You can't win with a racist. But I'm trying anyhow: Could I get a little help here?

[Magda Hassan]

Max, Google have a search option for peer review articles and journals. http://scholar.google.com Some/many of them are behind pay walls or similar but you will still find many useful articles there. All of the gender and race research vis-a-vis brain size, IQ etc have been well covered for decades. It is pretty elementary stuff but you want us to do your research for you. It might be more useful for all concerned if you go off and do some reading and find out exactly what your friend has been reading and put forward the relevant quotes/articles/hypotheses etc otherwise it is too time consuming this end re-inventing the wheel. We can manage members with autism, we already have some, but not members who don't do their basic research. None of us have the time to do that for others. We are busy with our own projects.

Help me explain to me crazy friend (crazier than me, at least. And I keep cats. Give them names. Try to teach them martial arts.) why this source of funding would taint anything that it was associated with, let alone writings on race. That's one of the things she just doesn't get.

It is a white supremacist and Nazi front since the day it was founded. Lot's of information around about those connections including those I already provided. Look at the founders. Look at the grants given and the terms they are given. Look at the acceptance or rejection of the work done by the recipients of those grants by their peers. The only other people accepting them are fellow recipients of Pioneer Fund grants. The entire rest of the academic world have peer reviewed them and given them the thumbs down.

The volume of my friend's reading is not really the problem. Her problem is selective dismissal. Anything she reads that supports her crazy = gold. Anything that doesn't, she goes after fine points of grammar.

Genuine scientific research does not selectively dismiss anything. What she is doing is cherry picking to suit her biased agenda. Just like some Christians do with the bible eg: hell and damnation for homosexuals but not for people who wear mixed fibers in their clothing. Biblically they are both damned. She is placing herself in with the crazy Westboro Baptist church types of academia if she selects her evidence in this way.

I've found a lot of rebuttals. But I can never have too many. She's got a real zest for Peer Reviewed sources.

Looks like she is only using those peers that also get funding from the Pioneer Fund. All other scientists (that is 99.9999%) reject A) the concept of 'race' as a scientific category B) any scientific work done on the basis of using flawed scientific concepts like 'race'.

I watched the Rushton-Suzuki debate. It seemed to me that Rushton won. At least, he did by the standards of my Middle School Debate squad. He was in control, calm, clear, presented his argument cogently and understandably. Suzuki seemed rather fraught, kept repeating Lewontin without really explaining him.
Or rather, it seemed Rushton won right up until he was asked about the Pioneer Fund and lied. That was where I became convinced that I had to convince my friend that she didn't have a rhetorical leg to stand on.

Can't blame Suzuki for being fraught. Probably frustrated at the complete stupidity of giving discredited quacks like Rushton hours of broadcast space better able to be used in real science education. Suzuki was debating Rushton, not the individual viewers like yourself who may or may not have had the background information on Lewontin. Rushton certainly would have. Or should have. So no explanations should be needed. Now there is another source your friend can read up on, Lewontin, who doesn't believe in genetic determinism. Lots of peer reviewed articles for his work and he is accepted as a real scientist by his peers in the non-Pioneer Fund funded world of science. Look at who Rushton's peers are. There are about 10 of them that give glowing reviews of each others works. A circle jerk off. This is how the Neo-cons work too. Please look at Adam Curtis' blog entry on TINA to see how it is done.

[Max Blair]

We can manage members with autism, we already have some, but not members who don't do their basic research. None of us have the time to do that for others. We are busy with our own projects.

I am sorry to have given you the impression that I am not sufficiently well informed to post here. It seems I've gotten off on the wrong foot with just about everybody who's responded to me. I am especially sorry to seem to alienate you, as it was one of your posts discovered in one of my many Google Searches on this topic that led me here. If I started with some very basic questions, it was because I was trying to get a feel for what really is out there after a long tango in deep darkness. I am triply sorry if you think I have wasted your time.

Now there is another source your friend can read up on, Lewontin, who doesn't believe in genetic determinism. Lot's of peer reviewed articles for his work and he is accepted as a real scientist by his peers in the non-Pioneer Fund funded world of science.

What is your opinion of the AWF Edwards 2003 Challenge to Lewontin, that gives us the adage "Lewontin's Fallacy?" My friend thinks Edwards thoroughly discredits Lewontin.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/12879450

Look at who Rushton's peers are. There are about 10 of them that give glowing reviews of each others works. A circle jerk off. This is how the Neo-cons work too. Please look at Adam Curtis' blog entry on TINA to see how it is done.

That blog entry looks really interesting and useful on a quick once over. Thank you especially for this.

