On the one hand I will grant that most bloggers should adopt Andrew Sullivan’s principle of giving every possible perspective a fair hearing. However, it is impossible to describe Sullivan’s airing of the Charles Murray Bell Curve stuff about race and intelligence as simply as that. Sullivan uses a different writing style for the smaller number of issues that he clearly supports and cares about. Again, marshaling evidence in long, frequent posts and answering critics with counterarguments are signs of good blogging, not bad, but you cannot do that and claim to be impartial. Andrew at least wants readers to respect the perspective that races not only can have different intellectual capacities but that inborn difference helps the racial stratification of American society.
Thankfully the debate mostly died out some time ago for lack of new things to say. Now, however, the issue has currency again, although not for the reasons that Doug covered below, to which Andrew responded here. Instead the new ideas come from science and, at least indirectly, from the rise of Barack Obama.
Normally I would turn on my microscope and forget about blogs for the day, but Andrew’s response to Doug indicates that someone should take another whack at Chas Murray’s zombie idea (emphasis mine).
If anything, the evidence that cognitive skills have much more influence on income and success in this advanced global economy than in previous times when other skills were more valuable suggests that we need to focus on education more, not less. But intelligence is not infinitely alterable. My point was that growing inequality will be very, very hard to prevent or restrain in the face of these factors.
It would be generous to assume that race has nothing to do with this point. However, given that both Doug and Andrew specifically reference Murray, it is hard to avoid the racial undercurrent to Andrew’s point that some classes of people (the intellectually infirm, if you will) should accept inequality as natural. There is not much arguing with the general idea, certainly not while George H.W.’s idiot kid still has White House dirt on his loafers. The racial aspect, however, could use new data.
Maybe I can help. Here are three studies of recent vintage, all of which boil down to the point that the cultural expectation of failure has a tangible effect on real success (listen, for example, to this episode of the awesome Radio Lab).
* A small study found that Obama’s success almost erased the racial testing difference in a demographically matched sample of urban public school students. To his credit Andrew linked this study. However, it remains unpublished (as far as I know) and thus is the weakest of the lot.
* Before that, Claude Steele found that he could create or eliminate a racial testing gap simply by convincing students that the test was (gap) or was not a test of intelligence (no gap).
* Another recent study:
Short writing assignments in which students discuss their most cherished value may be a powerful new tool to help struggling black youths reduce stress and boost their grades, U.S. researchers said on Thursday.
[…] “For these children, there was an increase of almost half a grade point (0.4 grade points) in their overall grade point average across two years (based on a 4.0 scale),” he said. […] The writing assignments had only a marginal effect on high-achieving black students and no effect on white students of European descent. He said there were too few Asian-American or Hispanic students to study.
Add this work together and it becomes hard to avoid the conclusion that cultural prejudices explain more than just a part of racial testing differences in America. It’s all there is. Speaking as a guy who broke the IQ test as a nine year old (after a while the tester said there wasn’t much point going on) and therefore would be thrilled if IQ did guarantee wealth and fame, I think that the test is mostly bogus as a metric with which to compare people. For one thing it is too culturally specific. For another, see above.
For a third thing, does a field exist where IQ ensures success? Here in research science someone has a losing hand if he comes to the table with pure wattage and the next guy brings a mix of confidence, judgment, political skill, patience and time management. Carnegie Mellon, one of my degree institutions, struggles with fundraising because it graduates the bright guys in business (analysts and CFOs) whereas Harvard graduates dim but savvy players who become CEO. Naturally Harvard has an endowment that could drown Scrooge McDuck. For some reason the NFL still screens quarterbacks for IQ even though some of the greatest arms in history are dumb as a post*.
It seems fortuitous that the qualities we grow by fixing the racial achievement gap promote success in life above and beyond a dry number like IQ. Conversely the idea that minorities cannot fix the gap is not only wrong, but cruel, because as long as it persists it has the pernicious effect of making itself true.
(*) John – do not read.
***Update***
John pointed out to me that Mat Taibbi made a related argument in this DiSantis-inspired rant for the ages.
gwangung
Stereotype threat has been around for about 15 years as an interesting phenomena. As more and data comes around to support this as an actual effect, it will HAVE to be taken seriously by people like Sullivan and Murray. If you can manipulate scores that easily (and it extends to women, too), then you can’t really use them as the precise tools people think they are.
Xenos
IQ tests are a useful, if limited, tool when trying to size up a particular child’s talents and abilities. They are useless when used to distinguish and draw contrasts between populations. When the populations do not have roughly similar backgrounds the IQ test is worse than useless.
If Andrew Sullivan understood math and science he would not have fallen for Murray’s misinformation. It is just embarrassing to watch.
Scruffy McSnufflepuss
If we can’t keep the peasants down with God, and we can’t keep the peasants down with science, where does that leave us? Keeping them down with tea parties? Man does not survive by teabagging alone.
Bootlegger
Nailed it Tim. Right-on.
TheOfficialHatOnMyCat
All I know is, in my shop, if a meeting goes over its time window, and somebody is asking a lot of absurd questions, there is a 99% probability that the confused one is the Mensa member.
matoko_chan
I think you should read this.
And this and this.
Pardon, I thought Redstate was the villagers-with-pitchforks-and-torches site.
I must have lost my way.
Andrew
The all time best takedown of Murray, that I can’t find now, made a slam dunk case that IQ is a western construct for measuring potential performance in an early 20th century office environment. It has absolutely nothing to do with intelligence, and it can be altered significantly by education, particularly early in life when the brain is much more malleable.
I think one example was of an adult African Bushmen, who score nearly rock bottom on IQ testing. Well, no shit they’re not good at office tasks. But they’re the best in the world at movement and awareness in their natural environment and test off the charts for such things. And when a genetic bushman is raised in a modern western society, they score just fine on IQ testing.
Tim F.
@matoko_chan:
You have completely missed the point. Allow me to quote a respected authority on the topic, me.
In other words nobody on this website thinks that inherent differences do not exist. Six hundred Richard Feynmans working in shifts would fail to teach George Bush quantum physics (or Newtonian mechanics. or geometry).
Given that, what do you think I am arguing does not exist?
sgwhiteinfla
Its teh poor people stupid! Black people have made too many of the innovations in this country for this to still be a rational position of anybody with half a brain. I won’t go through the litany of inventions that most people only talk about during black history month but it shows a lack of understanding of the real world outside of his bubble for Sully to give this any credence. Black people are disproportionally poor in this country. That is a fact. For that reason our kids disproportionately go to the worst schools in the poorest neighborhoods. Education is the key in all of this but its a pipe dream to believe that a poor black kid gets the same education that a upper middle class black kid does let alone a well to do non minority kid. But its the same "classical conservative" Andrew Sullivan who doesn’t want the big bad federal government involved with education less they tread on states rights. Until all kids no matter race or level of income are afforded the same level of education in this country you won’t see the same level productivity along racial lines. It is what it is.
worn
Tim,
While I’ve got no opinion on Andrew’s motives, I’m quite surprised you didn’t mention some of the recent research out that indicates growing up in a high stress environment (like extreme poverty) actually diminishes cognitive functioning. Given the significant overlap between the sets of those folks in this country that are poor and those that are black, it thus stands to reason that there might be measurable but generalized differences in racial achievement as a result, differences that have nothing in fact to do with race, but instead history. What is very sad to me is how much of a self-sustaining cycle this could be if the research has any merit.
J.A.F. Rusty Shackleford
Anybody else reminded of the episode of Diff’rent Strokes where Willis and Arnold don’t meet the criteria for Mr. Drummond’s old prep school?
OK, I’ll go away now.
Woody
The correlation between the socio-economic status of parents with student IQ scores approaches 1.
slag
@matoko_chan:
Clearly. You have lost your way.
