Danish board calls for retraction of controversial paper

http://retractionwatch.wordpress.com/2013/11/13/citing-scientific-dishonesty-danish-board-calls-for-retraction-of-controversial-paper-on-decline-of-western-civilization/

by tokenadult • 13 years ago

20 8 13 years ago

retractionwatch.wordpress.com

popularopinion• 13 years ago

Here's a link I found to the paper in question:

https://lesacreduprintemps19.files.wordpress.com/2011/04/nyb...

From my quick reading of the paper, Nyborg is arguing that based on Denmark's current immigration and minority birth rates, “by 2072 the total population [in Denmark] may consist of 60% ethnic Danes and 40% people of foreign origin.” Since these minority groups have lower average IQs than native Danes [1], the average Danish IQ will decrease from about 97 in 2013 to 93 in 2072. This "reverse Flynn-effect" will only increase with time since these foreign borns have a higher birth rate than native Danes. Nyborg then cites the correlation between a country's Average IQ and National GDP [2], and suggests that a drop of 5 IQ points is correlated with a 35% drop in Danish GDP. He ponders why many Danish politicians and intellectuals have ignored this data and encourages them to reconsider their policies before there is "an anti-Darwinian death spiral that dooms democracy, civilization, [and] welfare" (an argument very similar to that of Norway's Anders Breivik [3]).

[1] Racial differences in IQ have been well established for decades but there is no conclusive evidence for its cause. To give some concrete numbers, for the United States, the authors of a 1994 book found the average IQ of African Americans to be 85, Latinos 89, Whites 103, East Asians 106, and Ashkenazi Jews 113. Amerindians tend to score worse on average than white populations but better on average than black populations. These differences appear to be consistent over the past four decades, and still exist (although to a weaker degree) even after controlling for SES.

If you don't believe me (which you should, since this is a highly controversial topic), there's more information on the Wikipedia article about Race and Intelligence. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_and_IQ

[2] It's not the article he cited, but here is an excellent article that attempts to extend this theory. http://www.lagriffedulion.f2s.com/sft.htm

[3] In his manifesto, Breivik, who killed 77 people in the 2011 Oslo bombings, argued that Norway's (and the rest of Europe's) immigration policies are letting in too many immigrants, and these immigrants will eventually destroy Norway's national culture/heritage and bankrupt the nation's generous social policies. Breivik committed the attacks because he wanted Norwegians to discuss these policies before it was too late to change them.

aaron6953• 13 years ago

Godwin's law / Association fallacy.

But thanks for finding the article.

shadowOfShadow• 13 years ago

We need more honey pot journals to flesh out ALL the nutters.

aaron6953• 13 years ago

A fairly clear case of the scientific community censoring a paper mealy because they don't like it via dubious methods.

If they disagree with the results then they should do their own analysis rather than lowing themselves to this.

A similar thing happened to Bjørn Lomborg http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bj%C3%B8rn_Lomborg#Accusations_...

tokenadult• 13 years ago

Are you sure that's what is really going on here? The submitted article reports,

"The DCSD found that the defendant had committed scientific dishonesty by appearing as the sole author of an article and by including a reference which did not support the data it indicated to support."

There have been researchers in this same field who have called for better analysis of data sets, only to find that the data sets are not available.

http://wicherts.socsci.uva.nl/datasharing.pdf

http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjourna...

http://www.nature.com/news/psychology-must-learn-a-lesson-fr...

When researchers in a controversial discipline aren't being scrupulous in their scholarly practice, maybe there really is a problem there. (I express no opinion here about Lomborg, who works in a different academic discipline.)

aaron6953• 13 years ago

We all know what's really going on here. It's not a coincidence that this paper is very controversial.

Many, many papers would have errors like the above but are not hunted down like this.

spindritf• 13 years ago

The whole case looks personal and the panel was reportedly anything but impartial and competent[1]. This committee seems bizarre in general.

[1] http://drjamesthompson.blogspot.com/2013/11/helmuth-nyborg-g...

001sky• 13 years ago

He has just been stitched up by three critics in one of the The Danish Committees on Scientific Dishonesty which lurk in The Ministry of Science, Innovation, and Higher Education. In the midst of all this horrible nonsense, which has already caused him a lot of trouble and cost him his Emeritus status, I cannot help but be distracted by the funny names education departments give themselves. Innovation? I suppose a Committee for Public Safety is an innovation for Denmark, but the Jacobin terror got there first.

== From the link. Classic.

Danish board calls for retraction of controversial paper

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