Talk:History of the race and intelligence controversy/Archive 2

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Comment

I found a review of the books of Miele and Tucker on the online version of The Occidental Quarterly. I was previously unfamiliar with this journal. Lynn is on its editorial board and Rushton has published there. The point of view of the review was very much in line with what many of the editors here have been saying - ridiculing Tucker's book and praising the account of Jensen's life. On the other hand it seem to be allied to American White nationalism.

As a compromise, I think it might be permissible to have a completely separate section at the end of the article giving Jensen's autobigraphical account of how he views the history. It could be called Jensen on "Jensenism". Mathsci (talk) 14:44, 26 April 2010 (UTC)

I don’t see why there’s any need to split this part of the article into two sections. This method isn’t used by the other articles that David.Kane has mentioned which make use of primary sources and/or autobiographical material, such as the articles about Winston Churchill or Gandhi, so I don’t see why it should be necessary in this case. However, if the majority of other users here disagree with me about this, I’ll accept whatever the consensus is. --Captain Occam (talk) 14:56, 26 April 2010 (UTC)

No that is not the way wikipedia is edited. Better to take as examples politicians who've been involved in controversy and have subsequently written memoirs. Enoch Powell might be a good example. Mathsci (talk) 12:36, 27 April 2010 (UTC)

Why does it make any difference whether or not the person has been involved in controversy? The policy that you're basing your claim on, WP:RS, works exactly the same way regardless of whether the person has been involved in controversy or not. For you to claim otherwise would be worse that Wikilawyering; you would be literally making up non-existent policies out of thin air. --Captain Occam (talk) 15:29, 27 April 2010 (UTC)

<- Jensen's autobiographical statements are clearly primary sources as far as writing history is concerned: they are not necessarily reliable. That's why, for example, we have rules about sources for WP:BLP. Thus for biographies of living people we cannot use self-referential sources. That applies for example to the articles John Major or Margaret Thatcher, which are largely historical. Everything you need to read is here:

• Primary sources are very close to an event, often accounts written by people who are directly involved, offering an insider's view of an event, a period of history, a work of art, a political decision, and so on. An account of a traffic accident written by a witness is a primary source of information about the accident; similarly, a scientific paper is a primary source about the experiments performed by the authors. Historical documents such as diaries are primary sources.

Our policy: Primary sources that have been reliably published may be used in Wikipedia, but only with care, because it is easy to misuse them. Any interpretation of primary source material requires a reliable secondary source for that interpretation. A primary source can be used only to make descriptive statements that can be verified by any educated person without specialist knowledge. For example, an article about a novel may cite passages to describe the plot, but any interpretation needs a secondary source. Do not make analytic, synthetic, interpretive, explanatory, or evaluative claims about material found in a primary source. Do not base articles entirely on primary sources. Do not add unsourced material from your personal experience, as that would make Wikipedia a primary source of that material.

• Secondary sources are second-hand accounts, at least one step removed from an event. They rely for their material on primary sources, often making analytic or evaluative claims about them. For example, a review article that analyzes research papers in a field is a secondary source for the research.

Our policy: Wikipedia articles usually rely on material from secondary sources. Articles may include analytic or evaluative claims only if these have been published by a reliable secondary source.

• Tertiary sources are publications such as encyclopedias or other compendia that mainly summarize secondary sources. Wikipedia is a tertiary source. Many introductory undergraduate-level textbooks are regarded as tertiary sources because they sum up multiple secondary sources.

Our policy: Reliably published tertiary sources can be helpful in providing broad summaries of topics that involve many primary and secondary sources. Some tertiary sources may be more reliable than others, and within any given tertiary source, some articles may be more reliable than others. Wikipedia articles may not be used as tertiary sources in other Wikipedia articles, but are sometimes used as primary sources in articles about Wikipedia itself.