Edit: In case it isn’t obvious, quoting the American Enterprise Institute on education is like quoting Wile E Coyote on anger-management.
DougJ
Yes, I do.
matoko_chan
Tim, you seem to be arguing that increasing IQ is somehow amenable to environmental manipulation, or that high IQ is not a valid correlate to SES (socio-economic status). While IQ can be artificially depressed by environmental factors like nutrition and stress, there is no evidence to support that IQ and g can ever be increased beyond a basic genotypic limit. Many studies have been done.
MH
@slag: Haha, I love that analogy.
@matoko_chan: You seem to be arguing under the assumption that IQ scores measure intelligence. I suggest you challenge that assumption.
Bootlegger
@Tim F.: Tim, I skimmed that AEI article cited and it is making the "poor people are that way because of innate ability and nothing can change it" argument. Likewise for race and gender. The AEI "researcher" claims
Definitely neo-bellcurves.
matoko_chan
And this is the argument that Murray refutes.
MBunge
Here is a simple rule – All arguments and assertions about innate differences between racial, ethnic or religious groups are automatically bullshit unless the person making the argument is contending that HIS group is the inferior one.
It’s not a perfect rule, but at least it would weed out the self-flattering nonsense like Sullivan’s and Murray’s.
Mike
J.A.F. Rusty Shackleford
@DougJ:
There was a question that amounted to something like, "If a house has three beds, how many people live in the house?"
The answer is supposed to be three or four but Arnold comes up with a much higher number because he doubles and triples the count for each bed, which is how it worked when he and Willis still lived in their old neighborhood.
Anybody remember the example question I’m half-remembering?
matoko_chan
Yes, slag, I have lost my way.
It should be irrelevent Murray works for AIE.
However, I offer Dr. Lynn’s extensive work on IQ as corroboration.
TheOfficialHatOnMyCat
@matoko_chan:
I’m sorry, but I cannot read your comments without interpreting them to mean "Why spend all that money trying to educate those stupid pickaninnies?"
Am I missing anything?
matoko_chan
Mbunge, as a cauc, I am inferior to asians in mean IQ.
cauc mean== 100
asian mean== 103
Ann B. Nonymous
Where are the great Irish scientists and engineers? Frankly, most of the famous names of Ireland are the descendants of immigrants to the Emerald Isle. And how the natives resented the newcomers for uplifting them! Truly, if there was a race of people meant to be hewers of wood and drawers of water based on intellectual ability, it’s the sons of the old sod.
Obviously, this is a bunch of teabag. But it was a standard argument, well into the twentieth century, for Irish underdevelopment: "They’re stupid Micks."
Maybe Sullivan will finally get it, the way he sort of gets human rights, when it affects him personally.
MBunge
"The Coleman Report came under intense fire, but re-analyses of the Coleman data and the collection of new data in the decades since it appeared support its finding that the quality of public schools doesn’t make much difference in student achievement."
Please provide an example of a "high quality" public school will low-performing students and an example of a "low quality" public school with high-performing students.
MIke
Bootlegger
@matoko_chan: You’re knocking down the straw man. Clearly family ecology matters, but the evidence that its genetics and not environment is shrinking rapidly. Family ecology is correlated with school quality, this was Coleman’s big finding.
TheOfficialHatOnMyCat
@matoko_chan:
I think you are experiencing what is known as a cauc-up.
TheOfficialHatOnMyCat
Hanging out with the German humorists.
cyntax
A high IQ means you have an aptitude for taking IQ tests. That’s all.
In my MA program (designed to train English teachers for the post-secondary level environment), we do a lot of reading on the research surrounding how people learn to read and write. I won’t go into chapter and verse, but let me summarize one study.
For one semester researchers took a group of students who tested into the remedial track and toldd them they had tested into the accelerated track. The students were taught from the same syllabus as other "gifted" students and their teacher held them to the same expectations. Those students excelled.
In the same study a group of "gifted" students was told they had tested into a lower track, and were taught from that syllabus, and they performed on par with their lower track "peers."
The expectations students and teachers form about the students’ performance has a huge impact on the students performance. Now this isn’t to say all you have to is challenge poor performing students and overnight everything’s better, but IQ tests can’t and don’t isolate for the kind of variability described above. So trying to base an argument on IQ tests seems intellectually dishonest to me, or you could say stupid.
Adrienne
Oh contraire. We are giving him a fair hearing, we are just dismissing his arguments as old, stale, and therefore boiler plate conservative and WRONG, all in one fell swoop. Knowing the what the AIE exists to do I really don’t think that it out of line.
Bootlegger
@J.A.F. Rusty Shackleford: My favorite is "table, saucer, cup: place these in the correct order".
matoko_chan
Hatcat, this is my position.
The data show the highest correlate with student achievement is SES of the parents. In a way, I agree with Tim…raising the SES of the parents is the best way to gain acheivement.
However, hoodwinking ourselves over the iron limits of genotypic IQ does nothing to solve the problem…..which is, basically, not everyone needs to go to college.
:(
Zifnab
@Tim F.:
That Ratatouilli was a fantastic movie with a poignant moral story.
MBunge
"Mbunge, as a cauc, I am inferior to asians in mean IQ.
cauc mean== 100
asian mean== 103"
So, you can argue that "caucs" (who the bleep talks like that?) are inferior to asians. You are not allowed to argue that "caucs" are superior to anyone else, however.
Mike
MBunge
"However, hoodwinking ourselves over the iron limits of genotypic IQ does nothing to solve the problem…..which is, basically, not everyone needs to go to college."
You’ll find no one who’ll agree more than me that not everyone needs to go to college. What the hell did it ever do for Jonah Goldberg? But the idea that genetics should play any role in that decision is obscene.
Mike
slag
@matoko_chan: OK. So, why don’t you go ahead and perform your Minority Report IQ test on all the little childrens of the world and then we, as a society, will classify them into their place in life based on that one score. Problem solved.
The fact that kids are regularly told whether or not they "are smart" is disastrous to education. Read Kristoff’s column and you’ll see exactly why.
rachel
@cyntax: Um… I feel a bit conflicted here. The study and its results sound interesting but doesn’t the methodology seem a tad unethical?
matoko_chan
Ah, but a recent study shows that just the act of applying to a charter school raised the achievement level of the student.
Whether they attended or not. That is family ecology.
But it has nothing to do with IQ.
IQ is an upper limit on achievement.
Family ecology benefits only up to the level.
I see Balloonjuicers are educational romantics…..Anyone can be a lawyer! PhDs for everyone!
JGabriel
Andrew Sullivan:
You know, it’s actually very easy to restrain the growth of inequality: just make it unprofitable through progressively heavier taxes on those who hoard wealth and reward themselves too richly.
That such a course would make Sully’s head explode does not mean it’s difficult, just a ittle messy.
We all know that it was tried, and it worked, for instance when the highest tax brackets exceeded 90% during the Eisenhower administration.
.
Scruffy McSnufflepuss
Personally, I like Homer Simpson’s intelligence test:
"If he’s so smart, how come he’s dead?"
TheOfficialHatOnMyCat
See, you learn something every day. I always thought that only men with very small pen-ises could be lawyers.
I love this blog.
Bootlegger
@matoko_chan: Hey, as a college professor you’ll get no argument from me that "not everyone should go to college", but this has very little to do with genotype, very little. People have different aptitudes, no doubt, and we need to do a better job of 1) training people according to their aptitude (if they wish), and 2) giving higher regard, status and pay to non-academic professions.
sgwhiteinfla
matoko-chan
Is this what you were talking about?
http://www.amazon.com/Equality-Educational-Opportunity-Perennial-Sociology/dp/0405120885
James S. Coleman, Equality of Educational Opportunity (1966), concluded that the effects of the school environment on student achievement, whatever its racial or ethnic composition, appear to come from the educational proficiency of the school student body. In addition to the achievement level of other students, the "realistic" aspirations of other students affect academic achievement. In other words, as the educational backgrounds and aspirations of other students increase, a student’s academic achievement increases no matter what the individual student’s social class, race or background.
