Why on earth would anyone beleive that there is a genetic link between skin color and intelligence? Do these people believe that humans think with their skins instead of their brains?

Sully was right, eventually, about Bush and torture. But he's still wrong about everything else.

To rea's point, something I would have posted with a moment's extra thought: who is the audience for the idea that extra melanin makes you stupid? Why is this even something worth talking about?

Hmmm, so Binet was right. He thought that IQ was mutable to a certain extent. His test was intended as a diagnostic to determine the appropriate education/therapy for each individual tested, and not as a way to fetishize over group statitics. Not bad for a Frenchman.

Why on earth would anyone beleive that there is a genetic link between skin color and intelligence?

That there is a link was proven in Charles Murray's The Bell Curve.

Rea/Craigie: This is worth posting about because lots of people believe it, there is a test score gap, and plenty of conservative scholars keep insisting on the genetic link. Sullivan is widely read, and he linked to the AIE conference as if the debate were over and even good guys like Flynn are on board. That will become conventional wisdom mighty quickly if nobody bothers pointing out that's not what Flynn said at all.

Maybe I'm just going for the too obvious choice here, but wouldn't there be some value in comparing trend lines of the IQ's of blacks with trendlines that track their socio-economic progress (or the lack thereof)? --Annual income, crime rates in predominately black neighborhoods, home-ownership, divorce rates, etc.

It's the school system, stupid. Make schools equal and you will see a hell of a lot more improvement than 7 points. Let me give an example. I am a grad student, so I teach undergrad classes for my rent and sustenance. Sometimes I teach the same class with the same text at the community college as I do at the university. At the CC level, I spend a month teaching basics they should have known and the suburban kids at the university do know. When you take a cell bio class, it helps if you learned in high school science class just what exactly an enzyme is.

GC above is right on target. Anecdote: I taught some very basic stats skills to a group of field researchers on a survey project in South Africa. Attempting to demonstrate things like creating histograms, I gave an example of a simple survey of 10 persons who are asked a yes/no question, 6 of whom answer "yes". I said (and wrote on a chalkboard), "So, 6 divided by 10 equals 0.6 equals 60%." The research team leader raised his hand and said, "Where did you get the 0.6?"

Does anyone out there want to tell me that the guy's ignorance of percentages is related to his IQ, instead of to the fact that the apartheid government in SA ensured that homeland schools did not focus on science and math?

GC, I completely agree with you that schools need to be improved, but I also think that in some of the rougher urban neighborhoods, the environment has an adverse affect on how effective any quality of education can be. And from my experiences grading English papers at the CC level, public schools in pretty much all neighborhoods could stand radical improvements; explaining run-on sentences, comma splices, and other basic grammar really detracts from time that can spent teaching students how to construct persuasive arguements and cogent thesis statements.

Cyntax, but that would detract from the amount of time spent on reading the works of approved minority authors on various political topics! (Alternatively, it would detract from the reading of the traditional classics of Western literature, though there's damned little of that left in most public school curricula these days.)

Seriously, go read the papers. Fascinating stuff. No matter how you look at it, though, increasing educational achievement in blacks is good for everyone.

Good to see Sully is still trying to drag Murray into acceptable company. His effort at TNR wasn't quite enough.

I have to admit it: I read pretty much every David Brooks column. He's often quite good, honestly.

Youe're kidding, right? Wrong on both counts: He isn't good often, and it isn't honestly.

Ai yi yi, sorry. The above comment was intended for the subsequent thread. My apologies.

But as long as I'm here:

You definitely get today's "Knocking Down the Straw Man" award.

When he pries it from your cold, dead fingers.

That will become conventional wisdom mighty quickly if nobody bothers pointing out that's not what Flynn said at all.

Aw, c'mon, Kevin: You know jolly well it'll become conventional wisdom among dishonest right-wingers (but I repeat myself) regardless of whether anybody bothers pointing out that's not what Flynn said at all

It's nice that the gap narrowed slightly, but it's still huge. I blame the educrats for promoting ineffective educational methods. I blame the judges and others who interfere with a school's ability to preserve discipline. I blame liberals who work to keep poor kids stuck in lousy schools.

Educated parents can compensate for mediocre schools by tutoring their kids. But, a lousy school is a dasaster for a child whose parents don't have the education to teach him or her.

The Dems have sold out the underclass. Publicly funded vouchers would give poor children in failing schools the option of moving to a better school. The Dems kowtow to the teachers unions and oppose all vouicher attempts. Sadly, the Dems and the teachers' unions have been quite effective in depriving the poor of educational choice.

The situation is quite interesting. The W-B test score gap narrowed considerably among children born in the 1950-1975 era and a little among those born since then, but remains wide among adults.

For a graph showing the progress over the course of the 20th Century, see:

http://www.vdare.com/sailer/061126_iq.htm

Avatar, yeah cannocical reading lists are frought with mostly undeserved baggage. I think there's value in showing students a variety of viewpoints by selecting authors from various eras and backgrounds. And it can be particularly helpful if students can be exposed to an author or two who may have come from a background similar to the theirs. But the quality of the writing should never be sacrificed just to provide students with writers from a particular background, and to deny inner-city students exposure to Shakespeare just because he wasn't black is beyond patronizing.

I remember one interesting study in which a group half of black men and half of white men were tested three times with different instructions.

For the first, they were told they were doing a calibration test, and the individual scores would not be tabulated. Blacks did best on this test.

Then they were told the next test would be graded, but no mention was made of race. Blacks did worse on this.

For the third test, they were told the test would be graded and sorted by race. Blacks did worst on this one.

I blame the educrats for promoting ineffective educational methods. I blame the judges and others who interfere with a school's ability to preserve discipline. I blame liberals who work to keep poor kids stuck in lousy schools.

And of course craigie would have to stand behind "ex-liberal" for that straw man award.

But, a lousy school is a dasaster for a child whose parents don't have the education to teach him or her.

Obviously.

News flash, "ex-liberal": No one mistakes you for an honest commentator. Your bullshit is worthy of nothing but scorn. Shame on you.

Has Charles Murray ever bothered to compare test scores of upper and lower income African Americans with each other?

If there are differences within the African American group then this would tend to undermine Murray's whole premise that there are genetic causes of intellectual inferiority between the races. Particularly so if upper-income blacks had test scores comparable to upper income whites.

FYI, in 1994 Murry and some friends in Newton, Iowa, burned a cross next door to the police station. Murry later claimed that at the time he had no idea cross burning had any racial significance. This from a Harvard graduate no less.

*sigh,* this assumption again: "The IQ/achievement gap is narrowing. It is going away! Hurray!"

Don't we just wish! It would be a fantastic thing if the difference between racial groups was simply a function of the environment, that we could eliminate the gap by changing the environment. Imagine how life in a multicultural society would be different if different racial groups got comparable scores on mental ability tests. Affirmative action would be unnecessary, we wouldn't see an achievement gap in education (with the average black 18 year old performing as well as the average white 13 year old), we wouldn't read articles, eg, in yesterday's NYTimes, about how black lawyers do less well in large law firms. We wouldn't see poverty rates that are much higher among African Americans. We would see, for the African American population, the same kind of achievements that we have seen for Asian Americans. We would see, in other words, the kind of society that we all would prefer to live in.

However, the link provided by Sullivan also takes you to a paper by Arthur Jensen, much despised by liberals, but someone who understands psychometrics, measurement and scientific evidence (as opposed to Murray, a journalist with an agenda, and Flynn a sociologist with an agenda.) Jensen's conclusion is that the gap has narrowed, but the narrowing has ceased. Jensen also has done research on the environmental impact of racism--this was reported in his book "G" published in 1999--iirc, he found a difference of around 4-6 IQ points for children that could be attributed to growing up in a racist environment (in his sample, rural Georgia). So perhaps the "gains" defended by Flynn is a function of a society is somewhat less racist than in 1970.

In other words, the gap between African Americans and everyone else continues to be huge--it used to be the difference between 102 & 85 and now may be the difference between 102 and 91. And the gap still has huge consequences.