Thanks, Mathsci (talk) 15:57, 27 April 2010 (UTC)

Mathsci, I asked you if you could support your claim that whether or not a person is controversial makes a difference in what types of sources about them are and aren’t acceptable. You’ve responded by ignoring my question, and quoting a policy page that says nothing whatsoever about a person being controversial making a difference. Do you acknowledge that whether or not a person is controversial makes absolutely no difference in what types of sources can be used about them? --Captain Occam (talk) 17:20, 27 April 2010 (UTC)

WP:DNFTT. Mathsci (talk) 21:20, 27 April 2010 (UTC)

Are you accusing me of trolling for asking you to support the claim you’re making in this thread? --Captain Occam (talk) 22:48, 27 April 2010 (UTC)

You keep asking exactly the same question, and then keep ignoring my replies, which included above a precise statement of policy. But please also look at my detailed reply above concerning the changeability of Jensen's attitude over time. Anyway, what's in the article at the moment seems to be adequate. Mathsci (talk) 00:06, 28 April 2010 (UTC)

We should just have a link to the article on Jensen, for the biography of Jensen. This is an article on the history of a controversy so why aren't we using more historians as sources? This has nothing to do with how "controversial" Jensen is. it has to do with editors of an encyclopedia acknowledgin that the real experts on history, including reconstructing and interpreting history, are historians. It is not OUR task to take primary sources (e.g. what participants in the controversy) have said about it and edit it all together into a story we like - that is a flat out violation of NOR, no matter how the story ends. Better to base a history article on the research of professional historians. Slrubenstein | Talk 20:29, 28 April 2010 (UTC)

First a correction: An article about the history of a 20th and 21st century scientific debate, the participants in which are currently alive, does not require the special input of historians. The participants have written extensively about it, and their views are just as important. Moreover, to be precise, because I am the person who wrote the text in question, you can check for yourself to confirm that everything I wrote is near verbatim from the source. Here's the former article text again:

According to this autobiographical writings, during his year at the Center, Jensen "thought (and wrote) that it was unnecessary to invoke genetic causes for the observed racial differences in IQ, which I thought could be explained in terms of cultural bias in the tests and poor environmental opportunities for acquiring the particular knowledge and skills called for by conventional tests".[23] During that time, an invited presentation titled "How Much Can We Boost IQ and Scholastic Achievement?" came to the attention of the editors of the Harvard Educational Review, who asked Jensen to expand the presentation into a more comprehensive article for the Spring 1969 issue.[23] They specifically requested his view on the heritability of race differences, which he had not previously published.[23] The final paper was 125-pages, and according to Jensen covered four topics:

1. "experimental attempts to raise the IQ of children at risk for low IQ and poor scholastic performance by various psychological and educational manipulations had yielded little, if any, lasting gains in IQ or scholastic achievement"[23]

2. "individual differences in IQ have a high heritability (.70-.80, corrected for attenuation), but environment also plays an important part"[23]

3. "most of the exclusively cultural- environment explanations for racial differences in IQ and scholastic achievement were inconsistent and inadequate, so genetic as well as environmental factors should be considered"[23]

4. "certain abilities, particularly rote-learning and memory (i.e.. Level I ability) have only a weak relationship to IQ. which suggests that these Level I abilities might be used to compensate to some extent for low IQ (i.e.. Level II ability) and thereby make school instruction more beneficial for many children, regardless of their racial or social class background, who raw below average in Level II but are average or above in Level I."[23]

According to Jensen, the 5% of the article that covered race difference in IQ, in which he concluded that "The preponderance of the evidence is, in my opinion, less consistent with a strictly environmental hypothesis than with a genetic hypothesis, which, of course, does not exclude the influence of environment or its interaction with genetic factors"[24], aroused much attention because he had violated "the greatest taboo in the latter half of the twentieth century".[23] Jensen says this one aspect was blow up by the mass media, including coverage in TIME, Newsweek, LIFE, U.S. News & World Report, the New York Times Magazine, radio and TV. At Berkeley, where he was a professor, there was an "uproar" that lased for weeks, "with bands of demonstrators disrupting my classes, slashing all the tires on my car, and painting swastikas on my office door".[23] Jensen's mail was screened for explosives and he was placed under police protection.[23] His research at Berkeley was terminated with one school official explaining that "The Berkeley schools are a political unit, not a research institute."[23]

Obviously this isn't an editor-provided reconstruction from primary sources, but the straightforward account of an important POV. There is absolutely no sense in which this text is an WP:NOR violation nor a WP:V violation -- this can be confirmed from the source: [1] and from the deliberate overuse of quote -- and so the concerns about the source are have no policy implications.

