From twright@orion.it.luc.edu Fri Oct 14 16:32:39 MDT 1994 From: twright@orion.it.luc.edu (Talmadge Wright) Subject: IQ FLAP (MURRAY) (fwd) To: psn@csf.colorado.edu Date: Fri, 14 Oct 1994 17:34:56 -0600 (CDT) Forwarded message: > From root Fri Oct 14 13:01:00 1994 > Message-Id: <9410141800.AA06218@orion.it.luc.edu> > Date: Fri, 14 Oct 1994 13:57:05 EDT > Reply-To: LEFT-L - Building a Democratic Left Movement > > Sender: LEFT-L - Building a Democratic Left Movement > > From: Relda Elad > Subject: IQ FLAP (MURRAY) > Comments: To: LEFT-LIST > > CHARLES MURRAY IQ FLAP "The Bell Curve" > > I understand that Newsweek Magazine plans to produce a radio show > on the IQ flap on various stations in the NYC are on Saturday in a > time slot between 12:30 and 1:30 PM. > > Apparently the Wall Street Journal is also trying to gather > material on the issue for coverage in the next few days. > > This is a very important issue for the left. Let's not be blind to > credible science and irrevocably embarrassed. If the science is > legitimate, we'd best figure out how to adjust to it in ways which > will offer maximum long term advantage to ALL PEOPLE. > > The right wing will certainly use it to maximize their gains. > > Relda Elad > > > Solidarity is a mutual venture! > -- ********************************************************************** Talmadge Wright (312)508-3451 * Dept. of Sociology & Anthropology FAX:(312)508-3646 * Loyola University Chicago twright@orion.it.luc.edu * 6525 N. Sheridan Rd. * Chicago, Illinois 60626 * ********************************************************************** From U17043%UICVM.BITNET@vaxf.Colorado.EDU Sat Oct 15 05:08:08 MDT 1994 Date: Sat, 15 Oct 1994 05:00:32 -0500 (CDT) From: "Daniel A. Foss" Subject: Charles Murray's domain assumptions and the egalitarian alternative To: LEFT-L%UCBCMSA.BITNET@vaxf.Colorado.EDU /* warning...difficult both conceptually and in extent of unconventionality */ I have read the New York Times Magazine cover story on Charles Murray and his forthcoming book, The Bell Curve, with R. Herrnstein, mentioned by Talmadge Wright and others. I propose here to turn the underlying assumptions of the hereditarian-elitist-sociobiological doctrine inside out, in order to posit alternative assumptions whereby we may break decisively with those aspects of Intelligence ideology, eo ipso elitist however stated; then counterpose to it a set of assumptions and analyses cetering upon the proposition that *control of the definition of the cognitive is invariably political*, the most political aspect of any class or elsewise stratified society, after the control of the means of violence guaranteeing social hierarchy itself: It is the strategic control of the definition of the cognitive which ensures or at minimum facilitates the hierarchical principle's seeming Just and Reasonable, once the means of violence ensure hierarchy's preservation barring a cost in blood most likely unacceptable to the victims. It's best to dispense with the hopelessly contaminated construct of Intelli- gence; the underlying notions are found in the dichotomy or binary opposition of Smartness and Stupidity. The intimate association between Smartness/Stupid- ity and hierarchy is easily illustrated in common speech: A child who is disobediently disrespectful of Authority Figures is said to be "acting smart." Similarly, the bully accosts the victim, perhaps grabbing the latter's shirt and slamming him/her against the wall, snarling, "Ya tryin' ta get *smart* wid me? Ya tryin' ta get *wise*?" Gangsters, among themselves, have adopted the self-styled "wiseguys" in signalling defiance of official legality. Notable among the cliches wherein the word *smart* occurs is "smart as a whip," which suggests that the person or child so characterized either presently or in the future occupies, or will, a hierarchically superior position wherefrom the infliction of pain upon those Inferior to him/her may in the Nature Of Things occur. Analogues may be found in any and all class/hierarchicalized societies. Mind is the province of the ruling class (or its clerical component where it appears doubleheaded, the other head comprising the warrior component, such that e.g., both William I of England, 1066-1087, and William II, 1087-1100, could not sign their names). The Chinese sage Mencius, contemporary of Aristotle, said: "Some work with their minds and rule others. "Others work with their hands and are ruled by others. "Without the Superior Man there would be none to govern the peasants. "Without the peasants, there would be none to feed the Superior Man." The above nicely illustrated the functionalist streak in Confucianism, to be developed much further by Xunzi (d. 261 BC). The Classical Greeks were meanwhile so prone to assume the necessity of the citizen fully participating in the polity to live without working that the forced-labour system permitting it could go without saying, except in rationalizing Natural Slavery. Both Classical Greeks and Classical Chinese had highly developed definitions of the cognitive, in both civilizations inseparable from the cultivation of martial arts. Greek youth passed through the ephebe age-grade, which under the super- vision of the gymnarch learned to wrestle naked in the gymnasium, contributory to prowess in war as in love in later life; preparatory education, also, emphasized the study and even memorization of canonical texts commencing with the Homeric Epics. The six subjects studied in the Chinese Confucian system, devised by Confucius himself, included archery, charioteering, elite appropri- ate behaviour and rituals, and music; the study and memorization of the canon of texts (at first, the largely spurious records of the Ancient Kings; later, the Confucian Classics), was to be sure emphasized as in Greece. The differen- ces reflected the dominance of a citizen caste in Greece, monarchical states developed out of feudal polities in China. In the latter, Superior Man had initially meant, literally, Son Of A Lord. By Confucius' day, the recruitment of appointed officialdom by rulers in state-building called forth Confucius' policy of training young men of commoner birth into the simulacra of born and bred nobles. This is to say, the definition of the cognitive associated with a given ruling class in this society or that may seem elsewhere or in some other period of history bizarre, perverted (ie, Abominations(*)), or silly; but so long as the socialization process output prospective ruling-class members seemingly oozing Smartness as locally defined, no matter. [(*) In the Seleucid Empire, which more aggressively than the Ptolemaic propagated Hellenism as - in our terms - Westernization and Modernization, some Backward barbarians, as the Near Easterners were defined, eagerly aped the conquering Macedonian and Greek white military settlers, *cleruchs*, and as in eg Judaea, underwent reverse-circumcision surgery for respectable appearance in the gymnasium; others, in the same country, invented "Homosexuality" for the first known time in history, and pulled off the first known Fundamentalist Social Revolution.] I have invoked comparative-historical sociology to bring home the arbitrari- ness and transitoriness of social constructions of Smartness (with its inevitable and invariable fake antithesis, Stupidity, indicative of the lack, in the vast majority of the population, of the capacity to think). I cannot emphasize too strongly the fact of the systematic and ruthless *enforcement* of Essential Stupidity. [Eg, in the Jim Crow Deep South, a "smart nigger" was at the very least under suspicion of tending toward the most malign sort of African-American, the "bad nigger," whose life expectancy was not great by reason of adopting the assertiveness and elsewise psychically Normal profile of the "good" white person. Another version may be found in DSM-III-R, the Malleus Maleficorum of psychos, where among surefire signs of schizophrenia is listed "neologisms and overelaborate words." A loophole for flipped-out shrinks exists in the injunction to consider "educational level." But I happen to know this bag-lady with a PhD; suppose she got locked up, who'd believe she's a person of High Degree?] Where even the [notional] Athenian political paradise and intellectual hotbed was vertically divided into three hereditary castes, and the citizen caste itself into five classes (the Latin version, with four classes, gives us our word "class," from *slassis*, which made Classical Antiquity Classical), there wasn't any need for excellence in brains to be hereditary; merely the condition of Better Sort, *kaloi kagathoi*, there were so many dimensions of excellence for these agonistic competitors to finish in the money (or laurel wreath) in the relevant contests. All the educated could speak up and get taken seriously, there necessarily having been such a dearth of them. It is with the advent of *bourgeois society and bourgeois society alone* that the locus of cognitive performance, as newly redefined by the introduction of the mass- education in the mid-to-late nineteenth century, was sited in the discrete human organism. The grading of students was invented at Cambridge University in 1794. Thus, it is no older than time-scheduled living cum commuting, or Functioning, as it is known in common speech. (See D. Landes, Revolution In Time, 1982; Thompson, Customs In Common, 1993; Jean Lave, Cognition In Practice, 1985. "Functioning," curiously, conveys the sense of "being a moving part in someone else's machine.") From this time onward, the educational apparatus, whose massive existence, as Jean Lave cogently argues, has shaped and warped all of the prevalently conventionalized notions of how children and others learn, so as to leave unexamined the postulate of the necessity of the classroom, has made finer and finer distinctions among those undergoing this type of the formal socialization process *and* has sited the locus of "achievement" in the discrete organism. Thus it enforces one answer as to which of two possibilities is the case in the *absence of itself*: Either (a) With the exception of a very few geniuses and somewhat more numerous Retarded persons, *we are all the same*, pretty much. Appearances to the contrary are artifacts of measurement of persons of hierarchically unequal social origin. (b) Smartness is distributed Normally, like other measured continuous varia- bles in human populations; i.e., the Bell-Shaped Curve; and we are pretty damned certain that height is genetically determined; consequently, so is Smartness. Differentiated scores define *discrete organisms*. There is, given the disposition to locate the site of achievement (or future-achievement-propensity called *aptitude*) in the discrete organism, and to chastise ideation to the contrary as Deviance we call *external blame* or delusions about *locus of control*, just enough differences as between organisms *to make the inference heuristics - rules of thumb - and attributions of Inferiority vs Superiority in "Intelligence" Look Good*. Ideological representations of essential differences which do not exist find expression in the following ways: (1) Expectations of, or the sense of entitlement to, elite status or, more generally, any stratum appropriate to that of one's family of origin, as unconsciously absorbed from a point very early in life, *Determines Performance*: Once upon a time, an undergraduate at the State University misrepresentation wonderfully mixed up, and said: "You mean, where I'm going to End Up in Later Life determines how I'm going to do on the Test next Tuesday?!" It does, it does. (1a) Also, it follows from *this* interpretation that the lower IQ scores observed among the US black population is attributed to the circumstance that they're African-*Americans*: They've internalized via the socialization process, very early in life, the proposition that, "If there has got to be a Bottom, it might as well be us." Which may be demonstrated by the higher aptitude, achievement, and "Intelligence" scores observed among immigrants and their young children: People from Trinidad or Kerala (even untouchables or "scheduled castes") have their unconscious cognitive maps of society nullified by the fact of migration to a different society, whereby the place of persons with black skins in the Natural Order of Things becomes problematized, as opposed to a taken-for-granted Law of Existence. (2) The more you group your test score data, the closer to perfection does the correlation between household income of the family of orientation and the observed mean score of the interval become. Thus, it is possible to say, from grouped 1974 SAT data, that an increment of $23.41 in parents' income predicted an increment of one point on the Scholastic Aptitude Test. The zero-order Pearson r between the two variables was 0.96; and the regression coefficient was an amazingly significant five times its standard error for 12 observations. (I'd played with programming statistics formulae in the APL language, and put in as test data a table of figures from Harper's magazine just for the fun of it; that's what came out.) You may group your data by neighborhood, too; the principle and result are the same. (3) As everyone, no matter how socially Inferior, cherishes some invidious distinctions which demarcate him or her from some organism still more Inferior, everyone acquires some vested interest in shreds of lesser degrees of Inferiority. This legitimates the hierarchy as a whole, which according to the Census Bureau survey released last week, grows more hierarchized over time, an additional million people having fallen into poverty in the last year alone. (3a) It will be observed, in corroboration, that any readers of this post, whether on LEFT-L or on PSN, will consider themselves Smart; and this will hold even more strongly for nonreaders of this post; which is My Problem, given the epistemological impact of stratification. Nobody, except those very few with a material vested interest in Equality Of Result, will accept an egalitarian politics; at best, merely a few cosmetic mitigations of the *degree* of inequality and hierarchization, whose reformist appeal will *necessarily* lose out to that of the Charles Murray position, conducive as that is to the constitution of a neo-hereditary fake-aristocracy. All organisms construing themselves Smart will, in the crunch, or even without any crunch, crave, desire, or intend that their *own* children shall enjoy "all the advantages." Because the hereditary transmission of social rank (or status, a five- letter Latin word for the four-letter English word, rank) *is what children are for*. (3b) We have a literary text called The Art Of Motorcycle Maintenance, by Robert Pirsig, which is almost invariably misinterpreted by younger readers. Another, minority, reading of this text is: The protagonist, "Phaedrus," as an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of Chicago, had been *socially constructed as Smart*. Denied tenure, he had lost his occupation - there having been little he could have done with a PhD in philosophy except teach philosophy - and with it his family. Most agonizingly, he'd also lost his *licence to operate a mind*, in terms of social validation of Smartness: Those who are paid to Think are allowed to claim possession of Minds; others are, well, "We don't pay you to think," that's the last thing they tell you before, "You're fired." Having become Nouveau Stupid, "Phaedrus," under the strain of intolerable cognitive dissonance, concocts the Smart-looking, to the non-Professional reader, "Metaphysics of Quality," whereby he satisfies himself that, not only is he still Smart, but actually even exceeds in his Smartness the people who fired him. But doesn't convince anyone else. As we approach the end of the novel, it has become apparent that he has become "reality-impaired"; he's just a psycho ready for consignment to the hospital with a prognosis, to the reader, that doesn't look good. (Eighteen years later, Pirsig produced another literary text, this one execrable, called Lila. Here is conclusive evidence of the contingency and dependence upon social validation of Smartness, for "Phaedrus" now Believes in the hokum "Metaphysics of Quality"; what's worse, he can't even write good prose any more!) (3c) The siting of Smartness (or Stupidity) in individual essence, coupled with the liquidation of the industrial working class in the Reaganite de-industrialization (see the two books on this subject co-authored by Barry Bluestone), have polarized society into those constructed as having Essential Smartness, whereby we may suspect that in the case of most such organisms, *whatever they are paid to do is defined as Thinking*; and those whose *human capacity to think is defined out of existence* such that they cannot be convinced that they can, they do think, barring pecuniary compensation therefor. 4. If Equality and Egalitarianism will not sell, what will? Individuation, the Freedom of (or for) Uniqueness, the inalienable right to Difference and Incommensurability. I've appealed to many an otherwise-elitist on this basis. Once people have become generalizably incommensurable, invidious distinctions of stratification, Superiority or Inferiority must deteriorate in salience. The people! Untested! Can never be computed! Daniel A. Foss From SPECTOAJ%PUCAL.BITNET@vaxf.Colorado.EDU Mon Oct 17 04:09:37 MDT 1994 From: SPECTOAJ%PUCAL.BITNET@vaxf.Colorado.EDU Date: Mon, 17 Oct 1994 00:57:36 -0600 (CST) Subject: IQ and heritability To: psn@csf.colorado.edu There are many excellent books that destroy the IQ-Heritability Myth. Conceptually, the argument is especially weak on the issue of "intelligence". Basically, all forms of 'genetic determinism" are essentially theological arguments (PLEASE--nobody else get this book to print until I'm done with mine on this theme...). It goes like this: They don't want to say that "intelligence" is essentially class biased AND socially learned. They have to locate it within the human body so that some are superior than others. But they have to locate it in a part of the body which is not fixable, or easily fixable. AHA! the mysterious gene--the solid, atomic-like building block of all life (actually not so solid, but that's another story) I like to tell my students that intelligence, in one sense, is biologocally based and therefore genetically based if you consider the following examples. 1.People with poorer eyesight have a more difficult time absorbing data and therefore, ALL OTHER THINGS BEING EQUAL, will be "less intelligent." 2> So too for people with poor hearing. 3) So too for people who metabolize sugar too quickly or too slowly, if they have to take an IQ test right after eating. 4)Of course, a person with good hearing might be biologically inferior to one with bad hearing in the following situation---they both live in a very noisy apartment on the corner of 110th and Broadway in New York, and the one with bad hearing can b bad hearing can get more reading done because he/she is less distracted by the sounds of sirens and loud trucks..and by reading more, will absorb more knowledge and develop better critical thinking skills. 5)People that ....etc. etc. you get the point. One can find very high correlations that signify associations, without indicating how powerful an effect that strong association has on the world. The bio-determinists do not like the arguments raised above, because all those biological "defects" can be 100% remedied by altering the environment with glasses, hearing aids, diet, ear plugs, etc. They want to locate it in a part of the mind that is so essential that it is, in essence, "the SOUL." A place that is not fixable. They also claim that it is not a racist theory. Of course it is. If one says that success is based on inherited intelligence and black and latino people are less successful, on average than "whites", then they must have worse biological stuff. And of course, the whole issue of success is vague. A cop who takes bribes is more successful than a grade school teacher who makes less money. The whole issue of white collar criminal success, unemployed aeronautical engineers, the incredible brilliance of anyone who can raise one, or several children successfully, especially if that person has no adult partner, and some of the most intelligent fiscal managers I know are women on public aid (welfare) who have to make their checks support three people for a month....... Certainly they are as bright as some folks I know who inherited their money or married into it. This theology of bio-determinism is rising along with religious fundamentalist fatalism---they claim to be opposite but they are actually the same. They are responses to a decaying system---late capitalism that no longer rewards productive labor the way early capitalism (with all its brutality) did. Money is made in speculating, in all forms of gambling, and in entertainment, etc. A drug dealer can parlay a half-million dollar investment into ten or twenty million dollars in a year.....about the same that a 300 million dollar steel mill might make if it is reasonably profitable! Is this alienated (dare I say--also anomic...but essentially alienated) environment, with all the attendant forms of cynicism and get rich quick social and cultural trends, and increased instability, there is a drive for stability of an emotional type that can only be offered within capitalism by various forms of theology. Turncoats can sneer at what they call "true believers", but in fact, the turncoats are seeking, and finding considerable stability and security safely in the arms of the ruling elite. In any case, all these extremeies, extremist theologies are reflective of a social breakdown that is similar to what developed in the 1920's and 1930's in Europe. Then it was called fascism. This is not to say that every time one gets a parking ticket it is appropriate to shout that "fascism is here!" But when the wind does shift and long term trends start to reverse themselves in economics, in politics, and in culture, including the rise of fatalism, it is certainly important to explore more deeply whether it just might be a turn towards some kind of "unfriendly" fascism. Alan Spector bhs purdue calumet Hammond, IN 46323 From Dave.Byrne@durham.ac.uk Mon Oct 17 04:46:20 MDT 1994 Via: uk.ac.durham; Mon, 17 Oct 1994 11:47:07 +0100 Date: Mon, 17 Oct 1994 11:47:40 +0100 (BST) From: D S Byrne To: LMILLER@umassd.edu Subject: Re: Murray, Foss, "intelligence" and neural darwinism Miller is absolutely right to stress that what genetic makeup gives is potential and that development reflects the complex interaction of this with environmental factors. I would just add that birth is not the crucial genetic event. That is conception and the nine months prenatal are the most important environmental experience we tend to get. This is why correlational analyses relating measures of intelligence (dodgy anyhow of course) of adopted children to that of birth parents and adoptive parents don't prove anything very much about environment vs genetic capacity, but the whole point is that such simple partitioning of complex causal processes is bad science anyhow. From lichter@nicco.sscnet.ucla.edu Mon Oct 17 05:11:17 MDT 1994 From: lichter@nicco.sscnet.ucla.edu (Michael Lichter) Date: Mon, 17 Oct 1994 04:12:10 +0000 To: Dave.Byrne@durham.ac.uk Subject: Re: Murray, Foss, "intelligence" and neural darwinism On Oct 17, 4:47am, D S Byrne wrote: > are the most important environmental experience we tend to get. This is > why correlational analyses relating measures of intelligence (dodgy > anyhow of course) of adopted children to that of birth parents and > adoptive parents don't prove anything very much about environment vs > genetic capacity, but the whole point is that such simple partitioning of > complex causal processes is bad science anyhow. Isn't the "simple partitioning of complex causal processes" what we do? "Simple" is relative, of course, but our "partitioning" can't be too complex or we're not going to be able to understand it. Would you agree that a theory of the social production of intelligences (acknowledging that "intelligence" is multi-dimensional) is a valid topic for sociology? Michael From Dave.Byrne@durham.ac.uk Mon Oct 17 07:18:16 MDT 1994 Via: uk.ac.durham; Mon, 17 Oct 1994 14:19:08 +0100 Date: Mon, 17 Oct 1994 14:19:41 +0100 (BST) From: D S Byrne To: Michael Lichter Subject: Re: Murray, Foss, "intelligence" and neural darwinism The issue is around this word partitioning. I am perfectly happy with the notion that we understand things by simplifying, but that still allows us to consider complex causation in the form, for example, of models showing complex causation by multiple elements. What partitioning does, particularly when it takes the form of chopping up a correlational matrix by techniques like factor analysis or at the most simplistic stepwise regression analysis, is identify single causal factors and treat them as operating individually. The difference is really between realist and positivist models. I haven't read Murray's present work but from available press accounts of it it does seem that he is taking this sort of positivist route. By the way even if we allow a genetic component in a complex model, it is by no means clear that the kind of approach operated by Murray et al (if I am right about its nature) could ever demonstrate any real correspondence between genetic liability for 'intelligence' and phenotypical expression of 'race', especially in racially complex society with considerable genetic mixing. Dave Byrne From KRAMER@apollo.montclair.edu Mon Oct 17 08:33:57 MDT 1994 Date: 17 Oct 94 10:33:00 EST From: "LAURA KRAMER" Subject: Lewontin To: "psn" I recommend Biology as Ideology, a collection of radio talks by Lewontin, for several useful pieces related to the topic of genes and intelligence that has been on the net. Because it is not limited to a few screens, it is even better than a few pithy points. Also quite accessible to students. Laura Kramer kramer@apollo.montclair.edu From R0553@VMCMS.CSUOHIO.EDU Mon Oct 17 08:55:10 MDT 1994 From: R0553@VMCMS.CSUOHIO.EDU Date: Mon, 17 Oct 94 10:42:43 EDT To: psn@csf.colorado.edu Subject: iq Hi: Glad to see that others have noted the resurgence of IQ'ism. The piece in the Times Book Review this weekend was appalling. If you haven't read it, it reviews Herrnstein and Murray and two other books of similar ilk; it reports their arguments reasonably well. But, what is astonishing is how the reviewer manages to avoid trying to compare their claims to the innumerable criticisms mounted by people like Gould, Lewontin, etc. They are simply bracketed as a form of PC, in effect. It's a bit like the way left political opinion is excluded from TV as too extreme to even be discussed, with the result that the New Republic stakes out the "left." I also think there's an interesting historical question in all of this. Is it just my impression, or does this kind of ideology justifying inequality seem to come back into fashion at times when inequality is most pronounced? The other thing that struck me about all of this is how people like Murray, Wilson and others manage to make themselves like victims and long-suffering martyrs to their own ideas -- all of this from cushy positions at elite universities and wealthy foundations. Wilson's claim that his dousing by a critic represents the only time a professor has been physically attacked for his ideas strikes me as highly unlikely (given the number of confronta- tions at department meetings, for example) and, in any case, should stick in the craw of the victims of the McCarthy era (who did not get nice jobs at Harvard and a front page review in the NY Times.) Gotta go kill some ants. Peter Meiksins. Cleveland State University. From dhenwood@panix.com Mon Oct 17 15:48:41 MDT 1994 Date: Mon, 17 Oct 1994 17:50:39 -0400 (EDT) From: Doug Henwood Subject: Re: iq To: R0553@VMCMS.CSUOHIO.EDU I read that NYT Book Review piece with great anticipation - wondering just how the arbiters of official culture would take the Murray/Herrnstein thesis. When Murray's Losing Ground came out 10 years ago, he was regarded as a madman; now, no less than Bill Clinton says that on welfare, Murray is essentially right. This time, the arbiters of culture have pretty much accepted the inheritance argument. It's really appalling. Put that together with immigrant-bashing (see Mike Davis' scary piece in the new issue of The Nation [Oct 31]), and it all begins to have a pre-fascist feel. Speaking of inequality, it seems that income distribution is getting more unequal at a more rapid pace in the 1990s than the 1980s. At least that's what the Census Data suggests so far. Doug Doug Henwood [dhenwood@panix.com] Left Business Observer 212-874-4020 (voice) 212-874-3137 (fax) On Mon, 17 Oct 1994 R0553@VMCMS.CSUOHIO.EDU wrote: > Hi: Glad to see that others have noted the resurgence of IQ'ism. The piece > in the Times Book Review this weekend was appalling. If you haven't read it, > it reviews Herrnstein and Murray and two other books of similar ilk; it > reports their arguments reasonably well. But, what is astonishing is how > the reviewer manages to avoid trying to compare their claims to the > innumerable criticisms mounted by people like Gould, Lewontin, etc. They > are simply bracketed as a form of PC, in effect. It's a bit like the way > left political opinion is excluded from TV as too extreme to even be > discussed, with the result that the New Republic stakes out the "left." > > I also think there's an interesting historical question in all of this. Is > it just my impression, or does this kind of ideology justifying inequality > seem to come back into fashion at times when inequality is most pronounced? > > The other thing that struck me about all of this is how people like Murray, > Wilson and others manage to make themselves like victims and long-suffering > martyrs to their own ideas -- all of this from cushy positions at elite > universities and wealthy foundations. Wilson's claim that his dousing by > a critic represents the only time a professor has been physically attacked > for his ideas strikes me as highly unlikely (given the number of confronta- > tions at department meetings, for example) and, in any case, should stick > in the craw of the victims of the McCarthy era (who did not get nice > jobs at Harvard and a front page review in the NY Times.) > > Gotta go kill some ants. > > Peter Meiksins. > > Cleveland State University. > Ted Goertzel wrote: > I never cease to be amazed by the way some people on this list simply accept > all information that supports their point of view without bothering to check > it out. I also believed that Burt was a fraud, and said so in my original > paper on the Myth of the Normal Curve. Having followed the event, however,I > also know that there were two accounts written independently by a > psychologist > and a sociologist which defend Burt and argue that the people who accused him > were not only wrong but were aware that their accusatoins were wrong when > they made them. These two books are: > > R. B. Joynson, The Burt Affair, London: Routledge. 