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No, Blacks are Not Dumber than Whites |
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 by Daniel Koffler, November 21, 2007 |
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Are differences in performance on standardized tests indicative of differences in intelligence? Are differences in intelligence, in turn, rooted in genetic difference? Are the genetic determinants of intelligence distributed in predictable patterns along racial lines? Finally, are race-based discrepancies in mean intelligence brute biological facts, impervious to social or technological efforts to alleviate them?
These are hardly new questions. It wasn't very long ago when Richard J. Herrnstein and Charles Murray answered all the foregoing questions affirmatively in The Bell Curve, thereby inciting fresh brawls in the public policy world and in academia over political correctness, institutional and societal racism, academic freedom, the limits of social policy, meritocracy, the ethics of biological and anthropological research, the validity of intelligence testing—and on and on.
Perhaps the most remarkable
fact about The Bell Curve, in light of the controversy surrounding
it, is that, as Stephen Jay Gould put it in his New Yorker review,
the book "contains no new arguments and presents no compelling data."
Or to be somewhat more charitable, Herrnstein and Murray's work is
a straightforward retread of studies by psychometricians, psychologists,
and anthropologists stretching back at least to the late nineteenth
century, from Charles Spearman's purported discovery of the famous
"general factor of intelligence" (on which more in a little while),
to Lewis Terman's invention of the Stanford-Binet IQ test and hereditary
interpretation of its results, to Carleton Coon's lifelong pursuit
of a scientifically valid hierarchical taxonomy of races. Neither Herrnstein
and Murray's arguments nor, for that matter, the arguments of The
Bell Curve's critics, are anything new under the sun.
Which brings us to William Saletan's "Created Equal" series, which has been running in Slate since Sunday. Taking James Watson's ignominious career-suicide as his point of departure, Saletan argues that the longitudinal data concerning racial disparities in IQ are recalcitrant in the face of well-meaning beliefs in fundamental genetic equality —a view Saletan caricatures as "liberal creationism"—and that if we are unwilling to acknowledge this stark reality, we can't begin to address racial gaps in academic or professional success. In other words, liberal fantasies of a purely environmental explanation of differential achievement stand squarely in the way of the actual amelioration of such differences.
There are several tangled logical threads upon which Saletan's argument precariously hangs, including a barely questioned assumption that IQ is a reasonable approximation of intelligence, a related and similarly barely questioned assumption that there is a general intelligence factor (g) that standardized tests can measure, several rather hopelessly contorted interpretations of contradictory studies, and a seeming utter ignorance of the significance of intra-group changes in IQ scores over the last hundred years. I'll come back to all these points and more momentarily; but I feel it's my journalistic duty not to bury the lede, which so far none of Saletan's blogospheric critics seem to have noticed. Namely, the principal study on which Saletan rests his case is a two-year old paper by J. Phillippe Rushton and Arthur Jensen.
To put this as fairly as it can be put: Rushton and Jensen are anything but a new wave of scholars come to shed light on a heretofore intractable problem, as Saletan presents them. On the contrary, they have spent nearly a century combined harping on the same theme again and again, in paper after paper, and that theme is black racial inferiority. (Care for a taste of just how old-fashioned they are? They group human beings into a tripartite classificatory scheme of "Caucasoids," "Mongoloids," and "Negroids." It's in the 2005 paper, and it's roughly as credible as the Shem/Ham/Japheth theory of race.)
Jensen, as Melvin Konner noted in The Tangled Wing, has been tossing up one-sided hypotheses about the relationship between race and IQ since the 1960s that have consistently been swatted away by Gould, Howard Gardner, and others, but the fact that Jensen's findings have since been debunked did not prevent them from seeping into The Bell Curve. (Thus Saletan's articles come full circle, to say nothing of the geometric configuration of the chain of research supporting the hereditarian position.)
As for Jensen's co-author, in the excellent book Human Biodiversity: Genes, Race, and History, Jonathan Marks described the nature and integrity of Rushton's scholarly puruits as follows:
J. Phillipe Rushton calculated, on the basis of crude skull measurements of army inductees, that the average brain size of Asian males was 1403, of whites 1361, and of blacks 1346 cubic centimeters...
Have we thus discovered the biological basis for the differences in intelligence that previous generations have always assumed were there?...[T]he scientific issues and assumptions are as false as they have always been. First, we must admire the apparent cranial expansion of Asians over the last half-century, when researchers consistently reported their having smaller brains than whites. Obviously this implies the possibility of a comparable expansion in blacks. More likely, it implies the possibility of scientists finding just what they expect when the social and political stakes are high.
Meanwhile, in his review of Rushton's Race, Evolution, and Behavior in the Canadian Journal of Sociology Online, neuroscientist Douglas Wahlstein maintains an air of scholarly understatement, writing "I believe that great harm could be done to both the social and natural sciences if the standards for evidence and proof advocated in this book were to gain wider acceptance." Wahlstein further quotes Rushton replying to his critics to the effect that they "have failed to show an opposite predicted ordering in brain size, intelligence, sexual restraint.'' Apropos of that last point, Marks is delicate enough not to mention Rushton's companion studies of average penis size by race—and there, as the saying goes, you have it.
The foundation of Saletan's hereditarian argument is the pseudo-science of a man obsessed not only with his preconceptions of the inferior intelligence of blacks, but their lack of "sexual restraint" as well. Pity Saletan could not contact D.W. Griffith for comment.
In any case, Rushton's enquiries
into differential skull and brain-sizes among the races, and the problems
attendant upon them, are particularly relevant for present purposes,
because Saletan himself places some significant weight on the implications
of brain size, writing that magnetic imaging studies show " at least
a 40 percent correlation of brain size with IQ. One analysis calculates
that brain size could easily account for five points of the black-white
IQ gap." To outline just one of Saletan's numerous misunderstandings
of what correlations do, and do not, imply, let's turn back to Marks:
[B]asic scientific protocol requires that all relevant variables be controlled before drawing conclusions about the cause of an observed difference between samples. But in this case we do not even know what those variables are, or what the appropriate statistical corrections (for example, for body size) may be. Brain size correlates, for example, with age and with nutritional state in early life...
