Posted on 08/26/2005 6:49:50 PM PDT by dennisw
When the late Richard Herrnstein and I published The Bell Curve eleven years ago, the furor over its discussion of ethnic differences in IQ was so intense that most people who have not read the book still think it was about race. Since then, I have deliberately not published anything about group differences in IQ, mostly to give the real topic of The Bell Curve—the role of intelligence in reshaping America’s class structure—a chance to surface.
The Lawrence Summers affair last January made me rethink my silence. The president of Harvard University offered a few mild, speculative, off-the-record remarks about innate differences between men and women in their aptitude for high-level science and mathematics, and was treated by Harvard’s faculty as if he were a crank. The typical news story portrayed the idea of innate sex differences as a renegade position that reputable scholars rejected.
It was depressingly familiar. In the autumn of 1994, I had watched with dismay as The Bell Curve’s scientifically unremarkable statements about black IQ were successfully labeled as racist pseudoscience. At the opening of 2005, I watched as some scientifically unremarkable statements about male-female differences were successfully labeled as sexist pseudoscience.
The Orwellian disinformation about innate group differences is not wholly the media’s fault. Many academics who are familiar with the state of knowledge are afraid to go on the record. Talking publicly can dry up research funding for senior professors and can cost assistant professors their jobs. But while the public’s misconception is understandable, it is also getting in the way of clear thinking about American social policy.
Good social policy can be based on premises that have nothing to do with scientific truth. The premise that is supposed to undergird all of our social policy, the founders’ assertion of an unalienable right to liberty, is not a falsifiable hypothesis. But specific policies based on premises that conflict with scientific truths about human beings tend not to work. Often they do harm.
One such premise is that the distribution of innate abilities and propensities is the same across different groups. The statistical tests for uncovering job discrimination assume that men are not innately different from women, blacks from whites, older people from younger people, homosexuals from heterosexuals, Latinos from Anglos, in ways that can legitimately affect employment decisions. Title IX of the Educational Amendments of 1972 assumes that women are no different from men in their attraction to sports. Affirmative action in all its forms assumes there are no innate differences between any of the groups it seeks to help and everyone else. The assumption of no innate differences among groups suffuses American social policy. That assumption is wrong.
When the outcomes that these policies are supposed to produce fail to occur, with one group falling short, the fault for the discrepancy has been assigned to society. It continues to be assumed that better programs, better regulations, or the right court decisions can make the differences go away. That assumption is also wrong.
Hence this essay. Most of the following discussion describes reasons for believing that some group differences are intractable. I shift from “innate” to “intractable” to acknowledge how complex is the interaction of genes, their expression in behavior, and the environment. “Intractable” means that, whatever the precise partitioning of causation may be (we seldom know), policy interventions can only tweak the difference at the margins.
I will focus on two sorts of differences: between men and women and between blacks and whites. Here are three crucial points to keep in mind as we go along:
1. The differences I discuss involve means and distributions. In all cases, the variation within groups is greater than the variation between groups. On psychological and cognitive dimensions, some members of both sexes and all races fall everywhere along the range. One implication of this is that genius does not come in one color or sex, and neither does any other human ability. Another is that a few minutes of conversation with individuals you meet will tell you much more about them than their group membership does.
2. Covering both sex differences and race differences in a single, non-technical article, I had to leave out much in the print edition of this article. This online version is fully annotated and includes extensive supplementary material.
3. The concepts of “inferiority” and “superiority” are inappropriate to group comparisons. On most specific human attributes, it is possible to specify a continuum running from “low” to “high,” but the results cannot be combined into a score running from “bad” to “good.” What is the best score on a continuum measuring aggressiveness? What is the relative importance of verbal skills versus, say, compassion? Of spatial skills versus industriousness? The aggregate excellences and shortcomings of human groups do not lend themselves to simple comparisons. That is why the members of just about every group can so easily conclude that they are God’s chosen people. All of us use the weighting system that favors our group’s strengths.1
II
The technical literature documenting sex differences and their biological basis grew surreptitiously during feminism’s heyday in the 1970’s and 1980’s. By the 1990’s, it had become so extensive that the bibliography in David Geary’s pioneering Male, Female (1998) ran to 53 pages.2 Currently, the best short account of the state of knowledge is Steven Pinker’s chapter on gender in The Blank Slate (2002).3 ........
