultramarine are OK with this. (I am really trying to read your minds here.) I used the slightly "more cleaned-up" version from the Controversy page, but there are at least three issues of very bad referencing that I would like the cognoscenti to consider: (moved the list from the Controversy page). It's really one of our worst-written and worst-referenced sections just now, so please help me do something about that.

  • The footnote called "Rusthon" points to

    Joseph L Graves, "What a tangled web he weaves: Race, reproductive strategies and Rushton's life history theory," Anthropological Theory 2, no. 2 (2002): 131–54; Leonard Lieberman, "How 'Caucasoids' got such big crania and why they shrank. From Morton to Rushton.," Current Anthropology 42, no. 1 (February 2001): 69–95; Zack Cernovsky, "On the similarities of American blacks and whites: A reply to J.P. Rushton," Journal of Black Studies 25 (1995): 672.

All all three necessary? Which one includes the porn and Penthouse references? Is this really a good summary of the scholarly malfeasance that Rushton is criticised for? I would prefer just a single references, instead of 3 that say the same.
The porn and penthouse refernce is the one that is publicly available. I see no problem with having several supporting references. Ultramarine 17:41, 3 August 2005 (UTC)
  • Ditto for Gould. I would like a single reference that criticises Gould. Should be easy enough. The Gasper (2002) reference I already discounted (see above), and the "Goosed-up graphics" is also not so good, since it attacks an argument that doesn't really have anything to do with Gould's position qua race and intelligence research.
  • The "Pioneer Film" footnote has not reference at all and is just dangling in the air. Arbor 17:21, 3 August 2005 (UTC)
That is beacuse you removed the referencec. Ultramarine 17:42, 3 August 2005 (UTC)

Talk page suggestion

This page is extremely cumbersome. I have a suggestion and no idea how it might be implemented. I'd love to see this look more like a nested thread on a bulletin board or something, with the top talk page listing the heading (and maybe how many new responses), and those links taking someone to that heading on its own page. I got to thinking about it after seeing how Arbor made the footnotes and references work, which is very cool. I will be unavailable most of today, but I wanted to throw this out there. Jokestress 16:50, 3 August 2005 (UTC)

Pioneer Fund

An Editor deleted this material with the comment, " The article is not about the Pioneer Fund":

  • It has also paid for publication and large-scale distribution of materials like the Nazi propaganda film "Hereditary Defective" to high schools, colleges, and churches across the US. The film was produced by the Racial Political Office of the Nazi Party. The fascist Roger Pearson received over a million dollar in eighties and nineties [3][4]. The Southern Poverty Law Center lists the Pioneer Fund as a hate group. The Pioneer Fund has stated it rejects racism, and has claimed it is the victim of smear campaigns waged by those who consider a discussion of race to be taboo.

I added a much shorter description of the Pioneer Fund:

  • The Pioneer Fund was established in 1937 to further eugenics.

And that was also deleted. The Pioneer Fund and its motives are highly relevant to this article as they have been leading funders of research into race and intelligence. If references that characterize the Pioneer Fund are removed then so should all references to research funded by them. -Willmcw 20:49, August 3, 2005 (UTC)

Do you have a reference for The Pioneer Fund was established in 1937 to further eugenics? hitssquad 21:16, 3 August 2005 (UTC)
It's in their charter.[5] -Willmcw 21:25, August 3, 2005 (UTC)
I suggest that the name of the article be changed to Pioneer Fund and that all references to race and intelligence be deleted. --[ Hitssquad ]
That's a drastic proposal and I doubt that you are serious. Nonetheless, it would be interesting to see how much of the material here was paid for by the Pioneer Fund. -Willmcw 22:13, August 3, 2005 (UTC)
I was serious. The article is being used for advertising purposes. The original contents of the article should be deleted, the advertising items should remain, and the name of the article should be changed to reflect those remaining contents. hitssquad 17:24, 4 August 2005 (UTC)
I've rewritten the Pioneer Fund summary. Critics often fallaciously rely on removing it from its historical context and on the assumption that race and intelligence research is racist. Eugenics was considered at the time to have great potential and was embraced by most developed nations. This summary needs to note the questionable views of some of the fund's historical members, but not go so far as to reduce it to the views of these members, as the vast majority of its work is relatively uncontroversial, and sometimes quite notable (e.g. the Minnesota Twins Project).--Nectarflowed T 22:03, 3 August 2005 (UTC)
I'd quibble with "vast majority", but since it ins't in the article it isn't relevant. As of 1937 it was not a "scholarly" field, so I'll remove that word. -Willmcw 22:13, August 3, 2005 (UTC)
Eugenics was an academic discipline at many universities, and the 1930s were still part of the eugenics era.--Nectarflowed T 11:57, 4 August 2005 (UTC)
What universities had eugenics programs in 1937? -Willmcw 22:55, August 4, 2005 (UTC)
In the 1940s eugenics was still being tauted in high school and university text books. The stigmatization you're referring to that occured in reaction to the Nazi abuses didn't happen overnight. Tamer eugenics programs continued for decades.--Nectarflowed T 23:17, 4 August 2005 (UTC)
Ultramarine has just reverted all the good edits you folks made to that section. (Kudos, by the way. That was a very nice example of collaboritive editing by people with differing viewpoints that resulted in an improved presentation.) I am a bit exasparated by U's editing style and tone on the talk page, so I am not sure what we should do about this. I would prefer to have his viewpoints incorporated (and I hope yesterday's multi-hour session is documents my openness to accomodate his ideas, though I find them ill adviced), but I don't have the energy for yet another round. The collaborative version of Nectar, Rik, Will, and Hits is much better written, clearer, and describes the anti-Rushton POV home much more forcefully than Ultra's (somewhat petty and random) rant about the Pioneer fund (I actually think his POV is much better served in the collaborative version). Suggestions? I am clearly not qualified to communicate with Ultramarine. Arbor 15:22, 4 August 2005 (UTC)
Your version is certainly not NPOV. It omits all recent referenced questionable activity and criticism as well as the magnitude of the grants. Ultramarine 15:43, 4 August 2005 (UTC)
An article incorporating editors' viewpoints is an article incorporating advertising. Can you imagine showing this article to an acquaintance? The person might naturally be expecting to see an article about Race and Intelligence, but instead sees a bunch of advertising incorporated into the main body of the text. Make it editors'-viewpoints-free and you have an advertising free article that people from any viewpoint can agree is an item of useful reference. hitssquad 18:26, 4 August 2005 (UTC)
Hitssquad, you do not seem to understand wikipedia:NPOV. Wikipedia should not hide different views. Ultramarine 02:15, 5 August 2005 (UTC)
The advertisements placed in the text were not views on Race and Intelligence. They were advertisements for products unrelated to Race and Intelligence. Wikipedia can hide advertisements without violating NPOV. hitssquad 03:34, 5 August 2005 (UTC)
It sounds like your're saying that some editors have been trying to push the article toward something that would more appropriately be called anti-race and intelligence. If such is happening, they have a lot of company. Steven Pinker has noted how when dealing with taboo science topics, like genetics, ordinarily intelligent scientists lose some of their abilities and start to distort things.[6]--Nectarflowed T 20:42, 4 August 2005 (UTC)
What is your point? Again, your version was certainly not NPOV. It omited all recent referenced questionable activity and criticism as well as the magnitude of the grants. Ultramarine 02:18, 5 August 2005 (UTC)

Pioneer Fund summary

Arbor, I think Ultramarine just feels strongly about this topic and is letting that affect his edits. Let me rehash again the problems with the old Pioneer summary (these issues are coming up at the Pioneer page also).

1. Science funding obviously always deals with large amounts of money. For example, California's stem cell institute annually provides $300 million in funding. Emphasizing the relatively tiny amount of Pioneer funding (it is small fund) is probably meant to imply to vulnerable readers that it is actually a very large amount and that there is something sinister here.

2. The film they distributed was a eugenics film, produced by the early (pre-war i.e. pre-considered-to-be-evil) Nazi party. Ultramarine has described it here as a "Nazi propaganda film," relying on that vulnerable readers will bring their definition of later Nazi atrocities to the Fund's activities. This is a reductio ad hitlerum logical fallacy.

3. Ultramarine then goes on to introduce a grantee as "the fascist Roger Pearson," and proceeds to emphasize the relatively small (but spuriosly appearing to be large) monetary amount of his grants. I've explained on the Pioneer Fund talk page to Ultramarine why Wikipedia shouldn't dishonestly frame phenomenon, and this isn't as bad as what occurred there, but it is still unacceptable.

Roger Pearson is an athropologist and founder of several journals, including The Journal of Indo-European Studies, an anthropology, archaeology, and linguistics journal which one of the gnxp writers states to be "rather prestigious"[7] (I don't personally know). Prior to becoming an anthropologist, apparently in the 50s and 60s, his writings were extreme-rightist, and in the 70s he apparently moved into the conservative mainstream.[8] Opponents try to close the conversation by dismissing him as a fascist etc.

4. The Southern Poverty Law Center uses fallacious reasoning when they label the fund a "hate group,"[9] and they pretend the large amount of valuable scientific research Pioneer has funded at dozens of prominent universities doesn't exist. One third of their explanation is that it conducts race and intelligence research, which they consider to be scientific racism.

Another third of their reasoning fails to differentiate between the modern organization and the historical organization, and refers to criticism that their history reflects the history of the US, i.e. it contains historical attitudes, such as Anglocentrism, that are now disaproved of. This history allegedly includes in the 1930s or 1940s aiding in the publishing of the autobiography of a then-popular racist southern novelist, Thomas Dixon.

The last third of their reasoning refers to the funding of immigration reform organizations and of an extreme right (paleoconservative and white nationalist) journalist and editor named Jared Taylor. For an example of what apparently qualifies as white nationalist journalism, see this American Renaissance page of articles, including one that depicts Jensen being harassed by demonstrators. This is just standard US republican writing, and is in line with or a little to the right of the views of most viewers of Fox News.

--Nectarflowed T 22:21, 4 August 2005 (UTC)


Responding to the numbered points:
1. The type of research that will be (not has been) funded by the California stem cell research program is not comparable to the type of research conducted by Pioneer Fund researchers. They are apples and oranges.
2. The film was created by Nazis to further eugenics. That's the plain truth, not an innuendo or a logical fallacy. OTOH, it doesn't need to be in this article.
3. Searching on [Fascist "Roger Pearson"] brings many results, such as these: [10][11][12][13][14], etc. Pearson is or was a fascist, according to numerous sources.
4. If you have a rebuttal from the Pioneer or a source which criticizes the SPLC's reasoning for calling the Pioneer Fund a hate group then that's worthwhile. But we shouldn't use our own logic and reasoning to judge the designation wrong, because that would be original research.
Regarding the relevance of the Pioneer Fund's mission statement, it is relevant when science is funded by a group with an agenda. It goes directly to the credibility of the material their research produces.
-Willmcw 23:24, August 4, 2005 (UTC)
1. The stated point was "science funding always deals with large amounts of money."
2. A Nazi collaborator when they were just a German political party is different from a Nazi collaborator once the war started, once the U.S. declared war, and once the Nuremberg Trials had revealed their practices. Do you disagree? You support inclusion of the point because readers will mistakenly apply the definition from a different time (Nazi = evil). Yes, that is fallacious.
3. Yes, like any researcher who is mentioned related to race and intelligence, there is a host of sources calling them names. Pearson's actual biography needs to take precedence.
4. Part of writing a reputable article is choosing which sources add something legitimate, which the SPLCenter's reasoning doesn't. And, to be fair, they aren't scientists; they don't have expertise to bring to this.--Nectarflowed T 00:07, 5 August 2005 (UTC)
3. Calling someone a fascist is an attribution of motive. Motives cannot be tenably attributed unless such attribution has been confirmed by the subject himself. Unless Pearson calls himself a fascist, anyone else calling him a fascist is merely name-calling. Willmcw wrote Searching on [Fascist "Roger Pearson"] brings many results. Googling "is a fascist" [[15]] brings 43,800 results. Are all of those people really fascists? Sophie Panopoulos? Mozart? Santa Claus? hitssquad 01:04, 5 August 2005 (UTC)
1. For a psychology professor, $100,000 is probably a large research budget. For a biomedical researcher, it is not enough to even pay for lab equipment. The kind of research some do grantees is just re-analysis of other studies. That's pretty cheap.
2. As long as we indicate the date, 1937, we can assume that readers have enough familiarlity with history to know that World War II had not yet started. However I'm not sure that beloings in this article at all.
3. The fascists are not just "any" political orientation when it comes to matters of race and intelligence. Various fascist parties have been noted for having strong views on the issue. If a researcher is involved in political causes which call his impartiality into question, then that is a relevant matter to present along with his data.
4. Most private scholarly foundations are not called hate groups. The fact that the Pioneer Group has been shows that it is not a typical foundation.
-Willmcw 01:54, August 5, 2005 (UTC)

Advertising in article

Nectarflowed wrote, It sounds like your're saying that some editors have been trying to push the article toward... No. I'm saying that the article is very professional on the whole and that that is the problem. The advertisements that were placed within the text are reaching audiences that might never otherwise see them. The reader sees this great article and reads through it and is subjected to this advertiseing in the middle. He shares the link with his friends because it is, on the whole, a great article. His friends get subjected to the advertising. What we had before the advertising was inserted (or re-inserted) was Many of the IQ researchers supporting genetic differences in intelligence between races, like the above mentioned IQ researcher J. Philippe Rushton, have received millions of dollars in monetary grants from the Pioneer Fund, something often criticized. (Tucker 2002, Lombardo 2002, Kenny 2002) [9]. That was a concise and powerful statement. The implication of the statement is that there must or may be something seriously amiss with the Pioneer Fund if differential-psychology researchers are often criticized for receiving funding from it. Anyone who wants to know more can simply click on the Pioneer Fund link.