[Adele Edisen]

Would you-all like to know about a Nobel Prize winner in Physiology/Medicine, J.C. Eccles, 1963, whose hypothesis on synaptic inhibition in the mammalian nervous system was based on the supposition that certain identifiable interneurons existed in the spinal cord, despite neuroanatomists insistence that these neurons, called Golgi Type II interneurons, only exist in the retina of the eye, the cerebral cortex and cerebellum? Santiago Ramon y Cajal, who won a Nobel Prize in 1906 with Camillio Golgi, said they were extremely rare in the spinal cord, and in A Textbook of Neurohistology by Fawcett and Bloom, 1995, the authors do not mention their presence in the spinal cord. David P.C. Lloyd of Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research, and later Rockefeller University University, who discovered direct synaptic inhibition in the myotatic reflex system of the cord in 1941, never accepted Eccles' hyothesis which reversed Eccles own original hypothesis of electrical transmission to a chemical mode for excitation and inhibition. Ralph W. Gerard, M.D., Ph.D., Professor of Physiology at the University of Chicago, and President of the American Physiological Society, did not accept the existence of an interneuron-mediated inhibitory pathway either. The insertion of the Golgi Type II interneuron and the chemical hypothesis was made by Eccles because he did not know the neuroanatomy of the spinal cord nor had he evefr measured the intramedullary (within the cord) conduction delays of the sensory input to the point of synapic contact with motoneurons and intramedullary motoneuron output to the outside.

The central delay from the time of entry into the spinal cord to its exit from the cord in the cat is 0.8 milliseconds in the myotatic relex system; 0.5millisecond of that is due to excitatory and inhibitory sensory input within the cord, and about 0.3 milliseconds is due to electrical conduction over the dendrites, cell body, and axon of the motoneurons. These times would be longer in humans because of the larger distances to be traveled. In the cat, the central delay is due entirely to conduction time, and there is no 'synaptic delay' of 0.3-0.5 milliseconds at the synapse in the reflex system, as is being taught in physiology textbooks for fifty years or so, despite published evidence contradicting the Eccles' hypothesis.

Here is a modern problem which is being perpetrated in the scientific community largely due to research grants from pharmaceutical companies eager to sell drug products which can increase or decrease the excitability of neurons, and there are plenty of those. Yet none of them are accurately known to be involved by excitatory or inhibitory sensory endings at their synaptic boutons. Some amino acids are known as acting in a depressing or stimulating action, but the mechanisms are unknown. There are chemicals involved in the sympathetic and parasympathetic portions of our nervous system which are under hormonal control, but nervous transmission in the somatic part of the mammalian system is basically electrical conduction in nature and hence much more rapid in response, as needed in movements of the body.

An example of the myotatic reflex is the "knee-jerk" reaction when the tendon at the knee is tapped with a rubber hammer, causing a reflex extension of the knee joint by contraction of the quadriceps muscle that lies over the thigh. This is where the quadriceps muscle (the agonist) responds to a stretch, the myotatic reflex.. The sensory nerve carries this infomation to its motoneurons and at the same time a branch from the nerve goes directly to the hamstring muscle motroneurons (antagonist muscles) at the back of the thigh to prevent them from being stimulated to react.

Why is it important to study inhibition? Well, excitation and inhibition are the two basic processes by which the nervous system carries on its functions - from consciousness, hormonal control, digestion, maintaining body temperature, hearing, smelling, seeing, touching, feeling, moving, thinking, inmagining, dreaming, reading, et cetera and et cetera....

I know this is a lot of technical information to get all at once, but if a lay person can understand it, wouldn't you think an expert in the neurosciences could understand it as well? The entire field of neurophysiology has been remiss in their work, having studied only the last five years iof published works and told their graduate students to do the same. The Scientific Method works, if it is allowed to do so.

Just an example.

Adele

[Magda Hassan]

What is your opinion of the AWF Edwards 2003 Challenge to Lewontin, that gives us the adage "Lewontin's Fallacy?" My friend thinks Edwards thoroughly discredits Lewontin.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/12879450

Plenty of people have rejected Edwards position re Lewontin as well. I will also note that Edwards is a pupil of Ronald Fisher, a well known eugenicist and racist. He was also a scientist who sold himself to the tobacco corporations to produce studies saying tobacco did not cause cancer. Also noted is Debretts entry for Edwards where they note in their official biography of him that he was a member of the Eugenics Society. Birds of a feather....

[Max Blair]

What is your opinion of the AWF Edwards 2003 Challenge to Lewontin, that gives us the adage "Lewontin's Fallacy?" My friend thinks Edwards thoroughly discredits Lewontin.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/12879450

Plenty of people have rejected Edwards position re Lewontin as well. I will also note that Edwards is a pupil of Ronald Fisher, a well known eugenicist and racist. He was also a scientist who sold himself to thet tobacco corporations to produce studies saying tobacco did not cause cancer.

I'm sure she would argue guilt by association. Myself, not so much. Credibility matters. Academic pedigree does factor into overall credibility. It's not a huge thing in and of itself, but it is a thing. It would be useful to know what Edwards thinks of Fisher these days. Also of course, Fisher does still have his defenders, including science rockstar Richard Dawkins.

Still, eugenics. Yeesh.