[T[hough there was agreement that women have smaller average brains than men (assuming their brains don't grow in subsequent studies!), they apparently do not have lower average IQs. This obviously would undermine the strict determination of intelligence by brain size, which should already be common sense...
By now, this approach to the determination of the average intellectual abilities of group members has degenerated into sophistry. The populations within each "race" vary widely in measured cranial capacity, with the four largest sets of skulls deriving from the aboriginal males of Hawaii, Tierra del Fuego, France, and South Africa, respectively.
The upshot is twofold: First, there is no good reason to suppose that differentials in brain size are not attributable to dietary and other non-genetic variables, and second, whatever correlation between brain size and IQ exists must be weak enough to allow for women to have the same average IQ as men despite having smaller brains. Furthermore, Saletan's reliance on differential brain size stands in direct contradiction to his take on another of his data points, a study of children born in post-war Germany showing that children of white GIs had the same average IQ as children of black GIs.
Saletan explains this finding away by noting that military recruits are already pre-screened for intelligence. The trouble is that the very same brain-size data Saletan uses to bolster his hereditary interpretation of the IQ gap is originally based on measurements of soldiers, hence the fact that the offspring of black and white soldiers have the same average IQ implies that brain size differentials are either not genetically-determined, or else can be positively ruled out as explaining the black-white IQ gap.
Similarly, Saletan concedes
that the black-white IQ gap is narrower than it used to be, points out
the hereditarian explanation that "the gap closed fractionally in
the middle decades of the 20th century, but...scores
in the last two to three decades show no improvement," and dismisses
the import of this narrowing of the gap in extraordinarily blithe terms:
On the one hand, the IQ surge is hugely exciting. If it closes the gap to zero, it moots all the putative evidence of genetic barriers to equality. On the other hand, the case for it is as fragile as the case for the Iraq surge. You hope it pans out, but you can't see why it would, given that none of the complicating factors implied by previous data has been adequately explained or taken into account.
Here is where Saletan's argument really comes off the rails, even leaving aside the hopelessness of his analogy. The question before us is whether IQ scores are (strongly or weakly) genetically determined in patterns that roughly correspond to racial designations. The evidence for the affirmative is that there has always been and remains a gap between blacks and whites. (Recall that Asians currently score better than whites, but that, as Marks notes, early intelligence tests found higher scores among whites than Asians. One might conclude, as a hereditarian would no doubt be tempted to, that those early generations of intelligence tests were tests of social fit rather than intelligence. On what grounds, in that case, would one base one's confidence that current supposed intelligence tests do not in fact test various other qualities?) Never mind the fact that the black-white gap used to be greater than it is now; suppose instead, for the sake of argument, that the difference in average IQ scores of blacks and whites had remained the same throughout the entire history of IQ tests. Would that finding, at least, lend credence to the hereditarian argument?
It would not, absent relevant information about absolute changes in the average scores of blacks and whites in the same period. Only if blacks and whites not only maintained a nearly constant difference in scores relative to each other, but a nearly constant average score as well, would data about black and white IQ scores begin to support the case that IQ is in part racially determined. Alternatively, if, for example, the average IQ of whites improved from 50 to 100, while the IQ of blacks improved from 36 to 86, observers would note precisely the same absolute difference in average scores between the two groups at each end point, but a substantially different percent difference (half, in fact), not to mention intragroup changes in IQ that are completely inconsistent with the suggestion that racial genetics determine IQ.
And on this score, the data are unequivocal. According to Brad Delong's summary of recent studies:
The average IQ score of America's "white" population today is 100. According to Ulric Neisser, America's "white" children in 1932 had an average today's-test IQ score of 80. Dutch army conscripts in 1952 scored 30 IQ points lower than conscripts in 1982... [T]he African-American IQ test average rose by 6 points relative to the "white" average between 1972 and 2002. According to Brierley (1970), in the 1960s African-Americans from Ohio had an average IQ score greater than that of whites from Arkansas by 10 points.
In other words, in periods of time so short as to beggar any suggestion that they contained evolutionary augmentations of innate intelligence, average IQ scores of numerous groups improved by well more than the current 15-point gap between whites and blacks. Which is as much as to say that a genetic explanation of this phenomenon, the Flynn Effect, is about the least compelling explanation conceivable. At this point, to buy the line that, at least absent genetic engineering, racial discrepancies in average intelligence are immutable, one would have to deny the possibility that equal exposure to whatever environmental and educational factors produce the Flynn effect could close the IQ gap, an absurdly premature position to put it mildly. (In fact, a more recent study than the Rushton-Jensen paper shows no IQ gap once you control for acquired knowledge going into the test.) Alternatively, one could disclaim the notion that IQ is a reliable proxy for intelligence, but in that case there is no evidentiary basis for hereditarianism. Either way, the case that average intelligence varies with race is looking moribund.
So far, we have left alone an initial assumption implicit in the case for insuperable genetic differences in intelligence between races, and that is the existence of g, the general intelligence factor, which in its initial formulation by Spearman is the quality that all tests of mental ability measure in addition to any specific qualities, and is still supposed today to be responsible for a significant proportion of observable correlations in performance among standardized tests, and between tests and academic performance. If g does not exist, then there is no one quality that even a perfectly designed intelligence test would measure, and therefore, naturally, there could be no sense in which a racial gap in IQ scores would indicate a racial gap in intelligence.
Saletan comes recklessly close to acknowledging this point in the midst of his musings about brain size, when he ingenuously concedes, "[y]ou can debate the reality of g, but you can't debate the reality of head size." To be sure, no one doubts the reality of head size, but if g is not real, then the quantities purporting to correlate with g, head size among them if Saletan insists, are vacuous markers of differential intelligence.
