To: puroresu
Read Stephen Jay Gould's with caution. His "science" was heavily influenced by his commitment to Marxism/socialism: Oh, puh-LEAZE...
That's one of the sloppiest, silliest, longest-reaching bits of nonsense I've read in a long time.
Short form: The author, a socialist/Marxist, tries hard to claim Gould as "one of their own" in order to add some shred of respectability to their ranks, through the goofy tactic of a) admitting that "Gould did not openly identify himself as a Marxist nor did he claim to use dialectical reasoning" (because he *wasn't*), b) in the author's view some of Gould's arguments could be called "dialectic" in form (whoop-de-doo, it's an empty buzzword in this context), and c) Gould rejects attempts to stratify society as if certain classes, races, or genders were predestined to be above the others, and (gasp) so did Marx. Well so do most decent people of any philosophy, duh.
Swallowing this idiot author's "conclusion" about Gould (i.e. that he was therefore a flag-waving closet Marxist) is the height of gullibility. And since when have we believed Marxists?
On a side note, he completely misrepresents punctuate equilibrium as well.
To: Ichneumon
What is your opinion of his work? (not just this particular book)
141 posted on
02/09/2004 9:10:04 PM PST by
cyborg
To: Ichneumon
If you're impressed with Gould's work, fine. I've never found his obsession with equality to be founded on anything more than his ideology.
Races of people are simply different. Some excel at some things, others at other things. I don't particularly care to go around dwelling on superiority or inferiority. But the idea that with all the observable physical differences between the races, they would somehow manage to be absolutely equal in intelligence seems to me to be nothing more than an ideology.
No one has any problem admitting that some individuals have greater intelligence than others, but it's considered mandatory that we all recite as a mantra that, collectively, the individual members of each race added up would have the exact same group IQ.
Given the huge gaps we observe everyday between individuals in many different areas (intelligence, initiative, personal conduct, strength, etc.) it would stretch credulity to think that each racial and ethnic group is collectively precisely equal to every other such group in all those categories. It's like arguing that while some football players are better than others, every football team is of exactly equal skill with every other football team.
I don't pretend to have all the answers on this issue, but it's worth noting that it's the egalitarian side (Gould, etc.) who seem to want to stifle research into these issues.
People should be judged as individuals, but that doesn't mean we should expect just as many whites or East Asians to be in the NBA as blacks. And it may be possible (shudder) that whites are simply better at some things as a group than other races. That doesn't give whites the right to lord it over other people, or mean that other people are inferior as human beings. But in all likelihood, there are things in this world which whites, on average, do better, which is a more logical explanation for what we see when we look outside at the real world than some theory that climate and terrain are responsible (though in our Politically Correct world the latter would be the one to earn a Pulitzer Prize).
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