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Use and misuse of IQ tests - An epilogue (Post No. 100)

I would like to start this story from the final few points that need for synthesis, have been omitted in the course of this long saga, which may help to better understand the implications of the measurement of human intelligence by the samples of determinism that We met in previous games and we will provide an interpretive trail for the rest of this particular story:

" We know what the weakness mental and there arose the suspicion that all the people who are unable to adapt to their environment, which are less to the conventions of society or civil life, are the weak mental "HH Goddard, 1914.

" Not all criminals are feeble-minded but all feeble-minded people are potential criminals. That every feeble-minded woman is a prostitute potential, it would hardly challenged by someone. The moral sense as that of the business or the social or any thought process than other is a function of intelligence. Morality can not flourish and thrive if the child remains intelligence. "LM Terman, 1916.

Intelligence is so elusive and indefinable entity that can take the form that each prefers. Attribute identification with the moral conduct and adherence to social conventions today seems completely arbitrary and pointless, but maybe, deep down, the spirit of that time is not yet totally extinct and probably be wrong to underestimate the deteriorating effects that these visions compliance and approvals can produce today. You can now get an idea of \u200b\u200bwhere in reality the application of biological determinism in the social sciences went to parry, and those abuses may be committed within this conceptual framework. In his monumental work
measurement of intelligence on behalf of the army, RM Yerkes went to meet some disappointment: while most of the recruits was placed just above the limit of moron with a mental age of 13 years, including conscientious objectors, for political reasons as much as A 59% obtained a score, the higher the scale, and even the rebels and the government had fully a score higher than average. Yerkes but still found a way to comfort his prejudices, as usual, thanks to companies that meet the troops on their way:

" data results from an examination of prostitutes, according to the tests confirm the conclusion of the army, obtained test administered to civilians with prostitutes various parts of the country, that they are 30 to 60 percent deficient, and for the most senior moron, and that 15 to 25 per cent of all prostitutes are mentally capable of so low that it is wise (as the rest is possible under the laws of many states) imprison permanently in institutions for mentally weak . "RM Yerkes, 1921.
To take full advantage of this statement should make the effort to imagine the army personnel who gathers the prostitutes in the area, to wait in a big room and submit to the tests of IQ (and perhaps include an expression of man's work ...).