Perhaps, at this point, it will not come as a surprise that, despite the ubiquity of g in some (but only some) currents of psychometrics, there is ample reason to doubt that g is anything besides a mathematical manipulation, representing no real cognitive quality. And indeed, the case that g is a fabrication is nearly as old as Spearman's original proclamation of the discovery of g. As Gould recounted in his piece on The Bell Curve, as long ago as the 1930s, L.L. Thurstone "showed that g could be made to disappear by simply rotating the dimensions [on which correlated test results are plotted] to different positions. In one rotation Thurstone placed the dimensions near the most widely separated attributes among the tests, thus giving rise to the theory of multiple intelligences (verbal, mathematical, spatial, etc., with no overarching g)." The problem with g goes even deeper (and here I beg the reader's patience), since for any set of correlated variables, a descriptive factor analysis—the statistical method that led Spearman to believe he'd discovered g—can produce the appearance of a single factor underlying all the correlations to a statistically significant degree, even if the variables in question plot invented abilities that are stipulated not to have any interdependence.
Cosma Shalizi, a statistician at Carnegie Mellon, offers an exhaustive exploration of the mythical existence of g, the bottom line of which is that factor analysis, without which we would have no concept of g, while useful for descriptive statistics, is virtually useless for doing explanatory statistics. That is, if you already know that some given abilities are interdependent, a factor-analytic examination of them could greatly simplify the explanatory picture. If, on the other hand, you are seeking to explain correlations among variables, all that factor analysis can do is confirm your pre-theoretical biases. In other words, when Spearman, or Rushton and Jensen, or Herrnstein and Murray, or Saletan look at IQ test data and infer a general factor behind the results, they are doing nothing but gazing in the mirror. None of which is to say that there might not be a genetic determinant or determinants of cognitive ability, but rather that the people seeking to make a case for one are going to need to do better. As Shalizi puts it:
If, after looking at your watch, you say that it's 12 o'clock, and I point out that your watch has stopped at 12, I am not saying that it's not 12 o'clock, just that your watch doesn't actually give you any evidence about the time. Similarly, pointing out that factor analysis and related techniques are unreliable guides to causal structure does not establish the non-existence of a one-dimensional latent variable driving the success of almost all human mental performance. It's possible that there is such a thing. But the major supposed evidence for it is irrelevant, and it accords very badly with what we actually know about the functioning of the brain and the mind.
We are all familiar (or at least we should be) with the Michelson-Morley experiment, which signaled the death-knell of the theory of a "luminiferous aether" as the medium through which light travels. Considerably less well-known is the fact that Michelson and Morley did not set out to disprove the existence of the aether, but instead to confirm it. They genuinely believed it would be there, as the best physics of the day required a medium for any wave to travel in, so they looked and looked, but in the end were unable to detect any statistically significant displacement. The history of science is littered with similar failed experiments and obsolete concepts, from Ptolemaic astronomy to phlogiston and caloric fluid. What such concepts have in common is that they fit a substantial enough subset of data to merit belief from the best scientific minds of their day; nevertheless, they weren't real, and eventually reality demands that the scientists who held them jettison their false beliefs.
Likewise, the theory of g and of race-based differences in intelligence has a prima facie plausibility based on differential IQ scores, and a sufficiently clever, if shallow, statistical manipulation can make it appear to be explanatorily powerful. Nonetheless, in more than a century of searching, we have yet to find any actual substance to it. The hereditarians are free to re-run the Michelson-Morley experiment as many times as they like, but at a certain point, if they continue to fail to produce any results, it might be time just to give up.
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Daniel Koffler is a Clarendon Scholar and graduate student in philosophy at the University of Oxford. |
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Gray Dave
The upshot is twofold: First,
there is no good reason to suppose that differentials in brain size
are not attributable to dietary and other non-genetic variables
Actually there are two good reasons. First of all because the same differences are found at birth. Meaning it would have to be prenatal.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/S0160-2896(97)90004-0
Second because the difference isn't just cranial capacity, but the entire structure of supporting post-cranial skeletal traits. Such an integrated set of traits is not plausibly the result of developmental insult.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/S0160-2896(02)00137-X
whatever correlation between brain size and IQ exists must be
weak enough to allow for women to have the same average IQ as men despite
having smaller brains
Women and men have different brains in a lot more ways than different populations do. You are ignoring Saletan's statement that blacks and whites matched for head size don't differ in IQ. That is not true for men and women.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/0160-2896(94)90032-9
Saletan explains this finding away by noting that military
recruits are already pre-screened for intelligence. The trouble is that
the very same brain-size data Saletan uses to bolster his hereditary
interpretation of the IQ gap is originally based on measurements of
soldiers
False, that is one paper on *head* size, not *brain* size. Read the review paper Saletan links: the data for racial brain size differences comes from multiple methods, including MRI and direct brain measurement at autopsy. The different methods are in agreement.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/sites/entrez?Db=pubmed&Cmd=ShowDetailView&Te...
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/sites/entrez?Db=pubmed&Cmd=ShowDetailView&Te...
Daniel Koffler
Anonymous
I've been following Saletan's series like the slow motion trainwreck that it is. Really, nothing good will come of this. But, since we're talking about it, let's concede that Saletan's article is based on results derived from bad methodology. Say that headsize is bunk, that all the tests are culturally biased, that the testers are all bigots. Makes it easy to discount the findings. To me, this is just like the creationists or intelligent design types finding G-d in the gaps. They point to a hole in the fossil record and say that the lack of data is proof of divine direction. But what happens when scientists fill in the hole? Their faith is on shaky ground if they have predicated it on the lack of data. Similarly, what happens if they do design a good test and it does prove that, on average, people of African descent have a lower IQ? There don't seem to be that many tests out there proving the opposite.
I'm really unclear myself about this. Half of me thinks, let's just not open this can of worms. But I live in a city of poor blacks and relatively rich white people. So the other half of me thinks, if we do have this conversation, maybe we can do something. Perhaps if we could fix the educational system, the smartest young black men would have a realistic chance of success at something other than selling drugs, which will likely get them killed or incarcerated and remove their DNA from the gene pool. Of course, this isn't going to happen in America today. So maybe we ought to just interbreed like crazy. Or shut up.
Gee, wouldn't it be easy to be a conservative and see things as uncomplicated and without nuance?
Gray Dave
Recall
that Asians currently score better than whites, but that, as Marks notes,
early intelligence tests found higher scores among whites than Asians.
Marks is simply wrong. Probably cherry picking some study.
The earliest intelligence tests showed higher to equal scores for
Asians. History in this book.
http://www.amazon.ca/Abilities-Achievements-Orientals-North-America/dp/0...