The consensus among people who study intelligence is that mental ability has a significant biological basis, like it or not. The estimate is that ~70% of IQ differences among people is genetic--at least for people reared in normal environments. For African Americans, the environment seems to play a larger role than for the white population, but how much more is hard to figure out. Furthermore, no one has been able to identify the specific environmental factors that lower or raise intelligence. The assertion that the gap is caused by environment is an article of faith: of course, different races must be equal in all abilities, therefore, any difference must the effect of the environment.

How could there be a genetic difference? Duh, Evolution? Humans in Africa needed less mental quickness to survive and humans in Europe and Asia needed more mental quickness to survive? Does this make the descendents of Africans inferior? No. Does the difference have consequences in a competitive and complex modern society developed by the descendents of Europeans? Yes.

Much as we would like the gap between African Americans and other racial groups to go away, the current liberal strategy of wishing, hoping and aggressively attacking anyone who suggests otherwise doesn't seem to be affecting the gap. Of course, we need to do what we can, within reason, to make environments equal--different educational strategies, for example--this. But perhaps the time has also come to consider Plan B--social policies, opportunities and structures that make life for anyone (of any race) more orderly, safe, healthy, even if they have an IQ of less than 100. What this involves is reconceptualizing a eurocentric society to reduce the competitive advantage for smarter individuals.

The achievment gap also exists on the global scale. According to the Borgen Project, 300 million children suffer from hunger and hunger influences a child's ability to learn. Achieving the UN MIllennium Development Goals can improve these young lives.

PTate - The level of black poverty, the racism, and cultural differences combine to have a much greater effect on IQ than any genetic differences. (This was a point repeated expressed in The Bell Curve.) There's no way to separate out environmental factors in IQ from hereditary ones in comparing races.

If there is a genetic difference (on average), it's conceivable that blacks are inherently smarter than whites (on average), but their genetic advantage is more than cancelled out by environmental disadvantages.

Jeepers, I'm sorry my last post was so long. It's a complex topic.

pj in jesusland: "Has Charles Murray ever bothered to compare test scores of upper and lower income African Americans with each other?"

Forget Charles Murray. Real researchers have done this and what they find is that African Americans show a range of IQ which is comparable to other racial groups. It is just that the mean is a standard deviation lower.

Upper income blacks tend to get IQ scores that are lower than upper income whites. If you look at people with the same IQ--an African American and a white American, say--you see comparable levels of performance: It is just that there are fewer African Americans in the brightest group, and fewer African Americans in the US population. For every Condoleeza Rice, you will see 100 or more white scholars. Because of affirmative action, if you are an African American with an IQ of 115, you are significantly more likely to go on to medical or law school than a European American with an IQ of 115.

If you are an employer, your chances of hiring someone with an IQ of less than 85--someone considered untrainable by the US Army--is ~50% if you hire an African American and 16% if you hire a European American.

But, please, please, please, never think that ALL African Americans are less smart than ALL white Americans. If you examine population distributions by IQ score, you find that about 60% of the African American population have scores that are the same as those of white Americans. The gap arises because about ~ 40% more white Americans have scores above 100 and ~40% more black Americans have scores below 85.

but their genetic advantage is more than cancelled out by environmental disadvantages

Notice how "ex-liberal" "forgot" to mention cultural differences the in the second paragraph.

PTate:

The consensus among people who study intelligence is that mental ability has a significant biological basis, like it or not. The estimate is that ~70% of IQ differences among people is genetic--at least for people reared in normal environments.

There is no "the estimate". There are many estimates, and quite a few are much, MUCH lower than 70%. Also, be careful about mixing up R and R-Squared -- an R of 0.7 means an R-squared of 0.49, in other words, 49% heritability, not 70%.

Even the gold standard study (identical twins raised separately) has two serious methodological flaws -- In general, identical twins raised apart are not given random assignment to foster parents. Indeed, white babies are given to white parents, wealthy babies given to wealthy parents, in general.

Also, identical twins, by definition, share at least 9 month of pre-natal environment. Issues like mother's nutrition, stress level, and alcohol use provide a shared influence that is not properly disentangled by these twin studies.

Wait, so you're telling me that "Trading Places" is fiction?

Gregory: Notice how "ex-liberal" "forgot" to mention cultural differences the in the second paragraph.

Gregory my friend, I used the word "envirnmental" to mean the combination of poverty, racism, and cultural differences. In other words, "environmental" meant everything other then genetic. I believe that's how the word is generally used in the context of nature/nurture debates.

ex-liberal: "If there is a genetic difference (on average), it's conceivable that blacks are inherently smarter than whites (on average), but their genetic advantage is more than cancelled out by environmental disadvantages."

This is wishful thinking. There is no evidence at all for this. Not all African Americans live in abject poverty.

You can tease apart some of the environmental factors. For example, middle class African Americans--people for whom the physical environment is not aversive--get IQ scores that are lower than comparable middle class white Americans. Or consider black children adopted by middle class white families--those children had IQs that were basically at the norm for the African American population. So it is hard to attribute the gap to physical or rearing environments. Then, is the gap entirely the result of racism? Racism is real, but you better specify the mechanism by which racism causes IQs to be lowered so dramatically. And your mechanism needs to account for for the fact that other groups that have experienced racism--Jews, Asians--have not shown the same lowering of IQ effect.

Maybe stereotype threat? It hasn't held up.

Something in the pre-natal environment?--perhaps differences in fetal nutrition? I know one study a long time ago found that the children of black mothers and white fathers had IQs that were lower than the children of black fathers and white mothers, but I don't know if that has been replicated.

I believe that's how the word is generally used in the context of nature/nurture debates.

Which says nothing about how a word is used by a lying hack like yourself, "ex-liberal."

But, so you contend that nurture -- your "environmental factors" -- has "a much greater effect on IQ than any genetic differences"? I'm sure the world breathlessly awaits your evidence for this assertion.

No one -- but no one -- mistakes you for an honest commentator (although your defense of the Bell Curve crowd is hardly surprising). Why do you bother?

This is a tough issue. Recent research into the 'deep' mechanisms of gene expression have turned the traditional understanding of the human genome on it's head. (and other genomes as well)

Traditional concepts of genome mapping showed very slight differences between racial/ethnic groups (or man and mouse for that matter).

The newer evidence indicates the genetic differences are much greater (maney times) than ever imagined, both between species and within species.

In a rational view, there indeed may be fundemental differences between human racial groups in areas that are currently 'socially incorrect' to discuss. (intelligence, behavioral tendencies, athletic ability etc).

[For example, polite discussion doesn't address the topic of why nearly all track records are held by blacks, why Kenyans win marathons etc.)

Under the new genome view, the increasing IQ scores of blacks may very well be due to increased hybridization with other races in western culture. (Bringing up the issue of 'what does black mean as a racial identifier in the west?')

How humans will handle this sort of information remains to be seen, but if history is any guide, it probaby isn't going to be pretty.

It will be very easy to go charging off into a Hitlerian view of humanity, but genetically driven differences in human populations may someday need to be dealt with on some sort of rational level.

(Don't hold your breath though).

Anyone concerned about this topic should read the article about some charter schools, and research into different parenting styles between lower (in the U.S., more black) and upper/middle class. It seems that lower class kids are brought up with statistically far fewer interactions with adults, and these interactions are way skewed toward the negative, as opposed to the upper/middle class which are way skewed to the positive. Some charter schools (SKILLs or something like that - sorry, I don't have the article here... the "Work Hard Be Nice" schools) attempt to address the disparity in upbringing. It doesn't take equal schools (which lower class kids don't generally get) but UNEQUAL shools. In the opposite direction: twice as much money and effort and time to make up for disparity in effective upbringing. I think any IQ disparity is probably mainly the result of this sort of upbringing/nurturing disparity. Not to mention drugs, bad nutrition, inconsistency etc. etc. Just watch parents on the subway!

Gregory: Which says nothing about how a word is used by a lying hack like yourself, "ex-liberal."

But, so you contend that nurture -- your "environmental factors" -- has "a much greater effect on IQ than any genetic differences"? I'm sure the world breathlessly awaits your evidence for this assertion.

You're full of insults even when you agree with me. (I assume you don't take alternative position -- that blacks are genetically inferior to whites.)