These findings have had important implications concerning school race as a factor in student achievement since middle class overlaped with white and poverty class overlaped so well with students of color, particularly in the sixties.
While Coleman’s results showed higher achievement for all racial and ethnic groups in schools with greater percentages of white or middle class students, they also indicated that the apparent beneficial effects of a student body with a high proportion of white students do not result from school racial or genetic composition, but from the higher educational aspirations and better educational backgrounds generally possessed by white or middle class students.
Since white students are more likely than black students to be middle class, it is reasonable to assume that schools with a higher percentage of white students would have student bodies with higher and more "realistic" educational aspirations and better educational backgrounds than black or poverty class students of color. The percentage of families owning encyclopedias, (2) transfers in and out of school, (3) average daily attendance, (4) percent of students in college curriculum, and (5) average hours spent on homework, were used to determine school social class. The socioeconomic mix of students in classrooms was cited as one of the school characteristics that increases academic achievement.
Coleman’s (1966) first conclusion was that parents’ education, variable defined as family background, has the highest relation to achievement for nearly all racial or ethnic groups, particularly in later years of public school education.
Coleman’s second conclusion, which is the one that is almost more pertinent to his research, was that compared to the effects of family background, the effects of school staff and facilities on achievement are of minimal importance. In other words, improving the quality of schools attended by blacks alone will not reduce the gap between black and white achievement. Coleman (1966) concluded that school factors, particularly tangible facilities (age of the building, size of the library, currency of the text books, etc.), had little effect on student performance.
Coleman (1966) also reported that children from disadvantaged groups (including blacks) were more external in their control beliefs. Locus or center of control became a critical variable. The unresponsive nature of their environments was cited as one of the reasons (see page 16).
Christopher Jencks, Inequality (1972), reanalyzed Coleman’s EEOC data and also concluded that the achievement of lower class students, both black and white, was fairly strongly related to the socioeconomic level of their classmates. This usually meant that a student’s achievement was also related to the race or social class of his classmates, since black classmates tended to be poor classmates, and white classmates tended to be more middle class or vice versa.
I will be honest, its hard for me to understand how Coleman comes to these two counter conclusions. On the one hand the level of achievement goes up across racial barriers when a kid is surrounded by other kids who have high educational background and aspirations but this doesn’t have anything to do with the quality of the education? That makes no sense in my mind. Perhaps you can explain since you seem to be versed in Coleman what he defined as a "quality education".
The last paragraph is mine. Does anybody else have problems trying to format stuff in comments?
matoko_chan
No need. Dr. Lynn already did that.
Children are never informed of their IQ test results for that reason.
Unless their parents tell them.
Tim F.
Bootlegger, you are arguing with another straw man. Some measure of raw intelligence is clearly heritable, some influenced by the environment. Again, my post does not argue that genetic factors do not exist or that environmental factors dominate everything. Here is my point in bold:
With respect to intelligence and educational achievement, the racial gap is an environmental rather than genetic factor.
That is it. It would make my day if people would argue for or against that rather than points that were never in serious dispute.
You must be agreeing with some other Tim. LeHay? Geithner? Leary? My post argued that raising SES is fine but irrelevant, because you do not even need to do that. All that you need to do is remove the cultural expectation of failure.
That is why I titled my post ‘The Obama Effect’ rather than ‘The Give Money To Minorities Effect’. It actually argues against economic affirmative action as the most effective cure for the success gap. Remove the burden of negative expectations and it is unnecessary, keep them and it won’t work. As an apparent AEI fan you should love me for that.
cyntax
@rachel:
Yeah, I agree, but the results are still worth considering.
Bootlegger
@matoko_chan:
And you’re obviously knocking down the straw man since no one has said anything remotely like this. We’re arguing against biological determinism when it comes to academic aptitude and its pernicious conclusion that the elites are elite because they are genetically superior to those who are not elite. I don’t know how you’ve missed that, or if you’re dodging the point so you can continue to win victories against the straw man, but stop it, your moran is showing.
Oh, and nice ad hominen to go with your mouth full of straw.
slag
@matoko_chan:
If Murray wants to make up a term based on his quacktastic theories and then call me it, who am I to argue?
gwangung
@matoko_chan:
You’re still ignoring the effect of stereotype threat.
Don’t do that.
dm
I thought it was amusing that Murray’s Bell Curve was preceded in publication (by several years) by its refutation, Stephen J Gould’s The mismeasure of man.
Sure, there might be all kinds of correlations between IQ test scores and socioeconomic status, race, hair color, whether one had breakfast that morning, or even the phase of the moon on which the examination was given. That has no predictive power when dealing with individuals. The variance (width of the bell curve) in the results of those tests is so wide that they offer no indication of the IQ test score of the person sitting in front of you.
That’s the problem with the uses to which Murray’s book tends to be put. "Oh, it’s hopeless to improve people’s lot through changes in how they’re educated — they’re destined for a particular result". That’s non-sense. Improving educational possibilities improves the chances that a gifted individual will flourish (and improves the chances that gifted individuals will be recognized).
Murray’s silly "educational romanticism" label ignores the fact that his precious bell curves are too wide. It’s not "romanticism", it’s a recognition of the width of those curves.
TheOfficialHatOnMyCat
Moderation in all things, especially blog administration.
Confucius say, man who have lousy mod filter must clear the queue frequently.
This is in honor of the Asian bias we all know so well.
Martin
Given some of the PhDs I’ve worked with, I’m pretty sure that’s already happening.
matoko_chan
Its simple really, by placing a low achievement child with high achievement children you are simply raising the low SES of the child by averaging the low SES with the high ones.
That is why the children of families who merely took the time to apply to charter schools had higher achievement, and actually the same llevel of achievement that students from the cohort that actually attended the charter schools.
I suspect that is why Obama himself became such an achiever. ;)
Parental involvement.
Tim F.
Sadly, not no.
Bootlegger
@Tim F.:
Please read my post Tim, as I said exactly this (thus no straw for me). However, as the data and evidence mounts the effect size of heredity is going down. We had the same issue in criminology, there was a definite correlation between parents’ criminality and their children’s criminality. But was this because of genotype? The more methods we bring to bear, the smaller the effect of the gene. Now, its persistent, it doesn’t go away, but it is small relative to other factors.
My reading of the intelligence and education data is that they are coming to similar conclusions as their ability to measure environmental factors improves.
slag
@matoko_chan:
A flawless plan if I ever heard one. Your lack of understanding of human psychology is truly disturbing. If you are in the fields of either education or psychology, your IQ test failed to adequately limit your potential. Do over.
gwangung
Which tells me all I need to know that you’re not looking very carefully at the data.
You know that with proceeding generations, Asian American scores regresses to the mean. That correlates with increasing acculturalization and less emphasis on study and schooling.
JGabriel
What I find puzzling in this thread is the attempt to argue rationally with people like matoko_chan, who are propounding what is basically cargo cult pseudo-science – initially it looks like science because it has numbers and cites, but the foundations are quicksand, there’s no there there (define g), and ultimately it’s all just a front to justify racism.
.
matoko_chan
dm, that is neither Murray’s or my argument.
The question is, where to place resources to maximize achievement?
1. IQ is an upper limit on achievement.
2. Family SES and involvement is the strongest correlate with achievement.
Gould is widely reguarded as a poseur by most geneticists.
I would discount his "barry manilow statistics", particularily in the case of "punctuated equilibrium".
gwangung
@matoko_chan:
You’re not considering alternative hypotheses. Again, you’re ignoring the data on stereotype threat, which has applicability here.