That would be NPOV, just as would be mentioning Nike in a newscast because someone had accidentally crashed his car into the front of a Nike store. It becomes advertising if the reporter on the scene goes into the store and starts talking to the viewers for a stretch of many minutes about the various shoes for sale and their respective features and benefits and prices. This is analogous to what happened in this article. Readers can go into the Pioneer Fund store if they wish and find all that information out. Bringing the contents of the Pioneer Fund article into other Wiki articles simply because they are related topics is advertisement.

Willmcw headed one of his changes Pioneer Fund's mission is highly relevant to this article. Pioneer Fund's mission is relevant. That is why we had linked within this article to the Pioneer Fund article. A mishmash of titillating [[16] pull-quotes from the Pioneer Fund article is of diminished relevance to the point that it appears that the article is being used as a vehicle to get messages across to not-in-the-choir readers.

Nectarflowed wrote, If such is happening, they have a lot of company. Steven Pinker has noted how when dealing with taboo science topics, like genetics, ordinarily intelligent scientists lose some of their abilities and start to distort things. Pinker's book is drama. Biased motives in editors or scientists are irrelevant. What is important to the production of good articles is to stop trying to cater to each other's vices. Making a hedonics pact wherein every editor gets to make an equal bit of visceral contribution doesn't make a professional article. It makes an article with a bunch of advertising in it. hitssquad 23:08, 4 August 2005 (UTC)

The description above is incorrect. Here is the difference [17]. Note that the earlier version implies that all questionable funding happened in the distant past, makes no mention of the large scale of the grants, and makes no mention of the Pioneer fund being labeled as a hate group by a prominent anti-racist organization. Ultramarine 02:27, 5 August 2005 (UTC)
1. Your reply failed to address the point made in my first paragraph.
2. The phrase millions of dollars does not imply scale. It is a marketing term commonly used in the advertising trade. To imply scale, the reading audience would have to know what are typically low and high funding figures.
3. The SPLC is not an anti-racist organization. hitssquad 03:25, 5 August 2005 (UTC)
Your argument seems to be that the Pioneer Fund and its activites is not related to this article. This is false. Many scientific journals, especially in controversial areas, require that the author should list to the reader any potential conflicts of interests, like financial ties that can create bias. Doing research on IQ and race and receiving millions of dollars from an organization that also funds fascists and white nationalists certainly qualify, especially as the research itself is very cheap. Ultramarine 04:29, 5 August 2005 (UTC)
Ultramarine wrote: Your argument seems to be that the Pioneer Fund ... is not related to this article. None of your responses seem to take account what I wrote. Are you asking me to repeat my first paragraph? Here is a paraphrase: Linking to Pioneer Fund within the article is a mention of Pioneer Fund within the article. The reason it should be mentioned within the article is that it is related. The reason the Pioneer Fund article should not be inserted, in whole or in part, into an article on Race and Intelligence is that the Pioneer Fund is not the subject of that article. Doing so constitutes an instance of advertisement. Advertisements do not belong in encyclopedia articles. hitssquad 17:15, 5 August 2005 (UTC)
Many scientific journals... require that the author should list to the reader any potential conflicts of interests, like financial ties that can create bias. - That's true. If you owned stock in a company that would benefit from the research, for example. But it doesn't seem that receiving a salary from a funding agency is a competing financial interest. especially as the research itself is very cheap - are you sure? the biggest cost of research is paying for labor (salary, health insurance, plus overhead costs, etc.).
An editorial decision needs to be made on this subject. People should make proposals and which we should consider and vote on. Right now we're not getting very far by just randomly throwing claims back and forth. --Rikurzhen 06:50, August 5, 2005 (UTC)
But the IQ researchers already have salaries and health insurance from their universities. Regarding voting, Wikipedia works by consensus in cases like this. Regarding funding, see for example this from a tobacco journal:
The stated policy of Nicotine & Tobacco Research is that authors whose manuscripts are accepted for publication must declare all sources of funding in support of the preparation of any paper submitted for peer review. The journal requires full disclosure of financial support, whether it is from the tobacco industry, the pharmaceutical or any other industry, government agencies, foundations, or any other source. [18]. Ultramarine 07:30, 5 August 2005 (UTC)
By vote, I don't mean to imply majority rule. Declaring funding is not the same as declaring competing financial interests; the consideration of funding should take place at the level of peer review but it seems to be a step beyond what WP readers of a summary style main article would need to read. But this is getting off subject. I personally can't follow the details of this debate fully, which is why I suggested that specific proposals should be spelled out so we can evaluate them. --Rikurzhen 07:37, August 5, 2005 (UTC)
Obviously journals in controversial areas require disclosure of funding exactly because it can give a bias to the research. The very large funding from a very questionable source should be mentioned. I have already given one proposal for how to do this. What is yours? Ultramarine 13:14, 5 August 2005 (UTC)
Check my first paragraph in this section. It says: Many of the IQ researchers supporting genetic differences in intelligence between races, like the above mentioned IQ researcher J. Philippe Rushton, have received millions of dollars in monetary grants from the Pioneer Fund, something often criticized. (Tucker 2002, Lombardo 2002, Kenny 2002) [9]. Why don't you now tell all of us, Ultramarine, how that is not a mention of funding by the Pioneer Fund. hitssquad 17:21, 5 August 2005 (UTC)
At last, some good discussion. We should of course briefly mention why it is critczed. I propse something like "Many of the IQ researchers supporting genetic differences in intelligence between races, like the above mentioned IQ researcher and current head of the fund J. Philippe Rushton, have received millions of dollars in monetary grants from the Pioneer Fund, something often criticized. The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), an anti-racism organization, lists the Pioneer Fund as a hate group due to its funding of many alleged racist or fascist organizations and individuals [19]." Ultramarine 17:42, 5 August 2005 (UTC)
That looks like good langauge - more to the point than mentioning the Nazi film. -Willmcw 19:12, August 5, 2005 (UTC)

First off, let's remember what the obvious (meaning, minimally, first-step) solution to this disagreement is: has anyone published in a reputable source (whether scholarly or popular) questioned a Race/IQ researcher's bias based on the researcher's source of funding? If so, it is reasonable for this article to report that. If the source it itself biased (e.g. the National Review or the Nation) I think it would be reasonable to state paranthetically "a popular left-wing" or "a popular right-wing" publication. If the source is not popular, I think it is reasonable to provide a little context as well (e.g., "an independent scholarly journal," "the journal of the APA," or "A journal published by a consortium of pharmaceutical companies" — providing this contextualizing information takes up little space and reasonable people should be able to agree on what a fair description would be; including it is consistent with our verifiability and cite sources policies which encourage us to provide enough information about a publication so that readers can reach their own conclusions about bias). I do not know, but it would not surprise me if someone who is not a wikipedia editor has questioned Rushton or Jenson or someone else's work based on their funding source in a reputable publication. If this is the case, we have nothing really to argue about. We report it.

If no one (published in a major source, popular or scholarly) has questioned research based on its funding, well, then we can argue about this. So I'll conclude with my own opinion: Hitsquad wrote, above, "Biased motives in editors or scientists are irrelevant. What is important to the production of good articles is to stop trying to cater to each other's vices. Making a hedonics pact wherein every editor gets to make an equal bit of visceral contribution doesn't make a professional article," which I just do not understand. For one thing, I do not understand what Hitsquad means by "hedonics" or "visceral contribution." Be that as it may, it is a categorical error to conflate "editors" and "scientists." "Editors" are obliged to follow Wikipedia policies and are accountable to one another. "Scientists" are not obliged to follow wikipedia policies, and are not accountable to us. As editors, it is true that our own biases should not be reflected in the article (i.e. we have to follow our NPOV policy). But it is never a violation of NPOV policy for us to provide accurate contextual information about any source (scientist, or journal). On the contrary, it is a good idea.

It is true that when scientists teach scientific method to their students, they emphasize the importance of objectivity. I accept this as an accurate statement. But the fact that scientists value objectivity does not mean that all scientists are always objective. It would violate our NPOV policy for one of us editors to claim in an article that someone (Rushton or Gould) is biased. So we should not do that. But we should always provide any contextual information that may be relevant, as long as it is accurate.

I certainly think we should consider a separate section dedicated to discussing the possible political motives behind this research, because others have published on this topic, specifically in regard to this area of research. In such a section, we could go into greater detail. For example, the Pioneer Fund claims that "The Pioneer Fund is neutral on political and social issues and avoids grantees with social agendas to push," and if we mention that Rushton has received funding from the PF I think we should include this quote. However, to maintain NPOV, if anyone has published in a reputable publication a claim that the PF is in fact biased, we should mention that as well. We might also consider adding a bit more information such as the fact that among the founders of the PF were scientists who promoted eugenics and the argument that differences in intelligence are inherited, as well as jurists who prospecuted Naxis at the Nuremburg trials, and a Supreme Court Justice who concurred with the second Brown v. Topeka Board of Ed ruling (these facts are available from the PF website). And we could include arguments by published critics of the PF as well.

By the way, I have no idea what people mean by "advertizing" here. I don't see any advertizing and don't see this as a relevant issue. Slrubenstein | Talk 14:37, 5 August 2005 (UTC)

Here are several scholarly studies and criticisms of the Pioneer fund and supported IQ and race research.

Surely reports that juxtapose "Pioneer Fund", "Nazi", "Racism" and "Rushton" exist. But do any of them actually claim that Pioneer Funds bias researchers? A 1998 editorial INTELLIGENCE 26(4): 319-336 says they do not. --Rikurzhen 15:27, August 5, 2005 (UTC)
They certainly argue that or at the very least that it is important to know, like knowing if a tobacco company sponsor a study on nicotine. Also, could you please list the policy of INTELLIGENCE regarding potential conflicts of interest and disclosure of funding. Ultramarine 15:34, 5 August 2005 (UTC)
list the policy of INTELLIGENCE regarding potential conflicts of interest and disclosure of funding -- i don't know, google it. They certainly argue... at least show me a quotation. I skimmed them and searched for "bias" and all I saw was the accusation that they were evil, not that they were biased. That is, this sounds like good material for the "Nazi" and "racist" name calling section of the article. --Rikurzhen 15:37, August 5, 2005 (UTC)
Again, it is important to know, like knowing if a tobacco company sponsors a study on nicotine. Which is exactly why many journals require that the readers should know this. Regarding INTELLIGENCE, I could not find any, which certainly casts some doubt on the whole journal. Imagine if a tobacco journal had no such policy. Ultramarine 15:44, 5 August 2005 (UTC)
Tobacco is a multibillion dollar industry; research about tobacco has enormous financial consequences. I still don't see how knowing who's paying the bills tells you about bias in IQ research. I'd like to see that spelled out because it's not at all clear to me. Preferrably spell out by a verifiable source. --Rikurzhen 15:46, August 5, 2005 (UTC)
Again, there is scholarly critic that all the major researchers arguing for genetic differences in IQ between races have received millions from a fund that also gives millions to fascists. You may not understand that this is a problem, but because this is a scholarly critique of the field, Wikipedia should mention it. Ultramarine 16:02, 5 August 2005 (UTC)
The writing implies this critique is about money, but from what I can see this is about accusations of racism. Race_and_intelligence_controversy#Racism is the place to discuss such accusations. --Rikurzhen 16:34, August 5, 2005 (UTC)

I see merit in both Ultramarine's and Rikurzhen's points. Ultramarine is providing examples from what seem to be to be very legitimate sources. Rikurzhen is right, logically, that just because some people affiliated with the PF have been biased does not mean that all people who receive funding from PF are biased. My question is, what, specifically, do Ultramarine's sources argue? Do any of them, for example, speficically mention Rushton or other scientists mentioned in this article? If so, we should definitely quote them. If not, perhaps it would be sufficient to add a parenthetical that the PF has been linked to racism, with a link to an article on the PF that goes into greater detail. In other words, I think that the link Ultramarine is making between Rushton, PF, and racism merits mention in the article. However, unless the sources Ultramarine cites have more detailed arguments and evidence directly relvant to this article, I don't think the question should be discussed in detail in this article. Yes, the source of the money is relevant. But it doesn't ipso facto prove anything. It would be better to devote space to examining the arguments that Rushton is a racist and that his arguments are weak based on sources that explicitly address Rushton and his research, and put details about the PF (or debates about the PF) in the PF article. Slrubenstein | Talk 15:54, 5 August 2005 (UTC)

Yes, they mention them. See for example the last 3 links which leads to relatively short articles. Ultramarine 16:02, 5 August 2005 (UTC)
See also Pioneer fund. Ultramarine 16:02, 5 August 2005 (UTC)
If this is about accusations of racism then Race_and_intelligence_controversy#Racism is the place to discuss it. --Rikurzhen 16:04, August 5, 2005 (UTC)
This is more about bias in research in general than than racism in particular. The Pioneer Fund supports the research of those who agree with its hereditarian views. -Willmcw 21:45, August 6, 2005 (UTC)

Question

Can someone who has read the references about the Pioneer Fund answer a question: is the accuastion merely that many "hereditarians" have received funding for work by the Pioneer Fund or the ostenisbly more concerning situation that most data that "hereditarians" cite was generated by Pioneer Fund supported work? If known, it would be good to make that distinction clear in the article. --Rikurzhen 21:22, August 3, 2005 (UTC)