One reason for my belief in the importance of environmental factors is the writings of Dr. Thomas Sowell. Sowell has done years of research within numerous cultures in numerous countries. He has written several books and many essays on this subject. He has concluded that cultural impact is very strong, for many cultures in many different countries.

A second reason is that The Bell Curve issues the same warning several times.

A third reason is observation of how inner city children are raised. My wife works in an inner city hospital. The parental behavior she observes in the ER waiting room is not conducive to academic excellence.

A fourth reason is the situation in inner city schools that I've read about and others that I've observed.

Just a few comments from an urban educational researcher/ policy / data guy, since the late 80s:

1. Don't even bother with Murray. Just assume every word he says is a lie, including the words "and" and "the." I'm in the business, so I can see his fake social science, and how he distorts his data. I certainly don't see any inherent inferiorities by ethnicity or race. Bet you didn't know Murray, at the age of 14, burned a cross on a Black family's lawn.

2 a) My main area is Pre-K - 6. The gaps are real. But they are actually more gender driven than ethnic/racially driven. The minority males are consistently at the bottom even at four years old. But you see minority girls at that point performing quite well.

2 b) The gender gap is the next frontier. Dissect a human brain. You won't be able to tell what language this person spoke. You won't be able to tell what race this person was. But you will easily be able to tell whether this was a man or a woman.

3.Under federal law, schools (you know, 6 hours a day, times 180 days, assuming 100% attendance) are now 100% responsible for closing the gaps. Where is the rest of this "village" I keep hearing about?

4. Do not confuse average effects with individual effects. And you see all groups represented at the very top.

5. Poverty accounts for anywhere from 62% to 68% of the variance of student performance. Not 1%, not 99%; about two-thirds.

Th-th-th-at's for all now, folks.
-MaxGowan

MaxGowan,

I haven't quite seen such a humorous appeal to authority ploy in a while and the desert is your reliance on ad hominem attacks rather than addressing Murray's actual arguments and data. You sir, are a hack.

As for being unable to determine race from brain morphology, perhaps you should actually know something about the issue before you pontificate on the matter. Here too you're wrong.

You're full of insults

And they're richly deserved, "ex-liberal," as you're a lying hack. I don't really give a damn what your opinion is or why you hold it -- like I said, no one mistakes you for an honest commentator. No one forced you to debate dishonestly; you chose to. As a result, no one takes you seriously execpt as the object of muchdeserved derision -- the more so because you show no shame at all after having your lies repeatedly debunked, yet pretend to be an honest commentator. You fool no one.

I do notice that -- as I suspected -- you now seem to be attributing the differences in scores primarily to culture among your "environmental factors.

I would rather be full of insults than full of shit, *ex-liberal*, and I'm looking right at you here.

As for being unable to determine race from brain morphology, perhaps you should actually know something about the issue before you pontificate on the matter. Here too you're wrong.

Ah, the great and wonderous TangoMan crawls out of the slime to flog his association with "Steve Sailer" and try to get people to buy the same old line of race based analysis and so-called scientific proof.

Intelligence has nothing to do with race. Everything else TangoMan is waving around like a soiled copy of the unabomber manifesto is just boilerplate and bullshit, designed to advance a white supremacist agenda that hides behind the guise of "respectable" and "unbiased" scientific research.

Careful how you use the word "hack" there, buddy. You could wear that appelation like a flower in your lapel, that is, if your white sheet didn't already cover it up.

Whenever Steve Sailer makes his polite little pleas, and whenever they fall flat, "TangoMan" shows up and anonymously starts slinging the shit with the same curious point of view and the same agenda.

Funny how that problem will probably go away when Washington Monthly updates the software and can better prevent Salier/TangoMan from pulling that crap.

emjayay: "Anyone concerned about this topic should read the article about some charter schools, and research into different parenting styles between lower (in the U.S., more black) and upper/middle class"

For example, this article in Sunday's New York Times magazine.

The problem with many studies that find a correlation between parenting style and school performance is that they assume IQ is caused by the environment. They don't control for the fact that parents contribute both home environment AND genetics.

An alternate hypothesis for why--at the age of 3-- middle class kids have average IQs of 117 and kids of welfare mothers have average IQs of 79 is because they have parents with IQs of ~117 and ~80.

Liberals are much more comfortable attributing poor performance to inferior parenting than differences in gene pools. Parenting style seems like something we might be able to affect.

Again, most African Americans do not live in abject poverty. Most are loving and concerned parents. While parenting styles are likely to affect school performance for some children, parenting style are not the cause of the achievement gap in schools.

That whole difference in brain morphology between the races is bullshit and has been debunked for nigh on a century. Take that odious bullshit elsewhere.

...or be prepared to get specific. Cite your credible sources and get into the neurological structures and the neurotransmitter circuitry. And bring your fucking A-game, because I have a Masters in Neuro-Physiology and I will not be merciful.

Still wanna Tango?

Gregory: you now seem to be attributing the differences in scores primarily to culture among your "environmental factors.

Dr. Sowell has concluded that culture is highly important. He's done years of study on the subject.

Dr. Sowell has concluded that culture is highly important. He's done years of study on the subject.

"Highly important" != "primarily," you dishonest creep. Just about any of your "environmental factors" could be argued to be "highly important". What one chooses to emphasize, of course, can depend on whether, say, one wants to push the meme what "white culture" is inherently superior to "black culture."

Surely your straw-man-using, selectively-quoting, fallacy-embracing, Bell Curve defending, Kool-Aid-drinking, bullshit-spewing, constantly lying self wouldn't be going there. Oh, no, "ex-liberal" presents him/her/itself as an honest commentator.

Whoops, too late. Maybe if you hadn't established such a rep for dishonesty that dog would hunt, but you're way past that. You fool no one, "ex-liberal." Every time you post your bullshit here is an insult, so you only sow what you reap. And in spades.

And bring your fucking A-game, because I have a Masters in Neuro-Physiology and I will not be merciful.

Take your Masters and go tell Dr. John Mazziotta, M.D. Ph.D., Professor of Neurology, Radiological Sciences, and Pharmacology and the Pierson Lovelace Investigator at UCLA, as well as the Director of the UCLA Brain Mapping Program that he doesn't know what he's talking about when he's referring to the differing brain morphology of Asians and Caucasions:

differences between Asian brains and European brains...brains in Asian populations tend to be spherical...European brains tend to be more elongated...this must be some aspect of evolution and how the genetics of the brain determine its shape and structure...."

Go tell him that his work on classification schemas, which include race, is "is bullshit and has been debunked for nigh on a century" and you know this because you have a Master's degree.

Go set the Chinese Brain Bank straight and bring them into the 21st Century by getting them to disavow their recently established effort to learn more about how Asians brains differ from the standardized model developed from studies conducted on Caucasion brains.

Instead of asking me to tango, maybe you should be looking into getting a refund on what you spent on your Masters.

White people write the test. There is part of your gap right there.

I can't find a link to it, but I recall hearing about a standardized test in an ed psych class in the '80's called the BITCH test. It was written by black education professionals and white kids tested retarded. Anyone else recall this? Or have a link?

At last! I'm called a hack! It's taken 53 years of hard work, but thankfully I have finally arrived.

For the ringsiders, there's pleny of lit out there debunking Murray's Bell Curve. Oh and please note my other points, they certainly have policy implications coming up really fast. Additional credit: Any difference between student performance and school performance?

Cheers!

Everything about a person may very well be bound up in heritability. There's no magic law which exempts cognitive skills. Wish upon a star if you must.

I work in a city Special Needs Preschool. I can tell you why lots of minorities-and the whites who live in the city-are behind. It's very simple. Many of them are being raised by very young (undereducated)mothers or maybe their grandparents. It's like Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs. Survival is first. Many of these kids are hungry, poorly dressed for the weather, live in homes with few if any books, and spend entirely too much of their formative years watching TV.

There is little follow-through from our parents. Most of them love their kids, but many have multiple kids, are trying to go to school, whatever. There is little if any conversation at home, few books are read.

One of the things that is very rewarding is that when kids spend several years in our program, they begin to like books, to converse, to ask questions.

