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It's emotionally charged because the author is Ashutosh Jogalekar, who in the mid 2010's got himself fired from Scientific American as a blogger by praising the
by KennyBlanken 5y ago
It's emotionally charged because the author is Ashutosh Jogalekar, who in the mid 2010's got himself fired from Scientific American as a blogger by praising the theories of a scientific-racism book:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/whats-going-on-at-scientific-american-deleted-posts-sexism-claims-a-fired-writer/2014/07/16/46526b52-0d20-11e4-8c9a-923ecc0c7d23_story.html https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/whats-going-o...
> Jogalekar praised the book, saying it confirms the need to “recognize a strong genetic component to [social and cognitive] differences” among racial groups.
It should be noted that Jogalekar is a chemist.
What did the people whose work Wade cited for his book say?
> "Wade juxtaposes an incomplete and inaccurate account of our research on human genetic differences with speculation that recent natural selection has led to worldwide differences in I.Q. test results, political institutions and economic development. We reject Wade's implication that our findings substantiate his guesswork. They do not. We are in full agreement that there is no support from the field of population genetics for Wade's conjectures."
Instead of keeping his head down, Ashutosh followed up shortly thereafter with a blog falling over himself to find reasons to excuse or explain Feynman's rampant history of womanizing and general asshole-ism:
https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/the-curious-wavefunction/richard-feynman-sexism-and-changing-perceptions-of-a-scientific-icon/ https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/the-curious-wavefunctio...
...and then we have Jogalekar defending EO Wilson, whose book Sociology, proposed (in 1975) that human behavior was determined by genetics, was widely criticized as sympathetic to eugenics. Sound familiar?
Ask yourself this: why does Jogalekar keep defending authors of works that tread around scientific racism and eugenics?
- hoseja 5y agoJust because you call it "scientific racism" and "eugenics", doesn't mean it's wrong or untrue, just that you don't like it.
- tpush 5y agoIt absolutely is wrong and untrue, though, in addition to being racist. There being significant IQ differences between ethnicities/"races" that are caused by genetics is a long debunked theory; just look at the scientific discourse around something like "The Bell Curve".
- cinntaile 5y agoIt's very politicized, that makes it hard to judge who is doing real science and who is advancing a political agenda. One thing I wonder is what makes intelligence "special" so that there are no differences, as compared to other physical traits where you do see differences between ethnicities?
- tpush 5y ago> It's very politicized, that makes it hard to judge who is doing real science and who is advancing a political agenda. The science is clear on this question, and has been for decades; there never has been any scientifically well-supported theory showing genetic causes for observable differences of IQ between ethnicities. > One thing I wonder is what makes intelligence "special" so that there are no differences, as compared to other physical traits where you do see differences between ethnicities? The position isn't even that there are no differences in IQ between populations; the well-supported scientific consensus is a) IQ differences between individuals of a population are larger than between populations in the first place, and b) IQ differences between populations are largely not caused by genetics. Note that neither of these statements contradict the heritability of IQ, which a statistical effect.
- jevgeni 5y agoSo some variation in IQ is caused by genetics, but to a very small degree compared to other factors. Am I interpreting (a) and (b) correctly?
- wdroz 5y agoApparently yes, sound like the wage gap - differences between individuals of a population are larger than between populations in the first place - differences between populations are largely not caused by *sexism*
- soundnote 5y agoIntelligence is very highly heritable, at least within populations.