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Showing posts from August, 2008

The trouble with "racial research"

The tremendous victory of Barak Obama in the American presidential election (I'll confess to shedding a tear or 2 during his speech) has reminded me of something: A couple of years ago a professor by the name of Richard Flynn at Ulster University published some studies on comparative IQs of various races/countries. The results, not surprisingly, favoured the Western industrialised view of what is "intelligence". His study found that north western Europeans are the "smartest" and disparaged, among others, southern/eastern Europeans including my fellow Serbs. The results absolutely trashed Africans and Australian Aborigines. He previously came to the attention of the media by publishing studies that suggest that men are, on average, 5 IQ points "smarter" than women... What I find objectionable about his research is that it is essentially completely worthless and quite possibly dangerous. What application can such a study have, especially as regards ...