the neoliberal vision of the future

[frogwoman]

I have a question to you lefties: what if, say, 10 years from now there was produced 100% overwhelming evidence beyond a shred of doubt that a) intelligence is a real concept and highly inheritable and b) there are heritable differences between the various races? How would this affect your worldview? Would you all become Nazis then? Are you by definition a racist then? I am being quite serious. I am curious to know how you would react and if it would change your political views.

No it wouldn't. This stuff doesn't matter. It isn't an earth shattering revelation that means that your entire worldview would be changed. I'd still be a socialist.

 

[Bernie Gunther]

This is certainly true. Such debates will arise, no matter how dehumanizing and degrading they are, because our economic system will force them into being.

I do hope the U75 worshippers of "science" are taking note of the conceptual connections between Onarchy's science and his economics. He is what I've been telling you about.

I do hope you'll take note that his 'science' is mostly crap, and I think a case can be made that this is a requirement to make the conceptual connections you're talking about ...

 

[phildwyer]

I do hope you'll take note that his 'science' is mostly crap.

Depends what you mean. It is popularization of ideas that are common currency among some scientists. Is he saying anything that Dawkins and his ilk wouldn't subscribe to?

 

[littlebabyjesus]

I do hope the U75 worshippers of "science" are taking note of the conceptual connections between Onarchy's science and his economics. He is what I've been telling you about.

Certainly there are conceptual connections – he makes exactly the same kinds of errors and circular arguments. His 'science' and his 'economics' are both entirely bunkum as a result.

 

[frogwoman]

I actually agree with phil's last post. His science may well be crap but there are a lot of fairly well respected scientists who follow the same reasoning and largely dismiss any possibility of environmental factors in traits like intelligence etc. In some cases like that of charles murrray they've become reasonably influential and mainstream.

"science" isn't always all its cracked up to be.

 

[frogwoman]

Whether it's crap or not - imo it is - is irrelevant to phil's points.

 

[littlebabyjesus]

Depends what you mean. It is popularization of ideas that are common currency among some scientists. Is he saying anything that Dawkins and his ilk wouldn't subscribe to?

Yes he is! Onarchy has shown repeatedly that he doesn't understand how evolution works.

Then again, so have you.

 

[nino_savatte]

I actually agree with phil's last post. His science may well be crap but there are a lot of fairly well respected scientists who follow the same reasoning and largely dismiss any possibility of environmental factors in traits like intelligence etc. In some cases like that of charles murrray they've become reasonably influential and mainstream.

"science" isn't always all its cracked up to be.

Quite right, science can be conscripted to serve ideology in the same way that culture is colonised by ideology. Nazi science being a case in point.

 

[frogwoman]

I wouldn't always be so sure. (I'm not saying dawkins is like this btw)

 

[phildwyer]

Whether it's crap or not - imo it is - is irrelevant to phil's points.

"Crap" is the wrong word. It is the kind of science that will appear plausible in a capitalist society. I'd argue that these ideas are implicit in all post-Baconian science, but you don't have to agree with that to note that Dawkinsism is the scientific ideology of late capitalism.

 

[littlebabyjesus]

Quite right, science can be conscripted to serve ideology in the same way that culture is colonised by ideology. Nazi science being a case in point.

I don't agree. Certainly, science can be directed in particular directions, but good science transcends ideology. Nazi 'science' was mostly bad science precisely because it was attempting to prove particular ideological points.

 

[frogwoman]

Not just nazi science. These ideas are gaining currency among (some) scientists of all fields and it's dangerous to just say that they're "crap" and "unscientific". they may very well be and in fact probably are, but it doesn't change the fact that the people who are promoting these theories are presumably gathering evidence for it, using the right methods, etc, they're just choosing to overlook some factors (as happens in all scientific research btw) and leading that research to support political and ideological conclusions. Even if they're not even aware of doing so themselves. Have you read the debates in (for example) new scientist magazine over the last few years over this topic?
then again, what scientific research doesn't?

