Watson, intelligence and autism

Post Reply New Topic

From what he is quoted as saying, I think he has been mis-interpreted.

He said "all our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours – whereas all the testing says not really" and "“there is no firm reason to anticipate that the intellectual capacities of peoples geographically separated in their evolution should prove to have evolved identically. Our wanting to reserve equal powers of reason as some universal heritage of humanity will not be enough to make it so”.

Where in any of that does it say "less intelligent"?

What it actually says is "different intelligence", i.e. a different average profile across all the different types of intelligence. How is this derogatory?

No, 2ukenkerl, you didn't say anything about accents. I was using that to prove a point. People tend to think that the way they speak (be it grammar, vocabulary, accent, or whatever) is superior to others. When in fact it is usually an arbitrary manifestation of the culture they were born into. Should people with a southern accent 're-educate' themselves to speak with a midlands accent so that the average American will think they are more educated? I don't think so, but the media has required that for as long as we have had national broadcasting.

Why does any one speak the way they do? Language is always changing. If we grabbed a bunch of English speaking people and dropped them on a deserted island somewhere and came back in 100 years, would it be English? Sure - sort of. The initial language conventions would be a base for developing the language, but some things would be added to deal with the day to day, other things would be dropped. Meanwhile, the English that the rest of the world spoke would also change.

Black Africans speak a dialect that combines some vocabulary from their African languages with a (sometimes) simplified grammar (sometimes more complex), somewhat different pronunciation rules, and a variety of idioms. This came about after hundreds of years of development in (side-by-side) isolation from white English.

People that speak German, Spanish and French assign a gender (masculine/feminine/neutral) for every noun. English, Swedish and other languages dropped that practice. To some, it is proof of the superior intelligence of the Germans or French or Spanish people. To others, it is simply streamlining the language. Ultimately, does it make one language better? Nah.

The same is true of many patois (or 'pidgin') dialects, where conjugation is simplified. To someone that is invested in strict arbitrary rules for conjugation, it sounds incredibly primitive. But why change the ending of the verb "to be" to account for different parties? - If I say "I is, you is, he is, she is, we is, they is", it is quite clear what I mean. And that 'clean syntax' (that a computer programmer would appreciate) is more logical, and is easier to teach and preserve. Why not create a present perfect tense by saying "I be going" or "She be going"?? It sounds weird to someone that doesn't do it that way (just like Chinese may sound weird to a Lithuanian), but it is a logical systematic language pattern.

Right here:

The key is to understand that Watson is using a metaphor of volume, more intelligence is a greater amount, a greater volume. He talks about the capacity - how much intelligence someone can "hold or carry," and the line on powers of reason is similar. Differing amounts of power, different volumes, more is better. If you are unequal, one has less, and one has more - it's the only way you can have inequality on this measure. So I think it's pretty clear that Watson is saying blacks are less intelligent than whites. (Sorry if this is a little patronising: I find the unconscious, less obvious metaphors that much speech is littered with fascinating.)

Agreed, but that doesn't necessarily speak as to the inherent abilities of blacks in terms of intelligence. We might as well look at Iraq and say that Arabs must be stupid and unable to form coherent societies. The Ottomans tell us otherwise. Or Germany? The Germans are inherently genocidal? I don't think so.
I think there's a real ignorance in much of the west of the scale of destruction that slavery wrought on Africa. Africa had its own civilizations, which were brought down by European money and the taking of slaves. That's not to say that those civilizations weren't guilt-free, far from it, but without the huge scale of the slave-trade and the strife it brought, you'd see a very different continent. Slavery on a near industrial scale went on for a couple of centuries, and had a body count many times greater than the holocaust - that's not something a continent just gets over quickly. There are still artificial, western borders, debt, exploitation by the western powers, and remember that it was only in the 50s and 60s (and in some cases 70s) that colonialism was ended in many of these countries. It's pretty recent, there won't be a quick recovery. Blaming the mess that we in the west made on ethnicity is extremely unfair, IMO.

Agree with you on most points, but the Ottomans (Ottomen?) were not Arabs; they were Turkic.

YEAH, That has been done! Luckily, over a couple hundred, or few hundred, years, it hasn't changed enough to be THAT much of a problem. The same happened to a greater degree with swiss people, and they still have a common basis. HECK, Swedish could probably understand german with little effort, and DO understand danish relatively well.



Funny, **I** didn't notice that before. I doubt it was even 100 years. BESIDES, this is the US where they at least USED to teach English!! !! !



das Baby (NEUTER)
der Backfisch (MASCULINE)
das Fraulein (NEUTER)
die Frau (FEMININE ****FINALLY****)

Sorry for the misspellings. When I was a kid and heard German was hard because of THIS, I thought YEAH RIGHT! It made MORE sense. I had NO idea that either could have any gender. Still, I learned German better because IT is what I wanted to learn.



Swedish DID? WOW, I'm going to have to check that out. Danish DIDN"T! Danish has TWO "genders" ET and EN I believe they are natural and common(It is ET ship, EN city or EN girl or EN boy EN family or ET people). They make about as much sense as the German ones. That is to say they make LITTLE sense.



WOW, I never felt that. BTW even the GERMANS are changing this. Bad grammar is EVERYWHERE!



WOW, I can see you never thought this out! Why not just get rid of the verb itself!? THAT makes sense ALSO, **********SOMETIMES**********! The fact is that subtle things often come in useful. I have PERSONALLY seen this. If I were to do it, I could certainly do better, but NOT in the middle of its use, etc...



NOPE, it isn't. ESPECIALLY when pronouns are used. BTW as I recall, chinese doesn't even assign gender to PRONOUNS! THAT is why so many Chinese take SO long to get it straight. The concept itself is FOREIGN!