Yerkes was a prerequisite for the Immigration Restriction Act of 1924, and for a variety of eugenic laws enacted by various states in the U.S. in a few years. The law of Virginia for the forced sterilization of carriers of hereditary defects, real or fake, it was enacted in 1924, and was the first person convicted of an eighteen year old white named Carrie Buck, a recluse in the Colony for Epileptics and weak state of mind. His case was taken to appeal to the Supreme Court of the United States in 1927, and that was the litmus test for the validity of the law. The case of Carrie Buck would not have anything special had it not been for this historical circumstance, in turn linked to the chilling words written by Chief Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, then one of the most famous lawyers of America, at the conclusion of the proceedings for the defense of the law of Virginia, who became a kind of manifesto of the American eugenics movement: "Three generations of imbeciles are enough." Carrie Buck
Both his mother Emma Buck, then fifty-, were considered half-wit, having scored a mental age of nine and less than eight years, respectively, to test Stanford-Binet. The third generation of imbeciles, crucial to tip the scales of justice toward the sterilization was made up of six months by his daughter Carrie, Vivian Buck, who had been diagnosed with a mental impairment similar to a social worker.
In 1980, Dr. K. Ray Nelson, who became director of the Lynchburg Hospital where Carrie was sterilized, he discovered that the law of 1924 was applied until 1972, more than 4,000 forced sterilizations in Virginia. Carrie Buck was still alive and Dr. Ray Nelson decided to go see her, followed by other researchers and some journalists, and the case returned to light.
Carrie Buck was then an old simple and not very sociable, he read the newspapers and was regularly both with her sister Doris who with a neighbor that the more educated to help solve the puzzle. The first impression of Ray Nelson was confirmed by the psychologists who examined in old age: it was neither delayed nor suffering from any mental illness. So what we did in 1924 inmate in an institution for weak-minded?
The fact that this story mothers, daughters and grandchildren all have the same surname might have given you a clue already. Carrie was one of several illegitimate children of Emma Buck, was bred by the Dodds family, and lived with foster parents until seventeen, when she was raped by a relative of Dodds. Expectations from the hearing which decided the institution is not no diagnosis of mental deficiency, except for "is" the adoptive family, who had requested admission "in a school or somewhere," just want to remove from home compromising the prominence of her womb, and to protect the identity of the rapist.
At the time of first trial at the court of Virginia, 1924, the small Vivian Buck, the "third generation of imbeciles" was about six months, and the testimony of the social worker Miss Wilhelm: " It 'difficult to judge the chances of a child so small, but it seems to me that it is not exactly a normal child. For the look. I must say that, perhaps, the fact of knowing the mother can influence me in this point of view, but I saw the girl with the baby daughter of Mrs. Dodds, who has three only days older than she, and there is a difference between the two is quite marked in the development. This happened about two weeks ago. There is something that is not perfectly normal in appearance, but what exactly I can not say "is the whole of the evidence against the child's mental retardation. Nothing but the file shows.
Vivian Buck died from an intestinal infection at only eight years, and Paul Lombardo, who studied the case in 1980 , managed to retrieve the report cards of his brief two years of schooling. Except for one D in math, his ratings were between B and C in all subjects, with A in conduct. It was a brilliant scholar, as well as fellow school we all had just enough votes they obtained.
Nothing is known of Emma Buck, but at this point it is easy to doubt that his alleged mental impairment is identified only by his conduct low morale.
"Three generations of imbeciles are enough. "And probably in this soria there is no fool, not one. Two generations of children born out of wedlock enough. Carrie Buck was sterilized at twenty, and his family was considered a health hazard mind of the nation, but it was probably the sanctimonious puritanism of the United States to be threatened, not the intellectual quality of the country.
But it's not over yet. When, in 1980, Dr. Ray Nelson interviewed the protagonists and survivors to reconstruct the events of trial at the Supreme Court, the "Three generations of imbeciles are enough" of Justice Holmes, Doris Buck, Carrie's sister, suddenly burst into tears. Suddenly, he understood why she and her husband were never able to have children who did so wish, gave her account of that phrase hit the sadness of a lifetime. He remembered that day, a girl, took her to the hospital saying she had to be operated on for appendicitis, and connected everything.
"Three generations of imbeciles are enough."
Sister Carrie Buck was sterilized without her knowledge.

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Carnival

At the end of 2010, the year of biodiversity, readers point out the special Carnival, which will conduct bi-monthly throughout 2011. The best blog articles on the subject specialist will exhibit starting today. For this first round of the blog host is "short-sighted watchmaker, found one of my favorites right here. I started reading the contributions and I recommend a visit there to read and find food for thought at will. Have fun.

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Biodiversity Use and misuse of IQ test - Part 6 - Modern Times