Here's one statistic:
  • According to an American Broadcasting Company news report, the Pioneer Fund contributed $3.5 million to researchers cited in The Bell Curve, and almost half of the research cited to support the most controversial racial conclusions of the book was paid for by the Pioneer Fund. [20]
If not "most", then at least a large minority of researchers who support hereditarian views on intelligence seem to have been funded by the Pioneer Fund. -Willmcw 00:00, August 5, 2005 (UTC)
… and I don't think anybody says that we shouldn't include that POV. (For example it is largely the argument used by Shermer in Why people believe weird things, who devotes a whole chapter to it and largely builds the case "against race and intelligence research" on it. Very important to many people—including myself at a time.) The question is how and where this argument needs to be presented. Somebody needs to present this as a cogent of the form "Much of this research has been funded by the PF. Since the PF's mission statement is to promote research in to human biodiversity, critics have pointed out that yada-yada. Moreover, the PF has sometimes been accused of actively promoting racism, for example by yada-yada. However, blabla." I am sure that can be done, and several of you (Rik, Hits, Will, etc.) were working toward that goal. But thanks to Ultramarine's and Jokestress' reversion we are now back at square one, where the argument is presented as a confused string of insinuations and petty pointers in some stream-of-consciousness prose that (1) are far below the level of discourse that would merit their inclusion in Background section, and (2) are so far removed from arguments that are actually found in books (like Shermer's or skepdic's) as to constitute Original Research instead of being a honest representation of a common POV.
(Don't misunderstand me: I think the "argument from biased funding" is sufficiently well-known to merit inclusion at a very visible place of this article—I would have thought he summary of Public controversy to be just the place, but can live with Background. But the "argument from Penthouse", the "argument from SPLC" and to some extend even the Reductio ad Hitlerum are far below the "intelligent discourse level" that I want to read when opening an encyclopedia and they are minority POVs whose overexposure violates WP:NPOV.)
As to (1), my quibbles would disappear if this was part of Race and intelligence controversy, which is just the place for minority POVs. Arbor 18:46, 7 August 2005 (UTC)
Insanely busy weekend, but I was planning to make that point more or less exactly. Currently the section we're discussing consists merely of a juxtaposition of various criticisms in such a way that they seem to be making a point, but there is no logical structure to it. This is below the standard we should expect from this article. I'm 100% behind Arbor's comments. --Rikurzhen 19:00, August 7, 2005 (UTC)
As you just noted, "argument from biased funding" is sufficiently well-known to merit inclusion at a very visible place of this article. The title "Race and intelligence controversy" is pov and factually incorrect, which is discussed elsewhere. And where is evidence that the critique is the "minority pov"? Ultramarine 19:41, 7 August 2005 (UTC)
I've addressed your concern about the article title. Now you should consider the main part of Arbor's comment: Somebody needs to present this as a cogent of the form "Much of this research has been funded by the PF... --Rikurzhen 20:41, August 7, 2005 (UTC)
As I have noted earlier, the critique should not be hidden in another article as "public controversy". That large scale funding can give biased research is where much part of the evaluation process in science. Ultramarine 21:00, 7 August 2005 (UTC)
The main point is not what article this content should be in but rather how it should be written. All attempts to write a logically structured argument have been overwritten. As Arbor wrote: Somebody needs to present this as a cogent of the form "Much of this research has been funded by the PF. Since the PF's mission statement is to promote research in to human biodiversity, critics have pointed out that yada-yada. Moreover, the PF has sometimes been accused of actively promoting racism, for example by yada-yada. However, blabla." I am sure that can be done, and several of you (Rik, Hits, Will, etc.) were working toward that goal. But thanks to Ultramarine's and Jokestress' reversion we are now back at square one, where the argument is presented as a confused string of insinuations and petty pointers in some stream-of-consciousness prose that (1) are far below the level of discourse that would merit their inclusion in Background section, and (2) are so far removed from arguments that are actually found in books (like Shermer's or skepdic's) as to constitute Original Research instead of being a honest representation of a common POV. --Rikurzhen 21:04, August 7, 2005 (UTC)

I guess you consider the complete deletion of every mention of the critique done by you and Arbor to be "attempts to write a logically structured argument" [21][22] Ultramarine 21:16, 7 August 2005 (UTC)

Ultramarine, that's not helpful. You're being purposefully obtuse: I know you know better. We moved that material of the controversy page because as presented it didn't amount to anything more than a random collection of name calling. But that's a completely separate issue, which you should stop brining up for the sake of addressing the problem that Arbor describes. --Rikurzhen 21:21, August 7, 2005 (UTC)
What point? This "But the "argument from Penthouse", the "argument from SPLC" and to some extend even the Reductio ad Hitlerum are far below the "intelligent discourse level" that I want to read when opening an encyclopedia and they are minority POVs whose overexposure violates WP:NPOV.)"? I agree. I do not want arguments from the Penthouse magazine, like Rushston wants. You have presented no evidence of "minority pov". Ultramarine 21:27, 7 August 2005 (UTC)
If anything is "some stream-of-consciousness prose" it is Arbor's text in what you call "the main point". The conflict is regarding the content, not "how it should be written". Ultramarine 21:33, 7 August 2005 (UTC)
The main problem is not so much what is said but that there is nothing linking it all together. It's merely a collection of nasty things that have been said about R&I researchers, mostly Rushton (whose work could be completely edited out of this article series without noticable changes). There needs to be a logical structure explaning why I should care about this claim or that claim and how they are related to one other. (I suspect, as I think others do, that they are not related.) The challenge for you or whomever else wants to keep this material on the front page is to improve the logic of the presentation so that it is clear why we should be talking about the the SPLC or Penthouse. If you can't do that, then I would consider it evidence that this material does not represent a coherent POV but rather a collection of quasi-related minority POVs concatonated together to seem serious -- there is plent of room for them on public controversy page next to claims that Arthur Jensen is like Hitler. --Rikurzhen 21:42, August 7, 2005 (UTC)
What argument or arguments introduced by Rushton from Penthouse (or from Penthouse Forum or from a semipornographic book) are you referring to, Ultramarine? hitssquad 04:30, 8 August 2005 (UTC)

The Pioneer Fund and its activites are related to this article. Many scientific journals, especially in controversial areas, require that the author should list to the reader any potential conflicts of interests, like financial ties that can create bias. Disclosure to the readers of funding is necessary because it can give a bias to the research.

From on journal in a controversial area. "The stated policy of Nicotine & Tobacco Research is that authors whose manuscripts are accepted for publication must declare all sources of funding in support of the preparation of any paper submitted for peer review. The journal requires full disclosure of financial support, whether it is from the tobacco industry, the pharmaceutical or any other industry, government agencies, foundations, or any other source" [23].

Doing research on IQ and race and receiving millions of dollars from an organization that also funds fascists and white nationalists certainly also qualify. Especially as the grants are very large considering that the research is not expensive and that the IQ researchers already have salaries and health insurance from their universities.

Here are some scholarly critque of the Fund and IQ research on this ground.

Since the critique is common among scholars, NPOV requires that it is presented prominently in Wikipedia. Ultramarine 21:58, 7 August 2005 (UTC)

You're not answering my criticism. I have no problem with placing each individual claim (somewhere) in this article (series). But without some kind of logical structure connecting it all together, I call this juxtaposition original research / building a POV from many disparate POVs. It can be cleaned up as Arbor suggested by giving it a logical structure, or I can just turn it into a bulleted list with a heading of "miscellaneous criticism". Simplying placing one criticism in line after another is misleading. --Rikurzhen 22:45, August 7, 2005 (UTC)
Nothing prevents you from presenting your suggestion here so we can discuss improvements to the text. But please, do not just delete the critique as previously. Ultramarine 22:53, 7 August 2005 (UTC)
I've introduced the bulleted list format that section as a form of argumentation. Do not simply revert the text. It must be improved. As a side note, you know the difference between deletion and moving. --Rikurzhen 22:57, August 7, 2005 (UTC)
A bulleted list is not an encyclopedic text. Please correct. Ultramarine 22:58, 7 August 2005 (UTC)
EXACTLY! Neither is text which is essentially a bulleted list concatonated with spaces and put into paragraphs. I don't think there is a relationship between the various criticisms being made. It is up to you to show how these various points relate: I think they don't. --Rikurzhen 23:01, August 7, 2005 (UTC)
Every text in this article can be made into a bulleted list. Should this article be removed? Ultramarine 23:03, 7 August 2005 (UTC)
Why do you refuse to at least directly recognize my/Arbor's point? These are not related criticisms. They are merely a collection. There's no logical structure to it. That's why I can so easily turn it into a bulleted list. It's up to you to add whatever logical structure you think exists between these points, because previously none was given. --Rikurzhen 23:06, August 7, 2005 (UTC)
Again, I can turn every other paragraph into a bulleted list and using your argument the whole article should be removed. Ultramarine 23:12, 7 August 2005 (UTC)
Not if one item logically relates to the next! Then it should be easy to turn that outline into a paragraph with logical structure. But what I'm saying is that this section consists of logically indepedent criticisms, and that merely juxtaposing them is not a logical structure. Putting the SPLC in a paragraph about money makes no sense, one is about money and one is about racism. The oneous is on you to write this section in a way that the various items in that list are related to one another other than just being a miscellaeous collection of criticisms. The alternative is NOT DELETION, as you seem to fear, but breaking this up into the highly relevant material for the front page and the less relevant material for sections of racism or whatnot. --Rikurzhen 23:17, August 7, 2005 (UTC)
Could you please link me to the "Bulleted list" Wikipedia policy? Ultramarine 23:23, 7 August 2005 (UTC)
Well, I'm done with this conversation for a while. In the meantime, try to do as I asked and turn that bulleted list into paragraphs that have a meaningful logical structure: an introductory sentenece, supporting arguments that relate to that topic in a logically clear way, and a conclusion sentence. I want you to ADD logic; I don't want to DELETE anything. --Rikurzhen 23:26, August 7, 2005 (UTC)

Rushton semipornographic accusation

This accusation sounds like it could be political mischief; has anyone looked into this? The user who added this appears to have gotten it from this Zack Cernovsky article.

  • "Some of Rushton's references to scientific literature with respects to racial differences in sexual characteristics turned out to be references to a nonscientific semipornographic book and to an article in the Penthouse Forum" (Cernovsky)--Nectarflowed T 11:21, 4 August 2005 (UTC)
Maybe it would help to state the reference details of the book and the article. hitssquad 17:18, 4 August 2005 (UTC)
Cernovsky attributes the claim to Weizmann, F, Wiener, N. I., Wiesenthal, D. L., & Ziegler, M. (1991). Eggs, eggplants, and eggheads: A rejoinder to Rushton. Canadian Psychology, 32, 43-50.--Nectarflowed T 23:33, 4 August 2005 (UTC)

New links on the Skepdic webpage

This is mostly a news flash that might interest some of you. (No consequences about the material we present here are implied.)

One of the things that interests me about the Race and intelligence issue the its perception among sceptics (i.e., members of the Sceptic Society and similar organisations). The Skeptic dictionary (to which we link) is a good presentation of the viewpoint traditionally entertained by a large number of skeptics (large consonant with Shermer)—a viewpoint I myself have followed (and repeated) with great conviction. I think that up to the early 90s, one could have said "the sceptic society is very critical of race and intelligence research" or something similar. However, at least since the Miele–Jensen book this is no longer true, and the "skeptic society" (however we want to define that group of fine indivuduals (which includes myself)) no longer has a clear POV on the matter.

However, the Skepdic entry remains as it has been, at least in print. The web edition (to which we link from the front page) has contained for a while now a very critical counterpoint to the entry basically attacking the entry for many of the vices traditionally scorned by skeptics. Some new things have appeared on that page, however. First, the page now links to our very own Race and intelligence page (or rather a derived version. That's great news and a pat on the back for the fine editors on this page.

It also links to the June PPPL issue. For a time now it has linked to the "Does race exist?" [24] debate between two anthropology professors. I think this is good news for all. The skepdic entry tries to present a much broader number of viewpoints than before, which should be consonant with the mission statement on that movement. Arbor 18:52, 6 August 2005 (UTC)

If you are talking about this article, I don't see mention of Wikipedia. Can you cite the link? Also, skepticism is an immutable position or a philosophy, not a POV. That's not to say that scientific skeptics (like me) don't have a POV. Jokestress 19:28, 6 August 2005 (UTC)

The link is at the bottom (with a yellow New sticker). It's called Dr John Grohol's Psych Central: Race and intelligence, and turns out to be this very article. As I said, I think until the mid-90s, the proponents of scientific scepticism seem to have had a unified POV on race and intelligence research, well represented by the (original) skepdic article (i.e., without the extra links and counterpoints). (I encouraged you to chronicle that in my very first message to your talk page, which contains a reading list) Arbor 20:13, 6 August 2005 (UTC)

I just sent him a note to consider changing it to this page. He cites me in one of his other entries, and he is very good about clarity and precision. Jokestress 20:32, 6 August 2005 (UTC)
I just checked, and the link has been changed to mention Wikipedia. (Pats Jokestress’ back.) Arbor 20:57, 14 August 2005 (UTC)

SPLC

by all indications, the SPLC is a cash cow for a few unscrupulous individuals to gain financial reward under the guise of fighting racism; it is unacceptable to treat a claim from them as an honest assesment without noting their recent shady behavior --Rikurzhen 01:16, August 8, 2005 (UTC)

My suggestion is that the SPLC discredits the otherwise perfectly legitimate criticism of the PF, and that other sources of criticism should be quoted. --Rikurzhen 02:20, August 8, 2005 (UTC)

Willmcw, have you considered my reasons? --Rikurzhen 17:09, August 10, 2005 (UTC)

judging researchers on their research

who claims that you can judge a serious researcher on anything other than the merits of his/her work? Tucker seems to think that you should not [25] --Rikurzhen 01:17, August 8, 2005 (UTC)

conflict of interest?

has any journal ever reported PF money as part of a "conflict of interest" disclosure. if not, then this is a spurious and novel/unsupported juxtaposition of facts. --Rikurzhen 01:20, August 8, 2005 (UTC)

Added source. Removed your claims without sources. Ultramarine 01:46, 8 August 2005 (UTC)
You're not acting as a good faith wiki editor. I'll wait for the rest of the editors to cast their judgement. Would everyone please consult the page history to see what Ultramarine has removed. --Rikurzhen 02:02, August 8, 2005 (UTC)
You have asked of me that I give sources and refused to accept text without those. Now I ask of you the same thing. Ultramarine 02:10, 8 August 2005 (UTC)
Nothing in that text indicates that PF money should be considered a "conflict of interest". I deleted it because it wasn't relevant and as far as I know, no one has claimed that PF money is a "conflict of interest". --Rikurzhen 02:18, August 8, 2005 (UTC)
Is this the text under discussion that Ultramarine removed?[26]
"There has been no serious claim of systematic misrepresentations by race and intelligence researchers as a group. However, many IQ researchers have claimed that critics of race and intelligence research are themselves guilty of systematic misrepresentation of the true majority views of researchers in presenting this field to the public."
--Nectar T 21:30, 9 August 2005 (UTC)
The text that was the problem was "The scientific community accepts that research can be biased due to various conflicts of interest. Therefore, many scientific journals, especially in controversial areas, require that the researcher should let the readers know any potential conflicts of interests that can have affected the research, like financial ties or the source of the funding for the research [7]. Many critics of the research claiming genetic differences in IQ have criticized the source of much of the funding for this research, the Pioneer Fund (Tucker 2002 [8])."
The text you linked to is being discussed in this section. --Rikurzhen 22:17, August 9, 2005 (UTC)


from here:

Financial relationships (such as employment, consultancies, stock ownership, honoraria, paid expert testimony, patents) are the most easily identifiable conflicts of interest and the most likely to undermine the credibility of the journal, the authors, and of science itself.

