>[...]However, I think that moving
>from this to concluding that "races" may be more or less intelligent than
>other races is a huge leap... we all possess roughly the same brain, after
>all.
It is another misunderstanding. I did not say some races are more
intelligent in general. I meant special abilities - 's' factors.
What would you say about BigDon project? Current results bury egalitarians
deeply in the sand.
>Was the experiment done in such a way that all other factors which affect
>intelligence (e.g. education, exposure to literature, etc.) were
>controlled?
3D operations are considered culure-free. Both Raven's Tests is are examples
of such, specialized one.
>Nature only
>takes one so far -- about as far as a cave man, I believe -- after that,
>all the rest of the development is due to nurture.
Why go any further? Can't we safely assume that the very beginning of
religions takes place then?
> If one race has (say)
>better spatial perception than another, that tells us that the culture he
>lives in values (eg trains for) that quality/ability more.
Why trains? We are all (I hope) darwinists, we should consider first things
first. Is it so strange to suspect that due to natural reasons some percent
of a population dies out. These natural reason would be the must of
transforming 3D easily. Why can't such elimination result in more spatial
race (or tribe, clan...)?
>To confirm my thesis, one need only point to adopted children -- as a
>class, do they show the aptitudes of their *biological* parents, or their
>*sociological* parents? My money is on the later.
Consider it mine :-))
As I wrote two times
"Scientific American" May'98, article :"The Genetics of Cognitive....", page
45, at the bottom there is a nice chart.
Method : MZA, Adoptions
Correlations legend:
A: children and their birth parents
B: adopted children and their birth parents,
C: adopted children and their adoptive parents
Let's say - spatial ability
Age in years:
3: A=.15; B=.09; C=.02 !
4: A=.18 ; B=.07 ; C=.01 !
5: A=.20 ; B=.18 ; C=.02 !
....and it is getting worser and worser for your thesis :-)
C-correlation never exceedes 0.03 and it even happened to be negative
= -0.02
In terms of statistics it means that there is no such correlation.
What now?
--- Michal Kulczycki AKA Ronan the Great University of Wroclaw, Psychology Dept. ICQ #: 8954988