1989. > > R. Fletcher, "Intelligence, equality, character and education," > Intelligence 15: 139-149, 1991 > > The Joynson book got a lot of attention when it came out, and caused a > major controversy in the British psychological association. It is also > discussed in a box on page 12 of The Bell Curve, which points out that > Burt's major conclusions have been replicated with recent data almost > exactly. I never cease to be amazed that the Burt affair will not go away. I would think however that when attempts are made to blame Burt's downfall on left-wing politics, outsiders and the press most PSN types will smell a red herring. The two books quoted above are revisionist attempts to save Burt's reputation and, by implication, some of his findings on heridity and IQ. That there are complex issues at the root of this and that some of Burt's detractors made mistakes is true. Other charges stand and are not refuted by the revisionists, for example that Burt indeed authored a dozen articles, notes and book reviews under false names. For a good review of the above two books see Franz Samelson, "Rescuing the reputation of Sir Cyril Burt", Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences, 28, pp. 221-233, 1992. The point is, like the "Bell Curve", these books represent, in my view, a general shift in the 'intellectual climate' towards rigid heriditerian views. Hank Stam Department of Psychology University of Calgary Calgary, Alberta Canada stam@acs.ucalgary.ca From gimenez@spot.Colorado.EDU Tue Oct 18 11:38:25 MDT 1994 Date: Tue, 18 Oct 1994 11:40:29 -0600 (MDT) From: Martha Gimenez Subject: Re: Lewontin To: psn@csf.Colorado.EDU I am forwarding this message on behalf of T. Rouse ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Kramer's suggestion re: Lewontin's Biology series is a good one. It might also be time to once again check out NOT IN OUR GENES, Lewontin's rebuttal to E.O. Wilson (since Murray is on the loose). TR (i.e., T. Rouse) From 3ZASIB3%CMUVM.BITNET@vaxf.Colorado.EDU Wed Oct 19 01:05:30 MDT 1994 Date: Tue, 18 Oct 1994 09:45:40 -0400 (EDT) From: Robert Newby <3ZASIB3%CMUVM.BITNET@vaxf.Colorado.EDU> Subject: Slippery Slope II: Scientific Racism Rejuvenated To: Association of Black Sociologists , Progressive Sociologists Network , afsc , Joyce Henricks , Alice Littlefield , Mary Senter <34MBPAK@CMUVM.CSV.CMICH.EDU>, Ulana <34YVN75@CMUVM.CSV.CMICH.EDU> Organization: Central Michigan University In a piece this past summer I argued that the passing of the 1994 crime bill that has now become law has placed our nation on a Slippery Slope toward "the final solution." That law has in it the death penalty for 60 offenses. The very language of the debatand the law show contempt for humanity, particularly if that humanity has been deemed superfluous for capitalist America. Demonizing the discarded and criminalizing race is part and parcel of that contempt. This latest assault by the New York Times in their cover book (10/16/94) review of Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray's _The Bell Curve_; _Race, Evolution and Behavior_ by J. Phillippe Rushton; and _The Decline of Intelligence in America_ by Seymour W. Itzkoff takes the country down that Slippery Slope with scientific racism. Malcolm Browne (othe New York Times) begins his "What is Intelligence, and Who Has It?" as follows: "Onemay loathe or share the opinion expressed in the three books under review, but one thing seems clear: The government or society that persists in sweeping their subject under the rugwill do so at its peril." He goes on to say that the authors of these three books "believe that America is rapidly evolving a huge underclass, an intellectually deprived population...whose cognitive abilities will never match the future needs of most employers and for whom American society seems to have less use each year." They even argue that Head Start is futile.According to Browne, Herrnstein and Murray argue that while much of the problem rests with the heritability of IQ, the issue is no longer solely genetic. If mothers with low test scores are producing children with low test scores, it does not matter whether the cause igenetic or not. Of course, Murray and Herrnstein observe that since a "large proportion of this emergent underclass is black....the potential for racial hatred seems enormous." But more to the point, Herrnstein and Murray point out that as technology increases and the job market for the people "at the low end of the intelligence spectrum dries up," it may be "increasingly likely to create a 'custodial' state that minimally nourishes, houses and cares for its despised underclass in the equivalent of an Indian reservation." Sounds like concentration camps to me. Couple this scientific justification with the popular perceptions whites have of blacks as shown in Hacker's _Two Nations_ and all of sudden this gets real serious. The "reservation" idea has been suggested by State Senator (D) John Kelly of Michigan and liberalpundit Mike Royko of the Chicago Tribune several years ago. At what point do the "prisoners of the underclass" become too expensive to maintain their "custody." The scientific racism of these works IQ provide the intellectual foundation and preparation for genocide. Since the publication of William J. Wilson's the Truly Disadvantaged, I have argued that the "underclass" concept was nothing more than a preparation for this trend. Even so, I never thought they would get this blatant this soon. Where is Sidney Wilhelm when we need him? Robert Newby Internet: Robert.Newby@cmich.edu Central Michigan University Bitnet: Robert.Newby@cmuvm Department of Sociology AT&Tnet: (517) 774-3410 Mt. Pleasant, MI 48859 From 34LPF6T%CMUVM.BITNET@vaxf.Colorado.EDU Wed Oct 19 12:51:22 MDT 1994 Date: Tue, 18 Oct 1994 19:22:13 -0400 (EDT) From: "T R. Young" <34LPF6T%CMUVM.BITNET@vaxf.Colorado.EDU> Subject: Higher thoughts on lower Intelligence To: ALL RECIPIENTS OF PSN Organization: Central Michigan University Most discussion has been on the technical validity of measuring I.Q. and the political implications of faulty measurement...I would like to change gears and reflect on other considerations. A. How many different intelligences are there...I expect that there are literally hundreds of different ways each of us are brighter, more competant than our peers...to give title, knee and approbation to those of us who might score in the top 1/2 of one percent of those who take the present I.Q. tests seems to be a vicious and particularly stupid thing to do. B. How many other capacities yet to be measured are congenial to the human estate: for example, before I would trust another living human being, I would want to know his/her I.D. score; her/his integrity/dependability score. C. Then too, there is the question, measured by my A.S.Q. test, of the degree to which people use the intelligence they have. A.S.Q. refers to their artificially stupid score which I define as the potential to under stand that which is going on but failure to do so...marxist theory of capitalism is a case in point...bright guys and girls in the USA have very high A.S.Q. scores...maybe because we are not good enough teachers. D. Given that a lot of people are stupid compared to those of us who are bright, still they are far brighter than the brightest ape; how much weight do we assign to the small differences in the distribution of officially measured I.Q.??? Anyhow?? One of the most memorable days I have spent in all my life was in a home for 'retarded' children...others walked by, I stayed and talked with the kids...loving, trusting, wanting kids. Maybe we should have a L.Q. measuring the capacity to love and to trust??? E. Most of us grow heavy with anger at the uses and abuses of I.Q.; uses which allow us to dismiss as many people as we wish in our dramas of social justice and injustice; abuses which put such genius to such miserable ends. Never forget that I.Q. tests gained official support in World War I as a way to figure out who would be the best soldiers and killers of other artificially stupid soldiers. Nor to forget that I.Q. is used to select the workers to watch and control their former friends. F. Finally, I.Q. is used to ground a political system in which those who invent the things which can be used to control and manage the consciousness of others are given great honor, title and homage. There are better uses of the small gauge intelligence which we small gauge individuals possess. T.R. Young, bright but incompetant human being From julian@CVAX.IPFW.INDIANA.EDU Wed Oct 19 17:36:31 MDT 1994 Date: Wed, 19 Oct 1994 18:38:50 EST From: Jim Julian To: psn@csf.colorado.edu Subject: Biology is Destiny (NOT!) Some sort of random thoughts about IQ & other "Biology is Destiny" arguments... 1. The notion that inheritance was the reason for individual differences in cognitive function was popularized within english- speaking cultures by Sir Frances Galton in the last half of the 19th century. The vehicle was a book, "Hereditary Genius." with which his peers in the British aristocracy were quite enamored. Unsurprisingly, ethnicity, race, and social class are dealt with in terms of inherited intelligence. No need to guess who the most genius prone peoples were in the gospel according to Galton: They were the "heroic" peoples of western history. Much of the "study" was based on manufactured evidence, especially those part that were meant to demonstrate the inheritance of feeble-mindedness. "Hereditary Genius" was published in 1869. Galton continued to pump out similar well-received nonsense through the 1890's. 2. As I recall, the original IQ tests were developed to see who would and who would not benefit from education. Surprise - elite children would benefit lots, lots more than non-elites given the way the early IQ tests (Stanford-Binet) were setup. 3. In the early 20th century, the American Eugenics Society (now the American Sociobiology Society?) argued that we should control "breeding" to get rid of undesirable inherited traits and to promote desired (by whom?) individual traits. 4. The fascist scholars of Europe trembled before the idea of Eugenics with religious ecstacy and promptly turned it into a chant of the sacrificial alter. 5. In the USofA, several states armed themselves with eugenics theory and created laws requiring the sterilization of "mentally subnormal persons who had been convicted of a wide range of criminal activity. Some of these laws were still on the books in the 60s and early 70s. Some may still be. A question: The current "biology is destiny" arguments are part of a hegemonic process legitimating the brutal activities of elites towards non-elites. I don't think "biology is destiny" (BID?) is a legitimation of social hierarchies in a PASSIVE sense. BID is either 1) an active legitimation for the brutal transformation of social structure, 2) a mythology meant to enhance solidarity among elites during times of significant challenge to their rule, and/or 3) a device for "overburdening" critical scholars with the chores of debunking the new old lies so that pro-elite scholars gain control of the agenda. We become reactionaires responding to their agenda rather than setting the agenda. So, what is the role of BID in the discourse attached to and very definitely part of the current struggle? What gives BID voice while silencing other voices? Jim Julian julian@cvax.ipfw.indiana.edu From HSTAUB@bss1.umd.edu Thu Oct 20 20:21:32 MDT 1994 Thu, 20 Oct 94 22:24:00 +1100 From: "ALLAN LISKA" Organization: University of Maryland,College Park To: psn@csf.colorado.edu Date: Thu, 20 Oct 1994 22:23:22 EDT Subject: Re: Higher thoughts on lower Intelligence  Most discussion has been on the technical validity of measuring I.Q.  and the political implications of faulty measurement...I would like to  change gears and reflect on other considerations.   A. How many different intelligences are there...I expect that there are  literally hundreds of different ways each of us are brighter, more competant  than our peers...to give title, knee and approbation to those of us who  might score in the top 1/2 of one percent of those who take the present  I.Q. tests seems to be a vicious and particularly stupid thing to do.   for those of you who have not yet seen the cover of newsweek, you should pick it up. there is an article that tackles the book "the bell curve". the article, as i think it should be, is largely negative. but in the center the editors have a picture of a bell- curve with different, famous people in the world underneath. i think this chart illustrates t.r.'s first point rather well. there is a picture of marilyn vos savant (iq-228 beyond genius) at the upper end. towards the middle is j.d. salinger (iq-104, very normal). now, comparing the two: the only thing that vos savant has ever done for me is to run a column in sunday's paper answering people's questions. salinger, on the other hand, has written some incredible books that have really affected my life (particuarly the catcher in the rye). it seems that iq isn't equivelant to skill. j.d salinger is a brilliant novelist (imho) regardless of iq. i guess that is what bothers me most about iq tests, they don't tell me anything about a person. -allan ...................................................................... .ALLAN LISKA Oliver North and Marion Barry in '96 . .DEPT. OF SOCIOLOGY -This way we will only sell guns . .UNIVERSITY OF MARYLAND to the drug dealers we buy our . .HSTAUB@BSS1.UMD.EDU crack from! . . -- FREEDOM NOW, FOR LEONARD PELTIER!!!!-- . ...................................................................... From MGWENG01@ULKYVM.LOUISVILLE.EDU Thu Oct 20 21:35:44 MDT 1994 Date: Thu, 20 Oct 94 23:38:58 EDT From: "Morton G. Wenger, Dept. of Sociology" Subject: Bell Curves and non-linear swastikas To: University of Louisville, Louisville, KY 40292 USA PHONE: (502) 852-6836 FAX: (502) 852-0099 Is it the bell-shaped curve that we will see on the banners of the fascists after the 1932/1996 elections? As to the questions as to timing/why now, it seems pretty clear to me that whether one takes an instrumental/conspiritorial view or a structural/mystical view, the eugenicist crap arrives on the scene just in time for the next ten years of judicial appeals regarding Norplant, involuntary sterilization, try 'em and fry 'em/no habeas corpus writ Clinton crime bill genocide, and no food for surplus tots welfare reform. Maybe some of the psn'rs who favor no-consent experimentation on welfare moms (and you know who you are) in New Jersey can start turning their coats in time to reap the expert witness bonanza that is sure to follow in the wake of reincarnated 1920s style racist claptrap, and 1990s style market genocide. N'est-ce pas, good buddies? INTERNET: MGWENG01@ULKYVM.LOUISVILLE.EDU From 3ZASIB3%CMUVM.BITNET@vaxf.Colorado.EDU Thu Oct 20 22:07:26 MDT 1994 Date: Thu, 20 Oct 1994 08:22:02 -0400 (EDT) From: Bob <3ZASIB3%CMUVM.BITNET@vaxf.Colorado.EDU> Subject: Richard Cohen on the "New" Scientific Racism To: Association of Black Sociologists , afsc , Progressive Sociologists Network Organization: Central Michigan University A recent op-ed piece by Richard Cohen puts the heritabilty of IQ in perspective. An excerpt: "Why...the big to-do about _The Bell Curve_, Herrnstein's and Charles Murray's new bookn the subject [of IQ]? "I'll answer the question in a moment, but first some detail on how big a to-do I'm talking about. The _New Republic_ magazine devoted its cover and 14 commentaries to the book. The Wall Street Journal reprinted excerpts of the Murray-Herrnstein book on its editorial page. Newsweek did a cover story and the New York Times Book Review dedicated its first page to three books on the general subject of intelligence, one of them _The Bell Curve_. "What's more, for months the book's publication was preceded by a something- great-is-coming buzz.... "The big to-do...has little to-do with science and everything to do with...politics. The data conform very nicely to the politics of those who would junk affirmative action and all sorts of social programs, including welfare. They argue that giving money to the dumb poor can only mean more dumb poor." I say: That is the point we are talking fascism here folks pure and simple. The question is "What is to be done?" We must begin by responding "en masse" to the mainstream media about what this really means and be bold in what we see as the implications of this work. When Murray says "I think fear of being called a racist is one of the more overblown fears in society." I guess that to be real for him who wears that label as a badge of honor. But the truth is Murray is more representative of the Third Reich than the likes of Ross Barnett and George Wallace. The real question is how do we create a more responsible and just social-political-economic hegemony? Robert Newby Internet: Robert.Newby@cmich.edu Central Michigan University Bitnet: Robert.Newby@cmuvm Department of Sociology AT&Tnet: (517) 774-3410 Mt. Pleasant, MI 48859 From JOBRIEN@ucs.indiana.edu Fri Oct 21 00:46:07 MDT 1994 From: JOBRIEN@ucs.indiana.edu Date: Fri, 21 Oct 94 01:48:37 EST Subject: racism!!!! To: psn@csf.colorado.edu I've eve's dropped this discussion for some time . . . but would like to enter in with a point intended to stimulate thought . . . not rancour or rhetoric from right or left. The question IS . . . how can a more equal, more just, more more truly ideal society be brought to pass? Who would admit to not sharing those goals???? Who would disagree that the social problem definition of `racism' is the application of different rules and standards, the applicaton of different rights and responsibilities and rewards - by the power of the `State' on the basis of the social construct of `RACE' (a conglomeration of genes around deviations from the special species means). Now, while those distasteful folks like Rushton advocate correlations of intelligence with such socially constructed perceptions . . . a recent article in the Cleveland Plain Dealer advocated exactly the opposite form the same concept. From the Progressive Left . . . the acknowledgement that it was legally, ethically and morally (just possibly) acceptable to use `race' as a criteria for hiring and firing . . . but in favor of socially designated minority groups - not in favor of the elite (white female in this case). The food for thought that I would like to see discussed . . . is our opinions on the acceptability of racially based public policy . . . regardless of it it is pro or con socially designated minority groups. John O'Brien Indiana From michaell@aragorn.ori.org Fri Oct 21 14:49:10 MDT 1994 Date: Fri, 21 Oct 1994 13:51:39 -0700 (PDT) From: Michael Lee Subject: iq To: psn@csf.colorado.edu It is amazing to me that we pay so much attention to a concept simply because it has numbers and a bell curve. A better measure would be a test that took into account the range of the human mind. On one end would be pure creativity - no earlier associations here to get in the way. (probably a problem at this end) At the other end would be pure memory of what has already been established. (the ESTABLISHment) tends to like this, and the current tests obviously measure more on this end. But even when we come up with a more fair test of human brain function - is it not still obvious that this would be critically determined by nutrition, experiences, resources, associations - in a word - Class. Michael From baustin@frank.mtsu.edu Fri Oct 21 20:18:30 MDT 1994 Date: Fri, 21 Oct 1994 21:19:54 -0500 (CDT) From: "Ben S. Austin" To: Carl Dassbach Subject: Re: IQ and race I wish Carl's view of this "most recent stupidity" were correct and ignoring it were a feasible response. I, for one, would like nothing better than to devote my energies to other things. But I think there is no more likelihood of these books (Murray, Rushton, Brown) being soon forgotten than of the reactionary political agenda of the religious/political/ social right wing slipping into obscurity. It has been too long in construction, too carefully and insidiously entertwined with the political structure and "public morality" -- and these books are an outgrowth of that agenda. These people have to take a beating just as the biological racism of the 1890-1920 era took from the scientific community and just as Shockley, Jentzen and others took three decades ago. And guess what, thirty years from now -- or less -- we will have to do it all over again. It's not going away on its own. The media isn't going to drop it as long as it sells news copy and enhances ratings. Its credibility with the general public is guaranteed in the absence of scientific rebuttal. Ben Austin On Fri, 21 Oct 1994, Carl Dassbach wrote: > My own feelings on this matter is that this most recent stupidity (like > the previous stupidities on this matter) should simply be ignored. While > it is important to criticize the idiots who take this (and similar) > positions, by devoting a great deal of attention to the book, we give it > more credence then it is due or worth. > > In two months, the book will be forgotten (although the underlying > fascists ideas will always remain). Lets speed up rather then extend the > process of forgetting. > > Carl Dassbach > From trouse@frank.mtsu.edu Fri Oct 21 21:44:21 MDT 1994 Date: Fri, 21 Oct 1994 22:45:54 -0500 (CDT) From: "Timoth P. Rouse" To: "Ben S. Austin" Subject: Re: IQ and race B. Austin and others are right. The Murrays et al. are not going to just sit down and shut up as long as they figure they have an audience. Are they the remnats of modernity? To be sure, it ain't easy being a proletarian in elite or proletarian universities. We can confront the likes of Murray's & E.O. Wilsons in our lectures, scholarship, and activism. Their noses have to be bloodied just for scoring high on TR Young's Artifical Stupidity Quotient (ASQ). In the meantime, elections are upon us and BONEheads will soon be in place to think about the policy implications of Murray and his ilk. Visions of hegemony provide the nightmare of a stable national underclass. The end of reflection is upon us. Edward Bellamy's LOOKING BACKWARD provides a framework for self-criticism and social sensitivity scales (SSS). What a future....What a country. TR (trouse@frank.mtsu.edu) From U17043%UICVM.BITNET@vaxf.Colorado.EDU Sat Oct 22 01:21:21 MDT 1994 Date: Fri, 21 Oct 1994 01:44:44 -0500 (CDT) From: U17043%UICVM.BITNET@vaxf.Colorado.EDU Subject: social hierarchy -> notions of human nature To: LEFT-L%UCBCMSA.BITNET@vaxf.Colorado.EDU The three books propounding IQ-hereditary-cognition-class/race-behavioral- genetics relationships, featuring Herrnstein & Murray's The Bell Curve, as reviewed, on the whole favorably, in The New York Times Book Review last Sunday, tell us, from the standpoint of the sociology of knowledge and the study of ideology, that this is what turns on the US book-reading and book- buying public *at this time*, or more pretentiously, *in this historical period*. The latter public is to be identified with the upper middle class. [I've recently run across another factoid - Justin Schwartz please take note - to the effect that sixty percent of the US adult population does not read or does not buy a book in any given year; said factoid I'd picked up either from Neil Postman or from Robert Hughes (ie, last year's The Culture of Complaint). Looks exaggerated; but that may depend on what's meant by "book." - df] The upper-middles are the beneficiaries of the legislated inegalitarianism- cum-deindustrialization social counterrevolution under Reagan-Bush (if to lesser degree than the Really Rich), the effects whereof continue unabated, if not more strongly than ever, to this very moment. They are interested parties, and much more overtly, crassly so than their forebears, who read Michael Harrington, Paul Goodman, Norman O. Brown (among a host of other bestselling reformist to radical social/cultural critics and muckrakers), were in the early 1960s: The "neo-philosophes" cast by history as harbingers of the optimistic-to-utopian reformist legislation and extraparliamentary radicalism of the Sixties carried on in an environmental-determinist ambience positing a priori assumptions of human perfectibility given social-structurally supportive, ideally participatory-democratic, mobilized communities of dissidence articulating local needs and interests, "controlling the decisions affecting their own lives." This writer, indeed, was present in Syracuse NY, when the now-loathsome bureaugibberish locution, "empowerment," was generated in an OEO-funded entity called the Community Action Training Center; and the prototype-verbiage was, in particular, attributable to one Warren O. Haggstrom, PhD, Professor of Social Work at Syracuse University, thanks to whom what became "empowerment" acquired the Shrinko-motivational-characterologically transformative usage it still retains. [Note: Haggstrom characterized "powerlessness" as a species of mental disease which, if remediated by - as it turned out - spurious formal organizations in slum neighborhoods, would impart the sense of power, which in turn would conduce to deviance-reduction cum upward-mobility aspirations. Which didn't occur, the prime beneficiary having been Haggstrom's career.](*) The point, before I digress more, is that, hitherto, reformist social- ameliorationist institutional change presupposing a priori assumptions of paramountcy of the social envioronment in facilitation of "opportunity," ie, circulation of elites, alternated with mean-spirited conservative consolidation and closure of elites as they were: The early nineteenth century was of the former type, Jefferson and his pal Benjamin Rush, notably, having seen a black man with skin disease exhibited in a circus, inferring that prolonged contact with whites had manifested in turning the unfortunate's skin white in blotches! Rush, the Philadelphia psychiatrist, medicalized each and every behaviour he disliked, inventing such diseases as Masturbatory Insanity and Anomia (compul- sive lawbreaking); the latter, of course, French-suffixed, transmitted to Emile Durkheim who, inverting its psychiatric usage for sociology, gave us *anomie* as memorized by undergraduates to this day. The late nineteenth century was, Robber Barons having made their money and, inventing High Society, meaning to keep it, hereditarian and racist; babble anent the Great Race of Anglo-Saxons crossing the Atlantic and back. Then the Progressives arrived, with a reform that proved two-faced: "Americanizing the immigrant," ie, coercively assimilating her/him to a standard whereby it was sustainable conviction that the United States of America was, as it still is, Stronger Than Dirt, they abandoned racial minorities utterly. Strife, of a bizarre character, erupted over the tribal faction which would end up concoct- ing the IQ tests; and it was the Jewish boy, Wechsler, who victoriously hijacked the measurement of cognition from the *goy momzer*, Louis B. Terman, who would have consigned *'Am Yisroel* to subhumanity/Retardation. As late as 1960, 55% of Clinical Psychologists, the majority of testers, were Jewish (as were 60% of psychiatrists, 75% of psychoanalysts, and 80% of the latter's Shrunkees). Blessed be the Name of Wechsler; for his test has made my good friend Alan Spector whatever he is today; while I, myself, was assigned the terrible burden of being "brilliant" albeit an egregiously slow, near-dyslexic, reader, zilcho in the abstract-reasoning department, and bereft of indications of brains other than fantastic trivia-memorizing. A job is a job. Albeit in the end I flopped, I'd got farther than I should've; and to this day wish I'd been raised Stupid, the probable outcome in a *goyish* family with several children. Happily, the tests redeemed themselves by privileging the Chinese immigrants who permanently populate this computer room; and this writer can say aught ill of them excepting only the probably-racist impatience with whatever Chinese consider jokes. (A Chinese Milton Berle? Jack Benny? Lenny Bruce? Fantastic!) The Progressives gave way to outright terroristic racists (the KKK had five million members in 1925) and immigration-restrictive tribalists, spurred by fear of admitting Boshevik Hordes. Till the Great Depression and through the 1930s, even under cover of an antiracist war against Hitlerite Fascism, the racist, elitist, WASP-heavy Establishment above and Coughlinite and America- Firsters below, gave Stronger Than Dirt a new, reactionary-repressive twist. (Tweedy, old-family WASPs directed the War with some uncertainty as to Who Was The Enemy; their passive obliviation of Holocaust activities is, to recent scholarship, complicit and culpable in the monumentally tragic result.) The hegemony was, however, shifting: The Democrats enacted landmark legislative and administrative measures for black people, if piddling considering what was needed; and opened the social-mobility floodgates with the GI Bill as they state-subsidized suburbanization. Throughout these twentieth-century turnabouts, the industrial working class was there; it was discontented to put it euphemistically; and till the Purges and Rightist Terror of McCarthyism was the backbone, the muscle, of Democratic Party liberalism. Even later, a more tepid, circumspect liberalism emanated from trade-unionism and working-class-based political machines. (To this day, in Chicago, pro-union posters appear in advertising space on subway station walls during labor disputes, as they never do in New York City; and the sacred right of the working class to smoke on rapid-transit platforms may not be abridged by the slicker, and worse, Mayor Daley who, unopposed, freely abridges the right to expression by Minorities by denying them, given widespread lack of home phones, permission to use phone booths after dark; these are removed and otherwise incapacitated. [Note: Alleged Community Groups spring out of the ground like mushrooms, supporting the uprooting of phonebooths allegedly used by crack dealers only; the latter use booths slightly farther away. Whites are not aware of these goings-on. Fascism-by-stealth, I call it.] These vestiges of the working class Tradition and its heroic moment in 1894, when Atty Gen Olney shot first, asked no questions later, and thereby perhaps saved The Whole Ball Game, are gone now, along with the working class, in Chicago and even more so everywhere else. The classic industrial working class is 15% of the population, and its restraining hand against the polarization of stratification is now removed. Moreover, the Reagan-Bush legislation, as continuing under Clinton, subsidized the motive to get rich, in contravention of the motivational assumptions of classical political economy. "Accumulate! Accumulate! That is Moses and the Prophets!" But to practice that religon in our day, bounties need be paid for conversions to the True Religion. (Dwight David Eisenhower, of boring memory, and his Treasury Secretary, Humphrey, most Orthodox of Republican True Believers, needed no tax subsidies to motivate the instinct of pecuniality.)