In other words, in periods
of time so short as to beggar any suggestion that they contained evolutionary
augmentations of innate intelligence, average IQ scores of numerous
groups improved by well more than the current 15-point gap between whites
and blacks.
So what? IQ improved exactly the same amount for blacks and whites. We already knew IQ wasn't entirely genetic. Some group differences might be entirely environmental and some might be entirely genetic. There are specific reasons the white and black difference looks genetic, just as there are specific reasons the Flynn Effect does not.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minnesota_Transracial_Adoption_Study
shows
no IQ gap once you control for acquired knowledge going into the test.
This is not convincing since most intelligence tests like Ravens, which also show the largest differences, don't require previous knowledge at all. Not to mention IQ tests which are as simple as pushing a button when a light turns on.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/0160-2896(93)90039-8
Gray Dave
And then realized this was just more links to Rushton and Jensen.... hilarious!
Yes, the research is peer-reviewed. That's how it works.
Daniel Koffler
Peer-reviewed. As is Marks, extensively, and he happens not to be a laughingstock. As for "There are specific reasons the white and black difference looks genetic" --- refer to Shalizi. It looks genetic to people who want it to look genetic.
This is not convincing since most intelligence tests like Ravens, which also show the largest differences, don't require previous knowledge at all. Not to mention IQ tests which are as simple as pushing a button when a light turns on.
IQ tests are indeed not designed to test for prior knowledge. Yet, when it is controlled for, we find no IQ gap. Again, feel free to disclaim the idea that IQ is a reliable proxy for intelligence.
Ano --- Eric Turkheim has a good discussion of the issues you raise at Cato Unbound.
Gray Dave
Cosma Shalizi, a statistician
at Carnegie Mellon, offers an exhaustive exploration of the mythical existence of g,
Meanwhile you link to a BLOG post for your authority... hilarious!
Shalazi's criticisms are nothing new. The exact same arguments were in Mismeasure of Man 30 years ago, and real scientists who actually publish in research journals (instead of blogs and pop sci books) dismissed them as confused back then as well.
http://www.debunker.com/texts/jensen.html
http://www.psych.utoronto.ca/users/reingold/courses/intelligence/cache/carroll-gould.html
Daniel Koffler
From Thomas Sowell, whose conservative credentials are impeccable:
[T]he greatest black-white differences are not on the questions which presuppose middle-class vocabulary or experiences, but on abstract questions such as spatial perceptual ability.... [Herrnstein and Murray's] conclusion that this "phenomenon seems peculiarly concentrated in comparisons of ethnic groups" is simply wrong. When European immigrant groups in the United States scored below the national average on mental tests, they scored lowest on the abstract parts of those tests. So did white mountaineer children in the United States tested back in the early 1930s. So did canal boat children in Britain, and so did rural British children compared to their urban counterparts, at a time before Britain had any significant non-white population. So did Gaelic-speaking children as compared to English-speaking children in the Hebrides Islands. This is neither a racial nor an ethnic peculiarity. It is a characteristic found among low-scoring groups of European as well as African ancestry.
In short, groups outside the cultural mainstream of contemporary Western society tend to do their worst on abstract questions, whatever their race might be....
Perhaps the strongest evidence against a genetic basis for intergroup differences in IQ is that the average level of mental test performance has changed very significantly for whole populations over time and, moreover, particular ethnic groups within the population have changed their relative positions during a period when there was very little intermarriage to change the genetic makeup of these groups.
Fin.
Gray Dave
refer to Shalizi. It looks genetic to people who want it to look genetic.
No it looks genetic because there are no more viable environmental variables or even theories to explain it. Because it meets genetic predictions but not environmental predictions.
For instance racial groups differ most
on the subtests influenced by genetics, and least on the subtests
influenced by environment. This is exactly the opposite of what an
environmental theory would predict.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1098/rspb.2007.0461
Daniel Koffler
Sorry, Shalizi is a serious statistician with a serious argument. "Real" scientists? You mean Jensen, again?
Here's the link to Rushton's catalog of vdare articles, for anyone interested in a bit more background.
Daniel Koffler
Daniel Koffler
Gray Dave
Then why should anyone have any confidence in your ability to evaluate scientific research?
Sorry, Shalizi is a serious statistician with a serious argument
Then why did he publish it on his blog instead of one of the journals devoted ENTIRELY to the issues he is dealing with.
http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals/titles/0027-3171
Shalazi raises no novel or important points. And hereditarianism is in no way dependent on or even made the least bit more plausible by a unitary intelligence. The black and white IQ difference looks just as genetic whether the structure of intelligence is general or more specified. Though most scientists who publish in journals rather than on their blogs do agree the evidence supports the former.
A plurality of scientists who publish in journals rather than on their blogs also agree the racial difference appears to have some genetic causation.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snyderman_and_Rothman_(study)
Daniel Koffler
Throat clearing: More on why Marks was right and Rushton wrong.
Much more on why Rushton is not a credible source for anything at all, period, end of story. Do you have any studies to link to that aren't by Rushton and Jensen or depend on Rushton and Jensen?
This matter of "looking genetic" is a flagrant falsehood. It all comes from Rushton's research, which has been extensively demonstrated to be not just inaccurate, but patently fraudulent, both in its acquisition of data and its statistical methods. If you torture data you can make them show what you wish.
Mencius
You seem to be asserting that members of all human population groups have the same mental capacity.
Do you have any evidence for this claim? If so, what is it? Because all I'm seeing here is attacks on various arguments for the opposite claim.
Surely, if there is no particular evidence either way, your conclusion should be that you have no idea whether or not "blacks are dumber than whites." So why don't you just say this?
Gray Dave
in an academic journal is not the same as winning a debate in an academic journal.
I notice you didn't link Rushton's replies to these critiques which were largely published in the same journals (why all these respected journals would allow such an allegedly pseudoscientific scholar to respond and publish in them is another question; a racist conspiracy I suppose. Maybe that's why Shalazi is forced to publish on his blog, the racist science establishment is keeping him down!)