For someone citing research, you sure don’t understand the science behind it.
Zifnab
@Bootlegger:
We already have training based on aptitudes. For instance, I have friends who’ve apprenticed as plumbers and electricians and now make decent money working for the city.
Likewise, savvy small business owners hold a fair amount of status, regard, and pay without regard to academic background. And there are myriad business schools (of varying quality) where one can learn the ins and outs of small business ownership.
Generally speaking, the status and the regard come with the money which, in turn, comes from hard work and skill. The "problem" is that you’ve got very large corporations that shell out very high salaries to large numbers of academic professionals. Common wisdom dictates that these corporate jobs are the fastest and easiest ways to achieve the desired status, regard, and income. Such a path used to be referred to as "selling out", but by now the practice is so common that everyone is expected to aim for a job as a Microsoft programmer or an Exxon engineer or a BoA broker.
But it didn’t used to be that way and it certainly isn’t the only path to success. It just happens to be the most clear cut and obvious one.
gwangung
@matoko_chan:
No, they don’t.
You really DON’T read much science, do you?
Bootlegger
I wish I could stay and argue this all day kiddos, but work calls and Kentucky is a big state.
Have fun, this is a great topic to kick around.
Tim F.
Whoever made that argument is an overpaid idiot. IQ contributes, certainly, but to think that George W Bush is the only certified moron who ever grabbed the brass ring is to be deaf, dumb and blind.
matoko_chan
Nice.
JGabriel resorts to argument by ad hom.
This is Redstate, right?
You changed the heading as a spoof.
Corner Stone
@Bootlegger: You speak for yourself! I happen to like being an educational romantic. Whatever the hell that means.
matoko_chan
Well, I gtg too.
Perhaps Balloon Juice should adopt a new symbol for the header, instead of the guy with the balloon.
A pitchfork rampant with a torch gules perhaps?
slag
@matoko_chan: Yes, please go join the teabaggers whose persecution complex over their rejected theories is almost (though not quite) equal to yours.
Andrew
Yes, because IQ is a measure of dedication, drive, connections, wealth, memory, coordination, physiology, and luck.
Wait, it isn’t?
Oh, then that is a FUCKING STUPID THING TO SAY.
Corner Stone
@cyntax: I’m calling straight BS on this result. Are you telling us that kids who had previously been high achievers settled down to the mean?
gwangung
I wouldn’t be surprised, since that’s consistent with the data from the stereotype threat studies.
anonevent
@matoko_chan:
No, actually, drive is an upper limit on achievement. Sorry, Troy Aikman has achieved everything he wanted – super bowl, hall of fame, hot wife, money still coming in – and his IQ is far lower than mine.
There was a two hour thing on the history channel last night about Einstein’s development of the General Theory of Relativity. He actually had a number of years where he just kept trying random equations to see if he could get it right. He gave a conference on what he had accomplished at that point, which was not correct; one of the members of the audience was the mathematician David Hilbert. Hilbert went home, and basically solved the equation. Luckily, when Einstein went back home, he realized that one of his earlier attempts was almost a solution. Hilbert allowed Einstein to get credit because Einstein had worked a lot longer at it, or we could be talking about Hilbert’s theory of Relativity. But Hilbert would not have been able to put the equation together without the insight that Einstein had. So, who succeeded more?
Andrew
I actually like that.
"Balloon Juice: This is what happens to stupid."
With names such as matoko and BOB and Paul L. impaled upon it.
Brick Oven Bill
The ‘Obama Effect’ was previously discussed in this forum and roundly mocked by this left-leaning group.
To deny biological differences based on evolutionary environment is to proclaim that evolution stopped 30,000 years ago and almighty God has implanted us all with identical plastic brains, upon which cultures make impressions.
Personally, my belief is that as man began to compete with himself for resources as he increased in population 30,000 years ago in eastern Africa, a certain percentage of these men sought new hunting grounds in the north. As these men used these fresh resources to sustain life, the seasons killed off those men who were not smart enough to place trees on end, and create shelters from the weather. And it went from there.
This would explain why there are no African space programs.
It is either that or Almighty God and identical plastic brains. I understand that the educated classes are leaning towards Almighty God magically transporting mankind to all corners of the earth, all those years ago. This theory is, I guess, plausible.
Andrew
Lookit, you have to recognize that some folks (such as Hilbert and Einstein) are just so much smarter than everyone else that it’s useless to even consider them as normal people. I’m working on a PhD and I am a mental midget compared to such folks.
It’s like discussing welfare policy based on Warren Buffet’s stock portfolio.
gwangung
By the way….anybody who says this…
is an intellectual and scientific fraud who can’t tell their toes from their fingers. I would even suspect trolldom, since there’s been a fair amount of useful research that sprung from punctuated equillibrium.
Folks who tend to doubt punctuated equilibrium tend to be of the creationist mindset….
JGabriel
matoko_chan:
Obviously not. If this were Red State, we’d be agreeing with you.
.
Andrew
I’m fairly certain that we have now achieved an all new level of stupid. Or all-time great spoofery.
Xenos
@matoko_chan:
Which does not surprise me, if it were true, seeing as he was a Paleontologist with a side specialty in the History of Science. The Mismeasure of Man is not about genetics in any case. It is about pseudoscience, and the historical and political origins intelligence testing.
Sheesh. 10 gallons of miseducated ignoramus in a 5 gallon bag. Typical victim of pseudoscience. Persistent stupidity like this is usually attached to a law or engineering degree.
JGabriel
Brick Oven Bill:
No, BOB, it is not. It is simply to acknowledge that, like most animals, the evolutionary changes in homo sapiens over the past 30,000-60,000 years have to do with local variations in immune response and geographic environment/climate conditions. Human intelligence (i.e., self-consciousness and symbolic &analytic facility), in general, is so far beyond what is necessary for survival, that it’s unlikely to have been a factor for heavy selection.
.
greennotGreen
I don’t see that whatever any particular group’s mean IQ matters one little bit as long as the range within one group overlaps with the range of another. If we know for a fact that all blue people have IQ’s 50% lower than all purple people, then we could educate the different colors appropriate to their innate abilities. But that’s not remotely the case. It doesn’t even matter if one breeding group does have a higher mean IQ than another since many individuals in the "lower" group will still have IQ’s higher than many individuals in the higher group.
There was a show on PBS may years ago about sexuality, but what one Lakota man said in it is applicable to intelligence as well. He said, "We don’t have any people to waste."
Educate and utilize each individual to the best of his or her potential. The rest of this is just chatter.
MH
Has to be a troll…right? Please tell me not even BOB is this brick-headed.
Shinobi
Is THAT why Carnegie Mellon has no money?
I feel like I deserve to have gone to Harvard instead for not realizing that.
Corner Stone
@Andrew: I’ve long wondered why there are no African space programs.
Personally I think it’s because black people are just really sucky at math.
.
.
Too soon?
Brick Oven Bill
I disagree with you JGabriel. In our unit, we had a saying ‘the stupid will be punished.’ But this unit worked in a highly complex environment of human interactions and machinery. Because we live in the age of oil, nothing really bad ever happened to the relatively stupid people in our unit other than they did not get promoted.
It probably would have been different in the Middle Ages if there were only so many resources to share among the group.
In contrast, for those who have benefitted from competitive evolution in a hunter-gatherer environment for an extra twenty or thirty thousand years, the saying might have been ‘it’s good to be fast’, or something like that. This would explain the demographics of wide receivers.
gwangung
What they’d say is that he’s not a geneticist, but what he says is solid, based on data. Anyway, anyone who’d dismisses punctuated equilibrium without a nuance is an ignorant hack, pretty much on the creationist level.
