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Originally Posted by CliffFletcher
Why the assumption that there's a political agenda at play? Greater male variability is a fact of genetics. This research was meant to use math to look into how that variance could play out with regards to intelligence.
Do we really want to assume science is always motivated by ideological and social agendas? Isn't that what global warming deniers accuse the climate scientists of - using dubious research to justify a political and economic agenda? How far do we want to go down the road of suppressing science just because it could be used to support controversial ideological positions?
Discovering how the world works, and making decisions about how we ought to behave, are two entirely different things. Keeping them separate is a cornerstone of the enlightenment and of the scientific method.
Research has identified something known as general intelligence. The fact that it's controversial and some people are upset at the idea doesn't change the science.
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I agree with a lot of your points.
My main issue is with a lot of the "research" in the field of sociology and intelligence as a whole. You're basically taking very abstract concepts, like human intelligence and personality, and attempting to quantify them.
Sociology as a field also seems obsessed with proving that nurture outweighs nature, when they should be focusing on the role of both nature and nurture in human experience. It's a field of study that is inherently politically motivated.
I do disagree that the variation hypothesis is a "fact". There are studies going both way on the subject. Like I stated before quantifying intelligence isn't possible and will automatically lend itself to bias. "Variation hypothesis" is a hypothesis and not a fact. There also appears to be differences in the degree of variability across economic, cultural, and national backgrounds. This suggests either bias in the testing or a nurturing effect, which is in opposition to the proposition that there is greater inherent (IE genetically pre-determined) variability of intelligence in males.