Book review: INEQUALITY: A GENETIC HISTORY by Carles Lalueza-Fox
Given its putative topic, Lalueza-Fox’s (2022) book is most notable for what it doesn’t discuss.
Stupid? No. Unfamiliar? Yes. The meaning of low mean IQs in developing nations
Illiterate people’s thinking probably remains grounded in their everyday experience. When these people take a test that solely measures abstract thinking, they perform poorly. This does not make them stupid. Instead, it shows the disconnect between their natural mode of thought and the unfamiliar test content.
Quack Multiculturalism as an unscientific ideology
The most fundamental problem is defining multiculturalism. Frisby (2013) described four types of multiculturalism that are often present in American culture: Boutique, Kumbayah, Light-and-Fluffy, and Bean-Counting Multiculturalism. Each of these seems like “multiculturalism,” but is actually consists of merely “going through the motions,” often unthinkingly.
Combining cut scores for gifted identification: No impact on diversity
I already blogged about an important paper which showed that averaging scores on tests is the most accurate method of identifying children for gifted programs (McBee, Peters, & Waterman, 2014). A paper by my colleague, Joni M. Lakin, built on this earlier research and was named the Paper of the Year in Gifted Child Quarterly…
Ethics of DNA research on indigenous people: Not thorny at all
Undark published an article on September 30, 2019, about the “thorny ethics” of collecting genetic data from the world’s indigenous populations. This is an important issue because genomic databases consist overwhelmingly of people of European ancestry. Results from these databases will not generalize well to non-European populations. In fact, the more distantly related a group…
