Word: trait
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...trait in any population at any time there is more or less variation. This variation arises because different individuals differ from each other genetically and because they have experienced up to that moment different environmental histories. In an attempt to partition the causes of the variation, geneticists have introduced the concept of heritability. Unfortunately, there are two different quantities, both of which are called "heritability" in genetics, but which have quite different meanings and consequences. There has been a considerable confusion between the two in the popular literature of the subject, a confusion that has considerable consequences and to which...
...came to be made by a professor! Precisely the same error is made in arguments about the genetic inferiority of the working class. By referring over and over again to the "high heritability of I.Q.," as if I.Q. had a heritability which was a fixed property of the trait, Herrnstein completely obscures the fact that all measures of heritability of I.Q. are estimates of the heritability within social classes, and indeed within families to a very large extent. In no case ever reported is there an estimate of heritability that can be referred to the whole white population...
...countless allusions to such refutations or criticisms in articles like Dr. Benda's. The technical literature contains a veritable chorus of agreement on the fact that the I.Q. is heritable--not as heritable, let us say, as physical height, but more heritable than any other broad human psychological trait yet measured. Without a doubt, the confusion about I.Q.'s heritability is the controversy's most regrettable distortion. Geneticists who, in the technical literature, acknowledge I.Q.'s large genetic component refrain from adding their findings or judgments to the public debate, no doubt for fear of having articles like Benda...
Intransigence is not an Israeli monopoly, nor reasonableness a dominant trait in Arab policy. So interwoven are the rights and wrongs of the Arab and Israeli cases, so conflicting their claims to a twice-Promised Land, so much death and grief and hurt a part of existence to both peoples, so real their fears and so inescapable their hostility, that outsiders who arrive there to talk of evenhandedness, fair-mindedness and rational solutions find themselves instantly suspect for their naiveté. The most egregious assumption that outsiders make is that their detachment gives them superior wisdom. In fact, the intractable...
...Anderson quickly decided. In his view, the muckraker "has more confidence in America than most others." Why? Because his work teaches him to respect-and depend on -three American virtues: "First, the relative scarcity of corruption [a trait that will come as news to regular Anderson followers]. If it were the norm, it would not be news. Second, the probity of most citizens: if the majority found official corruption undisturbing, the cry of the reformer would become hollow. Third, the ultimate responsiveness to truth, when forced to the wall, of our governmental system...