The Salem Hypothesis.
geg6
Well, according to all these stupid theories, I guess I’m a fake and imposter. Completely lower middle class (and that’s stretching it), no college parents (and one a high school dropout). I was told the results of my childhood IQ test by the school psychologist (mainly to deride me for not fulfilling my "potential"). Graduated top of class as undergrad and got an MEd. But I still get paid shit,despite my brilliance and overcoming matoko_chan’s theory on why I was destined for failure. I guess I’ll tell my sister with the PhD that she, too, is a fake and that’s why we both deserve our lousy university salaries.
Mike P
Isn’t a lot of this addressed in Outliers? Gladwell shows that basically the only difference between grade school students and their achievement levels has to do with the fact that well off students are usually enrolled by their parents in summer enrichment programs while poor kids just spend their summers playing or whatever. He points to the KIPP schools with their longer days and shorter summer vacations as evidence that the gap can be closed. It has little to do with actual IQ (which Gladwell believes to be moot after a certain base level that’s "good enough") and more to do with opportunities.
Corner Stone
@gwangung: I can’t speak for the study population, but if someone told me I was expected to do mediocre or poorly on a test or exam I would blow the doors off that F’ng place.
Alternatively, if someone told me I was expected to do very well on a test or exam I would blow the doors off that F’ng place.
So, not sure what to make of these predictive indications.
Xenos
Aside from the barely occulted racism, this goes to show that you don’t know shit about hunter-gatherers.
James F. Elliott
I’ve never quite understood the utility of this discussion. Even if — and I do not believe the science is at all settled or even indicative at this point — general IQ trends (and let’s not forget how culturally-specific the IQ test is) are limited by ethnic genotype, individual variation on the whole is so wide that such trends are useless in evaluating any individual. There’s simply no practical value or utility to Murray’s argument, even if he’s correct about broad trends.
Tim’s point is well-taken: it’s the culture, stupid. Culture is a wide and variable thing, and even small changes — like expectations of failure — can have immense impact. The research of ethnopediatric anthropologists like Meredith Small makes this pretty clear.
David
Regarding your assertion about the usefulness (or lack thereof) of pure intelligence as a predictor of success, and the supposedly dimwitted that outperform, I would highly recommend that you read the following:
Schmidt, F. L. (2002). The role of general cognitive ability and job performance: Why there cannot be a debate. Human Performance, 15, 187-210.
Truly, there is no real argument that g is not the strongest predictor of job performance across a multitude of jobs. Not the only one, but the most broad and generally useful predictor of future job performance.
anonevent
@Andrew: I too am working on my PhD, and Einstein and Hilbert are definitely in a different league – them: Majors, me: t-ball – but relative to each other, I think Hilbert had the greater IQ, but Einstein had the drive to do the hard work. Part of my point in this example is that you have to define success just to make his arguments work, and i didn’t quite how he was measuring.
And from the point of the title, Obama doesn’t fit any of the molds that matoko_sham keeps trying to force his arguments into.
Woodrow "asim" Jarvis Hill
Jesus. Two people in this thread who Fail at Evolution.
To echo others, Gould and PE are well-regarded in the community of theorists who work on Evolutionary Sciences — not always agreed with, but the theory and the man are generally understood. It’s mostly Evolutionary Psychologists (who are not really involved in developing the theoretical models) who get pissed about Gould; throwing the terms and Gould’s name into El Google pops up this back-and-forth between Gould and a number of EvolPsych folks which helps explain the situation.
For the record, my minor was Psychology, and I also did studies in Evolution (and Creationism) in college. I think the EvolPsych guys are WAY off, and I’d not cite them for much — and I’m usually a strong defender of psychology.
So far as BOB. Among many other damned good reasons for no one in the cradle of civilization to develop "rockets", to take your lame example to heart, is that most of Africa lacks easy access to the metals you’d need to build many industries:
And that’s without the simple fact that Evolution doesn’t work that way. "Survival of the fittest", aside from being a crap term to describe the nuanced way Darwin describes Evolution, isn’t a fuckin’ competition. at least read, say ORIGIN OF SPECIES, before spouting pseudo-scientific crap. Hell, I read Morris and Whitcomb in high school!
gwangung
@Corner Stone: Well, remember about studies…they’re dealing with populations. Meaning lots of people, with effects that vary, from friggin’ huge to virtually non-existent. If there’s an effect that lasts from study to study, I’d say there’s something there that might affect students in general in other contexts.
Brachiator
@matoko_chan:
Wow. This topic is rapidly descending into drivel. Charles Murray is not a geneticist. He is not even a scientist or mathematician of any stripe. His book largely reports the IQ work of psychologists who, surprise, surprise, aren’t geneticists either.
So you have this weird misdirection of psychologists saying that IQ says something real about human genes and inherited traits simply because they have measured … something. This is somewhat interesting, but not nearly as interesting as some posters here think.
And Gould was useful because, as a trained scientist, he could look at the data and the math and point out the flaws. And as someone knowledgeable of the history of science, he could show how Murray and his ilk were not doing science at all, but simply trying to find a way to rationalize their ideology and bigotry.
Your words here indicates one of the problems of pop-evolutionary writing. Journalist Robert Wright was guilty of this big time in The Moral Animal and, like Charles Murray, believes that writing about science makes you a scientist. Human beings spent millions of years as opportunistic scavengers with occasional bursts of hunting, and somehow folks want to glom onto a relatively brief and absolutely recent period in which humans were hunter-gatherers as somehow determining everything there is to know about human evolution. It just ain’t that simple.
El Cid
I would like some statistics-minded researcher to pull together some charts on the periodicity with which different media — blogs, newsweeklies, Sunday talk shows — choose to once again highlight speculation on whether or not blacks are less intelligent than whites (and no matter how it’s gussied up, that’s always what really motivates the discussion).
I don’t know how I knew, but right before all the newsweeklies highlighted The Bell Curve fake science book on their covers, I was at a newsstand wondering when would be the next time that all the magazines focused once again on whether or not blacks were dumber than whites.
And, lo and behold, it happened a couple weeks later.
gwangung
No kidding.
If you’re not trying to maximize the talents of the poor–YOU’RE WASTING YOUR RESOURCES.
Of course, given the attitude of most right wingers vis a vis the environment, I guess we shouldn’t be surprised how wasteful they are in their approach to life.
Brick Oven Bill
“Aside from the barely occulted racism”
And again, a person who argues against Creationism is labeled ‘a racist’. It is standard practice among the modern left to target the speaker, when the message cannot be refuted. This in the opposite of traditional ‘Liberal’ positions of freedom of thought, expression, and reflection.
I do not believe that an Almighty God created us with identical plastic brains. This is an argument based in logic. Ironically, in this argument, Reverend Wright and I agree. Reverend Wright says:
"Left brain is logical and analytical. Object oriented means the student learns from an object. From the solitude of the cradle with objects being hung over his or her head to help them determine colors and shape to the solitude in a carol in a PhD program stuffed off somewhere in a corner in absolute quietness to absorb from the object. From a block to a book, an object. That is one way of learning, but it is only one way of learning. African and African-American children have a different way of learning."
The Reverend is absolutely correct. Each and every one of us has had 30,000 years of evolutionary energy implanted into our DNA. None of us are ‘deficient’, we are ‘different’.
Jamey
Balloon Juice FAIL.
qv: Sully on health care. "I got mine, you can suck it." And so forth.
HitlerWorshippingPuppyKicker
Unfortunately it is standard practice among failed spoof trolls to say things like this. You really need to upgrade your material. You sound like DougJ doing one of his Maude Frickert routines.
Assuredly, your own plastic brain is unique. In your case, I’m thinking melamine.
Tattoosydney
@TheOfficialHatOnMyCat:
No. Some women with very small pen-ises get to be lawyers too.
Corner Stone
@Jamey: Totally freakin agree.
Anyone who suggests someone should follow the Sully model – on anything besides selfishness or stupidity – just simply fails.
