Intelligence, as measured by IQ tests, is higher for Asians than Europeans and higher for Europeans than Africans, writes William Saletan on Slate.
Tests do show an IQ deficit, not just for Africans relative to Europeans, but for Europeans relative to Asians. Economic and cultural theories have failed to explain most of the pattern, and there’s strong preliminary evidence that part of it is genetic. It’s time to prepare for the possibility that equality of intelligence, in the sense of racial averages on tests, will turn out not to be true.
Saletan suggests liberals will have to struggle to deny the facts, like creationists rejecting evolution, or “try to reconcile evidence of racial differences with a more sophisticated understanding of equality and opportunity.”
I don’t understand genetics very well. I wonder about the evidence that IQ increases significantly over time as groups have more access to education. But I have to credit Saletan with guts for writing about this issue.
On the same theme, Gene Expression defends DNA pioneer James Watson for telling an inconvenient truth.
Reposting from a lower thread:
Herrnstein and Murray (the Bell Curve authors) themselves acknowledge:
This is from the Bell Curve, quoted in Thomas Sowell’s review of it, quoted here.
As Sowell, in his review, points out, once one concedes that the fifteen point difference in IQ between whites in the 1940s and whites now is environmental, it becomes difficult to claim that the fifteen point difference between blacks now and whites now is genetic.
The other thing to keep in mind is that the 15-point difference is between the means. The differences between the outliers (several standard deviations away) are very small, but they do exist, just as they exist between males and females.
The only time such a discussion becomes “racist” is when people think that because the means show a difference, one can safely generalize across the board, which simply is not true.
I might be in the top 1% in IQ, but there are still plenty of blacks and women who are smarter than me.
Cardinal Fang:
The second linked article addresses your point, and refutes it. It’s a very long arguement, but quite interesting.
Does anybody dispute that East Africans are genetically disposed to be better long distance runners anymore? Are there any significant marathons not dominated by East Africans anymore?
Is it even controversial to point these truths out?
I have no problem accepting that orientals have higher IQs thau caucasians. I have enough, if I use it properly.
Cardinal,
The Gene Expressions post does seem to refute your claim.
What if IQ is linked to race? I think the ultimate answer to that question is “Nothing! so what?” However as a society we are a long way from reaching that conclusion. As a society we think it’s important, which is unfortunate. Wouldn’t it be nice if we could turn our attention to more important issues, like the still unsettled question of how many angels can dance on the head of a pin? Or, if we must think about intelligence, can we stick to the really big, important questions, like who’s really smarter, a Wisconsinite or a Minnesotan?
A few years ago I gave some thought to what and how we think about race. The result was an article “Profiles In Prejudice” which is on my website. Here’s a link, http://www.brianrude.com/pro-prej.htm
Brian Rude said:
“What if IQ is linked to race? I think the ultimate answer to that question is “Nothing! so what?””
I disagree.
If true, the ramifications are substantial.
What if IQ is linked to race? What if IQ is linked to blood type?
I don’t think there would be much controversy about #2, since we can’t see a person’s blood type so there’s no risk of prejudice. But as hypotheses go, either one is equally plausible. We shouldn’t have taboos on what questions scientists can ask.
I think we need to be very careful and very sceptical about this. What we don’t know massively outweighs what we do know and that will likely continue to be the case for quite some time.
I also think we shouldn’t underestimate the harm which will be done if this sort of thing is misrepresented or blown out of proportion. As much as we want to think otherwise, people aren’t as good as we’d like them to be. There will be a good number of people who see these sorts of things and disregard the fact that many of these results are speculative, that there’s much we don’t know, and that this information can’t tell you anything about individuals. Instead, they will assume the worst and feel that their prejudices have validated by the weight of science.
I am white and am married to an african american man (who happens to be unusually smart for a person of any race). One of the things I have learned which honestly came as a suprise to me is the extent to which people are personally hurt by other’s prejudices and bigotries. I always kind of assumed that since bigotry was obviously wrong, people who were the victems of it would just blow it off as ridiculous. Instead, I have discovered that over time (and especially when targeted against children) bigotry is deeply and personally wounding to the people it is directed against.