This describes conflicts of interest, not financial support in the form of grants. It cannot support the claim made in the article. Many critics of the genetic hypothesis have criticized the source of much of the funding for this research, the Pioneer Fund (Tucker 2002 [9]). Defenders argue that established standards of evaluating scientific research required that the grantees supported by the Pioneer Fund be judged only on the scientific merits of their research. Critics respond that it is a well known in the scientific community that the source of funding may bias the research [10]. "source of funding" <> "financial relationship" --Rikurzhen 07:49, August 10, 2005 (UTC)

Tucker's view is in the public controversy

text from article:

Scholar William H. Tucker has questioned the whole field due to this funding. "My commitment to the right to unfettered research is not diminished one iota by my contention, described in detail elsewhere, that research into racial differences in intelligence has provided no results of any scientific value and that it has been used primarily, if not exclusively, to legitimate racist ideology" [27][28].

Then Tucker is an idiot. You don't question a whole field due to it's funding. You question it when its claims are inconsistant with reality.
Not true. Cancer research paid for by tobacco companies, climate research paid for by oil companies, these are examples of research that is questioned, in part, due to the sources of funding. -Willmcw 19:08, August 9, 2005 (UTC)
That's interesting speculation. But as per the discussion from a few days back -- show me a citation that specifically says that. Else, it's just original research to link moral criticisms of the PF to criticisms of work done by independent researchers it supports. --Rikurzhen 21:27, August 9, 2005 (UTC)
Not original research at all. Here's a transcript of a report by the late Peter Jennings which raises that exact point: [29]. -Willmcw 22:15, August 9, 2005 (UTC)
Maybe you'd like to pull out a quotation. I think you'll find (as was my complaint with Ultramarine's interpreation) that you're reading more into it than is really there. We're looking for claims of a financial conflict of interest. --Rikurzhen 22:48, August 9, 2005 (UTC)

if you're interested in speculation, consider this original argument... from the article:

Although the fund typically gives away more than half a million dollars per year, there is no application form or set of guidelines. Instead an applicant merely submits "a letter containing a brief description of the nature of the research and the amount of the grant requested." There is no requirement for peer review of any kind; Pioneer's board of directors—two attorneys, two engineers, and an investment broker—decides, sometimes within a day, whether a particular research proposal merits funding. Once the grant has been made, there is no requirement for an interim or final report or even for an acknowledgment by a grantee that Pioneer has been the source of support, all atypical practices in comparison to other organizations that support scientific research [11].

if the PF is so laxed in giving away grants, then seemingly you could request a grant and not be under any obligation to have something to show for it. if there is no (or little) accountability after grants are given, then it seems odd to say that the PF exerts financial control over grant recipients. seemingly they have less than average influence over what is done with their money. --Rikurzhen 23:00, August 9, 2005 (UTC)

How does this claim differ from those described here? Shouldn't this be part of the public controversy article? --Rikurzhen 02:09, August 8, 2005 (UTC)

Tucker is questioning the whole field, not only accsuing the researchers of being racists. Ultramarine 02:19, 8 August 2005 (UTC)

There's a difference between questioning the utility of science and making a claim of financial conflict. These are surely related in the pragmatic what do you do about R&I research, but logically 100% separate in the kind of claim being made. I see plenty of evidence for a no-utility or racism charge, but no evidence of a conflict of interest charge. --Rikurzhen 02:22, August 8, 2005 (UTC)
Please, no original research. Ultramarine 02:28, 8 August 2005 (UTC)
Exactly. You are making the leap from questioning utility to questioning financial "conflicts of interest". I don't see the connection. --Rikurzhen 02:29, August 8, 2005 (UTC)
Come back when you have refuted Tucker scholarly work. Hint: Wikipedia is not the place. Ultramarine 02:32, 8 August 2005 (UTC)
I don't believe that Tucker is saying what you think he is saying. I think Tucker is great -- I just don't think you're reading him correctly. Prove me wrong by showing me quotations that support your interpretation of what he is saying. --Rikurzhen 02:35, August 8, 2005 (UTC)
I have given a direct citation. Ultramarine 02:41, 8 August 2005 (UTC)
Quoted above! But where does it say anything about money or conflict or bias? It talks about racism and utility (i.e. scientific value and political use)!!! --Rikurzhen 02:44, August 8, 2005 (UTC)
Hmm.. The whole book, chapter, and the paragraphs before talks about funding. Ultramarine 03:03, 8 August 2005 (UTC)
Yes, but I see no accusations of bias! No claims about financial conflicts of interest. If that's in there, you should be able to substantiate it. --Rikurzhen 03:08, August 8, 2005 (UTC)
Read more carefully. He refers to another book for this argument. Ultramarine 04:03, 8 August 2005 (UTC)

Pretend I'm dumb. Humor me. Spell it out for me: clearly I don't see it. --Rikurzhen 04:07, August 8, 2005 (UTC)

Articles often using something called footnotes. There is a footnote after the cited text tht leads to this: See Tucker, The Science and Politics of Racial Research. Ultramarine 04:17, 8 August 2005 (UTC)
Google print gives access to that book [30] --Rikurzhen 04:22, August 8, 2005 (UTC)
As I stipulated about that quotation, I see lots of racism -> bias and political interest but no fincancial interest -> bias. --Rikurzhen 04:24, August 8, 2005 (UTC)
Are we talking about the quotation above? --Rikurzhen 04:19, August 8, 2005 (UTC)

Removed Tucker at moment since his other book does not seems to be only about the funding from the Pioneer Fund. Ultramarine 04:56, 8 August 2005 (UTC)

pioneer fund response

from the journal INTELLIGENCE 26(4): 319-336 [31] The Pioneer Fund, one of the only nonprofit foundations making grants for study and research into human individual and race differences, along with many of the scientists it has funded, has been widely and unfairly attacked in the media, often with false charges. In this editorial, the president of Pioneer provides a unique perspective on some of the controversies. --Rikurzhen 02:16, August 8, 2005 (UTC)

Again, regarding INTELLIGENCE, I could not find any policy regarding conflicts of interest and source of founding, which certainly casts some doubt on the whole journal. Also, an editorial by the president of the fund is hardly evidence of anything. Ultramarine 02:23, 8 August 2005 (UTC)
No kidding. Talk about academic logrolling... Jokestress 02:26, 8 August 2005 (UTC)
You have no interest in presenting both sides of this issue? --Rikurzhen 02:30, August 8, 2005 (UTC)
Feel free to add your link to "Public controvery". Tucker scholary study is not "the media". I am saddened to see that you use a website that promulgates Kevin B. MacDonalds anti-Jewish ideas. Ultramarine 02:38, 8 August 2005 (UTC)
Silly! Google is a powerful tool for finding reprints, and while I have academic access to journals, most people don't. Discuss Tucker in the section above. --Rikurzhen 02:42, August 8, 2005 (UTC)

dummy corporation

the dummy corporation stuff is very interesting, but does this relate to any researchers in this field? i can't find tucker's data for this. unrelated criticisms are inapporpriate for the front page. like splc, I question the relevance and reliability of this claim. --Rikurzhen 03:02, August 8, 2005 (UTC)

More original research. You can easily see that it is true here [32].
Is it relevant or is it not? (I don't care which, but right now I see no evidence that it is.) If they only set up dummy corporations to support neo-Nazi groups, then it is reprehensible behavior but totally irrelevant to research in this field. Just juxtaposing nasty claims about PF with claims that many researchers are supported by PF is not acceptable: either there is a connection, in which case it should be said or there is not in which case this is irrelevant. --Rikurzhen 03:55, August 8, 2005 (UTC)
Put another way, a criticism of the PF is not in itself material worthy of discussing in this article. There needs to be a specific reason to put it here, rather than just in the PF article. --Rikurzhen 03:57, August 8, 2005 (UTC)
I merely inserted it to explain why the funds do not go directly to the researchers. I am happy if we remove all of this, including that earlier statement. Ultramarine 04:07, 8 August 2005 (UTC)
The article insinuates that the researchers receiving PF grants are personally financially benefiting. This misrepresentation needed to be corrected. A treatise on non-profits and a seemingly irrelevant bit about dummy corporations is not needed. --Rikurzhen 04:09, August 8, 2005 (UTC)
Again, you can easily see that it is true here [33].
What part of that shows me that IQ researchers are being paid thru dummy coroporations? --Rikurzhen 05:43, August 8, 2005 (UTC)
For example Rushton's Charles Darwin Research Institute. Ultramarine 06:31, 10 August 2005 (UTC)
If this is about Rushton, then say it -- preferably in an attributable way. So far, all accusations of bias have been about Rushton. Odd that he would have $100k go thru that org while $1.3M went thru his Univ. --Rikurzhen 06:39, August 10, 2005 (UTC)
Another is over one million dollar to Arthur Jensen's Institute for the Study of Educational Differences. Ultramarine 07:03, 10 August 2005 (UTC)
Hmm... that seems to be within the WP editor's disgression. It would be better said with an attribution to someone that this is worth noting, rather than just said. --Rikurzhen 07:07, August 10, 2005 (UTC)
See for example this [34].
Attribute claims to a prominent source, as per WP:NPOV, lest they be considered an insignificant minority. --Rikurzhen 08:12, August 10, 2005 (UTC)
This is a significant, academic source. Ultramarine 08:14, 10 August 2005 (UTC)

I'm still not seeing any discussion of why "dummy corporations" are noteworthy. Without an external value judgment, I can't see the point of it. --Rikurzhen 14:05, August 10, 2005 (UTC)

Critics have used this argument and thus Wikipdia should discuss it. You are not final arbitrator of what is appropriate for Wikipedia. You have a strange view of yourself if you argue that everything must be understood and accepted by you. Ultramarine 19:58, 10 August 2005 (UTC)
Critics have used this argument... Then it should be possible to name said critics. That's all I ask. --Rikurzhen 20:59, August 10, 2005 (UTC)
See the sources above and of course here [35]. Ultramarine 21:02, 10 August 2005 (UTC)

systematic misrepresentation

There has been no serious claim of systematic misrepresentations by race and intelligence researchers as a group. However, many IQ researchers have claimed that critics of race and intelligence research are themselves guilty of systematic misrepresentation of the true majority views of researchers in presenting this field to the public.

I added this text to the article, which Ultramarine deleted. I think it should be reinserted. --Rikurzhen 03:37, August 8, 2005 (UTC)

Give sources. Ultramarine 03:41, 8 August 2005 (UTC)
For the second claim: Gottfredson, L. S. (2005a). "Suppressing intelligence research: Hurting those we intend to help". In R. H. Wright & N. A. Cummings (Eds.), Destructive trends in mental health: The well-intentioned path to harm (pp. 155-186). New York: Taylor and Francis. Or Gottfredson, L. S. (1994). Egalitarian fiction and collective fraud. Society, 31 (3), 53-59. Plus the content of the public controversy article.
For the first claim: the lack of any such claim. If one can be found, then it would be important to include here. Otherwise, we need to correct the possible misinterpretation that some believe all of the researchers are misrepresenting the field (difficult in light of the consensus statements). --Rikurzhen 03:52, August 8, 2005 (UTC)
Please list the study showing the majority view of the researchers in the field. Ultramarine 04:58, 8 August 2005 (UTC)
Huh? I guess you haven't been around for a while:
  • "Intelligence: Knowns and Unknowns" a report from the American Psychological Association [36] -- later published as Neisser et al (1996)
  • "Mainstream Science on Intelligence" [37] -- later published as Gottfredson (1997) -- a statement signed by 52 intelligence researchers meant to outline "conclusions regarded as mainstream among researchers on intelligence".
  • Snyderman, M., & Rothman, S. (1987). "Survey of expert opinion on intelligence and aptitude testing". American Psychologist, 42, 137–144. (some details in this section)
--Rikurzhen 05:40, August 8, 2005 (UTC)

If there are systematic misrepresentations, it affects the whole field. Ultramarine 11:15, 3 August 2005 (UTC) -- Ultramarine, this seems to be your own suppostion, rather than an outside claim. I would counter that There has been no serious claim of systematic misrepresentations by race and intelligence researchers as a group. Becuase I know of none. This needs to be figured out. What made you make that original claim? --Rikurzhen 06:39, August 8, 2005 (UTC)

