If that were true then we'd be hailing large corporations as innovators - afterall, they're the result of the winnowing process of a bunch of buyouts and mergers. The fact is, people can stay working for a lot of reasons... money, 401K, location, boredom, etc. The corporate culture is what's important in innovation, because it defines the degree that an individual's skills can be used. The most creative person in the world won't create a hit if he has to go through a dozen concept meetings. Autonomy is related to smaller size, and also to flexibility and innovation. Give me a geek who likes wearing a T shirt any day over a corporate crew in suits.
My understanding of Scientific Creationism is that it's the same thing as intelligent design theory... the idea that the probability of random organization of life is vanishingly small, so at some point in the process there must have been some external force. Not all ID people are religious... there are people who think that aliens could fit the bill.
I don't personally agree with their interpretation, but it is scientific... there are several biologists, biochemists, and statisticians working on chasing down some of these theories.
A better way to put it might be: some questions shouldn't be asked *yet*. The Bell Curve and every other book that posits a biological link between race and performance is jumping a couple of steps. We need to account for all of the social variables first, and we just don't know enough about how much unconcious expectations play a role in shaping a person's performance on a variety of tasks (although we know that they do). Only when those variables are nailed down should people start looking for biological causes.
(I know, offtopic, but...)
The Air Force has looked into it, but you run into a problem with backwards skill transfer: people's primary skillz become how to play the video game, not fly the jet. You get a much better learning rate with cheezy games that use the same visual-spatial skills, but not the exact motions needed to fly. The best program available for it (at least a few years ago when I was working on this) is a program developed by the Israeli Air Force called Space Fortress that uses ASCII graphics. Players have to pilot a ship with their right hands, fire weapons with a trigger, use their left hands to choose weapons, remember an IFF code and hit it on the keyboard, and tap a steady rythem with their feet.
After that, flying a jet in combat comes naturally.
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If that were true then we'd be hailing large corporations as innovators - afterall, they're the result of the winnowing process of a bunch of buyouts and mergers. The fact is, people can stay working for a lot of reasons... money, 401K, location, boredom, etc. The corporate culture is what's important in innovation, because it defines the degree that an individual's skills can be used. The most creative person in the world won't create a hit if he has to go through a dozen concept meetings. Autonomy is related to smaller size, and also to flexibility and innovation. Give me a geek who likes wearing a T shirt any day over a corporate crew in suits.
My understanding of Scientific Creationism is that it's the same thing as intelligent design theory... the idea that the probability of random organization of life is vanishingly small, so at some point in the process there must have been some external force. Not all ID people are religious... there are people who think that aliens could fit the bill. I don't personally agree with their interpretation, but it is scientific... there are several biologists, biochemists, and statisticians working on chasing down some of these theories.
A better way to put it might be: some questions shouldn't be asked *yet*. The Bell Curve and every other book that posits a biological link between race and performance is jumping a couple of steps. We need to account for all of the social variables first, and we just don't know enough about how much unconcious expectations play a role in shaping a person's performance on a variety of tasks (although we know that they do). Only when those variables are nailed down should people start looking for biological causes.
(I know, offtopic, but...) The Air Force has looked into it, but you run into a problem with backwards skill transfer: people's primary skillz become how to play the video game, not fly the jet. You get a much better learning rate with cheezy games that use the same visual-spatial skills, but not the exact motions needed to fly. The best program available for it (at least a few years ago when I was working on this) is a program developed by the Israeli Air Force called Space Fortress that uses ASCII graphics. Players have to pilot a ship with their right hands, fire weapons with a trigger, use their left hands to choose weapons, remember an IFF code and hit it on the keyboard, and tap a steady rythem with their feet. After that, flying a jet in combat comes naturally.