Posted on 08/09/2013 3:06:33 PM PDT by reaganaut1
“IQ is a metric of such dubiousness that almost no serious educational researcher uses it anymore,” the Guardian’s Ana Marie Cox wrote back in May. It was a breathtakingly ignorant statement. Psychologist Jelte Wicherts noted in response that a search for “IQ test” in Google’s academic database yielded more than 10,000 hits — just for the year 2013.
But Cox’s assertion is all too common. There is a large discrepancy between what educated laypeople believe about cognitive science and what experts actually know. Journalists are steeped in the lay wisdom, so they are repeatedly surprised when someone forthrightly discusses the real science of mental ability.
If that science happens to deal with group differences in average IQ, the journalists’ surprise turns into shock and disdain. Experts who speak publicly about IQ differences end up portrayed as weird contrarians at best, and peddlers of racist pseudoscience at worst.
I’m speaking from experience. My Harvard Ph.D. dissertation contains some scientifically unremarkable statements about ethnic differences in average IQ, including the IQ difference between Hispanics and non-Hispanic whites. For four years, the dissertation did what almost every other dissertation does — collected dust in the university library. But when it was unearthed in the midst of the immigration debate, I experienced the vilification firsthand.
For people who have studied mental ability, what’s truly frustrating is the déjà vu they feel each time a media firestorm like this one erupts. Attempts by experts in the field to defend the embattled messenger inevitably fall on deaf ears. When the firestorm is over, the media’s mindset always resets to a state of comfortable ignorance, ready to be shocked all over again when the next messenger comes along.
(Excerpt) Read more at politico.com ...
Why are you so certain it is only cultural differences, when, for example, the testing gap between the black and white children of socio-economically equally upper-middle class is persistently gaping?
Obama’s not stupid, but he’s certainly not brilliant.
I’d peg him at about a 110.
PapaBear, you’ve pegged it exactly! The average Mensan is socially inept to a point that it hinders professional success.
Smart people without such handicaps tend to work in law or medicine or finance or IT or creative fields at such a level that they don’t need Mensa to find and spend time with other smart people.
Also, a good chunk of them are, shall we say, ‘chunky’, and there tends to be something of a ‘swingers’ undercurrent or subset to many Mensa chapters.
If liberals believe in "hardwired genetic differences," why do they fight so hard to suppress research showing that intelligence is heritable and that there are significant mean differences in intelligence between racial and ethnic groups?
Marxist (i.e. modern "liberal") dogma states that the human mind is a blank slate, and that we're all purely a product of culture and economic circumstances. You seem to subscribe to the same view. It's a good thing that people who bred animals and plants didn't think like this, otherwise we would have never bred crops or domesticated wild animals.
Michael Jordan is probably the result of such breeding ca 1850 and before
Sounds about right. Obama wouldn't seem stupid if we weren't constantly being told by his supporters how brilliant he is. If people keep telling you that the mediocre is terrific, you're bound to find it terrible (or vice-versa)
I remember reading an article by Alan Greenspan (smart guy, lousy Fed Chair towards the end of his term) where he stated that the two most intelligent Presidents that he ever worked with were Nixon and Clinton. That's probably true when it comes to raw intelligence, which isn't to say that either were good Presidents.
So true!
Like meeting the designated brainiac in a dull family—all of the nerd affectations, but no ability to deliver the goods.
I've taken several IQ tests over my lifetime. In school I usually scored somewhere between 134 and 139. (We took several in my High School psych classes.)
I've taken 3 tests over the last 5 years and my score has steadily dropped. My last score was 127.
So, during the Obama administration I am actually getting dumber.
No, I am not joking.
Probably that you're getting older. Is the test calibrated for age? After I got a really nice score on my GREs, I never officially took another IQ test. Why mess with success? <^..^>
Yeah all of the tests I've taken are timed AND age is calculated into the test results.
But I can feel my mental faculties slowing.
I think it is due to the meds I need to take to function. Rx pain meds for severe arthritis in my knees and ankles.
I would ask how many generations those black kids' families have been in the upper-middle class. Some research has shown that it takes generations--2 or 3, at least--for "disadvantaged" people (for example, immigrants) to catch up to the achievement level of the population. If these black families are new to the middle class, it is very likely that the parents of those kids simply do not know how to effectively stimulate their children intellectually.
I would also ask if the kids in those upper-middle class black families embrace the "black" culture, which is a culture that denigrates achievement.
And so forth.
Environment plays a huge role in intellectual development. Bad nutrition, early childhood disease, and lack of intellectual stimulation all conspire to impair brain development of young children, and once that crucial developmental window is gone, the opportunity to maximize the genetic potential is lost forever.
There is plenty of research into intelligence and the various factors that affect it.
I am not going to pretend that I know why liberals do what they do, but I can tell you that their supposed horror at any measurements that show racial differences in intellect does not reflect their inner beliefs. They do believe that minorities are stupid; they would not support affirmative action otherwise. When people want to stop affirmative action programs and switch to merit-based programs, the liberals always yell racism on the basis that minorities cannot possibly hope to compete on a level playing field. It is very clear that liberal support for lowering the admission standards for minorities stems from their belief that minorities are stupid.
Marxist (i.e. modern "liberal") dogma states that the human mind is a blank slate, and that we're all purely a product of culture and economic circumstances. You seem to subscribe to the same view. It's a good thing that people who bred animals and plants didn't think like this, otherwise we would have never bred crops or domesticated wild animals.