 

[Idris2002]

Within the past minute or so I've been able to find this from lasthe New Scientist link, which confirms that our Norwegian friend isn't entirely wrong (note I said not entirely wrong.)

Any human whose ancestral group developed outside Africa has a little Neanderthal in them – between 1 and 4 per cent of their genome, Pääbo's team estimates. In other words, humans and Neanderthals had sex and had hybrid offspring. A small amount of that genetic mingling survives in "non-Africans" today: Neanderthals didn't live in Africa, which is why sub-Saharan African populations have no trace of Neanderthal DNA.

It's impossible to know how often humans invited Neanderthals back to their cave (and vice versa), but the genome data offers some intriguing details.

"It must have been at least 45,000 years ago," says David Reich, a geneticist at Harvard Medical School who was involved in the project. That's because all non-Africans – be they from France, China or Papua New Guinea – share the same amount of Neanderthal DNA, suggesting that interbreeding occurred before those populations split. The timing makes the Middle East the likeliest place where humans leaving Africa and resident Neanderthals did the deed.

So does this support what Onar was saying above? Sadly, no. Onar wanted to breath some life into discredited polygenist theories of human origins, and he wanted to do this in order to bolster the idea that the human species can be categorised into distinct 'races' each of which has lesser or greater cognitive endowments. By throwing the neanderthals and homo erectus into the debate he's implying that the 'European' and 'Asian' races possess a greater cognitive endowment (i.e. more intelligence) than the 'African' race because of some infusion of traits taken into the populations of those continents after their ancestors diffused out from Africa and intermarried with local populations.

But note that the New Scientist averred that only 1 to 4 % of the human genome was derived from the neanderthal populations. Not only that, but it seems unlikely that any specific traits commonly shared within any human population can be linked to any neanderthal genetic contribution:

Can we trace any human traits back to Neanderthals?

Probably not. Some researchers had hypothesised that some human genes, including one involved in brain development, originated from interbreeding with Neanderthals, but Pääbo's team found no evidence for this. In fact, no Neanderthal DNA sequences are consistently found in humans. "Each person has a different bit of Neanderthal in them," says Reich.

However, Sarah Tishkoff, a geneticist at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia not involved in the project, says it is possible that interbreeding introduced traits into a few human populations. "It will be interesting to look at other ethnic groups and other Neanderthals," she says.

 

[phildwyer]

I don't agree. Certainly, science can be directed in particular directions, but good science transcends ideology.

In that case, how do you explain the simultaneous emergence of capitalism and Baconian science?

 

[frogwoman]

I don't agree. Certainly, science can be directed in particular directions, but good science transcends ideology. Nazi 'science' was mostly bad science precisely because it was attempting to prove particular ideological points.

Except when they discovered that smoking causes cancer.

 

[nino_savatte]

I don't agree. Certainly, science can be directed in particular directions, but good science transcends ideology. Nazi 'science' was mostly bad science precisely because it was attempting to prove particular ideological points.

Of course, it all depends on what one means by the word "science". If science attempts to "prove particular ideological points", then surely it has been colonised by ideology or has been conscripted to serve ideology. Another example is how the US (and other nations) have used science to further military ambitions. In other words, to develop new ways of killing people.

 

[littlebabyjesus]

"Crap" is the wrong word. It is the kind of science that will appear plausible in a capitalist society. I'd argue that these ideas are implicit in all post-Baconian science, but you don't have to agree with that to note that Dawkinsism is the scientific ideology of late capitalism.

Dawkins has, imo - as we've discussed before – an odd angle on certain aspects of evolutionary theory. Not because he's wrong as such, but because there are more useful and revealing ways of looking at things – Gould's way, basically. But there is no equivalence between this and onarchy's science. Onarchy is objectively, demonstrably wrong. Calling what he's doing 'science' is like calling astrology a branch of astronomy.

 

[frogwoman]

Yes there is. How do you explain that the authors of the bell curve were not dismissed as cranks and - in murrays case at least - went on to influence social policy?

Phil posts some bollocks but on this point he is spot on. Science doesn't exist in a vacuum free from the pressures of the rest of society.

