May 19, 2014

Wade in "The Spectator"

Nicholas Wade has an excerpt from A Troublesome Inheritance in The Spectator.

I'll reiterate my view that it's fruitful to think of this as a British v. American dust-up. The British competition-based paradigm (Adam Smith, Darwin, etc.) was fairly dominant in the natural and human sciences and in associated intellectual spheres from the 19th Century to the stock market crash of 1929. 

But after 1929, businessmen couldn't afford to fund intellectuals anymore, so the prestige of competition-based thinking plummeted. Only governments could pay for scholars in the mid 20th Century, so intellectuals in the 1930s quickly generated lots of rationales for why competition was bogus, as proven by all those busted businessmen who can't ante up for universities anymore, and central planning by the government was ideal both in practice and theory. One side effect was the collapse in prestige of the Galtonian tradition and the rise to dominance of the Boasian.

Here's something that's hard to keep in mind simultaneously: both Galton and Boas were pretty good guys. They both made contributions. When one's worldview like Galton's was riding a little too high, like Galton's was early in the 20th Century, the other served as a corrective. They still do.

 The Boasian worldview became too dominant later on in the 20th Century, in part because America became so rich and powerful compared to Britain. But both nature and nurture are important.

But the subtext to a lot of this struggle is a fairly adolescent struggle for turf dominance over the past. When you look at the combatants, it's pretty obvious that the breakdowns tend to be British v. American, WASP v. Jewish, and country boy v. city boy. There are many exceptions (e.g., Robert Trivers), but the natural biases are hardly invisible.
    

45 comments:

  1. Boas, unlike Galton, href="https://www.vdare.com/articles/franz-boas-liberal-icon-scientific-fraud">'shaded' his data.

    "This is not science; it`s fraud — and modern liberalism is founded on it."

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  2. Boas was dishonest and this is well known. How in the world can be compared to Galton?

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  3. A scientist who makes discoveries that are decades ahead of their time (e.g. Darwin, Galton, Einstein, etc) oftentimes must contend with the fact that their followers are not always the best to carry forth their vision. In the soft sciences this is most often the case as ideological motives tend to come into focus. In the case of Franz Boas, his two major disciples that were directly trained under him remain Ruth Benedict and Margaret Mead.

    More than just the Oprah Winfrey of her day, Margaret Mead attempted to discredit the notion of nature playing anything more than a minor role in the field of human evolution. To that end her work and research was largely devoted. Her most famous work (at least in the popular culture), Coming of Age in Samoa is the direct result of ideological agendas influencing the research.

    Decades later it was completely established that Margaret Mead's work was largely a fraud that bordered on complete deception.
    Margaret Mead and Samoa: The Making and Unmaking of an Anthropological Myth by anthropologist Derek Freeman. Unlike Mead, who never bothered to learn the Somoan language nor actually stay among the natives in the mid '20's while conducting her research, Freeman demonstrates thru his own work in Somoa as well as conducting interviews with many of the children, now grown adults that Mead had interviewed that her work was a forgery.

    These are the disciples of Franz Boas, his main disciples who helped to spread his gospel to the four corners of academia as the infant science known as anthropology was just getting underway.

    One would hope that Galton's main disciples were not so ideologically bent when taking their teacher's theories into wider circles.

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  4. I have to agree with the first poster. Boas and his students , e.g., Meade, made up data to fit their theories. They also practiced a particularly nasty scorched earth policy of retribution against ideological dissenters. Cultural anthropology has not yet recovered recovered from the baneful, anti-scientific influence of Boas and his school and may never. One of the more notable victims has been Napoleon Chagnon, a truly notable and heroic scientistwho has been the victim of no end of intellectual skulduggery and thuggery. Of course, the soi disant Frankfurt School also played a role in the intellectual corruption of the social sciences but Boas stands head and shoulders above all others in the harm he caused and continues to cause.

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  5. It's dangerous to read too much Wittgenstein :

    According to The Guardian's Andrew Brown, the breakdown occurred because Trivers stayed up "all night, night after night" reading Ludwig Wittgenstein. This landed him in a hospital where he was "treated with the first generation of effective anti-psychotic drugs" and, as part of his therapy, he took art classes. He then got a job illustrating and later writing a "series of textbooks for high schools".

