✪✪✪ Unit 1 Psychology Discussion: Pseudoscience
The Skeptical Inquirer. Wiseman, Richard ; Watt, Caroline In the Unit 1 Psychology Discussion: Pseudoscience and history of science, Imre Lakatos stresses the social and political Pattern Recognition In The Book Riveted of the demarcation problem, the normative methodological Unit 1 Psychology Discussion: Pseudoscience of distinguishing between science Unit 1 Psychology Discussion: Pseudoscience pseudoscience. Delusions and the Madness of the Masses. Psychology of Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities.
AP Psychology: Unit I Review - Scientific Foundations
You can also request one of these extra features:. They all pass a series of tests to prove their writing prowess and hold the reputation of being the most professional in the industry. Want to make sure writer's skills match your needs? Get more details on how to choose the appropriate author. The average quality score at our professional custom essay writing service is 8. The high satisfaction rate is set by our Quality Control Department, which checks all papers before submission. The final check includes:. If for some reason we happen to leave a mistake unnoticed, you are invited to request unlimited revisions of your custom-written paper. For more information, check our Revision Policy.
Calculate the price of your paper Type of paper needed. You will get a personal manager and a discount. Academic level. Continue to order. Our features. We've got everything to become your favourite writing service. Money back guarantee Your money is safe. Our service is legit We provide you with a sample paper on the topic you need, and this kind of academic assistance is perfectly legitimate. Get a plagiarism-free paper We check every paper with our plagiarism-detection software, so you get a unique paper written for your particular purposes.
We can help with urgent tasks Need a paper tomorrow? Pay a fair price Our prices depend on urgency. Frequently Asked Questions. How does your service work? Why stop with simplistic appearance-based racial definitions? Why not consider other definitions for which there are genetic determinants? One obsolete theory attempted to link cranial capacity cc to intelligence. While cranial capacity is an accurate measure of brain size, the fallacy was in assuming that a larger cranial capacity and brain correlates with higher intelligence. The size of the brain itself is only weakly correlated with intelligence.
If this idea were taken to its logical conclusion , the world would likely be ruled by elephants, or sperm whales. It is only when a person has an extremely small brain, as with abnormal conditions such as microcephaly, that absolute brain size has any negative impact on cognitive functions. Furthermore, having a very large amount of brain tissue, referred to as megalencephaly, is recognized as being pathological and is strongly correlated with several neurological disorders, especially severe epilepsy and autism. What is much more important than absolute brain size includes factors such as cortical folding, neuronal organization, dendritic and synaptic connections, etc. A handful of 21 st century racialists including figures such as J.
Philippe Rushton and Arthur Jensen have continued to argue that certain races are just inherently dumb. While they still like their skull and brain size measurements, their arguments hinge more on pointing to differences in races' average IQ scores and claiming this is the work of genetics. These claims rest on several big assumptions:. Increasingly, evidence has been suggesting that environment plays a large role in IQ. This started with the discovery of the Flynn effect — the realization that national average IQ scores were increasing over time at a rate much faster than could be explained by genetics and, interestingly, ethnic minorities were often making the biggest leaps. Relevant to this discussion also is Eric Turkheimer's study of twins separated at birth and raised in different socioeconomic environments.
The study found that environment mattered more to the development of IQ in the poor kids than it did in the rich kids. Essentially, some degree of genetically-determined IQ exists, but the degree to which it develops is dependent on how intellectually-stimulating their environment as children is. Although these IQ-based arguments for racialism are often used by white supremacists, taken to their logical conclusion, they would better support Asian or Jewish supremacy than white supremacy.
Rushton actually agrees that Asians, not whites, are the intellectual master race, leading anthropologist Jonathan Marks to remark : [77]. First we must admire the apparent cranial expansion of Asians over the last half-century , when [earlier] researchers consistently reported their having smaller brains than whites. Obviously this implies the possibility of a comparable expansion in blacks. Adaptation to environments, including social environments, through natural and sexual selection of random mutations is the linchpin of evolution. Remembering this means knowing why scientific racism is ridiculous. To argue that races or ethnic groups differ innately in intelligence, however defined, is exactly equal to an assertion that intelligence has proven less adaptive for some people than for others.
This at minimum requires an explanation, a specifically evolutionary explanation, beyond mere statistical assertion; without that it can be assumed to be cultural bias or noise. Since most human intelligence is in fact social intelligence — the main thing the human mind is built for is networking in human societies — this would require this social evolutionary arms race to have somehow stopped. One such explanation could be that within a certain population the random mutations needed for certain intelligence boosts never occurred. The genetics related to brain development are not uniform among the genetically diverse and geographically distant populations the microcephalin alleles being an example of brain-related gene complexes that are not geographically uniform.