Then there’s also the fact that workplaces still tend to be places where minorities face a lot of challenges. Everyone needs their job and doesn’t want to cause trouble, so all it takes is one person who is a bigot to make life miserable and often no one is willing to stand up and stop it. My husband has quite literally experienced prejudice which interfered with his ability to do his job well at every company he has ever worked for. He always took the high road and over time, with one exception things worked themselves out, but has was very hard. And that one exception lead to a job loss, 2 years of temporary patch positions, no insurance and many thousands of dollars in debt. The person responsible has since been fired, but that doesn’t help us now.
There are people who already feel that they are justified in looking down on and even refusing to cooperate with black people (usually because they assume that the person doesn’t actually deserve to be there due to the inferiority of their race). If they percieve that science is substantiating their own bigotry, it really will cause substantial harm in the lives of many people.
Like I said, I think we need to be careful and sceptical about all of this. There’s just too much we don’t know and the potential for a lot of very real harm
The I.Q. link to genetics is the only place where you will see liberals deny evolution. I.Q is the same for all races and all peoples on the face of the Earth and has undergone absolutely no evolutionary pressures due to the widely disparate environments that humans live in.
All other traits are shaped by the environment-race in fact is one of them! But only I.Q. is immune from such natural laws.
I.Q. is a produce of intelligent design and is the same for all humans….LOL. Get real folks. The science is what it is. There is generally a 1.1 standard deviation between white and black I.Q. that has persisted in every measure since the 1930s. The general I.Q. has risen for all groups, but the gap remains and will not go away.
Only wishful thinkers and political opportunists think otherwise.
I agree with Rex. The difference is between the means. Individual variation overwhelms the variation between races. I don’t have the figures handy, but I would bet that a one-sigma variation is at least 15 points. This means that there is a good chance that any individual of any race might be smarter (or dumber) than any individual of another race.
That leaves little basis for any kind of discrimination. Larry Byrd, after all, turned out to be a pretty good basketball player.
Why would anyone think that a difference in inteligence would allow discrimination? How does that follow?
You should treat people as individuals in providing services, but you need to understand that group measurements will always reveil major differences.
Racism/sexisim/whateverism is using the group profile to judge an individual. Group profile exist and are overwhelmingly true-but you don use those profile to hurt people. You certainly don’t ignor the group profiles when making government social/education/whatever policy. That leads to failure and the ‘blame game’ (damn white people again!)
Here in Maryland we have students in the same classes, from the same neighborhoods, withthe same family incomes, the same level of degrees in the home, but with different races well mixed, and on the state tests the race diffences show up in every catagory. If the group difference is ignored by callng it racist, then the difference must be due to racism and racism is committed by someone!
Then we go and hunt down the racists (damn white people!) for something that is NOT CAUSED BY RACISM! This lead to even more problems.
Ignor reality at your own risk. Provide equal opportunity and equal treatment. Be fair to all. Abandon equal outcomes (no one demands equal outcomes on the basketball court by race-why is that?)and you will reduce the racial conflict.
Miller Smith, you are incorrect about your claim that the IQ gap between whites and blacks has remained unchanged since the 30’s. There is tentative military testing data which indicates that the gap closed by 3 points between 1940 and 1965. In addition, there is good data indicating that the IQ gap between 1970 and 2001 closed an additional 5 points. (Paper outlining these results and published in Psychological Science can be found at http://www.brookings.edu/views/papers/dickens/20060619_IQ.pdf).
I do know that Arthur Murray has been making the opposite argument, but the mere fact that there are well researched and well constructed studies which find otherwise should give pause to fair minded people before they jump on the bandwagon.
