Originally posted by dadudemon
Google searched...first result:"African women have a shorter gestation period, produce more multiple births, have fewer complications giving birth (due to fetus’ smaller head size and elongated skull), and African children become sexually mature at an earlier age and thereafter are considerably more sexually active than other races."
just to put this upfront: I'm not arguing the conclusion that black children mature faster than whites, I know nothing of the subject and it would be easy to ascribe clear sociological reasons for such. I don't think it is genetic by any means, if it is true at all, but whatever.
However, this page is nonsense. Take some time with the references. The citations look annotated, but when you look up the stuff in the annotations, the work is highly selective, often just clipping single lines with no context from works of only marginal relation to the topic.
The one, specifically, that got me was table 11-3, though from how it reads, I wouldn't be surprised if this is an exemplar for the quality of intellectual rigor for the page.
Initially, the source of the table is suspicious. It comes from a book, written in 1978, Developmental Psychology of the Black Child, illustrious enough to earn a place on the Awful Library Books blog, though virtually no mention in academia, save what appears to be an unfavorable review two years after its publication. Erectus Walks Among Us mentions that the author, Dr. Amon N Wilson, was attempting to show the superiority of black children, introducing an obvious bias, which I think is made all the more apparent with the titles and summaries of the books he has authored on the link I just provided.
Further, looking at the annotation for this citation (number 11 on the EWAU page), we see Wilson's book followed by a statement about the maturation of African babies and something about "r" growth patterns. Of the 3 citations, 2 are books, one by Micheal Levin, titled "Why Race Matters", that deals specifically with why political policies need to be racialized, the other by William Gayley Simpson, titled "Which Way Western Man", published by National Vangard, the publishing company of the National Alliance, a white supremacist/fascist organization, and is essentially a treatise on why White Christian Man is the best and how we are losing him to multicultural political correctness. The last is a Nature study from 1969 that is neither about development or African children. Additionally, the work was only ever part of the "Letters" section of Nature, and I am unable to find where it was later published in full peer-review form. Further, in general, the only place where citations of this work appear is in the writings of individuals like J Philippe Rushton, whose views are in the massive minority in the scientific community and who has also been known to say things about needing to preserve Christian European society, and has suggested the "Muslim Problem" [sic] is not just cultural, but genetic.
The next line goes on to directly quote a study by David Satcher, though oddly there is no link to the title or publication info of the paper. Though it may just be an oversight, it might also be due to the fact the paper is titled "If We Were Equal", and makes the claim that differences in mortality rates are liked to socio-economic issues, which is the opposite of how the site attempts to present the data. The following citation is similar, as the study in question claims that in early stages of life, blacks and whites claim identical growth patterns, and only show differences later in life, that could easily be attributable to socio-economic issues:
Most research on the aging process in the skeleton has not considered or elaborated differences that may exist between the races. Thus, techniques developed for the estimation of age assume that the racial background of the standards is compatible with the specimens to be assessed. However, racial differences in areas such as skeletal growth and bone density have been reported, along with specific variations in the aging process, in the ribs of disparate populations. The present investigation examines metamorphosis in the sternal ribs of American blacks (N = 53 males, N = 20 females), and tests the application of age estimation standards developed by the authors from a white population. All specimens were obtained from medical examiner's cases of known age, sex, and race. Although the sample was limited in both quantity and age range, analysis of the data revealed racial differences in both rate and pattern of metamorphosis. Statistical analysis showed that the calculated mean age per phase for black ribs was nearly identical to whites in Phases 1 through 4 or until the mean age of 28 years. By the early 30s, differences in morphology and their chronological association with the aging process became apparent and increased with age in both sexes. Blacks were consistently overaged from 3 to 10 years in Phases 5 through 7. Therefore, it was concluded that biological differences between these populations do exist and can affect age estimation from the rib. Social factors may also be involved, but they cannot be demonstrated from the available data. While the degree of interracial variation does not require completely new standards, the authors have suggested specific modifications of the white standards for use on black specimens.
Basically, EWAU are using this to suggest that black babies mature faster than whites, though that is the exact opposite of what was found in the study.
We can take this even further, however. Even though it is clear there are issues with chart 11-3, EWAU claims the data is valid (though we get no information about how it was collected), they claim it reflects a faster maturation of the brain. This claim is unsupported. Additionally, they go on to cite Shaw et al. (2006) as suggesting that faster maturation of the brain was associated with lower overall IQ.
However, what they don't talk about is what matures. Shaw found that it was cortical thickness in the lateral and medial prefrontal cortex that related to IQ, not just "brain maturity" in general. In fact, all of the measures presented in table 11-3, if you trust them anyways, are with regard to visuo-motor, motor control or spatial navigation. These tasks are more associated with posterior frontal, posterior parietal, hippocampul, cerebellar or collicular activation. No data that I am aware of links visuo-motor development to IQ or the cortical thickness of the medial or lateral prefrontal areas, and no measure of cortical-thickness-by-race was performed. Again, this shows a clear cherry picking of evidence.
I could go on, citation 12 is equally problematic (cites Rushton himself along with studies from nearly 150 years ago), and I assume this is emblematic of the rest of the references. Let me emphasize, I didn't pick #11 because it was overly terrible, but rather, chart 11-3 was the first thing that jumped out at me, and in looking into it, found how terrible this was. Not that this invalidates your argument, but I would try to not use this as a reference in the future. In terms of intellectual honesty, it sits roughly in the same place as a highschool essay about a literary work written after only skimming the Crib's notes.