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qa3690/is_199512/ai_n8710752
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_hb3203/is_199401/ai_n7875869
I already linked to a study that supported genetic, but not environmental, predictions and had nothing to do with Rushton or Jensen. The Minnesota Transracial Adoption Study. It is the only adoption study that tested the black IQ of adoptees in childhood and adulthood, and this incredible intervention didn't do anything. The 130 adoptees also markedly differed in IQ as a function of how much black ancestry they had. Which is not the same thing as how dark they looked or what they believed about their own ancestry.
Behavioral genetic modeling, which is highly sensitive to genetic developmental patterns, also supports genetic, but not environmental, predictions.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/S0160-2896(96)90004-5
Whispers
"You seem to be asserting that members of all human population groups have the same mental capacity."
I saw no such claim. You should be aware of the difference between knocking down a proof of the proposition X and an assertion of the proposition ¬X. That would be a fairly low-level exercise in logic.
Why are the only possible explanations "everybody is equally smart" or "race is a determining factor of intelligence"?
Daniel does a solid job of showing that, even within racial subpopulations, "average IQ" is a highly malleable statistic. By this I mean, it has improved by 25% among white Americans in the past century, for example. With evidence like that, how can anyone seriously insist on conitnuing to beat the racist drums?
Gray Dave: sadly, "peer review" is only as good as the peers reviewing it. Furthermore, even papers that have passed through peer review to get published are still subject to criticism by people working in the field. If two racist pseudo-scientists have managed to find a racist editor who is happy to publish whatever they type, there is no mechanism to prevent that from happening.
Your arguments have all the hallmarks of pseudo-science. When logical contrary evidence is offered, you simply ignore it. In terms of the general mathematical structure of the problem and the general morass of inter-related variables that are involved, you, like Saletan, are fixated on only one variable. That attitude represents bad science, especially when the variable in question has already been shown to be non-determinative.
Righteous Bubba
Note this thread in which Gray Dave offers the same crappy argument and loses. He's very much like a creationist in that he will keep reasserting failed arguments as if they hadn't been demolished.
Gray Dave
If two racist pseudo-scientists have managed to find a racist editor
who is happy to publish whatever they type, there is no mechanism to
prevent that from happening.
Sheesh, you people obviously know nothing about any of this
science. You are just rushing in from the outside like you know what
you're talking about. You don't. It's embarrassing.
Arthur
Jensen is considered a leader in his field, if not the most important living figure in differential psychology. In one prominent study
ranking the 100 most eminent psychologists of the 20th century he was
placed number 47, right next to Stanley Milgram.
http://www.assessmentpsychology.com/eminentpsychologists.htm
And Rushton publishes his theories in numerous respected journals, as his critics are seen to lament.
http://www.psychology.uoguelph.ca/faculty/winston/papers/rushton.html
Your arguments have all the hallmarks of pseudo-science. When logical contrary evidence is offered, you simply ignore it.
Give me a break. I've cited study after study that support my arguments. I haven't ignored one "logical" point from you. All I see here is tenuous piece-meal knowledge of a vast and complex literature, pre-set conclusions, and a steady stream of elementary factual mistakes.
By this I mean, it has improved by 25% among white Americans in the
past century, for example. With evidence like that, how can anyone
seriously insist on conitnuing to beat the racist drums?
I already answered this bogus criticism that IQ malleability between generations must somehow demonstrate something about the source of black and white differences - an entirely different issue, with evidence already speaking to it. Why do you think the Flynn Effect demonstrates the environmentality of black and white differences, but not, say, the IQ difference between 5 year olds and 25 year olds? Or between retarded people and MIT students? Does the secular rise in IQ somehow demonstrate that every possible IQ difference must now be entirely environmental?
It doesn't work like that. There are specific reasons that the black and white intelligence difference looks genetic, just as there are specific reasons the Flynn Effect looks environmental. And so far no real challenges to that evidence .
Tyro
I am chagrined and impressed that not only have I found this article informative and insightful, despite its having been written by a recent college grad with no relevant research or professional experience in the field of intelligence and genetics, but I came away more well-informed than before after having read an excerpt of a Thomas Sowell article. Wonders never cease.
Daniel Koffler
Well, trolls, like herpes, are a communicable disease. Thanks, Righteous Bubba, for
doing the epidemiology. Please note the barracking Gray Dave takes in this comment thread, and further that his evidentiary support is drawn from a) boutique racist journals or b) studies that actually conclude the opposite of what he claims. "Peer review! peer review! peer review!" indeed.
And with that, reserving the right make use of the dialectizer, I withdraw.
waldtest
Missing from the discussion of explanations of the remarkable growth in IQ over time, the closure of the gaps in intelligence between those at the center and periphery noted in the comment by Anonymous on "Devil in the Details," and the persistence of "racial" differences is the substantial body of brain research on the plasticity of the brain, its continued growth post-birth and the trimming of connections through adolescence and beyond. Don't learn a language before 10, much harder after, etc.
None of the purported science of Jensen, Rushton, Murray incorporate contemporary understandings of brain development. Any fair reading of US history and culture would underscore that African-Americans have and continue to live in lousy environments (lead, anyone) and have been systematically discriminated against in access to education and cultural resources, both of which would be expected to have negative impacts on learning and brain development.
Murray had it exactly backward. The evidence does not support giving up on African-Americans by abandoning such programs as Head Start. The evidence suggests that until the environmental and cultural determinants of post-birth brain development are equalized, no fair test of the genetic hypothesis is possible. The post-war German study offers strong evidence that if such equalization is achieved, evidence of innate differences will disappear.
Gray Dave
What exactly are these "boutique racist journals", hmm?
Could you be referring to, say, Intelligence, the leading disciplinary journal of psychometric research? The same journal that published the Fagan and Holland study you've been waving around that you found through Shalazi's blog? I suppose so-called "racist" journals are fine when they publish papers you find felicitous. Only when they publish inexpedient numbers from transracial adoption studies can they be ignored.
My "evidentiary support" comes from numbers which I am either accurately reporting or am not accurately reporting from the published source material. I don't see anyone claiming the latter. That the authors of a paper interpret their measurements according to one theory has no implications for how other researchers are obligated to interpret the same measurements. They don't believe the measurements are related to intelligence, but provide no evidence for this belief. Rushton and Jensen do believe the measurements are related to intelligence, and provide evidence for this theory.