I find it rather revolting that when it comes to things like stem cell research, cloning, and combining human and animal DNA, my fellow conservatives are quick to point out that claims being made about such work’s value are extremely dubious and speculative, not to mention morally problematic. Yet when faced with research which is just as speculative with far more unknown than known and whose moral implications are quite serious as well, it is taken as a sign of intellectual bravery to “stand with science”. It is blatant hypocrisy. This is a speculative business. There is much we don’t know and the moral implications deserve serious consideration. The wagerness of conservatives to jump on this bandwagon and ride hard and fast with it is extremely troubling to me. It is very much remeniscent of liberal’s enthusiastic and obsessive persuit of stem cell research and the like. I do not think the liberal’s “brave stance” speaks well of them. And I am likewise appalled at what conservative’s “brave stance” in this area says about them.
There is too much that is unknown for us not to be careful and at least a little cynical about the whole thing.
With all this back-and-forth about I.Q., there must a decent definition of I.Q., right? I’d prefer a definition that isn’t self-referential if anyone has one too offer.
rebeccat, points are not standard deviations. The point change is not statistacaly significant. Only a few studies have shown any point closure and those are refuted by the overwhelming number that show a steady state.
Here is my question: Why the intense desire to deny an I.Q. difference between groups? Whites sure as heck aren’t the highest in that domain. Whites are the average human, so it’s not like ol’ white me is all that up on oppressing people due to I.Q.
I.Q. is important when we are making public policy. If we ignor it due to political considerations, then our policies WILL fail and the blowback will be distructive for racial relations for generations to come.
I should spell check….
Question:
If x hours of good teaching or tutoring for y years led to a full standard deviation of IQ gain, would that undermine the notion of IQ as “fixed”?
I.e., if someone were to show that, say, you could increase average IQ in 100 kids by a full s.d. over 3 years, how would that change this conversation? What would Murray say?
Here’s a rather interesting piece:
http://www.geocities.com/rnseitz/Definition_of_IQ.html
Actually, you don’t need to be that skeptical. The data has been shown, over and over again, and as genetics replaces archaeology to explain how people left Africa, acquired language, acquired culture, etc., it will continue to explain how genetic mutations including those of various forms of intelligence and IQ also occurred in the populations, and hwo those populations migrated across the world.
It may well be that education increases IQ, but it’s not clear to me why that isn’t a prejudice modern people have over premoderns. Look at the Greeks, and their oral histories and plays. Not exactly the stuff of idiots to remember thousands of lines of poetry. For all of the studies that show improvements based on education or nutrition, etc. orver and over again, we see that those gains level off eventually, or when applied to everyone, those with higher g-factors get more out of it, and the peaks of the racial groups don’t get closert together.
it would help if any of you read murray. he DOES address these questions. studies of X hours of tutoring for Y years has shown that: the gains for lower IQ folks aren’t as big as those for higher IQ folks, so if you give someone with a score of 85 that help and one with 115 that help, their increases are not the same.
hit reply too early: specifically, those with higher IQ make more dramatic increases over the short term than the lower IQ folks did, when given the same amount of tutoring. So you aren’t shrinking the gap, you are increasing it. But over the long term, the gains of both groups subside.
—I.Q. is important when we are making public policy. If we ignor it due to political considerations, then our policies WILL fail and the blowback will be distructive for racial relations for generations to come.
This was exactly murray’s point. If you keep making public policy re: job creation, job retrainng, fixes to poverty, incentives to marriage, laws about drug use, etc. for the average or above average person, how does that actually help the at risk population, when the at risk population’s IQ is statistically more likely to be in the bottom fifth on the IQ measure.
Personal experience here:
- Most Asians that I knew weren´t really inteligent. I´m not reaally inteligent either.
- Working a teacher in Brazil, where RACIAL differences are very smaller than *social* ones, I see very intelligent blacks. The most adored(And REALLY intelligent) student in one school that I worked was black(He was really black, not mulatto). Sure, his parents praised his intelligence, as well his teachers did. And I knew others black students that were more intelligent than most of whites.
Sure, Brazilian blacks aren´t raised to be thought as different from white ones…
(Yes, the country has tough social and racial tensions, but the divisions are more social than racial. There aren´t black neighborhoods, for example).