Unfortunately, we often don't get referrals from Head Start or other agencies until a child is 41/2. By that time, it is difficult to make up for lost time. If we get kids when they are 3, it often makes a real difference.

But don't kid yourselves. Lots of these kids go home to crappy lives. I don't know what the answer is, but until we acknowledge that, nothing will really be accomplished.

Susan - I'm lucky - I work with folks like you. You know you make a difference, the most cost-effective (for society) of 6:1; only neonatal intensive care units have a greater ratio. But beyond the mere numbers, for many kids, you alter their life trajectories, giving them a fair shot in life.

Mother's education accounts for 82% of the variance in socio-economic status; add father's education, and it's 96%. But a quality Pre-K can make an enormous difference even on this score. In one Pre-K program Ive evaluated, one year of the program (for both child and mother) was the equivalent of nine years of mother's education, in terms of their child's performance, four years later, in third grade.

The problem from my limited vantage point, and what I work on, is providing teaches with reliable information on where they are strong and where they need help - and doing so rapidly. I have never met an early childhood teacher who didn't really want to be the best.

McGowan: For the ringsiders, there's pleny of lit out there debunking Murray's Bell Curve.

Actually, there's plenty of lit debunking a straw man. The Bell Curve said that genetics has a substantial impact on IQ in general. It also said that black IQs were lower on average.

However, several times the book warns that no conclusion can be drawn regarding a genetic componant of black/white IQ differences because the black environment is so different.

Most of the book's critics refute the book's supposed allegation that black IQ's are genetically lower, even though the book goes out of its way to make it clear that it's NOT saying this.

Mother's education accounts for 82% of the variance in socio-economic status; add father's education, and it's 96%.

Notice that elephant in the room? No matter, simply respond like education researchers and treat socioeconomic status as an independent variable - just pretend that intelligence (independent variable) has no bearing on SES (dependent variable) and never even entertain the notion that intelligence is a highly heritable trait. Nope, simply posit that if we give all poor parents a lottery windfall then their children will perform like the children of highly educated and intelligent adults whose SES is highly correlated to their high-skill careers.

Just learn to wish away that which you find ideologically inconvenient.

Wouldn't a fairly simple way to settle this be to test African kids who grew up in some middle class environment in Africa somewhere? Are there any African countries that have a fairly substantial middle class population?

I seem to recall that many if not most of the questions on an IQ test were language independent (ie Im going to say 10 numbers and I want to repeat them back to me in reverse order). So lanugage probably wouldn't be a problem.

Does anyone know if any studies like this have been done?

"Why on earth would anyone beleive that there is a genetic link between skin color and intelligence?"

Because just as different human populations living in different environments may evolve differences in skin color they may also evolve differences in intelligence.

I'm sure a troll, semi-troll, or wannabe troll posing as a legitimate presence will oblige on this one, so here goes:

O.K., so if you assume, arguendo, that Blacks (and I guess you need to define this a bit better than that) have, as a group, lower genetic pre-disposition towards higher scores on intelligence tests . . .

So what? What exactly would a policy-maker do with that information? While we are at this ridiculous game (its got to be better than Mac vs. P.C.) if you feel strong, what should be done if it turns out that Asians have a higher average predisposition towards I.Q. than Caucasians?

I can't friggen wait for this one.

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I'm sure a troll, semi-troll, or wannabe troll posing as a legitimate presence will oblige on this one, so here goes:

Hmm, I suppose you're purposely restricting your question to the folks who inhabit the troll category because you don't want substantive answers and are instead looking for outlandish responses that are easily dismissed.

I'll be interested to read how trolls like Pale Rider respond to your question.

Wow - some fantastic comments here. In a subject I can only say what my ex-wife experienced as a elementary school teacher used to say:

"Kids who have parents who give a damn about education, who read to their kids, and are involved with the educational process way outscore kids who's parents don't do these things."

As I recall, she felt race made little if any difference.

xmd: Also, be careful about mixing up R and R-Squared -- an R of 0.7 means an R-squared of 0.49, in other words, 49% heritability, not 70%.

No, PTate was correct, heritability estimates are interpreted as percentages of variance.

TangoMan,

Looks like Blacks are making some real progress in that big IQ gap you love so much. Just project out the graph that Kevin reproduces and it looks like there's more of same to come.

Must suck to be you, huh?

frankly0,

Disaggregate the data that Flynn referenced and this is what you get. There's nothing that sucks about being on solid methodological ground on an issue. I'm fine, but thanks for caring. Sailer does a nice job in explaining what's going on.

>"How humans will handle this sort of information remains to be seen, but if history is any guide, it probably isn't going to be pretty."

IMHO: The deterioration of this 'discussion' is living, breating proof of the above.

Bottom line on this topic is that the final race/nature/nurture vs intelligence verdict really isn't in yet.

That said, rational examination shows developing evidence tilts us further and further toward the fact that genetics play a massive role in who and what we are... more than we want to admit.

Unfortunately, it is very dangerous territory for our self-image as 'intelligent' creatures. That may be the crowning 'Inconvenient Truth' of our time. Bummer, that.

Side... oddly nobody has jumped on the 'why are most top atheletes black' question?

Poor nutriton? Poverty? Lack of nurturing parents?

Or is it a genetic ability conferred in the rate of nerve fiber signal propagation as related to melanin content, the ratio of twitch to slow muscle fibers and differing body proportions?

Like I said, dangerous territory.

TangoMan,

I looked briefly at Sailer's "analysis", and found this priceless commentary:

The real problem comes when blacks leave the school system and choose a lifestyle for themselves. They apparently fail to impose enough intellectual rigor on themselves to maintain the positive trend.

So let's see, if blacks don't stay as smart when they leave school, it's NOT because, say, they are pushed into a world that won't give them opportunities that keep their minds developing, but, instead, they simply are being their shiftless selves.

You know, it's always funny in a way how racism in a person can't stop finding ways to reinforce itself.

And what even the "disaggregation" mainly shows is that it is black CHILDREN who are displaying the greatest, and continuing, increases in IQ. Why that might possibly be a good sign for the idea that the IQ gap is all inherited I can't begin to understand.

In medicine, genetics play a significant role in your health. If one or more of your parents were diabetics, for example, the likelihood of you being a diabetic (with an associated average shortened lifespan) if vastly increased. Women, who have a slightly different genetic makeup, have significantly longer average life spans. If genetics play a role in health and lifespan, it is hardly unreasonable (though politically incorrect) to point out that genetics likely could have effects upon one's mental capacity.

How to test someone's mental capacity is much more problematic. A meta-analysis of such studies might be interesting.

A lot of posters have mentioned that even upper-income blacks seem to test lower than upper-income whites. I have been told that the difference virtually disappears when you compare family *wealth*, rather than income -- because income is this generation, but wealth tends to include how well the last generation was doing.

Of course, right now, I can't find any cite for this, so add salt as necessary.

xmd: Also, be careful about mixing up R and R-Squared -- an R of 0.7 means an R-squared of 0.49, in other words, 49% heritability, not 70%.

No, PTate was correct, heritability estimates are interpreted as percentages of variance.

As I said, Heritability is the same as R-Squared (e.g. it is a % of explained variance). We are in agreement here.

However, I'm pointing out that many people are sloppy about mixing and matching Correlations (R) with Variance (R-squared).

A Heritability result of 70% implies a Correlation of 0.837. Although a few studies have suggested R > 0.8, it is clear that PTate is wrong when he said "The estimate is that ~70% of IQ differences among people is genetic". That is the HIGHEST estimate ever found, and as I pointed out earlier, those studies (identical twins raised apart) have serious methodological flaws.

Another poster on the list said "Poverty accounts for anywhere from 62% to 68% of the variance of student performance".

Genetics + Environment must add up to 100%. 62% + 70% is a hell of a lot more than 100%.

frankly0,

And what even the "disaggregation" mainly shows is that it is black CHILDREN who are displaying the greatest, and continuing, increases in IQ. Why that might possibly be a good sign for the idea that the IQ gap is all inherited I can't begin to understand.