[Note: By analogy with "sexuality," where the power of the former was, in the nineteenth century, certainly, far more formidable an urge than the latter.] I can explain why this had to be so, but none of you are remotely ready for such stuff. Without a working class, with the population polarized into the minority paid to sell shared mental life as pseudocommodities, the remainder not paid to think or paid not to think, wherefrom arises my suspicion that, whatever the former are paid for is construed as thinking, a new central contradiction of capitalism has arisen. [Note: Not with a ten foot pole will I touch hot stuff like this here.] Ideology is summoned to crawl out of the woodwork to legitimate a fake, spurious, selfishly and heritably privileged cognocrats affecting designer genes from best boutiques. Magic numbers become heritable: Says a psychiatric researcher of this writer's acquaintance, "My own IQ is 133, and my daughter's IQ has also been tested at 133." Family heirloom, no? What we have here are "notions of human nature," tricked out as science. As scientific-seeming, they may *appear to be proven*. They cannot, however, be *falsified*, scientifically, in that the motive for the dissemination of such notions is social and extra-scientific. The Opposition's response to these, to any, "notions of human nature" must be to account for, to explain, why they exist from *outside* the discourses, knowledge base, methods, and professional literature of psychometrics and human behavioural genetics: All societies give rise to normative-idealist "notions of human nature" (as well as folk-wisdom acknowledging lapses from idealized standards) compatible with prevalent social conditioning and social construction in each; also, they posit whatever sort of "human nature" is assumed or explicitly propounded as *prior* to society-as-it-is (with the latter's conditioning and construction). *The latter is quite impossible*. (For so far from belaboring the obvious, I'd like to take a halt, assume a loftier view:) The only truly universal part of the natural habitat of humans in general or in particular are society and community with their corresponding shared culture). It is in this society - subsuming community - with community subcul- tures, at least, the only part of each person's environment that she or he is systematically taught from birth that it is Forbidden to transform. Yet, transformed it is, has always been, by quotidian struggle, reformist legisla- tion, administration, social upheaval or Revolution or Civil War, and the ever- ubiquitous "unintended consequences." The Opposition must restate these elementary propositions iteratively, so long as they are denied or banished from consciousness. Meanwhile, it is legitimate for us to play the same game by highlighting deep-seated yearnings slighted or stifled by media-propagated "notions of human nature." For instance, wherein rightism exalts "the individual," this alludes to the predatory-accumulative-"competitive-edge"-obsessed monad of bourgeois individualism, an emergent construct for centuries inseparable from bourgeois culture of the most residual sort so long as capitalism be with us. The Opposition, therefore, appeals to stifled and suppressed cravings for *individuation*, at this time as a rule disallowed (outside narrow spheres of adult life whereof one such liminal state, the Halloween Party, approacheth; but only such that the Halloween Party and suchlike "liminal states," as the anthropologists call them, *change nothing*. To the eroded communities of small towns and urban neighborhoods, with their oppressive conformities, The Opposition responds, firstly, with a hearty, "good riddance," and critiques the obsolete, deliquescing former-Thingie with a vision of *communities of the individuated*, such as never hitherto existed (except, possibly, in the fiction of Marge Piercy, Woman on the Edge of Time, 1975; He, She and It, 1991). Nobody, absolutely nobody whatever, wants to be "Equal," ie, aver that she or he construes herself-himself as *no better than anyone else*; this will be treated with Prozac, Zoloft, whateveritis, for "poor-self-esteem!" Least of all will those "Paid To Think" contemplate the ignominy of being "Equal" to those who are paid-nottothink or not-paidtothink. The prospect of communities and a wider society guaranteeing uniqueness is, however, inexorably in contradiction with hierarchy, buttressed as the latter is by the one-dimen- sional measuring instruments of the psychometricians. The latter, like the State Lottery, sell Magic Numbers; but are *less fair*, in that all the winning tickets are sold in certain neighborhoods, none in others. The Opposition counterposes its own vision, whose thrust must be *completely new* and *completely different*. Which is only appropriate and quite reason- able, given that US capitalism has revolutionized itself twice over since World War II, as Marx long ago warned us is something capitalism *will do* (should you ever be nodded out, complacent, or excessively-certain of anything, especially). We are, have been, asleep at the switch beyond even what might be charitably called *egregiously*. There is no adequate sociological macrotheory for the fantastic irrationalities of the USA (though I've tried my limited best to come up with some pieces of it). Time to get to know the Beast better to understand its odder excrescences, like the present IQ-aristocracy game. Daniel A. Foss From SPECTOAJ%PUCAL.BITNET@vaxf.Colorado.EDU Sat Oct 22 06:21:07 MDT 1994 From: SPECTOAJ%PUCAL.BITNET@vaxf.Colorado.EDU Date: Fri, 21 Oct 1994 16:07:37 -0600 (CST) Subject: Can't ignore spread of fascist ideas..... To: psn@csf.colorado.edu I often have found myself in agreement with Carl Dassbach's useful points; however, on the question of "ignoring" the rise of Charles Murray's racist analysis===combined with the attempt to link crime and genes and race===I think that it would be a terrible mistake to ignore it. Murray has become the Howard Stern of the sociology world===a clever comment, a sly wink, and the reverse charisma of a particular type of demogogue who says "What's plain folks like us supposed to do?" I don't believe in shouting fascism against every parking ticket, but let's look at reality. There has been a major structural adjust ment in the economy that has severely hurt the lowest income 20-30%, many of whom are black and latino. And this is really just the beginning. Really. If you are ill and the specialist tells you that you are ill, that is a problem. If you are ill and the specialist tells you that you are cured, then you really have to worry! How really bad will you be the next time he tells you that you are ill?? They are saying that the recovery is in place, except for unemployment.......what happens when the economy dips again?? Along with this shift in the economy comes a shift in politics and in ideology. I hate to sound like a vulgar, mechanical, economic determinist marxist, but let's get real again.....does the "autonomy of ideology" position assert that there is NO connection? Was the racist ideology upsurge in the 1920's in USA and rise of fascism in Europe connected to a contracting economy or was it coincidence? GM has just announced MAJOR downsizing; the effects of the military downsizing has yet to be felt, when tens of thousa thousands of youth who would have gotten jobs through that now will have to join the search in the private sector...(No--I don't support the ideas that the U.S. military is "good" because it provides jobs; I'm only pointing out that this will exacerabate the crisis). I don't want to waste too much time on exposing the anti-science of those racist bio-determinist positions. Leon Kamin, Richard Lewontin, Levins, Rose, Allan Chase (The Legacy of Malthus), Stephen Jay Gould, Ashley Montague, Sillen and Thomas, Val Woodward, and dozens of others have shredded that argument. First of all, those racist fools can't even define "race." If it is biological, then bi-racial children should have IQ's halfway between black and white IQ's...of course that is ridiculous. What percentage "African" are the people of India....or Puerto Rico....or Sicily....or Spain...or Israel? The whole discussion is nonsense. Second, as many have pointed out, how can you define "intelligence"... ...I think intelligence is dedicating your life to smashing capitalism. The most mentally challenging things in the world are people oriented, such as being a political organizer or a parent. The number of variables that are themselves in a state of flux are far more complicated in those situations than they are in a college calculus class...which many low income people might fail...yet that is the reason put forward for their unemployment, as if failure to pass calculus is why there is so much unemployment in Detroit. The same parallel argument goes for the nonsense about "crime" genes. How do they define "crime"? Obviously, they are focusing on people who shoot with guns and hit with fists, but not on the people who HIRE the ones who shoot with guns and hit with fists. I don't want to belabor the point here; if you missed a chance to read an excellent expose of the genes=crime argument, I can send one to you if you e-mail a request. Third, again, read the writers above to get an understanding of how the heredity/environment issue is misunderstood. (Oops, I left out Peter Conrad and Troy Duster..two more insightful writers.) Shallow, dualistic thinking leads to a misunderstanding of the issue...it is not "how much is heredity and how much is environment?" Nobody can say it is only environment or a person born blind would have the same potential in basketball as Michael Jordan...but that is why it is a foolish way of looking at it. Nobody can say it is entirely genetic, because there are plentyof ch hildren of high IQ parents who do not succeed. So the debate gets framed within the narrow range of "how much is genetic and how much is environmental?" This argument appears to be LIBERAL, and as is often the case, it allows the Liberal argument to front for fascist arguments. ("How much inferior are black people to white? Oh, I wouldn't say THAT much"...say the mainstreamers.) As I mentioned in an earlier post, biological traits are only definable within an environmental context. Hence, it is not a combination of heredity and environment, with varying percentages....it is something that cannot be defined in terms of either one.....the example I gave of why someone with bad hearing might be intellectually superior to someone with good hearing because their bad hearing could block out distractions!...is an example of how the so-called fixed traits can only be defined in terms of particular environments. But for the capitalists, the environment is fixed---accept subordination, oppression, exploitation, even fascism...and therefore, the issue for them and their racist cheerleaders is what kinds of biological traits will be most adaptable to the oppression they will experience. But even that gives the oppressors too much credit; they mostly just lurch around from theory to theory to see what they can sell to the masses to divert them from struggle. To sum up....these so-called "new" theories aren't even based on new research. It is political correctness in the truest sense of the word--being politically in step with the politically powerful. A public relations campaign to fufill a political agenda. Now to the main question: "To Ignore or Not Ignore....." This isn't going away soon. US News, Time, Newsweek, Discover, Chicago Tribune and dozens of other publications as well as TV are pushing this,and IT DOES HAVE AN EFFECT. These racist fools are speaking in the name of social science. The last time around, when Arthur Jensen wrote articles based on the fabricated research of Cyril Burt (who was shown to have literally fabricated data to suit his conclusions about IQ being genetic), and Jensen took it further to say that blacks in general were born dumber than whites in general, I received a copy of "The Indiana Teacher"---a magazine sent to tens of thousands of teachers. On the inside cover was an editorial, quoting some of Jensen's arguments, and saying that these were important points (blacks born dumber than whites....) that teachers needed to give thoughtful consideration to. I don't think attacking those guys gives them more credibility. It gives them LESS credibility. The first attacks against Jensen were by student and community activists, followed soon after by the academics. It was the movement against that led to the investigations that uncovered the fraud. Jensenism receded only to be replaced by the "Church of Sociobiology" and then in the past year or so the "Crime in the Genes" so quickly followed by and combined with the revival of Jensenism. Some studies indicate that most Americans do believe that intelligence is "substantially"inherited, and of course, that provides a handy explanation for why minorities can't get jobs. We need to build a movement against this. As it turns out, (and I apologize, because this should have been the first sentence of this overly long polemic)...some people are organizing. An International Statement of opposition to racist biological determinism, covering both the crime and IQ sides, is being developed. This was done 20 years ago and published in NY Times with 1500 signatures of scientists and academics. We should do it again, with even more signatures. It will help destroy the image that these racist charlatans speak for social science. It can be used as resolutions at conferences, as ADs in school newspapers, local papers, press releases, maybe even NYTimes. The specifics all have to be worked out. The statement is in the processof being developed. If you are interested in helping circulate something like this, get back to me....spectoaj@pucal.bitnet. And of course, rest assured that I'll bring it up again as the campaign develops. Alan Spector BHS Dept. Purdue Calumet Hammond, IN 46323 SPECTOAJ@PUCAL.bitnet From goertzel@crab.rutgers.edu Sat Oct 22 06:34:33 MDT 1994 Date: Sat, 22 Oct 94 8:37:03 EDT From: Ted Goertzel To: PSN@csf.colorado.edu Subject: Myth of the Bell Curve I've followed the commentary on The Bell Curve with interest. I believe I am the first commentator so far who has actually read the book. It is very well written and thought out, and really exemplary in communicating the results of quantitative research to a statistically unsophisticated audience. By most objective, academic, scientific standards, it is an excellent book. This is not to say that it doesn't have its weaknesses, but they are not in overlooking the kinds of rhetorical points that most PSN commentators have made. Most of the arguments made on PSN are anticipated in the book and responded to with extensive citations and/or quantitative findings. If PSN members believe this book is important, they will have to do a lot of hard work to refute it. Just going into battle with the kinds of arguments expressed on the network will make the left look rhetorical and shallow compared to the rigorous science of Herrnstein and Murray. There has been little discussion of the actual recommendations in the book. They do not, for example, propose abandoning affirmative action, but limiting the margin given to blacks or other minorities on tests such as the GRE and LSAT to half a standard deviation. They give statistics showing that in elite schools the minority mean is often more than a standard deviation less than the white mean. This seems unfair, especially to white students from modest economic circumstances who feel treated unfairly. Their recommendation is a plausible policy, different from the policy of having a quota for minorities and admitting the strongest minority candidates regardless of how they compare to the majority. What policy do PSN members advocate? Quotas? Class as opposed to racial criteria? Herrnstein and Murray also address the question of socioeconomic vs. ethnic or racial criteria. Some of the weak points in the book are mentioned in the current issue of Newsweek - e.g., the "Flynn effect" which they use to explain away the fact that IQ scores seem to be increasing over time rather than falling as their theory predicts. Probably the most fundamental weakness is overlooking the importance of cultural factors. Another flaw which happens to interest me in the image of "The Bell Curve" itself. I published a paper (with Joe Fashing) on this back in 1981 in Humanity and Society. Since this is a very difficult journal to find, and I believe the paper will interest you, I am sending an adaptation of it along. Feel free to use this in your courses, cite it in your writings, etc. It has been buried long enough. Ted Goertzel PS I am thinking of revising and updating this. If any of you have come across misuses of the normal curve, please send them on to me. Ted Goertzel, Rutgers University, Camden NJ 08102 The Myth of the Bell Curve by Ted Goertzel Adapted and condensed from: Ted Goertzel and Joseph Fashing, "The Myth of the Normal Curve: A Theoretical Critique and Examination of its Role in Teaching and Research," Humanity and Society 5:14-31 (1981), reprinted in Readings in Humanist Sociology (General Hall, 1986). Surely the hallowed bell-shaped curve has cracked from top to bottom. Perhaps, like the Liberty Bell, it should be enshrined somewhere as a memorial to more heroic days. -Earnest Ernest, Philadelphia Inquirer. 10 November 1974. The myth of the bell curve has occupied a central place in the theory of inequality (Walker, 1929; Bradley, 1968). Apologists for inequality in all spheres of social life have used the theory of the bell curve, explicitly and implicitly, in developing moral rationalizations to justify the status quo. While the misuse of the bell curve has perhaps been most frequent in the field of education, it is also common in other areas of social science and social welfare. When Abraham de Moivre made the first recorded discovery of the normal curve of error (to give the bell curve its proper name) in 1733, his immediate concern was with games of chance. The normal distribution, which is nothing more than the limiting case of the binomial distribution resulting from random operations such as flipping coins or rolling dice, was a natural discovery for anyone interested in the mathematics of gambling. De Moivre was unhappy, however, with the lowly origins of his discovery, He proceeded to raise its status by attributing to it an -importance beyond its literal meaning. In his age, this could best be done by claiming hat it was a proof of the existence of God. He announced: And thus in all cases it will be found, that although Chance produces irregularities, still the Odds will be infinitely great, that in process of Time, those irregularities will bear no proportion to the recurrency of that Order which naturally results from Original Design .... (Walker, 1929:17). De Moivre's discovery of the bell curve did not attract much attention. Gamblers are perhaps better served with discrete distributions. Theologians, for their part, no doubt preferred to base their case for God's insistence on less probabilistic grounds. Serious interest in the distribution of errors on the part of mathematicians such as Laplace and Gauss awaited the early nineteenth century when astronomers found the bell curve to be a useful tool to take into consideration the errors they made in their observations of the orbits of the planets. Further developments in the myth of the bell curve were left not to the astronomers or theologians but to the early quantitative social scientists. Systematic collection of population statistics began in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries as a response to the social upheavals of the time and the consequent concern with understanding the dynamics of mass behavior. These early sociologists were not concerned with theology, but they were seeking proof of the orderliness of society. Relying on the justifiably great prestige of Laplace and Gauss as mathematicians, they took the bell curve as proof of the existence of order in the seemingly chaotic social world. Unfortunately, the early social scientists often had a poor understanding of the fact that the mathematical formulas of Gauss and Laplace were based on assumptions not often met in the empirical world. As Fisher (1923, Vol. 1: 18 1) points out: the Gaussian error law came to act as a veritable Procrustean bed to which all possible measurements should be made to fit. The belief in authority so typical of modern German learning and which has also spread to America was too great to question the supposed generality of the law discovered by the great Gauss. The mathematicians, on the other hand, did not feel that it was their domain to check whether or not the empirical world happened to fit their postulates. The bell curve came to be generally accepted, as M. Lippmnan remarked to Poincare (Bradley, 1969:8), because "...the experimenters fancy that it is a theorem in mathematics and the mathematicians that it is an experimental fact." Adolph Quetelet, the father of quantitative social science, was the first to claim that the bell curve could be applied only to random errors but also to the distributions of social phenomena (Landau and Lazarsfeld, 1968; Wechsler, 1935:30-31). The myth of the bell curve was part of Quetelet's theory of the Average Man (Quetelet, 1969). He assumed that nature aimed at a fixed point in forming human beings, but made a certain frequency of errors. The mean in any distribution of human phenomena was to him not merely a descriptive tool but a statement of the ideal. Extremes in all things were undesirable deviations. His doctrine was a quantification of Aristotle's doctrine of the Golden Mean, and it is susceptible to the same criticisms. While there may be traits where the average can reasonably be considered to be the ideal, the argument's application is severely limited. One might argue, for example, that average vision is ideal, whereas nearsightedness and farsightedness are undesirable deviations. But is this true of physical strength or of mental abilities, or even of physical stature (one variable for which there is actually substantial evidence of an approximately normal distribution)? Quetelet, like Aristotle, exempted mental abilities, arguing that those who were superior to the average in intelligence were mere forerunners of a new average that was to come. Quetelet's doctrine of the Average Man was ill suited to a society that was more in need of a rationalization for inequality than a glorification of the common man. His use of the bell curve, however, was useful as part of the social Darwinist ideology that was emerging as a justification for the inequities of laissez-faire capitalism. The myth of the bell curve found its most enthusiastic and effective champion in Francis Galton and the eugenics movement of which he was a major founder. The importance that he attributed to the bell curve can be illustrated by the following quotation (Galton, 1889:66): I know of scarcely anything so apt to impress the imagination as the wonderful form of cosmic order expressed by the "Law of Frequency of Error." The law would have been personified by the Greeks and deified, if they had known of it. It reigns with serenity and in complete self-effacement amidst the wildest confusion. The huger the mob, the greater the apparent anarchy, the more perfect is its sway. It is the supreme law of Unreason. Whenever a large sample of chaotic elements are taken in hand and marshalled in the order of their magnitude, an unsuspected and most beautiful form of regularity proves to have been latent all along. The tops of the marshalled row form a flowing curve of invariable proportions; and each element, as it is sorted into place, finds, as it were, a preordained niche, accurately adapted to fit it. Galton went beyond Quetelet not only in his enthusiasm for the bell curve but also in his attempt to gather data to demonstrate its general applicability. He obtained data on a number of physical traits that he was interested in improving, such as height, weight, strength of the arms and of the grip, swiftness of the blow, and keenness of eyesight. The variables tended to be approximately normally distributed, but the fit was not perfect. He consequently converted his data into a type of standard score and averaged the standard scores together (Galton, 1889:201). These average scores fit the fit the normal curve very well as might be expected since he had averaged together a number of largely unrelated variables and created a mean score that reflected little more than random error. Karl Pearson (best known today for the invention of the product-moment correlation coefficient) was Galton Professor of Eugenics at the University of London and Galton's biographer. He accepted the ideology of the eugenics movement and was preoccupied with curing social problem by creating a race of superior blue-eyed and golden-haired people (Pearson, 1912). He was, however, too good a statistician to repeat Galton's methodological errors or to accept the Gaussian model on the basis of authority. He used his newly developed Chi Square test to check how closely a number of empirical distributions of supposedly random errors fitted the bell curve. He found that many of the distributions that had been cited in the literature as fitting the normal curve were actually significantly different from it, and concluded that "the normal curve of error possesses no special fitness for describing errors or deviations such as arise either in observing practice or in nature" (Pearson, 1900: 174). The Myth in Testing Theory Pearson's conclusions were not sufficient to stop the application of the normal curve of error as a norm in assigning classroom grades or in psychological testing. Most objective tests that are in practical use today rely on summated scaling techniques. This means that the person taking the tests answers a large number of items and receives a total score corresponding to the number of items that he or she answers correctly. This type of measurement, which is also used in Likert-scaling in sociological research, has an inherent bias toward the normal distribution in that it is essentially an averaging process, and the central limit theorem shows that distributions of means tend to be normally distributed even if the underlying distribution is not (if the means are based on large random samples). This inherent bias is most likely to be realized if the responses to the test items are poorly intercorrelated (i.e., if the test or scale is poorly constructed to measure a central factor). If a large number of people fill out a typical multiple choice test such as the Scholastic Aptitude Test (or a typical sociological questionnaire with precoded responses such as "strongly agree, agree") at random using a perfect die, the scores are very likely to be normally distributed. This is true because many more combinations of responses give a sum that is close to the theoretical mean than give a score that is close to either extreme. This characteristic of the averaging process is useful in calculating probable errors in random sampling and is consequently discussed in elementary statistics books (e.g., Blalock, 1960:138-141). When averaging is used in testing or measurement, however, it means that the greater the amount of error present, the greater the likelihood of a normal distribution of scores, even if the variable being measured is not normally distributed. All objective tests contain a certain amount of error in that the chance of a respondent's getting a given item right depends not only on the central factor being measured but also on other general factors and on characteristics idiosyncratic to that item (not to mention the element of luck). Thus it is not surprising that summated scaling devices tend to give normal distributions. The problem comes when this tendency is interpreted not as a result of unavoidable error, but as a confirmation of a preconceived idea that the variable being measured is in fact normally distributed. The early developers of standardized intelligence tests were pleased to find that their distributions of scores were approximately normal, although they were disturbed by the fact that perfect normal distributions were rarely, if ever, achieved. Tborndike (1926:521-555) went so far as to average together scores achieved by the same respondents on eleven different intelligence tests in order to achieve a more normal distribution. He thus repeated Galton's mistake by averaging together somewhat diverse measures and then assuming that the resultant distribution was due to the normality of the underlying variable rather than to the increased measurement error. (The importance of this, of course, depends on how different the various tests were.) He also discounted the fact that the intelligence tests themselves were standardized in such a way as to give normal distribution. Despite the efforts of prominent psychometricians such as David Wechsler (1935:34) to counter it, the myth of the bell curve was widely disseminated in psychological texts (Goodenough, 1949:148-149; V , 1940-16-17; Anastasi, 1968:27) and is widely used as a criterion for test construction. More modern texts usually recognize that there is no theoretical justification for the use of the normal curve, but justify using it as a convenience (Cronbach, 1970:99-100). The clear assertion by prominent psychologists such as Wechsler and Cronbach that psychological phenomena are not somehow inherently normally distributed is a clear advance over the type of indoctrination that students of educational psychology typically received in the 1930s and 1940s. This methodological advance coincided with a general trend in the social sciences away from sociobiological arguments. The close tie between methodological presuppositions and ideological concerns is illustrated by the fact that the myth of the bell curve has recently been reactivated precisely as part of an attempt to reassert racist arguments about the biological determinants of human abilities. In his highly controversial article on genetics and I.Q., Arthur Jensen (1969) went to considerable length in an attempt to demonstrate that I.Q. scores are approximately normally distributed. In 1994, Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray used the phrase "The Bell Curve" as the title of their widely reviewed book on Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life. While their book presents elaborate statistical justifications for most of its assertions, however, the claim that intelligence is normally distributed is defended on common sense grounds. Herrnstein and Murray (1994: 557) simply assert that "it makes sense that most things will be arranged in bell-shaped curves. Extremes tend to be rarer than averages." They note that the bell curve "has a close mathematical affinity to the meaning of the standard deviation," a concept which they use extensively in the book, and remark that: It is worth pausing a moment over this link between a relatively simple measure of spread in a distribution and the way things in everyday life vary, for it is one of nature's more remarkable uniformities. In reality, there is nothing remarkable about the fact that measures which contain a good deal of random variation will fit a measure designed to measure random variation. The question whether intelligence is or is not normally distributed is actually irrelevant to the thesis that observed differences in I.Q. scores between racial groups reflect innate biologic differences. Jenson, Herrnstein and Murray apparently introduce the topic of the normality of I.Q. score distributions because readers who have been led to accept the myth of the normal curve in other contexts may assume that a normal distribution proves that the measurement was valid. If the normal distribution were properly understood as nothing more than a distribution of random errors, it would not lend any weight to their arguments. tests. The Myth of the Bell Curve in Grading The myth of the normal bell curve also lives on in educational institutions, where students and faculty often casually refer to "grading on the curve" or "curving the grades." Many administrators resemble the superintendent of schools in "Elmtown" (Hollingshead, 1961) in assuming that a normal distribution of scores indicates that a good job of grading was done. Often, instructors are expected to turn in an approximately normal distri- bution of grades and any substantial deviations must be justified. In a 1970-1972 dispute at a large state university, conflict over grading and other issues led to a situation in which all but one of the full-time junior faculty members were fired, denied tenure, or resigned under pressure (Goertzel and Fashing, 1969). The initial controversy arose when some administrators became concerned about the tendency toward "grade inflation" on campus, an issue that has been of some national concern as well (Jencks and Riesman, 1968). The dean of the college distributed statistics showing that the mean grade point average had been increasing over time and in comparison to other institutions. There was also considerable difference in the average grades given out by departments on campus. The Sociology Department was particularly singled out for its high average grades, and pressure was put on the department chair to bring his faculty members into line. One junior faculty member was told that he must use "common sense" standards in grading that would result in a "more or less normal distribution" of grades. The teaching assistants in the chairman's introductory sociology class were given more explicit instructions: The combined average grades for each of their four classes was not to exceed 2.6 (or a low B -). Five teaching assistants were summarily dismissed after they refused to sign a document declaring their willingness to carry out the intent of the chairman's directive. The issue became a major focus of conflict on campus, leading the dean and other senior faculty and administrators to enunciate assumptions which are not often states so clearly. They made it clear that their concern went beyond the question of the "average" or mean grade. They were also concerned that the number of As be relatively small. Indeed, they insisted that the usual distribution of grades should approximate a normal distribution in that most grades should be clustered around the mean (or C) with relatively few at the extremes. Most of the spokesmen who supported a normal distribution said they thought that such a distribution was the "usual," "natural" or "common sense" result to be obtained from correct grading procedures. In a more traditional view of grading as representing objective academic standards, instructors should grade papers according to their intrinsic merit and give out whatever grades result even if the distribution results in a lot of A's or F's. On tests, an instructor should know, before looking at the results, what score will be required for each grade. This practice, however, may be administratively inconvenient for several reasons. Enrollments may drop if too many students fail. Admissions to elite programs may be too large if too many students receive high grades. The myth of the bell curve serves administrative convenience by assuring that a predictable proportion of students can be channeled into each strata of the educational and occupational system. The Bell curve in Theory and Research The use of the myth of the bell curve in research serves to reinforce some persistent biases, as well as to disguise sloppy research practices. These biased research findings may then be used to justify the assumption that abilities and talents are normally distributed and that grades and other social rewards should be distributed according to the bell curve. The assumption that social phenomena should be normally distributed is consistent with pluralist or other multicausal theoretical models, since a large number of unrelated and equipotent causes lead to a normal distribution. Indeed, the early pluralists in political science expected political attitudes to be normally distributed, since they believed them to be caused by numerous, equipotent independent factors (Rice, 1928:72). Similarly, if social status is determined by a number of independent factors, we would expect it to be normally distributed. If, as Marxists and others argue, it is largely determined by a single variable, such as the relationship to the means of