Old nutters

[gettin2dizzy]

got to love them
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/london/7050020.stm

[the_lone_wolf]

controversial post warning...

so are they put out because he said black people are less intelligent than white people or because he said it was a result of "inferior" genes? as far as i'm aware (as in i can't find evidence to the contrary) when scientifically tested black people on average don't score as well in IQ tests as white people. how can they dispute that?

now whether the reason is social or genetic is the question that should be debated, and if he made an ascertion that it was genetic, with insufficient evidence to support it, then yes, he shouldn't be able to voice his own unfounded views...

having said all that though, this quote:

"people who have to deal with black employees find this is not true".

does somewhat smack of BNP:rolleyes:


right... that should warm up the forum...

[gettin2dizzy]

The whole quote was

He went on to say he hoped everyone was equal but that "people who have to deal with black employees find this is not true".


you missed the quote:

The scientist has courted controversy in the past, saying that a woman should have the right to abort her unborn child if tests could determine it would be homosexual.


He is the guy who discovered the structure of DNA, not just Jimmy Saville ****ed.
Nutter!!

[the_lone_wolf]

oops, i did miss the second quote, that's what happens when you try to read the forums on the quiet at work;););)

sounds like a nut to me, perhaps he'd be better suited to life in the USA, with views like his they'd elect him president:rolleyes:

[Mousetrapper]

I've seem him talk a few times - he really is a nutter, if he hadn't been the one of the guys that took most of the credit for solving the DNA structure (Franklin got stuffed out of the Noble prize on account of being dead!, and quite possibly a women) then he'd have been bounced out of Cold Spring quite a while ago.

[Warthog]

The key quote is this one: "all our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours - whereas all the testing says not really". Now if scientific testing says that they are not as intelligent, then that is simply fact and cannot be thought of as racist. I have no idea whether it is true or not but I would be interested to hear about the research.

[tomjones2]

I think the value of IQ test is pretty debatable anyway, they can be influenced by how tired you are at the time, what mood you are in etc. People seem to use them as a fixed value, there is also many diffrent levels of test from ones that last 10 mins to 2 hours.

[MiniMatt]

I think the value of IQ test is pretty debatable anyway, they can be influenced by how tired you are at the time, what mood you are in etc. People seem to use them as a fixed value, there is also many diffrent levels of test from ones that last 10 mins to 2 hours.

Exactly, IQ tests are notoriously difficult to define without introducing a bias. Most are created by middle class, western, white men; it really shouldn't come as a suprise if that's the precise group that tends to score higher. Even the seemingly innocuous can be biased; for example, the 3D shape manipulation questions - this is something influenced heavily by an engineering culture - one that is historically strong in the west; give the same test to a caveman of 5000 years BC who's never built anything and they may do less well, yet it's commonly thought that there is no intelligence gap - ie. pop a cavebaby into a time machine and raise them in the 21st century and they'll be just another ordinary individual.

It's a tricky one, as a liberal lefty I despise the views quoted, but the "bad" part of being a liberal lefty is that freedom of speech is paramount. The quote incorrectly attributed to Voltaire best sums it up - "I dissaprove of what you say but will defend to the death your right to say it".

[philbut]

I agree miniMatt. It's very hard to create at truly objective IQ test. Stuff like non verbal reasoning and all that is OK to a point, but the way a person views the world and their previous experience of such abstract ideas will affect the way they can do stuff. I find it very hard to believe that there is any real difference in IQ between people of certain races. Of course there will be individual differences, just as there are between white males in the UK! For a real result, you would need to study people who had grown up with exactly the same life experience to rule out other factors. Maybe the data he refers to is because of social conditioning or something rather than IQ difference.

[the_lone_wolf]

So where's the evidence to support the claim that a bias in the test itself is the reason for the discrepancies in the test results? Assertion without evidence is what said nutter professor was doing and he got laughed off the stage (and rightly so). any person conducting a scientific study would have taken steps to try and counter the effects of any cultural bias in the IQ tests used, if they didn't they'd get jumped on and discredited before they'd even published...

got to get to work now, when i get home i'll prepare a better argument;)

[philbut]

He did have evidence didn't he??? I don't have any however, just a hunch. Of course they will have tried to account for cultural difference etc. You can never have the perfect experement, and social experiements can only ever examine a tiny proportion of the total populus, thus error is (I would imagine, but just guessin here) quite large. Would still be interesting to see where they took their samples from and how many etc.

I await your perfected argument ;)

[the_lone_wolf]

I await your perfected argument ;)
no argument is perfect...





...unless it's from a creationist;)



i haven't read the studies yet, so can't make a judgement on the sample size or error rate, but i'd expect if it were obviously going to affect the conclusions of the studies that it would have been picked up before the papers were published...

[Warthog]

Just as an interesting coda to all this, he has now apologised about the comment, and seems to be rather bewildered about the whole affair (he is pretty old). The overwhelming opinion that I have come accross since looking into this is that there is no scientific basis for a difference in IQ between races, indeed that races don't even have a clear boundary, they are merely social cadres people tend to use, so there can't possibly be a clear difference. Interesting.

[yorkie_chris]

I can tell what the result will be;

Anything showing less than perfect equality (or whites as lower IQ!) will be ignored, or said to not take into account cultural differences, or dismissed as racist propaganda.

Fact is, evolution has taken different courses for the different races of people, black people are obviously better at most sports, look at heavyweight boxing or football for example, so what says our IQs are all the same racially?

