(NAME-MCE) What I.Q. doesn ¹ t tell you about race.

[Nicholas Meier]

Since genetically there is no such thing as race, it seems pretty hard to
argue for intelligence being genetically connected to race. Simple as that.


> From: Bill Howe <bill at billhowe.org>
> Reply-To: NAME-MCE - National Association for Multicultural Education Email
> Discussion Group <name-mce at nameorg.org>
> Date: Mon, 24 Dec 2007 08:39:18 -0500
> To: ***NAME-MCE <Name-mce at nameorg.org>
> Subject: (NAME-MCE) What I.Q. doesn’t tell you about race.
> 
> 

<http://www.newyorker.com/>
http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/books/2007
> /12/17/071217crbo_books_gladwell?printable=true#editorsnote

*What I.Q.
> doesn't tell you about race.*
by Malcolm
> Gladwell<http://www.newyorker.com/search/query?query=authorName:%22Malcolm%20G
> ladwell%22>
December
17, 2007

If what I.Q. tests measure is immutable and
> innate, what explains the Flynn
effect—the steady rise in scores across
> generations?





One Saturday in November of 1984, James Flynn, a social
> scientist at the
University of Otago, in New Zealand, received a large package
> in the mail.
It was from a colleague in Utrecht, and it contained the results
> of I.Q.
tests given to two generations of Dutch eighteen-year-olds. When
> Flynn
looked through the data, he found something puzzling. The
> Dutch
eighteen-year-olds from the nineteen-eighties scored better than those
> who
took the same tests in the nineteen-fifties—and not just slightly better,
> *
much* better.

Curious, Flynn sent out some letters. He collected
> intelligence-test results
from Europe, from North America, from Asia, and from
> the developing world,
until he had data for almost thirty countries. In every
> case, the story was
pretty much the same. I.Q.s around the world appeared to
> be rising by
0.3points per year, or three points per decade, for as far back
> as the
tests
had been administered. For some reason, human beings seemed to be
> getting
smarter.

Flynn has been writing about the implications of his
> findings—now known as
the Flynn effect—for almost twenty-five years. His books
> consist of a series
of plainly stated statistical observations, in support of
> deceptively modest
conclusions, and the evidence in support of his original
> observation is now
so overwhelming that the Flynn effect has moved from theory
> to fact. What
remains uncertain is how to make sense of the Flynn effect. If
> an American
born in the nineteen-thirties has an I.Q. of 100, the Flynn effect
> says that
his children will have I.Q.s of 108, and his grandchildren I.Q.s of
> close to
120—more than a standard deviation higher. If we work in the
> opposite
direction, the typical teen-ager of today, with an I.Q. of 100, would
> have
had grandparents with average I.Q.s of 82—seemingly below the
> threshold
necessary to graduate from high school. And, if we go back even
> farther, the
Flynn effect puts the average I.Q.s of the schoolchildren of 1900
> at around
70, which is to suggest, bizarrely, that a century ago the United
> States was
populated largely by people who today would be considered mentally
> retarded.

For almost as long as there have been I.Q. tests, there have been
> I.Q.
fundamentalists. H. H. Goddard, in the early years of the past
> century,
established the idea that intelligence could be measured along a
> single,
linear scale. One of his particular contributions was to coin the
> word
"moron." "The people who are doing the drudgery are, as a rule, in
> their
proper places," he wrote. Goddard was followed by Lewis Terman, in
> the
nineteen-twenties, who rounded up the California children with the
> highest
I.Q.s, and confidently predicted that they would sit at the top of
> every
profession. In 1969, the psychometrician Arthur Jensen argued that
> programs
like Head Start, which tried to boost the academic performance of
> minority
children, were doomed to failure, because I.Q. was so heavily
> genetic; and
in 1994 Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, in "The Bell
> Curve,"
notoriously proposed that Americans with the lowest I.Q.s be
> sequestered in
a "high-tech" version of an Indian reservation, "while the rest
> of America
tries to go about its business." To the I.Q. fundamentalist, two
> things are
beyond dispute: first, that I.Q. tests measure some hard and
> identifiable
trait that predicts the quality of our thinking; and, second,
> that this
trait is stable—that is, it is determined by our genes and
> largely
impervious to environmental influences.