production, there would be no reason for this to be the case. In point of fact, income is not normally distributed in the United States or any other known society. Income can be measured easily in monetary units, this is well accepted. A graph of the income distribution in the United States can even be found in Herrnstein and Murray's book (1984: 100), and it is not a bell curve. Other measurements used by social scientists, however, provide only a rough index of the underlying trait. If sufficient error is present in these measuring instruments, a normal distribution may well result. Lundberg and Friedman (1943), for example, compared three measures of socioeconomic status in a rural community. These tests measured social status by arbitrarily assigning points to the furniture and other objects observed in the respondents' living rooms. After applying several tests to the same families and plotting the resulting distributions, the authors noted: assuming that in a random sample, socioeconomic status is normally distributed, the distortion of the normality of the distribution by the Guttman version of the Chapin scale suggests the presence of spurious factors .... In other words, the bell curve was used as a standard for deciding which test was valid. The commentators on the article (Knupfer and Merton, 1943) were quick to point out that this was an unjustified assumption. Income, property, education, and occupational status are not normally distributed; why should socioeconomic status as measured by a summated scale of the paraphernalia in the respondents' living rooms be? Yet the assumption that distribution should be normal is widely used, perhaps in the absence of any other criterion to demonstrate that a good job of measurement has been done. A U.S. Forest Service Report (1973:24a), for example, reports with satisfaction that scores on an index of the wilderness quality of roadless areas were quite normally distributed. There is no reason why this should be the case except that the Forest Service has averaged together a number of possibly unrelated variables (scenic character, isolation, variety). (In fact, distribution found by the Forest Service deviates significantly from normality; but, as if often the case, they did not check the goodness of fit.) The use of normality as a criterion reinforces sloppiness in scale construction, since a sloppy scale has more error and is thus more likely to approximate a normal distribution. The myth of the bell curve is also consistent with theories that assume that social behavior is a reflection of individual differences (provided, also, that it is assumed that individual differences are normally distributed). Stuart Dodd (1942:251-262), for example, used the bell curve in developing his theory of social problems. A social problem, to Dodd, consisted in a deficit of some characteristic that is socially desirable. The 2% of the population that falls below two standard deviations from the mean on a desirable characteristic are the "minimals," and they constitute the social problems. These "minimals" include divorcees, prostitutes, illegitimates; the sick, blind, crippled, or insane; the poor and unemployed; criminals and political refugees; inferior races such as Bushmen and Pygmies; the illiterate or ignorant; the overworked and underprivileged; the offensively vulgar; atheists; foreign language minorities; hermits and social isolates. Dodd was certainly aware that not all phenomena are normally distributed, and he realized that the two percent figure may not always be appropriate. Yet, only the assumption of normality led him to even suggest this figure; otherwise, what possible reason could there be for suggesting that the divorce rate, poverty rate, unemployment rate, to say nothing of the proportion of foreign language minorities, should fall at 2%? Dodd also used the bell curve to estimate the possible range of human characteristics, determining that it was unlikely for the range to exceed 12.5 standard deviations (Dodd, 1942:261-262). He noted, however, that the range of incomes in our "capitalistic culture" exceeded 2000 standard deviations. His suggestion that the variance in incomes should be limited to correspond to the variance in abilities is perhaps a good one, but more rigorous data show that the assumption of normality cannot be used m determining the range of these abilities. Weschler (1935) shows on the basis of much better data, that the range of human traits rarely exceeds a ratio of 3:1 (the range ratio of Binet Mental Age scores is 2.30:1). Nothing in this paper should be taken as questioning the use of the normal distribution where it is appropriate (e.g., in estimating confidence intervals from random samples). To make this correct usage clear, it might be wise to revert to the earlier phrase, "normal curve of error." This would make it clear that the normal bell curve is "normal" only if we are dealing with random errors. Social life, however, is not a lottery, and there is no reason to expect sociological variables to be nor- mally distributed. Nor is there any reason to expect psycho- logical variables to be if they are influenced by social factors. Certain physiological traits, such as length of the extremities, are often approximately normally distributed within homogeneous populations. Other traits, such as weight, which are affected by social behaviors, are not. Indeed, if a phenomenon is found to be normally distributed, this is very likely an indication that it is caused by random individual variations rather than by social forces. The myth that social variables are normally distributed has been shown to be invalid by those methodologists who have taken the trouble to check it out. Its persistence in the folklore and procedures of social institutions is a reflection of institutionalized bias, not scientific rigor. References Anastasi, A. 1968 Psychological Testing. New York: Macmillan. Blalock, H. 1960 Social Statistics. New York: McGraw-Hill. Bohrnstedt, E. and C. Bohrnstedt 1972 'How One Normally Constructs Good Measures, Sociological Methods and Research, I, 3-12. Bradley, J.V. 1968 Distribution-free Statistical Tests. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall. Cronbach, L. 1970 Essentials of Psychological Testing. New York: Harper & Row. Dodd, S. 1942 Dimensions of Society. New York: Macmillan. Fisher, A. 1922 The Mathematical Theory of Probability. New York: Macmillan. Forest Service, U.S.D.A. Roadless and Undeveloped Areas Within National Forests. Springfield Va.: National Technical Information Service. Galton, F. 1889 Natural Inheritance. London: Macmillan. Goertzel, T. and J. Fashing 1981 "The Myth of the Normal Curve: A Theoretical Critique and Examination of its Role in Teaching and Research" Humanity and Society 5: 14-31. Goodenough, F. 1949 Mental Testing. New York: Rinehart. Herrnstein, R. and C. Murray 1994 The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life. New York: Free Press. Hollingshead, A. 1961 Eltmtown's Youth. New York: Wiley. Hoyt, D.P. 1965 "The Relationship Between College Grades and Adult Achievement." Iowa City: American College Testing Program, Research Report No. 7. Jencks, C. and D. Riesman 1968 The Academic Revolution. New York: Doubleday. Jencks, C., et al. 1972 Inequality. New York: Basic Books. Jensen, A. 1969 "How Much Can We Boost I.Q. and Scholastic Achievement?" Harvard Educational Review 39, 1-123. Knupfer, G. and R. Merton 1943 "Discussion." Rural Sociology 8, 236-239. Landau, D. and P.F. Lazarsfeld 1968 "Adolphe Quetelet." In Vol. 13 of International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences. New York: Macmillan and Free Press. Lundberg, G. and P. Friedman 1943 "A Comparison of Three Measures of SocioEconomic Status." Rural Sociology 8, 227-236. Pearson, K. 1912 Social Problems: Their Treatment, Past, Present and Future. London: Dulau. 1900 "On the Criterion That a Given System of Deviations From the Probable in the Case of a Correlated System of Variables Is Such That It Can Be Reasonably Supposed to Have Arisen from Random Sampling." The London, Edinburgh and Dublin Philosophical Magazine and Journal of Science 50, 157-175. Quetelet, L.A.J. 1969 A Treatise on Man. Gainesville, Fla.: Scholar's Facsimiles and Reprints. Rice, S. 1928 Quantitative Methods in Politics. New York: Knopf. Thorndike, E.L., el al. 1927 The Measurement of Intelligence. New York: Columbia University Press. Thurstone, L.L. 1959 The Vectors of the Mind. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Vernon, P. 1940 The Measurement of Abilities. London: University of London Press. Walker, H. 1929 Studies in the History of Statistical Method. Baltimore: Williams and Wilkins. Wechsler, D. 1935 The Range of Human Abilities. Baltimore: Williams and Wilkins. From goertzel@crab.rutgers.edu Sat Oct 22 06:34:33 MDT 1994 Date: Sat, 22 Oct 94 8:37:03 EDT From: Ted Goertzel To: PSN@csf.colorado.edu Subject: Myth of the Bell Curve I've followed the commentary on The Bell Curve with interest. I believe I am the first commentator so far who has actually read the book. It is very well written and thought out, and really exemplary in communicating the results of quantitative research to a statistically unsophisticated audience. By most objective, academic, scientific standards, it is an excellent book. This is not to say that it doesn't have its weaknesses, but they are not in overlooking the kinds of rhetorical points that most PSN commentators have made. Most of the arguments made on PSN are anticipated in the book and responded to with extensive citations and/or quantitative findings. If PSN members believe this book is important, they will have to do a lot of hard work to refute it. Just going into battle with the kinds of arguments expressed on the network will make the left look rhetorical and shallow compared to the rigorous science of Herrnstein and Murray. There has been little discussion of the actual recommendations in the book. They do not, for example, propose abandoning affirmative action, but limiting the margin given to blacks or other minorities on tests such as the GRE and LSAT to half a standard deviation. They give statistics showing that in elite schools the minority mean is often more than a standard deviation less than the white mean. This seems unfair, especially to white students from modest economic circumstances who feel treated unfairly. Their recommendation is a plausible policy, different from the policy of having a quota for minorities and admitting the strongest minority candidates regardless of how they compare to the majority. What policy do PSN members advocate? Quotas? Class as opposed to racial criteria? Herrnstein and Murray also address the question of socioeconomic vs. ethnic or racial criteria. Some of the weak points in the book are mentioned in the current issue of Newsweek - e.g., the "Flynn effect" which they use to explain away the fact that IQ scores seem to be increasing over time rather than falling as their theory predicts. Probably the most fundamental weakness is overlooking the importance of cultural factors. Another flaw which happens to interest me in the image of "The Bell Curve" itself. I published a paper (with Joe Fashing) on this back in 1981 in Humanity and Society. Since this is a very difficult journal to find, and I believe the paper will interest you, I am sending an adaptation of it along. Feel free to use this in your courses, cite it in your writings, etc. It has been buried long enough. Ted Goertzel PS I am thinking of revising and updating this. If any of you have come across misuses of the normal curve, please send them on to me. Ted Goertzel, Rutgers University, Camden NJ 08102 The Myth of the Bell Curve by Ted Goertzel Adapted and condensed from: Ted Goertzel and Joseph Fashing, "The Myth of the Normal Curve: A Theoretical Critique and Examination of its Role in Teaching and Research," Humanity and Society 5:14-31 (1981), reprinted in Readings in Humanist Sociology (General Hall, 1986). Surely the hallowed bell-shaped curve has cracked from top to bottom. Perhaps, like the Liberty Bell, it should be enshrined somewhere as a memorial to more heroic days. -Earnest Ernest, Philadelphia Inquirer. 10 November 1974. The myth of the bell curve has occupied a central place in the theory of inequality (Walker, 1929; Bradley, 1968). Apologists for inequality in all spheres of social life have used the theory of the bell curve, explicitly and implicitly, in developing moral rationalizations to justify the status quo. While the misuse of the bell curve has perhaps been most frequent in the field of education, it is also common in other areas of social science and social welfare. When Abraham de Moivre made the first recorded discovery of the normal curve of error (to give the bell curve its proper name) in 1733, his immediate concern was with games of chance. The normal distribution, which is nothing more than the limiting case of the binomial distribution resulting from random operations such as flipping coins or rolling dice, was a natural discovery for anyone interested in the mathematics of gambling. De Moivre was unhappy, however, with the lowly origins of his discovery, He proceeded to raise its status by attributing to it an -importance beyond its literal meaning. In his age, this could best be done by claiming hat it was a proof of the existence of God. He announced: And thus in all cases it will be found, that although Chance produces irregularities, still the Odds will be infinitely great, that in process of Time, those irregularities will bear no proportion to the recurrency of that Order which naturally results from Original Design .... (Walker, 1929:17). De Moivre's discovery of the bell curve did not attract much attention. Gamblers are perhaps better served with discrete distributions. Theologians, for their part, no doubt preferred to base their case for God's insistence on less probabilistic grounds. Serious interest in the distribution of errors on the part of mathematicians such as Laplace and Gauss awaited the early nineteenth century when astronomers found the bell curve to be a useful tool to take into consideration the errors they made in their observations of the orbits of the planets. Further developments in the myth of the bell curve were left not to the astronomers or theologians but to the early quantitative social scientists. Systematic collection of population statistics began in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries as a response to the social upheavals of the time and the consequent concern with understanding the dynamics of mass behavior. These early sociologists were not concerned with theology, but they were seeking proof of the orderliness of society. Relying on the justifiably great prestige of Laplace and Gauss as mathematicians, they took the bell curve as proof of the existence of order in the seemingly chaotic social world. Unfortunately, the early social scientists often had a poor understanding of the fact that the mathematical formulas of Gauss and Laplace were based on assumptions not often met in the empirical world. As Fisher (1923, Vol. 1: 18 1) points out: the Gaussian error law came to act as a veritable Procrustean bed to which all possible measurements should be made to fit. The belief in authority so typical of modern German learning and which has also spread to America was too great to question the supposed generality of the law discovered by the great Gauss. The mathematicians, on the other hand, did not feel that it was their domain to check whether or not the empirical world happened to fit their postulates. The bell curve came to be generally accepted, as M. Lippmnan remarked to Poincare (Bradley, 1969:8), because "...the experimenters fancy that it is a theorem in mathematics and the mathematicians that it is an experimental fact." Adolph Quetelet, the father of quantitative social science, was the first to claim that the bell curve could be applied only to random errors but also to the distributions of social phenomena (Landau and Lazarsfeld, 1968; Wechsler, 1935:30-31). The myth of the bell curve was part of Quetelet's theory of the Average Man (Quetelet, 1969). He assumed that nature aimed at a fixed point in forming human beings, but made a certain frequency of errors. The mean in any distribution of human phenomena was to him not merely a descriptive tool but a statement of the ideal. Extremes in all things were undesirable deviations. His doctrine was a quantification of Aristotle's doctrine of the Golden Mean, and it is susceptible to the same criticisms. While there may be traits where the average can reasonably be considered to be the ideal, the argument's application is severely limited. One might argue, for example, that average vision is ideal, whereas nearsightedness and farsightedness are undesirable deviations. But is this true of physical strength or of mental abilities, or even of physical stature (one variable for which there is actually substantial evidence of an approximately normal distribution)? Quetelet, like Aristotle, exempted mental abilities, arguing that those who were superior to the average in intelligence were mere forerunners of a new average that was to come. Quetelet's doctrine of the Average Man was ill suited to a society that was more in need of a rationalization for inequality than a glorification of the common man. His use of the bell curve, however, was useful as part of the social Darwinist ideology that was emerging as a justification for the inequities of laissez-faire capitalism. The myth of the bell curve found its most enthusiastic and effective champion in Francis Galton and the eugenics movement of which he was a major founder. The importance that he attributed to the bell curve can be illustrated by the following quotation (Galton, 1889:66): I know of scarcely anything so apt to impress the imagination as the wonderful form of cosmic order expressed by the "Law of Frequency of Error." The law would have been personified by the Greeks and deified, if they had known of it. It reigns with serenity and in complete self-effacement amidst the wildest confusion. The huger the mob, the greater the apparent anarchy, the more perfect is its sway. It is the supreme law of Unreason. Whenever a large sample of chaotic elements are taken in hand and marshalled in the order of their magnitude, an unsuspected and most beautiful form of regularity proves to have been latent all along. The tops of the marshalled row form a flowing curve of invariable proportions; and each element, as it is sorted into place, finds, as it were, a preordained niche, accurately adapted to fit it. Galton went beyond Quetelet not only in his enthusiasm for the bell curve but also in his attempt to gather data to demonstrate its general applicability. He obtained data on a number of physical traits that he was interested in improving, such as height, weight, strength of the arms and of the grip, swiftness of the blow, and keenness of eyesight. The variables tended to be approximately normally distributed, but the fit was not perfect. He consequently converted his data into a type of standard score and averaged the standard scores together (Galton, 1889:201). These average scores fit the fit the normal curve very well as might be expected since he had averaged together a number of largely unrelated variables and created a mean score that reflected little more than random error. Karl Pearson (best known today for the invention of the product-moment correlation coefficient) was Galton Professor of Eugenics at the University of London and Galton's biographer. He accepted the ideology of the eugenics movement and was preoccupied with curing social problem by creating a race of superior blue-eyed and golden-haired people (Pearson, 1912). He was, however, too good a statistician to repeat Galton's methodological errors or to accept the Gaussian model on the basis of authority. He used his newly developed Chi Square test to check how closely a number of empirical distributions of supposedly random errors fitted the bell curve. He found that many of the distributions that had been cited in the literature as fitting the normal curve were actually significantly different from it, and concluded that "the normal curve of error possesses no special fitness for describing errors or deviations such as arise either in observing practice or in nature" (Pearson, 1900: 174). The Myth in Testing Theory Pearson's conclusions were not sufficient to stop the application of the normal curve of error as a norm in assigning classroom grades or in psychological testing. Most objective tests that are in practical use today rely on summated scaling techniques. This means that the person taking the tests answers a large number of items and receives a total score corresponding to the number of items that he or she answers correctly. This type of measurement, which is also used in Likert-scaling in sociological research, has an inherent bias toward the normal distribution in that it is essentially an averaging process, and the central limit theorem shows that distributions of means tend to be normally distributed even if the underlying distribution is not (if the means are based on large random samples). This inherent bias is most likely to be realized if the responses to the test items are poorly intercorrelated (i.e., if the test or scale is poorly constructed to measure a central factor). If a large number of people fill out a typical multiple choice test such as the Scholastic Aptitude Test (or a typical sociological questionnaire with precoded responses such as "strongly agree, agree") at random using a perfect die, the scores are very likely to be normally distributed. This is true because many more combinations of responses give a sum that is close to the theoretical mean than give a score that is close to either extreme. This characteristic of the averaging process is useful in calculating probable errors in random sampling and is consequently discussed in elementary statistics books (e.g., Blalock, 1960:138-141). When averaging is used in testing or measurement, however, it means that the greater the amount of error present, the greater the likelihood of a normal distribution of scores, even if the variable being measured is not normally distributed. All objective tests contain a certain amount of error in that the chance of a respondent's getting a given item right depends not only on the central factor being measured but also on other general factors and on characteristics idiosyncratic to that item (not to mention the element of luck). Thus it is not surprising that summated scaling devices tend to give normal distributions. The problem comes when this tendency is interpreted not as a result of unavoidable error, but as a confirmation of a preconceived idea that the variable being measured is in fact normally distributed. The early developers of standardized intelligence tests were pleased to find that their distributions of scores were approximately normal, although they were disturbed by the fact that perfect normal distributions were rarely, if ever, achieved. Tborndike (1926:521-555) went so far as to average together scores achieved by the same respondents on eleven different intelligence tests in order to achieve a more normal distribution. He thus repeated Galton's mistake by averaging together somewhat diverse measures and then assuming that the resultant distribution was due to the normality of the underlying variable rather than to the increased measurement error. (The importance of this, of course, depends on how different the various tests were.) He also discounted the fact that the intelligence tests themselves were standardized in such a way as to give normal distribution. Despite the efforts of prominent psychometricians such as David Wechsler (1935:34) to counter it, the myth of the bell curve was widely disseminated in psychological texts (Goodenough, 1949:148-149; V , 1940-16-17; Anastasi, 1968:27) and is widely used as a criterion for test construction. More modern texts usually recognize that there is no theoretical justification for the use of the normal curve, but justify using it as a convenience (Cronbach, 1970:99-100). The clear assertion by prominent psychologists such as Wechsler and Cronbach that psychological phenomena are not somehow inherently normally distributed is a clear advance over the type of indoctrination that students of educational psychology typically received in the 1930s and 1940s. This methodological advance coincided with a general trend in the social sciences away from sociobiological arguments. The close tie between methodological presuppositions and ideological concerns is illustrated by the fact that the myth of the bell curve has recently been reactivated precisely as part of an attempt to reassert racist arguments about the biological determinants of human abilities. In his highly controversial article on genetics and I.Q., Arthur Jensen (1969) went to considerable length in an attempt to demonstrate that I.Q. scores are approximately normally distributed. In 1994, Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray used the phrase "The Bell Curve" as the title of their widely reviewed book on Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life. While their book presents elaborate statistical justifications for most of its assertions, however, the claim that intelligence is normally distributed is defended on common sense grounds. Herrnstein and Murray (1994: 557) simply assert that "it makes sense that most things will be arranged in bell-shaped curves. Extremes tend to be rarer than averages." They note that the bell curve "has a close mathematical affinity to the meaning of the standard deviation," a concept which they use extensively in the book, and remark that: It is worth pausing a moment over this link between a relatively simple measure of spread in a distribution and the way things in everyday life vary, for it is one of nature's more remarkable uniformities. In reality, there is nothing remarkable about the fact that measures which contain a good deal of random variation will fit a measure designed to measure random variation. The question whether intelligence is or is not normally distributed is actually irrelevant to the thesis that observed differences in I.Q. scores between racial groups reflect innate biologic differences. Jenson, Herrnstein and Murray apparently introduce the topic of the normality of I.Q. score distributions because readers who have been led to accept the myth of the normal curve in other contexts may assume that a normal distribution proves that the measurement was valid. If the normal distribution were properly understood as nothing more than a distribution of random errors, it would not lend any weight to their arguments. tests. The Myth of the Bell Curve in Grading The myth of the normal bell curve also lives on in educational institutions, where students and faculty often casually refer to "grading on the curve" or "curving the grades." Many administrators resemble the superintendent of schools in "Elmtown" (Hollingshead, 1961) in assuming that a normal distribution of scores indicates that a good job of grading was done. Often, instructors are expected to turn in an approximately normal distri- bution of grades and any substantial deviations must be justified. In a 1970-1972 dispute at a large state university, conflict over grading and other issues led to a situation in which all but one of the full-time junior faculty members were fired, denied tenure, or resigned under pressure (Goertzel and Fashing, 1969). The initial controversy arose when some administrators became concerned about the tendency toward "grade inflation" on campus, an issue that has been of some national concern as well (Jencks and Riesman, 1968). The dean of the college distributed statistics showing that the mean grade point average had been increasing over time and in comparison to other institutions. There was also considerable difference in the average grades given out by departments on campus. The Sociology Department was particularly singled out for its high average grades, and pressure was put on the department chair to bring his faculty members into line. One junior faculty member was told that he must use "common sense" standards in grading that would result in a "more or less normal distribution" of grades. The teaching assistants in the chairman's introductory sociology class were given more explicit instructions: The combined average grades for each of their four classes was not to exceed 2.6 (or a low B -). Five teaching assistants were summarily dismissed after they refused to sign a document declaring their willingness to carry out the intent of the chairman's directive. The issue became a major focus of conflict on campus, leading the dean and other senior faculty and administrators to enunciate assumptions which are not often states so clearly. They made it clear that their concern went beyond the question of the "average" or mean grade. They were also concerned that the number of As be relatively small. Indeed, they insisted that the usual distribution of grades should approximate a normal distribution in that most grades should be clustered around the mean (or C) with relatively few at the extremes. Most of the spokesmen who supported a normal distribution said they thought that such a distribution was the "usual," "natural" or "common sense" result to be obtained from correct grading procedures. In a more traditional view of grading as representing objective academic standards, instructors should grade papers according to their intrinsic merit and give out whatever grades result even if the distribution results in a lot of A's or F's. On tests, an instructor should know, before looking at the results, what score will be required for each grade. This practice, however, may be administratively inconvenient for several reasons. Enrollments may drop if too many students fail. Admissions to elite programs may be too large if too many students receive high grades. The myth of the bell curve serves administrative convenience by assuring that a predictable proportion of students can be channeled into each strata of the educational and occupational system. The Bell curve in Theory and Research The use of the myth of the bell curve in research serves to reinforce some persistent biases, as well as to disguise sloppy research practices. These biased research findings may then be used to justify the assumption that abilities and talents are normally distributed and that grades and other social rewards should be distributed according to the bell curve. The assumption that social phenomena should be normally distributed is consistent with pluralist or other multicausal theoretical models, since a large number of unrelated and equipotent causes lead to a normal distribution. Indeed, the early pluralists in political science expected political attitudes to be normally distributed, since they believed them to be caused by numerous, equipotent independent factors (Rice, 1928:72). Similarly, if social status is determined by a number of independent factors, we would expect it to be normally distributed. If, as Marxists and others argue, it is largely determined by a single variable, such as the relationship to the means of production, there would be no reason for this to be the case. In point of fact, income is not normally distributed in the United States or any other known society. Income can be measured easily in monetary units, this is well accepted. A graph of the income distribution in the United States can even be found in Herrnstein and Murray's book (1984: 100), and it is not a bell curve. Other measurements used by social scientists, however, provide only a rough index of the underlying trait. If sufficient error is present in these measuring instruments, a normal distribution may well result. Lundberg and Friedman (1943), for example, compared three measures of socioeconomic status in a rural community. These tests measured social status by arbitrarily assigning points to the furniture and other objects observed in the respondents' living rooms. After applying several tests to the same families and plotting the resulting distributions, the authors noted: assuming that in a random sample, socioeconomic status is normally distributed, the distortion of the normality of the distribution by the Guttman version of the Chapin scale suggests the presence of spurious factors .... In other words, the bell curve was used as a standard for deciding which test was valid. The commentators on the article (Knupfer and Merton, 1943) were quick to point out that this was an unjustified assumption. Income, property, education, and occupational status are not normally distributed; why should socioeconomic status as measured by a summated scale of the paraphernalia in the respondents' living rooms be? Yet the assumption that distribution should be normal is widely used, perhaps in the absence of any other criterion to demonstrate that a good job of measurement has been done. A U.S. Forest Service Report (1973:24a), for example, reports with satisfaction that scores on an index of the wilderness quality of roadless areas were quite normally distributed. There is no reason why this should be the case except that the Forest Service has averaged together a number of possibly unrelated variables (scenic character, isolation, variety). (In fact, distribution found by the Forest Service deviates significantly from normality; but, as if often the case, they did not check the goodness of fit.) The use of normality as a criterion reinforces sloppiness in scale construction, since a sloppy scale has more error and is thus more likely to approximate a normal distribution. The myth of the bell curve is also consistent with theories that assume that social behavior is a reflection of individual differences (provided, also, that it is assumed that individual differences are normally distributed). Stuart Dodd (1942:251-262), for example, used the bell curve in developing his theory of social problems. A social problem, to Dodd, consisted in a deficit of some characteristic that is socially desirable. The 2% of the population that falls below two standard deviations from the mean on a desirable characteristic are the "minimals," and they constitute the social problems. These "minimals" include divorcees, prostitutes, illegitimates; the sick, blind, crippled, or insane; the poor and unemployed; criminals and political refugees; inferior races such as Bushmen and Pygmies; the illiterate or ignorant; the overworked and underprivileged; the offensively vulgar; atheists; foreign language minorities; hermits and social isolates. Dodd was certainly aware that not all phenomena are normally distributed, and he realized that the two percent figure may not always be appropriate. Yet, only the assumption of normality led him to even suggest this figure; otherwise, what possible reason could there be for suggesting that the divorce rate, poverty rate, unemployment rate, to say nothing of the proportion of foreign language minorities, should fall at 2%? Dodd also used the bell curve to estimate the possible range of human characteristics, determining that it was unlikely for the range to exceed 12.5 standard deviations (Dodd, 1942:261-262). He noted, however, that the range of incomes in our "capitalistic culture" exceeded 2000 standard deviations. His suggestion that the variance in incomes should be limited to correspond to the variance in abilities is perhaps a good one, but more rigorous data show that the assumption of normality cannot be used m determining the range of these abilities. Weschler (1935) shows on the basis of much better data, that the range of human traits rarely exceeds a ratio of 3:1 (the range ratio of Binet Mental Age scores is 2.30:1). Nothing in this paper should be taken as questioning the use of the normal distribution where it is appropriate (e.g., in estimating confidence intervals from random samples). To make this correct usage clear, it might be wise to revert to the earlier phrase, "normal curve of error." This would make it clear that the normal bell curve is "normal" only if we are dealing with random errors. Social life, however, is not a lottery, and there is no reason to expect sociological variables to be nor- mally distributed. Nor is there any reason to expect psycho- logical variables to be if they are influenced by social factors. Certain physiological traits, such as length of the extremities, are often approximately normally distributed within homogeneous populations. Other traits, such as weight, which are affected by social behaviors, are not. Indeed, if a phenomenon is found to be normally distributed, this is very likely an indication that it is caused by random individual variations rather than by social forces. The myth that social variables are normally distributed has been shown to be invalid by those methodologists who have taken the trouble to check it out. Its persistence in the folklore and procedures of social institutions is a reflection of institutionalized bias, not scientific rigor. References Anastasi, A. 1968 Psychological Testing. New York: Macmillan. Blalock, H. 1960 Social Statistics. New York: McGraw-Hill. Bohrnstedt, E. and C. Bohrnstedt 1972 'How One Normally Constructs Good Measures, Sociological Methods and Research, I, 3-12. Bradley, J.V. 1968 Distribution-free Statistical Tests. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall. Cronbach, L. 1970 Essentials of Psychological Testing. New York: Harper & Row. Dodd, S. 1942 Dimensions of Society. New York: Macmillan. Fisher, A. 1922 The Mathematical Theory of Probability. New York: Macmillan. Forest Service, U.S.D.A. Roadless and Undeveloped Areas Within National Forests. Springfield Va.: National Technical Information Service. Galton, F. 1889 Natural Inheritance. London: Macmillan. Goertzel, T. and J. Fashing 1981 "The Myth of the Normal Curve: A Theoretical Critique and Examination of its Role in Teaching and Research" Humanity and Society 5: 14-31. Goodenough, F. 1949 Mental Testing. New York: Rinehart. Herrnstein, R. and C. Murray 1994 The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life. New York: Free Press. Hollingshead, A. 1961 Eltmtown's Youth. New York: Wiley. Hoyt, D.P. 1965 "The Relationship Between College Grades and Adult Achievement." Iowa City: American College Testing Program, Research Report No. 7. Jencks, C. and D. Riesman 1968 The Academic Revolution. New York: Doubleday. Jencks, C., et al. 1972 Inequality. New York: Basic Books. Jensen, A. 1969 "How Much Can We Boost I.Q. and Scholastic Achievement?" Harvard Educational Review 39, 1-123. Knupfer, G. and R. Merton 1943 "Discussion." Rural Sociology 8, 236-239. Landau, D. and P.F. Lazarsfeld 1968 "Adolphe Quetelet." In Vol. 13 of International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences. New York: Macmillan and Free Press. Lundberg, G. and P. Friedman 1943 "A Comparison of Three Measures of SocioEconomic Status." Rural Sociology 8, 227-236. Pearson, K. 1912 Social Problems: Their Treatment, Past, Present and Future. London: Dulau. 1900 "On the Criterion That a Given System of Deviations From the Probable in the Case of a Correlated System of Variables Is Such That It Can Be Reasonably Supposed to Have Arisen from Random Sampling." The London, Edinburgh and Dublin Philosophical Magazine and Journal of Science 50, 157-175. Quetelet, L.A.J. 1969 A Treatise on Man. Gainesville, Fla.: Scholar's Facsimiles and Reprints. Rice, S. 1928 Quantitative Methods in Politics. New York: Knopf. Thorndike, E.L., el al. 1927 The Measurement of Intelligence. New York: Columbia University Press. Thurstone, L.L. 1959 The Vectors of the Mind. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Vernon, P. 1940 The Measurement of Abilities. London: University of London Press. Walker, H. 1929 Studies in the History of Statistical Method. Baltimore: Williams and Wilkins. Wechsler, D. 1935 The Range of Human Abilities. Baltimore: Williams and Wilkins.  From THALL@DEPAUW.EDU Sat Oct 22 09:26:48 MDT 1994 Date: 22 Oct 1994 10:32:58 -0500 (EST) From: "Thomas D. [Tom] Hall, THALL@DEPAUW.EDU" Subject: IQ & Goertzel To: psn@csf.colorado.edu I want to read Ted's post and mull all this over. However, I thought I'd share a few things passing the hallways here at DePauw (Dan Quayle's alma mater--but also Barbara Kingsolver & Vernon Jordan). By the criteria Murray & Herrs. suggest, old Danny Boy should not even have gotten into college--If I am to trust the comments from the few senior faculty members who actually had him as a student. The merits of DQ are beside the point, but I cannot help but wonder how ardent those who want to use IQ to deny opportunities to some would be if it were more publicly pointed out that some of their heroes would also be denied! Of course DQ had access to beau coup $, and as ole bobby zimmerman says, "money doesn't talk, it swears!" If I recall some of Lewis Feuer's work on Einstein, he too would have been denied. random thoughts on a sunny saturday.... Tom Hall thall@depauw.edu Department of Sociology DePauw University Greencastle, IN 46135 317-658-4519 From HSTAUB@bss1.umd.edu Sat Oct 22 10:20:03 MDT 1994 From: "ALLAN LISKA" Organization: University of Maryland,College Park To: psn@csf.colorado.edu Date: Sat, 22 Oct 1994 12:22:05 EDT Subject: Re: Can't ignore spread of fascist ideas.....  Date sent: Sat, 22 Oct 1994 06:22:43 -0600  Send reply to: SPECTOAJ%PUCAL.BITNET@vaxf.Colorado.EDU  From: SPECTOAJ%PUCAL.BITNET@vaxf.Colorado.EDU  Subject: Can't ignore spread of fascist ideas.....   I often have found myself in agreement with Carl Dassbach's useful  points; however, on the question of "ignoring" the rise of Charles Murray's  racist analysis===combined with the attempt to link crime and genes and  race===I think that it would be a terrible mistake to ignore it. Murray  has become the Howard Stern of the sociology world===a clever comment, a  sly wink, and the reverse charisma of a particular type of demogogue who  says "What's plain folks like us supposed to do?"   in addition to way to many listservs, i also subscribe to prodigy. there is a huge difference in attitudes toward these so-called "scientists" in the two arenas. while people on this list have dismissed these ideas for the drivel they are, the people on prodigy (which is largely consrevative) take it as evidence for some pre- conceived notion that white people are inherently superior. i am worried about the impact these articles, books, and ideas are having on the non-academic world. when i post on prodigy i feel like i am fighting a losing battle to convince people that these ideas are wrong and have been wrong since they were introduced. so, alan, you have my complete support, whatever it is that you feel is necesary to stamp out these kind of racist ideas, i will do. -allan ...................................................................... .ALLAN LISKA Oliver North and Marion Barry in '96 . .DEPT. OF SOCIOLOGY -This way we will only sell guns . .UNIVERSITY OF MARYLAND to the drug dealers we buy our . .HSTAUB@BSS1.UMD.EDU crack from! . . -- FREEDOM NOW, FOR LEONARD PELTIER!!!!-- . ...................................................................... From FEAGIN2@NERVM.NERDC.UFL.EDU Sat Oct 22 11:27:06 MDT 1994 Date: Sat, 22 Oct 94 13:29:30 EDT From: FEAGIN2@NERVM.NERDC.UFL.EDU To: psn@CSF.COLORADO.EDU This is a section from a textbook of mine, wrtten more than a decade ago. Some may find it useful for contextualizing the current so-called "IQ" debate: In the early 1900s popular writers, scholars, and members of Congress warned of the peril of allowing inferior stocks from Europe into the United States. Kenneth L. Roberts, a prominent journalist, wrote of the dangers of the newer immigrants making Americans a mongrel race: "Races can not be cross-bred without mongrelization, any more than breeds of dogs can be cross-bred without mongrelization. The American nation was founded and developed by the Nordic race, but if a few more million members of the Alpine, Mediterranean and Semitic races are poured among us, the result must inevitably be a hybrid race of people as worthless and futile as the good-for-nothing mongrels of Central America and southeastern Europe." The "Alpine, Mediterranean, and Semitic races" generally covered countries of heavy emigration other than those of northern Europe; the Italians and European Jews were thought by such writers to be examples of " inferiority." Half-truths about disease and illiteracy were circulated about the southern and eastern European immigrants. It was true in some years between 1880 and 1920 that half the adult Italian immigrants could not read and write, but in other years the overwhelming majority were literate. In no year were the charges of total illiteracy leveled at Italian Americans by the press and politicians accurate. Particularly hostile was the leap from the proportions illiterate to assumptions of low intelligence. In the first three decades of the twentieth century stereotypes of intellectual inferiority were based in part on misreadings of the results of new psychological tests inaccurately labeled intelligence (IQ) tests. The term "intelligence test" is inaccurate because the tests measure only selected, learned verbal and quantitative skills, not a broad or basic intelligence. In 1912 Henry Goddard gave Binet's diagnostic test and related tests to a large number of immigrants from southern and eastern Europe. His data supposedly showed that 83 percent of Jewish and 79 percent of Italian immigrants were "feeble-minded," a category naively defined in terms of low scores on the new tests. With the coming of World War I some prominent psychologists developed verbal and performance tests for large-scale testing of draftees. Although the results were not used for military purposes, detailed analyses were published in the 1920s and gained public and congressional attention because of the racial-inferiority interpretation some psychologists placed on the test results of the southern and eastern Europeans among the draftees. In 1923 Carl Brigham, a prominent young Princeton psychologist who would later play a role in developing today's college entrance tests, wrote a detailed analysis of the alleged intellectual inferiority of immigrant groups, including Italian Americans, drawing on data from army tests. The average scores for foreign-born draftees ranged from highs of 14.87 for English and 14.34 for Scotch draftees, to an average of 13.77 for all white draftees, to lows of 10.74 for Polish and 11.01 for Italian draftees. The low test scores for such groups as the Italian Americans were boldly explained in racial terms; those European groups were then considered inferior "races" or inferior "racial stocks." These results were used by psychologists such as Brigham to support the prevalent ideology of "Nordic" intellectual superiority being espoused by racist theorists such as Madison Grant. Brigham went on to argue that the sharp increases in southern and eastern European immigration had lowered the general level of American intelligence. The political implications of Brigham's analysis were proclaimed: immigration limits were necessary. Political means should be developed within the United States to prevent the continued "propagation" of "defective strains" in the population. Here was pseudoscientific support for such government action as passage of the 1924 Immigration Act, which would severely restrict Italian and other southern European immigration on racial grounds. An important aspect of this stereotyping of Italian and other European immigrants is the role of the government. The definition of these immigrants as undesirable racial groups was stimulated by social psychologists working with and for state agencies, in this case the U.S. armed forces, and their research was used by another branch of government, the Congress, to restrict immigration. The "intelligence" differences measured by psychological tests were assumed to reflect the inferior or superior genetic background of European "racial" stocks. In those decades few seriously considered the possibility that the linguistic (English), cultural (northern European American), and educational bias in the tests and in interpretive procedures could account for the differences. These debates over the inferiority of European "racial" groups are now a historical curiosity. No social scientists today would advance arguments of white ethnic inferiority on the basis of paper-and-pencil test data. Some immigrant leaders developed humorous strategies for dealing with concern over their intelligence and their "blood" lineage. One prominent Italian American leader, Fiorello La Guardia, suffered personal attacks that incorporated stereotypes. For his criticism of officials such as President Herbert Hoover he received letters such as the following: "You should go back where you belong and advise Mussolini how to make good honest citizens in Italy. The Italians are preponderantly our murderers and boot-leggers." La Guardia's countertactic was biting humor. When asked to provide material on his family background for the New York World, he saw the ghost of "blood" inferiority behind the request and commented: "I have no family tree. The only member of my family who has one is my dog Yank. He is the son of Doughboy, who was the son of Siegfried, who was the son of Tannhuser, who was the son of Wotan. A distinguished family tree, to be sure-but after all he's only a son of a bitch." From soc40001@frank.mtsu.edu Sat Oct 22 11:54:54 MDT 1994 Date: Sat, 22 Oct 1994 12:55:48 -0500 (CDT) From: "Andrew W. Austin" To: SPECTOAJ%PUCAL.BITNET@vaxf.colorado.edu Subject: Re: Can't ignore spread of fascist ideas..... In-Reply-To: <01HIJIIJ1LHU91VTTQ@PUCAL.BITNET> Another chapter in the constant struggle to legitimate the antisocial corporate actor for skeptical masses. A religio-political system of extreme libertarianism already mixed up with a terrifying spiritual determinism has now become integrated with the biological determinism that arises out of the ideology of positive science. Diabolically, The Order has provided the enemy for us - the African. Just as Calvin allowed for the rational system of capitalism - and later that political beast called republicanism - to command the theology of christianity, biological spencerianism allows for the utter rejection of humanity. Just as the bible was used by the southern aristocracy to reproduce the system of slavery and segregation, the bible of standardized intelligence tests is being used to justify a program of segregation and eugenics in postmodern society. The tendency of calvinists to seek determinism of any sort has historically been a consequence of the anomic condition created in the void of any communitarian (not majoritarian) values - of any social responsibility to each other. The postmodern condition has been called *postnomic*. Here, norms are not uncertain, but irrelevant. This calls for a new legitimizing agent, one which transcends a mere religious ethic that can be freely choosen in a (symbolic) democratic society. One which is *objective* and *neutral*.... ...Enter SCIENCE. Christian fascists love science when it legitimates The Order. This calls for PRAXIS, not catharsis. AWA From 34LPF6T%CMUVM.BITNET@vaxf.Colorado.EDU Sat Oct 22 12:49:10 MDT 1994 by VAXF.COLORADO.EDU (PMDF V4.3-10 #8140) 22 Oct 1994 10:06:38 -0600 (MDT) Date: Sat, 22 Oct 1994 11:10:56 -0400 (EDT) From: "T R. Young" <34LPF6T%CMUVM.BITNET@vaxf.Colorado.EDU> Subject: OF CURVES AND ARTFUL COUNTS To: ALL RECIPIENTS OF PSN Organization: Central Michigan University CARL HAS DONE US A SERVICE BY TRIGGERING A FINE DIALOGUE ON CURVES AND SUCH...AND TED G.s' piece on the history of the bell curve is most valuable to those who want to argue with the curvi-linear crowd as well some should. However there are two or three other grounds on which one might set the argument and I would like to open up those for your consideration. A. Technical point...the Bell curve presumes a complete pictograph of a given form of behavior...in this case, something we might call I.Q. The new sciences of complexity/chaos teaches us that, of the five dynamical regimes found in nature, three do not lend themselves to such graphics....beginning with an attractor called a butterfly attractor, rather than getting a single distribution, one gets a bimodal curve. If, in fact, one rotates any complex attractor [by which we mean the complete outcome field for a given run of behavior], one gets progressively messy curves with progressively 'noisy' peaks. There are new techniques from physics and math which one can use to find hidden attractors even in very messy distributions. The point here is that, if we want to find the correlates of I.Q., we should be ready to find very complex patterns on any given kind of behavior in which we might be interested...lots to be done before we can make the kind of simple minded claims that Dodd and his students like to make. B. Philosophical point...in an early posting, I alluded to an 'artificial stupidity score.' That idea comes from a semi-serious spoof I made on artificial intelligence in which I made the philosophical point that, far more interesting the the I.Q. of people and perchance machines, was the ways in which a society was organized to make use of the information available to it...I made the distinction between 'naturally stupid societies' and 'artificially stupid societies.' I was very serious about that dis- tinction...the USA and the former USSR were high on my ranking of artific- ially stupid societies since they had a magnificent knowledge process and a miserable capacity for the distribution of that knowledge for their citizens to use...medical knowledge, political knowledge, communications and other realms of knowledge are artifically limited for purposes of profit and/or control. So, my best advice is to go beyond the terms of arguement of those who like curves too much and disorder too little. You have whole new tactics to use in the continuing stuggle for social justice. C. Political Point...some said, rightly, that we should not ignore these treatises on I.Q....I agree. The question becomes, what are the terms of engagement against those who would use I.Q. [or race or gender or ethnicity as grounds for access to social justice supplies in a wealthy society with a fiscal crises... My own view is that one has to change the material bases which make such knowledge sets [whatever their truth value] grounds for such exclusion. How do we do that in a progressively globalized economy in which the wealth of nations is partially determined outside national politics??? I've tried to give some of the answer in a new article in the August issue of Humanity and Society...but most of the answer will not come from academics on the right or left...in that Carl D. has a point...it will take street politics and a lot of trans-national organization in order to take the grounds away from the elitists/apologists for stratification...we can and should inter- vene at crucial points but we might be more modest and realize that the real poetic genius from which such answers come reside in the 3rd world and the peoples there who will make the revolutions which change the way in which both wealth and knowledge are produced and distributed...In Iraq, in Yugoslavia, in South Africa and in Guatemala, the real genius is working to change structurally stupid societies into smarter and wiser forms. T.R. Young From julian@CVAX.IPFW.INDIANA.EDU Sat Oct 22 13:59:18 MDT 1994 Date: Sat, 22 Oct 1994 15:01:41 EST From: Jim Julian To: psn@csf.colorado.edu Subject: Thoughts on what to do A few "What to do?" suggestions with off-the-cuff examples: context. I prefer to call that context "biology is destiny" (BID), but call it what you will. The BID component to fascist ideology affects people grouped in many ways, e.g., "race," gender, class, health status, and so forth. **EXAMPLE** Announcements about the discovery of genes for this or that have been occurring with a high degree of frequency and often neatly compliment prior BID claims about *fate* and social group. Many of these announcements make outrageous claims about behavior and/or disease without even deigning to suggest what intervening physiological mechanisms may be involved. Some of these have had devastating effects on the lives of people from many different social groups. The media, for several years now, has emphasized two "risk factors" for breast cancer: delayed child- bearing and inherited risk. If I recall correctly, when added to certain types of breast tissue, these risk factors account for all of 18% of the variance in breast cancer. The inheritance risk, complete with newly identified "inherited or altered" gene, account for all of four percent (4%) of the variation in breast cancer. Most women who have breast cancer have sisters or daughters or nieces or female cousins. Imagine how much needless stress and anxiety is generated about their own fate among these relatives of those with breast cancer. A factor that explains only 4% of the error variance around the national rate causes unresolvable fear among 100% of the women who are related to breast cancer victims! Imagine how debilitating that stress and anxiety might be, especially when added to other BID terror stories relating to women. The only ways to reduce risk? If you are at the right age (early to mid-20s) have that kid now! If you are older, have a mammogram once a year (early detection can prolong your life) and worry over the sin committed against NATURE-AS-GOD committed by having the temerity to challenge (BID) your natural place in the order of things. other ideologies supporting fascist transformations of political- economy plus b) the fascist transformation of political and economic life. A split-labor theory approach would seem suitable. **EXAMPLE** Where welfare "reform" is concerned there was an interesting comment made on CNN's "Larry King Live" by the oily Texan running for the Senate in California. He said something very close to "...poor people want this system reformed, too. I talked to a black the other day..." I would guess that the remark was not one born of simple-mindedness, but was thought up as a prefab remark by one of the campaign consultants working in his $12 million plus BID for the senate (sorry, couldn't resist the puntation -- must be genetic). Interestingly, the comment wasn't challenged. The upshot is that the media has come very, very close to defining the following identities; poor=welfare=black. Racism then becomes a device for enlisting the support of poor and near- poor "whites" in shattering a social support system that services far more "whites" than "blacks." The poor "white" man looks in the mirror, sees a "black" face and shoots himself thinking he is ridding the world of the "black" menace that really all along was the rich white man who owned the mortgage on the poor "white" man's house and who foreclosed on the dead poor "white" man's house right before it was paid off so he could make another killing in the real estate business. 3. Work on developing a theoretical discussion of the mass media (at PSN and beyond) that allows for a connection between theory and practice. The voice of the new right flows from its cultural production capacity. To counter BID, fascist cultural production must be countered. No example here. I have been working on this for a few years and if anyone is interested I will forward the introductory chapter of a book to them. 4. The internet is a remarkable piece of technology that has, I read somewhere, about 30,000,000 users world-wide at this time. Some creative net-surfing with an analysis of the situation and a list of things to learn more about and a list of ways to complain about biased media could have some interesting results. This would be especially true if it were possible to measure the results of such net-surfing on the mass media. **A COUPLE OF PALTRY "STUFF TO LEARN" & COMPLAINT EXAMPLES** a. Stuff to learn about - Contact media organizations that are promoting the book and ask them "why?" Don't attack the corporate functionaries you talk to, don't call them fascists, don't attack their morality however repugnant you might it. Just ask them why they are promoting the book. Books are hyped just like movies these days. It might be interesting to find who the literary agent is, are there corporate (advertising) sponsors for the promotion, are there any ad firms involved, who would makes decisions about what books are going to hyped, does that person have a phone number or email address. If enough inquiries of this sort are made, some real answers should emerge. Yes, it will cost the caller and the media organizations some time and money. The cost to the caller for a 10 minute phone call would be what? About $2.40 at most? It would cost the media company a little more, but hardly enough to be troublesome. One-hundred ten minute calls would take up about 16.7 staff hours. That shouldn't be too much to pose a problem. And we consumers of the mass media would learn a lot about how those organizations operate. Just by asking! :-) b. COMPLAINTS - Journalists are supposed to utilize certain rules when writing news. If you see stories presented that lack objectivity and balance, complain about it. Complain about it to publishers, to editors, and to reporters. If the response is the usual no response, then (if it is broadcast media) file a formal complaint with the FCC. The next time you complain, you might get a response -- you might even get equal time. There are of course, real pitfalls associated with this course of action, as I'm sure many of you know. On the other hand, it is a stop-gap activity in the attempt to get the media to be fair. 5. The real problem is that there is no readily available, pan-class, daily opposition press/media in this country. The corporate world has near total control over real-time news and long-term media themes. There is no objective (material) reason why this should be the case. Jim Julian julian@cvax.ipfw.indiana.edu  From rpalm@unm.edu Sat Oct 22 15:49:59 MDT 1994 Date: Sat, 22 Oct 1994 15:52:21 -0600 (MDT) From: rebel palm aitchison Subject: Re: Myth of the Bell Curve To: Ted Goertzel In-Reply-To: Thank you Ted for answering at least one of my questions since this discussion started on the list--But is it based on good "science"? If it is, it seems reactionary to dismiss it just because it doesn't come up with findings that are "nice" or politically correct. Such shouting down reminds me of the "leading" scientists of the day who shouted down Galileo and Harvey and more recently Bakker and other palentologists who said that dinosaurs were warm-blooded, etc. If we're going to be social SCIENTISTS and not demagogic journalists, then we are obliged, I should think, to explore ANY results that adhere to good scientific method. Otherwise we should go into politics or become talk show hosts because that will be about the level of "scientific" inquiry we will be at. On Sat, 22 Oct 1994, Ted Goertzel wrote: > I've followed the commentary on The Bell Curve with interest. I > believe I am the first commentator so far who has actually read > the book. It is very well written and thought out, and really > exemplary in communicating the results of quantitative research > to a statistically unsophisticated audience. By most objective, > academic, scientific standards, it is an excellent book. This is > not to say that it doesn't have its weaknesses, but they are not > in overlooking the kinds of rhetorical points that most PSN > commentators have made. Most of the arguments made on PSN are > anticipated in the book and responded to with extensive citations > and/or quantitative findings. If PSN members believe this book > is important, they will have to do a lot of hard work to refute > it. Just going into battle with the kinds of arguments expressed > on the network will make the left look rhetorical and shallow > compared to the rigorous science of Herrnstein and Murray. > > There has been little discussion of the actual recommendations in > the book. They do not, for example, propose abandoning > affirmative action, but limiting the margin given to blacks or > other minorities on tests such as the GRE and LSAT to half a > standard deviation. They give statistics showing that in elite > schools the minority mean is often more than a standard deviation > less than the white mean. This seems unfair, especially to white > students from modest economic circumstances who feel treated > unfairly. Their recommendation is a plausible policy, different > from the policy of having a quota for minorities and admitting > the strongest minority candidates regardless of how they compare > to the majority. What policy do PSN members advocate? Quotas? > Class as opposed to racial criteria? Herrnstein and Murray also > address the question of socioeconomic vs. ethnic or racial > criteria. > > Some of the weak points in the book are mentioned in the current > issue of Newsweek - e.g., the "Flynn effect" which they use to > explain away the fact that IQ scores seem to be increasing over > time rather than falling as their theory predicts. Probably the > most fundamental weakness is overlooking the importance of > cultural factors. > > Another flaw which happens to interest me in the image of "The > Bell Curve" itself. I published a paper (with Joe Fashing) on > this back in 1981 in Humanity and Society. Since this is a very > difficult journal to find, and I believe the paper will interest > you, I am sending an adaptation of it along. Feel free to use > this in your courses, cite it in your writings, etc. It has been > buried long enough. > > Ted Goertzel > > PS > I am thinking of revising and updating this. If any of you have come > across misuses of the normal curve, please send them on to me. > Ted Goertzel, Rutgers University, Camden NJ 08102 > > > > The Myth of the Bell Curve > by Ted Goertzel > > Adapted and condensed from: Ted Goertzel and Joseph Fashing, "The > Myth of the Normal Curve: A Theoretical Critique and Examination > of its Role in Teaching and Research," Humanity and Society 5:14-31 > (1981), reprinted in Readings in Humanist Sociology (General Hall, > 1986). > > > Surely the hallowed bell-shaped curve has cracked from top to > bottom. Perhaps, like the Liberty Bell, it should be enshrined > somewhere as a memorial to more heroic days. > > -Earnest Ernest, Philadelphia Inquirer. 