I have not said that at all. What I said is that environment has a huge effect on whether an individual is able to develop the full potential of their genetic background. I also said that on the level of the population, there is no reason to think that the distribution of intelligence genes is different between racial groups. Let me try to simplify that. If, in the population, 50% of the people have a gene for blond hair, 50% have a gene for brown hair, and 100% have a gene for black hair, the distribution of hair color genes will always remain 50:50:100. (Remember, each person has two sets of genes.) So, without speaking of an individual's chance of being blond or brunette, I can still discuss the distribution of blond/brunette/black hair genes in the population. This is what I am doing with intelligence. Every person's intellect is a product of both environmental and genetic factors. There is a wide range of IQs seen in any group of people from the same environment.
Take an average kid, and rear him in an environment that's as close to exactly the environment that Albert Einstein or Steven Hawkings grew up in, and I strongly doubt you will wind up with a Nobel-prize-level physicist.
There is NO amount of environment and training that would have turned Danny DiVito into an NBA All-Star player.
Environment can serve to bring out the genetic potential (or not) but it cannot compensate for what's not there.
I disagree. The "WHY" is critically important in making policy decisions.
Currently, the accepted wisdom is that statistical group differences in performance is entirely due to environment, and that by sufficiently improving the environment of the lower-performing group, the group differences can be eliminated. The perceived duty is then to spend as much as needed to eliminate the differences.
If statistical differences in average group performance has a primarily genetic basis, then NO amount of spending will erase the difference.
This is why there is such hysterical upset whenever genetics is mentioned -- too many people would lose money and power if we stopped spending money on something that will not get fixed.
And just as there are differences in ability among individuals, there are differences in ability across ethnic groups as well. If you had a strictly merit-based system, "minorities" (i.e. blacks and hispanics) probably would still under-perform compared to whites and asians. Liberals don't want to admit this, so they push affirmative action and quotas. That way anything that contradicts their egalitarian dogma and blank-slate model of the human mind can be swept under the rug.
Head start programs and busing are cases in point. Liberals insisted that by dumping more money into various social programs and by moving inner city black kids into schools with middle class white kids, their academic performance would improve. It didn't. All it did was spend a lot of money and resources that could be better spent elsewhere, all the while creating problems for those kids who were actually learning.
What makes the parents bad? Part of it is the welfare state, where mothers are paid for having children, but have no financial incentive to raise them to be productive and law-abiding?
Behavior can also be influenced by genetics. For example, blacks have a 15% higher testosterone level than whites, which will influence aggressive behavior.
The differences between ethnic groups result from a mixture of cultural and environmental factors. Cultural--the "black culture" ostracizes successful people--ever hear the term "Uncle Tom"? That is the black culture derogatory term for anyone who dares to step out of the ghetto to try to make anything of him or herself. That culture is actually quite similar to the poverty culture I grew up in. It's hard to overcome, and many people never do get past that.
Still, culture is only part of the picture.
Environment plays a huge role. Things like lack of maternal nutrition during pregnancy, and malnutrition and illnesses within the first few years cause permanent and irreversible impairments of brain development. The black and Hispanic poverty cultures typically have very non-nutritious diets. A fetus can have the best combination of intellect genes possible, but if his mother only eats junk food while pregnant and only feeds him junk food during childhood, his brain simply will not develop to its full potential. Infectious diseases also prevent the brain from developing fully (because the body is spending so much energy to fight the disease, it has none to spare on brain development); some infectious diseases cause direct brain damage. In addition, the brain of a child who is not intellectually stimulated during infancy and toddlerhood will also not develop to its potential. All of these environmental factors exist in poor neighborhoods, which also tend to have a large minority population. (The whites living in those same neighborhoods also have the same issues.) These environmental factors lower IQ permanently.
Until those culture and environmental factors are addressed (which takes time, money, and hard work), minorities will not do as well on a merit based system. The way I see it, affirmative action is a quick and easy "fix" which does nothing about the problem, but gives liberals the illusion that they *are* doing something--and liberals are all about show, not substance.
From The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education, 2009:
For both blacks and whites, family income is one of the best predictors of a student’s SAT score. Students from families with high incomes tend to score higher. Students from low-income families on average have low SAT scores. Because the median black family income in the United States is about 60 percent of the median family income of whites, one would immediately seize upon this economic statistic to explain the average 200-point gap between blacks and whites on the standard SAT scoring curve.The above was also noted in the book, "The Bell Curve". Read the bolded part above again. The average black child, raised in a top-income household, has a lower SAT score than the average working-class white child.But income differences explain only part of the racial gap in SAT scores. For black and white students from families with incomes of more than $200,000 in 2008, there still remains a huge 149-point gap in SAT scores. Even more startling is the fact that in 2008 black students from families with incomes of more than $200,000 scored lower on the SAT test than did students from white families with incomes between $20,000 and $40,000.
Affirmative action in higher education does not primarily help the black child from the ghetto. It primarily gives an advantage to the children of upper-income blacks over working-class whites. It means that the child of a black professional will be more likely to be admitted, and likely get a better financial aid package, than a smarter working class white kid.
Where is the fairness in that?
And I would still ask the question: how many generations removed from the ghetto are these black children, on average? That environment can take generations to overcome in terms of child development. Furthermore, what is the culture within the family? Is it still "black" poverty culture? Also, were those kids in the upper middle class families born into that class, or did their families fight their way there during their childhood?
The bottom line is that we're still talking environmental and cultural factors, here. Those need to be fixed before we see real improvement.
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