Mnemosyne
Okay, I glanced at that Wikipedia entry and immediately saw a big gap: why did they look at the IQs of nonadopted white kids, but not nonadopted black kids? If you're checking for racial differences, you need to remove the effect of being adopted from <i>both</i> the white kids and the black kids, not just the white ones.
Oh, wait, I'm not a peer-reviewed scientist, so apparently I'm not allowed to point out the emperor forgot to put his pants on today.
Gray Dave
African-Americans have and continue to live in lousy environments
(lead, anyone) and have been systematically discriminated against in
access to education and cultural resources, both of which would be
expected to have negative impacts on learning and brain development.
White children in the lowest income group have higher IQ scores than black children in the highest income group. The IQ differences are even wider between middle and upper class blacks and whites. This isn't about lead. And the we're talking about blacks and whites in the same schools. Measurable differences in educational and cultural resources aren't even tied to IQ differences.
And again:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minnesota_Transracial_Adoption_Study
Anonymous
Rushton: "If it really was a colour blind society, and nobody even noticed race, maybe there would be some more justification for it (the criticism)...But people are pulling their hair out and are saying, 'What about Toronto the Good? Where did it go to?' What about Ottawa? I'm sure it is the same? What about Montreal? I'll bet you it's the same. I'll bet
it's the same in every bloody city in Canada where you have black people.
It's inevitable that it won't be. So there you go."
Found it quoted from an Ottawa newspaper in a white nationalist message board (won't link to it, and the link to the original article is broken). There's the ugly passion at the heart of the man, from which all his distortions of data and suspect methodology emanate. So there you go.
Gray Dave
why did they look at the IQs of nonadopted white kids, but not nonadopted black kids?
what you mean exactly. They looked at the biological offspring in the white families along with the adoptive siblings. There were no biological black offspring in the white families.
Righteous Bubba
<i>Chanting you're right, doesn't make you right.</i>
Please make theory meet practice.
Mencius
If that's not a hypothesis, what is it?
Seeing as people assert this statement quite frequently, again, it would be nice to see some evidence.
Questioning evidence proposed for ~x does not constitute evidence for x.
truthynesslover
You mean black men dont have biger penises?
Anonymous
Something can be both prenatal and related to nutrition and diet. Keep that in mind.
Arnold
Gray Dave repeatedly and exhaustively explains the current scientific literature on this question, and all that the rest of you seem able to muster is some name calling. You are clearly ignorant of how academic psychologists and sociologists operate, how studies are conducted, how factor analysis works, and a host of other issues. The final post from Mr. Koffler was especially disappointing - you basically admitted defeat.
Bringing the discussion back to what I think is its ultimate motivation, I'd like to point out that it's wrong to jump from the knowledge that some of the racial differences in cognitive ability appear to be genetic to any particular policy recommendation (ESPECIALLY those recommended at the end of the bell curve). Even if there is a substantial genetic component to the gap, the Flynn effect demonstrates that environmental factors can still have a major impact on a group's intelligence. Particularly encouraging in this regard is the fact that blacks are catching up to whites in iq tests (http://www.brookings.edu/views/papers/dickens/20060619_IQ.pdf). It may well be that what's required to help close the gap further is more affirmative action, anti-poverty programs, and other liberal policies.
Also, it is important to remember that these are only averages- it is absolutely wrong to infer from the mean IQ of a group what any particular member's cognitive capacity is. So this knowledge cannot legally or morally provide a basis for such discrimination.
Finally, as for the reasons behind the gap, consider that blacks have only been living in large urban societies for at most 400 years. The rest of our ancestors have been in such societies for thousands of years, and natural selection has accentuated the types of skills that help us thrive in such an environment, which are also those reflected in iq tests. Blacks tend to develop more quickly, be more physically fit, and are otherwise better adapted to a premodern environment.
Anonymous
Some of our ancestors were living in urban societies for thousands of years (about eight thousand for those in the middle east and Asia, and one or two for Europe and the Americas), but the overwhelming majority of people everywhere, including industrialized Britain and Germany, have been agriculturalists until the end of the nineteenth and middle of the twentieth centuries. Urban society has always depended on agriculturalists to feed it.
Africans have also had urban societies for a thousand years, but Subsaharan Africans were mostly gardeners (without ploughs), herders, and some hunter gatherers.
Africa has always been the most diverse (with Polynesia) both culturally and genetically, because it has the oldest population. Making generalizations about Africans is silly. Likewise it is false to imply that Europeans have experienced thousands of years of urban civilization. Perhaps the Iraquis have, but the British were painting themselves blue when the Romans arrived and the Germans and Scandinavians were still practicing human sacrifice until the year 1,000 AD, when they finally accepted Christianity.
It would be helpful if people took the trouble to really learn some facts about ethnography, archeology, and history before making sweeping statements.
kcurie
It is absolutely cracking.. ja ja ja
I am still amazed at the crackpots one can find around the "internets"
dani.. is sad that you still have to post stuff like that... pity.
And actually it is extremelly short.. one would need to mention all the anthropologichal work in france, Uk, Spain, germany...
You would need to add the studies on social environment research.
You should add so many references that you could not do anything else....
what about the link relating school average grades and success with parents education?
And then explain that race traits are related with a small (infinitesimal) part of DNA. and then explain that DNA has almost no function in brain connectivity which is basically driven by inter-neuron communication...
But then you would need to teach those guys some kind 101 in biology and brain development..
And of course you should try to teach those guys a little bit more about geneto-proteic networks and human brain evelopment...
In any cas it is probably useless.. they have an agenda behind.. they could not care less about science. Their aim is explaining an specific social structure. fortunately all scientists (except a bunch) are not worried about keeping certain structures and call it like it is.
IQ has probably nothing to do with intelligence. Intelligence can be hardly measured at all except for some particular cases where specific abiities appear . Anthropology has already explained all this "mistery" about IQ test. The influence of genes in the great majority of brain functions is small and almost nill in all abstract function .. and the small part that might exist (we are still in doubt about it) would probably come from inderect effects (some brain structures could be affected by the g-p network) which have ntohing to do with those part of the networks which apply to skin color
It's sad that you still have to say stuff like that in the US .. but given the huge inequalities in the US..