    While recovering, he took courses in art, and was hired to illustrate, and then to write, a series of textbooks for high schools. Despite his history degree, it was obvious to his supervisors that he knew little about human biology, so he was given the animals to write about, and started to learn modern Darwinian biology.[1]

    This exposure to evolutionary theory led him to do graduate work with Ernst Mayr at Harvard from 1968 to 1972. He earned his Ph.D. in biology on June 15, 1972, also from Harvard. The second half of his first major paper, "The Evolution of Reciprocal Altruism" was published in 1971.[2]

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  6. I'm not quite sure what you mean, Steve, about this being an American vs British dust-up. Are you implying that Americans are antagonistic towards evolutionary thinking?That seems rather hard to believe. Here's WIKIPEDIA's list of key thinkers in the development of the neo-Darwinian synthesis:

    1. RA Fisher:British

    2. Dobzhansky: Ukrainian. Moved to the USA in 1927, where he worked under Thomas hunt Morgan at Columbia and Cal Tech.

    3. Haldane: British

    4. Sewall Wright: American

    5. E.B. Ford: British

    6.Ernst Mayr: German

    7. Bernhard Rensch:German

    8. Chetverikov: Russian (poor guy; he ran afoul of Lysenko).

    9.George Gaylord Simpson:American

    10. Stebbins: American

    Americans:3
    Britons:3
    Germans:2
    Russians:1
    Ukrainians:1

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  7. Boas was brilliant and right about some important things. If HBD types value truth above posturing they should freely admit this, as Steve suggests.

    An interesting wrinkle is that Boas is often accused of arriving at pro-nurture positions a priori, as being good for the Jews, which may or may not be true, but he also favored universal assimilation to a WASP cultural standard, not excepting the Jews.

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    1. Not that I don't believe you, but could you provide a quote on assimilation to a WASP norm?

      There is almost certainly a caveat in his statements on such things or a tongue in cheek or a crossed finger.

      Delete
  8. It's humorously often the case that the patron saint of X was actually opposed to X. So it was with Boas and multiculturalism.

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  9. I should stipulate: universal assimilation within the United States.

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  10. theories of "overproduction" and "wasteful competition" go back to the morgan/rockefeller funded "efficiency movement". The ruling class, through their clubs and new behemoth tax exempt foundations even created cartelized philanthropy and science (rock's general education fund created the council of learned societies which included the nea, the aha, etc., which were also rock funded). that science was increasingly funded by the gov. is not an effect of the 29 crash, but an effect of the merger of the foundations and their associated groups with the executive branch of the gov., which is the essence of the new deal.

    hence, the rock. "war and peace studies" become a post war blue print, and ford's "grey areas" becomes "the great society". The foundations remain the venture capitalists of scientifically rationalized policy. Now, they can get the gov to print the dollars to do the heavy lifting of creating and enforcing "consensus".

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  11. """"""""Boas was brilliant and right about some important things."""""""""""""

    Name them. And, exactly why he was strongly opposed to not only eugenics but to nature playing a major role in human evolution.



    """""""If HBD types value truth above posturing they should freely admit this, as Steve suggests. """"""""

    Just as those who choose to resurrect Boaz by glossing over his errors. Notice that his two major and direct 20th century disciples, Benedict and Mead, who have had far, far greater influence over perhaps millions of university students regarding the entire nature vs. nurture issue at large. The fact that these two direct disciples of his were themselves quite far from even competent (soft) scientists and had an ideological agenda to push through their research as well as on their students is very telling indeed as to the type of "science" they were engaging in. Human nurture, indeed.

    In some ways, Boas was the Steven Jay Gould of his day: Confidently certain of his own personal ideological agenda vs what he perceived as inaccurate science (nature, which would be found today in the fight vs the Genome project and DNA at large). Just as Boas would not or could not respond to the naturalist component that comprise human evolution, so to did Gould fight vs the naturalist component of human IQ (as witnessed in his distortion, lies, and deceptions vs the Bell Curve, vs Arthur Jensen's research, his mischaracterization vs the established 19th century scientist S.G. Morton, etc.) In the case of Mead and Benedict, apparently the apple didn't fall to far from the tree. They were the branches of the Boasian rotted root.

    Boas and Gould. Different generations and yet both of the same cloth. Ideology must trump science and the accurate facts be damned.

    Not coincidentally, Gould was strongly vs Galton.



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  12. "They both made contributions."

    This is worth noting because a lot of content on similar blogs skews towards deterministic explanations of intelligence and other traits. Meanwhile, Sailer is consistently reasonable about the importance of both nature and nurture.