Second: What is important from a policy perspective is to ensure that the view being expressed in this text isn't absent from the article, whatever the sources cited. I emphasize: the goal should be a solution to the WP:NPOV problem of excluding the POV expressed here, and ostensibly the POVs of the other sources being discussed above. The first step to solving that problem is to agree that there is an NPOV problem. Then we should work to find a solution. --DJ (talk) 04:40, 29 April 2010 (UTC)

Boy, you do not understand how historians work, and you do not understand our NOR policy. You write, "The participants have written extensively about it, and their views are just as important." Precisely! This is data And NOR tells us to be very careful about how we present raw data. Scholars who are trained in the appropriate fields analyze and interpret data. Wikipedia is not the place for an editor to forward his or her own interpretation of the data. I have never questioned that you were using real data. It is because you are using real data that i am concerned, that they way you present it in the article suggests a particular interpretation of the data. According to Wooldridge, a real historian, in the 1970s, both sides of the dispute came out with similar strongly personal statements denigrating the other side - overt scientific racism vs Marxist left-wing conpiracy. This included Jensen, Lewontin, Eysenck. Gottfredson in her 1998 article is repeating the statements of her side (Marxist left-wing conspiracy). All of these data need to be analyzed and iterpreted, which is what historians do. So all these strongly personal points of view are best summarised as briefly and as neutrally as possible - we should look for reliable secondary sources, preferably by trained historians.

DJ, on the Race and Intelligence page you supported our using statements by psychometricians, because they are the experts in IQ testing. Well, this is an article on history, and historians are the experts on history - yet now you say that their expertise is not relevant, that somehow you can interpret the data for us. This seems hyppocritical, but maybe i am misunderstanding you. But it certainly seems unencyclopedic, and raises serious NOR concerns. Slrubenstein | Talk 11:43, 29 April 2010 (UTC)

I was asked to comment about this issue. I am unfamiliar with the specific content, but I do know our content policies fairly well. I agree with SLR that we should be extremely cautious not to become historians ourselves by creating a "history" out of primary sources, regardless of how reliable they are. The most critical flaw with primary sources is that they lack perspective and context, and this is where the professional historian or scientist reviewing and writing about them adds his most valuable contribution. As a tertiary source, WP needs to rely on high quality reliable secondary sources who have already "digested" the raw data (i.e. the primary sources), selected the most relevant bits out of them, and put them in perspective for us. If we do this process on our own, we'd be engaged in original research. Crum375 (talk) 12:27, 29 April 2010 (UTC)

Agreed with Crum375. See WP:WEIGHT and WP:PSTS. ... Kenosis (talk) 13:32, 29 April 2010 (UTC)

(Outdent) I don’t think anybody’s arguing here that we ought to be reinterpreting primary sources. There are really three questions about this article:

1. Is the material quoted by DJ above, using Jensen’s autobiography as a source, an inappropriate reinterpretation of a primary source? Or does it fall within the limits of acceptable uses of primary material, along the lines of what’s in the Winston Churchill and Gandhi articles, which also contain content cited to these individuals’ autobiographies?
2. Given that the article currently presents a very negative perspective on a living individual (Arthur Jensen), and that this is not the only perspective that exists about him in the source literature, does WP:BLP require us to present other perspectives about him also? When DJ brought this question up at the reliable sources noticeboard, the opinion there was that compliance with BLP was more important than concerns about primary vs. secondary sources.
3. Is Mathsci correct that every source suggested thus far that portrays Jensen favorably is unacceptable for one reason or other? Sources that have been suggested thus far are Jensen’s autobiography, Gottfredson’s paper about the controversy over him, Eysenck’s book about this controversy, Snyderman and Rothman’s book about it, and the six other sources that Varoon Arya suggested here. If WP:BLP requires that we portray Jensen with some balance in this article, then we need to use at least one of these sources, but Mathsci has rejected all of them for miscellaneous reasons.

