���Mike Palij raises a number of points, but I'll start with his citing the importance of headlines of newspaper articles for creating an impression, quite possibly misleading. Well, Mike went much further than this in his first posting on this thread. After an introduction that implied that the subject was not appropriate for a TV documentary (I don't know any other way of reading it), he then cited a list of items from a very lengthy Daily Mail article, presumably listed to demonstrate the supposed iniquities of the programme. Somehow he omitted to mention the following:
"In the programme a range of academics line up to criticise the views of the two men." "Oona King, Channel 4's head of diversity, said the programme shows conclusively 'that you cannot link race to IQ'." (Oona King is a mixed-race black Jewish ex-MP (Labour Party): http://tinyurl.com/ykjwmj7 ) And from both the Mail and Telegraph articles: "A Channel 4 spokesperson said: 'This new season of programmes sets out to explode some of the myths about race and science and to cast light on the history and consequences of scientific racism. 'The Season debunks the myths about science and race – science has been misused to legitimise racist beliefs and practices – these programmes are the antidote to that. 'Season roundly dismisses the ideas: that race is a predictor of intelligence; that racial purity has scientific benefits and that any one race is superior to another'." I'm not sure Mike is in a good position to criticize sub-editor headline writers when he presented such a one-sided impression of the articles he cited. After all, repeating a point made by Mike himself (that people often don't read closely past the headlines), TIPSters may well have thought that Mike had told them all they needed to know about the content of the articles, thereby gaining a thoroughly misleading idea of them, and of the upcoming documentary. Parenthetically, the inspiration for the documentary may have been a scholarly debate featured in *Nature* in February this year: Darwin 200: "Should scientists study race and IQ?" http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v457/n7231/full/457786a.html There are a number of interesting items in Mike's lengthy second posting on this thread, but almost the whole of it is irrelevant to the point supposedly being answered. So I'll make it again: Mike's heading for the thread is "The British Continuing Obsession". Note the word "continuing". This can only mean it is an obsession in the present as well as the past, so I asked for evidence that "this is [sic] an obsession in Britain and (b) that the topic comes up more in the news in Britain than in the States. In other words, I was rebutting the clear implication in Mike's heading that distinguishing groups of people on the basis of their IQ is currently an obsession in Britain. Mike cites two living British psychologists, both outside of mainstream psychology. Since when has the work of two psychologists out of many thousands constituted a general "obsession"? On Mike's saying he doesn't understand the relevance of question (b) above: I hope its relevance is now clear. If IQ is supposedly a "continuing" (i.e., current) obsession in Britain, where is the evidence that it comes up in newspapers more frequently than in the States? As I said, almost all of Mike's second posting was not relevant to my questions, but I note that much of it consists of straight "cut and paste" from Wikipedia, hardly a scholarly procedure. That this is also rather indiscriminate is indicated by the following: >Hans Eysenck, see: |By far the most acrimonious of the debates has been that over the |role of genetics in IQ differences (see intelligence quotient#Genetics |vs environment), which led to Eysenck famously being punched on |the nose during a talk at the London School of Economics.[10] So? Are we supposed to take exception to the fact that Eysenck believed that genetic factors play an appreciable role in IQ scores? And |In 1994 he was one of 52 signatories on "Mainstream Science on |Intelligence," an editorial written by Linda Gottfredson and published |in the Wall Street Journal, which defended the findings on race and |intelligence in The Bell Curve.[14] The article in question, containing 25 short statements on specific issues, went far beyond dealing with race and IQ. In this document you will find such outlandish statements as: 9. IQ is strongly related, probably more so than any other single measurable human trait, to many important educational, occupational, economic, and social outcomes… 22.There is no definitive answer why IQ bell curves differ across racial-ethnic groups…. Most experts believe that environment is important in pushing the bell curves apart, but genetics could be involved too… Mike cites some British psychologists involved with the British Eugenics Society, and gives the impression that the eugenics movement in Britain was concerned with differences between ethnic and racial groups: >Historically, I think that it can be documented that the issues >of eugenics, whether different ethnic and racial groups differ >in significant ways on measures of moral and intellectual ability, >represent a consistent intellectual tradition in Great Britain. Mike includes two categories here, thereby enabling him to include the "IQ and race" issue. In fact historically the eugenics movement in Britain was almost entirely about what were believed to be heritable mental and physical disabilities, and I don't think there was anything much, if at all, about ethnic and racial groups. But these items have little relevance to my main point, requesting from Mike evidence that there is an obsession with categorizing groups of people on the basis of the IQ currently in Britain. Allen Esterson Former lecturer, Science Department Southwark College, London http://www.esterson.org --- To make changes to your subscription contact: Bill Southerly (bsouthe...@frostburg.edu)