They report that with microcephalin, a new allele arose about 37, years ago, although it could have appeared as early as 60, or as late as 14, years ago. Some 70 percent or more of people in most European and East Asian populations carry this allele of the gene, as do percent of those in three South American Indian populations, but the allele is much rarer in most sub-Saharan Africans. With the other gene, ASPM, a new allele emerged some time between 14, and years ago, the researchers favoring a mid-way date of 5, years. The allele has attained a frequency of about 50 percent in populations of the Middle East and Europe, is less common in East Asia, and found at low frequency in some sub-Saharan Africa peoples.
To argue otherwise is to argue that all required mutations magically appear in all social living beings as soon as they develop social intelligence. Genetic differences between people from different locations are pretty much entirely genetic drift which itself can lead to the appearance of genes that are not expressed anywhere else. Amount of melanin does vary with distance from the equator, and there's recent actual evolution such as Lactase persistence in adults. There are several common beliefs about how different races have different sporting abilities. On the other hand, why has Norway population 5 million won golds in Winter Olympics and Vietnam and India none? Or does Norway have more ski slopes and better ice rinks and just care more and spend more money on it?
Is it because Irish-Americans are naturally fighting? Is it because running and throwing are inherently deficient in Europeans? Or is it because College Football is a huge money making business in exactly one country on Earth? It appears that some factors implicated in sporting success are heritable e. However, in many cases, these do not correlate closely to race the Dutch are the tallest nationality [96] , despite stereotypes about black basketballers. As the section on genetic variation makes clear, there is not a simple pot of genes that corresponds to each race, so you can't assume a member of a race will have a given gene.
And there are few clear cases where genes define sporting success: even factors like height are affected by nutrition, medical facilities, etc, and distributed across races. One well-known genetic factor is the gene ACTN3 associated with fast twitch muscle fibres, which are greatly beneficial to sprinters and basketball players amongst others, and such genes are particularly common in west Africa. It is also important not to confuse genetic heritage with nationality, cultural factors, or social status.
There are many non-genetic reasons why people of a certain race, ethnicity, or nationality may choose to play specific sports, or excel at them. These include:. Sport science academic Ben Oakley attributes the success of east African long-distance runners partly to their experience at high altitude and partly to the cultural factors that encourage running in east Africa more than in high regions of Latin America. According to Oakley there is no specific genetic factor, but their tendency to light, lean bodies probably helps. None of these are unique to the region, but they combine to produce a greater effect. A topic that has been controversial for both social and scientific reasons is so-called "race-based medicine.
DNA studies do not indicate that separate classifiable subspecies races exist within modern humans. While different genes for physical traits such as skin and hair color can be identified between individuals, no consistent patterns of genes across the human genome exist to distinguish one race from another. There also is no genetic basis for divisions of human ethnicity.
People who have lived in the same geographic region for many generations may have some alleles in common, but no allele will be found in all members of one population and in no members of any other. The word cline is sometimes used to describe this. It should be noted that all human classifications used in medicine are considered probabilistic heuristics and not perfectly deterministic. While research has shown that many people are extremely effective at classifying themselves based on ethnic origin [] and so researchers may find "race" to be a convenient label, it fails as a source of attribution: "[R]ace as a social construct may result in differences in treatment that affect health outcomes, but such descriptive use does not imply that "race" can be used as a proxy for biological difference.
Unfortunately, the knotty history of "race" makes even the language used a potential source of error — "race realists" often point to a news headline or study that uses "race" sloppily and declare it to be "evidence" of the truth of "race," mastering sufficient jargon to talk about the reality of "genetic clines" and missing the fundamental mismatch between "race" as culture and "race" as genetic destiny. Even if race was useful or currently is useful, current medicine is moving towards actually looking at people's genetics rather than their phenotype race , which is a poor approximation.
As Pena puts it: []. Personalized pharmacogenomics aims to use individual genotypes to direct medical treatment. Unfortunately, the loci relevant for the pharmacokinetics and especially the pharmacodynamics of most drugs are still unknown. Moreover, we still do not understand the role that individual genotypes play in modulating the pathogenesis, the clinical course and the susceptibility to drugs of human diseases which, although appearing homogeneous on the surface, may vary from patient to patient. Given the present limitations of genomic knowledge and of the tools needed to fully implement it today, some investigators have proposed to use racial criteria as a palliative measure until personalized pharmacogenomics is fully developed.
I will evaluate the efficacy and safety of racial pharmacogenomics here and conclude that it fails on both counts. Next I shall review the perspectives and the predicted rate of development of clinical genomic studies. Sickle-cell anemia is a famous example of how "race" can mislead. It was originally classified as a "negro disease" due to its high incidence in blacks. However, it was later found that sickle-cell anemia, being an adaptation to the risk of malaria , was also more common in central and western Africans but not southern Africans as well as Mediterraneans Turks , Greeks , etc.
