Have you read Brainstorm by Rebecca M. Jordan-Young? http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674057302 I think you would really really really like it. It is my single favorite non-fiction book. Although it is about sex differences, there is a lot of relevant stuff about interpreting the sorts of studies that people use with racial groups as well.
One of my pet peeves is "evolutionary arguments" that are simply someone asserting some selective pressure existed in recent human history and thus some group has some trait not shared by other humans. Or even worse, this trait is also encoded in the DNA. Usually the evidence for the existence of the selective pressure is weak, but even more importantly, the line of reasoning is completely unconvincing regardless of the selective pressure existing or not. Doubly so for traits that are nearly impossible to measure and hard to link to genetics, such as "general intelligence" or things of that ilk.
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timeasmymeasure
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Date: 2012-10-05 07:08 am (UTC)I think you would really really really like it. It is my single favorite non-fiction book. Although it is about sex differences, there is a lot of relevant stuff about interpreting the sorts of studies that people use with racial groups as well.
One of my pet peeves is "evolutionary arguments" that are simply someone asserting some selective pressure existed in recent human history and thus some group has some trait not shared by other humans. Or even worse, this trait is also encoded in the DNA. Usually the evidence for the existence of the selective pressure is weak, but even more importantly, the line of reasoning is completely unconvincing regardless of the selective pressure existing or not. Doubly so for traits that are nearly impossible to measure and hard to link to genetics, such as "general intelligence" or things of that ilk.