Re: BELL CURVE CRITIC EXPOSED?
Bearcat (bcat@netcom.com)
Sat, 4 Feb 1995 23:12:56 GMT
jerrybro@uclink2.berkeley.edu wrote:
: labonnes@csc.albany.edu (S. LaBonne) wrote:
: > The point you seem unable to grasp is that continued thinking in
: > "racial" terms is not necessarily useful.
: I don't think it's necessarily useful. Nor do I think it's
: necessarily useless. I'm arguing against the latter claim. The
: former is obvious.
: > Certainly nobody in _this_
: > thread inspires any confidence that it is useful! Just _why_ are you
: > so emotionally attached to the idea of race, anyway?
: I'm not. I'm emotionally repelled by the twisting of fact to deal
: with unpleasant facts. TBC doesn't make any claim to be a text
: in biology; yet it is treated as if it had made such a claim, and
: naturally found to fall far short, since it argues in terms of
: categories which are not particularly useful to biologists. What
: is the point of misrepresenting the intent of the book? To escape
: the need to deal head-on with the unpleasant data the book has
: gathered, I suspect.
If it is incapable of dealing in the arena in which it makes
assertions (ie that intelligence is heritable along racial
lines) then it has no business implying them.
If critics are going to attack it for this very weakenss, it is
no defense whatsoever to pretend that this very strong bological
argument is somehow alright, because TBC "doesn't make any claim
to be a text in biology."
- Bearcat
|