But do not worry.. in 100 years.. if by any change the US changes enough to have a larger number of black middle class folks you will see how the US will be no different than any other country in the world and black people will have exctly the same IQ than any other central group... whatever the IQ would be at that time.
Anonymous
This is all very nice. But out in the real world things play out the way you argue against.
Orientals are the smartest. Then come the Whites, then the blacks. I have no idea how Hispanics are supposed to score, but I gather it isn't very good.
Are you sure you don't have an ax to grind in this argument? Basically it comes down to you saying he is wrong. You quote a few people who said things that support your position.
You even pull in a quote from the g man himself, Stephen Jay Gould "contains no new arguments and presents no compelling data," referring to the bell curve book. He said that, but is it true? Am I going to buy the bell curve, spend a week reading it closely, then another couple of weeks pulling references to go through, all the while boning back up on stats so that I can understand properly what I'm reading? Or how I'm being lied to by the study maker?
I think not. A lot of people have criticized the bell curve and other books like it. How do I know Mr. Gould was dispassionate? That he didn't judge the book consciously or otherwise on the basis of what he wanted to be true? And how do I know the same isn't true of you?
Supposedly Gould had a mega IQ, and worked at the Smithsonian. The one book of his I read, Wonderful Life, wasn't exactly impressive, to me at least. How anyone can take the Burgess Shale and make it boring is beyond me. I guess it takes a high g or something to read between his lines and find the excitement.
Here is the thing. A mathematician produces something that is that is testable. A physicist does the same. The engineer, chemist you name it. The results can be seen and judged.
Now the soft sciences... For want of a better term I think of economists, psychologists, social scientists of all stripes, and well philosophers as the modern day equivalent of witch doctors. They wave their chicken bones or studies and tell people what is popular or what they want to hear. And sometimes they make a living doing it. If they would do it in loinclothes with a lot of tattoos and bone piercings in various body parts they would be a lot more entertaining.
No shame in it. I guess. After all it has been good enough for priests to make a living at it for a long time.
Now that was a bit long winded. But let me tell you: Here in the real world there is a very noticeable difference between the races as regards intelligence.
And poll any women you know. Any gay people. Or think back to PE or sports when you shared a shower with black people. If you think their pee-pees aren't larger, you are totally full of sh*t. I believe you or I believe my eyes?
And have you ever played sports? If you were to say that blacks can't run faster or jump higher than whites, you are again full of it. And since there is such a large racial difference in athletic ability, why shouldn't there be one for intelligence?
Here is the thing: when you investigate reality, you investigate reality. Not what you want to be true.
You may well be right, and Saletan wrong. But what you say doesn't jibe with what I see on a daily basis.
So why are you right? In particular I want to know how you strike down the penis size argument. Let's start small then go to the "big" stuff like IQ.
Oh and I'll bite:
"(Care for a taste of just how old-fashioned
they are? They group human beings into a tripartite classificatory scheme
of "Caucasoids," "Mongoloids," and "Negroids." It's in
the 2005 paper, and it's roughly as credible as the Shem/Ham/Japheth
theory of race.)"
So how are the cool kids that went to Yale classifying things these days? If I were to spend an hour or so thinking about it, I might come up with 5 or 6 or 7 identifiable races. Someone else more.
Dish, don't just do a drive-by dismissal. Why is this old fashioned? How many people still use it? Why should it be changed?
Anonymous
Doesn't not being able to fit into society and be successful constitute some failure of blacks in intelligence to adapt to the slowing evolving society that we have experienced since the beginning of time? To those who would say that they are more fit for other endeavors that require greater physical attributes, I ask you, if they were so intelligent why would they then choose to fight the system and make living inherently harder for the rest of their descendants.
QUESTION: Is there a classical age civilization in non arab Africa that is on par with the technological achievements of Romans, Greeks, Mesopotamians (Persia, Phoenicia, Akkad, Ur), Chinese (Qin, Song Han ...etc etc), Americas (Aztecs, Incas), Egypt?
Africa seems to have many resources and the only other regions who did not develop significant civilizations were either hampered by land area or lack of resources.The way you are looking at genetic IQ is from a sociological standpoint analyzing the last few centuries of human culture; however, what happens when you compare the ancient civilizations of each continent with the ancient civilizations of Africa , a time which racial bias would not have hampered their growth as greatly as during their integration into western civilization during the last half milennia.
Anonymous
i didnt mean classical age i meant pre renaissance
Arthur
Anonymous - you're overstating your case, but you do have a point. I should have been clearer about the mechanism I'm proposing.
You're right that the majority of people in the West living in an urban environment is a relatively new phenomenon, but since Roman times even those living in rural areas depended on their interactions with urban centers for trade, military protection, etc. This led to a number of important innovations that people had to adapt to including written laws, public bureaucracies, coinage, and (probably most importantly) a standardized, written language.
In subsaharan Africa, by contrast, cities are a relatively new phenomenon that emerged only after the Islamic conquests of North Africa in the early middle ages, and even then were fairly limited in scope. And written language is extremely new - Swahili was only standardized in 1928 (using Roman script), and the earliest known written Swahili was in Arabic in the 18th century. Compare that to Chinese, which has been a written language since at least 1,000 BC. It can't be stated as bluntly as I initially put it, but the general story is basically the same - Westerners and East Asians have been adapting to modernity for significantly longer than people of African descent have.
Anonymous
I have done extremely poorly again and again on an administered IQ test. It is to my and my family's genetic shame. The fact that it was a Brazilian test and in Spanish should not be an excuse for my American non-Spanish speaking family. Plus, I did take Spanish in high school so really, there is no excuse. I'm a dummy and the only job society should be expected to gift me is one that uses my strong back and/or athletic ability.
Anonymous
They speak Portuguese in Brazil. And IQ tests are always done in the testee's native language.
Idiot.
Clay
The revelation that Jews have a 10-15 point lead over the average White is greeted with much self-congratulatory back-slapping in the Jewish community, while any suggestion of a deficit in Black IQ is either not mentioned, or attacked.
Matt
One thing seemingly left out of this so far is questioning the very fact of biological races existing.