    He's also a pretty thoughtful, nice guy.

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  13. Anonymous:"It's humorously often the case that the patron saint of X was actually opposed to X. So it was with Boas and multiculturalism."

    Founders are usually much more profound than followers. Hence, Boas is much more nuanced (and much more interesting) than Boasians.

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  14. I think that you are being a tad disingenuous, Steve. This is not an America vs Britain dust-up. It's a Jew vs WASP dust-up. Jews are simply more powerful in the USA than they are in the UK. Hence, WASPS in the UK can speak a bit more freely than they can in the USA.

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  15. Actually, Boas would probably also consider cultural anthropology of today to be a betrayal of his legacy, at least according to the blogger A.J. West (alwestmeditates.blogspot.com). Anthropology as Boas conceived of it was intended to document pre-industrial cultures, cultures which without the dedicated work of anthropologists we would know little about. Modern anthropology is basically a branch of sociology, except heavy on the theory and light on quantitative analysis, and focused on modern, urban, industrialized cultures. It does not offer the same contribution to knowledge that Boasian pre-structuralist anthropology did.

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  16. Boas was a pretty good guy?

    Really?

    Steve stop sucking up.

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  17. Steven Goldberg praised Margaret Mead highly in THE INEVITABILITY OF PATRIARCHY, later reissued as WHY MEN RULE. Contrary to the slanders repeated here, Mead believed strongly that there was innate masculinity and that it needed validation. She admitted that attainment of high extra-familial prestige was an overriding male drive, and that women were driven more to home and family pursuits.

    Derek Freeman was a mental case, explained here:

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Derek_Freeman

    Regarding Samoan culture, comparing when he studied the Samoans to when Mead did is comparing apples and oranges, as they studied the Samoans during different periods. It's like studying US adolescents in 1925, and then in 2005.

    Mead reported faithfully what she saw. Samoa had fallen apart under the influence of Uncle Sam by the time Freeman went there.

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  18. Steve, your dichotomy of British/competition versus American/planning does not work as a historical matter. There was plenty of socialist thought in Britain before the Great Depression, and Britain much further along "The Road to Serfdom" than America was by the time of the Great Depression (although they subsequently went even further).

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  19. Off-topic yet on theme. From Jon Frosch's ATLANTIC review of Abel Ferrara's Welcome to New York (a thinly fictionalized portrayal of the DSK scandal):

    "Most troubling of all is Ferrara's decision to have Simone [the film's version of Anne Sinclair, DSK's wife) constantly talk about money, and his insistence on her attachment to Israel (when we first see her, she's being toasted at a dinner given by a pro-Israel group). Given Sinclair's background—she is Jewish, and her grandfather, renowned French art dealer Paul Rosenberg, fled the Nazis in 1940—it's a particularly nasty touch, and reeks of latent anti-Semitism and sexism."

    What more evidence do you need, folks?

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  20. Sounds like the classic case of the eccentric genius with the better product being beaten in the marketplace by someone with more business nous and a better marketing department.

    In the marketplace of ideas it is not the best ideas which win but the ideas best marketed.

    The Ashkenazi advantage is in pushing their ideas, more so than it is ascertaining the truth.

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  21. Heres my conspiracy theory. Thanks to a unique ability to burn bridges sailer has been reduced to find raising drives to make ends meet. He's got one coming up in fact and low an behold what should he post but his theory about how every academic but me just follows the money. But not me, no sir I'm a truth teller. Now if I can direct you to google pay I'd really like some money. Truth telling ain't free.

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  22. There are always exceptions, but I'm an American Jewish (nominally) city boy, and I've always thought nature vastly outstripped nurture. If nothing else watching all the various ethnic groups running around New York with widely disparate outcomes.

    I wonder how much is really a turf war as you say and how much is a decision by the Ashkenazi powers that be after 1970 or so to launch an intellectual war to prevent Hitlerism (as they would conceive it) from ever taking root again by preventing anyone from thinking about nature? That was always the subconscious feeling I got, though I can't say I was anywhere close to the people making the decisions.

    I can see why being in nature-->nature over nurture, but I don't think the argument that city life would be conducive to nurture over nature is quite as strong. Certainly it's thoroughly unnatural, and you can see lots of different cultures, but somehow the blacks always wound up on bottom no matter what was tried...

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  23. (EXCLUSIVE) Eric Cantor’s Top Aide: I’ll ‘Bankrupt’ Virginia GOP, Install Allies, Rebuild It With Cantor’s Donor Cash

    ...Ray Allen, has “angrily” stated to multiple individuals that he intends to bankrupt the Republican Party of Virginia (RPV), to install his own people throughout all levels of RPV’s State Central Committee, and to rebuild the RPV with money from Eric Cantor’s donors...

    Folks, this is war.

    Any possible future for Western Civilization is hanging by a thread.

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  24. This is a silly post. Boas did great damage to science. No one can point out anything he did that was of value, but for some reason Steve feels compelled to praise him.

    This requires explanation. Saying Boas was for the nurture side of things is trivial. No one for the last 10,000 years has been against nurture playing a role.

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    1. It's a shot test.

      Anglo v Jew

      Someone pointed it out above. It's Jew v WASP in the US. Just put quotes around "American" and it all makes sense. The Anglo identity was keenly felt back then.

      Publish and be damned.

      Delete
  25. Here is chapter three of Boas's The Mind of Primitive Man, entitled the "The Influence of Heredity Upon Human Types," with some discussion of Galton and regression to the mean.

    http://books.google.com/books?id=UyC1AAAAIAAJ&printsec=frontcover&dq=mind+of+primitive+man&hl=en&sa=X&ei=9eN6U7GXB9e1yASlzIKYCw&ved=0CCsQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=%22influence%20of%20heredity%20upon%20human%20types%22&f=false

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  26. But both nature and nurture are important.

    Amen, Steve.

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  27. """""Contrary to the slanders repeated here, Mead believed strongly that there was innate masculinity and that it needed validation.""""""

    A lie.


    """"""She admitted that attainment of high extra-familial prestige was an overriding male drive, and that women were driven more to home and family pursuits."""""""

    Whatever.

    """"""Derek Freeman was a mental case""""""""

    Uh, no, Derek Freeman started out as a great admirer of Margaret Mead. He became disillusioned when his own research in Samoa directly contradicted her book. Freeman could speak and learned the Samoan language and spent a longer time than Mead did (who only spent the early winter of '25 thru spring of 26 a total of roughly 5-6months there), Freeman spent '42-'44, and again in the mid 60s in Samoa. He became an honorary member of one tribe while there as he actually lived among them (unlike Mead who chose to remain in the US missionary house for the entire time and had to rely on interpreters).

    UNLIKE, Mead, who did NOT even bother to LEARN the Somoan language and fed her young subjects certain leading questions with a pre-ordained agenda (nurture trumps nature). But then, this is the same leftist who during undergraduate yrs participated in demonstrations to "Free Sacco and Vanzetti", those innocent and wrongly accused of anarchism.

    It is all too easy now to forget that, waay back in the 20's such South Sea places as American Somoa, Fiji, Tahiti, etc. were quite exotic, remote, and very little known about by most people, including the intellectuals of the time.

    In that sense by consciously choosing Samoa to be her doctoral thesis Mead had a leg up on the vast majority of US, so to speak, and thus since very few people would be able to contradict whatever poop she decided to invent, no one was the wiser for several decades.



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  28. """""""Regarding Samoan culture, comparing when he studied the Samoans to when Mead did is comparing apples and oranges, as they studied the Samoans during different periods."""""""

    Now this is a direct lie. Freeman studied them in '42-44, a little more than 16yrs after Meads brief 5-6months (and she never learned the Samoan language while Freeman did). Freeman had access to many of the very same children that Mead interviewed. Nearly all of them confessed that "they'd put one over on the white lady who kept asking us all these weird questions about sex."

    Can we say, someone had a particular agenda at work? As in, "The Western ideals of Victorian Modesty, Christian values, etc are not universal in all parts of the world. In Samoa free love is entirely the norm' THAT was the basis for Meads doctoral thesis in Samoa as it relates to sexual relationships.

    Mead also didn't realize (or chose to ignore) the fact that Samoa had been heavily Christianized by missionaries during the 19th century and in some ways were even more prudish than various other 'liberated' cultures at the time.


    """""""It's like studying US adolescents in 1925, and then in 2005."""""""""""""""""

    Freeman was in Samoa roughly 15yrs after Mead. Samoan culture had not significantly changed during the first time he had arrived. He also returned in the 60s.

    Remember, both times he was there conducting his research the internet had not been invented and various technologies weren't yet on the horizon.



    """""Mead reported faithfully what she saw""""""

    Lie, especially when her own interviewees responded to others that they had made up stories for the strange white lady who wanted to know all about sex.

