Re: BELL CURVE CRITIC EXPOSED?

Mika-Petri Lauronen (mplauron@paju.oulu.fi)
7 Feb 1995 09:35:09 GMT

Unfortunately I've read only a part of this thread, so what I say may have
come up earlier. Anyway, these are my opinions, not anybody else's.

A definition of race would be easy medically. However, it doesn't have to
have anything to do with color. According to some recent researches, it
is now thought that the dark skin color is an adaptation developed in an
area with much UV-radiation. In practice it means that if some members of
a "white" race settled down in a sunny area, after many generations they
would be black.

Which, according to the Bell Curve, would mean their intelligence has
gone down. Very interesting - our intelligence depends on the amount of
ultraviolet light we are exposed to. Hmm... if the ozone layer keeps on
destroying, our children and their children will loose a considerable
amount of intelligence.

Another thing is of course the relevancy of the tests they use for
defining a person's intelligence. If you look at the history of IQ-tests,
you find some interesting material. For example, the first version that
was used (they tried to develop a test that was indipendent of culture
or schooling or geography) showed that the black were more intelligent
than the white. So these "scientists" thought there was something wrong
with these tests (they of course assumed that white were more intelligent
than the black. They were, of course, white). So they developed a new
test. This time white were the most intelligent - but women kept getting
better averages than men. So they adjusted the test once more. Now
everything was in place - the most intelligent being in the world was
the white man.

There's science for you. Just imagine - a person wanting to prove that
the speed of light wasn't a constant makes a test to measure this and
finds himself wrong. Instead of changing his theory, he changes the
method of measurement until the speed of light is a variable.
That would make some interesting effects in our lives, don't you think?

--

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