Precisely, it's the children who are showing the gains. Let me tone down my snark for a moment. The heritability of intelligence increases with age for one's environment is not as uniform throughout one's life. If you compare the environment that parents, teachers and family impose on young children you'll see far more uniformity than you will as the children age and can start to exert their own preferences and thus create environments more to their liking. Most adults don't have someone punishing them when they go to bed too late, or don't want to read a book, or hang out with a friend who's "trouble." The nature-nurture split on intelligence changes over a child's development cycle. The role of imposed environment can be huge, but it's not sticky, and this is the key. Gains made in Head Start evaporate fairly quickly, so much so that Nobel Laureate James Heckman even conceded that Head Start should not be looked at as a means of raising intelligence but as a means of fostering better personal habits which can support successful life outcomes.

What Flynn didn't do with his analysis was to correct for the age of the study subjects and the varying levels of heritability of intelligence. Disaggregating his data shows that the gains are really concentrated among the young and those gains will dissipate over time as the children begin to control their own environments.

Regarding lifespans: Med die younger in accidents, wars and as an occupational hazzard. That has more top do with life-span averages than the "Y" chromosome itself.

I'll be interested to read how trolls like Pale Rider respond to your question.

Notice how poor TangoMan shits his pants when Global Citizen draws her sword of knowledge on him.

I'll be happy to go as many rounds as you would like, dumbass.

Let's take the good Dr. Maziotta and follow the link provided by TangoMan:

Just listened to an interview about the "Atlas of the Brain" on THE WORLD on PRI. Check out the atlas' website. You can listen to the full interview here. GNXP readers can pick up a mild HBD angle at around 2 minutes & 40 seconds, when the interviewer asks about the contrasts in the multi-nation survey, Dr. John Maziotta responds that there are "...differences between Asian brains and European brains...brains in Asian populations tend to be spherical...European brains tend to be more elongated...this must be some aspect of evolution and how the genetics of the brain determine its shape and structure...." My initial thought was that Europeans are more dolichocephalic and Asians are more bachycephalic, long-headed vs. short-headed, but this seems like too simple of an answer. Note how even "liberal" mainstream commentators express interest in differences no matter the party-line that race is a sociological construct.

What this is, dear reader, is a wingnut/white supremacist/racist using a piece of reseach to try and further their agenda. Note that this is NOT Dr. Maziotta's actual work--this is someone's interpretation of it, distilled into a comment on a website.

Here's a sampling of what else is on that website:

Hating the French and the Arabs[and/or Muslims] is now greenlighted from on-high, and therefore is not subject to social sanction. The degree of their agressiveness could be like the "Two Minute Hate" as seen in 1984 - purely natural aggression that has no proper social outlet. Can you imagine their rage if dislike of blacks or mexicans were to be greenlighted by [the liberal media], complete with round-the-clock media blitzes on black crime and outright Mexican hatred of America (plus a peek at the real social costs)?

See the bias?

Now, let's go back to the work that Dr. Maziotta did in 1994 and ask some questions about it.

First, the work is behind a subscription wall. Second, it's obscure as hell, as well as the good Dr. Maziotta. He's at UCLA, he's probably well respected in his field. Is he the cats pajamas in the world of brain size research?

Well, actually, no. His method?

He used an MRI to measure the size of the brains.

How accurate is an MRI?

In animal studies, researchers at Johns Hopkins have effectively used magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) to measure with 94 percent accuracy the size and amount of heart muscle damaged by a heart attack, known in medical terms as a myocardial infarct, or m.i., for short.

Do you think there's any chance that the size of the brains measured by Dr. Maziotta and then quoted by the racist web site provided by TangoMan could be wrong? Well, there's a 6% variance in the accuracy of an MRI measuring an organ like the heart. Could that then be extrapolated to being slightly inaccurate when measuring the brain?

I think I'll leave it to the reader to decide. But this is where TangoMan's little diatribes fall apart. When you follow the links, when you investigate his claims, he is relying on the most obscure, most biased interpretation of material that isn't readily available for verification. Note how he went right to a study done in the 1990s and quote on a racist web site in 2003--and when a cursory examination of the interpretation of the data and the methodology that is used is worked up--

*poof!*

TangoMan's "science" goes up in smoke.

hank: O.K., so if you assume, arguendo, that Blacks (and I guess you need to define this a bit better than that) have, as a group, lower genetic pre-disposition towards higher scores on intelligence tests . . .

So what? What exactly would a policy-maker do with that information? While we are at this ridiculous game (its got to be better than Mac vs. P.C.) if you feel strong, what should be done if it turns out that Asians have a higher average predisposition towards I.Q. than Caucasians?

I agree with hank. Each individual needs to be treated according to his/her own ability.

Similarly, the fact that blacks on average have lower IQs (whether due to genetic or environmental factors) says nothing about any particular person. David Blackwell is likely smarter than any of us posting here, regardless of his skin color.

But, there is a bit negative information in average IQs. If blacks are under-represented in some area, one cannot automatically conclude that the cause was racism or unfair discriniation. Part of the cause may be IQ differences.

Kudos to TangoMan and ex-Liberal; I did not die in vain.

Kudos to Brooks631@msn.com; I did not die in vain.

The answer is integrated schools. But that's too scary for liberals and anathema to conservatives.

Oh well.

TAngoMan,

Your arguments are so completely dishonest.

Why don't you just admit that you have absolutely NO reason to believe that the rises in IQ among black children go away because of something THEY choose to do, rather than things that are external to them, most obviously the culture in which they live -- a culture rife with racism, conscious and unconscious?

Can you and your ilk finally acknowledge that you are just making up, based on pure speculation, the "explanation" that a decline in IQ correlated with age must be due to something inherent to black children?

Truly, where does your intellectual dishonesty EVER end?

Just to make a further point: if the IQ gap is far less with children than it is with older people, isn't the NATURAL explanation that leaps out at you that it's most likely due the cumulative effects of the environment as people age?

I had always thought that the argument of the people who emphasize heredity was always that the IQ differences one sees in early age mostly track throughout life, across virtually all groups. It was supposed to be measuring something inherent, something stable.

But now that it seems to go against their racial heredity process, they just throw it out the window.

Real consistency there, you know?

A-game Tango, not bullshit from a propaganda website. As to implied credibility of academics - how much do you automatically award Ward Churchhill? Exactly. William Harrison is to Biology and Maziotta is to neuro-science. Flakes in every field.

Now I am in the middle of a blizzard and have no idea how long my power will stay on, so people, deal with this ass-hat.

Structurally, there is greater difference between men and women, as there is an actual genetic difference, than there is between races.

Shape is pretty irrelevent, as no structural differences exist, i.e. you can not tell what race a hippocampus came from by examining the structure; and anyone who says otherwise is a damned liar and not worth my time.

What matters are the structures and the chemistry and those are constant across races, and your "sources" are garbage.

Now my dance card is full, and I don't like to sail.

Horatio Parker: The answer is integrated schools.

Well, that's what the Brown v. Bd of Ed. decision said. Yet, there have been some outstanding segregated schools. E.g., at the college level there's Howard University, and at the high school level there's Dunbar HS

"There was also an outstanding black high school in Washington, D.C., which had remarkable achievements from 1870 to 1955. For example, most of its graduates during that period went on to college, even though most white high school graduates did not make it to college during that era. As far back as 1899, this school's students scored higher on standardized tests than two of the three white academic high schools in the District of Columbia.
[snip]
Dunbar High School was an achievement, but it destroyed a thousand excuses. The prevailing dogma is that all the failures of black schools were due to the sins of white people, including inadequate funding and racial segregation. But Dunbar was inadequately funded -- its class sizes were 40 or more -- and it was racially segregated for more than 80 years. Its history of success was therefore not welcomed by black "leaders."

Yes, the occasional model school had exceptional rates of success. And were then held up as examples and simultaneously used to hold down the rest of the population. Statistically, a white person was more likely to attend college. Period. To pretend otherwise is intellectual dishonesty; a tactic with which you are well acquainted.

Your arguments are so completely dishonest.

My mistake, I thought you could actually be reasoned with, I won't make the same mistake again.

