Posted on 04/10/2021 7:15:03 AM PDT by SunkenCiv
The core doctrine of the orthodoxy in the social sciences is a particular understanding of human equality. I don’t mean equality in the sense of America’s traditional ideal – all are equal in the eyes of God, have equal inherent dignity, and should be treated equally under the law – but equality in the sense of sameness. Call it the sameness principle: In a properly run society, people of all human groupings will have similar life outcomes. Individuals might have differences in abilities, the orthodoxy (usually) acknowledges, except for undeniable ones such as height, upper body strength, and skin color. Inside the cranium, all groups are the same.
The sameness principle theoretically applies to any method of grouping people, but three of them have dominated the discussion for a long time: gender, race, and socioeconomic class. Rephrased in terms of those groups, the sameness premise holds that whatever their gender, race, or the class they are born into, people in every group should become electrical engineers, nurture toddlers, win chess tournaments, and write sci-fi novels in roughly equal proportions. They should have similar distributions of family income, mental health, and life expectancy. Large groups differences in these life outcomes are prima facie evidence of social, cultural, and governmental defects that can be corrected by appropriate public policy.
Murray travelled this road long ago in The Bell Curve. He does not want to rehash those arguments. But he takes dead aim at the fundamental "scientific" criticism that was levelled at The Bell Curve, most notably by Stephen Jay Gould, who was a prominent enough public intellectual that his criticisms were parroted immediately by legions of Murray's critics desperate to anathematize his work. This attack rested largely on an open conspiracy of Murray's critics to misrepresent his work by asserting (falsely) that Murray had argued that racial differences in tested IQ were mostly or entirely genetic and that IQ was mostly or entirely inherited. Murray, of course, had expressly and repeatedly argued that genetic inheritance and environmental factors both play a role, and he was agnostic about the differential impact of each.
Apart from the misrepresentation of Murray's work, the critics also added the assertion that "race" was an artificial and meaningless construct and that the "races" had not been separated nearly long enough for significant genetic differences to have arisen. The implication of this view is that all relevant differences among "racial" groups are therefore cultural in origin. When we stop to look back on the debate now, the sheer intellectual dishonesty of this criticism should be apparent. Gould, et. al., were conceding that the "races" might well differ in skin color, in facial features, in tendencies towards typical body types, in average height and weight, etc. An expert can take a skeleton and, with high probability, identify its "race." One can identify "race" with a high degree of probability through any number of physical tests. Murray's critics conceded all that. But they argued that none of these things were important enough to matter with regard to social functioning and outcomes, and that it must be categorically asserted in principle that not enough time had elapsed for mental functioning to have differentiated. This was really a perverse and inverted form of the "motte and bailey" argument. A sweeping and demonstrably false proposition is offered -- here, that "the races" are indistinguishable -- and when the self-evident falsity of that proposition is pointed out, the critics fall back immediately on the motte: the core argument that no argument about differentiation about mental functioning can be admitted, and that to even raise the possibility is to commit an unforgiveable racist offense. These critics essentially conceded that everything except mental functioning had differentiated, but that mental questions are simply off limits to all non-racist people. The problem is that this proposition then gets turned into the sameness principle, which is the foundation of modern leftist intersectionality theory.
Murray's target in Human Diversity is the sameness principle. The question is how to approach the subject without reigniting The Bell Curve controversy. In that regard, Human Diversity is brilliantly framed. With regard to gender, Murray focuses on temperament and interests. He looks to the current neurobiological work on differences in brain structure and function between men and women, hormonal differences, differences in emotional sensitivities and personality profiles, and differences in social functioning across cultures. He is careful to always acknowledge a high degree of overlap and the presence of outliers in both sexes, but on average over large groups, men and women are incontrovertibly different in the physical structure and functioning of their brains and in temperament and interest orientation. These differences in turn correlate with in differential tendencies in social expression. The sameness principle is false. With regard to race, Murray focuses on the growing recognition of racial differences in myriad medical domains. Not only are there myriad racial correlations with specific conditions (Tay Sachs, Sickle Cell Anemia, etc.) but people of different races often have different responses to medicines and different prognoses with various courses of treatment. The sameness principle is not only false; it will kill people if doctors are blind to the differences. This is a recognized issue in pharmaceutical research; gender and racial differences are real, however much that may be anathema to the woke cultists.
