User talk:70.68.206.90

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It might not have been your intention, but you recently removed content from Race and intelligence. Please be careful not to remove content from Wikipedia without a valid reason, which you should specify in the edit summary or on the article's talk page. Thank you. Alf melmac 08:15, 20 August 2006 (UTC)

It might not have been your intention, but you recently removed content from Race and intelligence. Please be careful not to remove content from Wikipedia without a valid reason, which you should specify in the edit summary or on the article's talk page. Thank you. A link to the edit I have reverted can be found here: link. If you believe this edit should not have been reverted, please contact me. Jaedza 08:16, 20 August 2006 (UTC)

Please stop. If you continue to vandalize pages, you will be blocked from editing Wikipedia. Alf melmac 08:26, 20 August 2006 (UTC)

You have been temporarily blocked from editing for vandalism of Wikipedia. Please note that page blanking, addition of random text or spam, deliberate misinformation, privacy violations, and other deliberate attempts to disrupt Wikipedia are considered vandalism. If you wish to make useful contributions, you may come back after the block expires. AmiDaniel (talk) 08:27, 20 August 2006 (UTC)



Thank you for experimenting with the page Race and intelligence on Wikipedia. Your test worked, and has been reverted or removed. Please use the sandbox for any other tests you want to do. Take a look at the welcome page if you would like to learn more about contributing to our encyclopedia. —ptk✰fgs 06:36, 26 August 2006 (UTC)

Welcome to Wikipedia. We invite everyone to contribute constructively to our encyclopedia. Take a look at the welcome page if you would like to learn more about contributing. However, unconstructive edits are considered vandalism, and if you continue in this manner you may be blocked from editing without further warning. Please stop, and consider improving rather than damaging the work of others. Thank you. —ptk✰fgs 06:53, 26 August 2006 (UTC)

Please do not place db-attack on articles which are not attack pages. Additionally, please be sure to use the appropriate syntax when applying tags to an article (you applied Template:TotallyDisputed] with a link rather than with template syntax). Finally, please be sure to visit Talk:Race and intelligence and start a thread there describing your concerns regarding the neutrality of the article. —ptk✰fgs 07:07, 26 August 2006 (UTC)

Again, please start a thread at Talk:Race and intelligence describing your concerns regarding the neutrality of the article. Thanks. —ptk✰fgs 07:22, 26 August 2006 (UTC)

Contents

[edit] Copyright violation in Race and intelligence

Please do not add copyrighted material to Wikipedia articles, as you did to Race and intelligence without permission from the copyright holder. See Wikipedia:Copyrights. Copyright violations are unacceptable and persistent violators will be blocked. Your original contributions are welcome. —ptk✰fgs 07:18, 26 August 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Race and intelligence

Hi. Please stop posting long essays to the talk page of Race and intelligence. Most of the POVs you express are covered in detail in the article itself, with footnotes, references, and all. However, if you do feel that some POV is mis- or underrepresented then please bring that to the attention of the editors, and be very specific. Especially, remember to give an explanation of how much this POV or that deserves our attention. It is very helpful to include assessments and reactions from other primary or from secondary sources to establish the validity of primary sources. Oh, and get an account, would you? Arbor 11:40, 5 September 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Race and intelligence 2

Hello again. I am moving what looks like a very long essay about race and intelligence from the article talk page to your talk page. While it brings forward several interesting points, the essay is overlong and most of the points have alreayd been discussed. However, please feel free to bring back to the talk page a short summary of any point you feel has been missed. My suggestion would also be to bring one point (or no more than a very few, two or three), presented in as concise a manner as possible. Unfortunately, long-winded prose such as you wrote lacks succintness which gives it less impact (and less appal for those who don't have the time to read it all). I you have other concerns, you can also reach me on my talk page.--Ramdrake 12:08, 5 September 2006 (UTC)