Of course, "his is an essential blog".
HitlerWorshippingPuppyKicker
Thanks, I always forget to include them.
Corner Stone
@Tattoosydney: Fuck. Have you seen a female partner whip it out? Put you to shame my friend.
Woodrow "asim" Jarvis Hill
Actually, I’d call you more of a Lamarckian. Your insistence that "Africans" essentially never "evolved" while others did, and that these evolutions "auto-magically" passed via DNA to their offspring, is much more along the lines of that theory than anything Darwin developed, much less our modern understanding. To quote the above wikipedia bit:
The interesting thing? This theory would be imposed by a state — Stalin used a variant of it in Russia, suppressing Evolution and Genetic theory along the way.
Have fun with that.
Xanthippas
I know better than to do this, but honestly I’m too lazy to make these points all over again so I’m just going to mostly paste my comment from the last Bell Curve thread.
Here’s a great column by Stephen Jay Gould that he wrote when The Bell Curve came out.
Two things I find interesting. He references early education, which we now know does make a difference in IQ. But he also mentions how bias might effect test scores:
Which instantly made me think of this (which Tim cites to above):
So essentially, two of the four premises that Gould lists that must be true for the central thesis of The Bell Curve, that IQ is immutable, and that is genetically based, are kicked away. The other two (which Tim alludes to above) that IQ can be represented by a single number, and people can be ranked in linear order on the basis of IQ, were criticized even when the book came out. So what’s left? What was there at the beginning: a dressing up of social Darwinism and conservative racial and class stereotyping.
How does anyone, including Sullivan, defend Bell Curve with a straight face?
Origuy
Paging Robert Boyle. Actually, he was Anglo-Irish, but that supports the point I’m about to make. Scots and Irish are about as close genetically as two groups of people can be. However, the list of notable Scottish scientists in Wikipedia is as long as your arm, while the article on Irish People lists only a few.
From the start of the 18th century, and the closer economic ties to England, the Scottish educational system became the best in the world. It, more than the English system, was the model for the American system. With his Wedgewood connections, Darwin could have gone to Oxbridge, but he and his brother read at the University of Edinburgh.
On the other hand, Ireland remained an English colony until the 20th century; religious and linguistic differences between the gentry and the lower classes stifled advancement. Trinity College, Ireland’s oldest university, didn’t allow Catholics until 1970.
Tattoosydney
@Corner Stone:
DADT.
Xanthippas
I’ve read this comment and following ones, and as near as I can tell the only point you appear to be making is that there is an upper limit to IQ, and that we should accept that some people will not be able to go to college or become scientists and doctors. And that to think otherwise makes you an "educational romantic." Well I know Murray’s made the point about intelligence limiting what people do in life several times (here’s one particularly hackneyed example that my co-blogger destroys) but you either forget or are failing to acknowledge that another point Murray and his co-author Herrnstein made in "Bell Curve" is that welfare policies must be dramatically changed so as to reduce the incentive of poor people to breed. So let’s not leave that out when we address the intense opposition to Murray that you find here and on other blogs.
As for accepting that not everyone will be brilliant…I’m about 100% sure that nobody here thinks that if you just educate everybody properly and boost their socio-economic status, then everybody can be a doctor and a lawyer. But studies conducted more recently since the 1960’s like the one that Kristof is referencing in his column, clearly indicate that poverty has a negative impact on intelligence. In that column Kristof says that Prof. Nisbett suggests investing more money into intensive early education programs. We have real world examples of how these succeed, in the form of the Harlem Children’s Zone (whose success, and the research upon which their approach is founded, is documented in this TAL show.)
Research and real-world examples like these have convinced liberals like myself and others that in fact IQ is malleable, and that you can increase chances of childrens’ academic success by boosting their parent’s socio-economic situation and putting them in intensive early education programs.
So what are you arguing against exactly?
matoko_chan
IQ is not malleable, in these sense that you are describing it.
If a child’s genetically determined IQ is artificially suppressed by a suboptimal environment, then changing the environment can result in the achievement of the full genetic potential.
There is absolutely no evidence that environment can overcome an optimally realized IQ. Otherwise the lower 10% of the bellcurve (functional retardation) could become doctors and lawyers too.
Aaron Baker
Most infuriating about Sullivan’s recent Murray post is this comment: "But intelligence is not infinitely alterable. " Sullivan very disingenuously acts as if this uncontroversial opinion is what has everyone het up about Murray.
For all his ongoing flirting with THE BELL CURVE, I very much doubt that Sullivan will ever attempt a substantive defense of Murray’s (rightly controverted) racial views. He’ll just go on suggesting that Murray’s critics are refusing to grasp the obvious, indeed banal truth.
Mnemosyne
True. However, you cannot determine who should and shouldn’t go to college by looking at their genetic/family background. We all would have been better off if George W. Bush had been steered to vocational training instead of business school. There are plenty of white, middle-class people who would do better in manual jobs and plenty of working-class minority people who would do just fine in academic and business jobs.
That’s the big part that people like Murray refuse to talk about: your academic future depends much more on what social class you come from than what your individual innate abilities are, because we assume that social class automatically determines innate abilities.
It’s like the people who assume that you can tell a criminal by his or her skin color and/or class status, which allows thieves like Jeffrey Skilling to operate until they bring down entire companies. After all, Skilling couldn’t possibly be a thief — he went to Harvard Business School!
matoko_chan
duh….that is Coleman’s finding, and the basis of Murray’s argument and of mine.
The corollary to this thesis is that there is a hereditary, biological component to IQ that is intransigent to environmental manipulation.
You can argue about what proportion of IQ is hereditary, and what proportion is environmental, but you cannot argue the existance of a hereditary component, the genome.
Unless you are trying to argue that IQ is wholly environmentaly determined.
Blank Slate anyone?
I am an otaku of Steven Pinker and Pascal Boyer, btw.
Mnemosyne
There is also absolutely no evidence that IQ and race are linked. None. Zero. And yet you still keep trying to imply that there is.
White people are just as likely to be dumb as black people, but they’re also more likely to have the social supports (good schools, middle-class parents) that will allow them to hold middle-class jobs and not be stuck in manual labor. You could very well have a black guy working in a factory whose IQ is higher than his manager’s, but if he never had the opportunity to optimize his IQ the way his manager did, he’ll be stuck in that lower-level job even though he’s innately smarter.
But, of course, that’s the aspect you can’t admit, isn’t it? The way our educational and class system is set up, we are deliberately sabotaging some intelligent people and boosting other, less intelligent ones up far beyond their abilities based solely on race and social class.
matoko_chan
YES! that is what I mean, but the peasants all got invested in screaming RACIST! per usual.
European education tries this, but they sukk.
Kids wind up getting pigeonholed and not realizing their potential.
And this is America…..college is our greatest good.
How do you tell the 40percenters (the lower left side between the mean and functional retardation) that they dont need college?
I think….we need somehow to make trade-schools cool.
Rick Taylor
Einstein was a physicist, Hilbert a mathematician. Those are related but still distinct disciplines. Einstein may have his name on the theory of relativity, but in mathematics we still speak of a "Hilbert space."
matoko_chan
What on earth are you talking about?
I haven’t said anything about race except for my flip asian comment.
I’m an eventer….do you know what that is? 3-day event rider.
I had a class with Karen O’Conner once. She repeated something George Morris (the greatest chef d’equipe the US Oplympic team has ever known) once said.
I think that is true of everything, sports, school, performance art, w/e.
But the 10% or w/e that is biologically hard wired is intransigent.
Mnemosyne
You’re defending Charles Murray to the death. Charles Murray’s entire theory is based in the idea that black people have lower IQs (are naturally dumber) than white people. If you disagree with his theory that black people are naturally dumber than white people, then why are you defending his theory?
matoko_chan
Rick Taylor:
Oh……I worship Hilbert.
