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In the Bell Curve itself, the authors cite 13 "scholars" who have had their work funded by Pioneer. Among these is Phillipe Rushton of Ontario. Rushton is cited eleven times in the Bell Curve, and Murray and Herrnstein go to great lengths to ensure their readers that Rushton "is not a quack." This despite the fact that Rushton's "scientific methodology" has included approaching shoppers at a Toronto mall (one-third black, one-third white, and one-third Asian) and asking them "how far can you ejaculate," or "how large is your penis?" He has also said, that intelligence is inversely related to penis size, because "it's more brain or more penis. You can't have everything," and has claimed that the success of the Nazi army was due to its Aryan genetic purity. Interestingly enough, Rushton's data on penis size all comes from one study, conducted in 1898 by an anonymous French Army surgeon who traveled through Africa and recorded the size of African penises, and from a second study comparing the penises of Nigerian medical students to Czech army officers. In this study, it turned out the Nigerians penises were longer, and the Czech's had greater circumference. So why is length more important in effecting brainpower than girth? Who knows? Neither the original study, nor Rushton, explains this point.

Rushton's arguments on brain size are based on the genetic distance studies of Dr Allen Wilson, from the University of California. Yet Wilson, having reviewed Rushton's work, notes that those scientists using his work to argue for innate racial differences, let alone superiority or inferiority in intelligence, have "totally misrepresented" his findings. Furthermore, respected anthropologists like Christopher Springer at the British Museum have noted that Rushton's brain size and head size data is completely without merit.

[...]

The Bell Curve references Lynn's work in an effort to "prove" the following propositions that are central to the book's arguments:

1) African Blacks have IQ's substantially below the African American average;
2) East Asians have higher IQ's than any other group; and,
3) Immigrants of color to the US have sub-par IQ's

Taking a look at his "evidence" on African IQ, there is little doubt of its intellectual vacuity. Lynn's "proof" was based heavily on a 1988 review by three South African psychologists who looked at Black South African test performance. But the authors of this study concluded the OPPOSITE of Lynn and Murray and Herrnstein. In fact, when presented with Lynn's interpretation of their work, they responded with the following:

"It would be rash to suppose that psychometric tests constitute valid measures of intelligence among non-Westerners. The inability of most psychologists to look beyond the confines of their own cultures has led to the kind of arrogance whereby judgments are made concerning the ‘simplicity' of African mental structure and ‘retarded cognitive growth'."

The main source for the Bell Curve's claims regarding African IQ was a Lynn article from Mankind Quarterly in 1991, in which he said mean African IQ was 70. Lynn claims that he arrived at this figure by looking at the "best studies" on the subject since 1929. The study he claimed was the "best" was conducted in 1989 and involved 1,093 16-year old blacks, who scored a mean of 69 on the South African Junior Aptitude Test. From this, Lynn then extrapolated mean IQ to the whole of Black Africa. Even worse, Lynn completely misconstrued the findings of the study in question. According to the study's author, Dr Ken Owen, his test was "not at all" evidence of genetic intelligence. In fact, Owen has noted that the results were found directly related to the existence of apartheid era oppression, and the fact that the test was in English.

Another of the "definitive" studies cited by Lynn in his own article was a 1929 study, in which 293 blacks in South Africa were given the Army Beta Test and scored a mean of 65. But this test was administered by M.L. Finch, an open protagonist of the view that blacks were inherently inferior, even before he had done any studies to "prove" such a thing: he was, in other words, hardly a pure, unbiased scientist. Furthermore, the Beta Test was one of the most culturally biased tests in the world at that time: one question on the 1929 version in dispute showed people playing tennis without a net. To get full credit for the question, one would have to draw the net in the picture—something few black Africans could have possibly known to do in 1929, having never been exposed to the game. A leading proponent of the Beta Test, C.C. Brigham, actually admitted that the test had no validity whatsoever for non-Americans: a fact totally ignored by Lynn, and by the Bell Curve.

[...]