[edit] IQ Test Scores are Not an Absolute Measure of Intelligence

IQ tests scores are not an absolute measure of intelligence; they tend to ignore many aspects of human cognition and the cognitive process. Things like creatively, wisdom, ability to learn, ability to adapt and practical skills are not gauged by these tests in a meaningful way. IQ tests also fail to measure the same construct among all people to whom the tests are applied, the more culturally distinct the group (I.E. Truckers, and Musicians) the greater the discrepancy (See Sternberg, Grigorenko, and Kidd, 2005). To apply a single test to an entire population of distinct individuals from varying backgrounds is unbelievably biased unless used to gauge a particularly relevant skill. Example: Race horses are not gauged for their poker skills. - Just as Sociologists are not measured by their ability to paint.

The fact is intelligence does vary among humans, but this can be for many reasons: prenatal care, subjective interpretation, interest factors, differing environments, life circumstances etc. My concern is not with differences among individuals, but with claims that imply that group differences involving subjective and highly bias testing situations can amount to genetic differences in the traits being tested.

How does one compare the intelligence of a gifted painter with that of a mediocre Physicist? According to the narrow methods and perspectives used and held by many Psychometricians, the Mediocre Physicist is likely to be perceived the more intelligent. Why, because this is what the testing situation demands that they think or believe.

Psychometric tests do not and can not measure the number of years spent in practice, nor can they measure interest, motivation, interpretation, diet, home & social life, daily activities etc., of the individual being tested; nor do they try! Despite these obvious and fundamental short comings this model is often presented as valid and unbiased by many practitioners.

Cole, Gay, Glick and Sharp (1971:233) made the following insightful observation: “ Cultural differences in cognition reside more in the situations to which particular cognitive processes are applied than in the existence of a process in one cultural group, and its absence in another. A similar position is held by Berry (1974).

Sarason and Doris (1979) view intelligence as a cultural invention that does not necessarily hold true across cultures. ( Serpell, 1974; Super, 1983; Wober, 1974) Even within a given society, different cognitive characteristics are emphasized from one situation to another and from one subculture to another. These differences extend not just to conceptions of intelligence but to what is considered adaptive or appropriate in a broader sense.

Views of intelligence vary from culture to culture; and the majority of these views do not reflect Western ideas (See, Berry & Bennett, 1992; Greenfield, 1997; Okagaki & Sternberg, 1991; Serpell, 1993; Yang & Sternberg, 1997)

“Often intelligence tests measure skills that children are expected to acquire a few years before the taking the test (Sternberg, Presidential addresses; Culture and Intelligence, 2004).”

“Vernon (1971) points out the axes of a factor analysis do not necessarily reveal a latent structure of the mind but rather represent a convenient way of characterizing the organization of metal abilites. Vernon believed that there is no one ‘right’ orientation of axes. Indeed, mathematically an infinite number of orientations of axes can be fit to any solution in an explanatory factor analysis (See Sternberg, 2004).”

Robert Sternberg and his colleagues ask the experts to define “intelligence” according to their beliefs. Each of the roughly two dozen definitions produced in each symposium was different. There were some common threads, such as the importance of adaptation to the environment and the ability to learn, but these constructs were not well specified. According to Sternberg, very few tests measure adaptation to environment and ability to learn; nor do any tests except dynamic tests involving learning at the time of the test measure ability to learn. He further states, traditional tests focus much more on measuring past learning which can be the result of many factors, including motivation and available opportunities to learn (Sternberg, Grigorenko, and Kidd, American Psychologist, 2005). - IQ test items are largely measures of achievement at various levels of competency (Sternberg, 1998,1999, 2003). Items requiring knowledge of the fundamentals of vocabulary, information, comprehension, and arithmetic problem solving (Cattell, 1971;Horn, 1994).

IQ scores do change over time. The average change between age 12 and age 17 was 7.1 IQ points; some individuals change as much as 18 points (Jones & Bayley, 1941).

IQ tests are convenient partial operationalizations of the construct of intelligence, and nothing more. They do not provide the kind of measurement of intelligence that tape measures provide of height (Sternberg et al, 2005).