I would not be at all suprised to see different results

[gettin2dizzy]

Its acceptable that japanese & chinese have a higher IQ than white europeans, this was just an extension of that. Stupid thing to say!

[MiniMatt]

I can tell what the result will be;

Anything showing less than perfect equality (or whites as lower IQ!) will be ignored, or said to not take into account cultural differences, or dismissed as racist propaganda.


That bit, I'm sure you're quite right on.


Fact is, evolution has taken different courses for the different races of people, black people are obviously better at most sports, look at heavyweight boxing or football for example, so what says our IQs are all the same racially?

I would not be at all suprised to see different results

This bit, I'm not so sure on. You've got to be real careful that what you're attributing to genetics doesn't actually have an environmental cause. For example, in the UK, black people tend to get shot more often. Obviously this doesn't mean that black people have bullet attracting DNA, but that socio-economic (and latent racism) factors place tend to place them in crappy housing estates where people get shot. The same argument could well be applied to any real or perceived bias toward black sporting success - if you're growing up in a crappy housing estate with poor educational opportunities, your liklihood of a successful merchant banking career is unlikely to make you millions. Sport however, offers more of a chance on an equal footing.

And then you're back to the old "define intelligence" bit, which makes IQ tests so damn crap to begin with. For example, I'm sure most people would have trouble putting the words "Wayne Rooney" and "Intelligent" in the same sentence, yet there's obviously an amazing amount of brain processing going on in working out angles, velocities and force vectors. It might not be the sort of thing he's conciously aware of, but there's a lot going on in his brain that is far better than most mere mortals. Does this mean that Wayne Rooney is considerably more intelligent than most? In many ways, I think it probably does.

[the_lone_wolf]

And then you're back to the old "define intelligence" bit, which makes IQ tests so damn crap to begin with. For example, I'm sure most people would have trouble putting the words "Wayne Rooney" and "Intelligent" in the same sentence, yet there's obviously an amazing amount of brain processing going on in working out angles, velocities and force vectors. It might not be the sort of thing he's conciously aware of, but there's a lot going on in his brain that is far better than most mere mortals. Does this mean that Wayne Rooney is considerably more intelligent than most? In many ways, I think it probably does.
as impressive as what rooney does it's not cognition though, it's learning through experience, repeating the same motions enough that they become engrained in the memory. rooney wasn't born with the capability to play football like he does, even if he was born with some slight advantage he's had to practice to get this good...

intelligence is defined by being able to reason, solve problems, think abstractly etc. this is what intelligence has been defined to be, and if it were suddenly changed to mean the ability to solve the necessary equations to kick a football then wayne rooney would be classed as intelligent.

while separately obtained results may not be comparable, if you apply the same test to all subjects you will get a scientifically reasonable result.

[MiniMatt]

I see the point there, but as a query, does one have to be concious of the cognition for it to be classed as intelligence? I certainly see where you're coming from with regard to ingrained experience - for the sake of brevity, and just to **** off the scientists let's (incorrectly) call this "muscle memory". A concert pianist, and indeed perhaps many sports such as pole vault, long jump etc. all require the same motions to be repeated over and over again till they reach perfection.

I'd argue (if only for the sake of argument, not entirely sure I've convinced myself to be honest) that a footballer does display reasoning, adaptability, abstract thinking and problem solving. If you phrase it as a classroom test it becomes more obvious - we're travelling forward at 15mph and need to get object X into area Y which is currently 30 yards ahead and 10 yards to the right; also in the area are 11 other objects attempting to intercept object X, each with their own velocities and vectors which are constantly changing, and 10 other objects, again each with their own velocities and vectors, which we can use to assist us in getting object X into area Y. Phrased as a classroom experiment and it becomes problem solving.

I'd certainly agree that the basic "what angle to I need to kick this and at what force to get it to go in direction X at height Y at velocity Z" are simply learnt through experience, but isn't the rest, ie. "tactical awareness" if you like actually problem solving, reasoning and adaptability going on at an advanced and extremely rapid level? And if it isn't intelligence what is it? As it's undeniably a massive amount of "brain power".

I'm only being argumentative because I'm bitter and twisted - every IQ test I do has me coming out somewhere between a squirrel and a golden retriever :D

[the_lone_wolf]

Matt, you and i agree on several things, most notably the overall crappiness of IQ tests, but then i have my own reasons for not liking them:p

i've got to disagree about a footballer showing reasoning when they kick the ball though, being able to coordinate yourself to accomplish something like kicking a football or fighting off a predator is soemthing all humans are capable of doing, i don't think that is a sign of reasoning, because you don't think "that ball is travelling at Xmph on a vector XYZ, i want to make it travel at Ymph on a vector ABC, so i need to apply this force F at this vector .... ....." - you just think "ball go there now" and it usually does, the more you practice the more consistent the result

yes, it involves a huge amount of brain processing to calculate all that in the time slot you've got, but considering we are the ones who define intelligence, it's not sheer processing power that equates to intelligence...

[yorkie_chris]

The same argument could well be applied to any real or perceived bias toward black sporting success - if you're growing up in a crappy housing estate with poor educational opportunities, your liklihood of a successful merchant banking career is unlikely to make you millions. Sport however, offers more of a chance on an equal footing

A fair point, but I don't think it's the only factor, you're right about it being hard to determine cause and effect with these things.

So, am I an old nutter for not beleiving races to be equal?

[gettin2dizzy]

Frog catching a fly with it's tongue. Genius!

[neio79]

wow that bloke is a nutter, but if his views had lots of scientific proof then he shold have been aloud to speak. As it turns out he is talking cr*p really