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Re: Is white racism nec. all bad?
Lane Singer (lsd@ix.netcom.com)
15 Apr 1995 19:40:25 GMT
In <D72ytI.Er9@nntpa.cb.att.com> gupta@mrspock.mt.att.com (Arun Gupta) writes:
>
>In article <3mkdhm$s2s@ixnews3.ix.netcom.com>,
>Frank Forman <Forman@ix.netcom.com> wrote:
>
>> I believe that psychocultural traits are *shaped*, not totally
>>determined, by biological factors and that these factors are unevenly
>>distributed among different populations. In evidence, I offer J.
>>Philippe Rushton, _Race, Evolution, and Behavior: A Life History
>>Perspective_ (New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 1995).
>
>
>If you call what J. Philippe Rushton produces to be science, then
>a race of Frank Formans would also never have achieved the scientific
>age.
>
>Here are a few paragraphs about Rushton from Leon Kamin's essay
>"Lies, Damned Lies, and Statistics".
>
>The Rushton portrait of Negroids -- stupid, small brains, big penises,
>sexually licentious, criminal, spawning lots of low-birth-weight babies
>for whom they will not care --- strikes a responsive chord in America;
>......
>
>Rushton asseerts that blacks have bigger penises that whites....To
>demonstrate that blacks have big penises, Rushton cited just two
>sources -- some casual observations by an anonymous French army
>surgeon in Africa writing in 1898, and some unpublished data from
>Kinsey's study of American sexual behavior. The volunteer male
>subjects in the Kinsey study were asked to measure their own penises.
>The proportion of black subjects complying with that request was
>significantly smaller than the proportion of whites. The few blacks
>who did comply -- scarcely a random sample of blacks -- claimed
>slightly larger penis sizes than the many whites who responded.
>
>To demonstrate that black genes produce unbridled sexual behavior,
>as well as large genitals, Rushton reported that a significantly
>higher proportion of black than of white interviewees had told Kinsey
>that the female partner tended to have more than one orgasm per act
>of intercourse. To assert this as a fact Rushton -- unknown to his
>readers -- had to lump together the responses of male and female
>interviewees, which had been tabled separately by Kinsey. The
>actual data were that 18 percent of black males, but 8 percent of
>black females (!), claimed that the female had multiple orgasms;
>among whites, the proportion making that claim was 9 percent of
>both males and females. The data as published by Rushton indicated
>simply that 13 percent of blacks and 9 percent of whites reported
>multiple female orgasms.
>
>****
>Being a tenured professor in a university, writing papers and
>attending conferences, having journals that publish your work,
>and being able to cite backwards, forwards and sideways, working
>in an "Institute of Science" or a "laboratory", and speaking more
>in jargon than in English are only the paraphernalia associated
>with science.
>
>Going through the motions however, does not make science.
>
>Here is another example of "science" produced by another of these
>scientists, again, quoting Kamin :
>
>"The high rate of sexual activity in Negroids," Lynn has suggested,
>may be caused by a high level of the male sex hormone, testosterone.
>The "crucial supporting evidence" for the notion that blacks have an
>over-supply of testosterone is the fact that "Negroids have higher
>rates of cancer of the prostrate than Caucasoids...an important
>determinant of cancer of the prostrate is the level of testosterone."
>The chain of reasoned evidence is : prostrate cancer is caused by
>testosterone; blacks tend to have prostrate cancer; therefore blacks
>must have lots of testosterone; the abundance of testosterone makes
>blacks sexually active; that causes them to produce lots of babies,
>for whom they will not provide, and who will become criminals and/or
>welfare caess. Its all in the genes.
>
>...To show that testosterone causes prostrate cancer ....Lynn cites
>a paper by Ahluwalia et. al.. That paper, Lynn writes, reported
>"higher levels of testosterone in patients with prostrate cancer
>than in healthy controls." [But] Ahluwalia et. al. reported that
>black prostate patients in the United States had higher testosterone
>levels than did control subjects. But among blacks in Nigeria,
>control subjects had higher testosterone levels than did prostrate
>patients !.....
>
>What about the next claim, that blacks are more prone than whites to
>develop prostrate cance ?.....Lynn reprints some age-standardized
>incidence rates for prostrate cancer for "Negroids" and "Caucasoids"
>in seven American cities. Those statistics and others had been
>gathered by the International Union Against Cancer. There was
>variation from city to city, but in each case African-Americans had
>about twice the incidence of whites. The highest white rate was
>59.7 per 100,000 population in Hawaii...the lowest black rate was
>72.1, in New Orleans.
>
>The paper from which Lynn copied (or tried to copy) those figures
>contains other relevant statistics. The reate in Senegal was 4.3 --
>the lowest rate except for Japan and Shanghai, among the thirty-odd
>countries for which data were given. The rates in Jamaica and(then)
>Rhodesia were 28.6 and 32.3 -- still far below the rates of both
>black and white Americans. Follow-up studies by the International
>Union reported a rate of 9.7 in Nigeria. In the Cape Province of
>South Africa, the rate for whites was a low 23.2; for Bantus it
>was 19.2 and for Africans in Natal 23.2. The facts are well known
>to every serious scholar concerned with prostrate cancer : American
>blacks have an alarmingly higher rate of prostrate cancer than
>American whites, but black Africans have a much lower rate than either
>American blacks or whites.
>
>...To admit Lynn and Rushton into the scientific mainstream -- I'll
>say it bluntly -- is a betrayal of science. To say this out loud is
>not to advocate what Malcolm Browne describes as a "shroud of
>censorship imposed on scientists and scholars by pressure groups."
>It is a simple defense of truth and integrity in science.....
>
>End Quote
>
>To this I must add, what about all those who signed the statement
>published in the Wall Street Journal, along with Rushton and Lynn ?
>What nature of people are they ?
>****
>
>** I repeat, a race of Frank Formans is as likely to reach the
>scientific age as Forman claims for "Australoids, Capoids, etc."
>In any case, these are untestable propositions, and anyone's
>opinion is as good as anyone else's.
>
>-arun gupta
>
What he said.
--
Lane Singer
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