And John Wheeler.
Do you have Wolframs book?
Ok….i yield meh…..you could never find a discussion of Hilbert space on Redstate.
;)
matoko_chan
?????
Did we read different books?
Mnemosyne
Nope. But it looks like one of us comprehended Murray’s point better.
Tim F.
The research described in my post makes that a false dichotomy.
Xanthippas
The heritability of IQ is not nearly as accepted and un-controversial as you make it out to be.
matoko_chan
so…..Tim F says that there is NO hereditary component to IQ?
It is wholly environmental?
Okfine.
cya.
Xanthippas
Agreed. This is what I was trying to get at in my comment, that one of the conclusions of the Bell Curve is that poor people need to breed less. That is hardly the same as saying "Well, some people are only so smart" which is a relatively non-controversial and common-sensical opinion.
Tim F.
Do you even read what I write? Honestly, did you read my post or any of my comments in it? I have a hard time believing that a high-IQ asian person like you can act this dense.
Tim F.
Here is my point again, again written in bold font.
With respect to intelligence and educational achievement, the racial gap is an environmental rather than genetic factor.
This is copied verbatim from another comment that I wrote above. It was in part addressed to you, matoko. So far on this thread not one of your comments has addressed that point. None. Instead you set up a straw argument about the general heredity of intelligence and kung-fu’d that straw guy, interminably, for hours.
For the sake of openmindedness I will make one more effort. The false dichotomy that I describe concerns the question of whether racial differences in test-measured intelligence and educational achievement are a product of socio-economic status or inherited genes. My post goes out of its way to keep discussion focused on that question.
Why is it a false dichotomy? Because of the stereotype threat. That is a technical term. It is a scientifically measured phenomenon that explains why black American children do more poorly than demographically matched white children. It explains why the answer to racial achievement gaps is not to change their economic status but rather to remove the stereotype threat.
Please give me some sign that the point sunk in this time. If it doesn’t, after all these tries, I will feel ashamed as a teacher.
Xanthippas
Either you are mis-reading Murray, or are you completely unaware of more current opinions of his. Here’s an excerpt from his WSJ column from 2007:
I don’t care how you try to slice it, that is not an argument for increased spending on early childhood education. You should consider revising either your opinion of Murray or your knowledge about what he supports.
gwangung
Don’t you DARE lump this feeb in with us!
Tim F.
Don’t take it personally. ‘Twas a small jab at a reference to asians and IQ that the feeb in question made above.
asiangrrlMN
Tim F., this is a very fine post and you have stated your position clearly. I would like to point out that mako-chan or whatever s/he is calling him/herself because I refuse to read the posts after the fiftieth stupid one is white. Or as s/he put it, cauc. I have seen this person on other lefty blogs saying the same stupid shit, and it’s always intended to rile.
Secondly, as one of the mythical Asian people with the incredibly high IQ (which, by the way, I do have), I can tell you that it matters less than the fact that I come from a family that expected me to go to college and grad school and that we are at least upper-middle class in status, though my parents didn’t start that way. I didn’t even think about whether or not I was going to college because it was a given that I was. I didn’t want to go, but I never questioned that I had to go.
The other point I would like to make is that the East Asians who came to America back in the sixties/seventies came for educational reasons. Both my parents went to the number one university in Taiwan. My dad is a Rhodes scholar. My mom was valedictorian (or thereabouts) of her class. They had to take an exam to get into Taiwan National University, and they were put on their career tracks in 9th grade. They had to take an exam to come to the states to study as well.
In other words, they are the best of the brightest in Taiwan. They came here to study, and they stayed here. So, in essence, you had the highly-educated, highly-motivated people coming from East Asia. Believe me, there are plenty of stupid people in Taiwan. I have been there.
My mom is a psychologist, and she administered an IQ test to my dad for her grad school project. The problem was, he didn’t get the cultural references because he had only been in the states for a year. There is now a Taiwanese version of the Weschler. It’s ridiculous to argue whether IQ is mutable or not because it really doesn’t matter.
Sorry to be so long-winded, but this kind of faux-scientific argument that is off-topic, by the way, really gets me wound up.
asiangrrlMN
@gwangung: See my long-winded post above. The whackatoo is white with an Asian fetish.
Brick Oven Bill
Tim, I think the point you are missing is that, if you believe in evolution, a population’s genetic makeup is a subset of the environment in which that genetic makeup evolved. We are all tailored to the environments of our ancestors. Some environments favored cognitive ability, others favored physical ability. Some favored tall stature, others short stature. Some favored light skin, others dark.
The only alternative to this conclusion is home school-style Divine Intervention.
Lesley
I’d like to see IQ test results of the teabagging population . THOSE FUCKERS ARE WHITE AND YET, SO VERY VERY DUMB. They are also severely spelling-challenged.
slag
@Tim F.: Not to muddy waters, but I believe stereotype threat can be defined more broadly to include all races and genders.
And I would argue that the mechanisms behind stereotype threat can just as easily damage kids who are identified as "not smart" early on in life, as mako_chan appears eager to do.
Mnemosyne
My known ancestors came from Ireland, England, Germany, Sweden and Italy. Which environment am I "tailored" to — the mountains of Italy and Germany? The high humidity and low sea level of Ireland and England? The arctic environment of Sweden?
How about people whose ancestry comes from both Europe and Africa, or from Africa and Asia, or from Asia and Europe? Which of those environments are they specifically tailored to?
Da Bomb
I don’t understand… my black feeble mind, which would naturally indicate my IQ is somewhere between 0 and 85, can’t grasp.
Even though I went to one of the top 200 public schools in the country, the 2nd top public school in the city of Houston, named after Michael E Debakey, the heart surgeon; I knew that I couldn’t, shouldn’t have aspirations to become a doctor. My genotypic IQ limited me.
So instead of becoming an anesthesiologist, I went and got my masters degree and attained a high paying marketing job.
Also just a little tidbit, the high school I attended had a black student population of 48%. I guess that means we just have more caucasian blood in us.
Doh!
Mnemosyne
@slag:
I saw a really interesting study recently where they took groups of white and Asian kids and told one group that Asians always score better on math tests and then administered a test. Sure enough, the white kids in the group who were told that Asians always score better scored lower than the white kids who were told no such thing.
There’s also a certain element of practice. College-age women score lower on spatial ability tests than college-age men … unless you first have them play a video game for about a week. Then the women’s scores are similar to those of the men, which kind of puts a damper on the whole idea that women "genetically" have less spatial ability than men.
Brick Oven Bill
That is a social, and not a scientific question you pose Mnemosyne, and thus should be left to sociologists, Almighty God, or economics, depending on which belief system you choose to practice.
You should perhaps study Central and South America if you are curious.
slag
@Mnemosyne: It’s true. There are tons of studies documenting this very phenomenon. The funniest thing about this whole discussion is how Bell Curvers want to play it as a "liberals are so closed-minded" game. As if these arguments haven’t been tossed around since the dawn of time, used to rationalize everything from colonialism to eugenics. As if they have nothing to do with ideology and everything to do with "scientific realities".
Kind of sad, really.
Adrienne
No you idiot. What he, and everyone else is saying, is that while there is definitely a hereditary component to IQ, other factors seem to be far more important when it comes to how one actually arrives at their individual IQ score, how and why these scores differ from individual to individual and from population to population, and most importantly what is the best way to improve these scores based on the first two.
Further, their argument is that that differences between populations cannot be explained by a racial component to genetic intelligence. Race is really just a social construct that is based upon whatever gene(s) is/are responsible for the traits we associate with the individual races (skin color, hair texture, eye color, etc). I doubt highly that these genes are also coupled together and therefore passed along with whatever genes are responsible for the individual variations in IQ and aptitude – which is the only way that the argument that racial differences in IQ are explained by some sort of this race is inherently smarter than that race would make any freaking sense at all.