Sir Cyril Burt ended his day by defeating, reducing fraud to support his convictions, but his idea that the low values \u200b\u200bof IQ were the stigmata through which recognize individuals inevitably destined for the lower layers of company had already marked the existence of a large number of people: the examination eleven plus ", argued that every student at the age of eleven, was the incarnation of the idea of \u200b\u200bintelligence as a unilinear scale value drive on which the people once and for all, and separated on 20% of kids who could have access to the classical schools and university, the remaining 80% considered inappropriate for higher education for schools and technical remained in force in British schools from 1944 until the mid-60s, who knows how frustrating potential talent. In addition, the
g, 's "general intelligence" Spearman resurrected more times: in 1969, Arthur Jensen published in the United States How Much Can We Boost IQ and Scholastic Achievement? that caused a sensation because it sounded like a definitive demonstration of lower innate intelligence of blacks, with 15 points of deviation from the average white (remember to historicize to better understand the context in which certain statements are taken on public opinion: we are in the battle for civil rights and Martin Luther King was assassinated a few months); in his work the g shone like a lighthouse which illuminates the universe could even be the measure of value not only of humans but of all living things, of course, arranged in a linear scale from bottom to top. Feel it here:
" The common features of experimental tests developed by psychologists compared, most of which clearly distinguish, say, chickens, dogs, dogs from monkeys and apes from chimpanzee, indicate that they are roughly ordered along a dimension g g (...) The can be seen as a concept with a broad-based interspecies biological culminating in primates. "
On this caricature of evolution as a linear scale of progress I have already written in the past, and this case is one of the most embarrassing I've ever met. Jensen picked up all errors that we encountered repeatedly in this series of six stories of determinism: the reification (in this case, runaway ) g of Spearman mathematical abstraction from a real mental function, the classification of complex entities (people) along a linear scale on the basis a single numerical value, the category mistake to use the causal determinants of differences within groups to explain the differences between groups (values \u200b\u200bof the heritability of IQ within groups to claim a genetic basis for differences between blacks and whites), the confusion between "hereditary" and "inevitable and unchangeable."
But guess what are the most solid data on the heritability of IQ is based on which Jensen? Again, studies on identical twins fake Burt: fraud is discovered only a few years later. Find
here a reply to the criticisms of Gould in which Jensen, in my view, is given in the foot more than once. In 1994
the g resurrected again when Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray published, amid great fanfare, The Bell Curve , despite the pervasive advertising that accompanied him, this text also presented no new arguments with respect to what has been seen, covering the old prejudices in a most modern statistical framework, but used with evident bad faith: it hides the weakness of the correlations, it is perfectly silent data against known and available, and so on. The Bell Curve pen had little academic value, and it was nothing more than advocacy of a cause: the social inequalities are justified by the accumulation in the lower strata of society intellectually less gifted individuals, who report their inferior genes to their offspring, and blacks are burdened with those fateful and inescapable 15 points in less than an average IQ than whites to make any vain hope of social redemption. And 'no need, therefore the community to engage in mass education programs and invest resources in welfare, social inequalities because they are irreversible. But because this argument is sustainable, is once again must occur four basic premises that we have always met since the beginning of this long discourse - that intelligence is governed by any single factor and unit - which has measured and classified - that both hereditary and genetically determined - that is unchangeable. If any of these assumptions were false, the whole building would collapse. Herrnstein and Murray defended nor ever discussed any of these critical foundations of their work, just gave it for granted. The only point on which we spent was to demonstrate that the results of IQ tests were not subject to statistical distortion, so if the average IQ of blacks was 85, and the average of 100 whites, the difference was not considered reliable and sitematiche subject to distortion. But if a century of fine psychometricians are dedicated to this measurement technique, I'd be very surprised if they brought with them yet due to defects in method as distorting the results! What The Bell Curve that refused to discuss is if the blacks are, on average, a score of 85 and 100 whites, it's because the blacks live, on average, in worse social conditions than whites? And 'this is the distortion that interests us, not about the flaws of the measure.
Finally, the sample from which, months ago, had left the starting point for all this long review of the topic: Professor Richard Lynn, University of Dublin, which recently caused a bit of fuss in Italy, saying that the Southerners are less intelligent than northern Italians ( touch ). For him to classify peoples and nations based on the values \u200b\u200bof IQ is a true passion. In his most famous book, IQ and the Wealth of Nations (2002), has under any differences in wealth or poverty, backwardness and progress, the average IQ of nation by nation. It is worth just doing a few methodological remarks: Lynn ranking based on their average IQ 185 countries, the data available were actually 81. For the other 104 nations, or the value is extrapolated from other sources, or obtained as the average of neighboring countries (some of which, it must be assumed, in turn, the data will have been produced in the same way).
First observation: if here, instead of IQ, it comes to productivity of dairy cows, no Livestock magazine would never have agreed to publish data obtained in this manner.
Second observation: the method by which missing data are obtained, assumes that there is a relationship between ethnic groups, or at least geographically close, and their values \u200b\u200bof QI, which is the thesis that you would like to demonstrate, the circularity of the demonstration is not involved As often happens, the interpretation of results, but even in their production, in the etymologically strict sense of "pre-judgment." But these
sterile exercises of classification for groups of human value, from time to time brings at least some positive note.
For example, to the "fateful 15 IQ points" you end up discovering that the average difference of 15 points, actually use it quite often.
of 15 points increased the average IQ in some countries in the 40 years following the end of World War II, in parallel with the improvement of general conditions of social structure and education, and 15 points is the difference in average IQ between Catholics and Protestants in 'Northern Ireland, in favor of the Protestants (1). The Northern Irish Catholics and Protestants are not two different ethnic groups: unless you want to argue that the religious sect is genetically determined, it will be worthwhile to recognize that the 15 points of IQ are a legacy of more or less standardized featuring groups socially disadvantaged?

(1): Jacoby R. and N. Glauberman: The Bell Curve Debate . Times Books, New York, 1995.

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WITH STUDENTS IN THE FIGHT

http://tv.repubblica.it/palinsesto/2010 -11-30/9574

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