Based on the opinions expressed above by Maunus and SlimVirgin, it seems like the material quoted by DJ is acceptable (and also necessary in order to comply with BLP), since it makes it clear that these are Jensen’s own views on the matter rather than describing them as fact. I’m hoping you’ll agree with that also, but if you don’t, I’d appreciate you answering the other questions I mentioned here. --Captain Occam (talk) 15:32, 29 April 2010 (UTC)

I think the current sentence about Jensen's later self-justifications is ample. Any futher expansion would obviously have to be matched by similar statements from the autobiographical writings of scientists like Richard Lewontin, Leon Kamin and Stephen J. Gould, or anybody else for that matter. This history is not about whether Jensen or anybody else was right or not, but a record of historical events and the personages involved in them. Dj's edits are not allowable because they give WP:UNDUE emphasis to Jensen; they skew the article and are extremely biased to one point of view. Unless historians have said so, why should wikipedians attempt to evaluate his paper from 1969, in particular based on his own writings 30 years later? In fact, as far as the 1969 paper is concerned, according to secondary sources, the "Burt affair" at the time had the effect of casting major doubts on one of the main pieces of data for that article - Leon Kamin is recorded as having pointed that out at the time. Subsequent data, such as twin studies conducted 20 years later, cannot be used to comment on the debate in the 1970s: this is what Captain Occam and Distibutivejustice apparently want to do. This article is intended to chronicle the history. It is not an article trying to persuade readers that hereditarianism is correct or not; nor is it intended as an article to discuss the scientific subject of the debate and indeed whether there was any underlying science involved. A summary of additional material from the secondary source by Wooldridge is probably the right way to go now, given the advice of Slimvirgin, Maunus et al. According to them Adrian Wooldridge is a reliable source. If other editors here can provide evidence or arguments showing that he is an extreme left-wing Marxist historian, I'm sure this would be of general interest. Mathsci (talk) 22:18, 29 April 2010 (UTC)

Not at all. Either what's written about Jensen (1969) needs to be less and less controversial (e.g. less description of it's contents) or it needs to be balanced (i.e. neutral) which may require more text. Either will do. --DJ (talk) 06:39, 3 May 2010 (UTC)

American Anthropological Association's RACE website

This is from AAA's RACE website:

1900s-1930s: Race and Intelligence

1980s-1990s: The Debate Over Race and Intelligence Redux --120 Volt monkey (talk) 15:29, 26 April 2010 (UTC)

Need for Expert tag

In view of the extensive discussion of this topic, more input from qualified experts would be helpful. Xxanthippe (talk) 08:16, 1 May 2010 (UTC).

I believe there is at least one expert editing here already, and adding a tag won't attract any others—and given that the article is already tagged, adding a second starts to look as though it's being disfigured. The best way to get other input is to ask on the relevant wikiprojects. SlimVirgin ^{talk contribs} 12:43, 1 May 2010 (UTC)

I agree that more input would be helpful here, but very few people seem to be offering it in the places where it’s needed the most, such as the NPOV/BLP concerns that DJ and I raised at the bottom of this section. Do either of you (or anyone else) have anything to say in response to his and my comments there? --Captain Occam (talk) 13:04, 1 May 2010 (UTC)

I left a comment about the policy position but I can't comment on content without making myself familar with it. In brief, is the 1969 article unclear? If not we should be able to say what it says, backed up an interpretation from a secondary source. Then if the author disputes that description, add a brief summary of his position. But in the sections you linked to the author's recent interpretation was longer than the secondary source's, and it didn't really address the issues. SlimVirgin ^{talk contribs} 13:58, 1 May 2010 (UTC)

I am also opposed the the expert tag. Given the differences between experts, NPOV is best served by disinterested observers looking through the reliable sources. Stephen B Streater (talk) 14:08, 1 May 2010 (UTC)

I’m not sure what you mean by “the section I linked to”, but the 1969 article isn’t particularly unclear. There are plenty of secondary sources that do a fairly good job describing it, and adding that information is one of the changes I’d like to be made to this article. The problem is that the current text is based primarily on what William Tucker says in his book The Funding of Scientific Racism, which obviously takes a very unfavorable view of Jensen (what do you expect from a book whose title denounces Jensen’s research as “scientific racism?) and every other source that’s been suggested about this has been rejected by Mathsci for one reason or other. And obviously, trying to change anything about the article without Mathsci’s approval has tended to result in edit wars and multiple AN/I threads. --Captain Occam (talk) 15:11, 1 May 2010 (UTC)

The article seem to link to sources other than the original Jensen article in that section. Is it online? SlimVirgin ^{talk contribs} 15:15, 1 May 2010 (UTC)

I added it in a footnote just to make sure the reader can see the original. SlimVirgin ^{talk contribs} 15:31, 1 May 2010 (UTC)

-> It was already in all the Jensen references I added yesterday, with a clickable URL :) Mathsci (talk) 15:53, 1 May 2010 (UTC)

Yes, thanks, that's where I nicked it from. :) It's worth having it in a footnote just after the first reference to the article, so that people can read what Jensen himself said. SlimVirgin ^{talk contribs} 17:08, 1 May 2010 (UTC)

I suggest creating an article called How Much Can We Boost IQ and Scholastic Achievement? and refactoring the NPOV problem out of this article. If that doesn't work, I recommend moving as much as possible to Arthur_Jensen#IQ_and_academic_achievement. --DJ (talk) 16:13, 1 May 2010 (UTC)

I think creating an article here about Jensen’s 1969 monograph would be a very good idea. It wouldn’t fix all of the NPOV issues I’ve raised with this article, but his monograph is definitely notable enough to deserve its own article at Wikipedia. --Captain Occam (talk) 17:04, 1 May 2010 (UTC)

I came across this article from a chance visit to AN/I, that foetid sewer of Wikipedia's underworld. The article seemed to me to be a battleground between uncompromising POV warriors and poorly written because of that. I put an expert-needed tag on the article but this was removed by SlimVirgin who claimed that the article already had one expert editing it (I don't know who he was referring to). If ever an article were in need of expert attention, this is it. Attention not from another factional POV warrior but hopefully from somebody with a scholarly record in the history of ideas who would be practiced in the exposition and comparison of competing ideological views. At present the matter of an expert-tag looks like developing into one of Wikipedia: Lamest edit wars. On a different note, in view of recent edits here, we should all be mindful of the 3RR rule. Xxanthippe (talk) 07:23, 2 May 2010 (UTC).

I don't think this debate has to due with lack of expertise - there are experts scholars on both side of the controversy (and editors with a high level of expertise on both side of the debate here at the article). I don't see the need for an expert needed tag.·Maunus·ƛ· 14:05, 2 May 2010 (UTC)

The reason we need it is that Mathsci, who is not an expert, is WP:OWNing the article. mikemikev (talk) 14:43, 2 May 2010 (UTC)

If that were the case why would an expert help? If you believe he is OWNing don't you think there are more direct ways to deal with that problem, for example the dispute resolution process? ·Maunus·ƛ· 17:05, 2 May 2010 (UTC)

<- Creating an article about Jensen's article alone would be a POV fork. But by all means try to create it and see what happens. Mathsci (talk) 07:09, 3 May 2010 (UTC)

Done. How Much Can We Boost IQ and Scholastic Achievement? Mostly your text I believe. --DJ (talk) 07:55, 3 May 2010 (UTC)

And speedy delete tag added. You can't copy-paste text like that out of context. Mathsci (talk) 10:29, 3 May 2010 (UTC)

I have replaced the expert tag with the comment: Input needed from disinterested experts who can mediate between the factions. I think that the wish to exclude such persons is undesirable. Xxanthippe (talk) 00:38, 4 May 2010 (UTC).

Nobody has said they wanted to exclude disinterested experts, anyone is welcome here. I do think that a disinterested expert is about as rare as a white elephant - as usually people only become experts in topics that interest them. The problem here might well be that there are toio many experts. I really don't see the need for this tag.·Maunus·ƛ· 05:29, 4 May 2010 (UTC)

We need people who are expert at being disinterested. There is a shortage of them at present. Xxanthippe (talk) 05:42, 4 May 2010 (UTC).

