Re: Times review of Rushton book (fwd)

I appreciate the comments by Boris Stremlin and agree with his additions to
my comments. I dashed the comments off the top of my head. I think that
Boris' comments about defining "bad science" are a considerable improvement
over my rather narrow, hurried comments.  But I do believe that we have a
responsibility to "go public" with our criticisms, rather than simply write
another book or discuss it with colleagues or "our own" students. Who will
address the students in those Education courses if not us?

Alan Spector


----- Original Message -----
From: Boris Stremlin <bc70219@binghamton.edu>
To: WORLD SYSTEMS NETWORK <wsn@csf.colorado.edu>
Sent: Wednesday, December 08, 1999 2:07 AM
Subject: 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
>