This is true, but it is also true if we include gorillas as a "group". The IQ of Koko the gorilla was determined to be in the range 70 to 95 - higher than the nation of Ghana, where the average IQ is 62. Several other sub-Saharan nations in Africa fall near the low end of this range. Many nations fall below the high end. There are at least three at 90 - Turkey, Croatia, and Israel (probably due to its large Arab population). Only one, Japan (110), is a full standard deviation higher than Koko's high end estimate. Average IQ in the USA is 98 and falling due to immigration from lower IQ nations, high fertility among low IQ groups, and low fertility among high IQ groups due to a variety of media propaganda campaigns to reduce fertility here in the US (think abortion, feminism, homosexuality, lesbianism, hedonism, zero population growth, catholic-bashing, etc.). The media has, of course, also been behind the open-borders propaganda to enable massive illegal immigration.
IQ matters (see here), but, obviously, IQ is not the only thing that matters. Ghana is not ruled by gorillas!
If you define the "intelligence" as the ability to solve IQ test, then the answer is YES!
I think they have reached parity in some fields of science, such as biology. But certainly not in computer science, engineering and mathematics.
However, in mathematics, in the last two years, more than 30% of new PhDs in math have gone to women.
Murray says there have only been two woman mathematicians who are "great" mathematicians in history. But I think there are some modern women mathematicians who are at least near-great: one example is the Princeton professor Ingrid Daubechies, whose work in harmonic analysis (wavelet analysis) was spectacular and unexpected.
But here's the question - what makes for a good IQ test and why? If I strap electrodes onto someone's chest and make them run on a treadmill, can I call that an intelligence test? If not why not? What are the criterion that make for a good intelligence test?
I'm not into academia and brains. However, I see that a lot of great sports figures have equally talented offspring. So if good atletic ability can be inherited well good brains can too. Then there are race horses too where breeding is a big thing. Parents matter.
You've never heard the expression, "An idea so stupid only an intellectual could believe it."?
I sort of discounted him when he said he wanted to help Bill Clinton push his agenda. Okay, so it was early on in the
Clinton Administration, but still, if that guy had common sense intelligence, he would have picked out Clinton for
the grifter that he is.
Measuring intelligence? You have to define the measure, and define what you're measuring.
That's the point you're not getting: an intelligence score is *not* simply like a notch on a ruler with a range of scores---its whole purpose is predictive--i.e., how well will the person tested perform on g-loaded tasks, which in turn predict with remarkable and stable accuracy the success of the person in school, career and so forth. If you don't understand what the "signal" is used for, it is a waste of time to discuss with you how it is calibrated. Like I said, you need to read the literature---this is not a subject that is susceptible to cereal box top "25 words or less" type explanations.
Predictive value. Stability.
Read the literature, please. You're embarrassing yourself here.
FINALLY. It's not a real scientific measurement of intelligence then, it's merely a predictive tool. So why is it called an intelligence test when it really should be called a middle-class lifestyle prediction test?
BS. I might as well be posting to a brick wall---one covered with Che Guevara posters. I don't know what you are, but you're not a "scientist." Liberal troll? Go find some other thread to disrupt.
1. Intelligence is a very general mental capability that, among other things, involves the ability to reason, plan, solve problems, think abstractly, comprehend complex ideas, learn quickly and learn from experience. It is not merely book learning, a narrow academic skill, or test-taking smarts. Rather, it reflects a broader and deeper capability for comprehending our surroundings--"catching on," "making sense" of things, or "figuring out" what to do.