Dishonest you say? Take it up the whole field of psychology:

One is that the heritability of IQ rises with age—that is to say, the extent to which genetics accounts for differences in IQ among individuals increases as people get older. Studies comparing identical and fraternal twins, published in the past decade by a group led by Thomas J. Bouchard, Jr., of the University of Minnesota and other scholars, show that about 40 percent of IQ differences among preschoolers stems from genetic differences but that heritability rises to 60 percent by adolescence and to 80 percent by late adulthood. With age, differences among individuals in their developed intelligence come to mirror more closely their genetic differences. It appears that the effects of environment on intelligence fade rather than grow with time. In hindsight, perhaps this should have come as no surprise. Young children have the circumstances of their lives imposed on them by parents, schools and other agents of society, but as people get older they become more independent and tend to seek out the life niches that are most congenial to their genetic proclivities.

No, no, no, TangoMan.

Go back and try to explain to us the whole deal about why you decided to cite one of your little pet-posts, as in, the one that willfully misinterpreted Dr. Maziotta's study and why you had to link to a website posting from several years ago in order to do so.

You want to deal with the actual challenges to the assertions you're making and the methodology used to back them up?

Defend the methodology of your assertions before you start in with the 'safe' posts. It's pretty clear how you operate--you've been at this long enough. How many more of your little "pets" can we dissect to show what a liar and a fraud you are?

William Harrison is to Biology and Maziotta is to neuro-science. Flakes in every field.

If you're inclined to libel someone you should back up your libelous statements. Mazziotta's publications are in top journals. Who exactly are you again? A crank on the internets.

Damn. Lights are back off. I gotta save my battery. Later guys. I'm going to enjoy a fire.

Global Citizen, I have no idea how the success of black students at Howard U and Dunbar "held down" the rest of the black population. The students' success should have been an inspiration to the black community and a refutation of racists who doubted black academic ability.

BTW the idea that integration was required for black educational success sounds a bit racist. Consider the following three propositions:

A. Blacks can only learn well if there are sufficiently many Caucasians in the class.

B. Asians can only learn well if there are sufficiently many Caucasian in the class.

C. Jews can only learn well if there are sufficiently many Gentiles in the class.

You will probably agree that (B) and (C) are untrue and bigoted. I think the same goes for (A).

If you're inclined to libel someone you should back up your libelous statements. Mazziotta's publications are in top journals. Who exactly are you again? A crank on the internets.

The man's not here to defend himself; defend your use of an outdated post on a racist web site and defend the methodology of using an MRI to measure the size of the human brain. Explain how many brains were measured and what the actual variances were.

In short, put up or shut up.

Pale Rider presents...

The TangoMan Method exposed:

Here's what TangoMan said:

Take your Masters and go tell Dr. John Mazziotta, M.D. Ph.D., Professor of Neurology, Radiological Sciences, and Pharmacology and the Pierson Lovelace Investigator at UCLA, as well as the Director of the UCLA Brain Mapping Program that he doesn't know what he's talking about when he's referring to the differing brain morphology of Asians and Caucasions:

The study allegedly said: "differences between Asian brains and European brains...brains in Asian populations tend to be spherical...European brains tend to be more elongated...this must be some aspect of evolution and how the genetics of the brain determine its shape and structure...."

For context (and context is where we see just how TangoMan and his racist bullshit can really unravel), let's have a look at the 2003 article on the BBC News website:

Unlocking the brain's secrets
By Caroline Ryan
BBC News Online health staff

Everyone's brain is different
The mysteries of how the brain controls everything from language to movement could be explained by a "map" created by scientists.
The international team behind the atlas used thousands of images of the brains of people of all ages, and with a range of conditions.
They hope to create the most comprehensive picture yet of the brain's structures and functions.
They have carried out brain scans on 7,000 people to obtain the data needed to create the map, and they say they will continue to add to the atlas as more research is carried out.

What do we know after actually taking a look at what Dr. Maziotta was a part of trying to research? Was the intent of this study to determine, as TangoMan says, the "differing brain morphology of Asians and Caucasions:"

No, sorry, that was NEVER a stated intention of the study. The intention of the study was to map what an "average" brain looks like so they can study conditions such as Alzheimers. There is nothing inherent in this study that pursued the notion that the size of the human brain is different among different races.

Nice methodology there, TangoMan. You use a scientific study with a benign purpose and twist that into some kind of 'race based' study that has nothing to do with what the study was actually attempting to do.

Back to the article:

[snip]

The only way to understand how the brain works, say experts, is to gather information from as many scans as possible, in an attempt to establish what an "average" brain looks like.
Dr John Mazziotta, an expert on the imagery of the human brain from the University of California, Los Angeles, (UCLA) said: "No two brains are the same. Their shape. Their size. The way they are organised.
"You can't just point at an area and say, 'Here's the seat of language'.
What we really want to do is find out what a Alzheimer's brain looks like before the disease manifests itself.

Those are Dr. Maziotta's words. Does it sound like he cares what the size of an Asian brain or a Caucasian brain is? Does it sound like he's pursuing the "differing brain morphology of Asians and Caucasions" as TangoMan asserts?

How about more from the article:

[snip]

Arthur Toga, professor of neurology at the UCLA, who also worked on the map, told BBC News Online: "There was no way to compare or contrast that information without a comprehensive map of the brain.

[snip]

"We know what an Alzheimer's brain looks like, but what we really want to do is find out what a Alzheimer's brain looks like before the disease manifests itself.
"That could allow doctors to begin treatment early."
He added: "The most important thing is to have an applicable general database against which we can compare disease populations."
But the team's work was not finished.
"We want to have an understanding of the brain that's more comprehensive than we have now," he said.

Wow, TangoMan. That's two of the leading researchers on the project, stating what they're pursuing and that the project is not finished.

Does it sound like they're pursuing whether or not an Asian brain is bigger or smaller than a Caucasian brain? Why would TangoMan quote an unfinished study and expect anyone to conclude that there was anything of scientific value to be had in it? Seems like jumping the gun to me. Seems pretty intellectually dishonest to take an unfinished study dedicated to mapping the brain and turn that into some kind of race-based assessment on the human brain.

THAT'S how you fuck up TangoMan's world, kids. Just peel back the curtain and there he is, frantically working the controls with his pants around his ankles, and the sickening illusion of what he's trying to do is stripped away, revealing him to be a completely dishonest and immoral hack who can't even quote the right science the right way.

TangoMan--a dishonest hack. QED.

Well, that's what the Brown v. Bd of Ed. decision said. Yet, there have been some outstanding segregated schools.

Not the point. The point is that disadvantaged minority students perform better in integrated schools.

B vs B was correct.

BTW the idea that integration was required for black educational success sounds a bit racist.

Facts aren't racist. Nor are they as simplistic as you would seemingly prefer.

If you want to know why blacks don't do as well in school, study a bit of American history.

But for those professional educators who have studied the matter, it's quite clear: integration works, and works well.

There are many who don't want a solution to this problem, and others who fear it. Much more convenient to find a way to blame blacks for their problems.

xmd: "A Heritability result of 70% implies a Correlation of 0.837. Although a few studies have suggested R > 0.8, it is clear that PTate is wrong when he said "The estimate is that ~70% of IQ differences among people is genetic". That is the HIGHEST estimate ever found, and as I pointed out earlier, those studies (identical twins raised apart) have serious methodological flaws."

First, of all, the correct way to interpret heritability is not R2--it is the exceptional case in which the coefficient has the same value as the percent of variance accounted for. The fact that you don't know that makes me question the validity of your other claims.

The findings of twin studies converge with other research methods--family studies, adoption studies. The usual criticism is the one you make--that the home environments of twins reared apart are actually very similar. However, the correlation between two unrelated individuals who are reared in the same household is .28 in childhood and .04 in adulthood: it declines over time. How do you account for the fact that a shared environment has no effect in the one case and yet different households can have so much effect in the other?

I took my estimation of the heritability of IQ from 5 different studies with an N of 155 pairs of twins.
sample 1 (US): 19 twin pairs, average of two tests = .71
sample 2 (Denmark): 12 twin pairs, average of two tests = .69
sample 3 (England): 37 twin pairs, average of two tests = .75
sample 4 (US): 42 twin pairs, average of three tests = .75
sample 5 (Sweden): 45 twin pairs, one test = .78

The weighted average is .745. So where is the evidence to support your claims?

