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Care to explain?

The book: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bell_Curve

Reading the summary at the top of the Wiki entry, it's already not surprising the book has been labeled racist. Any book that discusses race, inheritance, and socioeconomic class always gets called racist.

Actually this book sounds fascinating, must be a interesting read, agreeing with it or not.

I’m reading it now; it is fascinating, because the idea that it’s possible to measure intelligence and used it to predict probabilities for individual and group outcomes is one of the most useful, strongest-supported ideas in all of the social sciences, yet many people either misunderstand the state of scientific consensus (“IQ doesn’t really measure anything, intelligence tests are largely bogus”) or actively try to deny that this is possible for political purposes (“many people are disadvantaged because of low socioeconomic status, but we can equalize everything with more government spending“). Understanding something other people don’t should allow you to gain an economic advantage somehow; there should be sort of arbitrage opportunities to profit from the knowledge differential. For example, many people think having a four-year college degree adds x amount of value because the average college graduate earns y more dollars over their lifetime than the average non-college graduate, and this means that everyone should go to college. But if you understand that a large part of x actually comes from the inherent value in being intelligent, and a large part of the reason students of top universities make better workers is that they were really smart even in high school, not necessarily because a university education is worth what students are paying, perhaps instead of hiring only from top universities, you can hire students straight out of high school based on their SAT scores (yes, the SAT measures intelligence) and train them yourself? Universities use a multitude of signals when deciding who to admit (test scores, essays, reference letters, extracurriculars), so in addition to trying to determine intelligence, they’re also trying to determine other character traits, but The Bell Curve (at least I think this is where I read it) presents some data related to job hiring that shows intelligence is the trait that’s most measurable and provides the most predictive power.

That's an incredibly cheap dismissal that's simply not true. There are plenty of books that look at those issues from a humanist perspective.

The Bell Curve is labeled racist because it is myopic about the existence and importance of race. Race is not a valid scientific categorization: it is not based on statistical grouping of DNA, or anything concrete other than "people used to be assholes to foreigners." There is an order of magnitude more genetic + cultural diversity among each race than there are between the races.

That's an incredibly cheap dismissal that's simply not true

Examples, please, of books that investigate socioeconomic status & race that have not been called racist? Because I can't think of any. By the way, I'm not talking about literary explorations of race like "Huckleberry Finn". Although that was called racist too.

There are orders of magnitude more genetic [...] diversity among each race than there are between the races.

Hold it right there, buddy. License, registration, and sources please. Mostly sources.

Well, you could read Stephen Jay Gould's The Mis-measure of Man.

Or you could read The Bell Curve. It is positing a small difference between "races", a difference so small that it is very minor compared to the expected range of deviation for a populace.

The idea that there is a scientifically definable thing called "race" lacks data. That is your row to hoe if you believe other. Skeptics are not required to disprove the existence of the tooth fairy, Nessie, or "race".

I wonder then, what about the Melanesians that have 6% of DNA of a unique population?

Or that asians and whites have wildly different reactions to milk.

Or that some diseases only affect blacks, or whites, or whatever?

This is not data? People use freely the same techniques to categorize humans, to categorize other animals with significant variations in their species, why only humans you must not use the word "race" and use other words to describe the same thing?

You've learned anything about the history of race relations and think "race" is a better word to describe that phenomenon than "lactose intolerant"? I'll be right back, going to inform my friends that because they aren't Chinese we can go get ice cream.

> Or that asians and whites have wildly different reactions to milk.

Asians and whites don't have wildly different reactions to milk. Adult mammals are generally lactose intolerant. There is a mutation that, in humans, is found far more often in people with ancestry in Northern Europe (which isn't coextensive with "whites") than any other origin, but which is neither universally absent in all other people or universally present in people of that origin that results in lactose tolerance.

Most supposed "racial" differences (EDIT: that is, most that refer to anything that is actually a measurable difference between real human populations at all) are of this type -- things that are statistically more or less common in a population of a particular origin that is not coextensive with any of the usual "race" categories with which the supposed hard-and-fast difference is popularly associated.

Doesn't genetic testing allow you to determine where your ancestors came from to an astonishing degree? I'm pretty sure there are lots of valid ways to define a race. The question is how useful it is. Also in the past a lot of people have been lumped together inappropriately, for example apparently the genetic diversity in Africa is the biggest of all continents, yet all people from there were lumped together as "blacks".

The distribution of genetic variants within and among human populations are impossible to describe succinctly because of the difficulty of defining a "population," the clinal nature of variation, and heterogeneity across the genome (Long and Kittles 2003). In general, however, an average of 85% of genetic variation exists within local populations, ~7% is between local populations within the same continent, and ~8% of variation occurs between large groups living on different continents,. (Lewontin 1972; Jorde et al. 2000a; Hinds et al. 2005) (Editied my previous post to reflect a single order of magnitude between 8% and 85%).

Thanks Wikipedia. Regarding being labelled racist, fine, everything gets labelled that. Even this post. I took your statement for something bit more meaningful than the cynic's "woe is the opinion of The Populous".

"The distribution of genetic variants within and among human populations are impossible to describe succinctly because of the difficulty of defining a "population," the clinal nature of variation, and heterogeneity across the genome (Long and Kittles 2003)."

This is completely f'n stupid...

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/gnxp/2010/12/to-classify-h...

[edit]

BTW, I find it funny that you're wiki-scholaring using old sources that date back to before we learned all non-african humans have some neanderthal dna in them.

"There is an order of magnitude more genetic + cultural diversity among each race than there are between the races."

Yawn...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_Genetic_Diversity:_Lewont...

He wrote a book arguing the black people, as a race, are less intelligent than white people.

Have you read it?

Am I wrong?

Well I read it because I wanted to know if it was really racist or not. Unfortunately that was 16 years ago, so I am not 100% sure of my conclusion anymore. But I think ultimately I didn't think it was racist. I seem to remember they explicitly wrote about the effect of environments.

Would have been curious to get an opinion by somebody who read it recently.

They seem to be saying that nature & nurture is at play. Your comment mentions only the first bit.

Some ethnic groups do have different average levels of intelligence. Ashkenazi jews, for example:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ashkenazi_Jewish_intelligence

My own guess is that for some blacks, there has not been enough time for the Flynn Effect to occur for them to catch up with the general population. This is not due to any fault in them, but a result of no/substandard education for many generations. I imagine in a few generations any difference from the average will disappear. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flynn_effect

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