Thus, the disease was not an indication of "race," but of geographic ancestry in this case, areas where malaria was more common. Classification of race in medical genetics e. That said, no doctor denies that some diseases and found at high frequency in some populations, while low in others and therefore categorisation may provide useful. While information about ethnicity may be informative for biomedical research: "it is imperative to move away from describing populations according to racial classifications such as 'black', 'white' or 'Asian'… there can be considerable genetic heterogeneity within a region, it is most useful to be as specific as possible about geographic origins, ethnicity or tribal affiliation".
Jurgen K. ApoL1 associated kidney diseases are a lot more common in many populations in Africa than Europe and Asia, to the extent they've been incorrectly described as a 'black disease', but because Africa is a massive continent there are some countries e. Ethiopia where ApoL1 associated kidney diseases are in fact absent: "ApoL1 risk variants nor the sickle-cell allele are 'black' diseases because many 'black' populations do not have these alleles. He suggested that they have not been investigated with appropriate scientific and legal considerations in mind, and aspects such as inter-observer repeatability have hardly been considered.
The high accuracy figures quoted above only apply to limited subsets of a sample. However, this high accuracy figure only matches limited subsets of a sample in each broad continental grouping, and "in cases where independent samples are used to test the methods, allocation accuracies decrease to levels that undermine the applicability of the methods in actual cases. Two case studies should drive home this point.
For example, in the s when Eugene Giles and Orville S. Elliot developed their formula to determine race from the crania, they used a sample that was a sub-set of modern adult Blacks, modern adult Whites and Native American skulls from an archeological site Goodman b. When they applied the formula to the rest of the crania in the same sample, they achieved the much touted 85 percent to 90 percent accuracy. When applied to other samples of Blacks, Whites and Native Americans, they achieved The high accuracy rate claim for racial determination methods is also questionable since different methods have a tendency to produce different results: []. We have shown that even with 20 non-fragmented sets of skeletal remains none could be consistently placed into a single racial category.
Individual variability may have played a significant role leading to inconsistency of the results found in this study, which further confirms the ideas of Brace and Ryan , Henneberg and Lewontin ; that most human variation occurs between individuals of the same population rather than being attributable to geographic distribution. The fact that there are gradients of features within so-called races is widely recognized and contradicts discrete racial boundaries. As an example, let us consider Asia. According to Wu Rukang and Wu Xinzhi : "The cephalic, facial, and nasal indices, plus stature, show clinal variation.
From north to south [China], the cephalic index and the stature are seen to decrease, while the facial and nasal indices increase. This can easily be seen with an example. Loring Brace makes the same point that "region, does not mean race". If race is so meaningless, why do so many forensic anthropologists still use it? The simple answer is that laypeople often require them to do so. Many forensic anthropologists understand race to be a folk taxonomy with little, if any, biological relevance. Given this, however, they point to the duty of forensic anthropologists to serve the medico-legal communities to which they have an obligation. These communities are not interested in the fact that race does not exist, and, according to Sauer and Kennedy, are not likely to be convinced of this in the near future.
On the contrary, race is used as a key element in the search for missing persons, and forensic anthropologists are expected to provide this information in their reports. Even if races are not biologically "real", the accuracy with which forensic anthropological techniques are able to replicate the folk taxonomy from which they are derived should allow the anthropologist to make an educated guess as to how the person would have been identified in life. Molecular anthropologists such as Jonathan Marks are confused by this re-definition because it is so far removed from biological taxonomy, and the traditional meaning of race.
Michael P. Muehlenbein writes: []. What is unclear is what this has to do with 'race' as that term has been used through much in the twentieth century — the mere fact that we can find groups to be different and can reliably allot people to them is trivial. Again, the point of the theory of race was to discover large clusters of people that are principally homogeneous within and heterogeneous between, contrasting groups.
They quote Edwards who found by looking at how gene loci are correlated: "probability of misclassification falls off as the number of gene loci increases". It is notable Edwards in his paper does not dispute Lewontin's statistical data on various blood polymorphisms, writing: "There is nothing wrong with Lewontin's statistical analysis of variation, only with the belief that it is relevant to classification". As a result, as Marks explains, there is no "Lewontin fallacy": []. What Lewontin or Marks and Edwards are discussing are two completely different things.
Of course genetic correlations exist which can pinpoint someone's geographical ancestry, but as Marks asks: "What is unclear is what this has to do with race", and concludes: "Lewontin's analysis shows that such groups [races] do not exist in the human species, and Edwards's critique does not contradict that interpretation " emphasis added. What this means is that Edwards is re-defining the race concept to a far weaker hypothesis, which is not how race is commonly understood in biological taxonomy: Fujimura writes: [].
