My point was simply that it is ridiculous to believe 1) that the media in the US is so monolithic and dominated by the right-wing (of all things) that scientific findings favoring the left-wing would be suppressed and 2) that a genetic explanation is inherently conservative (both genetic and environmental explanations, by turns, may support both right and left-wing ideas).
Maybe Yankee fever is the explanation. The SF Giants (they're not in NY anymore) are clearly going to beat whoever the AL sends up. Rick Dr. Rick Froman, Chair Division of Humanities and Social Sciences John Brown University Siloam Springs, AR 72761 rfro...@jbu.edu ________________________________________ From: Mike Palij [m...@nyu.edu] Sent: Saturday, October 16, 2010 7:24 AM To: Teaching in the Psychological Sciences (TIPS) Cc: Mike Palij Subject: Re:[tips] Are Genes Left-Wing? On Sat, 16 Oct 2010 02:22:47 -0700, Allen Esterson wrote: >Rick Froman writes in appreciation of Mike Palij's quotations from >Oliver James's article in The Guardian "Why genes are leftwing": > >>Good point. The media is widely known for their >>right wing proclivities. > >Hey! We don't all live in the States! > >The most influential medium in the UK, the BBC, is hardly "right wing". >And while the popular national press is predominantly right-wing, there >is also a strong centrist and left-wing presence. First, I want to thank Allen for providing background on Oliver James. I had gotten a pointer to the article from another list that I'm on and was not familiar with his background (though I had looked briefly on the Guardian website for some background on James but I did not find anything; I would have searched more but I was taking a break from Yankees-Rangers League Championship game #1 when they were still down 5 runs before their AMAZING comeback to win the game -- GO YANKEES! ;-) >>Just in case that might not be true, I think it might >>be more productive to look for reasons that both >>the right and the left might fear finding that human >>behavior is largely determined by environment. > >Wouldn't it be more productive to spend the time checking out the >evidence itself? Indeed, but considering that I posted this late on a Friday evening, one might be forgiven for not being more engaged in fact checking (especially with a Yankee game on ;-). It should be noted that James does not refer to psychoanalysis at all in the article, instead he focuses on research on the human genome, the editorial in the Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, and related sources that argue that "It's The Environment, Stupid!", the research by Anita Thapar which has been used to calim that there is a genetic basis to ADHD but examination of her results appear to suggest that only 16% of the children in her sample had genetic characteristics that she claimed served as the basis for ADHA, and so on. Though I am sure that Allen's depiction of James as an all-round intellectual badguy is valid, Allen did not address the specific points in James article. >Alternatively, may I suggest that, if are inclined to follow up your >own suggestion, you might also look at the reasons why (predominantly) >many on the Left might fear finding that genetic predispositions play a >substantial role in human behaviour. (You could start with Oliver >James. :-) ) Well, that one is easy, both historically and philosophically though James did allude to some of the reasons towards the end of his article, namely, that genes imply, at least popularly, that certain characteristics of individuals are immutable and unchangable and that individuals with such "traditional" genetic defects as "stupidity", "reluctance to work", etc. (extra points to anyone who can explain "draptomania" without checking out the Wikipedia entry on it here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drapetomania ), will require individuals with "superior genetics" to take care of them -- one of the issues that Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein tackled in their right-wing "The Bell Curve". Quoting from the Wikipedia entry on "The Bell Curve" (yada-yada): |Its central argument is that intelligence is a better predictor of many |factors including financial income, job performance, unwanted pregnancy, |and crime than parents' socioeconomic status or education level. Also, |the book argues that those with high intelligence, the "cognitive elite", |are becoming separated from those of average and below-average |intelligence and that this is a dangerous social trend. Most of the |controversy concerns Chapters 13 and 14, in which the authors wrote |about racial differences in intelligence and discuss the implications of |those differences. The authors were reported throughout the popular |press as arguing that these IQ differences are genetic, and they did |indeed write in chapter 13: "It seems highly likely to us that both genes |and the environment have something to do with racial differences." |The introduction to the chapter more cautiously states, "The debate |about whether and how much genes and environment have to do with |ethnic differences remains unresolved." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bell_Curve So, while Oliver James may claim that genes account for a tiny amount of behavioral characteristics (say, 1%), Murray and Herrnstein would argue that certain characteristics, such as "intelligence" as reflected by a "general intelligence factor" or "g" has, say, 40-80% of its variability accounted for by genetic factors. I'll leave it to the interested reader to locate the APA Task Force on Intelligence Report on the "The Bell Curve" and what it states. The nickle version is available here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligence:_Knowns_and_Unknowns (Hint: there's a link to the report at the end of the entry) This wouldn't be much of an issue if one assumed that the environment could overcome genetic influences -- one would then be focused on how to structure environments in order to overcome the genetic influences. But if one believes that environments can't overcome such genetic influences, then the best one can do is control the "genetic defectives" so that they have minimal opportunities to disrupt society and stay out of the way of the "genetic superiors". It's an old story, perhaps told most interetingly by Huxley in his "Brace New World" or in a more scholarly fashion by Danial Kevles in his "In the Name of Eugenics", and we have some sense as to how that can end up. Right-wingers tend to worry about social control (policy implications: build more prisons, arrest more people, associate civil rights with being weak on crime, etc.) while left-wingers tend to worry about changing the environment and increasing opportunities (e.g., imporving health care, educational systems, etc.). Of course, there are variaous perspectives on the nature-nurture debate as well as on gene-environment interactions that may make certain behavioral categories worse or better. But I've got an AL LCS game 2 to prepare for, so I'll leave this for someone else to explore. ;-) -Mike Palij New York University m...@nyu.edu --- You are currently subscribed to tips as: rfro...@jbu.edu. To unsubscribe click here: http://fsulist.frostburg.edu/u?id=13039.37a56d458b5e856d05bcfb3322db5f8a&n=T&l=tips&o=5727 or send a blank email to leave-5727-13039.37a56d458b5e856d05bcfb3322db5...@fsulist.frostburg.edu --- You are currently subscribed to tips as: arch...@jab.org. 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