Topic: Genes and Behavior

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Year: - Current Postings - 1999/2000 - 1998 - 1997 - 1996 - 1995

Name: Candi Corcoran
Username: ccorcora@coe.drexel.edu
Subject: re: Ann's question
Date: Mon Mar 13 21:13:45 EST 1995
Comments:
I think everything would be exactly the same.

Name: Kiri Weaver
Username: kweaver@cc.brynmawr.edu
Subject: ann's question
Date: Wed Mar 15 10:55:40 EST 1995
Comments:
Would it? What is the correlation, for example, of "intelligence" and schizophrenia? ...and suicide? Intelligence can be a very difficult power to control.

Name: Candi Corcoran
Username: ccorcora@coe.drexel.edu
Subject: Kiri's question
Date: Fri Mar 17 15:37:22 EST 1995
Comments:
I'm not certain there is a correlation...let me write you.

Name: Barry Robinson
Username: rbr@ruph.cornell.edu
Subject: Gould and the Bell Curve
Date: Mon Mar 20 14:13:42 EST 1995
Comments:
Stephen J. Gould has written two magazine articles on the Bell Curve. One is in the Nov. 28th issue of the New Yorker, and the other is a fairly recent issue of Natural History (I forget which month.) He also wrote "The Mismeasure of Man" back in the early eighties which is as good a refutation of the Bell Curve as you are likely to find. (Of course, I must admit at this point that I have not yet read the Bell Curve -- I refuse to buy it and I don't frequent libraries much these days. Oh well.) One of his points is that one has to view IQ as immutable in order for the arguements in TBC to stand up, but that it has been shown that test scores can be improved by training. (People claim that SAT scores are roughly indicative of IQ, and there are numerous courses that claim to raise your SAT scores.) So, we could raise everyone's IQ by 10% fairly simply. I don't think there would be much difference in society. Doubling everyone would be another matter.

Name: Lauren Lock
Username: llock@inforamp.net
Subject: intelligence
Date: Thu Apr 6 11:21:15 EDT 1995
Comments:
my interpretation of the observations is that the definition of 'intelligence' is in itself limited. It is an EXTREMELY arbitrary concoction to ensure that we all remain white sheep. It is a credit to humanity that creativity and insight prevail and yes, flourish, when our limits are and have been so predetermined for us, Imagine what we could accomplish as a species if we allowed ourselves to.

Name: Candi Corcoran
Username: ccorcora@coe.drexel.edu
Subject: Ahhh...finally some sense.
Date: Mon Apr 10 12:53:18 EDT 1995
Comments:
As reported on page A35 of the April 7th edition of ³The Chronicle of Higher Education,² Andrew Hacker, a political scientist who writes frequently about race, says he can undermine the thesis of The Bell Curve by ranking various white ethnic groups by th

Name: Candi Corcoran
Username: ccorcora@coe.drexel.edu
Subject: Oops :^ D
Date: Mon Apr 10 12:59:21 EDT 1995
Comments:
(continuation of previous message) their college graduation rates. their college graduation rates.

Name: Denis Breglia
Username: breglid@aol.com
Subject: Bell Curve
Date: Tue Apr 18 23:08:12 EDT 1995
Comments:
The first message of "The Bell Curve" is that "IQ Rules" The racist stuff that follows gets all of the attention. I believe that the warning of a future USA being a no-middle-class plutocracy based on IQ should be taken seriously.

Name: Paul Grobstein
Username: pgrobste@brynmawr.edu
Subject: Bell Curve
Date: Fri Apr 21 12:09:01 EDT 1995
Comments:
Needless to say, at the bottom line, I'm with Lauren Lock. Humans can be, are, and SHOULD be much more than what is measured on IQ tests. Making this argument as loudly, clearly, and compellingly as possible is, as I see it, the only effective way to me

Name: Paul Grobstein
Username: pgrobste@brynmawr.edu
Subject: Bell Curve
Date: Fri Apr 21 12:12:11 EDT 1995
Comments:
... the only effective way to combat Dennis Breglia's appropriate concerns that our culture is moving towards an IQ based plutocracy. I've added a link to my original letter to expand on the thought that knowing something about biology provides a strong

Name: Paul Grobstein
Username: pgrobste@brynmawr.edu
Subject: Bell Curve
Date: Fri Apr 21 12:14:03 EDT 1995
Comments:
... argument in this regard. (yes, we'll fix this system so it stops cutting off lines)

Name: Paul Grobstein
Username: pgrobste@brynmawr.edu
Subject: The bulletin board
Date: Sun May 14 11:44:17 EDT 1995
Comments:
We've changed the bulletin board posting form. This is a test to see whether it is working better. It doesn't word wrap at the end of lines as you enter them, but you can see all of what you're writing if you use the bars at the side of the form, and keep everything visible horizontally if you use carriage returns. Try it. I think you'll like it.

Name: Richard Ball
Username: rball@iafrica.com
Subject: Bell Curve
Date: Sun Aug 6 06:04:34 EDT 1995
Comments:
This debate provides an interesting commentary on American responses to potential paradigm shifts. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions comes to mind. But without commenting on the relative merits of this discussion, there appears to be rich pickings somewhere for a thesis on the effects of relatively objective science confronting subjective conventional morality. Iconoclasts of popular wisdom are to be found not only here - the debate about cold fusion provides another fascinating area of confrontation between conventional science, and Don Quixote with a raised (and rather unsteady) alternative view. Interesting debate!!!!

