\doc\web\99\01\brainsz.txt Send reply to: From: "Shawn Chen" To: "'robert ballard'" , "'arthur hu'" Copies to: Subject: RE: [fair-diversity] Re: Rushton on brain size and letter "all diferences are socially constructed" Date sent: Tue, 19 Jan 1999 12:41:12 -0800 Robert: <> Robert, after I read your message I just did a search on the web after reading your message. Here is one link that contains more information related to your question: http://www.eugenics.net/papers/jprnr.html The Mismeasures of Gould By J. Philippe Rushton (Originally published in The National Review, September 15, 1997) In the part in this part related to your questioning, he said: "In my own published work, uncited by Gould, I have shown that brain sizes vary systematically by race -- but not to the benefit of Caucasians. For what it is worth, Mongoloids average about a cubic inch more than Caucasoids and over three cubic inches more than Negroids. This result has been corroborated many times since 1980, and by every available technique. ..." This link has a little more detail on different studies of the same claim: http://www.eugenics.net/papers/rushton.html For an opposite view on the matter, here is a link to a Gould's article: http://www.dartmouth.edu/~chance/course/topics/curveball.html CURVEBALL The New Yorker, November 28, 1994 BY STEPHEN JAY GOULD In closing comment he said: I closed my chapter in "The Mismeasure of Man" on the unreality of g and the fallacy of regarding intelligence as a single-scaled, innate thing in the head with a marvellous quotation from John Stuart Mill, well worth repeating: The tendency has always been strong to believe that whatever received a name must be an entity or being, having an independent existence of its own. And if no real entity answering to the name could be found, men did not for that reason suppose that none existed, but imagined that it was something particularly abstruse and mysterious. How strange that we would let a single and false number divide us, when evolution has united all people in the recency of our common ancestry -- thus undergirding with a shared humanity that infinite variety which custom can never stale. E pluribus unum. -----Original Message----- From: robert ballard [mailto:rballard@bambi.acc.nccu.edu] Sent: Tuesday, January 19, 1999 11:21 AM To: arthur hu Cc: fair-diversity@egroups.com Subject: [fair-diversity] Re: Rushton on brain size and letter "all diferences are socially constructed" Professor Rushton should compare Oriental brain size with Caucasian brain size. Or better still, Asian brain size with European(white) brain size. I have never heard of any such study. What would it reveal? If the study would show that "whites" have smaller brains than Asians, would we hear no more from Professor Rushton? Or to state it more positively, that the study proves that Asians have larger brains the Europeans. And suppose that the study would reveal that Asians have smaller brains than whites? Then how would this explain the academic success of Asians in the top American colleges and universities? Perhaps Harvard, Yale, MIT, and Stanford, etc. are inferior to Canadian universities? I do not think so and if you are Canadian, do not "flame" me. No insult to you is intended. I notice that Asian Indians (I think) dominate our National Spelling Bee. Yet two Jamacian girls were first and second in the last one, and I was happy to see a Black boy from West Virginia in the top ten. I am very much interested in the reasons why half of the finalist will always be from one small group. In the meantime, I say more power to you over achievers whoever you. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ HOW LOW CAN YOU GO? How does a 2.9% intro APR Visa sound? Transfer your balances from other high rate credit cards and save! Learn more at: http://offers.egroups.com/click/204/1 eGroup home: http://www.eGroups.com/list/fair-diversity Free Web-based e-mail groups by eGroups.com Ralph L Holloway [rlh2@columbia.edu] I think the data regarding black-whire differences in brain sizes do basically demonstrate lower brain weights for blacks. I have found that in my own sample of data from Columbia P & S which I've never published. Rushton mentions the Ho et al data, and they showed it too, but their explanation, as I recall, was the cultural reasons were somehow the explanation, how exactly was never elaborated, but could include diet, less wholesome environments, etc, etc. And there is the constant rub: it is impossible to garner information where B's and W's can be matched for all variables aside from brain weight, and then tested for the later and IQ jointly. I have a different explanation which is: blacks have more metabolically efficient brains, having evolved mostly in tropical conditions, and the difference between what I would call "adaptive intelligence" (the intelligence required to secure food, mates, family, and a moral and social order with laws) and "educational intelligence" (the intelligence to sort through and collate disparate words and phrases from formal Western educations) is nil between B's and W's. That is, they can do exactly what whites do with less brain mass. They have less brain mass because brain mass in tropical conditions is "expensive". In the Arctic regions, it doesn't matter. How on earth could one test the "intelligence" between Inuit or Greenland Eskimo and West African Congolese? As for the AAA, I dropped my membership several years ago over this and similar issues regarding the near-hatred that exists between social-cultural and biological anthropologists. Things have changed for the better, however, as the American Anthropologist has once again returned to a more holistic approach to Anthropology, supposedly the scientific study of humankind, and there is even encouragement for articles about physical anthropology. But in a nutshell, I believe the differences both in brain attributes and behavior are too minor to be of anything but the narrowest academic interest. Ralph Holloway