2. Intelligence, so defined, can be measured, and intelligence tests measure it well. They are among the most accurate (in technical terms, reliable and valid) of all psychological tests and assessments. They do not measure creativity, character personality, or other important differences among individuals, nor are they intended to.
3. While there are different types of intelligence tests, they all measure the same intelligence. Some use words or numbers and require specific cultural knowledge (like vocabulary). Others do not, and instead use shapes or designs and require knowledge of only simple, universal concepts (many/few, open/closed, up/down).
4. The spread of people along the IQ continuum, from low to high, can be represented well by the bell curve (in statistical jargon, the "normal curve"). Most people cluster around the average (IQ 100). Few are either very bright or very dull: About 3% of Americans score above IQ 130 (often considered the threshold for "giftedness"), with about the same percentage below IQ 70 (IQ 70-75 often being considered the threshold for mental retardation).
5. Intelligence tests are not culturally biased against American blacks or other native-born, English-speaking peoples in the U.S. Rather, IQ scores predict equally accurately for all such Americans, regardless of race and social class. Individuals who do not understand English well can be given either a nonverbal test or one in their native language.
There's more at the link, of course---I simply posted the material dealing with the "consensus" positions, for the benefit of those with a good faith interest in the topic. It's admittedly very general but it does represent well and succinctly the scientific community's consensus on the issues then and now. For more in-depth treatment, those of good faith are urged to read the literature---the subject cannot be covered in depth on this thread, particularly in the context of ideological "sound-bites" which those with a Lysenkoist political agenda rather than a scientific viewpoint seem to favor.
I don't have any quarrel with the thrust of your post, but I would advise that the supposed IQ of Koko the gorilla (which I note is reported not as a score but as a supposed "range" encompassing an entire standard deviation in testing) is one which her caregivers reported, and which for a variety of reasons, is open to serious question. The claim, of course, was immediately put to political use, resulting in an absurd New Zealand statute granting "human rights" to gorillas, apparently on the basis of the report of Koko's "IQ," which to my knowledge has not been reproduced, and which hence is scientifically trivial.
Posted by Map Kernow: "Predictive value. Stability. Read the literature, please. You're embarrassing yourself here."
Reproducibility is the key to science. These tests are not just pulled out of someone's butt on the spur of the moment. Pardon my vulgarity, but I grow very impatient with closeminded individuals who refuse to do even the smallest amount of reading on the Scientific Method.
Are these tests flawed? Do they underrepresent some groups or genders? Yes and yes...however, as science is self-correcting, tests such as the MMPI, IQ tests, etc. become more and more accurate and precise as time goes on and additional studies are performed to perfect procedures.
I also agree with Map Kernow that you are simply embarrassing yourself by demonstrating your willfull ignorance. Do some reading. Stretch your brain (it will improve your IQ score). God gave it to you - do something with it other than simply following unenlightened and fearful masses.
You've stated that you can't measure intelligence like notches on a ruler - in other words, an intelligence test doesn't measure intelligence. I've never denied what an intelligence test does do - predict certain outcomes and does correlate with some results. My sticking point is calling what it does correlate with "intelligence" without anything other than bluster or precise definition.
But what is it reproducing - all I've asked for is simple data on what the standard deviation for a given IQ test taken multiple times is for a given individual and what standard deviation for a given individual on different tests is. It's fairly simply data for you ever so smart experts to find and report. It ain't much for a person of your inestimatable IQ.
And your evidence for this is something other than your supposition? Like for example published records of Einstein's IQ test results?
Is English your second language? "I would not expect" is clear to most jr. high schoolers.
The dozen or so persons for whom I have been able to track IQ over decades does not show variability over 2 to 4%; remarkable for an abstract measurement.
So are the results for the Scientologist's e-meter readings.
You got me there. I have no idea what those are. Is it something to do with Japanese cartoon art?
You haven't read Sex on the Brain: the biological differences between men and women.
Have you?
Thank you. Are these results published anywhere or do you have a link to that data or any similar data?
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.