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Re: What Are the Race Deniers Denying?
Ron Kephart (rkephart@osprey.unf.edu)
9 Nov 1996 13:35:47 GMT
Duncan@drmac.demon.co.uk ("Duncan R. MacMillan") wrote:
>
> I get the impression that a lot of people who rubbish "The Bell Curve"
> seem to think that IQ was used to assign the subjects to their racial groups,
> instead of the other way round.
No, that's not the problem. The problem with the Bell Curve and other
pseudo scientific attempts to correlate "race" and "IQ" is that people
are assigned to "races" based on the US folk racial taxonomy, and then
differences (real or otherwise) between these groups are projected
onto their biology. The groups are NOT biological, but CULTURAL
constructs, and thus the conclusion that differences in "IQ" reflect
differences in genetics is wrong, wrong, wrong.
Of course, there is also a problem with the whole concept of "IQ" and
the notion that it represents anything more than performance on a test
which happens to be called an "IQ Test." The idea that the number
arrived at by analyzing performance on one of these tests represents
a genetically coded for "thing" inside the heads of people is also
wrong, wrong, wrong.
Ron Kephart
University of North Florida
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