Two other studies cited by Lynn to "prove" higher Asian IQ's are equally bogus[b]. The first used samples of American, British and Japanese students on a test of abstract reasoning. On this test the Brits and Americans did far worse; and the second study found that 9-year-olds in the UK did worse on the Ravens Standard Progressive Matrices than 9-year-olds from Japan and Hong Kong. But if you check the footnotes for this "evidence," you find that the author Lynn was citing for both of these studies was himself. And if you look up the studies, it doesn't take long to notice the flawed methodology involved in both: The first of these studies consisted of a test given to 178 Japanese children that did not reflect the demographic makeup of the nation as a whole, economically, culturally, or in terms of gender. The testers showed up at two schools, one urban and one rural, and gave the tests to whomever was present that day. Lynn then took the results of this test and compared it to a test that was thirteen years old, had been given to 64,000 American children, and had been pre-screened for representativeness; he then compared the Japanese results to a similarly pre-screened sample of 10,000 British children who had been given a similar test in the previous decade.

In the second study, Lynn claims to have found a substantial difference between Japanese and Hong Kong student IQ's on the one hand, and those of British children on the other. Yet this study looked only at 118 9-year olds from Hong Kong, 444 children from Japan and 239 British children, and involved [b]no known controls for environmental and demographic representativeness.

The third set of studies cited in the Bell Curve dealing with Asian IQ, comes from Harold Stevenson in Minnesota, who found that once socioeconomic status and various demographic variables were controlled for there was NO difference at all between the IQ's of Japanese, Taiwanese and American kids. Despite the fact that these studies were the most comprehensive and methodologically sound of all the studies cited on the subject in the Bell Curve, (even according to the authors themselves who noted that Stevenson "carefully matched the children on socioeconomic and demographic variables"), Murray and Herrnstein essentially dismiss them as quickly as they mention them, noting only that they are evidence of the "ongoing debate" about race and IQ, as if they are on a scientific par with the work of folks like Lynn.

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[This message has been edited by Underpants Man (edited 15 October 2005).]

[This message has been edited by Underpants Man (edited 15 October 2005).]
 

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...other studies cited by Lynn were also misinterpreted, including one involving a test given to black and white youth in South Africa, which actually found that the black students scored higher than the white students. In seven of eleven studies cited by Lynn to “prove” inferior African IQ, subjects were never assigned IQ scores at all: Lynn simply concocted them after the fact.

Rushton also ignores an array of studies going back over 150 years, which find no significant racial differences in size or weight of human brains. According to the preponderance of these studies, the average difference in white and black cranial capacities is no more than 50 cubic centimeters: a size difference of less than three-and-a-half percent. Even Rushton can’t seem to make up his mind about the importance of cranial and brain size to intelligence: indeed, despite insisting that the relationship is strong, he has also said, in typically inconsistent fashion: “…head size is a weak predictor of intelligence;”

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And here.

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Black students are well aware of the negative stereotypes held about them by members of the larger society. As such, when blacks who are highly motivated and value educational achievement take a standardized test and expect the results to be used to indicate cognitive ability, the fear of living down to the stereotype negatively impacts their performance. These students may rush through the test—so as to seem more confident than they truly are—or alternately take too much time, trying desperately not to make mistakes. The self-doubt engendered by the racist beliefs of the larger culture is added to the general anxiety that all test-takers feel, to produce, for black students, a unique disadvantage.

As proof that it is stereotype threat and not inherent ability differences that explain racial gaps on standardized admissions tests, Steele notes that when the same test questions are given to whites and blacks in experimental settings, and yet the students are told that the results are not indicative of ability, and will not be graded, the stereotype threat dissipates and they perform as well as their white counterparts.

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[This message has been edited by Underpants Man (edited 15 October 2005).]
 

Gong by Rushton's studies, the dumb Hore and Stupid-Euro must have gigantic size penises!! ROTFL
 

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Originally posted by Djehuti:
Funny how the foolish trolls who support the Bell Curve (Hore and Stupid-Euro) have absolutely nothing to say about this!! As I and so many others have said, the whole 'Bell Curve' study is flawed and highly inaccurate.

Gong by Rushton's studies, the dumb Hore and Stupid-Euro must have gigantic size penises!! [b]ROTFL[/B]

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The problem with this thesis though is that the Neanderthals lived in frigid Eurasia during the various Ice Ages and proved to be no more cognitively able than the tropics-adapted Africans who migrated into Eurasia and North East Asia.

This is the basis for the old thesis that evidence of "civilisation" in Africa had to be the work of groups that came into Africa from Europe or Eurasia. This was Seligman's thesis and supported implicitly and slyly by those who believe that Africans in Africa and their kith and kin in the Americas cannot compete equally with whites. They are just not intelligent enough.
 

