{"id":2162,"date":"2009-01-24T19:35:54","date_gmt":"2009-01-25T01:35:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.discovermagazine.com\/cosmicvariance\/2009\/01\/24\/barack-obama-vs-genetic-determinism\/"},"modified":"2009-01-24T19:35:54","modified_gmt":"2009-01-25T01:35:54","slug":"barack-obama-vs-genetic-determinism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/2009\/01\/24\/barack-obama-vs-genetic-determinism\/","title":{"rendered":"Barack Obama vs. Genetic Determinism"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>My theory is that Barack Obama, among his various superpowers, has the ability to reach out to groups of people across the world and subtly re-arrange their DNA.  How else are we to explain <a href=\"http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2009\/01\/23\/education\/23gap.html\">this<\/a>?<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>    In the study made public on Thursday, Dr. Friedman and his colleagues compiled a brief test, drawing 20 questions from the verbal sections of the Graduate Record Exam, and administering it four times to about 120 white and black test-takers during last year\u2019s presidential campaign.<\/p>\n<p>    In total, 472 Americans \u2014 84 blacks and 388 whites \u2014 took the exam. Both white and black test-takers ranged in age from 18 to 63, and their educational attainment ranged from high school dropout to Ph.D.<\/p>\n<p>    On the initial test last summer, whites on average correctly answered about 12 of 20 questions, compared with about 8.5 correct answers for blacks, Dr. Friedman said. But on the tests administered immediately after Mr. Obama\u2019s nomination acceptance speech, and just after his election victory, black performance improved, rendering the white-black gap \u201cstatistically nonsignificant,\u201d he said.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>The study hasn&#8217;t yet been published (or accepted), and doesn&#8217;t seem to be online; here is the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.newswise.com\/articles\/view\/548294\/\">press release<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>Via <a href=\"http:\/\/www.balloon-juice.com\/?p=16170\">DougJ at Balloon Juice<\/a>, who says everything that needs to be said.  Including that this is no surprise at all, at least to people who recognize the phrase &#8220;<a href=\"http:\/\/pewresearch.org\/pubs\/58\/women-cant-do-mathor-can-they\">stereotype threat<\/a>.&#8221;  Studies have shown that simply <em>reminding<\/em> women or minorities that they <em>are<\/em> women or minorities causes them to do statistically worse on tests involving subjects that they are, stereotypically, supposed to be bad at.<\/p>\n<p>One is almost tempted to conclude that scores on standardized tests might be influenced by factors other than one&#8217;s genetic background.  Who could have guessed?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>My theory is that Barack Obama, among his various superpowers, has the ability to reach out to groups of people across the world and subtly re-arrange their DNA. How else are we to explain this? In the study made public on Thursday, Dr. Friedman and his colleagues compiled a brief test, drawing 20 questions from [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[17,28],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2162","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-humanity","category-science"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2162","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2162"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2162\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2162"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2162"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2162"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}