10 November 1974. > > > > The myth of the bell curve has occupied a central place in the > theory of inequality (Walker, 1929; Bradley, 1968). Apologists > for inequality in all spheres of social life have used the theory > of the bell curve, explicitly and implicitly, in developing moral > rationalizations to justify the status quo. While the misuse of the > bell curve has perhaps been most frequent in the field of > education, it is also common in other areas of social science and > social welfare. When Abraham de Moivre made the first recorded > discovery of the normal curve of error (to give the bell curve its > proper name) in 1733, his immediate concern was with games of > chance. The normal distribution, which is nothing more than the > limiting case of the binomial distribution resulting from random > operations such as flipping coins or rolling dice, was a natural > discovery for anyone interested in the mathematics of gambling. De > Moivre was unhappy, however, with the lowly origins of his > discovery, He proceeded to raise its status by attributing to it an > -importance beyond its literal meaning. In his age, this could best > be done by claiming hat it was a proof of the existence of God. He > announced: > > And thus in all cases it will be found, that although Chance > produces irregularities, still the Odds will be infinitely > great, that in process of Time, those irregularities will bear > no proportion to the recurrency of that Order which naturally > results from Original Design .... (Walker, 1929:17). > > De Moivre's discovery of the bell curve did not attract much > attention. Gamblers are perhaps better served with discrete > distributions. Theologians, for their part, no doubt preferred to > base their case for God's insistence on less probabilistic grounds. > Serious interest in the distribution of errors on the part of > mathematicians such as Laplace and Gauss awaited the early > nineteenth century when astronomers found the bell curve to be a > useful tool to take into consideration the errors they made in > their observations of the orbits of the planets. > Further developments in the myth of the bell curve were left > not to the astronomers or theologians but to the early quantitative > social scientists. Systematic collection of population statistics > began in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries as a > response to the social upheavals of the time and the consequent > concern with understanding the dynamics of mass behavior. These > early sociologists were not concerned with theology, but they were > seeking proof of the orderliness of society. Relying on the > justifiably great prestige of Laplace and Gauss as mathematicians, > they took the bell curve as proof of the existence of order in the > seemingly chaotic social world. Unfortunately, the early > social scientists often had a poor understanding of the fact that > the mathematical formulas of Gauss and Laplace were based on > assumptions not often met in the empirical world. As Fisher (1923, > Vol. 1: 18 1) points out: > > the Gaussian error law came to act as a veritable > Procrustean bed to which all possible measurements > should be made to fit. The belief in authority so typical of > modern German learning and which has also spread to America > was too great to question the supposed generality of the law > discovered by the great Gauss. > > The mathematicians, on the other hand, did not feel that it > was their domain to check whether or not the empirical world > happened to fit their postulates. The bell curve came to be > generally accepted, as M. Lippmnan remarked to Poincare (Bradley, > 1969:8), because "...the experimenters fancy that it is a theorem > in mathematics and the mathematicians that it is an experimental > fact." > Adolph Quetelet, the father of quantitative social science, > was the first to claim that the bell curve could be applied only > to random errors but also to the distributions of social phenomena > (Landau and Lazarsfeld, 1968; Wechsler, 1935:30-31). The myth of > the bell curve was part of Quetelet's theory of the Average Man > (Quetelet, 1969). He assumed that nature aimed at a fixed point in > forming human beings, but made a certain frequency of errors. The > mean in any distribution of human phenomena was to him not merely > a descriptive tool but a statement of the ideal. Extremes in all > things were undesirable deviations. His doctrine was a > quantification of Aristotle's doctrine of the Golden Mean, and it > is susceptible to the same criticisms. While there may be traits > where the average can reasonably be considered to be the ideal, the > argument's application is severely limited. One might argue, for > example, that average vision is ideal, whereas nearsightedness and > farsightedness are undesirable deviations. But is this true of > physical strength or of mental abilities, or even of physical > stature (one variable for which there is actually substantial > evidence of an approximately normal distribution)? Quetelet, like > Aristotle, exempted mental abilities, arguing that those who were > superior to the average in intelligence were mere forerunners of a > new average that was to come. > Quetelet's doctrine of the Average Man was ill suited to a > society that was more in need of a rationalization for inequality > than a glorification of the common man. His use of the bell curve, > however, was useful as part of the social Darwinist ideology that > was emerging as a justification for the inequities of laissez-faire > capitalism. > The myth of the bell curve found its most enthusiastic and > effective champion in Francis Galton and the eugenics movement of > which he was a major founder. The importance that he attributed to > the bell curve can be illustrated by the following quotation > (Galton, 1889:66): > > I know of scarcely anything so apt to impress the imagination > as the wonderful form of cosmic order expressed by the "Law of > Frequency of Error." The law would have been personified by > the Greeks and deified, if they had known of it. It reigns > with serenity and in complete self-effacement amidst the > wildest confusion. The huger the mob, the greater the apparent > anarchy, the more perfect is its sway. It is the supreme law > of Unreason. Whenever a large sample of chaotic elements are > taken in hand and marshalled in the order of their magnitude, > an unsuspected and most beautiful form of regularity proves to > have been latent all along. The tops of the marshalled row > form a flowing curve of invariable proportions; and each > element, as it is sorted into place, finds, as it were, a > preordained niche, accurately adapted to fit it. > > Galton went beyond Quetelet not only in his enthusiasm > for the bell curve but also in his attempt to gather data to > demonstrate its general applicability. He obtained data on a > number of physical traits that he was interested in improving, such > as height, weight, strength of the arms and of the grip, swiftness > of the blow, and keenness of eyesight. The variables tended to be > approximately normally distributed, but the fit was not perfect. > He consequently converted his data into a type of standard score > and averaged the standard scores together (Galton, 1889:201). > These average scores fit the fit the normal curve very well as > might be expected since he had averaged together a number of > largely unrelated variables and created a mean score that reflected > little more than random error. > Karl Pearson (best known today for the invention of the > product-moment correlation coefficient) was Galton Professor of > Eugenics at the University of London and Galton's biographer. He > accepted the ideology of the eugenics movement and was preoccupied > with curing social problem by creating a race of superior blue-eyed > and golden-haired people (Pearson, 1912). He was, however, too > good a statistician to repeat Galton's methodological errors or to > accept the Gaussian model on the basis of authority. He used his > newly developed Chi Square test to check how closely a number of > empirical distributions of supposedly random errors fitted the bell > curve. He found that many of the distributions that had been cited > in the literature as fitting the normal curve were actually > significantly different from it, and concluded that "the normal > curve of error possesses no special fitness for describing errors > or deviations such as arise either in observing practice or in > nature" (Pearson, 1900: 174). > > The Myth in Testing Theory > > Pearson's conclusions were not sufficient to stop the > application of the normal curve of error as a norm in assigning > classroom grades or in psychological testing. Most objective tests > that are in practical use today rely on summated scaling > techniques. This means that the person taking the tests answers a > large number of items and receives a total score corresponding to > the number of items that he or she answers correctly. This type of > measurement, which is also used in Likert-scaling in sociological > research, has an inherent bias toward the normal distribution in > that it is essentially an averaging process, and the central limit > theorem shows that distributions of means tend to be normally > distributed even if the underlying distribution is not (if the > means are based on large random samples). This inherent > bias is most likely to be realized if the responses to the test > items are poorly intercorrelated (i.e., if the test or scale is > poorly constructed to measure a central factor). > If a large number of people fill out a typical multiple choice > test such as the Scholastic Aptitude Test (or a typical > sociological questionnaire with precoded responses such as > "strongly agree, agree") at random using a perfect die, the scores > are very likely to be normally distributed. This is true because > many more combinations of responses give a sum that is close to the > theoretical mean than give a score that is close to either extreme. > This characteristic of the averaging process is useful in > calculating probable errors in random sampling and is consequently > discussed in elementary statistics books (e.g., Blalock, > 1960:138-141). When averaging is used in testing or measurement, > however, it means that the greater the amount of error present, the > greater the likelihood of a normal distribution of scores, even if > the variable being measured is not normally distributed. > All objective tests contain a certain amount of error in that > the chance of a respondent's getting a given item right depends not > only on the central factor being measured but also on other general > factors and on characteristics idiosyncratic to that item (not to > mention the element of luck). Thus it is not surprising that > summated scaling devices tend to give normal distributions. The > problem comes when this tendency is interpreted not as a result of > unavoidable error, but as a confirmation of a preconceived idea > that the variable being measured is in fact normally distributed. > The early developers of standardized intelligence tests were > pleased to find that their distributions of scores were > approximately normal, although they were disturbed by the fact that > perfect normal distributions were rarely, if ever, achieved. > Tborndike (1926:521-555) went so far as to average together scores > achieved by the same respondents on eleven different intelligence > tests in order to achieve a more normal distribution. He thus > repeated Galton's mistake by averaging together somewhat diverse > measures and then assuming that the resultant distribution was due > to the normality of the underlying variable rather than to the > increased measurement error. (The importance of this, of course, > depends on how different the various tests were.) He also > discounted the fact that the intelligence tests themselves > were standardized in such a way as to give normal distribution. > Despite the efforts of prominent psychometricians such as > David Wechsler (1935:34) to counter it, the myth of the bell curve > was widely disseminated in psychological texts (Goodenough, > 1949:148-149; V , 1940-16-17; Anastasi, 1968:27) and is widely used > as a criterion for test construction. More modern texts usually > recognize that there is no theoretical justification for the use of > the normal curve, but justify using it as a convenience (Cronbach, > 1970:99-100). > The clear assertion by prominent psychologists such as > Wechsler and Cronbach that psychological phenomena are not somehow > inherently normally distributed is a clear advance over the type of > indoctrination that students of educational psychology typically > received in the 1930s and 1940s. This methodological advance > coincided with a general trend in the social sciences away from > sociobiological arguments. The close tie between methodological > presuppositions and ideological concerns is illustrated by the fact > that the myth of the bell curve has recently been reactivated > precisely as part of an attempt to reassert racist arguments about > the biological determinants of human abilities. In his highly > controversial article on genetics and I.Q., Arthur Jensen (1969) > went to considerable length in an attempt to demonstrate that I.Q. > scores are approximately normally distributed. > In 1994, Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray used the phrase > "The Bell Curve" as the title of their widely reviewed book on > Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life. While their > book presents elaborate statistical justifications for most of its > assertions, however, the claim that intelligence is normally > distributed is defended on common sense grounds. Herrnstein and > Murray (1994: 557) simply assert that "it makes sense that most > things will be arranged in bell-shaped curves. Extremes tend to be > rarer than averages." They note that the bell curve "has a close > mathematical affinity to the meaning of the standard deviation," a > concept which they use extensively in the book, and remark that: > > It is worth pausing a moment over this link between a > relatively simple measure of spread in a distribution and the > way things in everyday life vary, for it is one of nature's > more remarkable uniformities. > > In reality, there is nothing remarkable about the fact that > measures which contain a good deal of random variation will fit a > measure designed to measure random variation. > The question whether intelligence is or is not normally > distributed is actually irrelevant to the thesis that observed > differences in I.Q. scores between racial groups reflect innate > biologic differences. Jenson, Herrnstein and Murray apparently > introduce the topic of the normality of I.Q. score distributions > because readers who have been led to accept the myth of the normal > curve in other contexts may assume that a normal distribution > proves that the measurement was valid. If the normal distribution > were properly understood as nothing more than a distribution of > random errors, it would not lend any weight to their arguments. > tests. > > The Myth of the Bell Curve in Grading > > The myth of the normal bell curve also lives on in educational > institutions, where students and faculty often casually refer to > "grading on the curve" or "curving the grades." Many > administrators resemble the superintendent of schools in "Elmtown" > (Hollingshead, 1961) in assuming that a normal distribution of > scores indicates that a good job of grading was done. Often, > instructors are expected to turn in an approximately normal distri- > bution of grades and any substantial deviations must be justified. > In a 1970-1972 dispute at a large state university, conflict over > grading and other issues led to a situation in which all but one of > the full-time junior faculty members were fired, denied tenure, or > resigned under pressure (Goertzel and Fashing, 1969). > The initial controversy arose when some administrators became > concerned about the tendency toward "grade inflation" on campus, an > issue that has been of some national concern as well (Jencks and > Riesman, 1968). The dean of the college distributed statistics > showing that the mean grade point average had been increasing over > time and in comparison to other institutions. There was also > considerable difference in the average grades given out by > departments on campus. The Sociology Department was particularly > singled out for its high average grades, and pressure was put on > the department chair to bring his faculty members into line. > One junior faculty member was told that he must use "common > sense" standards in grading that would result in a "more or less > normal distribution" of grades. The teaching assistants in the > chairman's introductory sociology class were given more explicit > instructions: The combined average grades for each of their four > classes was not to exceed 2.6 (or a low B -). Five teaching > assistants were summarily dismissed after they refused to sign a > document declaring their willingness to carry out the intent of the > chairman's directive. > The issue became a major focus of conflict on campus, leading > the dean and other senior faculty and administrators to enunciate > assumptions which are not often states so clearly. They made it > clear that their concern went beyond the question of the "average" > or mean grade. They were also concerned that the number of As be > relatively small. Indeed, they insisted that the usual distribution > of grades should approximate a normal distribution in that most > grades should be clustered around the mean (or C) with relatively > few at the extremes. Most of the spokesmen who supported a normal > distribution said they thought that such a distribution was the > "usual," "natural" or "common sense" result to be obtained from > correct grading procedures. > In a more traditional view of grading as representing > objective academic standards, instructors should grade papers > according to their intrinsic merit and give out whatever grades > result even if the distribution results in a lot of A's or F's. On > tests, an instructor should know, before looking at the results, > what score will be required for each grade. This practice, > however, may be administratively inconvenient for several reasons. > Enrollments may drop if too many students fail. Admissions to > elite programs may be too large if too many students receive high > grades. The myth of the bell curve serves administrative > convenience by assuring that a predictable proportion of students > can be channeled into each strata of the educational and > occupational system. > > > The Bell curve in Theory and Research > > The use of the myth of the bell curve in research serves to > reinforce some persistent biases, as well as to disguise sloppy > research practices. These biased research findings may then be used > to justify the assumption that abilities and talents are normally > distributed and that grades and other social rewards should be > distributed according to the bell curve. > The assumption that social phenomena should be normally > distributed is consistent with pluralist or other multicausal > theoretical models, since a large number of unrelated and > equipotent causes lead to a normal distribution. Indeed, the early > pluralists in political science expected political attitudes to be > normally distributed, since they believed them to be caused by > numerous, equipotent independent factors (Rice, 1928:72). > Similarly, if social status is determined by a number of > independent factors, we would expect it to be normally distributed. > If, as Marxists and others argue, it is largely determined by a > single variable, such as the relationship to the means of > production, there would be no reason for this to be the case. > In point of fact, income is not normally distributed in the > United States or any other known society. Income can be measured > easily in monetary units, this is well accepted. A graph of the > income distribution in the United States can even be found in > Herrnstein and Murray's book (1984: 100), and it is not a bell > curve. Other measurements used by social scientists, however, > provide only a rough index of the underlying trait. If sufficient > error is present in these measuring instruments, a normal > distribution may well result. > Lundberg and Friedman (1943), for example, compared three > measures of socioeconomic status in a rural community. These tests > measured social status by arbitrarily assigning points to the > furniture and other objects observed in the respondents' living > rooms. After applying several tests to the same families and > plotting the resulting distributions, the authors noted: > > assuming that in a random sample, socioeconomic status is > normally distributed, the distortion of the normality of the > distribution by the Guttman version of the Chapin scale > suggests the presence of spurious factors .... > > In other words, the bell curve was used as a standard for > deciding which test was valid. > The commentators on the article (Knupfer and Merton, > 1943) were quick to point out that this was an unjustified > assumption. Income, property, education, and occupational status > are not normally distributed; why should socioeconomic status as > measured by a summated scale of the paraphernalia in the > respondents' living rooms be? Yet the assumption that distribution > should be normal is widely used, perhaps in the absence of any > other criterion to demonstrate that a good job of measurement has > been done. A U.S. Forest Service Report (1973:24a), for example, > reports with satisfaction that scores on an index of the wilderness > quality of roadless areas were quite normally distributed. There > is no reason why this should be the case except that the Forest > Service has averaged together a number of possibly unrelated > variables (scenic character, isolation, variety). (In > fact, distribution found by the Forest Service deviates > significantly from normality; but, as if often the case, they did > not check the goodness of fit.) The use of normality as a > criterion reinforces sloppiness in scale construction, since a > sloppy scale has more error and is thus more likely to approximate > a normal distribution. > The myth of the bell curve is also consistent with theories > that assume that social behavior is a reflection of individual > differences (provided, also, that it is assumed that individual > differences are normally distributed). Stuart Dodd (1942:251-262), > for example, used the bell curve in developing his theory of social > problems. A social problem, to Dodd, consisted in a deficit of > some characteristic that is socially desirable. The 2% of the > population that falls below two standard deviations from the mean > on a desirable characteristic are the "minimals," and they > constitute the social problems. These "minimals" include > divorcees, prostitutes, illegitimates; the sick, blind, crippled, > or insane; the poor and unemployed; criminals and political > refugees; inferior races such as Bushmen and Pygmies; the > illiterate or ignorant; the overworked and underprivileged; the > offensively vulgar; atheists; foreign language minorities; hermits > and social isolates. > Dodd was certainly aware that not all phenomena are normally > distributed, and he realized that the two percent figure may not > always be appropriate. Yet, only the assumption of normality led > him to even suggest this figure; otherwise, what possible reason > could there be for suggesting that the divorce rate, poverty rate, > unemployment rate, to say nothing of the proportion of foreign > language minorities, should fall at 2%? > Dodd also used the bell curve to estimate the possible range > of human characteristics, determining that it was unlikely for the > range to exceed 12.5 standard deviations (Dodd, 1942:261-262). He > noted, however, that the range of incomes in our "capitalistic > culture" exceeded 2000 standard deviations. His suggestion that the > variance in incomes should be limited to correspond to the variance > in abilities is perhaps a good one, but more rigorous data show > that the assumption of normality cannot be used m determining the > range of these abilities. Weschler (1935) shows on the basis of > much better data, that the range of human traits rarely exceeds a > ratio of 3:1 (the range ratio of Binet Mental Age scores is > 2.30:1). > Nothing in this paper should be taken as questioning the use > of the normal distribution where it is appropriate (e.g., in > estimating confidence intervals from random samples). To make > this correct usage clear, it might be wise to revert to the > earlier phrase, "normal curve of error." This would make it clear > that the normal bell curve is "normal" only if we are dealing > with random errors. Social life, however, is not a lottery, and > there is no reason to expect sociological variables to be nor- > mally distributed. Nor is there any reason to expect psycho- > logical variables to be if they are influenced by social factors. > Certain physiological traits, such as length of the extremities, > are often approximately normally distributed within homogeneous > populations. Other traits, such as weight, which are affected by > social behaviors, are not. Indeed, if a phenomenon is found to be > normally distributed, this is very likely an indication that it > is caused by random individual variations rather than by social > forces. > The myth that social variables are normally distributed has > been shown to be invalid by those methodologists who have taken > the trouble to check it out. Its persistence in the folklore and > procedures of social institutions is a reflection of > institutionalized bias, not scientific rigor. > > > References > Anastasi, A. > 1968 Psychological Testing. New York: Macmillan. > Blalock, H. > 1960 Social Statistics. New York: McGraw-Hill. > Bohrnstedt, E. and C. Bohrnstedt > 1972 'How One Normally Constructs Good Measures, > Sociological Methods and Research, I, 3-12. > Bradley, J.V. > 1968 Distribution-free Statistical Tests. Englewood Cliffs, > N.J.: Prentice-Hall. > > Cronbach, L. > 1970 Essentials of Psychological Testing. New York: > Harper & Row. > Dodd, S. > 1942 Dimensions of Society. New York: Macmillan. > Fisher, A. > 1922 The Mathematical Theory of Probability. New > York: Macmillan. > Forest Service, U.S.D.A. > Roadless and Undeveloped Areas Within National Forests. > Springfield Va.: National Technical Information Service. > Galton, F. > 1889 Natural Inheritance. London: Macmillan. > Goertzel, T. and J. Fashing > 1981 "The Myth of the Normal Curve: A Theoretical Critique > and Examination of its Role in Teaching and Research" > Humanity and Society 5: 14-31. > Goodenough, F. > 1949 Mental Testing. New York: Rinehart. > Herrnstein, R. and C. Murray > 1994 The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in > American Life. New York: Free Press. > Hollingshead, A. > 1961 Eltmtown's Youth. New York: Wiley. > Hoyt, D.P. > 1965 "The Relationship Between College Grades and Adult > Achievement." Iowa City: American College Testing Program, > Research Report No. 7. > Jencks, C. and D. Riesman > 1968 The Academic Revolution. New York: Doubleday. > Jencks, C., et al. > 1972 Inequality. New York: Basic Books. > Jensen, A. > 1969 "How Much Can We Boost I.Q. and Scholastic Achievement?" > Harvard Educational Review 39, 1-123. > Knupfer, G. and R. Merton > 1943 "Discussion." Rural Sociology 8, 236-239. > Landau, D. and P.F. Lazarsfeld > 1968 "Adolphe Quetelet." In Vol. 13 of International > Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences. New York: > Macmillan and Free Press. > Lundberg, G. and P. Friedman > 1943 "A Comparison of Three Measures of SocioEconomic Status." > Rural Sociology 8, 227-236. > Pearson, K. > 1912 Social Problems: Their Treatment, Past, Present and > Future. London: Dulau. > 1900 "On the Criterion That a Given System of Deviations From > the Probable in the Case of a Correlated System of > Variables Is Such That It Can Be Reasonably Supposed to > Have Arisen from Random Sampling." The London, Edinburgh > and Dublin Philosophical Magazine and Journal of Science > 50, 157-175. > Quetelet, L.A.J. > 1969 A Treatise on Man. Gainesville, Fla.: Scholar's > Facsimiles and Reprints. Rice, S. > 1928 Quantitative Methods in Politics. New York: Knopf. > Thorndike, E.L., el al. > 1927 The Measurement of Intelligence. New York: Columbia > University Press. > Thurstone, L.L. > 1959 The Vectors of the Mind. Chicago: University of > Chicago Press. > Vernon, P. > 1940 The Measurement of Abilities. London: University of > London Press. > Walker, H. > 1929 Studies in the History of Statistical Method. > Baltimore: Williams and Wilkins. > Wechsler, D. > 1935 The Range of Human Abilities. Baltimore: Williams and > Wilkins. >  > From soc40001@frank.mtsu.edu Sat Oct 22 17:39:10 MDT 1994 Date: Sat, 22 Oct 1994 18:40:34 -0500 (CDT) From: "Andrew W. Austin" To: rebel palm aitchison Subject: Re: Can't ignore spread of fascist ideas..... In-Reply-To: that emerged in the 1920s in Western Europe. Originially, the term was very specific, referring to Mussolini's brand of corporatism. However, it was coopted by Hitler and modified horrifically. Hitler fused this political form of corporate organization with scientific racism and the resulting ideology became the driving force behind the rise of the National Socialist German Workers (Nazi) Party. I can understand the confusion. It is a common tactic of fascists - whether it be Zhirinovsky's Liberal Party or Hitler's Nazi Party - to label their parties democratic. In fact, they are totalitarian regimes. The first thing Hitler did in consolidating his power was to execute the labor leaders (no Kautskyite was Adolf). The problem comes in when people - and with the entire weight of U.S. ideological institutions en masse imposing upon them the modern corporatist hegemony, who can blame them - confuse socialism and communism with Stalinism. Stalin was just another fascist who used the language of extreme democracy for legitimation. opposite ends of the political spectrum. Socialism is extreme democracy (political *and* economic); fascism is extreme authoritarianism. Singapore is a good example of a state leaning towards the latter. A representative of the former would be, perhaps, Sverige or Danmark, (although these states are still quite capitalist). Neither socialism nor communism has ever existed in true form. Unfortunately, for six million Jews, Fascism has. AWA From SPECTOAJ%PUCAL.BITNET@vaxf.Colorado.EDU Sat Oct 22 17:54:01 MDT 1994 From: SPECTOAJ%PUCAL.BITNET@vaxf.Colorado.EDU by VAXF.COLORADO.EDU (PMDF V4.3-10 #8140) 22 Oct 1994 17:49:22 -0600 (MDT) Date: Sat, 22 Oct 1994 18:15:48 -0600 (CST) Subject: This foolishness about so-called political correctness... To: psn@csf.colorado.edu This foolishness about so-called "political correctness" would be laughable if it weren't backed up with the power of the dominant politcal- economic powers of the U.S. Does anyone really believe the comparison between Herrnstein and Galileo??? Galileo was threatened by the ruling elite of his day; Herrnstein was CHAIRMAN OF THE PSYCHOLOGY DEPARTMENT AT HARVARD UNIVERSITY, for Pete's sake! Someone complained that it was "wrong" to say that Herrnstein was wrong. Well, that person certainly felt that HE had the right to say that Allan Liska was wrong. If I say that he is wrong, can someone else say that I am wrong? This gets to be nonsense!!! It cracks me up when someone expresses OUTRAGE when a critic makes a negative statement about one of these ruling class professors who is pushing racism (yes, it is accurate to call it racist--defend the findings if you want, but don't deny that they are racist--have the courage to defend the doctrine of racial inferiority--don't hide behind vague terms........) yup, it cracks me up when someone expresses OUTRAGE when a critic makes a negative statement about one of those ruling class professors, securely tenured, making at least $50,000/year..who is pushing racism........ and yet that same person doesn't have nearly a tiny fraction of the outrage because a negative statement has been made against tens of millions of black people who experience the pain of oppression which is bolstered by the theories of biological inferiority. Does it "suppress" the academic freedom of a black youth if his teacher believes the youth is biologically inferior? Does the OUTRAGED defender of the professor have any room for OUTRAGE over the way black people are treated...or does the OUTRAGED really belong to the chorus who believes that black people are not victims of discrimination, and therefore, the OUTRAGED eagerly embraces the truly Politically Correct And Properly In Step with the Politically Powerful ideology of biological racial inferiority. Political Correctness is not about being fashionable; it is about being in step with the politically powerful....does anyone really believe that Clinton and Company represent the forces of anti-racism, including anti-racist economic egalitarianism? Yup, it cracks me up when the big bully is bashing his opponent, and the opponent begins to scream, and the big bully starts to whine:' "HEY, you're not being fair...you're making me look bad." Alan Spector Purdue Calumet From BREKHUS@zodiac.rutgers.edu Sat Oct 22 21:00:34 MDT 1994 From: BREKHUS@zodiac.rutgers.edu Date: Sat, 22 Oct 1994 23:02:56 -0400 (EDT) Subject: Murray: Is it based on good "science?" To: psn@csf.colorado.edu In the Newsweek article William Julius Wilson says that Murray's work will never stand up to the test of scientific scrutiny. Ted Goertzel says on the other hand that it does. Without reading the book, it's hard to know the answer to this question. But Ted, since you've read the book I'm wondering how does Murray get from a correlation between lower average IQ scores among "blacks" than among "whites" and the cause of it being more "genetic" than environmental? If he has shown a correlation between scores on a test and one's defined race this is certainly nothing new. But I suspect that he has shown a statistical correlation with rigorous scientific methods and then explained the correlation with his own "normative" ideological" stance. Does he show causation or does he just show correlation and then use his own "ideological" stance to explain the correlation? Wayne Brekhus Rutgers University P.S.-I second Michael's call to avoid name calling and confront others' arguments instead. Besides, from her posts on other lists I'm pretty sure rebel is her real name and no deceipt is occuring. And what fun would psn be if only people who met our own definitions of "progressive" posted? From greens@tamsun.tamu.edu Sun Oct 23 00:31:24 MDT 1994 From: "Derek A. Kalahar" Subject: murray To: psn@csf.colorado.edu Date: Sun, 23 Oct 1994 01:33:56 -0500 (CDT) After mulling over the numerous posts reguarding chuck et al. I think it is completely valid to blow out of the water any sort of neo-eugenisit work. The validity of this work has been challenged extensively. The las nail should be in the coffin. However, the reactionary ideology of the period we live in allows silly work like chuck's to be published. I would say that if we really want to have scholorly discussions we cannot even talk about this book. We would do better to hash over Rush Limbaugh's latest radio revelations. The only thing this book points out is that facists can still find away to wreak havoc on popular conciousness. Whats Murray's IQ anyway. Considering the recent newsweek article I doubt he can beat madonna. From lichter@nicco.sscnet.ucla.edu Sun Oct 23 03:44:11 MDT 1994 From: lichter@nicco.sscnet.ucla.edu (Michael Lichter) Date: Sun, 23 Oct 1994 02:46:41 +0000 To: BREKHUS@zodiac.rutgers.edu Subject: Re: Murray: Is it based on good "science?" I went to the book store this evening to buy the book, but since it's not a bestseller yet, Crown won't sell it for 40% off, so I'm going to wait until it's been out a bit longer. On Oct 22, 9:01pm, BREKHUS@zodiac.rutgers.edu wrote: > If he has shown a correlation between scores on a test and one's defined race > this is certainly nothing new. But I suspect that he has shown a statistical > correlation with rigorous scientific methods and then explained the correlatio > with his own "normative" ideological" stance. Does he show causation or does > he just show correlation and then use his own "ideological" stance to explain > the correlation? book, H & M argue that the factors which would have masked "true IQ" in the past, such as lack of access to proper schooling, are largely gone in the present day. Contemporary measures of IQ, therefore, are relatively unaffected by environmental factors that might have blocked the expression of genetically-coded IQ. Therefore, the correlations are "real". In other words, they fudge, and are smart enough to fudge plausibly. Some of their fudging is pure misdirection. I read a little sidebar where they try to discredit the sort of arguments that Joe Feagin posted yesterday about immigration and IQ testing. What they say is that the person who found 83% of incoming Jews to be "feebleminded" wasn't trying to generalize about the whole population, and that while Goddard did make those kinds of generalizations in his book, his book had no apparent influence on the hearings that restricted immigration, because his book was not mentioned in the Congressional Record. I have no idea why H & M didn't just repudiate this early work. What they say instead is irrelevant: is the 83% figure any more believeable because the sample wasn't supposed to be representative of the entire group? Was Goddard's work less racist because no one mentioned it at the hearing? (And even if it wasn't mentioned, it could have been so well known that it didn't need to be invoked by name.) the heretibility of IQ, but the significance of IQ. H & M argue that we are a society divided into smart and dumb, and that the dumb -- regardless of why they are dumb -- are becoming increasingly irrelevant and are dragging "us" smart people down. If we disagree on with H & M on why IQs are distributed the way they are, but agree with them on what IQ means, then they have still won the most important battle. My sense is that they concede the point about multiple intelligences, but argue that what IQ measures are the intelligences which are key to success, so a counter-argument either needs to show that this is wrong or irrelevant (and it would be helpful to decide which it is). Doesn't this all evoke a version of BRAVE NEW WORLD where the alphas try to get the betas locked in a struggle to death with the gammas so that the betas and gammas won't notice that the alphas are eating up the whole social surplus? Michael From julian@CVAX.IPFW.INDIANA.EDU Sun Oct 23 11:42:51 MDT 1994 Date: Sun, 23 Oct 1994 12:45:15 EST From: Jim Julian To: psn@csf.colorado.edu Subject: IQ sciencism The IQ and race thing is, at the very, very best very bad science. At worst it is a partial legitimation for genocide. I'll restrict by comments to the bad science issue. Bob has covered the genocide part of it quite well, thank you. 1. There is no way that ANY scientific study could establish a valid causal claim about the genetic basis for intelligence, let alone "racial" differences in "intelligence." The issues are epistemological at heart and involve being able to separate the genetic contribution from the environmental contribution. This can be difficult even in laboratory studies using rats. a. Early rat psychologists tried to demonstrate the inherited nature of intelligence using maze learning experiments. A typical study of this sort would involve breeding "bright" white rats with "bright" white rates and breeding "dumb" white rats with "dumb" white rats. The results typically indicated that after several generations, the "intelligence scores" of the "bright" white rats were so far above the "intelligence scores" of the dumb white rates that the normalized distributions of the two groups hardly had a tail in common. "Intelligence" was operationalized as the number of trials required to run learn a maze or solve other kinds of problems. The fewer trials, the greater the rat's IQ. These early studies were not double-blind designs, but even if they had been there are validity issues that cannot be addressed even in this kind of "ideal" design. - First, there is the issue of criterion validity. Does the time or the number of trials required for a rat to learn a maze measure "intelligence?" Or could it also measure the sense of smell, whisker sensitivity, allergies to lab rat food, or something else instead of or in addition to intelligence? - Second, there is the issue of internal validity. Was the breeding of "intelligence" really nothing more than the breeding of one of those physiological traits? Don't know. These experiments couldn't answer that question because the design confounded rat "intelligence" with other possible causes by separating the rats into "bright" and "dumb" groups for breeding purposes. No randomization of assignment, no internal validity. If a study lacks either criterion validity or internal validity, it becomes little more than a case of garbage in, garbage out. Let me extend this tedious example to the human IQ and race debate. And please understand that I am not generalizing from rats to people, but I am describing (sort of) the behavior of scientists (sort of) in both cases. b. The sort of quasi-experimental design typically employed in the IQ & race research attempts to use groups found in the field as quasi-control groups. The most well-known of these is the "separated at birth twin study." (Also the most notorious!) The point of these studies is usually to estimate the proportions of intelligence which can be attributed to heredity and to experience (environment). Basically, the mean of the differences between IQs within a group of twins not separated at birth is compared to mean of the differences for IQs withn a group of twins separated at birth. The difference between the means is taken to be an estimate of that portion of IQ which is attributable to experience. That proportion is then used as a weight to partial out the environmental component of observed IQ differences between various groups, in this case, race, to estimated innate, inherited differences in intelligence. Sounds scientific, right? Wrong. - The criterion validity of measurement instruments in these studies is as questionable as the criterion validity of measurement in the rat lab studies. What do these instruments measure? Is it "intelligence" or is something else? Perhaps these tests measure integration into some specific subculture, say a rational-legal organizational subculture. May these tests also measure motivation as much as the ability to correctly answer questions. What is actually being measured by these tests is not well known, especially when elite groups for whom the instrument was designed are compared to subordinate groups for whom the instrument was not designed. There are other criterion validity questions and these can be examined later or elsewhere. - The internal validity of the twin studies rests on the assumption the entire wealth of experience is controlled for by simply by comparing non-separated twins with separated twins. This is not so. First, the experiences of non-separated twins is going to be quite similar but contaminated by experience. This could be statistically estimated and added to the experience side of the equation and isn't necessarily critical to the internal validity of the design. The other assumption, however, is that differences in experience for separated twins exhausts the full range of possible experience. This is highly questionable for a variety of reasons as made quite clear by the critics of Jensen & Hernstein in the 1970s and since. However, even if these problems for the IQ determinists were resolved, the internal validity of that part of the design which allows for the estimation of innate differences between groups is non-existent. Let me see -- for that logical leap to have any pretense of internal validity in a racist social order, one would was "white" and the other was "black." More of course would be required, but I'm not going to insult your intelligence by pretending that could happen. I wish the biology is destiny people would offer the same respect. The internal validity of multi-variate parametric statistical designs or the use of statistical controls has very limited internal validity under the best of circumstances. When fuzzy concepts are being operationalized the internal validity of these types of studies are zip. What happens is that the "scientist" makes assumptions and then begs the question on those assumptions. It really is garbage in, garbage out. 2. What is intelligence? There have been some good theoretical sorties into the question thus far which are (as far as I can tell) quite compatible with "The Myth of the Bell Curve." The bottom line is that intelligence is a concept related to gate-keeping in a social order characterized by massive distributive inequality. Let me put this in a slightly different way: There are as many scientific ways to answer the question "what is intelligence" as there are theoretical perspectives in which "intelligence" becomes a study object. My preference -- as a scientist -- is to take the development and usage of the concept "intelligence" as a study object. Doing so and reporting the findings is hardly a simple matter of rhetoric or debate. If I were to discover that the concept is linked to the justification of distributive patterns that favor one group over another, that is only reporting a finding. It is not "political correctness." If I were to discover that considerable attention is paid to "intelligence" within political economies that are developing fascist* features or display developed fascist features, that is only reporting a finding. Which brings me to my next point. * By the way -- I prefer a political economy definition of fascism based on Franz Neuman's Behemoth, i.e., fascism consists of a strong central state that is closely integrated at an organizational level with privately (not state) owned corporate structures and that has a well developed system of mass culture production that flows from both the state and corporate arenas.] 3. The only kind of validity the IQ & race studies (such as the Murray study) have is face validity. Face validity is nothing more than several "scientists" examining something (usually an assumption) as saying "Yep, that's right. Yup, yup!" or "Very logical indeed, Spock." or some other mutually confirming utterance. Studies like the Murray study have face validity, which is why the more important kinds of validity are normally only given a cursory examination or dismissed altogether as irrelevant. Studies like the Murray study have face validity because they "confirm" racist assumptions. The science is rotten, but its propaganda effects are mighty. It is a good applied example of what the "Thomas Theorem" was all about. 4. The rancor in the public part of the debate on PSN is a good example of split-labor effects. 5. The real issue here is not whether or not the latest claims- making based on a spurious line of research is valid. The real issue is the production of culture. If that is not recognized, then none of the rest matters. Homosapiens will lose. Jim Julian PS - No, I haven't read the Murray study. I have no need to do so.  From DAVIDSON@UConnVM.UConn.Edu Sun Oct 23 13:58:03 MDT 1994 by VAXF.COLORADO.EDU (PMDF V4.3-10 #8140) 23 Oct 1994 13:58:32 -0600 (MDT) Date: Sun, 23 Oct 1994 14:45:59 -0400 (EDT) From: Alan Subject: Murray's study To: psn@csf.colorado.edu If anything, and this is with only having read some of the reviews (mainly b/c I am working on 3 things at once), Hernstein and Murray's analysis can be faulted for not asking, or ducking the causal question (which is not much different than what 75% of social science research, including some of which claims to use causal models do). They do report a correlation between I.Q., and access to schooling. What they argue is that the causal path really doesn't matter b/c I.Q. differences of particular groups remains separated b/c of differential schooling. How differential schooling experiences become produced, as well as what intelligence actually is becomes ducked in the process, but is this any different from what one tends to read in the main public vehicles for relaying sociological DATA to other disciplines, no. It is very standard social science brought to particular ends. Alan G. Davidson From michaell@aragorn.ori.org Sun Oct 23 15:56:37 MDT 1994 Date: Sun, 23 Oct 1994 14:59:12 -0700 (PDT) From: Michael Lee Subject: THE BELL (Gaussian) CURVE To: psn@csf.colorado.edu As social scientists etc. we make great use of the "normal" distribution in survey work and other areas. Perhaps it would help this IQ debate to get straight on what a normal curve really is. It is primarily a mathematical concept that says if you SAMPLE in a RANDOM way out of a population, many many times, the sample mean will cluster around the real mean in a bell curve way. It does not mean that measurement in nature will follow the curve, although somethimes they will. For esample, how tall willow trees are at one year - ??? a few extremes at the tails and a normal distribution - I don't know - probably not. As we remember from grade school, when a teacher "fit" the class into a normal curve, pretending to grade on science, there had to be some D's and F's, even if everyone had done well. Looking back at the development of an IQ test - the development of these tests required some selection and discrimination so that the questions actually formed a bell curve, for more pretend science. From SPECTOAJ%PUCAL.BITNET@vaxf.Colorado.EDU Sun Oct 23 17:18:09 MDT 1994 From: SPECTOAJ%PUCAL.BITNET@vaxf.Colorado.EDU by VAXF.COLORADO.EDU (PMDF V4.3-10 #8140) 23 Oct 1994 17:17:07 -0600 (MDT) Date: Sun, 23 Oct 1994 11:41:21 -0600 (CST) Subject: If we are all supposed to have read the literature... To: psn@CSF.colorado.edu IF we are all supposed to have read the literature before being allowed to comment on it, I presume therefore, that all the "agnostics" on racial inferiority have read: 1)Allan Chase--The Legacy of Malthus 2)Not in Our Genes---Lewontin, et. el 3)The article in Science magazine that exposed how the main supporter of IQ and Heritability copied his data from a chart in a math book and pretended it was his data 3)Lewontin on Science and Politics of IQ 4)Leon Kamin's research on IQ fraud 5)Piaget on the elasticity of intelligence 6)Ashley Montague, and numerous more contemporary anthropolo- gists and biologists on the unscientific nature of using race as a biological concept 7)Gar Allen on the History of the Eugenics movement 8)read both Sandra Scarr's work and the critical evaluations of her work on IQ and heritability 9)Stephen Jay Gould's work on biology, genetics, and intelli- gence. 10)Savage Inequalities, by Kozol, as an answer to those fools who really think that the environment in black inner-city schools is as nurturing to IQ test scores as those in suburban schools. Why is it that those people who say that spending more money on the schools will not make a difference, manage to send their children to schools where LOTS of money is spent per pupil? Many of us have done A LOT of reading on this issue. I hear there is a new book coming out on creationism, that the world was formed about six thousand years ago. From what I understand, it is not based on new research, but rather is a summary of what has been discussed before. In that past, I've read quite a bit about the topic. I assume I'm allowed to say that the creationist argument is not scientifically sound even though I haven't yet read that particular book. I haven't read the latest version of the "Protocols of the Elders of Zion" (with a NEW introduction), nor the latest book arguing that Elvis is still alive, but I am familiar with the enormous numbers of holes in those theories and feel able to comment on them. In the case of Murray's book, I'll get around to reading it soon, but the argument has so many holes in it that have been discredited, and Murray himself is just analyzing and so overwhelming, that it is entirely appropriate to question both the analysis and the bias. PLEASE--PLEASE--PLEASE--PLEASE go out and read today, Sunday, October 22 column by William Safire and see how many, many, many people who will never read Murray's book will be influenced into thinking that probably black people are biologically inferior to whites, but what the heck, at least they are somewhat educable. I wonder if Safire even read the book, and if he did, I wonder if he read all the critiques of the arguments that Murray and Herrnstein left out of their books. Please, find and read that editorial and discuss with your students how a fake so-called open-minded position actually gives support to one side of an argument. alan spector From julian@CVAX.IPFW.INDIANA.EDU Sun Oct 23 17:26:17 MDT 1994 Date: Sun, 23 Oct 1994 18:28:47 EST From: Jim Julian To: psn@csf.colorado.edu Subject: RE: Murray's study Do Murray & Hernnstein duck the causal issue? I haven't read their book, I'm not going to read their book, I'm certainly not going to let M & H + MASS MEDIA set my research & debate agendas for me (more than they already have). (well, not much more -- Gag, can you imagine what Mr. Limbo, that master of turning the half-truth into an out-right lie, is going to do with M's & H's latest excess? - if he hasn't already?) But do M&H duck the causal issue and avoid the causal path? It doesn't matter, they still set the stage for the popular attribution of causality to genetics by using "race" as an independent variable. We have good reason to believe that "race" is a social construct, don't we? If you believe that to be the case, then "race" should be the *dependent* variable and IQ + works like M's & H's + Mr. Limbo's likely use of it should all be treated as *independent* variables in the construction of "race." Aside from this, yes there is a biological basis for human behavior, obviously. I'm not sure that pre-history folk were any more buffeted by nature than contemporary folk, though. As Marx pointed out in the Philosophic & Economic Manuscripts, we *are* of nature. Certainly by the time the CMP developed and most definitely since, humans have adapted features of the environment in massive ways. But humans have always survived by adapting the environment to humans far more than adapting genetically to the environment. This, too, Marx pointed out. I do think T.R. Young's points about the interaction of that class of phenomena we call "biological" and that class of phenomena we call "societal" are quite important. Where "genetic" programming is concerned, I think what we discover is that it is not really very interesting and consists of predispositions towards behavior like language use (as in using language, not how well it is used). Other "biological/societal" interactions are far more important, e.g., "nutritional intake/(political economy and culture)." My last comments on the BID variant "IQ & race" unless someone wants to talk about 1. generalizing the IQ/race issue to BID across a number of social groups, 2. talking about BID and split-labor theory / praxis, or 3. discussing mass media theory / praxis. Jim Julian From soc40001@frank.mtsu.edu Sun Oct 23 17:43:06 MDT 1994 Date: Sun, 23 Oct 1994 18:44:36 -0500 (CDT) From: "Andrew W. Austin" To: Michael Lee Subject: Re: THE BELL (Gaussian) CURVE In-Reply-To: I spoke today with an educational psychologist who does a lot of I.Q. testing and she offered an interesting point on all this. She noted that I.Q. is not a fixed quantity; that it is, in fact, rather maleable. To this she proffered that it is possible to retest an individual years after the initial test and find that their I.Q. has actually gone down! This is a consequence of her/his not learning enough in the years between assessments to score equivalently in their age range. Are we to believe that such an individual has become dumber over time? To what would we attribute this... creeping genetic regression to some primitive racial state? From MGWENG01@ULKYVM.LOUISVILLE.EDU Sun Oct 23 22:44:43 MDT 1994 Date: Mon, 24 Oct 94 00:47:14 EDT From: "Morton G. Wenger, Dept. of Sociology" Subject: IQ, ad nauseum... To: University of Louisville, Louisville, KY 40292 USA PHONE: (502) 852-6836 FAX: (502) 852-0099 First, as to the chastisement of Spector and Newby: red-baiting is always in order in some circles, calling fascist turncoats fascist turncoats never is. Get used to it if you aren't already. To those of you who base your current evaluations of utterances on the nature of the utterer, make sure you are up-to-date on that nature; this isn't the 60s and 70s, and some appalling things happened when it stopped looking like the red flag was the wave of the future. For those of you to whom this is too crptic, ignore it and read on... Like some, I swore to myself that i would not be sucked into a "serious" discussion of race/IQ/achievement- however, like the Carpathian peasantry, when Dracula rises from his grave, we might rather do other things, but we had better get out our sharpened stakes and garlic cloves. (BTW, I saw someone else use the Dracula metaphor for H&M's fascist diatribe, and I have always found it useful in talking to students about eugenicst/genocidal ideology, which I usually trace back to Malthus.) A couple of points more useful in class than in "scholarly" work: where was Murray at the recent Cairo conference??? As an unashamed advocate of eugenic policies, he must have been outraged at the attempt to suppress the reproduction of all those high-IQ "Asian" chromosomes! Obviously, he and his admirers would want to oppose any dysgenic limitation of Asian reproduction, wouldn't he? Or are Asians only smart in the US??? But if that's so, then what about "nature's" domination of "nurture?" Well, maybe the bulk of South Asians and Koreans coming to the US hols advanced degrees, and are already the IQ "elite" of their societies? But then, what of the "racial" component to Asian superiority??? Well, don't be a picky little approval-seeking Marxist psychopath, Wenger, with your snide and acerbic "tone of e-mail." Also, what is this "Asian" stuff anyway??? Is this supposed to be a "race?" What year is this? THIS is the "good" science that is fresh, new, and challenging? Someone quoted Bob Dylan somewhere here once before- I still want to know what price we have to pay to keep from going through these things twice (thrice, ad infinitum?). But, now for the clincher: This whole debate on PSN (Oh, the shame of it!) reflects an adoption of functionalist assumptions about inequality, to wit: 1) IQ testing is a TOOL, albeit a clumsy one, that measures SOMETHING. Maybe that something is good, maybe its not. However, let us assume it is good. Let us also assume that if it is good, it will be class-distributed, like all other good things, with the exploiters getting plenty of it, and the exploited little. Some of this good stuff is even class-distributed at birth, like birth-weight (directly), HIV infection (inversely), maternal mortality (inversely), etc. Would we argure, perforce, that maternal mortality CAUSES class standing? There may be some weird feed-back effect going on, but not one that outweighs the overall direction of the causal arrow. However, IQ is never measured at birth! I REPEAT: IQ IS NEVER MEASURED AT BIRTH! It is always measured after the child has become a symbol-user: I REPEAT: AFTER THE CHILD HAS BECOME A SYMBOL-USER, usuallyquite a bit thereafter. Now, for those who prattle about "the" literature on class and cognition, do Bourdieu and Bernstein have nothing to say about all this? Piaget, as another exasperated post alluded to? Certainly, events occurring from birth to four years of age are just as class-distributed as anything else, and the "good" stuff again accrues differentially to the exploiter, and is denied to the exploited. This includes so many aspects of good old Weber's "life-chances" that you, the reader can start drawing up your extensive list, including all the things that "the" literature (available even to the statistically semi-literate, so haughtily disdained in a recent post) that are determinitive of fundamental cognitive development. As poor old Karl M. tried to tell us in his sometimes obscure polemics on luddism, it ain't the tool that's the problem folks, it's the SOCIAL RELATIONS in which it is immersed!!! Yuh know? Like swords nad plowshares? Like helicopters painted with "Death from Above" and those thatsay "Life-flite" or some such? (I go on about this in my IQ paper from the pastat considerably more length: as soon as I can get it reproduced, I'll post it on PSN (a week maybe). Warning to the politically correct and the identity politicians: read to the end! 2) Our task as Marxists, for those who still call ourselves that, as I proudly and publicly do, is to understand the embededness of the tool in social relations, and class relations in particular. What then stands out, somewhat unremarkably for a Marxist, is that the "real" problem with IQ testing is not the test, it is the distributive mechanism for social rewards under capitalism, the labor market, pseudo-rationalized and legitimated by the class-based distribution of credentials (want more literature? start with Collins in his leftish mode). Even assuming that smart folks are really smarter, do we accept that the accumulation of credentials is a rational basis for the distribution of value in society? I mean, we don't even have to be pink to see the fallacy in this: paging Melvin Tumin! Paging Melvin Tumin! Isn't the ultimate question, even as raised by the sanitary genocidals, the "justice" of the distribution of "reward." Isn't productive output a good measure by which to decide this, on a class-by-class basis? I mean, if we don't believe this, then what the hell are we doing on psn, regardless of how usual or unusual our name is? (I often contemplate dropping my slave name and returning to my real name, Mordechai ben Aryeh-Laib, but that's a different story.) I could go on at length about why workers "deserve" more than "capitalists," but again, if you don't know why already, what are you doing here, indeed. 