From a biological standpoint, there are no races (=subspecies) within humans. Human variation in this regard is clinal, nt discrete.
It's difficult to argue for significant differences between categories of people, when those categories of dividing people are made up in the first place...
François Blumenfeld-Kouchner
Gray Dave
Matt, you are confusing yourself. Genetic trait differences between populations don't require the kind of extreme separateness you are implying they do to exist, which is why people from different parts of the world differ in so markedly in their genetic appearance traits and in the kinds of genetic diseases they get.
http://www.mazornet.com/genetics/index.htm
Evolution only requires genetic variation and local selective pressures. Even closely related ethnic groups that live amongst each other, but don't interbreed very often, can evolve the kind of differences we are talking about here on the time scale of 100s of years.
For example, an evolutionary biologist and an anthropologist already showed that the historical conditions and patterns of breeding in medieval Europe were sufficient to allow for the evolution of a 10 point average IQ gain in European Jews over the surrounding populations on a time scale less than 500 years. (for comparison Europeans and sub-Saharan Africans were even more separated for about 100,000 years)
http://homepage.mac.com/harpend/.Public/AshkenaziIQ.jbiosocsci.pdf
We already know the genetic variation is there, so how quickly traits evolve depends on a) how much gene flow between the groups (how much interbreeding) and b) the strength of the selective pressure (how many more babies with a given phenotype die or are born every generation).
So even if isolated ethnic and geographic groups shared 100% of their genes, 100% of the frequencies could still be different.
But population groups don't even share 100% of their genes. 85% of genetic differences are within a population, about 9% of genetic differences are between populations within continents, and about 6% of genetic differences are between continents. And we already know that 15% includes genes that are expressed in the brain.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/12/weekinreview/12wade.html
So either way there is plenty of room for the evolution of the kinds of differences we're talking about.
David F Smydra Jr
It feels like we need some serious stepping back here to get some perspective. First, unless someone has exhaustively reviewed all of the research on the matter -- a threshold that I have yet to see reached by anyone in this thread -- then it's hard to imagine that that person can takey any sort of authoritative position here. It's just too touchy a topic for shooting from the hip. As we said playing basketball growing up in Detroit, if you're going to drive to the hole, you better bring that shit.
Second, in the spirit of Matt's observation, we should do a better job of interrogating some of the fundamental premises being tossed about. Race, ethnicity, intelligence, brain power, gender, etc. are all slippery terms.
Anonymous
im asking not if westerners and Asians have been adapting to modernity after but rather if the lack of monumental architecture, written language, and great civilizations in pre renaissance times would indicate lower genetic intelligence in comparison to the Europeans and Asians who you've stated were able to organize efficiently and create monumental architecture (which is an indicator of superb social organization and surplus resources), written language and overall great civilizations.
tyrone slothrop
You'll forgive me anonymous, but what exactly is the big deal concerning "written language?" I'm a linguistic anthropologist and I am curious as to the importance you seem to assign to "written language."
Obviously Walter Ong and Jack Goody made much of the literacy/orality "distinction", but Goody seems to have stepped back from his claims. Likewise most of the profound differences between orality and literacy appear, upon closer ethnographic investigation, not to actually exist.
Anonymous
well you cant really deny that developing a complex system of communication such as written language is a indicator of great organization(to spread said language) and intelligence (needed to develop such communication)
Righteous Bubba
Is one corollary of such an argument that those who can't capitalize or punctuate properly are dumber than those who can?
The Realist
This article is a total fraud. Low black intelligence relative to
whites has been consistently found in hundreds of studies conducted
over the course of a century and all over the world, including the US,
the Caribbean, Europe, Israel, and Africa. As I say in my article, The
Reality of Racial Differences, at The Inverted World (link below):
"Despite all the efforts made in the US to achieve parity among the [blacks and whites], the IQ
gap has not gone away. In 1917, the first large scale IQ tests in America found
about a 17-point difference between the scores of the races; the most recent
studies show the difference is about the same11. The equalization of spending on black and white
education, government educational programs for the poor, diversity training, and
all the rest of it simply have had no discernible effect on the racial IQ gap.
"Not only is the difference found consistently across time, but also across
place. In reviewing the literature on black intelligence in Race
Differences in Intelligence, Richard Lynn found that the 57 studies of the
IQ of blacks in Africa conducted between 1955 and 1994 consistently showed that
they had a mean IQ of around 6712. Fourteen studies between 1986 and 2002 of blacks
in the Caribbean and Latin America found a mean IQ of 7113. Thirty-one studies of American blacks between
1918 and 1998 found a mean IQ of 8514. Twenty-nine studies conducted in Britain and the
Netherlands between 1966 and 2002 found a black IQ of 85 there as well15. In Israel, two studies of
Ethiopian immigrants who are Jewish by religion but racially black found a mean
IQ of 6516."
Attributing the black-white IQ difference entirely to environment is
absurd when the difference is found across widely varying environments.
Koffler's baroque arguments about "statistical manipulation" fall flat: there is no such manipulation here, just large and consistent
differences in test results. And IQ score is the best predictor that
has ever been found of school performance and socioeconomic status,
indicating that IQ is a good measure of intelligence.
Koffler also fails to take into account adoption studies. White and
black children adopted into well-to-do white households have radically
different IQs despite the similarity of their environments.
There is no good evidence for Koffler's statement that the
black-white IQ gap is diminishing. As Rushton and Jensen demonstrated
in an examination of this issue, this conclusion was formed on the
basis of illegitimately selective evaluation of IQ study results:
http://psychology.uwo.ca/faculty/rushtonpdfs/2006%20PSnew.pdf
One could go on and on showing Koffler's bias in his treatment of
this issue. From his insulting and contemptuous responses to people who
argue against him, one can tell that this is a very emotional issue for
him, and his emotion has clouded his view of the matter.
Racial differences in intelligence and other forms of behavior are
an issue of paramount importance that people need to accept and learn
to deal with. By providing them with another excuse to avoid that task,
Koffler holds back the ethical progress of the world.
For more discussion of this issue, see The Reality of Racial Differences at:
http://inverted-world.com/index.php/feature/feature/the_reality_of_racia...