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What Rosalind Franklin contributed to the discovery of DNA’s structure

nature.com

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Re: What Rosalind Franklin contributed to the discovery of DNA’s structure

#91

Post by dragonwriter »

saghm wrote: post #88
mightyham wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let's put this in the proper context. Many modern studies and analysis show similar disparities in intellectual abilities between ethnicities and races, based on a number of tests designed in the modern day by many different institutions globally. The suggestion that IQ tests are on the whole are a racist ploy is very conspiratorial. Furthermore, it's pretty hard to imagine how one would design visuospatial and patte…

> Let's put this in the proper context. Many modern studies and analysis show similar disparities in intellectual abilities between ethnicities and races, based on a number of tests designed in the modern day by many different institutions globally. The suggestion that IQ tests are on the whole are a racist ploy is very conspiratorial. The parent comment that original suggested this claim linked to an article tracing…

> the I.Q. test

there is no “the I.Q. test” there are many different ones, designed differently, the article distorts this, and attacks the original Stanford-Binet test as if it was the universe of IQ testing, and even there the entire substance of its attack on that test, delivered in meandering back and forth where it drifts in and out of discussing the SAT and other tests, seems to be that a researcher who later was influential in developing other tests also wrote their dissertation about the same work by Alfred Binet that a completely different researcher leveraged in developing what became the Stanford-Binet IQ test was a eugenicist who thought that blacks and other races were inferior and that testing supported this. Which isn’t just ad hominem, its ad hominem directed at someone not even involved in the development of the test. There is literally nothing in the piece actually arguing for any ill-motive, much less actual scientific flaw, in IQ testing.

There are some real issues that the article hints at – particularly regarding school rankings – but they spent a lot of time trying to juxtapose negative things with various tests that they had no real argument about and just hoped to use guilt-by-(often strained)-association to impugn.

Re: What Rosalind Franklin contributed to the discovery of DNA’s structure

#92

Post by pazimzadeh »

mightyham wrote: post #76
pazimzadeh wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That only matters if IQ is a measure of something that matters. There are several arguments which suggest it's not. 1. How good someone is at taking a test ≠ intelligence. https://medium.com/incerto/iq-is-largely-a-pseudoscientific-... 2. The IQ test may have been specifically designed to be difficult for certain populations, which were comparatively less educated. And those populations are still less educated today.…

I find the suggestion that IQ was designed to be racist highly unlikely considering that many studies have shown Asians to have higher average IQs than Europeans. Even in regards to SAT testing, Chinese American immigrants are extraordinarily over represented in upper percentiles.

For your argument to be valid, you would have to show that Chinese immigrants have always had higher than average IQ's (i.e. at the time the IQ test was first designed).

Otherwise, all it means is that Chinese immigrants may have a higher capacity for work/studies (unless you are also arguing that Chinese people have rapidly been evolving intelligence in the last 100 years. And if so, why?). Which may or may not be genetic, but is definitely not the same thing as intelligence.

I could not find that data, but I found this which is also interesting:

  Richard Nisbett, a professor of psychology who has written an excellent book about intelligence, cites a study that followed a pool of Chinese-American children and a pool of white children into adulthood. The two groups started out with the same scores on I.Q. tests, but in the end 55 percent of the Asian-Americans entered high-status occupations, compared with one-third of the whites. To succeed as a manager, whites needed an I.Q. of 100, while Chinese-Americans needed an I.Q. of only 93.

  So the Asian advantage, Nisbett argues, isn’t intellectual firepower as such, but how it is harnessed.
From https://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/11/opinion/sunday/the-asian-...

Plus, it's well known that one of the most reliable ways of improving IQ (and SAT scores) is to be born in a wealthier family.

At the end of the day, it still not particularly important if different races score higher or lower on measures of intelligence. It is the environment which selects the traits in a population. There is no adaptive advantage to investing in intelligence if your environment does not require it. It would be "dumb" to be "too smart" if that makes sense. The right question is why is the environment selecting for these traits, whether they are passed down genetically or culturally.

Re: What Rosalind Franklin contributed to the discovery of DNA’s structure

#93

Post by lern_too_spel »

mightyham wrote: post #48
phs318u wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please then provide some references to the e literature you’ve read supporting your claim. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof as the saying goes.

https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/doc/10.1.1.372.6092 Meta-analysis of the results of over six million participants tested for cognitive ability or aptitude that found a difference in average scores between Black and White individuals of 1.1 standard deviations. And if you are curious about the relationship between IQ and genetics this Wikipedia page has a ton of cited research: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heritabili…

South Korean IQs went up by an entire standard deviation for people born between 1970 and 1990. Japanese IQs went up by more than a standard deviation between 1940 and 1965. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S01918...

If you truly believe your extraordinary claims, you must believe these countries performed large scale human genetic engineering during these periods in a conspiracy hidden from the rest of the world.