 

[littlebabyjesus]

Yes there is. How do you explain that the authors of the bell curve were not dismissed as cranks and - in murrays case at least - went on to influence social policy?

They were dismissed as cranks by most scientists. Their ideas were given weight by certain sectors of society because they were racists who wanted to prove a racist point.

You should remember that the Bell Curve was ripped to shreds by a lot of people as soon as it was published.

 

[frogwoman]

At the time yes.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Murray_(author)#Biography

Does this look like the biography of a man who is dismissed as a ranting lunatic by everyone?

 

[littlebabyjesus]

Well onan here has shown the mental gymnastics that it is possible for a racist to perform in order to make the evidence fit their worldview. He wants to show that Northern Europeans are genetically superior to Africans, and he seems to have convinced himself that he has done so. That doesn't make what he's doing science.

 

[Idris2002]

 

[frogwoman]

It might support unscientific conclusions but that doesn't mean that it's not science. I'm not saying that science is worthless but it's not some perfect thing immune from the rest of society's pressures and the dominant ideology of the time will influence what's "scientific" in all sorts of ways - the type of research that gets funded, even the assumptions that the scientists have in their heads, etc.

 

[nino_savatte]

Well onan here has shown the mental gymnastics that it is possible for a racist to perform in order to make the evidence fit their worldview. He wants to show that Northern Europeans are genetically superior to Africans, and he seems to have convinced himself that he has done so. That doesn't make what he's doing science.

He's shrink-wrapped the science (and pseudo-science) to fit his thesis.

 

[littlebabyjesus]

At the time yes.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Murray_(author)#Biography

Does this look like the biography of a man who is dismissed as a ranting lunatic by everyone?

It wasn't peer-reviewed before publication. It was published by someone with a racist agenda for the benefit of people with a racist agenda. Racists in the USA have money and are prepared to distort the facts to fit their purposes. We shouldn't be surprised by that.

I don't automatically dismiss something that isn't peer-reviewed. Julian Jaynes was not peer-reviewed yet his theories on consciousness are a hugely valuable addition to science. But it's an indication that the authors were scared of what the peer review might say. It is an indication of the levels of dishonesty involved in the publication of that study.

 

[TruXta]

That means nothing at all. There are virtually no fields where it is actually possible to produce 8,000 publications in a lifetime. That's one a day throughout a career, ffs! It's a sign of someone who puts his own name on other people's work quite a lot. 100 first author papers is the maximum you could possibly produce off the back of your own research, unless they're all useless think pieces.

You might wanna think about this again, ymu.

 

[frogwoman]

Are the washington post or wherever else his screeds have appeared in racist papers?

Of course they were dishonest. But scientific research as a whole is hardly free from that, is it? Science is not some perfect objective thing. Science is carried out by humans, some of whom have very very nasty agendas.

what phil (I think) is argueing is that the dominant ideology of capitalism lends itself rather well to "debates" around race, IQ, intelligence, etc. The fact that these theories are taken seriously is not a result of capitalism but it would be taken a hell of a lot less seriously without it.

(I'm not for a moment saying that i believe their shit btw)

 

[littlebabyjesus]

As I'm sure you know, the level of scientific understanding demonstrated by the mainstream press is generally appalling. All kinds of crap is reported in national newspapers.

Ben Goldacre has a whole website dedicated to it. But yes, I would certainly question the motives of the Washington Post or any other newspaper who reported this study as fact. They need to have a long hard look at themselves.

 

[phildwyer]

If you believe that the physical structure of the brain produces ideas (as mainstream scientists do), then why wouldn't you believe that differences in the physical structure of the brain lead to different levels of "intelligence" (as Onarchy does)? His ideas are implicit in the "scientific" approach per se.

 

[frogwoman]

As I'm sure you know, the level of scientific understanding demonstrated by the mainstream press is generally appalling. All kinds of crap is reported in national newspapers.

That doesn't disprove that what's considered scientific or not is influenced by the ideology of the time. I'm not endorsing his shit or saying that all scientists believe it.