The argument we are having here is not whether intelligence has a genetic basis. It clearly does--we're just dickering over the magnitude of that effect. A different question is whether African American IQ is as genetic as Euro-American IQ. The idea that African Americans, as a group, may have lower mental ability scores than European Americans AND that the difference may be due, at least in part, to genetics makes liberals go crazy. They become like fundamentalists confronted with Evolution.

hank asks the salient question: "So what? What exactly would a policy-maker do with that information?"

I would propose that American society is an individualistic, competitive, society in which choice is valued and complexity is admired. This is the kind of society in which the rewards are huge for being smarter than others. But our society has been shaped to suit the dominant culture--a white culture with an average IQ of ~100. If a minority culture has an average IQ of, say, 91, fewer members of that sub-culture will succeed in the dominant culture. If a minority culture has an average IQ of, say, 105--your Asian group--more will succeed in the dominant culture. Policy makers could choose to make this society slower, simpler, more predictable, more uniform to reduce the quick, fast premium. Or they might try encouraging immigration from smarter than average groups because those are the super achievers and innovators. These would be two different approaches.

Horatio Parker: Not the point. The point is that disadvantaged minority students perform better in integrated schools.

But, what does the actual data show?

Here's a study showing that black graduation rates are far higher in black schools than in integrated schools.

The likelihood of an African American college student graduating within six years of institutional matriculation is greater if that student attends a historically Black college or university (HBCU) as opposed to a traditionally White institution (TWI). While approximately 17% of Black undergraduates attend HBCUs, 28.2% of African-Americans who receive bachelor's degrees receive them from historically Black colleges and universities.

But, what does the actual data show?

The actual data shows what I have stated.

What you have cited isn't a study.

But I'm sure you won't let that stop you.

Myself, I preferred it when segregationists had the balls to be themselves. Now they're racist *and* wimpy.

Horatio Parker, could you please provide a cite for what you asssert is the actual data?

Horatio Parker, could you please provide a cite for what you asssert is the actual data?

Not at my fingertips at the moment.

Read "Shame of a Nation" by Jonathan Kozol.

Horatio Parker: Read "Shame of a Nation" by Jonathan Kozol

The Amazon reviews are quite interesting and passionate. From I reviews, I gather that Kozol passionately believes in integration, while some of the reviewers say it has worked badly in their experience.

I also gather that Kozol considers what he calls the apartheid schools to be bad because of underfunding, at least in part. Not having read the book

sorry for inadvertant posting. I was going to say:

Not having read the book, I don't know what Kozol would think of segregated schools with facilities and funds fully equal to other integrated schools.

The Amazon reviews are quite interesting and passionate. From I reviews, I gather that Kozol passionately believes in integration, while some of the reviewers say it has worked badly in their experience.

FWIW, that reviewer was cherry picking data. True, St Louis inner-city minority students still didn't perform as well as white students on test scores, despite their being bused to suburban schools. However their graduation and continuing ed rates were spectacular when compared to the typical inner city minority student, a fact that that reviewer tellingly chose to ignore.

I also gather that Kozol considers what he calls the apartheid schools to be bad because of underfunding, at least in part. Not having read the book

Well, that's one the conveniences of apartheid; it makes it far easier to underfund. But no, separate but equal is not the answer, certainly not to Kozol. The point of B vs B was that blacks have the right to be part of, to participate in the dominant culture, and the educational arena is a critical area for doing so.

I see "ex-liberal" is still pretending to be an honest commentator. You fool no one, "ex-liberal". Horatio Parker has your number:

Myself, I preferred it when segregationists had the balls to be themselves. Now they're racist *and* wimpy.

As I predicted, you give away the game with statements like "The students' success should have been an inspiration to the black community" and your emphasis on "culture" (which, of course, unlike poverty and racism is partly a matter of choice).

You're trying to build a case that blacks, somehow, choose the conditions that result in inequality. And you keep trying to build that case, shoveling the intellectual dishonesty deep, despite bullshit having been called on you. And you still pretend to be an honest commentator (as well as to having once been a liberal). Why do you bother?

Gregory,

One gets what one pays for - Schaife refuses to pay Faux-Libber minimum wage as, on principle, the foundation does not believe in the concept. Charlie eats up most of their budget and he/she/it has tenure.

One gets what one pays for

Witness Washignton Monthly's comments system...

Read the whole thing. Flynn specifically points out that the later samples are "more elite" because the percentage of incarcerated Blacks between 1970 and today has gone up. Kevin's spin on this may be too optimistic.

And look at the huge disparity. Blacks still (even with these supposed gains) score 15% below Whites on standardized IQ tests. Wow.

Kevin's spin on this may be too optimistic.

No, that's been refuted. His so-called 'spin' is actually pretty accurate analysis.

Thanks for trying, though.

"Has Charles Murray ever bothered to compare test scores of upper and lower income African Americans with each other? If there are differences within the African American group then this would tend to undermine Murray's whole premise that there are genetic causes of intellectual inferiority between the races. Particularly so if upper-income blacks had test scores comparable to upper income whites."

Huh? Why would it? We live in a meritocracy. Smarter people earn more money than low-IQ people. And any group you look at will have a dispersion of smarter-to-less-intelligent people in it. The question is whether or not there are differences in average scores between races.

The question of whether or not there is a persistent IQ gap is quite important. If the gap will persist "for ever" then race quotas and other affirmative action policies will also have to persist for ever. They're unpopular enough as it is right now...

"No, that's been refuted."

Heh. Any actual arguments, chump?

As one so often finds these days with books that seek to challenge current sociological pieties while staying within the bounds of acceptable comment — bounds drawn and vigilantly patrolled by left-liberal opinion elites — this approach weakens Peter Wood's case. Why, after all, is the diversity racket so persistent? Intelligent people everywhere scoff at it and constantly make jokes about it. Even TV sitcoms do so. A recent episode of Fox TV's Andy Richter Show revolved around a workplace diversity wrangle, and had characters uttering lines like: "So I am supposed to celebrate your difference while at the same time totally ignoring it, right?" (I note, however, that this show seems to have been canceled.) Why, when wellnigh everybody — including, very likely, some large subset of the diversicrats themselves — knows that it is all nonsense, do we let it go on?

We all know the answer. Without massive gerrymandering of the "affirmative action" or diversity type, black Americans would pool at the bottom of postindustrial society even more conspicuously than they currently do. This state of affairs would be grossly offensive to American ideals of justice, equality, and national identity, all the more so in an age like the one we seem to have entered, when our country is under the constant threat of attack by foreign terrorists, and we are being reminded once again that if we do not hang together, we shall hang separately. For an optimistic, idealistic people like ourselves, wishful thinking is an irresistible temptation. We can, after all, always fall back — as Carleton Coon did in The Living Races of Man — on the hope that science (in this case, benign genetic engineering) will relieve us of our contradictions before they become too acute. When our idealism conflicts with reality, therefore, it is reality that must yield. Mr. Wood has fallen in with this principle. Races, he declares, "are social conventions, not biological realities." I wonder if he has ever watched the finals of an Olympic men's sprint event? Or looked into The Living Races of Man? The real dilemma facing America is that we can have a meritocracy, or we can have equal outcomes by ancestry group, but, unless the information now coming in by every post from the human sciences is all utterly wrong, we cannot have both. Both, of course, is exactly what we insist on having, and diversity is our current attempt at squaring this unhappy circle.

Heh. Any actual arguments, chump?

Haven't read the thread, huh? Figures...

Haven't read Flynn's actual study, huh, chump?

Figures...

As for "refuting", you are but a pale imitation of PTate, Pale Rider. Judging by the above thread, he pretty much owned you.