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the colder climates of Eurasia was more environmentally challenging than the warmer climates of Africa and elsewhere. So humans who had to survive in Eurasia were forced to "select for higher intelligence" just to survive in those difficult environments.

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What's really telling is that they have an unrealistically romantic view of Africa. Africa is famous for its insects (tsetse and mosquitoes to name the worst), dangerous wildlife (think hippos, lions, elephants, and crocodiles), and dry seasons.

And if I recall correctly, civilization in Europe originated in the warmer parts of the subcontinent, not in the temperate zones. Greece and Italy (capital of the Roman Empire) have Mediterranean climates, with hot summers and mild winters. Palm trees decorate the streets of Rome and Athens to this day. In contrast, the peoples of temperate Europe lived in barbarianism, and would continue to do so if there were no Romans or Greeks to inspire them. Also, in the Americas, it was the Mesoamericans such as the Olmecs and Toltecs who developed civilization, not the more primitive peoples in the temperate zones.

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Originally posted by lamin:

The problem with this thesis though is that the Neanderthals lived in frigid Eurasia during the various Ice Ages and proved to be no more cognitively able than the tropics-adapted Africans who migrated into Eurasia and North East Asia.

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Actually, on the contrary, the "tropics-adapted" Africans were more than capable than the Neanderthals, to the point of populating other regions and surviving in the variations as we know it, across the globe. The Neanderthals, on the other hand, ultimately died out!

 

Charles Murray has a PhD from Harvard, as did his "Bell Curve" co-author Richard Herrnstein.

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COMMENTARY

September 2005

The Inequality Taboo

Charles Murray

It has been known for many years that the obvious environmental factors such as income, parental occupation, and schools explain only part of the absolute black-white difference and none of the relative difference. Black and white students from affluent neighborhoods are separated by as large a proportional gap as are blacks and whites from poor neighborhoods.45

[...]

J. Philippe Rushton and Arthur Jensen co-authored a 60-page article entitled “Thirty Years of Research on Race Differences in Cognitive Ability.”51 It incorporates studies of East Asians as well as blacks and whites and concludes that the source of the black-white-Asian difference is 50- to 80-percent genetic. [...] Rushton and Jensen base their conclusion on ten categories of evidence that are consistent with a model in which both environment and genes cause the black-white difference and inconsistent with a model that requires no genetic contribution.53

[...]

When you compare black and white mean scores on a battery of subtests, you do not find a uniform set of differences; nor do you find a random assortment. The size of the difference varies systematically by type of subtest. Asked to predict which subtests show the largest difference, most people will think first of ones that have the most cultural content and are the most sensitive to good schooling. But this natural expectation is wrong. Some of the largest differences are found on subtests that have little or no cultural content, such as ones based on abstract designs.

As long ago as 1927, Charles Spearman, the pioneer psychometrician who discovered g, proposed a hypothesis to explain the pattern: the size of the black-white difference would be “most marked in just those [subtests] which are known to be saturated with g.”58 In other words, Spearman conjectured that the black-white difference would be greatest on tests that were the purest measures of intelligence, as opposed to tests of knowledge or memory.

A concrete example illustrates how Spearman’s hypothesis works. Two items in the Wechsler and Stanford-Binet IQ tests are known as “forward digit span” and “backward digit span.” In the forward version, the subject repeats a random sequence of one-digit numbers given by the examiner, starting with two digits and adding another with each iteration. The subject’s score is the number of digits that he can repeat without error on two consecutive trials. Digits-backward works exactly the same way except that the digits must be repeated in the opposite order.

Digits-backward is much more g-loaded than digits-forward. Try it yourself and you will see why. Digits-forward is a straightforward matter of short-term memory. Digits-backward makes your brain work much harder.59

The black-white difference in digits-backward is about twice as large as the difference in digits-forward.60 It is a clean example of an effect that resists cultural explanation. It cannot be explained by differential educational attainment, income, or any other socioeconomic factor. Parenting style is irrelevant. Reluctance to “act white” is irrelevant. Motivation is irrelevant. There is no way that any of these variables could systematically encourage black performance in digits-forward while depressing it in digits-backward in the same test at the same time with the same examiner in the same setting.61

[ . . . ]

So Spearman’s basic conjecture was correct—the size of the black-white difference and g-loadings are correlated—and g represents a biologically grounded and highly heritable cognitive resource. When those two observations are put together, a number of characteristics of the black-white difference become predictable, correspond with phenomena we have observed in data, and give us reason to think that not much will change in the years to come.70

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"The Bell Curve" and its critics

Charles Murray

Commentary, May 1995 v99 n5 p23(8)

Thus, the psychologist Richard Nisbett, writing in The Bell Curve Wars,(6) a compendium of attacks on our book, accuses us of being "strangely selective" in our reports about the effects of intervention, and wonders if we were "unaware of the very large literature that exists on the topic of early intervention."

