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From: John Selby <edu011@coventry.ac.uk>
Date: Tue, 13 Feb 1996 12:48:53 -0500
To: PROGRESSIVE SOCIOLOGISTS NETWORK <psn@csf.colorado.edu>
Subject: re: The Bell Curve & is .5=.5?
On Mon, 12 Feb 1996, INTT000 wrote:
>
>
> "Our traders declare that we are no match for Germans and
> [Japanese](1). Our men of science run about two continents and
> proclaim the glory of foreign [schools](2) and the crying need for
> technical instruction. Our politicians catch the general
> apprehension and rush to heroic remedies. Looking round
> impassionately from the calm atmosphere of [psychology or
> sociobiology](3), ... the remedy lies beyond the reach of revised
> educational systems, we have failed to realize that
> [intelligence](4)... is not manufactured by home and school and
> college; [it is](5) bred in the bone..."
>
> Who wrote this?
>
> Karl Pearson (used to be called Carl Pearson) wrote this in
> 1903 in an article entitled "On the inheritance of the mental and
> moral characters in man, and its comparison with the inheritance
> of the physical characters", in which he claimed that a true
> correlation coefficient of .5 was found.
>
> ( Notes:
> I take the liberty to change the words in the brackets. In the
> original text they are as follows:
> (1) Americans
> (2) universities
> (3) anthropology
> (4) the psychical characters
> (5) they are )
>
> So the interesting thing about Murray, Pearson et al. is not
> really the content of their argument. Rather it is this long
> ideological cycles that is interesting. In fact, technically our old
> friend Pearson is better than the contemporary Murray et al.
> Pearson, following the pioneering work of F. Galton, the famous
> cousin of Darwin, invented correlation coefficient (the Pearson
> product moment correlation coefficient) which we still use today.
> However that is not the full term. The full term is this: the
> correlation coefficient of inheritance. Furthermore, in the article
> I quoted above Pearson claimed to find the "true" correlation
> coefficient, which is .5. According to him, this .5 is not only true
> for human and animal physical characteristics but also human
> mental and moral characters. But is .5 =.5? That is one of the
> technical questions I asked students here in a graduate seminar.
>
> So when Samuel Huntington advocated a theory of Clash
> of Civilizations, is he alone in history? Lieutenant Colonel
> Ishiwara Kanji, one of the designers of the Japanese "Greater East
> Asia Coprosperity Sphere" made similar remarks in 1928 and
> Joseph Chamberlain did the same in 1899.
>
> Interesting ideological cycles although I don't know where
> to put post-structuralism and post-modernism.
>
> Tie-ting Su
> Department of Sociology
> McGill University, Montreal
Of course, Murray has done the same thing with his earlier work on the
underclass. See J.Macnicol "In pursuit of the underclass." Journal of
Social Policy, july 1987:299-318, among other sources which make the same
point that there is nothing new under the sun, especially nonsense.
John Selby
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John Selby
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Prof. Chris Chase-Dunn
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