Measured Lies

Last updated

Measured Lies: The Bell Curve Examined is a collection of essays on pathological science and pseudoscientific methods used in the science of sociology. [1] It was published in 1997 as a collection of responses, from academics in various related fields, to arguments in the book The Bell Curve . The collection argues that The Bell Curve advocates a specific and fallacious view of race and class, despite the authors' claims of neutrality. [2] [3]

Related Research Articles

Peer review Evaluation of work by one or more people of similar competence to the producers of the work

Peer review is the evaluation of work by one or more people with similar competencies as the producers of the work. It functions as a form of self-regulation by qualified members of a profession within the relevant field. Peer review methods are used to maintain quality standards, improve performance, and provide credibility. In academia, scholarly peer review is often used to determine an academic paper's suitability for publication. Peer review can be categorized by the type of activity and by the field or profession in which the activity occurs, e.g., medical peer review. It can also be used as a teaching tool to help students improve writing assignments.

<i>The Bell Curve</i> 1994 book by Richard J. Herrnstein and Charles Murray

The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life is a 1994 book by psychologist Richard J. Herrnstein and political scientist Charles Murray, in which the authors argue that human intelligence is substantially influenced by both inherited and environmental factors and that it is a better predictor of many personal outcomes, including financial income, job performance, birth out of wedlock, and involvement in crime than are an individual's parental socioeconomic status. They also argue that those with high intelligence, the "cognitive elite", are becoming separated from those of average and below-average intelligence, and that this separation is a source of social division within the United States.

Fisk University is a private historically black university in Nashville, Tennessee. The university was founded in 1866 and its 40-acre (16 ha) campus is a historic district listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

Jean-Pierre Serre French mathematician

Jean-Pierre Serre is a French mathematician who has made contributions to algebraic topology, algebraic geometry, and algebraic number theory. He was awarded the Fields Medal in 1954, the Wolf Prize in 2000 and the inaugural Abel Prize in 2003.

Queens College, City University of New York College in New York City

Queens College (QC) is a public college in the Queens borough of New York City. It is part of the City University of New York system. Its 80-acre campus is primarily located in Flushing, Queens. It has a student body representing more than 170 countries.

Richard Lynn English psychologist and author, noted for his views on the connection between race and intelligence

Richard Lynn is a controversial English psychologist and author. He is a former professor emeritus of psychology at Ulster University, having had the title withdrawn by the university in 2018. He is former assistant editor and current editor-in-chief of the journal Mankind Quarterly, which has been described as a white supremacist journal and purveyor of scientific racism. Lynn studies intelligence and is known for his belief in sexual and racial differences in intelligence. Lynn was educated at King's College, Cambridge, in England. He has worked as lecturer in psychology at the University of Exeter and as professor of psychology at the Economic and Social Research Institute, Dublin, and at the University of Ulster at Coleraine.

Charles Murray (political scientist) American political scientist, writer and public speaker

Charles Alan Murray is an American political scientist. He is the W.H. Brady Scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank in Washington, D.C.

James Mourilyan Tanner British paediatric endocrinologist

James Mourilyan Tanner, was a British paediatric endocrinologist who was best known for his development of the Tanner scale, which measures the stages of sexual development during puberty. He was a professor emeritus of the Institute of Child Health at the University of London.

David Berlinski is an American author who has written books about mathematics and the history of science as well as fiction. An opponent of evolution, he is a senior fellow of the Discovery Institute's Center for Science and Culture, an organization dedicated to promulgating the pseudoscience of intelligent design.

<i>Mankind Quarterly</i> Academic journal

Mankind Quarterly is a peer-reviewed journal that has been described as a "cornerstone of the scientific racism establishment", a "white supremacist journal", an "infamous racist journal", and "scientific racism's keepers of the flame". It covers physical and cultural anthropology, including human evolution, intelligence, ethnography, linguistics, mythology, archaeology, and biology. It is published by the Ulster Institute for Social Research, which is presided over by Richard Lynn.

Critical race theory American intellectual and social movement

Critical race theory (CRT) is a cross-disciplinary intellectual and social movement of civil-rights scholars and activists who seek to examine the intersection of race, society, and law in the United States and to challenge mainstream American liberal approaches to racial justice. For example, the CRT conceptual framework is one way to study racial bias in laws and institutions, such as the how and why of incarceration rates and how sentencing differs among racial groups in the United States. CRT is also used in sociology to explain social, political, and legal structures and power distribution through the lens of race. The word critical in its name is an academic term that refers to critical thinking, critical theory, and scholarly criticism, rather than criticizing or blaming people. It first arose in the 1970s, like other critical schools of thought, such as critical legal studies, which examines how legal rules protect the status quo.

Research design Overall strategy utilized to carry out research

Research design refers to the overall strategy utilized to carry out research that defines a succinct and logical plan to tackle established research question(s) through the collection, interpretation, analysis, and discussion of data.