Re: What Rosalind Franklin contributed to the discovery of DNA’s structure

#94

Post by notsosec »

underlipton wrote: post #65
notsosec wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a false dichotomy. The taboos about races / genetics are largely held and enforced by white people, not (just) by minorities.

In other words, the group that is supposed to be of superior intelligence, and which has the most to gain from a narrative of superiority, maintains, in your view, that they are not superior. Occam's Razor would say that they've come to this conclusion because they've found it to align most neatly with reality.

Oh nice you found Occam's razor. Can I borrow it to explain crime rates, test scores, etc.?

Re: What Rosalind Franklin contributed to the discovery of DNA’s structure

#95

Post by notsosec »

lolinder wrote: post #70
jojobas wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would you rather go to a 150 IQ doctor or a 90 one? Why?

I would rather ask more questions before deciding on my doctor. How well do they listen to me? Are they willing to give me time, or do they treat their patients as an assembly line? Do they continue to read up on new research, or are they relying on their 30-year-old med school degree? Are they someone that I'd be comfortable talking to about very personal matters? None of these questions have anything to do with IQ,…

Let's make the question more tricky. All you know are two things: * One doctor is white, one doctor is black * One of them has IQ 90, the other has IQ 150

You are allowed to choose based on this information only.

(I am what many people would call an "alt righter" and I would choose the doctor with IQ 150). I'm curious how other demographics would answer (white liberals, etc.)

Re: What Rosalind Franklin contributed to the discovery of DNA’s structure

#96

Post by dang »

underlipton wrote: post #19

I'll be the one to sacrifice my Internet Points by bringing up the notion that the question of who discovered DNA's structure is not nearly as important as is the question of why the question of who discovered DNA's structure is significant. It is, of course, primarily and famously the specter of the erasure of women from scientifically and socially significant developments, the thematic subject that this article add…

I'm not sure what you're arguing here but this is the sort of flamewar tangent that the HN guidelines ask users not to take threads on. Please don't.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Re: What Rosalind Franklin contributed to the discovery of DNA’s structure

#97

Post by jc_811 »

mightyham wrote: post #39
phs318u wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don’t wait long. Please educate yourself. His claim that “Africans” have inferior intelligence due to their genetics has precisely zero basis in scientific evidence.

[flagged]

I would theorize that this is related to poverty though (and all of the issues that stem from it) and not DNA & genetics. It's also been shown that our environment does change our DNA[1][2]

[1] https://www.nature.com/scitable/topicpage/environmental-infl... [2] https://developingchild.harvard.edu/science/deep-dives/gene-...

Re: What Rosalind Franklin contributed to the discovery of DNA’s structure

#98

Post by sacrosancty »

phs318u wrote: post #66

To all those commenting regarding IQ and it’s heritability, a) of course there are genetic factors relating to attributes arising from brain function. However the entire concept of IQ, focusing as it does on a selective subset of cognitive abilities, is a flawed measure of “general intelligence”. I personally know of a very highly rated individual who despite their astronomical IQ, is introverted to the point of bein…

[dead]

Re: What Rosalind Franklin contributed to the discovery of DNA’s structure

#99

Post by geysersam »

bowwoden wrote: post #21
pazimzadeh wrote: post #2

> She supposedly sat on the image for months without realizing its significance, only for Watson to understand it at a glance. That's not the lore as I learned it. The lore is that Franklin sat on the data for months before analyzing it (she wanted to collect more data). Then W+C visited her lab and saw the data, but did not instantly understand it. Instead, the lore is that they figured out the structure of the DNA…

Schrodinger predicted the double helix structure of DNA decades before it was observed to be fair.

Schrodinger predicted some "aperiodic crystal" storing information. No mention of double helix.

Re: What Rosalind Franklin contributed to the discovery of DNA’s structure

#100

Post by DoreenMichele »

Franklin... died of ovarian cancer in 1958 at just 37

This is news to me. I've heard before that supposedly her work was "stolen" by men in the field. I have always thought it more likely that she thought she needed more evidence or something like that. Women seem to have trouble getting good mentors and, like Vinny in My Cousin Vinny, may be weak when it comes to procedure -- aka the culture of the appropriate way to do things and get it taken seriously, etc.

Knowing she died so young makes me think this is largely why she "lacked adequate recognition" in the eyes of people crying sexism. I doubt that. I've heard of her and heard hand-wavy versions of how some guy stole from her or whatever but never looked into it because such stories tend to be framed in a way that frequently strikes me as biased and counterproductive as a woman trying to find my own path forward.

Women do face challenges. My opinions as to what those challenges are tend to differ from popular framing.

And this section fits more with my view of such things:

Franklin did not succeed, partly because she was working on her own without a peer with whom to swap ideas. She was also excluded from the world of informal exchanges in which Watson and Crick were immersed.

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