I certainly agree that an expert mediator would be desirable. ·Maunus·ƛ· 07:08, 4 May 2010 (UTC)

empirical vs normative statements

from the article:

[Jensen] advocated the allocation of educational resources according to merit and insisted on the close correlation between intelligence and occupational status, arguing that "in a society that values and rewards individual talent and merit, genetic factors inevitably take on considerable importance."

Do we instead mean that he predicted the correlation between intelligence and occupational status? I'm asking for a fact check. In general we need to be sure to distinguish between empirical predictions or descriptions on the one hand and normative recommendations on the other hand. --DJ (talk) 18:02, 2 May 2010 (UTC)

Please go and read the secondary source (Wooldridge) which this summarises. The word use is "insisted" in the text. No need to start an open-ended discussion. Here is the sentence: "He insisted that intelligene was closely correlated with occupational status - he dubbed this 'one of the most substantial and indisputed facts in pstchology and education' (Jensen, p.75) - and suggested that the schools succeeded in sorting children into different occupational positions according to their skills." His evidence for lack of people for jobs was based on "Perusal of want-ads in many metroplitan newspapers" (Jensen, page 88). I did notice that my summary has left out some detail on dysgenic and eugenic trends, which your question prompted. I'll fix that. Mathsci (talk) 04:21, 3 May 2010 (UTC)

Thank you for clarifying. The problem with the citations is that there are often multiple refs on a single sentence. The closer you can get the ref to the fact, the easier it is to fact check. --DJ (talk) 04:37, 3 May 2010 (UTC)

Fixed in the article. The detailed summary of Wooldridge has already been mentioned several times on this talk page. Mathsci (talk) 06:37, 3 May 2010 (UTC)

DJ, as long as you're looking for potential ways to improve this article, I'd appreciate it if you could comment on the suggestions I made above, towards the bottom of this section. --Captain Occam (talk) 09:41, 3 May 2010 (UTC)

Segerstrale's book - the "reification" of intelligence

I'm trying gradually to find a way of summarising what's in the the book of Segestrale. It discusses certain philosphical aspects of the debate on race and intelligence in depth, as a precursor to a discussion of the parallel issues in sociobiology. The authoress actually interviewed many of the figures involved in the 1980s and is an expert in the History and philosophy of science. I am quite busy working on Triumphs of Caesar now, but I am still gradually formulating a way to summarise what is in her book. Anybody else of course is welcome to have a shot. But it's not a book from which one can just pick phrases - the book is written in a very special way, as a philosophical exploration of ideas, a slow journey of discovery. A book review might provide a good summary ...

At present what I understand Segerstale to be saying is that first of all Lewontin, followed by Gould and others, objected to an indiscriminate statistical method being applied to understand a subject where a biological underlying explanation was expected. Their view was that an explanation would follow the normal scientific path of first formulating a theory and then testing it by experiment. They did not object to the study of intelligence per se, so the charge of censorship of research for ideological reasons or Lysenkoism was incorrect. They did object to an unjustified use of statistics to express an ill-defined multidimensional entity as one single number; and they further objected that that number was then treated as an immutable physical entity, like skin colour, having some kind of innate biological sense. That is what they called the "reficiation" of intelligence, a word borrowed from Marxism, although, as Segerstrale points out, having a different meaning in their context. This physical quantity was an "average" over a preselected population group. Lewontin and Gould called this appeal to biology "bad science". Post-war, in the aftermath of the holocaust. there was a taboo on scientific investigation into race as a result of the 1950 statement on race of UNESCO, broken by Jensen's paper: that was one further underlying feature of liberal American post-Vietnam society - people grew up within the ethos of environmental thinking and social change. The scientists involved were very much affected by the social changes and upheavals of the sixties. Their flirtation with a very American brand of Marxism was more a sign of the times than a rejection of reductionism. They called Jensen's adherence to statistics "bad science" not for ideological reasons, but because no other established form of science would use a single methodology in such a naive yet confident way - collect a number of other people's data indiscriminately, throw it into a computer and then read the answer. In Segerstrale's book, Christopher Jencks is used as an example of another social scientist who repeated Jensen's analysis of data for heritability, but this time taking more care about where the data originated: his answer was significantly different. The astrophysicist David Layzer's commentary is also cited, as is the October 1973 letter "A Resolution against Racism" in the New York Times organised by Students for a Democratic Society. The published allegations of Neo-Lysenkoism in the early 1980s were a response to Gould's book The Mismeasure of Man.