This is what James Watson,
> the co-discoverer of DNA, meant when he told an
English newspaper recently
> that he was "inherently gloomy" about the
prospects for Africa. From the
> perspective of an I.Q. fundamentalist, the
fact that Africans score lower than
> Europeans on I.Q. tests suggests an
ineradicable cognitive disability. In the
> controversy that followed, Watson
was defended by the journalist William
> Saletan, in a three-part series for
the online magazine *Slate*. Drawing
> heavily on the work of J. Philippe
Rushton—a psychologist who specializes in
> comparing the circumference of
what he calls the Negroid brain with the length
> of the Negroid penis—Saletan
took the fundamentalist position to its logical
> conclusion. To erase the
difference between blacks and whites, Saletan wrote,
> would probably require
vigorous interbreeding between the races, or some kind
> of corrective genetic
engineering aimed at upgrading African stock. "Economic
> and cultural
theories have failed to explain most of the pattern," Saletan
> declared,
claiming to have been "soaking [his] head in each side's
> computations and
arguments." One argument that Saletan never soaked his head
> in, however, was
Flynn's, because what Flynn discovered in his mailbox upsets
> the certainties
upon which I.Q. fundamentalism rests. If whatever the thing is
> that I.Q.
tests measure can jump so much in a generation, it can't be all
> that
immutable and it doesn't look all that innate.

The very fact that
> average I.Q.s shift over time ought to create a "crisis
of confidence," Flynn
> writes in "What Is Intelligence?" (Cambridge; $22),
his latest attempt to
> puzzle through the implications of his discovery. "How
could such huge gains
> be intelligence gains? Either the children of today
were far brighter than
> their parents or, at least in some circumstances, I.Q.
tests were not good
> measures of intelligence."

The best way to understand why I.Q.s rise, Flynn
> argues, is to look at one
of the most widely used I.Q. tests, the so-called
> WISC (for Wechsler
Intelligence Scale for Children). The WISC is composed of
> ten subtests, each
of which measures a different aspect of I.Q. Flynn points
> out that scores in
some of the categories—those measuring general knowledge,
> say, or vocabulary
or the ability to do basic arithmetic—have risen only
> modestly over time.
The big gains on the WISC are largely in the category
> known as
"similarities," where you get questions such as "In what way are
> 'dogs' and
'rabbits' alike?" Today, we tend to give what, for the purposes of
> I.Q.
tests, is the right answer: dogs and rabbits are both mammals.
> A
nineteenth-century American would have said that "you use dogs to
> hunt
rabbits."

"If the everyday world is your cognitive home, it is not
> natural to detach
abstractions and logic and the hypothetical from their
> concrete referents,"
Flynn writes. Our great-grandparents may have been
> perfectly intelligent.
But they would have done poorly on I.Q. tests because
> they did not
participate in the twentieth century's great cognitive
> revolution, in which
we learned to sort experience according to a new set of
> abstract categories.
In Flynn's phrase, we have now had to put on "scientific
> spectacles," which
enable us to make sense of the WISC questions about
> similarities. To say
that Dutch I.Q. scores rose substantially between 1952
> and 1982 was another
way of saying that the Netherlands in 1982 was, in at
> least certain
respects, much more cognitively demanding than the Netherlands
> in 1952. An
I.Q., in other words, measures not so much how smart we are as
> how
*modern*we are.

This is a critical distinction. When the children of
> Southern Italian
immigrants were given I.Q. tests in the early part of the
> past century, for
example, they recorded median scores in the high seventies
> and low eighties,
a full standard deviation below their American and Western
> European
counterparts. Southern Italians did as poorly on I.Q. tests as
> Hispanics and
blacks did. As you can imagine, there was much concerned talk at
> the time
about the genetic inferiority of Italian stock, of the inadvisability
> of
letting so many second-class immigrants into the United States, and of
> the
squalor that seemed endemic to Italian urban neighborhoods. Sound
> familiar?
These days, when talk turns to the supposed genetic differences in
> the
intelligence of certain races, Southern Italians have disappeared from
> the
discussion. "Did their genes begin to mutate somewhere in the 1930s?"
> the
psychologists Seymour Sarason and John Doris ask, in their account of
> the
Italian experience. "Or is it possible that somewhere in the 1920s, if
> not
earlier, the sociocultural history of Italo-Americans took a turn from
> the
blacks and the Spanish Americans which permitted their assimilation into
> the
general undifferentiated mass of Americans?"