Name: Tony Fantillo
Username: tfantill@cln.etc.bc.ca
Subject: The Bell Curve
Date: Tue Aug 22 19:42:18 EDT 1995
Comments:
The Bell Curve (actual) is a societal construct. The people that originated the Bell Curve never meant to use it the way we do today. What the curve does, to me, is LIMIT everyone's intelligence. To most people, unless you fall in the higher category, whAt it says is that you'll never amount to more then the curve tells you, which is pure garbage. I don't know if any of you have read Jeffrey Howard from the Efficacy Institute but if you have not I would highly recommend it. Jeffrey has a lot to say to us about intelligence. By the way Jeffrey is a social scientist who is quite vocal on this topic.

Name: Ira
Username: iraweiss@gwis2.circ.gwu.edu
Subject: Bell Curve
Date: Tue Sep 12 19:48:24 EDT 1995
Comments:
Professor Grobsetein's letter regarding G and the tests that are reputed to measure it is most astute, and I agree with much of what the good professor had to say. However I do have one question. He points out that his experience in that Middle School confirmed for him that such tests measure only the ability of the test taker to succeed at such tests. To the extent that results appear to correlate with various more life-relevant factors, he suggests that such corre- lations are due solely to the his second discovery; that poor results cause low self esteem, thus affecting aspirations, affectations and presumably self fulfilling low expectations. However, the SAT tests, the premier example of such G loaded exams, was standardized by correlating it with college success and grades. In these early validity studies the students were not made aware of their scores. Nevertheless those SATs predicted college success better than high school grades, admission interviews, socio-economic standing or any linear combination of the above. Questions: How did those SAT scores affect the test takers self-esteem without the test takers being aware of their scores? and why is Professor Grobstein so much more willing to draw conclusions from his rather poorly controlled experience teaching in one Middle School than in the results of the much better controlled original SAT valididty studies?

Name: Mead Walker
Username: dmead@omni.voicenet.com
Subject: Re: The Bell Curve
Date: Fri Nov 24 12:54:50 EST 1995
Comments:
The discussion of The Bell Curve starts of with consideration of IQ scores and personal characteristics that those scores are correlated with. The writer makes an excellent point that tends to be overlooked whenever this kind of correlation is used as evidence for some argument. The causality of the relationship does not flow from the correlation. He points out that the IQ score could be a cause of the person's lack of sucess rather than an effect. We live in a stratefied society characterized by a tremendous, and growing, gap between rich and poor, sucessful and unsucessful. All of the behavior, e.g., test scores, documented in books such as this can be analyzed as an effect of this development instead of as a cause. Of course, defining it as a cause has an obvious ideological value.

Name: Tom Eirik Gjerdrum
Username: tokgjm95@student.ume.se
Subject: Bell curve
Date: Tue Nov 28 19:38:00 EST 1995
Comments:
Thanks to the jewish professor for sharing his personal experiences of teaching "the disabled", I I had rather hoped for a scientific and/or rational viewpoint. Anecdotal evidence/arguments is an intellectual dead end when faced with hard data. Example: "I tried penicillin three times, it did not work." I am suspicious and curious about the validity of "the bell curve" methods and conclusions. I am afraid you did not enlighten me. Tom Eirik Gjerdrum Sweden

Name: Devil's Advocate
Username: ann@serendip.brynmawr.edu
Subject: proof
Date: Wed Jun 7 15:29:36 EDT 1995
Comments:
What proof of this supposed "unpredictability" do we have? Perhaps we just have limited resources to evaluate this complex system!

Name: John Zavacki
Username: jzavacki@epix.net
Subject: Unpredictablility and Generative Learning
Date: Tue Jul 25 08:49:17 EDT 1995
Comments:
The Uncertainty Principle in physics, coupled with the quantum mechanics, fractal geometry, and the lack of predictability I have experienced in various modalities gives rise to the notion that I have learned as much by chance as I have by effort.

Name: Steve George
Username: SAGEORGE@AMHERST.EDU
Subject: Free will
Date: Mon Jul 31 14:53:30 EDT 1995
Comments:
I'm not clear why a mysterious, transcendent "self" solves the free will problem, since one could ask the same questions about it as about the person whose will it is ("What made the self will it?") Perhaps the problem could be analyzed this way: in the world of actions, we say one is acting freely if one can do what one wants to do. Why not say, along the same lines, that one has free will if one can will what one wants to will? That would take care of cases such as blackmail, addiction, and temptation in which we tend to say a person lacks free will. A person's will could then be determined, in that past history and present circumstances explain why one wants to will something. What alternative is there? Surely someone whose will is simply random, who jumps unpredictably from one desire to another, isn't usually thought of as having free will. Such a person is a wanton, a "space shot"! The person whose behavior is the most predictable is usually thought of as having the highest level of free will. So there seems to me to be no deep incompatibility between free will and determinism. What a great web page - nice job, Paul!

Name: Dave Beveridge
Username: dbeveridge@wesleyan.edu
Subject: Bell Curve
Date: Wed Nov 8 20:54:11 EST 1995
Comments:
Paul, Im here with a student, Lisa Braun, who is writng on the Bell Curve in a class project. In browsing Serendip a week or so ago, I ran across a dialog on it, but tonight we cant find it. Let me know how to we can reach it. The student is lbraun@wesleyan.edu DLB

Name: Tony Kaney
Username: akaney@brynmawr.edu
Subject: Genes and Environment
Date: Thu Nov 16 17:38:59 EST 1995
Comments:
I generally agree that neither genes nor environment "fully determines" the phenotype, and that both "influence" it, I also believe that genes set definite limits on how a phenotype is expressed. This constitutes, in one sense, a form of determination. As a strict materialist I see as an analogy the observation that the structure of a protein is quite variable depending upon the conditions of the local environment. There are, however, limits to such structural variation beyond which the molecule cannot go, no matter how extreme the environmental conditions become. Thus, at least the range of structural variability of the protein is "determined" by its molecular structure alone, with the position within the range determined by the interaction between structure and environment.

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