Month: October 2019

I certainly agree with the main theme of the essay – that just because a study exists that seems to support an idea, that that idea is a good idea. Studies, especially those done in disciplines as fickle as psychology, will often produce different results depending on how they are executed.

I am in agreement with the idea that pop psychology is often quite flawed. Coming to general conclusions about the human mind is very difficult, replicating the test conditions of an experiment can be quite a challenge, and there are often biases in test samples which are hard to detect (such as participants being primarily college students as mentioned in the article.) Many famous and often-cited psychological studies, such as the Stanford prison experiment, are often criticized for being flawed and unscientific. And misuse of psychology can have serious consequences, as demonstrated the prevalence of lobotomies in the mid-20th century.

However, I’m not a big fan of this article. It’s not very substantiative, and only offers general examples of flawed uses of studies or flawed pop psychology. While I certainly appreciate investigations into overly simple narratives propagated by personalities like Malcolm Gladwell, author Andy Kessler fails to demonstrate exactly how he misuses studies to support his arguments and fails to explain any problems with Gladwell’s theory of “10,000 hours of experience is what makes a master” other than “athletes can have natural advantages” and “your real-world experience probably doesn’t reflect this,” neither of which are good reasons, especially in the light of the supposed “scientific studies” which Gladwell uses to back up his claims. While these studies may have been misused, Kessler fails to explain how the conclusions of these studies differ from Gladwell’s thesis, or how the methodologies of these individual studies are flawed.

Also, while the article is framed as a response to James Damore’s controversial essay criticizing Google’s efforts to promote workplace diversity, not once does he provide evidence in favor of Damore’s assertions. He merely questions the relevance of studies in general, not the ones Damore claims Google bases their practices on. There is also a clear political bent to this article, with criticism thrown specifically at diversity training, Barack Obama, and Hillary Clinton, even when the two Democrats have only marginal connections to the article’s subject.

Although I think this article is not very good, perhaps I can apply its central thesis to my essay topic. Many have argued that the results of the DNA testing done on descendants of Sally Hemings is still up for interpretation, considering that it is possible that another Jefferson could have fathered Eston Hemings, the ancestor of the descendant tested, given that Thomas Jefferson would have shared a Y-chromosome with his male relatives. However, most historians accepted the notion that Thomas was the father given the existence of the rumors during Jefferson’s time, the testimonies of Hemings’ children, and that few people other than Jefferson would have been around Sally Hemings enough to father her 6 children (assuming they all came from the same father) or to foster a long-term relationship with her.

The term “paradigm shift” was coined to refer to scientific events, but, as is evident by the multitude of entries for this assignment, is now used to refer to any change in thinking. An academic discipline which can also be drastically affected by paradigm shifts is history, as new evidence or material can completely change the interpretation of an event. Case in point is the question of whether Thomas Jefferson was the father of the children of his slave Sally Hemings.

Sally Hemings was born in 1773, and thus three years before Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence. She was three-quarters white herself, indicating that despite laws against the practice relations between slaves and their white overlords were common. Sally’s father is believed to have been her owner, Jefferson’s father-in-law John Wayles, thus making Sally a half-sister of Jefferson’s wife. The Jeffersons inherited Sally following John Wayles’s death.

In 1787, Jefferson was sent to Paris to succeed Benjamin Franklin as Minister to France. Sally came with him on this trip, where she became acquainted with Jefferson and his daughters. Upon returning to Monticello, she would have six children, four of which grew to adulthood.

Jefferson was first accused of having a relationship with Sally Hemings in 1802 by James Callender, a purveyor of political gossip. Callender had previously been a proponent of Jefferson, but turned on him after Jefferson refused to thank him for his efforts. The story attracted a great deal of attention but was never publicly addressed by Jefferson, though he may have denied the charges in a private letter.

When Jefferson died in 1826, he did not free Sally but did free two of her children who remained in Monticello and many of her relatives. (Sally’s other two children had left of their own accord.) While rumors of the affair continued to circulate after Jefferson’s death, most historians dismissed them as falsehoods, with his biographer Henry Stephens Randall claiming in 1858 the legend was invented by his enemies. Jefferson’s family admitted that the father of Hemings’ children was white, but typically named Peter or Samuel Carr, Jefferson’s nephews, as the father. One of Jefferson’s slaves supported Jefferson’s paternity in an 1873 interview, but Jefferson’s grandson denied this too. However, Hemings’ descendants all seemed to believe that they were Jefferson’s descendants, with some going as far as to change their names to Jefferson. Hemings’ last known surviving son Madison told his account of the Jefferson-Hemings relationship in 1873, though this account was not noticed by historians until the 1950s.

During the 1960s, Jefferson historians largely agreed that the Jefferson-Hemings relationship did not happen, agreeing with Randall’s thesis that it was merely another rumor invented by his enemies. However, some broke with consensus and argued in favor of the relationship, and some (like Winthrop Jordan) did acknowledge it as a possibility. One of the first major breaks came from biographer Fawn Brodie, who in her 1974 biography of Jefferson devoted a chapter to his relationship with Hemings and asserted evidence in favor of Jefferson having fathered her children. While historians disclaimed the account, the biography’s popularity brought new life to the controversy.

Into the 1990s, historians still did not accept Jefferson’s paternity of Hemings’s children. While they were increasingly willing to treat the story as plausible, they did not think satisfactory proof had been given. Alan Brinkley referred to it as “a story for which there has never been, and probably never can be, anything approaching proof.” A 1997 book by Annette Gordon-Reed became one of the most accepting of the claims, though it stated that a DNA test would be the only way to settle the issue.

Such a DNA test was conducted in 1998 by Eugene Foster et al., analyzing the Y-chromosomes of male line descendants of Heming’s sons alongside the Y-chromosomes of Jeffersons and Carrs and descendants of a supposed son of Hemings and Jefferson named Thomas Woodson. While the Woodson DNA did not match, the Hemings Y-chromosome matched the Jefferson Y-chromosome and not the Carr Y-chromosome.

This was the best evidence yet in favor of Jefferson’s paternity, and changed the minds of many historians. The Thomas Jefferson Foundation, which runs Monticello, published a report in 2000 supporting the conclusion of the 1998 study and ultimately agreed to factor this knew knowledge into scholarship and Monticello. Dissenting views still persisted, with some pointing out that other Jeffersons could have been the father instead. Nevertheless, this historical paradigm shift has had a drastic impact on scholarship of Jefferson. Coverage of the DNA test’s findings has stoked debate on Jefferson’s views on slavery and his treatment of his slaves, which was already a controversial subject to begin with. The unethical nature of master-slave relationships has also cast a shadow on Jefferson, as well as furthering additional discussion of such relationships in the South in general.