Re: Times review of Rushton book (fwd)

I concur with Alan's reading of the NYT review, but not with his
suggestion that we must find the "bad science" in Rushton's research at
any cost.  "Bad science" is not necessarily about mishandling data; in
this case, it is about the definition of concepts, namely "race" and
"intelligence".  Although the last decade has witnessed the return of
racially-based studies of intelligence such as Rushton's, it has also
produced many new approaches.  In regard to intelligence, it is now quite
commonplace to complement traditional IQ, which generally measures spatial
cognition and quantitative skills with emotional IQ, musical IQ, artistic
IQ, etc.  The idea behind the expanded definition is that the association
of intelligence with onely one type of IQ is culturally conditioned.

With
regard to race, I remember reading another NYT review sometime this spring
of a book whose title eludes me at the moment, but whose author makes an
argument that genetically, there is far more differentiation within"
races" than between them, meaning that race is only skin-deep.  I don't
know exactly how Rushton and the authors of the _Bell Curve_ define race,
but I suppose that they use government statistics, and the government's
categories are certainly not genetically based.

The upshot is that the bad science in these books is that they try to pass
off cultural (or at the very least, culturally-influenced) categories as
biological ones.  They are also quite primitive in that they don't really
account for geographic and historical variation (e.g. if belonging to the
"black race" predisposes one toward low intelligence, poverty and
violence, why did settled civilization emerge in Africa, as old Diop tells
us, and he makes it a point to define "black" the same way it is defined
on the street in New York City).  

In other words, if we concentrate too hard on Rushton's handling of his
data in order to hastily unform the unenlightened schoolteachers that his 
book really is bad science, we not only miss its readily apparent
drawbacks, but we reinforce the culture which privileges the" hard
sciences", which is precisely the vehicle that Rushton et al. use to gain
credibility.  So write the publisher, if you are a recipient of this book,
present a paper at a professional conference, and inform the students in
your class.  I see no reason of giving it much more attention than that,
unless you are ready to write your own textbook (I have to add that the
left-wing and world-systemy Intro to Sociology textbook by Appelbaum and
Chambliss is not much better than the NYT review at handling the _Bell
Curve_.

-- 
Boris Stremlin
bc70219@binghamton.edu