Mike,
I didn't intend to say I thought you should stop
posting the Jensen stuff. I was really commenting on
your statement about how it provoked "energy if not
inspiration" or something like that. Actually I find
the problem complex--having lived in a number of
different cultures and having become pretty much at
home in at least one other than the one I was born
into (where I often feel least at home). Some people
do seem to be brighter, catch on faster, etc. I think
they turn up in all cultures. Knowing how to
manipulate the artefacts of a culture that corresponds
to a greater level of division of labor doesn't make
somebody more intelligent than someone from a culture
corresponding to a less complex division of labor.
Didn't Sahlins say that Neolithic individuals were
probably the highest level of individual human
development (Stone Age Economics)? It's kind of
difficult to say whether a child who turns out to be
sharp or bright in an Andean village would also have
turned out to be sharp or bright in a Kpelle one. I
just don't know how you could ever test that
hypothesis.
My opposition to Jensen is the association of this
quality to some construct of race on a number of
bases, not least of which is the fact that the racial
categories he uses are bogus.
>
> But to answer your question, Paul. It is my strong
> impression that everyone
> who reads this list is NOT aware of Jensen or of the
> burgeoning field of
> behavioral genetics applied to human
> characteristics.
My "people who should know better" wasn't ever
intended to refer to people on XMCA but psychologists
who accept the racial categories Jensen uses == they
should know that there isn't anything there but
relative allele distribtions as Rachel originally
pointed out. Was this misunderstood?
>
> This topic is great concern to me. I do not think
> that committment to
> the cultural historical nature of mind is sufficient
> to allow those
> seeking to develop a chat perspective to ignore this
> form of discourse
> and its foundations.
I agree with you here too. I'm somewhat limited in my
access to a lot of specialized bibliography but am
curious: has any work at all been done on differential
levels of intelligence from a CHAT perspective? But
are differential intelligence levels evaluated at the
individual level even relevant to the development of
CHAT perspectives? Genevieve informs me that she
doesn't think much is done in this direction precisely
because CHAT looks at intelligence as a distributed
process. From this point of view individual genius,
or differential individual intelligence is simply a
non-issue. Leslie White argued similarly. He said
that if genius were genetic, then the same number of
geniuses would tend to exist at any given time. But
in fact, looking at different areas of human creative
activity, genius doesn't appear to be evenly
distributed at but tends to concentrate in short
periods of time. (e.g., Leibniz and Newton discovering
the calculus at the same time, other examples of
similar phenomena) Here one can think of Kroeber's
descriptions in Patterns of Cultural Development where
he traces the emergence of all kinds of styles in
different human expressions across dozens of cultures,
showing that the "genius" period is a restricted one
in a longer process.
>These people are seeking just
> the kind of nomoethic
> explanations you raised in your earlier message on
> other topics and for
> sure their technologies are central devices
> affecting the flow of people
> through community college systems.
I think you might be overestimating the degree to
which community colleges effectively implement the
testing that they do do. But I agree that it is most
effective to persuade people of the errors in someones
proposal when you know that proposal and can deal with
its particulars. But it gets so we need 36 or 48
hours a day.
Bottom line: i never meant to weigh in against your
continued posting of the Jensen material.
Paul H. Dillon
(using Genevieve Patthey-Chavez' email)
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