> Hardly Wilson's peer either, and the article shows this quite clearly.
Whether you find her politically correct isn’t relevant to the topic at hand: she’s clearly qualified to participate in a scientific discussion.
Whether you find her politically correct isn’t relevant to the topic at hand: she’s clearly qualified to participate in a scientific discussion.
No, her remarks about the normal distribution disqualified her from all scientific discussion.
https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpubh.2021.6757...
(and, for that matter, did you notice the clever way in which Razib said it was nonsense but didn't directly address or show any signs of understanding the argument? He was hoping that you'd have a good sense of righteous indignation and roll right past that without pausing to ask whether things like human cognition might not be as simple as the length of a cucumber.)
The normal distribution does not entail there is any such concept as a "default human".
Furthermore, that paper shows the corrupt logic inherent to a lot of woke criticism. You're tarred as a racist if you claim there are biological differences between races, while these same people cry that existing science is racist because it's not accounting for the biological differences between races.
Yes, the one which was in a peer-reviewed journal. If it was so roundly condemned you should have no trouble doing more than drive-by accusations.
McLemore didn't see fit to do more than drive by accusations of Wilson, so I'm not sure why I should bother extending her more courtesy than she extended to the recently deceased.
Other scientists have already commented on this widely anyway, so you can find them if you're actually interested.
And she doesn't even use that confusion to make any sensible point. The rest of that paragraph is just a rehash of the paper's argument. I don't "understand" why McLemore inserted this guff about normal distributions, but if I had to guess, she might have done it to strengthen the link between what Wilson wrote about and what the paper is criticising – not by reasoning, but by wordplay.
I suppose she referenced it because she hoped people would assume that an article on an important topic wouldn't just be thrown around by the same author as a citation in support of total nonsense. But people who assumed that would be wrong.
Questioning the idea of a "default human" is fine. Saying that the normal distribution implies the idea -- this is nonsense.
1. https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpubh.2021.6757...
Whatever the merits of that argument, that's not what the SciAm article was claiming -- which was a either ignorance or a deliberate confusing of the popular and technical meanings of the word "normal". She might as well said that magnetic fields have to do with the plots of land farmers grow crops on because they are both "fields".