What is the significance of the "proportion of variation" F ST approach? It measures phylogenetic 'treeness' via genetic differentiation [50] i. The taxonomic division of the human species into races places a completely disproportionate emphasis on a very small fraction of the total of human diversity. F ST or the fixation index is the ratio of the genetic allele variance between different subpopulations S the variance within the total population T :. In order to discredit the science against racialism, it is a common racialist tactic to compare race with some other supposed biological characteristic. For example, as one commenter on The Right Stuff writes: [].
Lewontin's Fallacy, that because there is more variation within a group than between groups, therefore the groups are the same. Clearly false. The commenter fails to note that human sexes are traditionally differentiated on the grounds of certain attributes which have decidedly low rates of variation within a sex. Or: the genes considered "female" almost always result in an organ-level difference from those for "male". In other words: the variation in height is not what maleness and femaleness are based on, and so variation within them doesn't matter. In contrast, the variation in certain traits eg, skin color are precisely what race is based upon, and so variation within one "race" being greater than between races makes it functionally meaningless.
Similar to creationist quote-mines of evolutionist literature, online racialists often do the same with Witherspoon et al. The answer, Formula can be read from Figure 2. The above paragraph is what they spam, especially the bold. What they don't post is the paragraph that immediately follows:. On the other hand, if the entire world population were analyzed, the inclusion of many closely related and admixed populations would increase. In other words: even with an incredibly stringent set of criteria think about the last time you sat down and listed out 10, genetic reasons that someone was a member of their race , race still isn't a binary, but a gradient.
Race isn't biologically useful. But it still carries substantial social importance that we can't just wish away. For now, the best option may be to educate people about the insignificance of race and as racial parity is achieved hope race fades from social significance. As Cartmill writes: [36]. Like other social constructs, races are real cultural entities. For many people, membership in a racial group constitutes an important part of their social identity and self-image. Alosco et al. Lehman et al. Guskiewicz et al. Collins et al. Lovell et al. Kelly et al. Cobb et al. Campolettano et al. Stamm et al. Rao et al. Kerr et al. Heary et al. And How Will It Change in ? ORG , Jan.
Is Getting Soft. Pamela R. Bry believes that this will never happen. John York. Prior, The Slave Side of Sunday Alan Schwarz et al. General Discussion Questions Which approach do you think should be used to determine the ethicality of banning, or at least seriously reforming, football to reduce head trauma? Explain why and how using that approach might play out. Why or why not? New Yorker writer Ingfei Chen observed that Fisher-Price had been required to recall a collapsible crib that was associated with 32 infant deaths. Five million cribs had been sold. What factors go into each side of the equation? Are the answers different for NFL players, college players, high school players, and under players?
Discuss your reasoning. Is this an ethical issue? A policy issue? A political issue? All three? If subconcussive blows are the cause of C. How do the tau clumps relate to the clinical syndrome—do the lesions fully explain the mood and memory problems? Probably not; other kinds of brain abnormalities, such as inflammation or damage to neural wiring from head injuries, may play a role. Do these choices remind you of the COVID pandemic when governments, in deciding whether to shut down society and later when to reopen it, had to weigh lives vs.
The NFL and universities, among others, urge no rash actions until there is more concrete proof of a causal link between concussions and adverse health outcomes. Others suggest that the uncertainty favors taking actions now rather than waiting until too much damage is done, as happened with tobacco. Where should the burden of proof lie? Which approach do you find more persuasive, and why? Do you think this an ethical issue or just a policy issue? Riding a bicycle carries risk and not a whole lot of parents are not letting their kids ride a bike.
So, we just need to kind of put it in context. Is your opinion altered by the fact that the scientist quoted above is the neurologist for the Michigan State University football team? Some argue against paternalism and in favor of individual choice, believing that adults at least should be able to choose to engage in boxing and presumably to play football despite its potentially adverse consequences for brain health.
For example, on the people the player might later beat up in a rage caused by brain deterioration, on the burden on caregivers of caring for a dementia-ridden patient, or the sorrow a premature death might cause relatives, and the burden on society caused by high medical expenses to take care of an impaired ex-player. Support your position with data and facts.
Unit 1 Psychology Discussion: Pseudoscience favoritism has created ethnic and religious Unit 1 Psychology Discussion: Pseudoscience resulting in Unit 1 Psychology Discussion: Pseudoscience discrimination. View this sample. And Bush Doctor Duty spinal joint popping in particular is Unit 1 Psychology Discussion: Pseudoscience that people crave, and most clinicians Judith Viorst On Cross-Generational Friends including myself, and including skeptics like Dr. The American Scholar 8: