(no subject)
This is actually a response I just made to a reviewer's comment on Amazon.com for The Global Bell Curve: Race, IQ, and Inequality Worldwide and it was well-written enough for a comment, that I decided to post it here:
"However, this explanation is hard to believe because north east asians and jews have certainly experienced similar racism, yet they have achieved high levels of socio-economic status in almost every nation. Lynn's explanation cuts through this obfuscation. "
No, the racism they have experienced is completely different. Jim Crow was only ended about 50 years ago. Ever heard of 400 years of slavery? Not even limited to the U.S. Africa itself was further screwed over by heavy European colonization and the slave trade. Completely different ballgame. The fact that Jews are now considered "white" should tell you something.
Africans, Jews, and Northeast Asians also have completely different histories, societies and cultures. So even without accounting for racism, why would you expect them to be the same? Studies have long since shown that cultures and even language alone, influence cognitive abilities. Some people are better at directional navigation because in their language, they tend to speak in terms of cardinal direction (N/S/E/W), whereas people who tend to speaks in relative directions (right/left/up/down) do worse, but have advantages in other ways of thinking (added for LJ: see here for a great essay excerpt from a new book, by an expert, on how language influences thinking and interesting studies on it).
With it being so clear, from so much research, that societies emphasize different types of education and ways of thinking, it becomes obvious that you have to account for this with IQ scores, as IQ tests are designed to favor testing of certain methods over others. There's even a difference in motivation in formal education. Some cultures are extreme and only do what is mandated by law: the Amish only give home schooling up to 8th grade (as required by law), whereas others have a strong emphasis on excelling in education (such as some Northeast Asian cultures).
Parents (and the culture they were raised in) have such a strong influence over how well their own kid will do in school, so you can't even rely on economic status alone. Even parents who break the barriers/glass ceilings for their race, will still be likely to teach a lot of the things their parents (the grandparents) taught them, to their kids (the grandkids). So they do get a boost by economic status, but it's not as if their cultural heritage was just erased over two generations.
The only way to account for genetics would be to test those who are part of adoption studies. For example, you might test an African-American raised by an affluent white family and see how well they do.
/end Amazon.com comment
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Anyway, while I don't see a problem with studying these matters, as they can reveal many helpful insights, we don't have enough data yet from different types of studies to say "this is genetic and not environmental." Thus, one should be reluctant to draw those types of conclusions.
As addressed by the second part of my rant, you have to ask that even if these measures of IQ were strongly genetic, what is this g (general intelligence factor or what IQ is said to measure) and does it truly measure intelligence well enough to say these differences are statistically significant?
I think that this is actually a bit of a vague question, because intelligence is only a general concept that we have and really needs to be reduced to specific, scientifically quantifiable measures that are well defined before we can even begin to answer that. Perhaps because the concept of "intelligence" varies so much from person to person and that it is such an abstract concept, it is inherently dangerous to speak of intelligence as a single, accurately quantifiable number, rather than speaking of subdivided concepts.
I don't know whether or not IQ, as measured now, has significant ancestral components. They certainly don't seem to be large ones, if they exist. How many of these scientists have looked at a timeline of genetic lineage relative to these specific ancestries/races being tested for comparison? Such a timeline would indicate how long it would take for such changes to evolve, so then we have to ask if we can see such changes occur in that time, probably less than 50,000 years for any given major split of the ancestral tree.
Human-level intelligence took millions of years from the smartest apes we see today. Some theories suggest evolved as a result of our emotions and interactions with each other; so that we could better understand and relate socially, not so much for outwitting the enemy. So it doesn't seem like there'd be such a strong preference for it to evolve so quickly. We didn't really take advantage of more than a little of our intellect from a technological perspective until the dawn of civilization, about 10,000 years ago, so evolutionary preference wouldn't seem to be strong for selecting that until then. Even then, the bulk of society has been composed of relatively poor people without access to higher education, so even then...