The psychologist Michael
> Cole and some colleagues once gave members of the
Kpelle tribe, in Liberia, a
> version of the WISC similarities test: they took
a basket of food, tools,
> containers, and clothing and asked the tribesmen to
sort them into appropriate
> categories. To the frustration of the
researchers, the Kpelle chose functional
> pairings. They put a potato and a
knife together because a knife is used to
> cut a potato. "A wise man could
only do such-and-such," they explained.
> Finally, the researchers asked, "How
would a fool do it?" The tribesmen
> immediately re-sorted the items into the
"right" categories. It can be argued
> that taxonomical categories are a
developmental improvement—that is, that the
> Kpelle would be more likely to
advance, technologically and scientifically, if
> they started to see the
world that way. But to label them less intelligent
> than Westerners, on the
basis of their performance on that test, is merely to
> state that they have
different cognitive preferences and habits. And if I.Q.
> varies with habits
of mind, which can be adopted or discarded in a generation,
> what, exactly,
is all the fuss about?

When I was growing up, my family would
> sometimes play Twenty Questions on
long car trips. My father was one of those
> people who insist that the
standard categories of animal, vegetable, and
> mineral be supplemented with a
fourth category: "abstract." Abstract could
> mean something like "whatever it
was that was going through my mind when we
> drove past the water tower fifty
miles back." That abstract category sounds
> absurdly difficult, but it
wasn't: it merely required that we ask a slightly
> different set of questions
and grasp a slightly different set of conventions,
> and, after two or three
rounds of practice, guessing the contents of someone's
> mind fifty miles ago
becomes as easy as guessing Winston Churchill. (There is
> one exception. That
was the trip on which my old roommate Tom Connell chose,
> as an abstraction,
"the Unknown Soldier"—which allowed him legitimately and
> gleefully to answer
"I have no idea" to almost every question. There were four
> of us playing. We
gave up after an hour.) Flynn would say that my father was
> teaching his
three sons how to put on scientific spectacles, and that extra
> practice
probably bumped up all of our I.Q.s a few notches. But let's be clear
> about
what this means. There's a world of difference between an I.Q.
> advantage
that's genetic and one that depends on extended car time with
> Graham
Gladwell.

Flynn is a cautious and careful writer. Unlike many others
> in the I.Q.
debates, he resists grand philosophizing. He comes back again and
> again to
the fact that I.Q. scores are generated by paper-and-pencil tests—and
> making
sense of those scores, he tells us, is a messy and complicated business
> that
requires something closer to the skills of an accountant than to those of
> a
philosopher.

For instance, Flynn shows what happens when we recognize that
> I.Q. is not a
freestanding number but a value attached to a specific time and
> a specific
test. When an I.Q. test is created, he reminds us, it is calibrated
> or
"normed" so that the test-takers in the fiftieth percentile—those exactly
> at
the median—are assigned a score of 100. But since I.Q.s are always
> rising,
the only way to keep that hundred-point benchmark is periodically to
> make
the tests more difficult—to "renorm" them. The original WISC was normed
> in
the late nineteen-forties. It was then renormed in the
> early
nineteen-seventies, as the WISC-R; renormed a third time in the
> late
eighties, as the WISC III; and renormed again a few years ago, as
> the
WISCIV—with each version just a little harder than its predecessor.
The
> notion
that anyone "has" an I.Q. of a certain number, then, is meaningless
> unless
you know which WISC he took, and when he took it, since there's
> a
substantial difference between getting a 130 on the WISC IV and getting
> a
130 on the much easier WISC.

