Comments on: Bell curves

By: Noel

Noel — Tue, 21 Feb 2006 03:25:47 +0000

Finally found some good infomation on the subject.

By: Count Iblis

Count Iblis — Tue, 07 Feb 2006 16:01:05 +0000

By: Count Iblis

Count Iblis — Tue, 07 Feb 2006 15:58:40 +0000

Interesting test here:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/science/humanbody/sex/add_user.shtml

By: adrian

adrian — Tue, 07 Feb 2006 03:31:47 +0000

Hmm,
what those tests don’t tell one is what pre-logical attitudes male vs females have towards making a display of one’s ability. From very young on sex roles are emphasised and gitls are taught to be demure and deferential, which some take very seriously and only a few ignore.
The Bell curve was invented to make radio activity managable by inverting two “random” halves of the event and it works very well to do such things. What it has to do with actual emotional and intelligence abilities I’ve yet to see explained. As soon as you find a way to keep sex roles and abilities apart let me know.

ALL tests embody and validate the bias of the tester and what are tests used for? Very simply put there’s no bias free person.

adrian

By: CapitalistImperialistPig

CapitalistImperialistPig — Tue, 03 Jan 2006 16:28:58 +0000

Oddly enough Lubos, there has been sex changing surgery on people who didn’t want it – usually infants who had ambiguous external genitalia, or were victims of circumcision accidents. Subsequent studies have shown that the results were almost invariably catastropic. Nearly all these people wound up with severe psychological problems related to sexual identity.

Aaron – I can understand why you are tiring of the topic – too bad your fatigue didn’t set in before you started spouting vacuous nonsense that you couldn’t back up.

By: Dangerous, stupid, or simply dishonest? | Cosmic Variance

Dangerous, stupid, or simply dishonest? | Cosmic Variance — Mon, 02 Jan 2006 22:36:30 +0000

[...] That’s what’s known in studies of rhetoric as a “blatant lie.” It’s true that Summers caused a firestorm; it’s also true that he cited such research. It’s just not true that it was the citation that caused the firestorm. The firestorm was caused when Summers suggested that differences in innate aptitude were more important than systematic biases in explaining the gender gap among professional scientists. He said this despite the existence of overwhelming evidence against it, including from the very sources he was citing. How loudly do we have to shout this? The “dangerous idea” is not the possibility of innate differences; it’s using them as an excuse to ignore the obvious and pernicious effects of discrimination. [...]

By: Arun

Arun — Fri, 30 Sep 2005 12:15:45 +0000

My summation would be

1. There are undeniable anatomical, physiological, behavioral differences between human males and females.

2. Whether the differences are innate or acquired is not known.

3. The relevance of these differences to the success of women in physics is even less known.

4. Some of Evolutionary Psychology is so pseudo-scientific that even biologists like Prof. PZ Myers (pharyngula.org) have a problem with it. From my POV, he can have the last word:

John Quiggin is picking on those poor evolutionary psychologists, as represented by Kristof’s laughable opinion piece on the “God Gene”. Quiggin hits on the usual deficits of EP: the evidence-free just-so stories, the unrealistic time-scales, the reduction of the complex to the simple, the superficial and endlessly flexible definitions of the phenomena they are addressing, etc. I agree completely with him, these are flaws in the evolutionary psychology research program. I have another gripe to add to the list, my main reason I reject evolutionary psychology and that whole line of tripe about genes “for” various things.

It’s nothing but modern molecular preformationism. Palmistry for the genome. We’ve been fighting against this simplistic notion of the whole of the organism prefigured in a plan or in toto in the embryo since Socrates, and it keeps coming back. We’ve moved from imagining a little homunculus lurking in the sperm to one hiding in the genome. It’s just not there. You can’t point to a spot on a chromosome and say, “there’s the little guy’s finger!”, nor can you point to a spot and say, “there’s his fondness for football!”.

By: Chris Crawford

Chris Crawford — Fri, 30 Sep 2005 03:58:25 +0000

OK, I agree that we’ve pretty much talked this out. I’ll summarize the main points that I have been pressing:

1. There are undeniable behavioral differences between males and females.

2. Some of these behavioral differences arise from genetic factors, not cultural ones.

3. Evolutionary psychology operates using a logic entirely different from that used in the physical sciences, and this logic is necessary and appropriate to the field. While rigorous mathematical deduction would be preferable, such analysis is inapplicable to the multivariate problems faced in that field.

4. Some (SOME!) physicists are so wrapped up in their own field that they cannot appreciate the subtleties of other fields, and do not accord them the respect they deserve.

By: Plato

Plato — Fri, 30 Sep 2005 01:59:27 +0000

Nature Conformable To Herselfby Murray Gell-Mann

It in no way diminishes the importance of the chemical bond to know that it arises from quantum mechanics, electromagnetism, and the prevalence of temperatures and pressures that allow atoms and molecules to exist. Similarly, it does not diminish the significance of life on Earth to know that it emerged from physics and chemistry and the special historical circumstances permitting the chemical reactions to proceed that produced the ancestral life form and thus initiated biological evolution. Finally, it does not detract from the achievements of the human race, including the triumphs of the human intellect and the glorious works of art that have been produced for tens of thousand of years, to know that our intelligence and self-awareness, greater than those of the other animals, have emerged from the laws of biology plus the specific accidents of hominid evolution.

When we human beings experience awe in the face of the splendors of nature, when we show love for one another, and when we care for our more distant relatives–the other organisms with which we share the biosphere–we are exhibiting aspects of the human condition that are no less wonderful for being emergent phenomena.

http://www.santafe.edu/~mgm/nature.html

By: Aaron

Aaron — Fri, 30 Sep 2005 01:00:37 +0000

I’m pretty much tired of this at this point, so I’ll confine myself just to this:

Your comment about traits appearing randomly is the kind of thing evolutionists try to avoid. Nobody’s happy explaining a phenomenon as a fluke. “And then, a miracle happened!” is never accepted as part of an evolutionary explanation.

I don’t know any ‘evolutionists’ who try to avoid it. Not everything is adaptive or selected for. Some stuff just is there. It happens. It’s not at all like saying that a miracle occurred.