Quote:
Originally Posted by Neverfly
Culture has nothing to do with I.Q.
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Actually, it does. That's rather the point. The mean IQ scores of the African American community over the past century, and the Irish and Polish during the earlier part of that century increased as those groups' standings improved (I don't have the citations for those at the moment). Does that mean those ethnic groups "got smarter," or does it mean that they got better at the things that the standard IQ tests measure? I'm banking on the latter.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Neverfly
So yes, cultural influence can have an impact on how much education people recieve, how much application they have- but Not an impact on their physical characteristics- including the physical brain.
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Do you know of a method for measuring the "physical characteristics" that are relevant to mathematical ability that is free from cultural bias? There have been many attempts at creating such a "bias-free IQ" test, but I'm not aware of one that actually does what it claims to do.
And the point of the studies I linked was that the difference between girls' and boys' math scores (biased as they may be!) disappears in more equal cultures, and that it is nearly gone in the US as well (and other things I linked provided copious evidence that the playing field is
not yet level, as some have claimed in this thread). How could that
possibly show that girls have less inherent mathematical ability than boys? Or, if you are not claiming that, what exactly is the counter-claim?
Yes physiological differences exist between girls and boys, even in the brain. But are any of those differences actually reflected by differences in ability? Not only has no such evidence been provided, but the evidence seems to show that any such difference is effectively non-existent!