However, this is entirely refuted by the fact that, on average, you actually find more variation WITHIN a particular population that BETWEEN populations. To pretend or argue otherwise, or that the racial gap is indeed a product of any one race’s intellectual superiority over another is to be seriously delusional.
Adrienne
Nope. Ceteris paribus, blacks with more caucasian blood score no better than those with less. This should tell you right there that the IQ gaps between blacks/whites is NOT explained by some type of racially triggered hereditary intelligence gene.
Tim F.
Yes. There is an excellent kindergarten study where a teacher reproduced the effect using (I believe) blue eyes versus brown eyes and randomly assigned personality traits.
Brachiator
@Brick Oven Bill:
Uh, no. It must make Darwin weep to know that on the bicentennial of his birth there is still so much outright misunderstanding about evolution floating around. And it must make him weep even more to realize the degree to which a lot of this misunderstanding is willful.
I mentioned in an earlier thread on this topic that anyone interested in this should read Ernst Mayr’s "What Evolution Is." A short read. You can even finish it this weekend if you really try.
You keep harping on stuff like "30,000 years of evolutionary energy," which is absolutely meaningless.
Da Bomb
@Adrienne: Nope. Ceteris paribus, blacks with more caucasian blood score no better than those with less. This should tell you right there that the IQ gaps between blacks/whites is NOT explained by some type of racially triggered hereditary intelligence gene.
I know that. I was being sarcastic.
Adrienne
@Da Bomb: I actually knew that you weren’t being serious, but it tied in with my previous comment as well and I should have mentioned that fact in that comment. However, since you brought it up (even though it was obviously tongue in cheek) I addressed it that way:-)
Da Bomb
@Adrienne: The point I was trying to make, is that race has nothing to do with intelligence. Some commenter named Matoko_Chan kept emphasizing Charles Murray’s Bell Curve and phenotypic IQ limit.
It’s just silly and unfounded.
Da Bomb
@Adrienne: Okay, good. I am glad we are on the same page! Yay!
HitlerWorshippingPuppyKicker
I think you meant ‘expression’ and not ‘subset.’
Either way, though, you are probably full of shit.
Brick Oven Bill
Brachinator; I work with some Mayans from time to time. They are not a tall people, which I speculate is due to their ancestors evolving in the rain forest. At a similar latitude, the Bushmen are shorter in stature on average than the Bantu, I also speculate that this has to do with the need to maneuver in a thick forest.
I know for a fact that Almighty God did not make us all the same height, because by seeing, I can perceive the differences.
We are all subsets of the environment if I understand Gaia worship correctly HitlerWorshippingPuppyKicker. This one I do not know for a fact, however.
Tax Analyst
Bingo! We have a winner!
Someone should send a tow truck for matoko_chan, he mistook the Bell Curve for a road to somewhere meaningfull and his prized Superior-IQ vehicle went off the road. He shouldn’t worry, though, there are lots of folks, some of them lower-IQ types, who would be able and willing to pull him out of his ditch.
Da Bomb
@Tim F.: Jane Elliot is the name of the teacher who performed that experiment in the 1960s. Her experiment was the foundation to Diversity Training in the workforce. It’s synonymous to what you are trying to explain.
Mnemosyne
@Brick Oven Bill:
Since when have geology and geography been "social" questions and not science?
asiangrrlMN
@Da Bomb: Yep. Here is a link.
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/divided/
She has done workshops with adults using this, and I saw her speak at my college.
The problem is, she only tackles the really blatant racist stuff. I used to do diversity training, and I realized that the only way you can really know what it’s like to be a minority in America is to experience it.
If I had unlimited resources, I would build a town that is made up of only people of color. I would groups of white people come and stay for a week, but they’d have to separate during the day. They would experience all the subtle ways society at large pecks away at you. In addition, they would learn what a toll it takes to have to be aware of the issues all the time.
I don’t think most people can truly understand what it’s like to be a minority unless they experience it for real (and not just think that they do).
Mnemosyne
@Brick Oven Bill:
Or, you know, malnutrition, which is endemic among Maya in Central America. But why let actual science get in the way of your half-baked speculations?
matoko_chan
No. Just because intra-group variation is greater than inter-group variation doesn’t mean inter-group variation is equal to zero.
Oh….apolos….I misunderstood. You are speaking of black american children only? Then your assertion is that there is no statistical significant difference in population IQ between black american children and white american children, and that all differences are environmental. (However, I do think Dr. Lynn’s sample sizes are adequate to prove that global mean differences exist.) I am only speaking of IQ as the limiting factor of achievement in school overall.
And particularily of this–
Murray is arguing that all students are limit capped by biology.
Not just black ones.
matoko_chan
And….ima cauc and a grrl.
I am an otaku of the Major is all.
Mnemosyne
@matoko_chan:
Really? Where does he argue that white, middle-class males also come in a range of intelligences and will naturally be limit capped by biology?
Hint: he doesn’t, because Murray thinks that all white, middle-class male children are always more intelligent than children of color, children of poor parents, and girls. The "romance" he’s speaking of is the foolish idea that children of color, poor children, or girls could ever be as intelligent as a white, middle-class boy. They certainly could never be more intelligent, and to think otherwise is a foolish, "romantic" notion.
Seriously, you may need to work on your reading comprehension if absolutely none of this occurred to you while reading Murray.
Tim F.
This is why people define their terms at the beginning of an argument rather than at the end of it. For example, are we treating IQ as a dependent or independent variable? Until now you have defended a graph that correlates achievement, the dependent variable on the Y axis, with IQ on the X-axis. The point of my post is in certain circumstances IQ can also be a dependent variable [along with achievement -> ergo they correlate because they are both influenced by a third factor]. The stereotype threat is one of those cases. You can pat yourself on the back for providing the next textbook example of post hoc ergo propter hoc.
Let’s see whether you can do anything other than miss my point and answer with a sweeping generalization that I just said that IQ is entirely environmental. There is a first time for everything.
slag
@asiangrrlMN: Awesome link! That chic rocks!
And @matoko_chan: If you want to know the definition of "grrl", you should really look into this documentary: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/divided/. You might learn something (if that’s possible).
asiangrrlMN
@slag: slag, yeah, it’s good, isn’t it? And I agree. matoko_chan is not a grrl at all.
Brachiator
@Brick Oven Bill:
You’re right. You’re speculating. The ancestors of the Maya, like all Native American peoples, came from Asia. Your knowledge of the migration of African peoples is non-existent.
God has nothing to do with evolution. Especially since a deity is not necessary to explain the science.
Subsets of environment has nothing to do with the concept of the expression of genes within environments.
Brick Oven Bill
Most of the African-descended people in this place came from Nigeria Brachiator. It is a fascinating story about a slave ship run around. The Nigeria-descendents eat roughly the same diet as the native Mayans, yet are taller than the Mayans. I suspect that the reason for this is that the Nigerians did not evolve in a rain forest.
Perhaps large stature was a benefit either in physical battle, or in sexual preference, for the Nigerians during their evolution. Perhaps it was Almighty God.
HitlerWorshippingPuppyKicker
@Brick Oven Bill:
Yeah, well, we all have to make sacrifices.
The Lounsbury
@matoko_chan:
Actually you’re a skilled Internet Loon.
matoko_chan
Oh, pardon if I misread this statement.
Let me repeat, I am arguing the anti-educational romanticism side.
You seem to be buying into the idea that race, class, and gender are the principal components influencing school achievement, and that IQ is somehow plastic under culture neutrality.
If that were true, then functional retardation would be ameanable to some level of environmental influence, wouldn’t it?
No, I understood that part of your argument very well, that Charles Murray is a racist who seeks to oppress blacks.
Got it.