Mitochondrial Eve still lurks in the background. Our ancestors survived a evolutionary bottleneck, perhaps a near-extinction event, within the past 300,000 years or so. We are all pretty close cousins in terms of geological time. The question is the amount of differentiation that has occurred among widely scattered breeding populations in periods measured in tens of thousands of years. Murray touches at some length on the various out-of-Africa migrations, with Denisovians, Neanderthals and modern homo sapiens all factoring in. I found it a useful summation of recent work across many related fields. The point is, 50,000 years is ample time for very significant differentiation to have occurred. The next question is what were the different selection pressures in different environments that pushed widely separated bands of out-of-Africa hominid migrants in different directions.
Worked in preview.
Google somehow changed the way they link/store images so there’s no shortage of linked images on FR that don’t display initially [or sometimes ever] on my somewhat locked down machines.
They had bigger brains than we do today.
(Bigger brains = higher IQ)
You’re probably right ... while I wasn’t there, I’m guessing they weren’t voting Democrat! BWAHAHAHAHAHA!!
alrighty then...
that explains my posture, knuckle dragging, and the appreciation for cooking over a wood fire...
Birds have a higher body mass to brain ratio then humans.
They are not exactly running the planet.
Because most of their brain mass is focused (pardon the pun) on seeing rather then cognitive reasoning.
Might have been the same case with the Neanderthal who possibly had better vision then the Sapiens.
Or not.
Until a decade ago they were arguing about if Neanderthal could talk.
What is for sure today is tomorrows not really.
Genesis 61 And it came to pass, when men began to multiply on the face of the earth, and daughters were born unto them,
2 That the sons of God saw the daughters of men that they were fair; and they took them wives of all which they chose.
3 And the Lord said, My spirit shall not always strive with man, for that he also is flesh: yet his days shall be an hundred and twenty years.
4 There were giants in the earth in those days; and also after that, when the sons of God came in unto the daughters of men, and they bare children to them, the same became mighty men which were of old, men of renown.<
Use the King James Version. All of these new age translations are parsed and perfumed hogwash.
My theory is certainly not inconsistent with either Scripture or current scientific thought. And recessive Neanderthal genes would explain why the ‘giants’ seem to keep popping up after the flood.
The word, “fair”, in verse 2, KJV, means, in Hebrew, “beautiful”, according to Strong’s Concordance. Brown-Driver-Briggs further defines it as good, pleasant to the sight.
Please tell me that you’re not one of those KJV people who refuse to believe you can look to the original Hebrew word to see what a word really means.
Only because I cannot read Hebrew, and even then the ancient usage of a Hebrew word is subject to conjecture.
I like the KJV because it doesn’t change. You have to learn the language it is written in- 16th century English. The words don’t change meaning with the times. The succession of modern translations are linguistically out of date by the time they are on the market.
Still nothin’, and when I copied the link and tried to open it in a tab, I got “Access to www.sciencedaily.com was denied”.
The Serpent and his disciples have attempted again and again to thwart God’s plan... Those ‘fallen angles’ of Genesis 6 have been judged as the devil to death ... This flesh journey is for all souls the opportunity to chose life eternal or getting blotted out forever... The Scripture indicates, the ‘tree of knowledge of good and evil’ and his best preachers/priests, planted some seeds along the way .. Much higher than average intellect .. always stirring up some scam pretending to be what they never were.
I have waited for decades to see how the gods of science were going to evolve their myth to explain what the Scripture foretold. Time is not on their side...
I right clicked and selected open image in new tag and the went to that new tab and copied that link to post in the usual image script format.
Try DNA tests for present members of the Democrat Party in Congress. More like 98% Neanderthal, 2%, not of this earth.
Pelosi, Stacey Abrams, Maxine Waters, Eliz. Warren, Sheila Lee-Jackson (no relation to the Confederate leaders, I assume), Biden, Harris, Coons, Whitehouse/Blumenthal, Schumer, etc. Any questions about where they came from?
Blacks have less Neanderthal DNA than anyone else on the planet.
Ahhhhh back in the day when short stories was like reading a whole book, never saw this one Thanks great read...
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