3) The real question is who deserves what, and Murray knows it. Rather than debating this question he assumes that rich people deserve what they get, and looks for a reason, coming up with the answer of smarter. What we as Marxists (can you really be "progressive" and NOT be a Marxist?) need to do is raise the question of the justice of the current distribution of power, rewards, etc. on the basis of what the PoMos call our "productivist" or "productionist" "bias," and stop arguing about the tools by which class injustice is defended. Welll... let me amend that- that's not all that we should do. While pointing out that the powerlessness of workers is not a functional process, but rather is a political one (Braverman, where are you now that we (still) need you?), we should also take pains to note that IQ is something you get after you are born, not before. But, looking at "the" literature, hasn't this been done numerous times? What new evidence do H&M bring to this key question? None that I can see. Furthermore, their citation of the data on A-A babies adopted by E-A's suggests that IQ is quite malleable after childhood. They use this to demonstrate that "race will out." That is, that even the beneficial effectseffects of white, privileged parenting cannot overcome the piss-poor protoplasm of Africans. I ask you folks, is IQ only malleable when it serves the racist purposes of these sly schmucks? Apparently. Oh, my gosh, I said a naughty ad hominem! Now the sophists among us can drag that White herring across the path of discourse once again. I take it back (not!). INTERNET: MGWENG01@ULKYVM.LOUISVILLE.EDU From dhenwood@panix.com Mon Oct 24 06:26:28 MDT 1994 Date: Mon, 24 Oct 1994 08:29:03 -0400 (EDT) From: Doug Henwood To: psn@csf.colorado.edu Subject: Re: Murray's study In-Reply-To: <01HIM9MUV62A00073P@VAXF.COLORADO.EDU> I don't have time to slog through The Bell Curve, so for those of you who have, I have a question: do they mention prenatal care, lead poisoning, chronic malnutrition, and the like? Doug Doug Henwood [dhenwood@panix.com] Left Business Observer 212-874-4020 (voice) 212-874-3137 (fax) From gimenez@spot.Colorado.EDU Mon Oct 24 08:34:39 MDT 1994 Date: Mon, 24 Oct 1994 08:37:11 -0600 (MDT) From: Martha Gimenez To: psn@csf.Colorado.EDU Subject: Re: Feynman and IQ I am forwarding this message on behalf of Adam Riggs ______________________________________________________________________ All, I just returned from vacation and have not yet read all of the posts on this issue, so forgive me if someone else has mentioned what I am about to say: I remember reading in one of the biographies on Richard Feynman that he had an IQ of only 125 !! His brother's was higher. So then, are we to believe that the greatest physisist since Einstein (along with Hawking at Cambridge, perhaps since Newton....) is only a few small clicks above "average"??!! Along with the Steinbeck reference I did read, it should be VERY clear that there are significant aspects of intellegence that this test is NOT measuring. Not new news by any stretch, but worth reiterating, considering the explosive nature and ramifications of this important debate. Adam Riggs Reed College From gimenez@spot.Colorado.EDU Mon Oct 24 08:34:39 MDT 1994 Date: Mon, 24 Oct 1994 08:37:11 -0600 (MDT) From: Martha Gimenez To: psn@csf.Colorado.EDU Subject: Re: Feynman and IQ I am forwarding this message on behalf of Adam Riggs ______________________________________________________________________ All, I just returned from vacation and have not yet read all of the posts on this issue, so forgive me if someone else has mentioned what I am about to say: I remember reading in one of the biographies on Richard Feynman that he had an IQ of only 125 !! His brother's was higher. So then, are we to believe that the greatest physisist since Einstein (along with Hawking at Cambridge, perhaps since Newton....) is only a few small clicks above "average"??!! Along with the Steinbeck reference I did read, it should be VERY clear that there are significant aspects of intellegence that this test is NOT measuring. Not new news by any stretch, but worth reiterating, considering the explosive nature and ramifications of this important debate. Adam Riggs Reed College From gimenez@spot.Colorado.EDU Mon Oct 24 08:37:54 MDT 1994 Date: Mon, 24 Oct 1994 08:40:25 -0600 (MDT) From: Martha Gimenez To: psn@csf.Colorado.EDU Subject: Re: IQ I am forwardig this message on behalf of Mark Selden _______________________________________________________________ Thanks to Alan and Ted for providing useful critical bibliography on the I.Q. issues (as well as heat and light). I guess I missed the real message in Safire's column (about black inferiority) because I was interested in a point that has nowhere appeared in the network discussion: which is the claim (Satire attributes it to M & H I believe) that whites may be smarter than blacks, but, Asians (maybe he was refering to East Asians? Surely M & H couldn't have been including, say, Indonesians and Indians and . . .?) rank highest. Perhaps this is the missing link in the raging debate about the East Asian miracle: not Confucianism, not the role of the State. . . but in their genes. For this reason, I found Safire much less offensive than anticipated. . . in the sense that the appeal to white chauvinism is, at best, rather mixed. While his readers may conclude that it is essential to stop Asians as well as blacks by whatever means possible, that didn't seem the intended message which, together with blowing his own horn included a measure of admiration for the brilliant architect I.M. Pei. If in fact M & H do conclude that Asians have superior I.Q. . . . what are the social, educational, and gene pool implications? What policy recommendations flow with respect to immigration, emigration, forced sterilization and procreation? mark selden From gimenez@spot.Colorado.EDU Mon Oct 24 08:37:54 MDT 1994 Date: Mon, 24 Oct 1994 08:40:25 -0600 (MDT) From: Martha Gimenez To: psn@csf.Colorado.EDU Subject: Re: IQ I am forwardig this message on behalf of Mark Selden _______________________________________________________________ Thanks to Alan and Ted for providing useful critical bibliography on the I.Q. issues (as well as heat and light). I guess I missed the real message in Safire's column (about black inferiority) because I was interested in a point that has nowhere appeared in the network discussion: which is the claim (Satire attributes it to M & H I believe) that whites may be smarter than blacks, but, Asians (maybe he was refering to East Asians? Surely M & H couldn't have been including, say, Indonesians and Indians and . . .?) rank highest. Perhaps this is the missing link in the raging debate about the East Asian miracle: not Confucianism, not the role of the State. . . but in their genes. For this reason, I found Safire much less offensive than anticipated. . . in the sense that the appeal to white chauvinism is, at best, rather mixed. While his readers may conclude that it is essential to stop Asians as well as blacks by whatever means possible, that didn't seem the intended message which, together with blowing his own horn included a measure of admiration for the brilliant architect I.M. Pei. If in fact M & H do conclude that Asians have superior I.Q. . . . what are the social, educational, and gene pool implications? What policy recommendations flow with respect to immigration, emigration, forced sterilization and procreation? mark selden From MGWENG01@ULKYVM.LOUISVILLE.EDU Mon Oct 24 22:37:38 MDT 1994 Date: Tue, 25 Oct 94 00:40:12 EDT From: "Morton G. Wenger, Dept. of Sociology" Subject: The "Asian" maneuver of H&M (Safire contrapuntally?) To: University of Louisville, Louisville, KY 40292 USA PHONE: (502) 852-6836 FAX: (502) 852-0099 As I noted in an earlier post, the category of "Asian" as used by H&M is a racist atrocity. THIS is not name-calling. The construction of such a "racial" category is intrinsically racist, and the atrocity resides in the fact that H&M know it. The reason for the deployment of this concept is what's interesting. H&M have a problem: how to PLAUSIBLY avoid being labeled racist, on a par with deGobineau, Stoddard, Grant, Hitler, Sumner (yes, that Sumner), and the ilk. In Germany, this wouldn't have been and maybe currently isn't such a big problem. The legitimating ideology of the inequality order, as in France and elsewhere, rests heavily on concepts of nation, race, and/or people (in the sense of "Volk). In the US however, the reliance on a bourgeois-democratic legitimating ideology presents powerful counter-currents to the "natural" direction of repressive ideology in a multi-ethnic society; i.e., unrecondite and overt racism, as stalks the streets and parliaments of contemporary Europe. How then to square this circle so that the repression to come can go down without too much squeamishness on the part of the liberal-technical intelligensia and ancillary class fragments? Voila the Bell Curve "Asian" maneuver. Although treated by abstract Idealists as largely composed of ideas, sentiments, culture, etc., "racism" is actually a concrete, historical ensemble of political-economic relations with cultural-ideological outcroppings and underpinnings. It never exists in the abstract, but only in the conjunctural moment. Thus, since Manzanar, there has existed no concrete antipathy between the hegemonic class and those of Asian (however defined) descent. Not so for the descendants of the African diaspora in North America. Bob Newby was right to lament the absence of a wide-spread recollection of Sydney Wilhelm's decades-old "Who Needs theNegro?" As the centuries-long conditions of oppression, combined with the acceleration of urban-industrial collapse during the Cold War, have taken their toll in the ghettos of America, the identifiable African descent-group has become increasingly unexploitable, and has been seen as an increasing drain on the budgets of the fiscally collapsing capitalist state. The fate of unexploitable and despised national minorities is well-known. However, I digress. The "problem" as H&M and their class confreres see it, is how to dissolve the North American ghettos without suffering unacceptable collateral ideological damage. Thus, the Final Solution to the African problem in America must be seen as un-racist and "fair." Thus the discovery of Asian genetic virtue. If we were racists, we would only extoll "Europeans," H&M hope the "educated" middle classes will believe. But it is not Norplant for the non-White, only for the unfortunate Africans. Why, the worst contemporary Asians experience is a a few genteel numerus clausii (sp?) in the elite academies, and in proportions far more favorable then their numbers. It is not race that motivates us, the Bell-curve genocides declare, but simple common sense. Furthermore, it is not all of Africa's children that we would incarcerate, contracept, monitor, and control, just one or two teensy-weensy standard deviations. And again, if we were race-haters, how could we stomach the superiority of Asians. Well, Mark Selden and others, we can see how W Safire and his ilk intend to have their racially superior cake andeat the dust of asians at the same time, if we turn to the review of H&M and their wackier fellow travelers in the NYT Book Review of 10/16/94, written by (pseudo)science reporter Malcolm W. Browne, wherein he notes without comment that "Mr. Herrnstein and Mr. Murray mention in passing that 'Ashkenazi Jews of European origins(wow, is this redundancy revelatory of the depths of H&M's knowledge of history and "race"!:MGW) ...test higher than any other ethnic group." Well, no wonder Safire can afford to be so magnanimous about Asian superiority! It's no... hmm, skip that construction! And to think that when a student of mine asked whether H&M were Jewish, I started to get huffy over what initially seemed like an anti-Semitic question to me. When I liberally asked her to explain what that had to do with anything, she blithely answered that if they were, their endorsement of racism and semi-genocide would carry all the more weight. Out of the mouths of students! The real issue then, is not the convoluted paths and contorted logic of modern American racism, but for PSN, is the placidity with which some of us want to entertain H&M's tract. We get deservedly bent out of shape when Hitlerite wannabees and racist scam-artists like Khalid M. and Louis F. spout their demented filth, but we want to reserve "scientific" judgement on H&M's call to genocide? Or at least some of us do- and we know who we are, and we should be ashamed. The rest of us should at least speak out in this and every other forum where we have voice- no matter how weary we are of fighting the same battle over and over again. If H&M are scientists, then so was Dr.Mengele. I close with a too-little-known fact: about half of the dozen or so "people" present at the Wannsee Coference (where the "Final Solution to the Jewish Question" was finalized) held legitimate doctoral degrees from German universities, the finest in the world at the time when those in question received their diplomas. Maybe Ph.D. can also mean "Pile them high and deep." Waddya think? INTERNET: MGWENG01@ULKYVM.LOUISVILLE.EDU From julian@CVAX.IPFW.INDIANA.EDU Tue Oct 25 10:50:50 MDT 1994 Date: Tue, 25 Oct 1994 11:52:39 EST From: Jim Julian To: psn@csf.colorado.edu Subject: Social Construction, Manners, H&M on Asians ----------(from a prior posting)---------------------------------------- All of the above, however, Quayles before the Great Failure implicit in the past days' discussion. Race, we know, is an invented - "socially constructed," as we prefer, it sounds more Seriously and Theoretically fictitious - figment. It aint. It's just visible, provided we're conditioned or elsewise have become sensitive to light-brown's disqualification from whiteness, which categorizes it as blackness; but other folks to it in sick ways of their own. I say *sick* because I've just seen a film called Sankofa; anyone not seen it yet, see it. Imaginary as it is, the consequences are yet with us; and yes, Race Matters. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Haven't seen Sankofa, but other wise, You Bet. What I mean by "socially constructed" is an *ongoing* process in which the "symbolic" world is changed in relationship to the "material" world with real results in the way humans interact with the material world. I might refine the definition here & there, but I define it in that general way because, yes, Race Matters -- and Gender Matters and Class Matters. "Race" matters enough to try and define terms & construct theories that allow for doing something about racist distributive practices. From my point of view "race" is the association of "physical characteristics" with a "symbolic world" that *leads* those with "superior" characteristics to brutally dominate those with "inferior" characteristics. "[L]ight-brown's disqualification from whiteness..." is active and on-going, not static, not invented once and left to its own existence. In terms of political-economy, "race" is more than a legitimation, it is a set of "directives" for incorporating the labor power of the oppressed in the (re)construction of an oppressive political economy. The M&H line of social construction suggests the *use* of IQ and/or "achievement" scores to actively attack African Americans' access to educational resources, just as "bad family values" is being used to attack poor people's access to state resources. ----------(About split-labor theory and H&M discussions)---------------- For those who are unfamiliar with split-labor theory, the overly simplistic basic idea is that "race" is used to factionalize groups, produce competition over "scarce" resources (like my labor, like your labor), and generally provide the CMP's ruling class with a more BIDdable, directible ruled class. I know there may be some who think scholars are part of the ruling class, but hey -- we mostly ain't. Okay, so Bob lacked a little tact in defending himself against someone's (what's in a name?) "science world" gate-keeping activities. What is observable in the "manners debate" is that that Bob was put on the defensive, *somewhat* silenced in linking M&H to genocide (which is underway now, folks, just look at the death rates), and much of the debate was simply diverted from treating the current Biology is Destiny variant at a macrosociological level to dealing with whether or not M&H did "good" science simply because they appear to "rigourously" crunch numbers. Exactly the kind of thing split labor theory predicts. ----------(About good science, bad science, &H&M )---------------------- An old psychology text (D.O. Hebb, A Textbook of Psychology, *1966*) reports two studies in which the mean IQ for relatively isolated groups dropped dramatically in just a few years. One of these groups were children raised on English canal boats in the 1920s. Between age 6 and age 12 the mean IQ for these children fell from 90 to 60, a 30 point drop. How many standard deviations is that? The group was "children growing up in isolated mountain communities in the [un]United States" The drop here was from 84 at age seven to 60 at age fifteen. A difference of 24 points. How many standard deviations is that? Rigourous quantitative analysis (and I do quantitative analysis quite well, thank you) is, logically speaking, NOT good science. It may be a part of good science, but it is hardly the whole of it and I would say it is the least of it. Understanding whole/part relations (or if you prefer the mathematical variant set/subset) is just one of many fundamentals of good science, so listen up good science advocates: Rigorous quantitative analysis within a confounded design is NOT good science, period. Nor is it good science to ignore the moral issues that accompany science work. Even if it were possible to actually scientifically ask the kind of question M&H ask, to do so would not be very different from scientifically asking "How long can humans survive in freezing water?" ----------(The Asian part of H&M's scientistic idiocy)------------------ Could this have any thing to with a) the ethnic compostion of the global capitalist class and b) the relocation of significan elements of that class along with its upper & middle managerial segments to the Americas? Jim Julian  From EWENLA@WVNVAXA.WVNET.EDU Wed Oct 26 11:52:37 MDT 1994 From: EWENLA@WVNVAXA.WVNET.EDU id <01HIQFKB8HAOOA174L@WVNVMS.WVNET.EDU>; Wed, 26 Oct 1994 13:48:40 -0400 (EDT) Date: Wed, 26 Oct 1994 13:39:10 -0400 (EDT) Subject: Another dimension of the IQ discussion To: psn@csf.colorado.edu Organization: West Virginia Network So far most of the discussion of the latest foray into scientific racism has focused on the growing attack on people of color. I do not want to dispute that in any way. But I think it's really important to realize that the arguments linking IQ (whatever that is) to intelligence are arguments that can and will be used against groups of whites as well. Let me jar your memories. I live among the hillbillies. We drink moonshine, handle snakes, feud and marry our cousins. That makes us feeble minded. So when I tell you that we, as a state, have the highest death rate in the country, the lowest percent of college graduates, the highest unemployment rate, 25 percent of our children live in poverty AND that we are 94 percent white, you know that our failures must be in our inbreeding and low IQ as a result thereof. I might also argue that West Virginia remains largely invisible as a state and social problem within the media because we give lie to the argument that poverty is colored. (Although I might also point out that we are Celtic people, NOT Anglo-Saxon!) So, I can tell you folks -- don't present it just as a simple question of color. It has serious implications for us white folks too! Also, in response to the question of whether the "masses" (I really hate that word) will read the book or be affected by the argument-- I raised the issue in my class yesterday. My students at the West Virginia Institute of Technology are the sons and daughters of coal miners and overwhelmingly first generation -- and several were aware of the controvery because it has been the subject of the "talk shows." Thanks for listening. From the boonies! Lynda Ann Ewen, Montgomery, WV ewenla@wvnvms.wvnet.edu From michaell@aragorn.ori.org Wed Oct 26 13:09:10 MDT 1994 Date: Wed, 26 Oct 1994 12:11:30 -0700 (PDT) From: Michael Lee Subject: Re: Another dimension of the IQ discussion To: EWENLA@WVNVAXA.WVNET.EDU In-Reply-To: <01HIQFT8IS9KOA174L@WVNVMS.WVNET.EDU> This is another example of why I think it is critical to never be misled into useless discussions ov race vs. class. I think it is class analysis first - having got that done (which it is not) there is then race within that. This does not make race secondary, but rather clarifies just who is who which is essential for political action and even crystal ball gazing. Michael On Wed, 26 Oct 1994 EWENLA@WVNVAXA.WVNET.EDU wrote: > So far most of the discussion of the latest foray into scientific racism has > focused on the growing attack on people of color. I do not want to dispute > that in any way. But I think it's really important to realize that the > arguments linking IQ (whatever that is) to intelligence are arguments > that can and will be used against groups of whites as well. > > Let me jar your memories. I live among the hillbillies. We drink moonshine, > handle snakes, feud and marry our cousins. That makes us feeble minded. > So when I tell you that we, as a state, have the highest death rate in the > country, the lowest percent of college graduates, the highest unemployment > rate, 25 percent of our children live in poverty AND that we are 94 percent > white, you know that our failures must be in our inbreeding and low > IQ as a result thereof. > > I might also argue that West Virginia remains largely invisible as a state > and social problem within the media because we give lie to the argument > that poverty is colored. (Although I might also point out that we are > Celtic people, NOT Anglo-Saxon!) > > So, I can tell you folks -- don't present it just as a simple question of > color. It has serious implications for us white folks too! > > Also, in response to the question of whether the "masses" (I really hate that > word) will read the book or be affected by the argument-- I raised the > issue in my class yesterday. My students at the West Virginia Institute of > Technology are the sons and daughters of coal miners and overwhelmingly > first generation -- and several were aware of the controvery because it > has been the subject of the "talk shows." > > Thanks for listening. From the boonies! > Lynda Ann Ewen, Montgomery, WV ewenla@wvnvms.wvnet.edu > From julian@CVAX.IPFW.INDIANA.EDU Wed Oct 26 17:27:09 MDT 1994 Date: Wed, 26 Oct 1994 18:29:37 EST From: Jim Julian To: psn@csf.colorado.edu Subject: Re: Another dimension of the IQ discussion Linda, I, too, appreciate your remarks about class and especially about mass media effects on agendas and group identity. I would be interested in hearing how the students "took" the M&H report, if that wouldn't be breaching any confidences you may have with them. Michael, The "crystal ball gazing" (a moment of flippancy I may come to regret) was based on an analysis that is very sensitive to class. To my way of thinking about it, class is a process -- class moves just like capitalism moves and that movement is powerfully influenced by racism, sexism, and ageism, each of which -- on their own -- contributes to the situations of real people in ways that are materially and measurably independent of class. Split-labor theory, partly the base underlying the "crystal gazing," is focused on the interactions between racism and how those who people various classes construct political lines of action relevant to each other and how these lines of action affect the movement of class. Class alone, I think, produces an especially misleading theory of political action and political/economic outcomes precisely where "just who is who" is concerned. The same, however, could certainly be said about racism alone, sexism alone, or ageism alone. Jim Julian ------------------------------------------------------------------- On Wednesday, October 26, Michael Lee wrote: > >This is another example of why I think it is critical to never be misled >into useless discussions ov race vs. class. I think it is class analysis >first - having got that done (which it is not) there is then race within >that. This does not make race secondary, but rather clarifies just who is >who which is essential for political action and even crystal ball gazing. > >Michael > >On Wed, 26 Oct 1994 EWENLA@WVNVAXA.WVNET.EDU wrote: > >> So far most of the discussion of the latest foray into scientific racism has >> focused on the growing attack on people of color. I do not want to dispute >> that in any way. But I think it's really important to realize that the >> arguments linking IQ (whatever that is) to intelligence are arguments >> that can and will be used against groups of whites as well. >> >> Let me jar your memories. I live among the hillbillies. We drink moonshine, >> handle snakes, feud and marry our cousins. That makes us feeble minded. >> So when I tell you that we, as a state, have the highest death rate in the >> country, the lowest percent of college graduates, the highest unemployment >> rate, 25 percent of our children live in poverty AND that we are 94 percent >> white, you know that our failures must be in our inbreeding and low >> IQ as a result thereof. >> >> I might also argue that West Virginia remains largely invisible as a state >> and social problem within the media because we give lie to the argument >> that poverty is colored. (Although I might also point out that we are >> Celtic people, NOT Anglo-Saxon!) >> >> So, I can tell you folks -- don't present it just as a simple question of >> color. It has serious implications for us white folks too! >> >> Also, in response to the question of whether the "masses" (I really hate that >> word) will read the book or be affected by the argument-- I raised the >> issue in my class yesterday. My students at the West Virginia Institute of >> Technology are the sons and daughters of coal miners and overwhelmingly >> first generation -- and several were aware of the controvery because it >> has been the subject of the "talk shows." >> >> Thanks for listening. From the boonies! >> Lynda Ann Ewen, Montgomery, WV ewenla@wvnvms.wvnet.edu >> > From rpalm@unm.edu Sat Oct 29 14:33:05 MDT 1994 Date: Sat, 29 Oct 1994 14:35:47 -0600 (MDT) From: rebel palm aitchison Subject: Re: IQ, genetics, and statistics (fwd) To: prog soc Any of you seen this? ---------- Forwarded message ---------- Date: Thu, 27 Oct 1994 17:38:16 GMT From: Darius Lecointe Subject: Re: IQ, genetics, and statistics It is interesting that "The Bell Curve" has resulted in a discussion on IQ, when most of its conclusions are not based on IQ. The following is a quote from a response by Nancy Cole, president of ETS. "In [the Bell Curve] and in the publicity about it, data from some of ETS's own tests are misused to promote a position about inherited racial inferiority that is scientifically invalid and which is personally abhorrent to me. As president of ETS, I am particularly disturbed that the authors treat the SAT as if it were an IQ test, which it is clearly not, and then use the results as if they provided proof on inherited intelligence, which is by any standard bad science." "ETS ACCESS," Vol. 5, No. 9, October 27, 1994. -- Darius A. Lecointe, Ph.D. (609) 951-6118 dlecoint@freenet.fsu.edu or dlecointe@rosedale.org "In God I trust: All others must bring data" From MDR@borg.evms.edu Sun Oct 30 15:28:05 MST 1994 Return-receipt-to: "MIRIAM D. ROSENTHAL - PH.D." 30 Oct 94 18:40:39 edt Date: Sun, 30 Oct 1994 18:40:04 -0400 (EDT) From: "MIRIAM D. ROSENTHAL - PH.D." Subject: THE BELL CURVE, PROP 187, & FASCISM To: PSN@CSF.COLORADO.EDU Organization: Eastern Virginia Medical School I'm Steve Rosenthal. I'm relatively new to PSN, which I got on through my spouse's EMail. I teach at historically Black Hampton University, where faculty do not have access to EMail. I have been following recent discussions on U.S. occupation of Haiti, the Bell Curve, etc., and I want to try to contribute a few comments. Murray and Herrnstein have been supported by Roger Pearson, head of the Pioneer Fund. What's that? It was set up by pro-Nazi U.S. eugenicists Harry Laughlin and Frederick Osborn in 1937, with money from textile magnate Wickliffe Draper. Since then the Pioneer Fund has funded virtually every racist, eugenicist researcher, including Jensen, Shockley, Rushton, Bogaert, sociologist Robert Gordon, Linda Gottfriedson, Michael Levin, Thomas Bouchard, and Seymour Itzkoff. Source of this and much more information is Stefan Kuhl, The Nazi Connection: Eugenics, American Racism, and German National Socialism (Oxford, 1994). Rushton and Itzkoff are the authors of the other two books reviewed together with The Bell Curve in the NYTimes. Further, according to Russ Bellant in Old Nazis, the New Right, and the Republican Party: Domestic fascist networks and their effect on U.S. cold war politics (South End Press, 1991), Roger Pearson, head of the Pioneer Fund, headed neo-Nazi groups in Europe until he moved to the U.S. in 1965. He has worked for the Heritage Foundation with Murray, headed the World Anti-Communist League, and was praised by Ronald Reagan in a letter that Bellant reproduces in the book. What does this have to do with Prop 187 in California? The Pioneer Fund has been pumping a lot of $$$ into the Prop 187 Coalition, arguing that illegal immigrants are further polluting the gene pool. Is there a concerted effort by members of the ruling class to build fascism in the U.S. or what? Steve Rosenthal, Hampton University, Hampton, VA. From Dave.Byrne@durham.ac.uk Mon Oct 31 03:27:51 MST 1994 Via: uk.ac.durham; Mon, 31 Oct 1994 10:29:54 +0000 Mon, 31 Oct 94 10:12:35 GMT Date: Mon, 31 Oct 1994 10:10:09 +0000 (GMT) From: D S Byrne To: Jim Julian Subject: RE: Rhetorical Flourishes In-Reply-To: <00986A96.F21238EC.30@CVAX.IPFW.INDIANA.EDU> Jim Julian makes some interesting points, particularly for all Guiness drinkers, but the general line of his note suggests to me that there may be a substantial difference between US and UK methods texts these days. I agree that there are still cookbooks in QM but following the interesting contributions of Catherine Marsh (whose 'The Survey Method' was a brilliant study) writers like de Vaus 'Survey Methods in Social Research' have taken up the themes in mainstream texts. I would particularly recommed 'Demystifying Social Statistics' which still gets published by Pluto. It is getting on, but the locating of quantitative procedures in social context remains first class. From INTT@MUSICB.MCGILL.CA Mon Oct 31 09:04:18 MST 1994 by VAXF.COLORADO.EDU (PMDF V4.3-10 #8140) 31 Oct 1994 09:05:58 -0600 (MDT) Date: Mon, 31 Oct 1994 10:12:10 -0500 (EST) From: INTT000 Subject: "IQ", Race, Regression mode of thinking To: psn@csf.colorado.edu Steve Rosenthal's piece is quite informative. After Rushton published his work which attracted media attention for a while and was grilled in Canada, I never imagined this pseudoscience could resurface at such a large scale. The following is a summary of comments I made at a graduate seminar on quatitative methods at McGill and the last World Congress of Sociology. Rushton and Murray and their associates try to present themselves as serious scientists who base their conclusion on large sets of empirical "facts". How do they derive their "facts"? They seem to follow the conventional approach in quantitative "social science" research, which I call the "regression" mode of thinking. The "regression" mode of thinking starts with "variables" and relates them. In the past few decades, the methods which are based on this mode of thinking advanced quite rapidly. In the 1980s, the fashion was 2-staged and 3-staged least squared regression, LISREL, etc. and the fashion now is multi-level analysis, non-linear dynamics, etc. The "building" becomes more and more sophisticated and beautiful. But it is largely built on sand. Why? Because many of the variables and the "causal" relations among the variables as used in "social sciences" are largely inheriated from social stereotypes. To me without addressing the fundamental problem in quantitative research, the sophisticated and beautiful methods are only "castles in the air". In this sense, the post-structuralists are right in abandoning the existing "structures" based on stereotypes. But then the question is this: can we say anything about social structure? can we re-construct It seems to me the core of the quantitative social research should be on construction of "sociological facts" (free of steretypes) instead of using various "regression" methods to perpetuate "social facts" (social stereotypes. Can we achieve construct sociological facts? I think we can. Social network approach is an (but not the only) example. Now come back to Rushton, Murray and the like. I believe it is this "regression" mode of thinking (which is the most commonly used in most of the disciplines in "social sciences") that lends some methodological aid to their pseudoscientific claim. What is the bases for their claim except the social stereotypes from the past? This kind of analysis is only "skin" deep. Now the intelligent ranking is "Asians, Whites, Blacks" and according to Murray, 40% of the intelligence are heriditary. In 1890s, according to Dr. Yang, a Nobel Laureat in Physics, "scientists", based their conclusions on "empirical facts" (including measure of the skull) testified before the U.S. congression that Chinese were not biologically fit to do science. (Now according to someone at McGill, Chinese may be able to do science but not social and human sciences.) Is there any scientific basis in using "skin" color to classify human beings? "African blacks" and Australian aboriginals both have dark skins. But the genetically "African blacks" are closer to "European whites" and the Australian aboriginals are closer to "East Asians". But even the above categories are meaningless genetically because of the long history of human migration and integration. So there is no doubt in my mind that the racial theory is pseudoscience. The cucial question is why these guys are so persistent and the media's willingness to perpetuate this shallow pseudoscience. Steve Rosenthal provided an insightful clue. Tieting Su Department of Sociology McGill University Montreal, Canada From dhenwood@panix.comTue Nov 22 18:11:31 1994 Date: Tue, 22 Nov 1994 15:36:25 -0700 From: Doug Henwood To: Multiple recipients of list Subject: More bell stuff According to Stephen Jay Gould's review of The Bell Curve in the New Yorker, Herrnstein & Murray report, buried safely in appendices, r2's for their work of .10 or less. And since they claim that IQ is 60% heritable, by their own claims, about 5% of all social outcomes can be explained by hardwired intelligence. Even if you accept everything else - the unitary conception of intelligence, its resistance to social manipulations, etc. - isn't this an amazingly modest statistical foundation on which to build a vicious political superstructure? Perhaps Ted Goertzel can explain why 5% of something is more important than the other 95%. Doug Doug Henwood [dhenwood@panix.com] Left Business Observer 212-874-4020 (voice) 212-874-3137 (fax)