TNT equivalent Class of units of measurement for explosive energy

TNT equivalent is a convention for expressing energy, typically used to describe the energy released in an explosion. The tonne of TNT is a unit of energy defined by that convention to be 4.184 gigajoules, which is the approximate energy released in the detonation of a metric ton of TNT. In other words, for each gram of TNT exploded, 4.184 kilojoules of energy is released.

Mainstream Science on Intelligence 1994 public statement published in the Wall Street Journal

"Mainstream Science on Intelligence" was a public statement issued by a group of researchers of topics associated with intelligence testing. It was published originally in The Wall Street Journal on December 13, 1994, as a response to criticism of the book The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, which appeared earlier the same year. The statement defended Herrnstein and Murray's controversial claims about race and intelligence.

Joe Lyons Kincheloe was a professor and Canada Research Chair at the Faculty of Education, McGill University in Montreal, Quebec, Canada and founder of The Paulo and Nita Freire International Project for Critical Pedagogy. He wrote more than 45 books, numerous book chapters, and hundreds of journal articles on issues including critical pedagogy, educational research, urban studies, cognition, curriculum, and cultural studies. Kincheloe received three graduate degrees from the University of Tennessee. The father of four children, he worked closely for the last 19 years of his life with his partner, Shirley R. Steinberg.

The relationship between fertility and intelligence has been investigated in many demographic studies. There is evidence that, on a population level, intelligence is negatively correlated with fertility rate and positively correlated with survival rate of offspring. Proponents of dysgenics postulate that, if the inverse correlation of IQ with fertility rate is stronger than the correlation of IQ with survival rate, and if the correlation between IQ and fertility can be linked to genetic factors, then the hereditary component of IQ will decrease with every new generation, eventually giving rise to a 'reversed Flynn effect', as has been observed in Norway, Denmark, Australia, Britain, the Netherlands, Sweden, Finland, France and German-speaking countries, where a slow decline in average IQ scores has been noted since the 1990s. However, detractors point out that genetic studies have shown no evidence for dysgenic effects in human populations and the theory's strong association with scientific racism and eugenics. They also note that the Flynn effect demonstrates an increase in phenotypic IQ scores over time in most other countries. Additionally, complicating any assessment of decreases in intelligence over time is the reliance on IQ as a unbiased measure of intelligence, which has been criticised by some scientists such as Stephen Jay Gould. Other correlates of IQ include income and educational attainment, which are also fertility factors that are inversely correlated with fertility rate, and are to some degree heritable.

Shirley R. Steinberg is an educator, author, activist,filmmaker, and public speaker whose work focuses on critical pedagogy, social justice, and cultural studies. She has written and edited numerous books and articles about critical pedagogy, urban and youth culture, community studies, cultural studies, Islamophobia, and issues of race, class, gender, and sexuality. Steinberg is the Research Chair of Critical Youth Studies at the University of Calgary, executive director of the Freire Project freireproject.org, and a visiting researcher at University of Barcelona and Murdoch University. She has held faculty positions at Montclair State University, Adelphi University, Brooklyn College, The CUNY Graduate Center, and McGill University. Steinberg directed the Institute for Youth and Community Research at the University of the West of Scotland for two years.

Data science Interdisciplinary field of study focused on deriving knowledge and insights from data

Data science is an interdisciplinary field that uses scientific methods, processes, algorithms and systems to extract knowledge and insights from noisy, structured and unstructured data, and apply knowledge and actionable insights from data across a broad range of application domains. Data science is related to data mining, machine learning and big data.

Noah Carl is a British sociologist and intelligence researcher. He was investigated and subsequently dismissed from his position as a Toby Jackman Newton Trust Research Fellow at St Edmund's College, Cambridge after over 500 academics signed a letter repudiating his research and public stance on race and intelligence, calling it "ethically suspect and methodologically flawed", and stating their concern that "racist pseudoscience is being legitimised through association with the University of Cambridge." An investigation by the college concluded that Carl's work was "poor scholarship" which violated standards of academic integrity, and that Carl had collaborated with right-wing extremists. Some newspaper columnists criticised the decision to dismiss Carl as an attack on academic freedom. Others questioned whether St Edmund's had failed to properly vet him before he was hired in the first place.

References

  1. Kincheloe, Joe L.; Steinberg, Shirley R.; Gresson, III, Aaron D., eds. (1997). Measured lies : the bell curve examined (1st St. Martin's Griffin ed.). New York: St. Martin's Press. ISBN   978-0312172282.
  2. Clark Studer, Susan (1996). "Review of Measured Lies: The Bell Curve Examined., , , Aaron Gresson, III". The Journal of Negro Education. 65 (3): 392–393. doi:10.2307/2967355. ISSN   0022-2984 . Retrieved 22 August 2020.
  3. Broadfoot, Patricia (1998). "Review of Measured Lies: The Bell Curve Examined, , , Aaron D. Gresson III". Comparative Education Review. 42 (3): 372–374. ISSN   0010-4086 . Retrieved 22 August 2020.