The article PTate linked to is indeed a very good one:

"Researchers began peering deep into American homes, studying up close the interactions between parents and children. The first scholars to emerge with a specific culprit in hand were Betty Hart and Todd R. Risley, child psychologists at the University of Kansas, who in 1995 published the results of an intensive research project on language acquisition. Ten years earlier, they recruited 42 families with newborn children in Kansas City, and for the following three years they visited each family once a month, recording absolutely everything that occurred between the child and the parent or parents. The researchers then transcribed each encounter and analyzed each child’s language development and each parent’s communication style. They found, first, that vocabulary growth differed sharply by class and that the gap between the classes opened early. By age 3, children whose parents were professionals had vocabularies of about 1,100 words, and children whose parents were on welfare had vocabularies of about 525 words. The children’s I.Q.’s correlated closely to their vocabularies. The average I.Q. among the professional children was 117, and the welfare children had an average I.Q. of 79. "

As PTate points out, the parents of those kids have contributed BOTH "parenting" and genetics. But at 3 years' age, Genetics probably weighs the heavier.

For that matter, with most other aspects of our minds having some kind of biological basis (i.e., being inheritable) it would be a highly surprising and counterintuitive result if there was ever any conclusive evidence presented for IQ NOT being inheritable.

So far, of course, there is no such evidence.

The quote, or whatever it is that someone posts above is probably the best suggestion why the myth that IQ is just random persists: we don't want to know otherwise.

Hey Sailer,

Stop trying to hide behind "nok" and "TangoMan." When you can actually use your own handle, lemme know.

Not that there's anything wrong with "changing" a handle now and then...ahem!

Ptate:

First, of all, the correct way to interpret heritability is not R2--it is the exceptional case in which the coefficient has the same value as the percent of variance accounted for. The fact that you don't know that makes me question the validity of your other claims.

"Heritabilty" is either R or R-squared. If you are claiming it is R then you are wrong. If you are claiming it is % variance (R-squared) then we are in agreement. If you are claiming it is somethign else, then I have no idea what you are talking about and would be interested in what definition you are using....

The findings of twin studies converge with other research methods--family studies, adoption studies. The usual criticism is the one you make--that the home environments of twins reared apart are actually very similar. However, the correlation between two unrelated individuals who are reared in the same household is .28 in childhood and .04 in adulthood: it declines over time. How do you account for the fact that a shared environment has no effect in the one case and yet different households can have so much effect in the other?

You just mixed up R and R-Squared again (though in this case it would actually strengthens your argument to get it right.). Just to be clear here: "Correlation" is R, "% variance" and "Heritability" are R-Squared.

[...]The argument we are having here is not whether intelligence has a genetic basis. It clearly does--we're just dickering over the magnitude of that effect. A different question is whether African American IQ is as genetic as Euro-American IQ. The idea that African Americans, as a group, may have lower mental ability scores than European Americans AND that the difference may be due, at least in part, to genetics makes liberals go crazy. They become like fundamentalists confronted with Evolution.

A bit of a strawman, but I'll play. The deal is this -- very few people have no preconceived notions about this topic. Many people (such as yourself) pick & choose the data to fit your preconceived notion. Even though I've pointed out to you that identical twin studies have a fatal flaw (the inability to measure the % of in-utero environmental influences) you persist in using your 70% number. Why is this? I think that a true scientist would say "Woah, that's a big flaw in this argument I'm making, maybe I should reserve judgement". I think the question is, in the face of conflicting evidence that suggests a wide possible range, where do you stake your claim. You seem to want to believe the high end (70%+) in the face of serious evidence this is wrong. Why?

Given liberals believe in Darwin, whose book was subtitled the The Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life, it is interesting to see so many liberals ridicule the existence of races in our species. The omnipresent underachievement on g-loaded tasks of Africans compared to their European counterparts in the UK, France, Cuba, Brazil, etc., suggests a simple explanation counter to the bogus claim of institutional racism. Are blacks in any other country better off in absolute terms than in the 'racist' US? It's just Occam's razor to prefer the Murray hypothesis.

I read the first twenty comments then skimmed the rest - this issue will be fought over long after we agree on abortion and religion...I would really like to be on the "progressive" side of this argument, but unfortunately every shred of empirical evidence and scholarly research I have seen refutes it. As Murray and Herrnstein pointed out in The Bell Curve, the disparity in intelligence is as accepted in its acedemic community as plate tectonics or evolution are in theirs... faith based attempts to argue it away are just that - wishful thinking.
I think Kevin has been pretty disengenuous in writing this post, if he were honest he would admit to his own doubts as to whether the "debate" is legitimate or not. The real question is what do we do as a society if we can't replicate Lysenkoism. Can we admit there is a difference without animus or prejudging individuals?

About halfway up this comments list PTate in MN linked to a NYT article, which actually was the one I was thinking of that I erroneously said was in the New Yorker. Thanks. And your point is a good one....but still in terms of the way brains develop (from my little layperson's knowledge) the interaction theory has to have something to do with IQ. By the way - NYC subway observation: Asian (mostly Chinese speaking, not high income or they probably wouldn't live in the lower reaches of Brooklyn) parents generally interact warmly, closely and continually physically and conversationaly with their kids.....who all end up getting into UC Berkeley.

Dr. Maziotta from UCLA works on 2 or 3 genes responsible for brain size. The focus of his experiments and data relate to the effect of these genes on differences from pathologic (microcephalic) states, and are a glimpse of what may have been the first steps in our evolution away from the other apes.

He doesn't study racial differences in brain size. In fact, he was recently on a publication which showed that variants in the genes he studies were NOT associated with normal (ie, no-pathological) differences in brain size among the general population.

... as an aside, R is the goodness of fit of the line (based on least squares methodology); R-sqared is the % variance explained by the relationship; if assigning heritability, R-squared would be more appropriate. An R-sq of 0.6 means that 60% of the variation of Y (brain size) can be explained by X (parental IQ, or whatever).

That being said, this is not an ideal way to estimate neither broad- nor narrow-sense heritability, which will actually involve a slightly more complicated model to subtract the effects of environment.

I would really like to be on the "progressive" side of this argument, but unfortunately every shred of empirical evidence and scholarly research I have seen refutes it. As Murray and Herrnstein pointed out in The Bell Curve, the disparity in intelligence is as accepted in its acedemic community
Posted by: Bud Tugley

Part of the progressive argument, if I may be so bold, is that statements like this provoke defensiveness. One doesn't get to appeal to scientific authority and immediately quote murray, who isn't an academic accepted among peers by any standard.

The willful quoting of hacks like him, usually by scientific illiterates, and ALWAYS by the racist white trash that believes in black inferiority anyways, engenders an automatic response for actual scientists to demonstrate or refute this outrageous claim. So far, no data supports the position of genetically-determined intelligence, but your misunderstanding (and I'm being charitible) of existing data allows you to reach a position which, I suspect, only justifies your preconceptions.

Nads,

Kevin Drum would not have linked to the AEI discussion if he did not consider Murray to be reputable -- what is your evidence that Murray is beyond the pale of acceptablity in his field?

aside from the fact that the funding for bell curve relied on the pro-eugenics, anti-immigrant, quasi-racist Pioneer fund, the overarching consensus among scientists and psychologists is that the book represents pseudo-science at its worst.

its estimates of heritability are overly simplistic, barely fit for controlled, inbred animal experiments, much less complex human populations. simply making race or socioecon status a covariate and continuing a simple regression is a completely inadequate way of addressing the complexity of these confounding variables. and this implies a willful deception, since he's supposedly studied stat.

which is likely why he didn't publish it in a peer-reviewed journal, but rather marketed it straight to his mouth-breathing audience.

the sole exception I've been able to find to scientists who uniformly dismiss his book are those quoted/referenced within it.

... as to Kevin's linkage ... it's his blog, but if you had the sense to use your search function, you'd also find that Kevin, for whatever THAT's worth, also treats murray as trash.

and fuck AEI ... what a random conservative hacktank thinks of scientific matters beyond most if its writers' and audiences' ken matters to me not at all.

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Didn't they recently find that among different people, DNA varied considerably? It was only 99% the same?

Well, 99% the same is the same as humans and apes!

The DNA study said nothing about race (that I know of), but obviously there is a lot of human variability.

Seems to me that the B-@ differences could be part biological, part cultural (or lack of emphasis on studying), poor schools, whatever.

Nature and nurture always seem to both play a role in things.