

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

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

[https://lesacreduprintemps19.files.wordpress.com/2011/04/nyb...](https://lesacreduprintemps19.files.wordpress.com/2011/04/nyborg-2011-the-
decay-of-western-civilization-double-relaxed-darwinian-selection.pdf)

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](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](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.

~~~
aaron695
Godwin's law / Association fallacy.

But thanks for finding the article.

------
aaron695
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_...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bj%C3%B8rn_Lomborg#Accusations_of_scientific_dishonesty)

~~~
tokenadult
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://wicherts.socsci.uva.nl/datasharing.pdf)

[http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjourna...](http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0026828)

[http://www.nature.com/news/psychology-must-learn-a-lesson-
fr...](http://www.nature.com/news/psychology-must-learn-a-lesson-from-fraud-
case-1.9513)

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.)

~~~
aaron695
"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"

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
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...](http://drjamesthompson.blogspot.com/2013/11/helmuth-nyborg-gets-
watsond.html)

~~~
001sky
_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.

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

