8-6-06 Blind Science
I've attempted many times, including here, to describe the influence of dogma within various scientific endeavors. It's a difficult pursuit for a guy like me, mainly because I'm not a scholar and I'm not a particularly ambitious person. I am, in fact, quite lazy. This leaves me somewhat handicapped in any endeavor to make convincing arguments along these lines because it takes an awful lot of work to locate and cite appropriate references for any spin I might feel like putting on it.
There's another side to this, however, which is merely how people outside of the academic or scientific communities view "science" and anything "scientific" with a sort of unquestioning acceptance. We read newspaper articles and see things on TV that purport to be "scientific" and unless the text of an article or a TV show calls attention to any dissenting views, I get a distinct sense from anyone and everyone I come into contact with that this stuff is swallowed whole, without question.
In my ongoing need to piss and moan about it, however, here's a link to an article entitled "Racial IQ Gap Narrows"
http://www.sciencenews.org/articles/20060805/fob6.asp
This article caught my eye right away. First of all, the "racial IQ gap" is one of those so-called "scientific" things that's been wafting its way into the minds of Americans for decades. How did it get there? Well, it's been established as some sort of "scientific fact" all this time because of IQ testing.
Now, if you do a search on Yahoo or Google with the two words IQ and BLACKS, you'll get to see that this so-called "scientific fact" has been fomenting a classic debate across the globe for several decades in the form of the "nature versus nurture" question. This basically boils down to whether various traits of personality and life performance are the result of "nature" and genetic makeup, or if those things are molded by "nurturing" in the way people are brought up and live. In the case of the former, consequently, improving the human condition would require nothing short of genetic engineering. But in the case of the latter, there are many things that could be done to improve the human condition short of such a drastic measure as re-engineering the genetic makeup of the entire human race.
As you can easily discover for yourself, this is a hot topic, and it's been a hot topic for quite a long time. In other words, our sacred "science" has been pissing away decades of work just debating this question.
The funny thing about it, however, is that this debate is based in large part upon the results of IQ testing over several decades. In the article I referenced above there's one paragraph near the end that I'll just quote here:
A fundamental problem with studies of IQ test results is that "nobody really knows what intelligence is," says Psychometrician Peter H. Schonemann of Purdue University in West Lafayette, Ind.
It lends some sense of irony to the whole thing, doesn't it? Here you have a white dominated society since before World War II, financing scientifc research into how to measure intelligence, developing all sorts of testing procedures and using them to test people for decades, and after all this time it's so easy for someone deeply immersed in the field to toss off this statement which completely invalidates the whole ball of wax! Meanwhile, the rest of the article just assumes that it's true, that blacks are NOT as smart as whites, based upon tests done over decades to determine something they STILL have no clue about!
On this particular front, I have to conclude that "science" is not only "blind", but it's also about as objective as the King's New Clothes.
There's another side to this, however, which is merely how people outside of the academic or scientific communities view "science" and anything "scientific" with a sort of unquestioning acceptance. We read newspaper articles and see things on TV that purport to be "scientific" and unless the text of an article or a TV show calls attention to any dissenting views, I get a distinct sense from anyone and everyone I come into contact with that this stuff is swallowed whole, without question.
In my ongoing need to piss and moan about it, however, here's a link to an article entitled "Racial IQ Gap Narrows"
http://www.sciencenews.org/articles/20060805/fob6.asp
This article caught my eye right away. First of all, the "racial IQ gap" is one of those so-called "scientific" things that's been wafting its way into the minds of Americans for decades. How did it get there? Well, it's been established as some sort of "scientific fact" all this time because of IQ testing.
Now, if you do a search on Yahoo or Google with the two words IQ and BLACKS, you'll get to see that this so-called "scientific fact" has been fomenting a classic debate across the globe for several decades in the form of the "nature versus nurture" question. This basically boils down to whether various traits of personality and life performance are the result of "nature" and genetic makeup, or if those things are molded by "nurturing" in the way people are brought up and live. In the case of the former, consequently, improving the human condition would require nothing short of genetic engineering. But in the case of the latter, there are many things that could be done to improve the human condition short of such a drastic measure as re-engineering the genetic makeup of the entire human race.
As you can easily discover for yourself, this is a hot topic, and it's been a hot topic for quite a long time. In other words, our sacred "science" has been pissing away decades of work just debating this question.
The funny thing about it, however, is that this debate is based in large part upon the results of IQ testing over several decades. In the article I referenced above there's one paragraph near the end that I'll just quote here:
A fundamental problem with studies of IQ test results is that "nobody really knows what intelligence is," says Psychometrician Peter H. Schonemann of Purdue University in West Lafayette, Ind.
It lends some sense of irony to the whole thing, doesn't it? Here you have a white dominated society since before World War II, financing scientifc research into how to measure intelligence, developing all sorts of testing procedures and using them to test people for decades, and after all this time it's so easy for someone deeply immersed in the field to toss off this statement which completely invalidates the whole ball of wax! Meanwhile, the rest of the article just assumes that it's true, that blacks are NOT as smart as whites, based upon tests done over decades to determine something they STILL have no clue about!
On this particular front, I have to conclude that "science" is not only "blind", but it's also about as objective as the King's New Clothes.
posted by Jeff Barnard at 9:42 AM
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