This is not a trivial issue. I.Q. tests are
> used to diagnose people as
mentally retarded, with a score of 70 generally
> taken to be the cutoff. You
can imagine how the Flynn effect plays havoc with
> that system. In the
nineteen-seventies and eighties, most states used the
> WISC-R to make their
mental-retardation diagnoses. But since kids—even kids
> with
disabilities—score a little higher every year, the number of children
> whose
scores fell below 70 declined steadily through the end of the
> eighties.
Then, in 1991, the WISC III was introduced, and suddenly the
> percentage of
kids labelled retarded went up. The psychologists Tomoe Kanaya,
> Matthew
Scullin, and Stephen Ceci estimated that, if every state had switched
> to the
WISC III right away, the number of Americans labelled mentally
> retarded
should have doubled.

That is an extraordinary number. The diagnosis
> of mental disability is one
of the most stigmatizing of all educational and
> occupational
classifications—and yet, apparently, the chances of being
> burdened with that
label are in no small degree a function of the point, in
> the life cycle of
the WISC, at which a child happens to sit for his
> evaluation. "As far as I
can determine, no clinical or school psychologists
> using the WISC over the
relevant 25 years noticed that its criterion of mental
> retardation became
more lenient over time," Flynn wrote, in a 2000 paper. "Yet
> no one drew the
obvious moral about psychologists in the field: They simply
> were not making
any systematic assessment of the I.Q. criterion for mental
> retardation."

Flynn brings a similar precision to the question of whether
> Asians have a
genetic advantage in I.Q., a possibility that has led to great
> excitement
among I.Q. fundamentalists in recent years. Data showing that the
> Japanese
had higher I.Q.s than people of European descent, for example,
> prompted the
British psychometrician and eugenicist Richard Lynn to concoct an
> elaborate
evolutionary explanation involving the Himalayas, really cold
> weather,
premodern hunting practices, brain size, and specialized vowel
> sounds. The
fact that the I.Q.s of Chinese-Americans also seemed to be
> elevated has led
I.Q. fundamentalists to posit the existence of an
> international I.Q.
pyramid, with Asians at the top, European whites next, and
> Hispanics and
blacks at the bottom.

Here was a question tailor-made for James
> Flynn's accounting skills. He
looked first at Lynn's data, and realized that
> the comparison was skewed.
Lynn was comparing American I.Q. estimates based on
> a representative sample
of schoolchildren with Japanese estimates based on an
> upper-income, heavily
urban sample. Recalculated, the Japanese average came in
> not at 106.6 but at
99.2. Then Flynn turned his attention to the
> Chinese-American estimates.
They turned out to be based on a 1975 study in San
> Francisco's Chinatown
using something called the Lorge-Thorndike Intelligence
> Test. But the
Lorge-Thorndike test was normed in the nineteen-fifties. For
> children in the
nineteen-seventies, it would have been a piece of cake. When
> the
Chinese-American scores were reassessed using up-to-date
> intelligence
metrics, Flynn found, they came in at 97 verbal and 100
> nonverbal.
Chinese-Americans had slightly lower I.Q.s than white
> Americans.

The Asian-American success story had suddenly been turned on its
> head. The
numbers now suggested, Flynn said, that they had succeeded not
> because of
their *higher* I.Q.s. but despite their *lower* I.Q.s. Asians
> were
overachievers. In a nifty piece of statistical analysis, Flynn then
> worked
out just how great that overachievement was. Among whites,
> virtually
everyone who joins the ranks of the managerial, professional, and
> technical
occupations has an I.Q. of 97 or above. Among Chinese-Americans,
> that
threshold is 90. A Chinese-American with an I.Q. of 90, it would
> appear,
does as much with it as a white American with an I.Q. of 97.

There
> should be no great mystery about Asian achievement. It has to do with
hard
> work and dedication to higher education, and belonging to a culture
that
> stresses professional success. But Flynn makes one more observation.
The
> children of that first successful wave of Asian-Americans really did
have
> I.Q.s that were higher than everyone else's—coming in somewhere around
103.
> Having worked their way into the upper reaches of the occupational
scale, and
> taken note of how much the professions value abstract thinking,
Asian-American
> parents have evidently made sure that their own children wore
scientific
> spectacles. "Chinese Americans are an ethnic group for whom high
achievement
> preceded high I.Q. rather than the reverse," Flynn concludes,
reminding us
> that in our discussions of the relationship between I.Q. and
success we often
> confuse causes and effects. "It is not easy to view the
history of their
> achievements without emotion," he writes. That is exactly
right. To ascribe
> Asian success to some abstract number is to trivialize it.


