Talk:The Kallikak Family

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I found this article hitting "Random page". Although it is an interesting article, it does need a small amout of work to clean of some POV. For example saying "torn to shreds", when "discredited" could have been used. I will try to come back later and do some NPOV edits, but it may take awhile. gK 02:39, 10 Nov 2004 (UTC)

[edit] deleted this part

To criticize Goddard for not realizing these methodological flaws in 1912 is likely missing the point, however. At the time, Goddard's methodology was as cutting edge as anything else in the field of human heredity, because there simply was little or no methodology to work from. It is easy at the beginning of the 21st century to criticize Goddard for failing to take proper account of environmental effects (nutrition and other dietary deficiencies, for example), but such knowledge was not known in his time and certainly had not been discussed on a scale that it is now.

That's pure opinion and has no room in this entry. The fact is that had Goddard looked past his bias, he could easily have found poverty and malnutrition to be the root of the family's troubles. He was way too eager to put forward his racist and elitist viewpoints without any due dilligence on other possibilities.

[edit] Recent study

I found this article to be interesting, as I discovered it in relation to studying Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder (FASD). Two recent articles by Karp suggest that the Kallikak families members likely had FASD due to prenatal alcohol exposure, which could have also plausibly contributed to their conditions in addition to poverty and such. I would like to add that recent perspective into the article, as well as a link to FASD. MLHarris 15:53, 17 February 2007 (UTC)