> Hardly Wilson's peer either

Wilson's peers were people who studied ants and other insects, or maybe people who write popular science.

If he wants to jump into his views of the human brain, she is as much a peer as he is.

> 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.

My point has nothing to do with political correctness. My point was that she does not in fact have the qualifications to critique Wilson's work.

> she’s clearly qualified to participate in a scientific discussion

No, her remarks about the normal distribution disqualified her from all scientific discussion.

Nothing "disqualifies you from all scientific discussion"; ideas that are provably wrong get tossed out, and if you think she's going to be such a frequent source of provably wrong ideas as to derail the discussion, then say so.

She's not proposing a falsiable hypothesis here which can compete in the marketplace of ideas. We're talking about the normal distribution. If she doesn't know what it is, that casts doubt on her understanding of all the other basics she learned during her undergrad and PhD. If (more likely) she does and she's just being dishonest, that casts doubt on everything she says for a different reason.

How? Did you read the paper she linked to and understand why she referenced it?

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.)

McLemore's claim, "the so-called normal distribution of statistics assumes that there are default humans who serve as the standard that the rest of us can be accurately measured against", is false. Moreover, the fact that no such thing as a statistically default human exists (which has been known since at least the '40s – see https://www.thestar.com/news/insight/2016/01/16/when-us-air-...) has nothing to do with the normal distribution as such. The default human body fails to exist despite the normal distribution of many of the measures that can be made of a human body. The paper McLemore linked, of which I have read as much as I can endure, does not, to its credit, make any such claim about the normal distribution or any other distribution. McLemore, in her article but not in her paper, is simply using amphiboly to confuse the different meanings of 'normal' as part of the phrase "normal distribution" and as a synonym for 'default' sensu 'basis of comparision'. This makes no sense – hence, "nonsense".

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.

You mean the paper that she co-authored that makes the same mistake, one that was roundly and harshly criticized by scientists and statisticians?

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.

> You mean the paper that she co-authored that makes the same mistake, one that was roundly and harshly criticized by scientists and statisticians?

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.

> 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.

That article doesn't mention the normal distribution.

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.

I don't know. Her statement about normal distribution having expectations about humans is not worthy of a high-schooler.

Can you explain in your own words, not Khan's, what you think her argument was — don't forget to cover the linked article she was referring to[1] — and why you believe it's incorrect?

1. https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpubh.2021.6757...

That linked article never even mentions the normal distribution -- it is just talking about how culture often misdefines "normal people" as straight white people.

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".