Two weeks ago,
> Flynn came to Manhattan to debate Charles Murray at a forum
sponsored by the
> Manhattan Institute. Their subject was the black-white I.Q.
gap in America.
> During the twenty-five years after the Second World War,
that gap closed
> considerably. The I.Q.s of white Americans rose, as part of
the general
> worldwide Flynn effect, but the I.Q.s of black Americans rose
faster. Then,
> for about a period of twenty-five years, that trend
stalled—and the question
> was why.

Murray showed a series of PowerPoint slides, each representing
> different
statistical formulations of the I.Q. gap. He appeared to be
> pessimistic that
the racial difference would narrow in the future. "By
> the
nineteen-seventies, you had gotten most of the juice out of the
> environment
that you were going to get," he said. That gap, he seemed to
> think,
reflected some inherent difference between the races. "Starting in
> the
nineteen-seventies, to put it very crudely, you had a higher proportion
> of
black kids being born to really dumb mothers," he said. When the
> debate's
moderator, Jane Waldfogel, informed him that the most recent data
> showed
that the race gap had begun to close again, Murray seemed unimpressed,
> as if
the possibility that blacks could ever make further progress
> was
inconceivable.

Flynn took a different approach. The black-white gap, he
> pointed out,
differs dramatically by age. He noted that the tests we have for
> measuring
the cognitive functioning of infants, though admittedly crude, show
> the
races to be almost the same. By age four, the average black I.Q.
> is
95.4—only four and a half points behind the average white I.Q. Then the
> real
gap emerges: from age four through twenty-four, blacks lose six-tenths of
> a
point a year, until their scores settle at 83.4.

That steady decline, Flynn
> said, did not resemble the usual pattern of
genetic influence. Instead, it was
> exactly what you would expect, given the
disparate cognitive environments that
> whites and blacks encounter as they
grow older. Black children are more likely
> to be raised in single-parent
homes than are white children—and single-parent
> homes are less cognitively
complex than two-parent homes. The average I.Q. of
> first-grade students in
schools that blacks attend is 95, which means that
> "kids who want to be
above average don't have to aim as high." There were
> possibly adverse
differences between black teen-age culture and white teen-age
> culture, and
an enormous number of young black men are in jail—which is hardly
> the kind
of environment in which someone would learn to put on scientific
> spectacles.

Flynn then talked about what we've learned from studies of
> adoption and
mixed-race children—and that evidence didn't fit a genetic model,
> either. If
I.Q. is innate, it shouldn't make a difference whether it's a
> mixed-race
child's mother or father who is black. But it does: children with a
> white
mother and a black father have an eight-point I.Q. advantage over those
> with
a black mother and a white father. And it shouldn't make much of
> a
difference where a mixed-race child is born. But, again, it does:
> the
children fathered by black American G.I.s in postwar Germany and brought
> up
by their German mothers have the same I.Q.s as the children of
> white
American G.I.s and German mothers. The difference, in that case, was not
> the
fact of the children's blackness, as a fundamentalist would say. It was
> the
fact of their *Germanness*—of their being brought up in a different
> culture,
under different circumstances. "The mind is much more like a muscle
> than
we've ever realized," Flynn said. "It needs to get cognitive exercise.
> It's
not some piece of clay on which you put an indelible mark." The lesson to
> be
drawn from black and white differences was the same as the lesson from
> the
Netherlands years ago: I.Q. measures not just the quality of a person's
> mind
but the quality of the world that person lives in. ♦




-- 
Bill
> Howe

Travel to China - June 1-14, 2008 - Teachers & Health Care Professionals
> -
http://www.billhowe.org/China2008.htm

Web - http://www.billhowe.org
Blog -
> Travel - http://billhowe.org/BillBlog/
Blog - Multicultural Education -
> http://billhowe.org/MCE/

Everything now, we must assume, is in our hands;
we
> have no right to assume otherwise.
If we do not falter in our duty now,
we may
> be able, handful that we are,
to end the racial nightmare,
and achieve our
> country,
and change the history of the world.

James Baldwin, "The Fire Next
> Time"
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