Old nutters

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


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

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

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.

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.

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.

Originally Posted by 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.

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".

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