No, you are correct regarding the whole field, which include both advocates and opponents of the genetic hypothesis. But receiving money from the Pioneer Fund, which include all the major names arguing for the genetic hypothesis, have been criticzed. Ultramarine 06:37, 10 August 2005 (UTC)
Your statement should include that the field includes both advocates and opponents of the genetic hypothesis. Ultramarine 07:04, 10 August 2005 (UTC)
Most of the 52 researchers who signed the Gottfredson mainstream statement haven't received money from the fund, and those who have may have published related work prior to associating with the fund.--Nectar T 07:45, 10 August 2005 (UTC)
Fine. See my above statement. Note also that there is no evidence that the scholars represent the majority view. Ultramarine 07:50, 10 August 2005 (UTC)
Remember Snyderman and Rothman (1987) literally ascertains the majority, and it agrees with the statement. We've been thru this recently on the talk page. --Rikurzhen 07:57, August 10, 2005 (UTC)
An almost twenty years old survey says nothing about today. And even then, the survey in no way showed what the majority of the reserachers in this field thought. Ultramarine 08:10, 10 August 2005 (UTC)
Thanks for joining us. Come back when you have a citation to support your claims. Everyone else who's published on this seems to find the survey compelling evidence of where the majority view lies. Coupled with the WSJ and APA reports, it is very clear. --Rikurzhen 08:21, August 10, 2005 (UTC)
I have not made any claim, only asked that you support yours which you have failed to do. Note that the APA report states that what evidence there is fails to support the genetic hypothesis. Ultramarine 08:39, 10 August 2005 (UTC)
You have made a claim that the three consensus statements and several papers I cited somehow can be dismissed. But that's beyond the scope of WP editing. The claim is attributed: "many IQ researchers have claimed ... misrepresentation ...". The claim is verifiable. The claim goes directly to addressing the accusation set up but not actually delivered in the "accusation of bias" section. --Rikurzhen 14:11, August 10, 2005 (UTC)
You have not presented any evidence regarding the majority view, which was my objection. Stating "many IQ researchers have claimed ... misrepresentation ..." is a very different claim. Ultramarine 20:01, 10 August 2005 (UTC)
I have presented evidence that "many IQ researchers have claimed that critics of race and intelligence research are themselves guilty of systematic misrepresentation of the true majority views of researchers in presenting this field to the public." Their claim doesn't need to be true or false. That's the point of NPOV and attributing claims. --Rikurzhen 21:02, August 10, 2005 (UTC)
Then it should be noted that the majority view is unknown regarding many views and that the IQ reserachers include both opponents and advocates of the partially-genetic hypothesis. In addition, this should not be part of Systematic misrepresentations, but Public controversy. Ultramarine 21:07, 10 August 2005 (UTC)

The change you made satifies my criticism. --Rikurzhen 21:41, August 10, 2005 (UTC)

Cyril Burt is history

the jab at Burt is anachronistic (thus irrelevant) and unbalanced; from the article on Burt:

Later, two independent authors, Ronald Fletcher (1991) and Robert Joynson (1989) both published books that, while not totally exonerating Burt, cast more doubt on his accusers than they initially cast on Burt's publications. Currently, scientific consensus tends to be that Burt's mistakes were due to carelessness or wishful thinking, not duplicity. He is still regarded as one of the most influential psychologists of the 20th century.

These are clearly matters for the public controversy article. --Rikurzhen 04:03, August 8, 2005 (UTC)

I updated the incorrect wikipedia article with a more recent study. Ultramarine 04:26, 8 August 2005 (UTC)
Like Rushton, I ask again: does censoring Burt's data affect anything presented in this article? From what I've read about the subject, the answer is no. Even if Burt made it all up, it doesn't matter now and he died 34 years ago. --Rikurzhen 04:29, August 8, 2005 (UTC)
It certainly shows that there has been accusations about fraud in the field of IQ and genetics. Ultramarine 04:34, 8 August 2005 (UTC)
Then it might be appropriate in a Wiki article on fraud in the field of IQ and genetics. hitssquad 05:28, 8 August 2005 (UTC)
AFAIK, Burt's work had nothing to do with race, and Hunter himself claims that most people seem to believe (at the time of his writing) that Burt hadn't committed fraud: a point on which he was dissenting. --Rikurzhen 05:42, August 8, 2005 (UTC)
Cybil Burt is part of the controversy surrounding the Bell curve. For example, Rushton mentions hims 3 times in his 1997 critique of Gould and argues that Burt was correct. Ultramarine 06:52, 10 August 2005 (UTC)
Whether Burt was a fraud or not doesn't have any impact on anything written in this article. Burt's findings are not mentioned in any other place. How can it be relevant? --Rikurzhen 06:55, August 10, 2005 (UTC)
Francis Galton is mentioned and even has a picture. None of his findings are relevant today. Thus, Cybril Burt which is often mentioned by some critics should also be mentioned. Ultramarine 07:11, 10 August 2005 (UTC)
If you think Burt should be part of the history section, add him. None of Galton's research findings are mentioned, only his historical significance. Likewise with Boas. Like I titled this section, Burt is history. --Rikurzhen 07:36, August 10, 2005 (UTC)
The we should also remove Gould since none of his arguments are presented. Ultramarine 07:41, 10 August 2005 (UTC)
Race and intelligence (Public controversy) --Rikurzhen 07:55, August 10, 2005 (UTC)
Again, none of Gould's argument are presented, only a citation removed from its context which seems like straw-man. I have added Burt to the same page. Ultramarine 08:04, 10 August 2005 (UTC)
Cute argument. Take it up with the person who wrote the article on Gould. You're trying to evade the point that Gould was a prominent figure in race and intelligence, but Burt was criticized for IQ research on white twins. --Rikurzhen 08:09, August 10, 2005 (UTC)
Gould never did any primary research. Can you name one study in this field that he has published? Ultramarine 08:11, 10 August 2005 (UTC)
Of course not. Few critics have. It does not save them from criticism of bias. However, Burt's reserach is no more important to this article than Hershey and Chase's experiments are to a modern understanding of DNA... History. --Rikurzhen 08:18, August 10, 2005 (UTC)
If Gould, who never published any study related to the field, should be accused of "Systematic misreprsentations", then Cybil Burt who did and is accused of fraud and is regularly debatted, should. Ultramarine 08:22, 10 August 2005 (UTC)
No, Ultramarine. You're persistent, but wrong. If the one and only mention of Burt is to say that he could have committed fraud on a topic that is only tangentially related to this article, then it doesn't belong in this article. Gould on the other hand literally "wrote the book" that constitutes the public understanding of this field. --Rikurzhen 08:27, August 10, 2005 (UTC)
And Cybil Burt is regularly debatted in the field, see above. Again, Rushton mentions him 3 times in his critque of Gould. No pov violations. Again, if Gould should be mentioned, then Cybil Burt should. Ultramarine 08:36, 10 August 2005 (UTC)

No... Cyril Burt may be mentioned in the hereditarian / nonhereditarian debate. But if he's not worth mentioning anywhere else in this article, then there doesn't seem to be any independent reason for mentioning the Burt affair. There's no more reason to mention Burt than there would be to mention Trofim Lysenko. --Rikurzhen 13:06, August 10, 2005 (UTC)

pov fork

Race and intelligence (Public controversy) seems like a wikipedia:POV fork. It pushes the criticism into a separate article, which is not beneficial. Unless I here a good argument to the contrary, I'm going to re-merge it back here. -Willmcw 08:23, August 10, 2005 (UTC)

it is a summary style subarticle. see wikipedia:summary style. what should be put on this page is a three paragraph (equivalent) summary of that article. --Rikurzhen 08:27, August 10, 2005 (UTC)

yahoo group

I started a yahoo group to share copyrighted material, such as paper reprint PDFs, for the sake of researchering material for this article. You can subscribe by sending an email (from whatever address you'd like to sign up with) to the "Subscribe:" address listed on this page.

i'll act as moderator. approval required to join, but not to post after joining. nothing should be visible to nonmembers. let's not use it for anything that can be done on the talk page.

also, if there's no obvious indication of the connection between your wp username and the email you use to sign up, send me a wiki-mail note so i know to approve you. --Rikurzhen 19:48, August 8, 2005 (UTC)

FYI changes to first two paragraphs

Just made a couple of changes to the first two paragraphs. Mostly added links. The only notable change (to me at least) was a lead-in sentence to explain why so much of the article is about IQ scores. Jokestress 02:44, 10 August 2005 (UTC)

Accusations of bias - rewrite

Suggested rewrite - Rikurzhen

Systematic misrepresentations

Researchers on both sides of the debate have been accused by other researchers variously of bias or of systematically misrepresenting the available data. As an example of criticism of the hereditarian side, it has been claimed that when some of Rushton's claimed supporting references were examined they were found to include a nonscientific semipornographic book and an article in Penthouse Forum.[38] There has also been claims of outright scientific fraud in research on IQ and genetics. See Cyril Burt. As an example of criticism of the non-hereditarian side, Stephen Jay Gould, one of the leading critics of race and intelligence research, has been accused of "scholarly malfeasance," (Rushton 1997b), tainting his research with a Marxist bias (Gasper 2002), and presenting misleading statistics.[39]

The Pioneer Fund

Many critics of race and intelligence research have criticized the source of much of the funding for this research, the Pioneer Fund (Tucker 2002 [40]). [Something about racism, because that's what the PF is accused of.] Defenders argue that established standards of evaluating scientific research required that the grantees supported by the Pioneer Fund be judged only on the scientific merits of their research. Many of the researchers supporting the partially-genetic explanation of the racial IQ disparity, like the IQ researcher and current head of the fund J. Philippe Rushton, have received grants of varying sizes from the Pioneer Fund.


Comments

  • I removed a lot of irrelvant stuff, but note that somethings about the PF and racism should be added if that's going to be discussed at all.
    • the "especially" bit is POV, and the brain-size criticism is Ultramarine's own complaint, not a published criticism
    • holding up the SPLC as a critic of R&I research does a disservice to serious critics; surely some intellecutal or group without such serious problems can be quoted
    • the nonprofit bit is irrelevant now that the claim about financial conflict of interest has been removed; the dummy coroporation claim is also not directed at any researchers AFAIK, if it is show us a quote
    • Laxed policies on grant requirements and followups is hardly a criticism of bias -- if it is, show me a quotation --Rikurzhen 05:38, August 10, 2005 (UTC)

darwin quotation

Charles Darwin wrote in his Descent of Man:

"... the various races, when carefully compared and measured, differ much from each other -- as in the texture of hair, the relative proportions of all parts of the body, the capacity of the lungs, the form and capacity of the skull, and even the convolutions of the brain. But it would be an endless task to specify the numerous points of difference. The races differ also in constitution, in acclimatization and in liability to certain diseases. Their mental characteristics are likewise very distinct; chiefly as it would appear in their emotions, but partly in their intellectual faculties."

I don't know who added it. But it is certainly germane. It is a reflection of 19th centurty ideas about race differences, coming from an original hereditarian. --Rikurzhen 07:45, August 10, 2005 (UTC)

Why should an overview article have a long quote from an eighteenth century hereditarian, who state as a fact dubious claims? Violates NPOV. Ultramarine 07:47, 10 August 2005 (UTC)
Because the history of an idea is germane. No less than starting the race article with historical descriptions. --Rikurzhen 07:52, August 10, 2005 (UTC)
(Edit conflict...) Ah. I put the quote back in a few moments ago, before I saw the debate here. Ulta, note that the History section is not (yet?) summary style, so it has a higher level of granularity than (say) the Public opinion section. When (and if) the history section becomes its own subpage then obviously the summary oughtn't include a full quote of "an eighteenth century hereditarian". Many of the findings of "Jensenism" is a consequence of Darwin's Dangerous Idea, so the man is certainly an important source. (I found the quote and will edit a bit for precision.) Arbor 08:03, 10 August 2005 (UTC)

Reading edit differences

Ultramarine, as I stated in the edit summary, there weren't any deletions in that edit i.e. Boas' quote wasn't deleted. The edit difference pages can be hard to make sense of sometimes. --Nectar T 11:06, 10 August 2005 (UTC)

You are correct regarding the Boa text. I will change it. Ultramarine 11:20, 10 August 2005 (UTC)

It's accurate to say the Bell Curve is considered to have started the contemporary debate.--Nectar T 11:09, 10 August 2005 (UTC)

Ultramarine, actually, Murray co-authored a book that has had a pretty notable influence on this field. I can't remember the name, but maybe someone else can.--Nectar T 11:18, 10 August 2005 (UTC)

He wrote a very criczed popular book. That makes him much less important than the discover of the Flynn effect. Ultramarine 11:20, 10 August 2005 (UTC)
Flynn is noteworthy for his gene*environment interaction theory, not so much for the Flynn effect, when it comes to the topic of race and IQ. --Rikurzhen 13:32, August 10, 2005 (UTC)
...the discover of the Flynn effect. Richard Lynn? hitssquad 11:50, 10 August 2005 (UTC)
Guess? Wrong. Ultramarine 11:51, 10 August 2005 (UTC)
Then who was? hitssquad 12:16, 10 August 2005 (UTC)
Often such a discovery is named after the discoverer. In this case James R. Flynn. Ultramarine 12:32, 10 August 2005 (UTC)
Flynn definitely gets first billing. Other people, including Lynn, had noted IQ scores were rising, but Flynn put it together as a worldwide pattern. It would be similarly difficult to apply the title ...discoverer of DNA. --Rikurzhen 13:32, August 10, 2005 (UTC)

the pioneer fund section

the pioneer fund section is particularly long. if the "main" tag is to be taken seriously, the text in this article should be shortened. one particularly easy change is to delete the splc section, because it carries with it so much baggage. surely some other critic can be substituted which does not have a financial motivation. --Rikurzhen 01:22, August 11, 2005 (UTC)

