Friday, October 19, 2007

Racist Professor: “I cannot understand how I could have said what I am quoted as having said"


Dr James Graham whose remarks on race and IQ caused a storm has cancelled his UK speaking tour - if there was any of it left - and gone back to the USA to try to save his job as Chancellor of an academic institution. The Times broke the story and carried this follow up today.

Comments there are mixed with some thinking he should stick to his guns and quoting spurious generalised IQ scores. It is patently obvious that most IQ tests are culturally and linguistically and in many cases historically at least also gender biased. Dr Graham is back peddling furiously. Good.

4 comments:

tonydj said...

You don't need to be a Nobel laureate to come to this conclusion!

Question. Name one historic written language native to Africa besides Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics. Restrict yourself to sub-saharan Africa to make it easier

Chris Paul said...

You are a fascist fathead and a considering this comment a complete and utter chump.

Egyptian hieroglyphics and indeed demotic scripts probably came from or were modelled on the language of (south) Kush and (east) D'mt kingdoms that pre-dated or in the case of Kush massively pre-dated most of their (egyptian) good bits.

Egyptian elites are known from their majestic art and craft to have borne what you would now call African characteristics.

Languages fitting your silly and deliberately limiting definition are known to include Ge'ez, Old Nubian and Meriotic. Ge'ez is still used, rather like Latin which it pre-dates, in church in Ethiopia. ON stopped being used, rather like Anglo Saxon (first relics well into the ADs) around 1450, Meriotic is a dead 'un but had a 700 year history straddling the BC/AD millennium.

There are 2,000 extant languages in Africa and some of the very oldest of these are still used.

As Dave-id Cameron would assert no doubt things do not have to be written down to be important.

Proto Celtic and Proto IE languages are in a similar timetable when it comes to being written down (or at least having surviving scripts which is different.

There have to be surviving media to have surviving writing. And there has to be an effort to find these. Considerable in Egypt and Northwards, not so to the South.

Perhaps a full blog post anon? We'll see.

tonydj said...

My question related to WRITTEN languages. I don't doubt the existance of SPOKEN languages.

Show me the written script!

Words like "probably" are not good enough. Ge'ez and D'mt originated in South Arabia (That's ASIA). Kush originally used hieroglyphics, the Meriotic script was a development of hieroglyphics with some GREEK influence...etc etc

King Shaka had to wait for H F Flynn to arrive before he understood writing.

Anonymous said...

Please explain to me what you mean by subsituting James Watson's name with mine.