Note that these are not my personal views and that the last paragraph is just what I've gathered from a quick second online reading of Segerstrale's fascinating book. Mathsci (talk) 06:19, 3 May 2010 (UTC)

Quick pointer to page numbers? --DJ (talk) 06:34, 3 May 2010 (UTC)

The book has 512 pages. The above is a summary of my reading, not a proposal for wikipedia content. As I wrote above, other wikipedians should read the book themselves (I read it on amazon.com - enter Jensen as a search term for example). Although Lewontin's critique of Jensen is mentioned earlier, it's really in Chapter 14, page 275ff, that Segerstrale has a detailed discussion of certain aspects of the Race and intelligence debate. As I say the book is written as a journey, trying to answer various philosphical questions - the last chapter is entitled "The battle for the soul - and for the soul of science". This is after all a book on the history and philosophy of science, not Hans Christian Andersen's the Emperor's New Clothes. Mathsci (talk) 06:41, 3 May 2010 (UTC)

Roger Pearson

Just to note that the main charges of Neo-Lysenkoism, mentioned by Varoon Arya (talk · contribs) above, appear to come from Pearson and for example can be found in his 1997 book "Race, intelligence and bias in academe". I haven't been able to locate the book. Pearson was financed by the Pioneer Fund. Doesn't this author have a rather problematic history? Just my first reaction. Of course, when he speaks of science, we as wikipedians can only take what he writes to be completely objective, not so? Mathsci (talk) 15:06, 4 May 2010 (UTC)

In addition to Pearson, one other author who discusses Neo-Lysenkoism in the context of this debate is Bernard Davis, as in this article: [2]. The article by Davis predates Pearson’s book, so it’s more likely that Davis is the person who introduced this idea than that Pearson is. Since this idea is apparently discussed by at least two separate authors, I think it ought to be covered in the article here. --Captain Occam (talk) 15:33, 4 May 2010 (UTC)

The idea goes back to Jensen (1972) and Herrnstein (1973) according the secondary sources (and of course the primary sources). Mathsci (talk) 21:36, 4 May 2010 (UTC)

Jensen's stance on eugenics

Mathsci has recently added this information to the article, cited to what Tucker says in The Funding of Scientific Racism. Reading Jensen's article itself, it's obvious that what Tucker is saying about it is inaccurate: what Jensen said that he favors is some sort of policy to reverse the trend of the blacks (and whites) with the lowest IQs being the ones who have the most children, not a policy to "reduce their numbers" overall. This discussion also only takes up around five pages of Jensen's 123-page article, so referring to it as one of his "two main conclusions" is similarly inaccurate.

We've been through issues like this before, in which Mathsci wanted the article to include contentious information from a highly opinionated source, and what's been resolved in each case is that in order to be consistent with NPOV policy, information like this can't be included without providing information from additional sources in order to balance it. As a further example of the same thing, I think the information that Mathsci has just added needs to to be either removed or balanced with another source. Mathsci, do you recognize that the same principle applies here also?

Please sign your edits and refer to the secondary source. If you have problem with the secondary source, explain why, very carefully. I have not read any cogent reason so far. You own reading/interpretation of the primary is a complete irelevance. Mathsci (talk) 16:27, 7 May 2010 (UTC)

I have no knowledge of Tucker but Loehlin et al (1975) [3] is an excellent secondary source. What do we do when Tucker and Loehlin conflict, as they do over what the main conclusions/argument of Jensen (1969) are? David.Kane (talk) 16:38, 7 May 2010 (UTC)