What I think about this is that part of writing a concise summary is choosing what adds a concrete point to the discussion and what doesn't. The reasoning that the SPLC point brings to the summary is that (1) the fund has funded some racist organizations and individuals, and (2) that it funds race and intelligence research (these are the two reasons the article currently gives). I'm not sure what bearing these two accusations have on potential bias in scientists' research.--Nectar T 02:16, 11 August 2005 (UTC)
My suggestion with SPLC is based on the assumption that there is another, more reputable, individual/organization which has made similar charges. If there is, their criticism could be substituted. This saves the space needed to criticize the SPLC itself. --Rikurzhen 02:32, August 11, 2005 (UTC)
Drop the SPLC baggage and it won't be so long. All we need to say is that it is controversial in its own right. Right now, the criticism of the SPLC is longer than the sentence about it's criticism. Wasn't someone here previsously arguing that we didn't need to have criticism of the Pioneer Fund here because there is already an article about it? Funny that the SPLC criticism is so long when it is just a commentator on the field. -Willmcw 03:46, August 11, 2005 (UTC)
Obviously that's not netural. Now that we know what we know about the SPLC, we can't be content to merely report their claims without pointing out their alleged conflicts of interest. I don't see how it could be hard to find a group or individual without a financial conflict of interest that could substitute as a entity to which we can attribute the same view. --Rikurzhen 04:00, August 11, 2005 (UTC)
Put another way, if this is truly a prominent view (worth mentioning at all) then there must be more than one group/individual making this claim. If they can be cited as an example instead of the SPLC, then we save that extra space.
That still leaves plenty of room for creative editing for concise language. --Rikurzhen 04:03, August 11, 2005 (UTC)


Re:"[There was an argument] that we didn't need to have criticism of the Pioneer Fund here because there is already an article about it".
I think that discussion that occurred previously (not mine) argued that the criticisms of the Pioneer Fund that we have listed don't imply the research is biased science, which is apparently the point of the section. The 2 criticisms we currently list are: (1) the fund allegedly uses dummy corporations to circumvent researchers' employer institutions, and (2) they have very relaxed requirements from grantees, apparently suggesting the fund is only concerned with if the grant furthers their ideological goal. Is the first point included in order to imply the researchers are being giving personal cash gifts as bribes?--Nectar T 05:49, 11 August 2005 (UTC)
That's sort of what it reads like, although I don't know that that charge is ever explicitly made by the cited author. --Rikurzhen 08:29, August 13, 2005 (UTC)

heritability

Jokestress and I were discussing heritability in the IQ article (Talk:Intelligence_quotient). From that discussion, I realized that some of the times "heritability" is written in this article it would be better to use another term. AFAIK, "between group heritability" isn't about heritability in the technical sense of the term. "Heritability" is being used as a short hand notation for something like "partly genetic cause of group differences". --Rikurzhen 01:03, August 12, 2005 (UTC)

Google does return hits on "between group heritability", so this is no doubt a common term. We should try to figure out if there is a standard definition and a standard way of describing how it differs from within group heritability (or just heritability as the WP article describes it.) This recent paper may be a starting point: PMID 15508003 --Rikurzhen 01:23, August 12, 2005 (UTC)

Critique of IQ itself

I admit that I have not read the entire talk page in great detail. But my single biggest problem with this article is that it bases the debate (a valid and important debate) solely on IQ testing. Now, I (after a lot of research and study and experience in the subject) am of the belief that IQ testing is one of the great intellectual frauds to have been perpetrated especially on the United States. This of course is POV, however many professionals (Gould, Pinker, and virtually the entire psychology, sociology, and anthropology departments at Harvard MIT and Yale) agree.

As such, it should at LEAST be noted in the introduction that, while this page will focus on the debate as it relates to IQ, a number of respected people reject IQ. As it was before I inserted a brief note, any critique of IQ was buried in the history section. I think it's more important than that.

Please also do not construe this as an attempt to discredit this page or its argument, I just think it's very important to make an important controversy on the subject more visible. Apollo58 17:23, 12 August 2005 (UTC)

Pinker, and virtually the entire psychology, sociology, and anthropology departments at Harvard MIT and Yale. Pinker writes in The Blank Slate a vociferous admonisment of Gould and others who reject intelligence/IQ (p. 149-150). You may want to reexamine your evidence. --Rikurzhen 17:30, August 12, 2005 (UTC)
I will gladly reexamine my evidence, most of it culled from studying with him at harvard, but i do not agree that this bit should be moved. I think its a fundamental critique of the entire basis of the article and should be at least noted in the introduction. This page goes on and on analyzing and commenting upon IQ tests only to then, at the very bottom, say "by the way some people reject IQ tests entirely." I really think this belongs at the top because it's deeper than a "public controversy."
I would agree, except that statements describing criticisms of IQ are in three places before the public controversy section:
  • intro: Critics examine the fairness and validity of cognitive testing and racial categorization, as well as the reliability of the studies and the motives of the authors, on both sides. Critics often fear the misuse of the research, question its utility, feel that comparing the intelligence of racial groups is itself unethical, or fear sociopolitical ramifications, whether justified or unjustified.
  • background: Some critics question the validity of all IQ testing or claim that there are aspects of "intelligence" not reflected in IQ tests. Criticisms of the validity of IQ testing focus primarily on questions of "test bias", which has many related meanings.
  • history: In response to The Bell Curve, Stephen Gould updated The Mismeasure of Man in 1996, criticizing many aspects of IQ research.
I believe that covers everything. The intro should be reserved for summarizing the entire article (in about 3 paragraphs), and so the current intro text, which covers a broader range of criticism, seems more appropriate to me. --Rikurzhen 17:56, August 12, 2005 (UTC)

Pinker is on the record as saying that he doesn't think that B-W IQ differences require a genetic explanation, often citing Thomas Sowell's argument from within-race ethinic differences. That may be what you're thinking of, but it's an entirely different proposition than the argument that Gould makes. --Rikurzhen 18:23, August 12, 2005 (UTC)

Strange. Here's a Pinker quote from Blank Slate: "I find it truly surreal to read academics denying the existence of intelligence. Academics are obsessed with intelligence. They discuss it endlessly in considering student admissions, in hiring faculty and staff, and especially in their gossip about one another. Nor can citizens or policymakers ignore the concept, regardless of their politics. People who say that IQ is meaningless will quickly invoke it when the discussion turns to executing a murderer with an IQ of 64, removing lead paint that lowers a child’s IQ by five points, or the presidential qualifications of George W. Bush." Google found me this, but I am sure I remember the quote from reading the book. Welcome to this page, by the way, we need all the good editors we can get, no matter your personal POV. Arbor 20:31, 14 August 2005 (UTC)

Debated assumptions

Getting back to this bullet point from the intro:

  • self-identified race is a useful categorization for social science research and can produce scientifically meaningful conclusions.

These assumptions need to be laid out in simple declarative sentences. This one is designed to link two things that do not necessarily follow. Let's take them one at a time:

  • self-identified race is a useful categorization for social science research

OK, for starters, "self-identified race" is a step away from the real debate. The only reason someone self-identifies with a race is because that culture has given them a specific set of 3, 4, 5, 6, or 30-some race choices. This bullet needs to explain the problem with race, not self-identified race. I'm not sure "useful" is the right word either. Maybe "commonly used" or "a convention used", but the real issue is its biological reality, not the social reality of race. This bullet needs to start with something like

  • race is a biologically meaningful taxonomy

not self-identified race, not meaningful for social science, but biologically/genetically meaningful. This helps readers understand that the debate centers around innate group differences in intelligence.

  • race... can produce scientifically meaningful conclusions.

Once we fix this as a simple declarative sentence, this part will be redundant. It's the qualifiers that onfuscate the real debate about this assumption.

Thoughts? Jokestress 16:53, 14 August 2005 (UTC)

There is a debate (in the world) about whether race is a biologically meaningful taxonomy, but the research described in this article does not start with that assumption. Only a very weak concept of race is needed to start doing social science resarch on race. The concept used is that people describe their own race (i.e. self-identified race). There was an attempt by Gould et al to claim that you can't do research on race unless you can prove that race is a biologial taxonomy (like species). This is, of course, not true as social science research on race goes about classifying people all the time on the basis of what race they check on a form.
A working assumption of some researchers looking at cause (i.e. entirely environmental vs partly genetic) is that race is not biologically meaningless, which is just to say that there is at least a scrap of real biology behind what people use to distinguish races (e.g., skin color is a natural kind variable, not merely a social construct), but they do not say that biology alone can be used to carve people into distinct racial categories. --Rikurzhen 17:21, August 14, 2005 (UTC)
I don't think there's any dispute that biological differences are the basis for organizing people by "race," but it is still arbitrary and socially constructed.
The real issue here is not social science. It's biology and genetics. It's the hereditarian hypothesis that "race" group differences in IQ scores may represent a biological predisposition to lower "intelligence" among some "races." The debated assumption on "intelligence" expresses the issue very well as it stands, but this one is missing the main debated assumption: that race can be measured and defined scientifically. That seems necessary to illuminate the hereditarian position. Jokestress 17:56, 14 August 2005 (UTC)
that race can be measured and defined scientifically So we're agreed that everything except the causal hypotheses could withstand even the assertion that "race is biologically meaningless"? Good -- then we don't have a problem with what assumptions should be at the beginning of the article describing the entire field.
It's the hereditarian hypothesis that "race" group differences in IQ scores may represent a biological predisposition to lower "intelligence" among some "races." What part of self-identified race is problematic? Try not to confuse two different ideas. One is that global human population variation is unambiguously and not-arbitrarily structured into distinct races: no one (no publishing researcher) believes this, nor would they need to because of... Two is that genome wide allele frequency differences exist between human breeding populations, and self-identified ethnic and racial groups are (to a very close approximation) breeding populations, such that genome-wide allele frequency differences exist between self-identified racial and ethnic groups. Thus, you don't need to be able to identify racial groups without reference to arbitrary social considerations to be able to identify genetic and biological differences between these groups. --Rikurzhen 18:06, August 14, 2005 (UTC)
Put more succinctly. You don't need to be able to identify racial/ethnic groups from biology/genetics alone in order to identify biological/genetic differences between racial/ethnic groups. Right? --Rikurzhen 18:14, August 14, 2005 (UTC)
That's just tautology and reification. There's no way to falsify what you said. If intelligence has a genetic component which varies by race, then "race" should be quantifiable. But since it can't be and varies by culture, scientists have abandoned the term in favor of more precise terminology. That's what's missing here. If the organizing principle of the scientific hypothesis is "race," then that needs a better basis than "self-identified." Height is heritable, and there is a corrleation between height and intelligence (I have no idea what it is, but everything has a correlation). If we divide people into short, medium and tall without defining those terms, we aren't being very scientific. Someone medium might self-identify as tall without an objective standard. Someone self-identified as tall in Asia might be considered short among the Dinka. Since it's a significant POV that "race" is biologically meaningless, the article needs to ackowledge that up front. The intro materials later do an OK job (we'll get to that), but this first bullet does not explain the debate well. Jokestress 20:41, 14 August 2005 (UTC)

I'm afraid that is a very confused description. If you want to go through this without jumping to the judgment of "tautology and reification", I'll put forth the effort to explain it. Else, I can just demand you support your claims with citations. The problem you will have is that the claims you are making are (1) over statements and (2) statements about other questions that don't logically relate to this topic. --Rikurzhen 21:04, August 14, 2005 (UTC)


I'll start from the basics. A single copy of a human genome is approximately 3 billion nucleotides in length. Except identical twins, no two individual humans have the exact same genome (also each person has two different genomes; chromosome pairs). For the sake of simplicity, let's assume that the only kind of differences between humans is the kind where one nucleotide is substituted for another (other differences do exist, but the logic is unchanged). These single nucleotide differences (polymorphisms) are called SNPs. On average any two individual genomes differ at 1 in every 1000 nucleotides; thus, there are approximately 3 million SNPs between two individuals. These SNPs include the genetic differences that cause obvious phenotypic differences (physical, mental, metabolic, etc.). But the majority of SNPs (probably) have no phenotypic effect. The different versions of a SNP are called alleles. Within a population, the allele frequency is the proportion of the population with each alternative SNP. There are as many allele frequencies as there are SNPs in the genome x populations in consideration.[41]

We are all the decedents of the first modern humans, who evolved ~100k years ago in Africa. Their progeny spread out and populated the world in a time window of ~10-50k years ago. The SNPs which exist in contemporary humans came from these ancestors. During the 10~50k years that our ancestors were spreading out and colonizing the world, the greater physical distance between them lead to divergence of allele frequencies. Some groups got different starting allele frequencies (founder effect). Some new SNPs emerged after populations separated. Some changed in frequency randomly over time and some changed because of natural selection. Population geneticists now know the allele frequencies of many SNPs in many existing populations.[42] The pattern of allele frequencies allows for historical inference of which modern populations are most closely related and when they diverged. Not surprisingly, geography is the largest determinant of allele frequency divergence between populations, and populations from different continents show greater differences than populations from the same continent. (related: International HapMap Project)

The 19th century concept of race as a typological/qualitative category is incompatible with the quantitative view of populations offered by genetics. When anthropologists say "race is meaningless" they mean 19th century concepts of race are meaningless, and they say it because of the quantitative nature of population differences. I and everyone else should agree because the evidence is clear. When they say "race" should be abandoned, they are making a political/didactic judgment that the 19th century concept is so strongly tied to the word "race" that it would be better to use their word "population" instead. Indeed, when talking about genetics the word population is often substituted. I haven't seen a consistent substitution in social science research.

However. Genetic (allele frequency) differences between populations clearly do exist and have been documented extensively. So if self-identified races, the labels that people apply to themselves for social reasons, are populations (see race) then we should not be surprised to find allele frequency difference between self identified races. In fact, we do.

In the U.S., we are quite specific about the concept of race and racial labels. The concept of race used in the U.S., that is the self-identified racial labels of U.S. populations, are highly concordant with population groups that emerge from population genetic analyses. That is, they are highly informative about ancestry, at least to the geographical level of continents. In the world as a whole, allele frequencies vary continuously along the lines of past population migrations. But in the U.S., populations have been sampled from select locations around the globe. This sampling breaks the continuity between continents and thus makes it mostly unambiguous to infer continent of ancestry of U.S. citizens from allele frequencies alone.