[edit] Psychometric G

Robert Sternbeg found at that if you use the kinds of tasks that are used in intelligence tests, then you will get the g factor. That statement reflected analyses he did that instead of using individual difference analysis used process analysis. Even using process analysis, he got a general factor. Sternberg states: "Do I think that there is general factor in the kinds of tests that psychometricians use?" I would say "Yes." That is a different question from, "If you define intelligence, not just as IQ, but as involving more than what the IQ tests in fact test, is there then a general factor?" then I would say the answer is "No." So the way psychometricians operationalize it, you get a g factor.”

L. L. Thurstone in the 1930’s stated that g’ can not have inherent reality, for it emerges in one form of mathematical representation for correlations among tests and disappears (or greatly attenuates) in other forms, which are entirely equivalent in amount of information explained.

Note: There are three major schools of psychometric interpretation and only one supports the view of g and IQ.

[edit] Race and Genetics

- Osbonre and Suddick (1971, as reported in Loehlin, 1975) attempted to use 16 blood-groups genes known to have come from European ancestors. Testing two samples the authors found that the correlation over the 16 genes and IQ scores was not highly positive as would have been predicted if European genes in Blacks increased IQ scores. In Fact, the correlations were -.38 and +.01. Because the results were not significant, the authors concluded that European genes lower IQ scores.

- Zuckerman (1990) demonstrated the dubiousness of results obtained through race premises. He found much more variation within groups designated, and, like many other species, humans showed considerable geographical variation in morphology (p.1134). Yee, et al. (1993) further concludes this.

- A study conducted by Tizard and colleagues involving Caribbean children showed that there was no genetic basis for IQ differences between black & whites. The IQ of the children at the Orphanage was: Blacks 108, Mixed 106, and White 103 (Flynn, 1980; also see Richard E. Nisbett, Race, Genetics and IQ, 1994. Also, The Bell Curve wars, 1995).

- Adjustments for socioeconomic conditions almost completely eliminate differences in IQ scores between black and white children. Co-investigators include Jeanne Brooks-Gunn and Pamela Klebanov of Columbia's Teachers College, and Greg Duncan of the Center for Urban Affairs and Policy Research at Northwestern University.


- IQ differences in the U.S are not as drastic as some have you believe. Many researchers put the difference between 7-10 points (Richard Nisbett, 2005; Vincent, 1991; Thorndike et al, 1986; Leon J. Kamin, 1995). As well, this conclusion is only reached after lumping the entire black population together as a single body. The truth is blacks from different regions in the U.S. differ markedly in culture and achievement.

- In more than a dozen studies from the 1960s and 1970s analyzed by Flynn (1991), the mean IQs of Japanese- and Chinese American children were always around 97 or 98; none was over 100. These studies did not include other Asian groups such as the Vietnamese, Cambodians, or Filipinos; who tend to achieve less academically and perform poorly on conventional psychometric tests.

-Stevenson et al (1985), comparing the intelligence-test performance of children in Japan, Taiwan and the United States, found no substantive differences at all. Given the general problems of cross-cultural comparison, there is no reason to expect precision or stability in such estimates.

- The measured amount of genetic variation in the entire human population is extremely small; genetically we are very similar. Indeed, 93% of all genetic variability occurs within Africa; the human groups with the greatest difference between them occur in Africa. Research has also found that the differences between chimpanzees and humans exceed 69%, whereas the widest range between any two groups of humans is less than 3%. All of this calls the concept of biological races into serious question.

Human populations have never been separated long enough for anything but the most superficial traits to have developed between them; regional human psychical traits over lap and graduate into one another. Traits like height and body shape offer much more genetic information than anything we use to designate the racial groups in North America and elsewhere. Furthermore, what is considered black in America could be considered white in Africa; that is, social ideas involving race differ from population to population. (See, Cavalli-Sforza, Menozzi, Piazza, 1994 & 2000; Davis, 1991; Allen & Adams, 1992. Cohen, 2002).