    If anything, it shows that perhaps Ms Mead was not entirely on straight at the time.

    I tend to think this is some leg pulling going on, as her reputation has fallen on hard times over the last decades and her deceptions have been found out to be worthless.

    And gain, THIS was Franz Boas most prominent disciple. A left wing deviant strongly driven by ideology and in forcing nurture on academia in more ways than one.

    And again; Samoa had been heavily Christianized during the 19th century by missionaries as had much of the Polynesian south seas.

    I'm thinking that this is a leg pulling exercise. Quite illuminating.

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  29. """"""""""The Ashkenazi advantage is in pushing their ideas, more so than it is ascertaining the truth."""""""

    Yeah, but they've been doing that for like the last 2,000 years or so and uh--

    Oh.

    Never mind.

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  30. possibly trite, but something I seldom see people comprehend:

    1. theories are explanations -- models of the world

    2. all models are incomplete and thus likely wrong in various ways

    3. when two models are competing, it's often the case that both models have merits. it's seldom the case, such as in physics with say Einstein vs Newton, that one model is strictly superior as an explanation to another.

    4. what's usually the case is that one model is incomplete in a way that another model isn't and vice versa.

    5. it requires a surprisingly high degree of sophistication and specialist understanding to see how competing models can be reconciled. the average intellectual just splits the difference (or worse).

    the human social/cultural/biological world is massively complex. that we are able to build explanatory models around that complexity is a miracle in itself. yes, culture is very important. but yes too, biology is very important. now, actually reconciling those two views in a way that adds insight is radically hard. so my advice to the average intellectual is: don't make too many assumptions about what you think you know about this topic. just hewing to the facts is hard enough.

    again, maybe that's trite, but i find it helpful. consider it a plea for humility.

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  31. Oswald Spengler5/20/14, 12:12 AM

    http://www.funnyordie.com/lists/3a81fffa8e/patton-oswalt-angers-twitter-idiots-with-fake-apologies

    "Patton Oswalt Angers Twitter Idiots with Fake Apologies"

    By TweetRoundup

    His series of “deleted” tweets have the trolls angry over literally nothing. Published May 07, 2014

    Patton Oswalt is at it again. When last we checked in, he was angering trolls by splitting tweets in two, and now he’s taken the next logical step by "deleting" offensive tweets that never actually existed. It’s all part of his mission to make people question why they’re so outraged, and to point out that those who want to be outraged, will.

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  32. I don't really know what you are getting at, Steve.

    The Darwinian paradigm ie evolution through natural selection, has been the generally accpeted dogma of biology since its inception, no serious scientist has doubted it for the last 150 years. Lysenko was the last challenger of Darwin of any note - and look what happened to him.
    Of course, polical correctness, particularly since 1945 has imposed a certain self-censorship and stifling of Darwinism as applied to humans - but this is more of a taboo, like Victorian sexual taboos than any serious science. Scientist just wanted an easy life, so ignored the obvious.
    As for England being behind this 'competition/battle' meme, here I disagree again. Since at least 1900, the predominant trend amongst English intellectuals has always been socialism or even 'scientific socialism' ie the Bloomsbiry set, Bertrand Russell, HG Wells, Fabian society etc. The meme is and was that human beings are 'above' the animals and shouldn't organize like animals in some sort of mass libertarian/Friedmanite/Republican style cock-fight bloodbath rrace to the top/bottom. In modern times Tony Benn was prime exponent of this typically english school of intellectualism - I suppose that Jimmy Carter was a milquetoast American version.

    Actually it seems to me that Anglo-Saxons, real Anglo-saxons that is, are more amenable to socialism and Friedmanism style cockfights appeal to Jews.
    The writings of Darwin and Huxley, for instance, are full of pleas of compassion for the poor and the fate of animals - they saw themselves mor as observers of merciless nature than advocates (ie Friedmanites) of it. I always remember a passage from Darwin's 'Species' in which he recalls his boyhood of the family cat and dog lying by the fireside, and of the dog licking and comforting the sick and elderly cat. No doubt the Friedman family would have skinned that cat and made a pair of gloves out of it.
    Bryan Caplan is the Friedman of modern times. Look at Gary Becker's proposed 'human organ trade' or Jeffrey Sachs' rape of Russia.

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  33. Boas on the human mind:

    "psychic unity of mankind."

    This is a quote. It's laughable. It's unscientific. It's the foundation of American Anthropolgy.

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  34. "Heres my conspiracy theory. Thanks to a unique ability to burn bridges sailer has been reduced to find raising drives to make ends meet. He's got one coming up in fact and low an behold what should he post but his theory about how every academic but me just follows the money. But not me, no sir I'm a truth teller. Now if I can direct you to google pay I'd really like some money. Truth telling ain't free."

    Ya pays ya money, ya takes ya chances... Oh wait.

    Become a stakeholder. People will take you more seriously.

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  35. Thanks to Anonymous for his link to Boas's The Mind of Primitive Man. A quick perusal is enough to show that Boas was open to the possibility of genetic differences in the mental make-up of different races, but that due to a lack of careful scientific studies it was impossible to disentangle the relative contributions of environment, including cultural environment, and genes. Whether he maintained this open-mindedness til the end of his career I don't know.

    He does make an interesting observation about the differences in the total number of distinct ancestors between small, and therefore necessarily inbred, populations, and larger out-bred ones, with special reference to the out-bredness of Americans. This "mathematical" consequence might explain why Ashkenazi Americans are, in effect, third cousins.

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  36. 40 year old grad student5/20/14, 7:12 AM

    Yes, they were "both good guys"... Snort

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  37. Maybe Galton is being given too much of a hard time in this post.

    Are we to understand that he was in the pay of Robber Barons and accordingly overemphasized heredity/nature to destructive effect?

    Also, can one really absolve Boaz of responsibility for his official students in the same way that one could absolve Galton of responsibilty for any nutcases who may have come after him?

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    1. Darn it, "come after him" s/b "come along after him."

      Delete
  38. >>David said:
    """"""""Also, can one really absolve Boaz of responsibility for his official students in the same way that one could absolve Galton of responsibilty for any nutcases who may have come after him?"""""""""""""

    Well, we know who the nutcases are in the case of Boaz (Mead, Benedict) and he directly taught them so in that case he does bear a direct responsibility on those most prominent of his disciples who came after him and promulgated his ideas far and wide.


    But in the case of Galton, who exactly would you consider to be disciples of his that turned out to be bonkers? Who?

    Name them, David. Who are they? Especially since Franz Boas is still paid lip service to as one of the founders of modern anthropology whereas Galton's more of an acquired taste: Not everyone's familiar with his work directly at first glance and it takes a little getting used to.

    In some ways, Steve should be given some credit for popularizing Galton's theories to a modern non-academic audience; otherwise they wouldn't have been totally familiar with his work.

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    1. I said "may have come along after him." I don't believe any did, but if, as the anti-eugenists typically insist, Galton was of a piece with people they regard as nutcases, such as Margaret Sanger, I still don't see how Galton could be considered to have anything to do with them the way Boaz certainly did with Mead and Benedict. My larger point is that Steve may be treating Galton unfairly by intimating that he was in the pay of Big Business and needed an equally biased "corrective" from the likes of Boaz.

      Delete
  39. I'm pretty much as "Jewish" and "city boy" as it gets, yet identify strongly with the Galtonian "British" view of things.

    So I'm not so sure about your WASP vs. Jewish dichotomy. I believe you are extrapolating too much from a few fringe Jewish academics who aren't representative of Jewish thought at-large. That is, I think most Jews have a similar concept of "breeding" that WASPs are notorious for.

    And if people (Jews as much as any other Westerners) have recently been straying from that worldview that is certainly a modern phenomenon. For example, read about the German Jews who came here in the 19th century -- their focus on the right marriages was almost medieval.

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  40. I'm not so sure about your WASP vs. Jewish dichotomy. I believe you are extrapolating too much from a few fringe Jewish academics who aren't representative of Jewish thought at-large.



    It would help matters if everyone, including Steve, would distinguish between what people believe themselves and that they want other people to believe.

    The "Boasians", including but not limited to Jews, believe very strongly in inheritance and genes, perhaps even more so than the "Galtonians" do. What distinguishes the two factions is not what they think but what they want other people to think. The Boasians want everyone else to disregard genes - even as they fixate on the issue themselves.

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  41. >>David said:
    """""""My larger point is that Steve may be treating Galton unfairly by intimating that he was in the pay of Big Business and needed an equally biased "corrective" from the likes of Boaz.""""""""""""""""


    And the nature vs nurture struggle for power and control over academia will go on, and on, and on, until one side achieves total victory in the classroom, in the culture, and over the official narrative of human evolution.

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