An aside... This is why Neil Risch warned against not using racial labels in epidemiology when it was suggested that we could eliminate racial labels and instead use genetically inferred populations. His warning was that you will reconstitute (with high concordance) the self-identified racial groups, but without that label to remind you of the social context of race, you might be tempted to unjustifiably infer that difference between the populations you inferred were genetic in origin because you used genetics to infer the groups. Just to drive that point home: the existence of genetic differences between races is not proof that a within-group heritable trait that varies between races does so for genetic reasons. Instead, different methods are needed to figure out the cause.

I think there is one other important point. Self-identified racial groups (in the U.S.) are arbitrary in aspects like what does a person with grandparents from 4 continents call himself?, but are not arbitrary in their relationship to genetics (allele frequencies). You occasionally hear arguments, like the one you gave, that racial groups could be substituted with (e.g.) lactose tolerance groups or (in your example) height groups. However, this is not true. The populations inferred from whole genome allele frequency comparisons integrate information from the entire genome, summarizing that complexity into (arbitrarily) many groups (populations). Height or lactose tolerance does not have this robust feature, and this is why height or lactose tolerance is not a reliable indicator of ancestry but self-identifed race is. The genetically inferred groups, OTOH, are maximally informative about genetic variation across the genome. The number of groups you decide to infer is arbitrary, but the choice to lump people into which group is very much not arbitrary.

Mull that over and let me know what details I can fill in. --Rikurzhen 21:48, August 14, 2005 (UTC)

One more thing comes to mind. That was mostly about genetics, but it might help to discuss anthropology in brief. The anthropologist have a much more complicated problem on their hands than intelligence (or biomedical) researchers in the U.S. Whereas most of the U.S. population can be placed into n=4 or so categories by ancestry, the rest of the world is not that simple. For example: are aboriginal Australians White, Black, Hispanic or Asian? None of the above. South Asians are also a tricky bunch with lots of gene flow and isolated groups. What race are the Kalasha? Race is not really a helpful concept for anthropology, but for reasons that don't impinge on social or biomedical studies of the much simpler U.S. population. In the U.S., racial labels are a zero-cost-to-assay category that integrates social and genetic information; a useful way to divide the population for some research, including intelligence research. --Rikurzhen 22:20, August 14, 2005 (UTC)

Thank you for such a detailed reply. I will indeed mull this over- may take a week or so (lots going on). Jokestress 03:48, 15 August 2005 (UTC)

I posted the text of a new article from JAMA in the Yahoo Group. It discusses the utility of race from the POV of medicine. Note that disease traits, like heart disease, are only slightly heritable (~20-30%, if at all) as compared to IQ (50-80%). --Rikurzhen 23:14, August 25, 2005 (UTC)

First sentence again

While I was away this sentence got revised:

Race and intelligence is a controversial interdisciplinary field studying the nature, origins, and practical consequences of racial and ethnic group differences in intelligence test scores and other measures of cognitive ability.

This is now inaccurate. If the article were titled race and intelligence testing or race and psychometrics, this revision would be accurate, but since both "race" and "intelligence" are not clearly defined terms, the first sentence should acknowledge possible racial and ethnic group differences in intelligence, and the debated assumptions should lay out the issues regarding definitions. Then we get into the evidence for this assertion in the first sentence after we explain the assumptions.

Once we get this issue squared away, we should also revisit the first debated assumption. Jokestress 04:16, 25 August 2005 (UTC)

Wikipedia is not the place to crusade against what words mean. Race Reality 05:22, 25 August 2005 (UTC)


I'm going to reply to Jokestress... As written, your argument is valid, but because it leaves out salient details, the conclusion is false. Let me explain:
The word "intelligence" is pre-scientific. Intelligence tests--of all kinds--mostly measure g, and as such g is certainly a part of intelligence. It is not only possibly but very likely that the common sense meaning of intelligence encompasses more than just g. For the sake of discussion, let's take this distinction, which I think comes from Sternberg:
  • analytic intelligence
  • creative intelligence
  • practical intelligence
Which I think came from surveys, interviews, literature searches, etc about what the common sense meaning of intelligence is. I think it is widely recognized that creativity probably falls under the common sense meaning of intelligence, but that g is not a measure of creativity. The Sternberg/psychometricans dispute is over over whether analytic and practical intelligence are separate (Sternberg) or whether both are mostly g. Regardless of this dispute, both recognize that g is an important aspect of intelligence.
IQ differences alone do necessarily imply intelligence differences, because test bias could lead to the situation where different IQ does not measure g the same for all races. However, this is not the case. Therefore, race differences in IQ are really differences in g.
Race differences in g imply differences in intelligence regardless of the creative/practical meanings of intelligence. The reason we know this is because of the predictive validity of g. Whatever creative and practical intelligences might mean, they don't imply that g is of limited value: g matters everywhere you might expect intelligence to matter.
The second point about the first sentence and your concerns is that you are putting preference on the title over the real world topic. The real world topic is racial and ethnic group differences in intelligence test scores and other measures of cognitive ability. The title is admittedly very corse-grained. If title length/ease of understanding where not an issue, we would use a more descriptive title, such as the italicized text I quoted above. We should immediately try to smooth out the title's courseness by giving a precise description about what the article is really about. --Rikurzhen 05:44, August 25, 2005 (UTC)
If we are distilling this title to race and intelligence, it is important that a causal reader understand why the title is admittedly coarse-grained. While most of the heavy lifting about controversies regarding "race" and "intelligence" should happen on those respective pages, it is critical to ackowledge these controversies up front before going into racial and ethnic group differences in intelligence test scores and other measures of cognitive ability.
To claim general intelligence factor is universally accepted is inaccurate. While Sternberg is certainly a critic, it seems Gardner is the main competitive model. His aphorism which best summarizes the model: "It's not how smart you are that matters, what really counts is how you are smart."
PS- haven't forgotten your excellent earlier comments above-- just back in town. I'd like to hash out this first sentence, which seemed fine when I left. Jokestress 07:34, 25 August 2005 (UTC)
Gardner's model has never gotten off the ground. Gardner has not tested his model -- thus it have no empirical backing -- whereas Sternberg has tested his model. Gardner's "intelligences" are recognized by other psychologists as "interests" such that Gardner has essentially redefined intelligence as interest. Gardner's multiple intelligence theory is not a serious alternative to IQ/g in any sort of way that would warrant mention in this article. Certainly not in a first sentence context. --Rikurzhen 08:15, August 25, 2005 (UTC)
Project Zero has been pretty inflential since it was founded in the 1960s. A lot of education specialists would consider multiple intelligences a serious alternative to IQ/g, or words to that effect. I need to add all that to general intelligence factor and work a bit on the multiple intelligence page to clarify that, then we can continue discussing this first sentence limitation of intelligence to IQ. There's a reason intelligence and IQ have separate entries, so we are getting back to whether this article is really about race and psychometrics. Jokestress 16:27, 25 August 2005 (UTC)
Try to tweak the title would be more appropriate than trying to bang on the "what is intelligence?" question in the intro sentence. Note that psychometrics deals with the measurement of all mental traits, not just "intelligence". --Rikurzhen 17:43, August 25, 2005 (UTC)

about the title

the indent was getting pretty deep --Rikurzhen 20:36, August 25, 2005 (UTC)

So perhaps race and intelligence testing, my first suggestion? That would certainly clear up the NPOV issue I see with the graph at the top of this current article. Jokestress 19:38, 25 August 2005 (UTC)

That's one of the more reasonable alternatives that have been proposed on the talk page. The prima facia problem is that school achievement, brain size measurements, and reaction time measures don't fit well under the heading of "intelligence testing". The second kind of problem is that it becomes a sticky philosophical quesiton as to whether measurements of intelligence are meaningfully different than intelligence itself from the point of view of discussing the topic. Sort of like talking about heat versus heat measurement. But at least there are good theoretical foundations for heat, unlike intelligence. That is, most of what's known about intelligence comes from intelligence testing, and the rest is largely intutition and speculation. --Rikurzhen 20:36, August 25, 2005 (UTC)

OK, here's what you need to do. Split the content of the page into Race and IQ and another new page called simply IQ (if such a short name is possible). The content should be split between specific race related results discussed purely in terms of IQ, perhaps with causal and historical discussions but nothing about how the IQ number is to be interpreted. That stuff goes in the IQ page, which should systematically express each interpretation as a contentious theory and offer disclaimers and counter-POVs as required. The separation is all that is required. Here's an example: On any one day I can talk about how I despise touchy-feely people *or* I can talk about how women are more touchy-feely. But never both in the same converation or I'm in deep shit! Just a thought.
Actually there is an IQ page already. So this may serve as an excersise in reducign duplication and putting things under the riught page as well.

I still like the current title. It's the title of several books (pro et contra the genetic hypothesis), the title of the Enc-Brit article (very much contra the genetic hypothesis), etc. It's what this subject is called (among several other names, of course.) Wikipedia is not the place for us to find "better" terminology for an established area of research and public debate. But while we are brain-storming different titles (and ignoring my own objection), how about Race and psychometric intelligence. The latter terms is sufficiently wishy-washy to enable people to keep their own, private definition of intelligence intact, while "psychometric intelligence" could (conceivably) be taken to encompass IQ test and related measures of intelligence. Still, I don't like it. Arbor 12:33, 26 August 2005 (UTC)

Arbor, I don't think that any title change will be satisfactory. Because "race and intelligence" is the title of so many books and article, I am inclined to give it preference over WP-editor proposed alternatives. I think the intro block and background section are sufficient warnings that "intelligence" -- the layman's term -- is imprecise and thus terms that have been given more precise definitions like "cognitive ability" and "IQ" are used in the rest of the article. I don't think we need to worry about the problem of "what is intelligence?" more than that, although the intelligence (trait) article could use more explication on that point. --Rikurzhen 17:54, August 26, 2005 (UTC)

what does hispanic mean

Sorry, but what do you mean by "hispanic"? People from Spain and other "latin countrys" (Italy, France, Portugal) or people with white and black genes?

neither -- the U.S. meaning of the word. see the Hispanic article for a description of the populations that label describes --Rikurzhen 06:40, August 26, 2005 (UTC)

I didn't know that either. (I am not American.) Some months ago I inserted an explanatory note. Here is my old edit, which I think made the article a lot more accessible for non-US readers. And here is the reversion, with explanation 'some cleanup'—without doubt a benevolent reversion in the spirit of removing stereotyping and imprecision. I would still lobby for my version, but I assume the tacit familiarity with racial classification exhibited by many of our American editors sometimes leads to rather opaque terminology (for the interested outsider). Arbor 07:04, 26 August 2005 (UTC)
I don't see any problem with mentioning that major Hispanic populations include Mexican, Puerto Rican, and Cuban immigrants to the U.S. If I remember correctly, these groups are also demonstrative of the diverse geographic ancestry of those labeled "Hispanic", with predominatly Native American, African, and European ancestry respectively -- although all three groups are heterogenous and admixed. --Rikurzhen 07:13, August 26, 2005 (UTC)

Charles Murray Commentary Article

Murray has a quasi-commentary-review article online [43]. A warning he makes that we may want to emphasize:

The concepts of “inferiority” and “superiority” are inappropriate to group comparisons. On most specific human attributes, it is possible to specify a continuum running from “low” to “high,” but the results cannot be combined into a score running from “bad” to “good.” What is the best score on a continuum measuring aggressiveness? What is the relative importance of verbal skills versus, say, compassion? Of spatial skills versus industriousness? The aggregate excellences and shortcomings of human groups do not lend themselves to simple comparisons. That is why the members of just about every group can so easily conclude that they are God’s chosen people. All of us use the weighting system that favors our group’s strengths.

His thesis is that B-W group differences are (whatever else they may be) seemingly "intractable".

He discusses data I haven't heard of yet that gives some hope on the "Is the gap shrinking?" question from our sub-article including recent IQ (not just achievement) data. We should incorporate this new data. --Rikurzhen 19:10, August 26, 2005 (UTC)

Incomplete Sentence

''Systematic misrepresentations''

There has been no serious claim of systematic misrepresentations by race and intelligence researchers as a group. Note that this group includes both advocates and opponents of the partially-genetic hypothesis.

However, individual researchers have.

The sentences above have some gramatical errors that make it very hard to comprehend what it is trying to say. Furthremore the "individual researchers have" setence should be made more succinct. If someone knows what it is suppose to say, could they fix it?

Anon comments that were controversially deleted

  • Here, let me lay it out for you. Blacks aren't as intelligent as hispanics. Hispanics aren't as intelligents as whites. Whites aren't as intelligent as Asians. If you divided people up by height and measured intelligence, there would be a group at the bottom and a group at the top of the intelligence spectrum. In this case, blacks are at the bottom. Why is it that everytime something is quantified (IQ) it is somehow racist against blacks? Too much time is spent on arguing about racial bias. If half as much time was spent on say...studying the material blacks would do much better. I don't know how I can make this any clearer. Maybe if I said it in ebonics? --User:151.205.27.11
  • This is the kind of article that will make me stop contributing to wikipedia - or even consult it. -herve661.

While I strongly disagree with the anon's comment above it is not simple vandalism and should not be deleted. Even more interesting and coincidental however this anon's comment reaches the same unscientific conclusions as the article does, albeit much more directly. zen master T 00:29, 27 August 2005 (UTC)

The argument appears to be: 'It's not vandalism, therefore it should not be deleted.' This page is for discussion relevant to the editing of the article, and non-germane clutter impedes this. Are there any reasons for retaining one-shot, non-constructive comments? --Nectar T 01:05, 27 August 2005 (UTC)
Random "this article is crap" comments are address by Wikipedia:Remove_personal_attacks. --Rikurzhen 01:22, August 27, 2005 (UTC)
herve661's statement does not meet any criteria for deletion. And the anon's response to herve661 is not vandalism. Also note the anon is, albeit much more directly, advancing the same unscientific apparently racist POV as does the article. zen master T 01:55, 27 August 2005 (UTC)
The anon comment was there long before Herve's comment. You have noted that the comments are not vandalism, but have not provided any arguments for your position that they don't meet the criteria for deletion. A non-constructive comment reflecting the article does not make it constructive.--Nectar T 02:04, 27 August 2005 (UTC)
The burden of proof is on those that would delete/censor. The anon's comment is in some ways an accurate summary of the article and his/her opinion could have been formed from reading the article, I am surprised you want it deleted. zen master T 04:10, 27 August 2005 (UTC)

from the Wikipedia:Remove_personal_attacks guideline:

Counter-examples which are not personal attacks -- they are not nice, but they are not affected by this guideline, but you might want to remove them anyway:

   * "This article is complete crap."
         o Does not refer to a specific author. Could be considered personally offensive if there is only one author. Not terribly constructive in any case.