The "very large literature" of which we were unaware? The only study Nisbett mentions that we do not is one published in Pediatrics in 1992 which he describes as showing a nine-point IQ advantage at age three for participants in the intervention. Nisbett neglects to acknowledge the unreliability of IQ measures at age three. More decisively, Nisbett is apparently unaware that a follow-up of the same project was published in 1994, when the children were, at age five, old enough for IQ scores to begin to become interpretable. The results? The experimental group had an advantage of just 2.5 points on one measure of IQ and two-tenths of a point on another -- both differences being substantively trivial and statistically insignificant.(7) In other words, the only study in "the very large literature" that we missed does not contradict our conclusion that such interventions have provided promising leads but no more.

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Tim Wise is not a reliable source. He has no credentials except "training in anti-racism".

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He is very well-read.

And, by your line of reasoning, Murray and Herrnstein aren't reliable either.

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To begin with, the authors of The Bell Curve were largely unqualified to write a book about genetics and IQ. Charles Murray is a political scientist, whose specialty lies in welfare and affirmative action issues. Richard Herrnstein (who died shortly before publication) was indeed a psychologist, but he spent his career studying pigeons and rats, not genetics and IQ. In fact, Herrnstein never published anything in peer-reviewed journals about genetics and IQ during his entire 36-year career. (He did publish a few articles in popular magazines.) The most that can be said for either of them is that they were familiar with the scientific method and were experts in fields that were distantly related to the topic.

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[This message has been edited by Underpants Man (edited 17 October 2005).]
 

Murray recived his Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology--not harvard University in Political Science, not Cognitive Psychology.

The BELL CURVE has been highly over-rated as a text. All it does is that it seeks to establish a correlation between IQ scores and success in life in America. Thus they claim that the lower the IQ the higher the chances on going to jail and being a general non-adaptive, anti-social failure in American life.

The problem with the BC is that crucial variables such as education, race as a sociological variable and class as a function of race were not factored into the explanations.

His latest follow-up provides nothing new except to rehash old numbers and claim that the so-called IQ gap in America is some kind of TABOO--nobody wants to talk about it. This, of course, is false.
 

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Originally posted by Horemheb:
This is one of the most racist boards I have ever seen.

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so you fit right in! NO?

by the way how did it take you 3138 posts to come to that conclusion............

just kidding man.....

dang...............

[This message has been edited by AFROCENTRIST32 (edited 17 October 2005).]
 

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Originally posted by lamin:
The BELL CURVE has been highly over-rated as a text.

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Read Gould's The Mismeasure of Man, and effecient evisceration of Murry's Bell Curve and other racist pseudoscience.

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The dumb Hore writes:
This is one of the most racist boards I have ever seen.

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As I said before, by Rushton's studies Hore must have a huge wanker!

[This message has been edited by Djehuti (edited 17 October 2005).]
 

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Originally posted by Evil Euro:
Tim Wise is not a reliable source. He has no credentials except "training in anti-racism".

Charles Murray has a PhD from Harvard, as did his "Bell Curve" co-author Richard Herrnstein.

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Sorry Stupid-mutt, but regarding Tim Wise's expertise, that, as you like to say, is irrelevant! His findings are what's undisputed facts! Just because someone is a Harvard graduate does not mean that person is flawless in his research. Then again, in your twisted mind, if a black man were to be valedictorian and the top graduate of a Harvard class, you would do the opposite and dismiss his credentials altogether!!

As Rasol says, may the bitter bile flow in you nitwit trolls, and may you get stomach ulcers from your own idiotic frustrations!!

[This message has been edited by Djehuti (edited 17 October 2005).]
 

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Horemheb said:

This is one of the most racist boards I have ever seen.

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We have been irritated by a few racists (for example, ABAZA, Evil Euro, and Giza-Rider), but I doubt that this is an entirely racist community.