And WOW, you NEVER mentioned declension! For SHAME! Actually, declension, if followed consistantly solves problems even ENGLISH still has! Unfortunately, it is so poorly thought out that it is used SO inconsistantly, that it makes little difference.

BTW I just checked out your statement about swedish. ******WRONG!******

den [den:] det de (dom) definite article
in the case of adjective (+ noun)

English translation
the, that


Examples
den röda bilen---the red automobile
de små barnen---the little children
det bästa jag vet---the nicest thing I know

So it is precisely the same as danish!

I don't know of any research done on autism in places such as Africa, so it is difficult to say that autism exists in the same rates as it does in more priveleged countries.

Whatever caused intelligences and autism to arise is no doubt due to environment (in the evolutionary sense). The environment gives rise to the trait or group of traits. Unfavorable traits tend to be filtered out unless there is some linked benefit to sexual success.

If there are lower rates of autism in less priveleged countries (I don't know, but one shouldn't assume), then one has to ask "What was different about that culture's/race's environment, their evolution, which might have chosen out autism?" Certainly the European countries have had their fair share of epidemics, which smaller countries are better at not spreading because it takes money to travel. If there was something about autism/intelligence which also benefited survival and therefore sexual success, then those countries who had the money to travel would've naturally had greater epidemics and perhaps had selected MORE for autism.

I sometimes wonder if it is a coincidence that the stereotypical "nerd" is portrayed as wearing thick glasses and being plagued by allergies.

Whoops! I think that came from my tendancy to think of Islamic civilization as part of a continuous timeline, the ethnicities of who's running what tends to get blurry after a while.

I would recommend reading Jared Diamond's book Guns, Germs and Steel. The first chapter, called Yali's question, asks precisely this question. Jared goes on to explain how circumstance, shaped by environmental factors, may be an explanation for less of a need for the 'scientific' mind. It has nothing to do with inherent intelligence.

Still, he was RIGHT in saying that intellectual capacities differ and it is wrong to assume that another race or likewise heavily isolated group should have the same biases, morals, etc... Anyway, capacity doesn't equate 100% with intelligence. NOBODY has hit their limits, and even HERE many talk of disparities between memory, ability, and intelligence. EVEN when talking about THEMSELVES! Some here even poke fun at THEMSELVES!

As for germans being genocidal? In normal times, they were relatively like live/let live. The turks and jews were BOTH there a LONG time. and they certainly let in other european peoples.

Actually, I should have said some dialects of Swedish (and Danish). Various forms of Danish have 1, 2, or 3 genders. >> Reference << And the Scandinavian "common vs. neutral" gender system is a considerable simplification over the Germanic/Old Norse (although not an elimination as I said). In some older isolated Swedish dialects, even adjectives are conjugated according to gender, but this has been eliminated in most. Even English has not eliminated all gender, but has a relatively simple pronominal gender system.

BTW, I just checked you spelling of pidgeon (pidgin) and swedish (Swedish) ... #### WRONG! #####

You are equating "reason" with "intelligence". I am saying that intelligence can take many different forms, of which logical reasoning is only one. What about emotional intelligence, musical intelligence, artistic intelligence to name but three others?

Sure, we should make a distinction between theoretical capacity and achievement, and most people don't hit their limits. And how exactly does anyone measure that theoretical capacity or limit? Oh, wait, they don't. They only measure achievement or developed ability. A person's score on verbal or math or spatial intelligence is always somewhere below their maximum potential, depending on how much they developed in that type of intelligence. Which means that any comparison of different groups for intelligence is not a genetic comparison.

Last edited by monty on 25 Oct 2007, 1:49 pm, edited 1 time in total.

You KNOW, for SOMEONE who seems so interested in keeping grammar CORRECT, you SEEM to have a SURPRISING and somewhat ANNOYING tendancy to CAPITALISE for NO particularly good REaSoN. Ahem.

Anyway, no arguments on the point that he is correct that intellectual capacities may differ, I'd simply dispute that fact that there are any good studies conclusively showing that this is definitely the case. Similarly, I'd agree with you that no one (or, at least, very few people) reach their limit. I'd be unsurprised if we discovered that Africans actually have a greater scientific capacity than caucasians, it's just that the Euro-American culture at present encourages scientific exploration more. Personally, while differences may exist, I firmly believe that culture and background play an overwhelmingly greater part in how different groups turn out.

You seem to have sauntered past the point I was making completely. Put certain stressors on just about any society, and they'll degenerate - so you see groups who were successful societies in one era become conflict-ridden anarchy or genocidal maniacs in another era. No need for genetics - just environmental factors and blind luck.

I've lived in two African countries. I think that Watson is suggesting rubbish. You can't make an assessment of intelligence of a race purely on poverty. That is backwards logic.

Bangladeshi very similar genetically to Pakistani
Afro-Caribbean descended from predominantly West African slaves.

The top scoring minorities in UK schools are Pakistani and Nigerian
Worst scoring minorities in UK schools are Bangladeshi and Afro-Caribbean

What Watson said was precisely the opposite of "making an assessment of intelligence of a race purely on poverty." What he said was that studies have shown that, when controlling for all other factors (including poverty), some races have lower intelligence capacities than others.

Now, whether such studies exist and whether they did in fact control adequately for those other variables is very much in dispute since he didn't cite those studies and many people believe those factors cannot be completely controlled. But if you think he's really "making an assessment of intelligence of a race purely on poverty," then you have completely failed to understand what he actually said and are instead arguing against something that everyone, including the person you are trying to criticize, would agree is wrong.

OK, as promised I stand corrected about Afro-Caribbean scientists. All of you managed to find three, only one of which is still alive.

Ed Almos