It certainly would be interesting to thaw a cave baby orphanage popsicle, raise them in modern society, and see how they turn out.
"However, this explanation is hard to believe because north east asians and jews have certainly experienced similar racism, yet they have achieved high levels of socio-economic status in almost every nation. Lynn's explanation cuts through this obfuscation. "
No, the racism they have experienced is completely different. Jim Crow was only ended about 50 years ago. Ever heard of 400 years of slavery? Not even limited to the U.S. Africa itself was further screwed over by heavy European colonization and the slave trade. Completely different ballgame. The fact that Jews are now considered "white" should tell you something.
Africans, Jews, and Northeast Asians also have completely different histories, societies and cultures. So even without accounting for racism, why would you expect them to be the same? Studies have long since shown that cultures and even language alone, influence cognitive abilities. Some people are better at directional navigation because in their language, they tend to speak in terms of cardinal direction (N/S/E/W), whereas people who tend to speaks in relative directions (right/left/up/down) do worse, but have advantages in other ways of thinking (added for LJ: see here for a great essay excerpt from a new book, by an expert, on how language influences thinking and interesting studies on it).
With it being so clear, from so much research, that societies emphasize different types of education and ways of thinking, it becomes obvious that you have to account for this with IQ scores, as IQ tests are designed to favor testing of certain methods over others. There's even a difference in motivation in formal education. Some cultures are extreme and only do what is mandated by law: the Amish only give home schooling up to 8th grade (as required by law), whereas others have a strong emphasis on excelling in education (such as some Northeast Asian cultures).
Parents (and the culture they were raised in) have such a strong influence over how well their own kid will do in school, so you can't even rely on economic status alone. Even parents who break the barriers/glass ceilings for their race, will still be likely to teach a lot of the things their parents (the grandparents) taught them, to their kids (the grandkids). So they do get a boost by economic status, but it's not as if their cultural heritage was just erased over two generations.
The only way to account for genetics would be to test those who are part of adoption studies. For example, you might test an African-American raised by an affluent white family and see how well they do.
/end Amazon.com comment
----
Anyway, while I don't see a problem with studying these matters, as they can reveal many helpful insights, we don't have enough data yet from different types of studies to say "this is genetic and not environmental." Thus, one should be reluctant to draw those types of conclusions.
As addressed by the second part of my rant, you have to ask that even if these measures of IQ were strongly genetic, what is this g (general intelligence factor or what IQ is said to measure) and does it truly measure intelligence well enough to say these differences are statistically significant?
I think that this is actually a bit of a vague question, because intelligence is only a general concept that we have and really needs to be reduced to specific, scientifically quantifiable measures that are well defined before we can even begin to answer that. Perhaps because the concept of "intelligence" varies so much from person to person and that it is such an abstract concept, it is inherently dangerous to speak of intelligence as a single, accurately quantifiable number, rather than speaking of subdivided concepts.
I don't know whether or not IQ, as measured now, has significant ancestral components. They certainly don't seem to be large ones, if they exist. How many of these scientists have looked at a timeline of genetic lineage relative to these specific ancestries/races being tested for comparison? Such a timeline would indicate how long it would take for such changes to evolve, so then we have to ask if we can see such changes occur in that time, probably less than 50,000 years for any given major split of the ancestral tree.
Human-level intelligence took millions of years from the smartest apes we see today. Some theories suggest evolved as a result of our emotions and interactions with each other; so that we could better understand and relate socially, not so much for outwitting the enemy. So it doesn't seem like there'd be such a strong preference for it to evolve so quickly. We didn't really take advantage of more than a little of our intellect from a technological perspective until the dawn of civilization, about 10,000 years ago, so evolutionary preference wouldn't seem to be strong for selecting that until then. Even then, the bulk of society has been composed of relatively poor people without access to higher education, so even then...
It certainly would be interesting to thaw a cave baby orphanage popsicle, raise them in modern society, and see how they turn out.