Organs can now be grown!

[Occhidiangela]

In the case of The Bell Curve a highly impactful OD would be "what is intelligence?"  The authors choose to define intelligence by a purely american, middle-upper class, predominantly white definition.  Obviously if you were to hold other people from different cultures/countries to this standard they would come out as extremely unintelligent.

Thank you for falling into the racial stereotype trap yourself.

Define white. ;) Better yet, quit while you are ahead on that score. ;)

secondly, despite what the authors attempt to portray there is really no concrete way in which we can accurately define intelligence.  there is also no research to suggest that genetics plays any direct role in ones intelligence.  (this is where nature and nurture come into play.)

The difficulty in definition is not the best reason to raise an eyebrow on that one, for my money. I share your misgivings about their findings.

Intelligence is not like height: we can't measure it as simply. Certain cognative functions and knowledge retention and display can indeed be measured, it is done frequently. The suitability of the test is of course an area of immense concenrn: what is it we actually measure with any test?

Digression: I was involved a few years ago with the card carrying smart guys who are rewriting the ASTB, a test battery that is being, once again, redesigned and improved upon to better screen candidates for Flight Training. The process of validation will take five years, once the final form is approved. Tests themselves are sensitive to inducing errors in one's conclusions, and in some cases they are predictors to but "a standard deviation." But I digress.

What is extremely hard to quantify and isolate, and to find an audit trail for, is potential intelligence. Nurture and nature combine, it is not a nurture versus nature problem.

Example: The capacity to learn multiple languages varies in potential AND opportunity. Some folks are more naturally apt, but if not exposed at an early age, may never have that potential tapped at all, or have it tapped only partially. Does that make them more or less intelligent? How did we ever measure the raw potential for language? Can we even do that? Or, can we do it "within this error band." The problem comes to policy, which has to be explained to those who don't bother to take the time to understand just what those error bands are, or mean, and the non objective meanings associated with test scores and labels.

What appears to be evident is that many people appear to have a reasoning ceiling. The cause and effect of that, however, isn't answered by The Bell Curve's study, for my money. I don't think it's answered anywhere, successfully.

The authors believed that different races genetics attributed to their intellectual prowess.  they let their bias effect their research in how they defined their operational definitions.  and then used the same research to justify and rationalize the belief they had all along.

I'll suggest that they isolated variables without effectively accounting for how the multiple variables interact with one another. That undermined their case. Intelligence determination, versus educational level, is one of those high order polynomials that one could try to solve for at the expense of one's sanity. :blink:

Oh, yeah, the agenda fairly leapt off of the pages.

My feeling was that the process used was "we see an outcome, lets find the data that shows how we think that outcome arrived" rather than "how did this outcome arrive?"

Now, let's talk about second hand smoke fear mongering, shall we? ;)

Better yet, let's quit while we are ahead.

Occhi