I see no reason not to remove them. They add nothing to the talk page. If the author who left the comment really wants to discuss the article, they can come and put their comment back -- and add some information about why they hate this article. Else it is just heckling. As the guideline says, this kind of non-constructive comment is worth removing anyway. --Rikurzhen 07:07, August 27, 2005 (UTC)

herve661 is saying the article will make him stop contributing to WP, that isn't saying "this article is crap". The anon is advancing the same disagreeable POV as the article does, so using your logic we should delete the entire actual article? zen master T 15:07, 27 August 2005 (UTC)

First debated assumption again

OK, reading it with a fresh eye today, I think I can live with the current iteration of the first sentence, provided the second debated assumption remains unchanged.

As for the first debated assumption, that's not the debate, as I have mentioned before. The controversy is whether "race" is a biologically or genetically meaningful taxonomy, rather than a pre-science folk taxonomy. It is certainly "scientifically meaningful" in the social science sense of studying the "social reality" of "race," but the main issue is the hereditarian hypothesis that "intelligence" has biological underpinnings which vary by "race." Jokestress 17:08, 27 August 2005 (UTC)

About the 1st assumption, I'm guessing that you have more to say? Else, give me some time and I'll try to infer your meaning. Alos, I like the second assumption, so that's cool with me. --Rikurzhen 18:47, August 27, 2005 (UTC)
Yes, I want to read and digest a couple of things (like the Yahoo group articles), after which I should have a more detailed argument and proposal for change. I agree that the second assumption is clear on what the main issue is there. Jokestress 18:55, 27 August 2005 (UTC)
Just a note while you're reading. Try to distinguish two alternative questions: (1) whether U.S. race labels are a suitable taxonomic category for humans and (2) whether given race labels they happen to divide people into groups such that group phenotypic differences could plausibly be caused by genetic differences between the groups. I believe the hereditarian hypothesis assumption we're looking to write is (2) not (1). --Rikurzhen 19:10, August 27, 2005 (UTC)
(Edit conflict. This goes right after J's first message.) I am not quite sure what you are saying now. («First sentence» of the article? Or the first bullet point?) I think current state of the introduction is terribly misleading. As you point out in your second paragraph above, the idea that race shouldn't be scientifically meaningful category is an extreme minority POV. (I don't see anybody slapping that POV into the introductory paragraph of Anthropology or African American studies either.) We are simply violating our obligations as WP editors by putting that into the introduction—there are lots of debates and controversy about his research, and I have the ambition to present them. The current intro needs to go with all speed. I would very much like to return to Nectarflowed's version from early July, which enjoyed widespread support among the editors of this page, before you changed it (July 15 edit).
However, I strongly support the ambition of you (and everybody else on this page) to explain the debated assumptions behind the hereditarian hypothesis with the utmost care. But rather than doing that in the introduction (before the hereditarian hypothesis has even been explained), I suggest we make a better job of the Background section, especially Basic concepts. The subsection The contemporary debate... would be a good place for a lucid presentation not only of the scholarly debate, but also of the tacit assumptions underlying these viewpoints. Currently, the second item says « interpretations that posit an IQ gap between racial groups caused by approximately the same matrix of genetic and environmental forces that cause IQ differences among individuals of the same race», and this would be the proper place to insert the fundamental epistemological concerns that are behind this hypothesis in the first place. (The section could benefit from a rewrite for better prose anyway, so please go crazy.) Arbor 18:59, 27 August 2005 (UTC)
I was mulling it over and coincidently I came to the same conclusion Arbor did. That's the place where we would want to put that exposition: the the contemporary debate section, not the intro block. --Rikurzhen 19:05, August 27, 2005 (UTC)
You guys are both wrong on this point. The first three paragraphs need to teach the controversy as if there were nothing else in the article but the intro. It's supposed to be a stand-alone abstract of what is discussed at length in the longer version.
And this claim that "race" is a biologically or genetically meaningful classification appears to be the minority POV among biologists and geneticists. It's my understanding that the trend is toward populations, clines, etc. The Murray below (besides the Tang confirmation bias stuff) is more about race and medicine. Just because you can divide people into four (or six or thirty) groups based on genetic clustering does not make "race" scientifically meaningful. Jokestress 20:03, 27 August 2005 (UTC)
Just because you can divide people into four (or six or thirty) groups based on genetic clustering does not make "race" scientifically meaningful. You miss my two alternative questions point above. Race is the category system we're stuck with for the moment. The only question for the herediatarian hypothesis is whether genetic difference between "races" is plausible. Arguging that research should be done on "populations" instead of "races" is a question at a completely separate level, and cannot be an argument against existence of genetic differences between "races". However, on the "race" vs "population" question, we'd find that "white"="European", "black"="African", and "East Asian"="East Asian". Thus, for those three "races" there is a one-to-one correspond with a continent-level population/geographic ancestry. Which makes the race vs population point moot for that kind of discussion. --Rikurzhen 20:15, August 27, 2005 (UTC)
Regarding what to put in the intro, your theory is correct, but your interpretation I disagree with. I think The primary focus of the scientific debate is whether group IQ differences also reflect a genetic component introduces the debate sufficiently without having to talk about the details and levels of that debate. Then the background info section can really introduce the complexity of that debate. --Rikurzhen 20:23, August 27, 2005 (UTC)
(edit conflict. bye!) I did indeed miss that. 2) isn't really the issue. The social reality of races in not in dispute: i.e. self-identification. That phenotypic differences can be organized by genetic clusters is not in dispute. The real controversy here is the "big three" (originally Negroid, Mongoloid, Caucasoid) and the ethnicities Hispanic or Jewish or Sinti or whatever are social constructs. In other words, you would probably be able to predict someone's hair type based on genetic cluster data, but that doesn't mean that hair type is a biologically meaningful category for comparing intelligence. I don't know if that makes complete sense. As I said, I need to think about how that first bullet should read. Jokestress 20:39, 27 August 2005 (UTC)

(not indenting b/c it gets hard to read) I'm not sure there's a charitable reading of that comment that I can respond to. Let me give a general response. First, consider this clip from a PLoS Genetics interview with Neil Risch[44]

Gitschier: Let's talk about the former, the genetic basis of race. As you know, I went to a session for the press at the ASHG [American Society for Human Genetics] meeting in Toronto, and the first words out of the mouth of the first speaker were “Genome variation research does not support the existence of human races.”
Risch: What is your definition of races? If you define it a certain way, maybe that's a valid statement. There is obviously still disagreement.
Gitschier: But how can there still be disagreement?
Risch: Scientists always disagree! A lot of the problem is terminology. I'm not even sure what race means, people use it in many different ways.

The take home message is that the interpretion of questions about race is highly contingent on the precise meaning and context of the question. The normal condition of "Scientists always disagree" is blown up to massive proportions by all of the political entanglements of how this data is interpreted.

On that note, my (q1) is certainly not an assumption of the hereditarian hypothesis, although supporters of that hypothesis may or may not have an opinion about (q1). The evidence for this comes from reading what they have to say about race (e.g. Jensen 1998 or that new Murray article), but for the sake of clear discussion let me try to craft an analogy to explain the logic...

Consider hair color and the category system "red head" or "not read head". (Note that whatever "race" is, it is much more than "skin color", so I'm not trying to hang this analogy on the color similarity but rather the categorization similarity.) Human hair color is a continuous trait. There is no stark line between "red head" and "not read head". Instead all of us have some degree of red pigment (phaeomelanin). But for the sake of categorization a line is drawn somewhere and people are partitioned into red or not-red; the actual location of that line may be arbitrary and we may say that red and not-red is socially constructed. One practical application of the red/not-red distinction was the observation that reds respond differently to anesthesia than not-reds. We can ask the question of the role of genetic differences between reds and not-reds in causing this phenotypic difference without having to assume that our red/not-red distinction was not to some extent arbitrary. We don't have to assume that the red/not-red distinction we drew was externally valid or intrinscially natural in order examine the causation question. It's sufficient that the existence of genetic differences between reds and not-reds is plausible. Because of several lines of data we have good reason to think that genetic difference exist between reds and not red (indeed we know at least one gene -- MC1R -- that causes hair color differences). --Rikurzhen 22:43, August 27, 2005 (UTC)

Jokestress wrote: In other words, you would probably be able to predict someone's hair type based on genetic cluster data 1) Races are groups, not individuals. 2) Racial categories, among individuals, latently distinguish discrete phenotypic traits and discretely distinguish latent phenotypic traits. The latter means that individuals are most-powerfully categorizable racially by latent factors of their expressed traits. (Hair color is not a latent expressed trait. It is a discrete expressed trait.) Latent factors are only discretely observable through the application of statistical techniques. -hitssquad 23:06, 27 August 2005 (UTC)

I'm not sure I follow, but something of note: quantitative/fractional geographic ancestry (a.k.a. "populations") is theoretically a better categorizer of human genetic and phenotypic variation than the U.S. census race/ethnicity categories. But if you define of race as "quantitative/fractional geographic ancestry", then you're okay. That save-the-term versus replace-the-term split is a huge source of the terminology debate Neil Risch was getting at. --Rikurzhen 23:48, August 27, 2005 (UTC)

Here's Murray's summary from the Commentary article[45]:

Turning to race, we must begin with the fraught question of whether it even exists, or whether it is instead a social construct. The Harvard geneticist Richard Lewontin originated the idea of race as a social construct in 1972, arguing that the genetic differences across races were so trivial that no scientist working exclusively with genetic data would sort people into blacks, whites, or Asians. In his words, “racial classification is now seen to be of virtually no genetic or taxonomic significance.”25

Lewontin’s position, which quickly became a tenet of political correctness, carried with it a potential means of being falsified. If he was correct, then a statistical analysis of genetic markers would not produce clusters corresponding to common racial labels.

In the last few years, that test has become feasible, and now we know that Lewontin was wrong.26 Several analyses have confirmed the genetic reality of group identities going under the label of race or ethnicity.27 In the most recent, published this year, all but five of the 3,636 subjects fell into the cluster of genetic markers corresponding to their self-identified ethnic group.28 When a statistical procedure, blind to physical characteristics and working exclusively with genetic information, classifies 99.9 percent of the individuals in a large sample in the same way they classify themselves, it is hard to argue that race is imaginary.

Homo sapiens actually falls into many more interesting groups than the bulky ones known as “races.”29 As new findings appear almost weekly, it seems increasingly likely that we are just at the beginning of a process that will identify all sorts of genetic differences among groups, whether the groups being compared are Nigerian blacks and Kenyan blacks, lawyers and engineers, or Episcopalians and Baptists. At the moment, the differences that are obviously genetic involve diseases (Ashkenazi Jews and Tay-Sachs disease, black Africans and sickle-cell anemia, Swedes and hemochromatosis). As time goes on, we may yet come to understand better why, say, Italians are more vivacious than Scots.

Note:

25 Lewontin (1972).

26 For a technical description of what has been labeled “Lewontin’s fallacy,” see Edwards (2003). For a nontechnical statement of how the understanding of this issue has been changing, see Leroi (2005).

27 Studies incorporating some variant of this type of analysis include Bamshad, Wooding, Watkins et al. (2003), Bowcock, Ruiz-Linares, Romfohrde et al. (1994), Calafell, Shuster, Speed et al. (1998), Mountain and Cavalli-Sforza (1997), Rosenberg, Pritchard, Weber et al. (2002), and Stephens, Schneider, Tanguay et al. (2001).

28 Tang, Quertermous, Rodriguez et al. (2005). The self-identified ethnic groups consisted of non-Hispanic black, non-Hispanic white, East Asian, and Hispanic. The statistical procedure was cluster analysis. The algorithms in cluster analysis are not trying to find groupings that correspond to any pre-identified characteristic of the people in the sample—that is, the researchers did not use any information about the physical characteristics that humans use to identify ethnicity. Cluster analysis simply looks for interrelationships among the genetic markers that identify statistically distinct entities.

29 In Tang, Quertermous, Rodriguez et al. (2005), “Hispanic” corresponded to a cluster, even though no one thinks of “Hispanic” as a race. People do not need to belong to different races, conventionally defined, to be genetically distinct.

Include in header or in basic concepts?

The main difference between the July 15th version Arbor pointed to and the current version is the inclusion of the debated assumptions. Jokestress has noted that the header should function as a stand-alone abstract. Rikurzhen has summarized the argument against including the race debate as "The only question for the herediatarian hypothesis is whether genetic difference between "races" is plausible." Studies like the Tang study and Rosenberg et al's Genetic Structure of Human Populations seem to verify that plausibility.

Regarding the IQ debate, the header makes it clear that the differences under discussion are not in 'intelligence' itself, but in "intelligence test scores and other measures of cognitive ability." The relevant question from there seems to be 'are measures of cognitive ability useful measurements?' The answer to that question (if it's the right question) appears to be, yes, IQ is considered to have significant predictive power. Gottfredson summarizes: "Intelligence as measured by IQ tests is the single most effective predictor known of individual performance at school and on the job. It also predicts many other aspects of well-being, including a person's chances of divorcing, dropping out of high school, being unemployed or having illegitimate children."[46].--Nectar T 00:59, 6 September 2005 (UTC)

Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org../../../r/a/c/Talk%7ERace_and_intelligence_Archive_15_14d4.html"